Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  “That shot came from your roof!” Beth exclaimed as she rushed over to Dylan’s side and then dropped to the floor to pull on her socks and boots.

  “The Civil Guard better hurry!” Dylan commented in response.

  “They’re on their way!”

  The energy that had engulfed the window dissipated quickly. The intruder leapt through the gaping hole that it left behind and trampled over the curtains’ smoldering remains as he dashed to his left after the fleeing girl. He grabbed her by the hair and tackled her through the doorway into the living room, but she somehow managed to twist around as they fell and landed on her back. She fought a valiant fight, punching and kicking and slapping and kneeing and trying to push him off, but it wasn’t enough. He wrestled her onto her stomach and cuffed her hands behind her back.

  Cuffed? Might the intruders have been agents of some government agency after all?

  The girl obviously hadn’t given up yet. The moment her captor sat back and started to relax she flipped over again, somehow freed one of her legs, and kicked him solidly across the side of his head. He fell hard against the window—a wonder that it didn’t shatter—but recovered quickly and launched himself at her as she struggled to get back on her feet. He stumbled forward and grabbed her by the handcuffs, yanking down on them as he fell and pulling her back down to the floor. She landed hard on her back and tried to kick him again as he jumped up, but this time he stepped in and blocked her attack with a forearm and then dropped to his knees, laying his shins across her legs and straddling her pelvis. Then he backhanded her across her mouth, bringing her struggle to an abrupt end.

  He stayed put for a moment, probably to make sure there wasn’t any fight left in her, then stood up. He rolled her onto her stomach against only minimal resistance then slid one arm up under the cuffs and grabbed her hair high enough that he pulled her head up off the floor. Then he lifted her to her feet and held her steady as he forced her to walk forward ahead of him.

  “It’s too late,” Dylan said. “They got her.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. C-U-F maybe. That girl’s definitely involved in something big. She had a visitor tonight who I think was some kind of agent. Probably S-I-A.” He looked at Beth and stood up. “I’m going after the guy on the roof.”

  “Going after him with what?” she asked, grabbing his jersey and standing with him.

  Dylan stopped, turned and stared at his discarded pistol. Beth was right. Given his present physical condition, he was helpless to take anyone on without a weapon. “There’s got to be some way to help her,” he said, more to himself than out loud.

  “How?” Beth asked.

  Dylan sighed. “I don’t know.” He turned back toward the deck and grabbed up his binocs again.

  Another intruder walked into the girl’s apartment, right through the front door. He was dressed in black like the others but wasn’t masked, so Dylan made a conscious effort to take as good a look at him as possible. He stepped over the body of a fallen comrade as though it were so much trash and walked over to where the other attacker was holding the girl. Dylan hadn’t even seen the dead one before. That first blinding flash must have been the shot that took him out of the fight.

  The newcomer appeared to be middle-aged and Caucasian. He had dark hair, some of which had gone gray, a dark beard, and...and dark eyes! He had dark eyes! “He’s not Cirran or Sulaini,” Dylan observed. “He’s Terran.”

  “What?”

  “I said he’s Terran, unless he’s wearing colored lenses for some reason.”

  “A mercenary?” Beth suggested.

  “Possibly, but more likely a traitor. Mercenaries rarely involve themselves in hostilities against their own governments these days. Too much like starting a fire in your own back yard.”

  The probably-Terran reached out and grabbed a fistful of the girl’s tank top, tore it off of her, and then stuffed it into her mouth. Then he pulled a pistol from inside his shirt—even older than Dylan’s from the looks of it—and rested the muzzle against her throat. He said something, then slowly slid the weapon down over her right breast and then across to her left, making little circles around her nipples. Then, finally, he slid it down between her breasts, over her stomach, and pushed the muzzle down into the front of her panties.

  The girl suddenly kicked him between the legs with what looked like all the force of an angry mule, actually lifting him off his feet before he doubled over. He backed off and dropped to his knees in obvious pain as his partner tightened his hold on their feisty prisoner and slapped her two or three times on the side of her head.

