She pointed at it. “That’s the Dome of the Rock! It’s in the very center of Jerusalem. The, uh, the Old City.”
Larkin frowned at it, realizing the weight of this news. “And that metal structure is the Bastion.”
The pilot came back on the screen. “Master, I just got confirmation from the Confed. We’re clear for descent. Do I have your permission to break atmosphere?”
“Yes!” Larkin replied emphatically. “Take us down.”
Finally.
Cristiana glanced out the observation window as the squid drones detached their limbs and drifted away, leaving the Sagittarian cutters free to carry out their task. She yanked the straps to cinch her body snugly against her seat and glanced at Larkin, who did the same.
“Let’s go tear shit up,” she said with an electrified grin.
“We’re not here to tear anything up,” Larkin said over the renewed rumble of the cutter’s engines. “We’re here to clandestinely assist the Confed and to find out who’s been helping the rebels. Got it?”
Despite his best efforts, he didn’t manage to deter Cristiana from grinning.
“Whatever you want to call it,” she said.
Larkin rolled his eyes as the ship pitched forward.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .
Kastor sat against one of the half-dozen HVAC units scattered across the rooftop. He’d chosen this building because at twelve stories, it stood a few floors taller than any of the other buildings surrounding the Old City Security Station. And though it sat a few blocks from the OCSS compound, its northern wall served as a good vantage point.
A Defender team already snuck around behind the three-foot concrete lip extending above the rooftop. They whispered to each other in Hebrew or Arabic and occasionally, when they wanted everyone to understand, Universal. They clicked open long, black cases holding rocket launchers and pushed them against the concrete lip. A few snipers lay prone on the roof setting up their long rifles behind small drainage holes in the concrete.
Qasim and his gaggle of fidgety computer techs huddled together behind another HVAC, some of them smoking vapes while others whispered and argued about something on Qasim’s tablet. Two other teams were sneaking into position to the sides of the OCSS at the moment, but they moved slow, waiting for confirmation from spotters at all angles that no Confed guards would see them if they moved into the next alley or building.
Kastor rested, having given his orders and now having naught to do but wait for them to be carried out so their surprise ambush could begin. He loosened the shemagh around his neck and placed his hand over his blazer sword scabbard. It had been woefully neglected during his time on Earth thus far, but today that would end.
He thought of Siraj and brought up the holo function on his cuff. With the press of a few buttons, a holo field materialized above the cuff, entering midstream into a battle from Siraj’s helmet camera. Kastor had asked him to attach the camera so he could keep track of the Defenders’ progress at eye-level rather than merely from satellite images. Seeing what another soldier saw gave Kastor infinitely more insight into the state of a conflict than cold data.
In the shaky holovid, Siraj ran down an alley with a group of other Defenders, shouting commands, some in Arabic and some in Universal. The camera view tilted up as Siraj looked at a pair of Confed hoverdrones zoom by overhead. As soon as his head tilted down again, a flurry of bullets whipped down the alleyway.
“Take cover!” Siraj’s voice shouted from the tiny cuff speakers.
Several of his men threw themselves behind a dumpster, while Siraj slammed his body into a thin-looking door and smashed through it into an uninhabited living room. He rushed around a couch and into the cramped kitchen, then used the butt of his rifle to shatter the window. A few seconds went by, then a few Confed soldiers appeared down the alley, approaching with their assault rifles up. Siraj wasted no time getting one in his sights and firing. The shot rocked the camera. Once it stabilized, Kastor watched Siraj’s target crumple. The other fired haphazardly, not knowing where the shot had come from. Siraj took another shot, and the second Confed soldier stumbled backward. His bullets sprayed even more aimlessly. He collapsed down to one knee. Siraj took one last shot, making the Confed soldier’s head kick back and paint the alley wall behind him.
“Clear!” someone shouted from nearby.
