New Praetorians 1 - Sienna McKnight

by R. K. Syrus

  Hands empty and raised, Sienna takes a few deliberate steps toward Sidewinder.

  “Kind and wise sir, I am unarmed,” Sienna says and turns thirty degrees either way to prove the fib. “Please do not shoot your humble servant.” Dari has a lot of polite and respectful terms, especially for addressing a male elder.

  She confronts a man close to sixty. He looks a lot more spry in person than in his surveillance pictures. He is not large, but his captive, a slim-boned girl, makes him and the wickedly curved blade he holds to her neck seem huge. Sidewinder’s left hand holds a pistol. His file says he’s right-handed. That could be an advantage. It’s hard to shoot off-handed under pressure.

  Sidewinder’s bloodshot eyes look at her. Dark pinpricks of hate pause momentarily on the outline of the RAPTEK. Then they continue over the rest of her. She can almost hear his mind writhing. Sidewinder is figuring his best chance to come out of this tight spot. Like he has come out of every other one before.

  Even without her visor, Sienna has a naturally wide range of vision. When she was small, she was self-conscious and thought her eyes were bulgy, like a frog’s. In her periphery, Bryan’s expression silently shouts to her: What the hell are you doing?

  She tries to cheer him. A slight inclination of her head lets him know. Don’t worry, I got this.

  “You! You are but a female. Send in your superior officer. I will talk only to him. Now get out of my sight, you worthless bitch!”

  Sienna starts to worry. Maybe she made a mistake exposing herself. The word translating as bitch is particularly foul and insulting. It denotes the base smell and filth imputed to female dogs as well as the animal itself.

  Sienna smiles meekly. She keeps her eyes downcast, unthreatening, while still being aware of the man’s every move. Some greasy gray hairs poke through his sleeping robe, hairs which sprout from a patch of crackly, dry skin. Below hang the disheveled curls of his hostage. A mop of dark hair frames the girl’s upturned face.

  “Yes, kind and wise sir, I am but a female,” Sienna admits. “I am here only to translate your words. You can see I am no threat.”

  She is well into the room. Sidewinder’s belief that they are after his hostage is snarling things up. Threatening their ultimate goal. Her first idea had been to reason with the unpleasant but historically very businesslike fellow. Time to improvise. Sidewinder has to live, but Sienna cannot let the girl hostage die.

  The RAPTEK system generates two distinct types of electromagnetic fields. A primary repulsor used to accelerate fléchette darts—the ones hidden on her wrist magazine. It’s overkill. Bolts from a big railgun can sink a battleship. All she faces here is a mangy coward. A second, weaker RAPTEK field pulls ammo into place. Sienna’s improvisation depends on this feature of the experimental system.

  She edges in.

  “NO CLOSER!” Sidewinder snarls. Sienna can smell his breath. “I will cut her head off!”

  The girl hostage’s strange eyes are nearly as uncanny as Sarge Bryan’s bio-engineered ones. They watch the activities of the adults closely. The girl is upset. You’d expect her to be with a blade the size of her own arm at her windpipe. But she is not hysterical. She does not struggle, seems to know what is coming before…

  “I will cut—”

  Sienna flexes the palm of her magnetic glove and feels a distant tug. Got something.

  Now or never.

  “No,” she says calmly. “You won’t.”

  Before Sidewinder can flinch, his knife’s blade is enmeshed in the electromagnetic field. It rips out of his sweaty grasp and flies into Sienna’s hand. At the same time, she flicks her right wrist three times and sends as many wickedly forked projectiles into and through Sidewinder’s gun hand. The impacts back him against a wall.

  Free, the girl runs forward. Sienna nudges her to the side and behind, out of harm’s way, toward Bryan and the other people who always have her back.

  And just for calling me names…

  Sienna wings the dagger at Sidewinder. It pins his robe to the wall and even draws a little blood. Bloody staples through cartilage pin the hand holding the gun to Sidewinder’s left shoulder. She walks forward.

  “I lied. I am a threat,” she says. “Let’s start over. My name is Colonel Bitch, and you are my prisoner.”

  She pushes the slide release button on the ruined pistol. Its magazine drops out, accompanied by a gratifying howl of agony.