  “Good girl,” Dylan muttered.

  “What’d she do?” Beth asked.

  “Kicked him square in the nuts. Looks like she hurt him pretty badly, too.”

  After a minute or so the probably-Terran climbed back to his feet, though he must still have been in a lot of pain, and leveled his pistol at the girl’s chest. He shouted something, then squeezed the trigger.

  She flinched as a small silvery dart that Dylan could barely see stung her in the center of her chest and stuck there. Her legs began to quiver. She appeared to be struggling to stay on her feet. Then her knees buckled and she collapsed. Her captor eased her to the floor, then pulled the dart out of her chest and slipped it into a concealed pocket in his shirt. Then, seemingly at the probably-Terran’s direction, he pulled off her panties and used them to bind her ankles together. Finally, he lifted her up off the floor, threw her over his shoulder, and hurriedly followed the probably-Terran out of the apartment.

  Dylan’s mind started racing. There were only two of them now, not counting the one on his roof of course, assuming he was still up there. One was carrying the unconscious girl while the other was doubtlessly still in a lot of pain, so both were moving slowly. If he could get to the roof and eliminate that one first...

  But as Beth had already pointed out, the enemy was armed and he was not. So how?

  The screaming whine of some kind of energy weapon suddenly filled the air as a blue-white beam lanced skyward from below, just beyond Dylan’s deck. Another beam of crimson answered the shot from above and the two flared bright purple when they crossed. Then they ceased together, and the roof shook with a loud thud and the rumbling of something heavy as it rolled down toward the edge.

  Dylan and Beth looked up in unison as the last of the attackers—those they knew about at least—fell hard to his deck. Dylan rushed to the doorway but stopped short of actually running outside. The man lay motionless, face-down in an expanding pool of dark blood. The back of his shirt had burned away and what was left of his charred and boiling flesh still glowed where the energy hadn’t quite dissipated yet. Beyond the body, near the deck’s edge, a disruptor rifle lay idle, just waiting for a new owner to claim it.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” Dylan commented. Then he lay prone and started to crawl outside.

  “What are you doing?” Beth gasped.

  “Stay here.”

  “Like hell!”

  She dropped to her stomach and followed him out, cringing and grinding her teeth as she clamped her jaws shut against the smell of scorched flesh and eviscerated inards that assaulted her nose and turned her stomach. Reluctant to do so, she nevertheless crawled right through the warm, sticky, oozing blood and over the lifeless body to the deck’s edge. Dylan grabbed the rifle, glanced quickly to the ground below to be sure it was safe, then started to squeeze between the railing posts.

  “Look over there,” Beth told him, pointing.

  Dylan looked to where she was pointing. Below them and off to the right another man lay motionless on his back in the middle of a small patch of flowers, holding a small pistol. He was dressed not in black, but in light-colored pajamas, the front of his shirt stained with blood.

  “Oh my God, I know him!” Beth exclaimed. “He’s one of the residents here!”

  Dylan glanced back at the corpse on his deck and concluded, “They must have
shot each other.” Then he gazed down at the other man again. “But why didn’t he just disintegrate like the window did?”

  He examined the rifle more closely. The sniper had used a low setting. But why? Weren’t the higher settings working properly? Perhaps he’d wanted to make sure he didn’t kill the girl or set her apartment on fire when he burned through the window. If so, then that was an important detail. It meant they didn’t just want her out of the way of something. They wanted her alive. No, more than that. They’d risked alerting her to their presence and allowing her a chance to escape rather than risk accidentally killing her. They didn’t just want her alive. They needed her alive. She was important. She knew something. But what? And who were they?

  “He may have saved our lives,” Beth commented.

  “What? Oh. We’ll have to thank him later. Let’s go.”

  Dylan squeezed the rest of the way out between the posts and dropped to the ground, rolling onto his good shoulder to absorb the shock and then up onto his feet, crouching low and looking around. The he signaled Beth to join him. She slipped through the posts more quickly and easily than he had, hung by her hands and lowered herself as far as she could, then dropped. She landed hard and a little awkwardly, but managed to stay on her feet.