Siraj hurried out of the first floor apartment and rejoined his fighters on their way down the alley. Probably fifteen of them, considering the volume of footsteps. Then, without warning, an armored, six-wheeled vehicle rolled up on the street ahead and stopped perpendicular to the alley. The Defenders halted as the vehicle’s main nodule twisted to face them, spiked with a thick machine gun barrel.
“Run! Go! Go!” someone yelled.
The machine gun opened fire before the group could get anywhere near cover. Over the sound of heavy, thudding shots, Kastor watched rounds slice straight through the flesh of his compatriots. Bodies fell all around him. His dozen or so fighters were reduced to a handful in seconds. He ran to the nearest door, blasted off the door handle, and kicked it open. He pressed himself against the wall inside the dark room as another Defender staggered inside, screaming and holding one of his forearms that now dangled from the upper arm, attached only by fleshy threads. Siraj rushed to him and felt around his pockets for first aid materials.
“Medic!” he shouted out the doorway, but his voice got lost in the hard wail of machine gun fire.
Kastor turned off the holovid and switched over to the tactical rendering of Jerusalem. He swiped his fingers outward over a screen on his cuff to zoom in on the Old City, closer and closer until he isolated Siraj’s present location. The rendering updated in real time, and thus it showed a small boxy shape on the street adjacent to Siraj—the armored vehicle. Kastor pressed his finger on it, bringing up the exact coordinates of that spot. He memorized them, then brought up the comm function and radioed the guided rocket crew. His cuff made a chime sound as it sent the audiochat request.
“Yes, Advisor?” a woman’s voice responded abruptly.
“I’ve got a target that requires an immediate strike,” he barked into his cuff. “Siraj is pinned down by an armored vehicle. Do you copy?”
“Copy, Advisor,” the woman said with speedy words. “Do you have coordinates?”
“Sending them now.” Kastor punched in a series of numbers into the keypad on the cuff screen and sent them.
A few seconds later, the woman came back on. “Got it! Launching now.”
The guided rocket teams were stationed several hundred meters from the Old City, so the rockets would take a little time to arrive on site. Kastor switched back over to Siraj’s helmet cam. When the holovid blinked back on, Siraj was kneeling over the groaning man who seemed to be doing everything he could to just keep blinking. Siraj wrapped his arm—both the upper arm and the dangling stump—with a bandaged roll.
“Stay with me, Amed,” Siraj said. “Stay strong.”
The wounded man’s face went pallid. His eyes were becoming glassy.
Then, out of the great, blue sky, a rocket screamed down and caused a sudden, ground-shaking explosion. The machine gun fire outside stopped. Siraj leaned out the doorway and peaked down the alley at a burning, semi-melted, blasted-apart stump of a vehicle. Kastor grinned at the sight.
“A gift from your guardian angel,” he muttered to himself.
Kastor heard light, crunchy footsteps approaching and felt a tap on his shoulder. One of the team leaders, a vaguely European-looking man with curly black hair poking out from his helmet, knelt beside him.
“Our teams are in position,” he said in a hushed voice. “We’re ready.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Carina Arm, on the planet Santa Maria . . .
Davin strode toward the aft of theFossa with long, swift steps. Once past the private rooms, through the cargo hold, and up the steel-plated steps to the upper platfo
rm, he stepped into the mechanical section of the ship, laden with exposed pipes and drooping airflow tubes and various humming machines. The ship showed its age especially bad back here: water stain rings at the point of connection between tubes and machines, rust lining the pipes, missing panel doors leaving clumps of wires unprotected, lots of faded or peeling labels.
Someday Davin would strike it rich and give this baby a full overhaul, but for now they just needed her to get them off the planet.
He tapped his knuckles on the hatch of the big, steel tank holding their mini-DTBFD—deuterium-tritium-based fusion drive. Almost a decade past its considerably long warranty, theFossa’s main engine needed lots of love to keep chugging.
The heavy hatch door creaked open to reveal Strange’s grinning, grease-smeared face.