  18

  Man, how many of these things are there?” T-Rex flicks a small scorpion off his pants leg.

  “What kind of a weirdo keeps crazy mierda like that in his bedroom?” Snakelips has gathered up the girl and holds her aloft, clear of the arachnid-infested floor.

  The girl looks local. Judging from her features and clothes, she could be Hazara tribe. On the other hand, Sidewinder may have grabbed her from south Khorasan, from the big refugee safe zones. In that case, she could have come from anywhere and been brought up speaking the local language. The girl has fast figured out that these odd new people are friendly. She tugs her minder’s facial piercings as though a nose ring is the most fascinating toy in the world.

  “Ow, girl,” Snakelips says mildly and gently pries small fingers off her facial jewelry. “Hey, Sarge, she’s got a hell of a grip on her.”

  “Give her a juice box. I’m busy.” Bryan holds Sidewinder by the neck. Nobu employs pliers to pull the metal nails out of the prisoner’s shoulder bones. He covers the wounds with pressure bandages so Sidewinder does not bleed to death and thereby waste their time.

  Bryan looks at Sienna, his eyes wide like twin golden moons. “Nice one, boss. But please, never, ever do that again. I tell the new cadet classes I didn’t raise no cowboys.”

  She grins back. “Far as I can tell, you raised nothing but.”

  Bryan turns to her and studies the glove apparatus on her hands.

  “How’d you do that? With the knife?” Bryan asks. “I thought the RAPTEK only shoots metal fléchettes.”

  She cocks her wrist back and feels the energy of the electromagnets. “It’s the loader. How do you think the projectiles get in my hand? There’s a shaped mag field that pulls them up. It’s way less powerful than the one for shooting. I had to get close to be sure I had the knife blade.”

  Sienna looks at the distraught and defeated Sidewinder. “Was totally worth the millions they spent developing it, just for the look on this guy’s face.”

  Bryan shakes his head, quietly mouthing, Never, ever, please.

  There’s a limited window to get what she wants. Denbow’s screw-up disabled part of their hovercopter’s stealth. That makes exfiltration before sunrise urgent.

  Snakelips balances the former hostage on her waist ammo pouches and helps search the rooms. T-Rex, always multitasking, needles her.

  “I wonder if they have one of those kangaroo baby carriers in olive drab.”

  Nobu snorts. “Rex, requisition a milspec Bjorn. NATO code M-NANNY.”

  T-Rex slaps his best friend’s hand.

  While the Dogs have an informal command structure, it is the sergeant’s job to deal with most operational details that come up during a mission. Including six-year-olds.

  “Sarge,” T-Rex asks, “what we gonna do with the miniature non-com?”

  “The Lee’s captain seemed like a tightwad,” Bryan says. “Standing orders from the ship are to leave ’em behind. Only exceptions are for urgent medical conditions directly caused by our op.”

  “Y’know… when she’s not all screaming in terror or has a knife to her throat,” their warrant officer observes, “she kinda looks like them old pictures of the Colonel you gots in your office, Sarge.” He can’t resist piling on. “Yeah, just like her spittin’ image if you axe me. Round about the time her mom, Dr. Theodora McKnight, was KIA helping out earthquake victims.”

  Sienna watches Bryan’
s bio-mechanical eyes meet the astonishing violet eyes of the girl. He has made up his mind. Wordlessly, she affirms Sarge’s plan.

  “Okay, okay,” Bryan says. “Nobu, write it up as suspected dysentery and shock caused by all the racket we made. We take her to the Lee. If she has family, Worldwide Help can get her back to them.” Using his drill-instructor voice, Bryan shouts down from the second-floor landing. “Now mop this up!”

  As all the men leave, Snakelips realizes what’s happening.

  “Hey! Where you all going?” she calls after them. “You know this is totally sexist, right? I’m a cold-blooded, hard-as-nails killing machine, not a malada nanny!”

  The girl, who doubtless does not speak their language and whose name no one yet knows, yawns. She hugs the female assassin and rests her head on neoprene-covered armor. Still in chameleon stealth mode, the uniform projects the color of the girl’s hair.