  “You all right?” Dylan asked. She nodded.

  They remained still for several seconds, watching and listening to be sure they were still safe. Solfleet’s war games still raged on in the distance, but the apartment battle seemed to have ended...at least for the moment.

  “What was that?” Beth asked fearfully.

  “What was what?”

  “I heard something.”

  Dylan sighed. He really hated it when people told him that.

  She twisted, first one way and then the other, searching the area all around them. Then she froze, her eyes fixed in a single direction.

  A vision of Marissa staring into the darkness of the Sulaini commander’s inner hallway flashed through Dylan’s mind. “Beth?”

  “Oh my God,” Beth said, half covering her mouth with one hand. Dylan followed her gaze to the pajama-clad man.

  “What is it?” Dylan asked.

  “He’s still alive!” she exclaimed as she rushed to his side.

  Dylan gazed at the man’s chest but couldn’t discern any movement. “Are you sure?”

  Beth pried the pistol from his hand. “Lie still,” she told him, ignoring Dylan for the moment. “Help is coming.”

  The wheezing man—Dylan could see now that he was trying hard to breathe—stared into space through glazed, unseeing eyes, no doubt totally oblivious to Beth’s presence, and let go his life’s last breath. Beth hesitated for a moment, then dragged her fingers down over his eyelids, closing them. And then, just for a moment, she bowed her head and closed her own eyes.

  The sky had begun to lighten, but no birds sang songs of greeting to the rising sun this dawn. Dylan allowed Beth her moment of silence, but when she began to shiver he knew that it wasn’t just due to the cool air and he told her, “We have to get moving.”

  She looked at him, then gazed down at the weapon in her hand. She checked its charge and Dylan doublechecked the rifle he’d picked up. Both were almost fully charged.

  They dashed across the garden and between the two farthest buildings, passing the bodies of those few early risers who’d been unfortunate enough to get in the enemy’s way. At least one, Dylan noticed, held a Solfleet-issue pistol in his dead hand.

  They put their backs to the wall of the building on their right and stopped when they reached its far end. Dylan glanced briefly around the corner and pulled back very quickly, then crouched low and peeked around it once more, just as briefly. Then he looked back at Beth and told her, “It’s clear,” and asked, “Are you ready?”

  “I’m scared,” she confessed.

  “So am I, but that’s good,” he assured her. “Means you won’t make mistakes, as long as you don’t let your fear get the best of you.”

  “I’m not a soldier, Dylan,” she reminded him. “I’m an administrative specialist.”

  “We’re all soldiers first, Beth,” he reminded her. Then he grasped her hand. “Come on.”

  They scrambled the fifty meters across the grassy front yard to the cover of the next building. From there they only had a few more meters to go to make it to the thick four-foot tall bushes that hid portions of the stone wall from view—the wall that surrounded the wide open parking lot, twenty feet below. They high-crawled over to it and peered down over the lot from between two of the bushes.

  “There they are,” Dylan said, pointing toward the center of the lot where the kidnappers were hurrying as best they could toward a common commercial cargo van’s opening back door, the one still carrying the unconscious girl over his shoulder.

  “What do we do now?” Beth asked.

  “Wait here.” He threw her a stern look. “I mean it this time.”

  He rose to his feet but still crouched as low as he could as he rushed to the right, toward the top of the slate-gray steps that led down to the lot, closing the distance between himself and his prey. Sirens wailed in the distance, echoing through the hills, but they were still at least a few kilometers distant.

  He popped up for another look. The van’s back door stood open and the kidnappers were almost there. He raised his rifle, aimed into the cab, and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flash glared red in his sights, and when it faded the driver had slumped over the controls.