“Howdy, Cap!” she said cheerily. “Want a kiss?” She puckered her black-stained lips and leaned toward him.
Davin recoiled away from her. “Hell no! What’s wrong with you?”
Strange shrugged lackadaisically. “Would be better for you than me anyway.”
“Fuel intake fixed?” Davin asked.
“Yep.” Strange stepped out and swung the groaning hatch door shut, pushing the lock lever up with a grunt. She pulled a dirty rag out of her coveralls pocket to wipe her hands as she stepped around Davin and headed back toward the front of the ship. “Looks like the coolant and compressed oh-two should work as well, although there’s no time to check the composition. We’ll just have to hope those old storage tanks weren’t corrupted.”
“Corrupted?” Davin asked, following her.
“You know, the gas mixture,” Strange replied, pausing to check a readout screen by the hatchway back to the hold. “Microfissures, corrosion, a faulty pressure valve—the oh-two can leak out, or let in other gases. Deplete the air pressure. Won’t get as much bang for your buck.” She tapped the screen a few times with the back of her knuckle—the only part of her handnot stained by grease—then turned and stepped onto the platform over the cargo hold.
“Do youknow all of this?” Davin asked as they crossed the hold. “Or are you just guessing?”
Strange let out a lighthearted laugh. “Somewhere in the middle.” She winked at him over her shoulder and continued on toward the cockpit.
Davin sighed, shook his head at her bouncy walk, and turned back to go get Kiki. She’d been keeping watch outside while they worked on the ship. Now it was time to get off this rock.
#
The gees pressed Davin back against the copilot’s seat as theFossa’s main engine growled, pushing them further and further into the sky. The shaky central console screen showed a visualization of the ship gaining altitude as they plowed through clouds out the windshield. Colors faded, giving way to the darkness of vacuum. Strange cut off the main engine once the shaking faded. She immediately flicked on the radar scanner and switched the console screen to a 2D map of their surroundings. Santa Maria showed up in the bottom left corner. They waited a few seconds to let the scanner work its technological magic.
No gunship on the horizon. Only a few small, stationary satellites. Strange had flown at an even altitude for a while in the upper atmosphere to get them a quarter of the way around the planet. As they suspected, the gunship was probably in a geosynchronous orbit over the forest island where they’d gone down. The Carinians would’ve known they’d taken off—they would’ve heard it or seen it or something—but they clearly didn’t know which direction their prey had gone.
“Alright, we got an escape window,” Davin said. He narrowed his eyes and scrutinized the starry expanse. “Where are the gates?”
“Let’s see,” Strange said, swiping her fingers over the console screen. “Looks like the gates back toward the TransTek system are . . . that way.” She pointed toward one side of the planet. “You ready to burn?” Her fingers wrapped around the acceleration lever as she eyed him, waiting for the greet light.
Davin breathed in a long breath and thought. His head told him one thing, but his heart demanded another. It felt like getting slowly ripped in half between two giants playing tug-of-war. He closed his eyes and rubbed the skin of his eyelids.
“No,” he said with a sigh. “We can’t go back that way.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because we already told them exactly where we were going,” Davin explained reluctantly. “They’ll have that system guarded. We won’t even get close to Sierra. We probably wouldn’t have been able to find her anyway.”
Strange started to object, but she couldn’t come up with a decent reason to, so she shut her lips and looked up at him. At Davin. At her captain. At the guy who steered them into this shitshow. He felt a sinking feeling in his chest, his every heartbeat a desperate and vain attempt to keep from descending further into hopelessness. Suddenly, like never before in his life, he missed home. Not his home on theFossa. His childhood home. He missed Agora and the dusty, rustbucket island of Flotsam. If he could track every movement over the course of his life, it would look like a series of eccentric orbits, expanding further and further away from Flotsam, and then from Agora, and then from the Voluntarist Network. He felt like this time, finally, he’d gone too far. He’d broken out of that eccentric orbit and now just drifted away into the nothingness.