  From upstairs Nobu says, “Hey, Whitebread. Help me sort and bag intel in this room. And watch out for the scorpions. They’re all over.”

  The specialist heaves himself up the stairs. They creak under his weight. He checks out the master suite.

  “They must like kids a lot here,” Whitebread says casually. “There’s kids’ clothes and toys all over. They gave her the biggest room.”

  Sienna leads the patched-up Sidewinder down to a cubbyhole on the ground floor beneath the stairs. It looks like this space has been used for drinking tea and smoking chillum pipes. If she hadn’t been so intent on figuring out how to get what she needs out of their prisoner, she might have anticipated the next disaster that was about to drop. All 382 pounds of it.

  “Whitebread,” Nobu says sympathetically, “you are a strong warrior, but your buffalo not always run in the same direction. See all the guy’s clothes and crap here? It’s Sidewinder’s room. And there is only one bed.”

  Sienna nearly has Sidewinder into the tea room. Her team cleared it out to serve as a makeshift interrogation cell. The first sign of a problem upstairs is Nobu gasping.

  “Oh crap…”

  The next is a rumbling, like a herd of bison coming down the stairs. All of them are moving in one direction. Sienna has just enough time to kick herself for not anticipating Whitebread’s possible reaction.

  Whitebread came to the Base from a Wyoming Junior Reserve Training program. Despite his very high IQ, he had no drive to attend college and always tried to hide his intellect. Something very evil had driven him away from his home. Whitebread’s mother was committed to a public mental hospital. According to county sheriff’s records, his father and older brother were killed in a propane explosion on their farm. Sienna always suspected there was more to the story. She hasn’t pried.

  Petr always takes harm and cruelty inflicted on innocents very personally. Most times, that is consistent with their mission, and commendable. However, in this case it threatens to ruin the whole Sidewinder operation. The point of the large and complex undertaking is nearly scotched by the point of a serrated blade that drives right at her prisoner’s head. Sidewinder would have stood there like a goof and gotten the worst nose job ever had Sienna not pushed him out of the way.

  “Specialist! Stand down!” she yells. “We NEED him!”

  But words no longer have any restraining effect. Whitebread is in a blood rage. He wants only to kill. The giant yells and prepares to slash at Sidewinder again with his foot-long knife.

  “My… brother, Dom, he was only trying to protect me… you whupped him until his ribs showed… you son of a bitch… gonna skin you like I SHOULDA!”

  Thankfully, the rest of her team is just as fast. Bryan and T-Rex grab Whitebread, but only succeed in preventing his forward motion. The blade, with its slick blood groove and sturdy ridges on the heel, custom designed for severing joints and limbs, hovers inches from Sidewinder’s face.

  Sienna grabs the big man’s elbow and wrist. She jabs pressure on specific nerve clusters. The weapon slips from numb fingers and clatters to the tile floor. Sienna kicks it away before Sidewinder gets any ideas that will get him frustratingly dead. Sienna puts her face close to Petr’s ear and whispers something the others cannot hear.

  She stands back. “Let him go. We’re good here.”

  Without a backward glance, she turns to the cowering Sidewinder. “All right. Playtime is over. Where were we?”

  19

  The room is bare. Sienna pushes Sidewinder’s good shoulder. He goes in. Her people have tossed out everything except two plastic chairs and a card table. Its surface is worn and stained with sepia-colored rings. Harsh light flares from a stupid elephant-shaped lamp. It sits way up on its shelf. There is no chance the prisoner can use it as a bludgeon or try to set a fire. This guy is not a scrapper. He is a talker. And an aspiring decapitator of kids.

  Sienna sits opposite Sidewinder. There’s no time for the whole gradual breakdown of resistance thing.

  On the ship, Langley spooks will be all over him and the squirming rotten things in his head.

  Not that Sienna is expecting a holiday basket from the CIA. Agencies rarely have the stomach for a real grab mission. They’re messy. These days, for them, at CENTCOM’s Doha base and others, it’s all about robot-dropped missiles and thermal gun sight camera videos of cars and houses silently exploding. “We got him!” they would shout. Never mind questioning a charred body is problematic, and the guilty are sometimes hard to find among collateral damage.