  The kidnapper carrying the girl lifted her off his shoulders and rolled her into the back of the van, then jumped in behind her as the probably-Terran suddenly returned fire into the bushes around Dylan’s position. Dylan ducked under the deadly shower and glanced over at Beth. She was on her knees and rising to join the firefight. He scrambled and tackled her flat onto her back.

  “Ouch! That hurt!” she hollered, slapping his arm.

  “Sorry,” Dylan told her, unfazed by her outburst.

  “What are you doing?” she continued to protest. “I could’ve hit him!”

  “And he could’ve killed you!” he fired back, silencing her.

  The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had started. Dylan jumped to his feet, rifle raised and ready to fire, but it was too late. The van was already speeding away. “Shit!” he exclaimed angrily as he lowered the rifle. He drew a few quick, deep breaths to try to relax as he started pacing back and forth, but it didn’t work.

  Beth stood up and brushed herself off, then started to tremble. “What was all that about?” she managed to ask between her own heavy breaths.

  “I don’t know, but...” Suddenly he remembered. He looked at her, his eyes wide with urgency. “The handcomp!”

  “What handcomp?”

  “The Solfleet handcomp they were working with!” he answered as he took off running past several curious and frightened onlookers toward the girl’s building.

  Beth took off after him but quickly fell farther behind, losing more and more ground with every step. “What Solfleet handcomp?” she hollered.

  Dylan bounded up the front stairs and dashed into the girl’s apartment, right past another black-clad intruder—he just caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of his eye—who was at that moment rifling none too gently through the girl’s closet. He dove forward and rolled up onto his knees against the back of the couch, then turned and fired, blasting the rising enemy out through the doorway to die at Beth’s feet.

  She stared down at the dead man in horror, looked up at Dylan, and then suddenly raised her pistol and fired toward the kitchen.

  Dylan swung his rifle around in time to see yet another enemy fall. Then he looked back at Beth. She was just standing there, breathing heavily through her gaping mouth, her eyes wide with terror and her body frozen still as a statue, still aiming her pistol at where her victim had been standing.

  “It’s okay, Beth,” he told her calmly as he cautiously approached her. “It’s all over now.” He reached her
side, being careful not to step into her line of fire, then carefully pried the pistol from her hands. “See? I told you you were a soldier first.”

  She looked at him as though she couldn’t comprehend what he’d said. Then she started to cry. “I’ve never shot anyone before,” she told him as the tears flowed down over her cheeks.

  Dylan stepped into her, intending to take her into his arms and comfort her, but at that moment someone fired off two rapid shots and she yelped and fell backwards to the floor. Dylan watched in horror and disbelief for a single split second before his instinct and training took over again. He dropped straight to the floor as he spun toward the kitchen and fired, nearly cutting the wounded man in half, then quickly bounced right back to his feet and whirled around in a circle. No more enemies...for the moment.

  “Beth!” He dropped to his knees and laid the rifle down beside him. He spotted a pair of small holes in a growing bright red smear of fresh blood high up on the right side of Beth’s already blood-caked blouse. He lifted the material from her skin and then poked his fingers into the holes and tore it open to check her wounds. Two streams of fresh blood trickled down her shoulder and mixed with the darker coagulated blood that already stained her flesh.

  So she’d been hit twice, by bullets judging from the look of her wounds.

  One of the rounds had cut through her bra strap and entered above her breast. The other had struck just above her collar bone. That one was just a graze relative to the other. A fairly deep one, but a still a graze. Neither wound would be fatal if she got help soon enough, but shock could be if she didn’t. He had to do something to stop the bleeding right away or all the help in the world wouldn’t save her.

  Her sleeve. It wasn’t spotless but it was cleaner than the rest of her blouse, so it would have to do. He laid his right hand over both wounds and applied pressure, then rolled her onto her side as gently as he could with his left. He straddled her and used his legs to keep her from rolling back, and as he pulled on her sleeve he spotted a bleeding exit wound at the base of her neck, just to the right of her spine.

  “That’s good,” he told her, speaking as calmly as he could manage, hoping to keep her from panicking. “It went right through.”