This must’ve been how Sierra felt on his ship.
Sierra . . . He missed her. And Jai and Jabron, too. If he had to be chased by murderous Carinians, Davin preferred doing it with them.
Then, in the heat of reminiscence, he remembered the video Sierra had recorded—the one they’d tried and failed to send into Carina. They still had it in their data storage.
And they were in Carina now.
Davin’s eyes widened as a newfound idea took shape.
“Strange,” he said, still thinking through it.
“Yeah?” she replied, twisting herself to face him. “What? What is it?”
“Which direction is Baha’runa?”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .
Pressed against the concrete lip at the edge of the rooftop, Kastor eased himself up enough to peek over with a pair of binoculars and scope out what they were up against.
About sixty meters out, the OCSS building looked like a reverse high-security prison: two layers of twelve-foot tall, chain-link fencing topped with curled barbed wire; semi-circular sandbag walls, each armed with a heavy machine gun and manned by two or three soldiers; a half dozen guards patrolling the sandbag-lined lower tier of the roof; snipers posted on the upper tier; two armored, six-wheeled vehicles sitting in front of the main gates, machine gun barrels swiveling along the upper module’s rotational axis, scanning the area. Kastor took away the binoculars so he could take it all in as a whole.
Qasim and his techs whispered behind him. They were crouched behind the fighters, armed with sidearms but ill-equipped to use even those. Fingertips tapped at a tablet screen. A constant stream of gunshots crackled from a handful of directions around them, punctuated occasionally by heavy, violent explosions. Only when they quieted for a few seconds were the staccato shouts audible.
“Qasim,” Kastor said over his shoulder. “Status update.”
“Alright, well,” he whispered a little louder so Kastor could hear. “It’s been almost three hours since the fighting resumed. Some team captains haven’t reported in a while, so we don’t have a solid estimate of casualties, but it looks like somewhere around . . . three or four thousand. So far.”
“To be expected,” Kastor muttered. “How’s our progress?”
Qasim let out a tense breath. “We, uh, we’ve taken the Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David. Most of the fighting right now is around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian quarter and Ha-Khurba Square in the Jewish quarter.”
Kastor nodded, trying to remember where things were. “And the North side?”
“Fighting all around the Yeusefiya Cemetary,” Qasim replied. “They haven’t broke
n through the Lion Gate yet. Looks like they’re pinned down from gunners on the wall.”
“Have you already called in the coordinates for a rocket strike?” Kastor asked over his shoulder.
Qasim hesitated. “Um, no.”
Kastor ducked back behind the lip so he could look at Qasim. “Do it. We need to be bearing down hard on them from all sides.”
“Yes, Advisor,” Qasim said, then dashed off in a crouched position to hide behind the nearest HVAC unit. His techs followed after him.
Kastor surveyed the line of Defenders pressed against the concrete lip, looking back at him expectantly, eyes wide, beads of sweat already creeping down from their hairlines. Most of them held combat rifles equipped with adjustable scopes. Two of them, one man and one woman, laid belly down, spread-eagle on the roof, the butt of their sniper rifles already pressed into the hollow of their shoulders. A few hovered over long, padded rocket launcher cases—textured black plastic that looked brand new. The weapons had been provided by anonymous suppliers that could, Kastor was sure, be traced back to Ulrich Morvan.
Kastor tightened his lips and nodded at them. They quietly adjusted their posture to be ready to pop up and start firing. Kastor tapped a button on his cuff to open a channel with all the fighters in his detachment, thirty-six in all.
He held the cuff close to his lips and whispered, “Pick your targets, gents. And remember, we need to get inside that building as fast as we can. Be swift, but think through every move you make. Always plan where your next cover spot will be. Never dally in the open. Know how many rounds are left in your magazine at all times. If you run out with more targets near you, switch to your sidearm. It’ll be faster than changing mags. And always be aware of your teammates’ locations. Don’t get separated.”
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 26