  That’s why Sienna used all of her influence to get here. Had she used Roger? Probably. But he knows how much getting the man behind Sidewinder means to her. Right here and now she will do anything, use anyone, to get what she came for.

  So close now. She pushes a scroll screen at Sidewinder. A double tap enlarges the picture, a grainy long-range photograph of him in an open 4x4. A younger man beside him is a blurry menace behind the steering wheel.

  “Asrah Qazi. You call him the Scythe of Heaven,” Sienna says flatly. “I’ve been after him for a while.” Her fingers idly feel for scars beneath the shoulder ridges of the RAPTEK. She stops. The motion feels too personal. Irrational. This guy has no idea who she is or who Asrah is to her.

  She watches her prisoner carefully. He watches back. Tough old bird. He is in restraints and in pain but not beaten or broken, not yet. When he looks at the picture, a spark of recognition flickers in dead fish eyes. It’s a glimpse of what’s rattling around in his vulture-like head.

  An evil, wicked hope. Perfect. He’ll sell out anyone.

  Sienna gives the prisoner a few seconds. Kerosene combustion in the mantle lamp throws off stark light and discomforting heat. The trumpeting elephant figure hisses like it’s permanently winding up a pachyderm sneeze. Their time’s running out. By the book, their prisoner should be on the copter and on his way to disappearing forever into the black-ops bureaucratic garbage disposal.

  Sidewinder exhales, as though expelling a long drag on an imaginary water pipe. He’s stowed his open contempt for her and seems almost humble. He switches from English back to Dari. He’s up to something.

  “We are alone?” Sidewinder says. “You have no one listening? None of your people understands our language, uh huh?”

  “No one’s listening. If you help me, maybe I can help you.”

  Sidewinder licks his lips. His eyes lower but keep flicking, left, right, left. “I know I am not so smart, not so exalted. I am not so notorious. Uh huh?”

  He leans back until his shoulder wounds make him flinch.

  He’s crafty. He might know we’re running on a short fuse.

  “I have to ask myself: am I worth all this?” Sidewinder rolls his eyes at his wrecked house and the wreckers busy wrecking it some more. “This is a neutral country. One it took much effort to create. Khorasan is a new start for a troubled land. A place to hide away the unwanted. We are deep within United Nations-recognized boundaries. No quick
dash over a disputed border, uh uh. Why? My business activities?” He smiles, recalling a decades-long list of murders, extortions, and violent corruption.

  “I do not think so. I only killed my own people. Never Americans. Not one,” he says proudly, like a car salesman bragging about his dealer warranty. “The transaction I am handling would not concern your government at all. So I ask, then I look, and I see. I see you. That is what I see. I see the look in your eyes.”

  “Well, look closer,” Sienna invites him. “Your ICC finding says dead or alive.”

  Sidewinder does not flinch. “I would be, as the teenagers put it, out-stressed. If you were here for me. Or my precious little jewel.”

  Sienna has a sick feeling he’s not talking about his treasure stash of black opals.

  Sidewinder shakes his head. “You are different. You have another need in you entirely. Something is empty. It is something you are wanting.”

  Sienna leans forward. “You know where HE is. TALK!”

  Tied hands brush a short, thick beard. The movement pains him. It signals a shift in initiative. In his favor. Damn.

  “I know my time in Khorasan is over.” Sidewinder exhales moist, spice-smelling breath. “Even if you release me, I would not anymore have my people’s trust. They see you come, see you go, and leave me. They will think I have become a spy. You should not have caused such a disturbance. Everything I have is for sale. I cannot stay. And if you take me to your ship, or land transport, or high air station, I will never leave your cages.”

  As if he were sketching out a map on the tabletop, the prisoner’s fingers scratch and poke. Somehow Sidewinder does see into her. “A ship. Yes.” Creepily insightful bastard.

  “That is good. It must be in the Gulf. Also very good.”

  Sienna fumes. I know I didn’t give anything away. This guy is hella slick and on his home turf.

  “Between here,” Sidewinder says. “Where we are, and the coast where you must go, is a place. Here.”