New Praetorians 1 - Sienna McKnight

by R. K. Syrus

  Sienna hears herself whisper, “Look.”

  Khalid’s man spins around and sees her. Then he sees no more. Two small rocks go through his eyes.

  Look! And find only my merciless gaze staring back.

  No tears for you as you fall.

  Another man comes out of a doorway, his machete raised. Sienna jams her elbow in Machete Man’s throat. She takes the two-foot blade out of his hands and wings it, hardly looking. It sprouts out of the chest of another onrushing enemy.

  No tears of sorrow.

  None of exultation.

  Machete Man comes up off the ground and grapples with her, eyes bulging, gasping through a bruised airway, still trying to strangle and gouge her. Sienna might have knocked out Machete Man. She is not that far gone, she can tell, still tell, the difference between combatants and bystanders. Or disarmed guys trying to give up. But the poor fellow is persistent. And clearly, he is a man who loves his knives.

  He pulls another blade from his belt. Sienna punches him behind the ear and spins him around, facing him away from her. He jabs backward at her head as she wrestles his left hand into a hammer lock. Sienna does her best to choke him unconscious without killing him. He doesn’t appreciate her gesture. He cuts his own shoulder in his bloodlust to carve Sienna’s features off.

  Sienna has no stone. But improvisation is always at hand, and so is the man’s spine. As she slides left to avoid his wild backward stabbing, she presses her palm against the unruly guy’s back. Her new sense of touch extends a few inches above her metacarpal bones. She can feel through squishy skin and fat to something round and solid: one of his lumbar vertebrae. Must be L1 or L2. In the heat of the moment, she can’t be sure. It does not matter. It feels much like a rock. The man bites her forearm. It hurts. Before Machete Man can tear off a juicy chunk of her flesh and wriggle away, L1 (or L2) comes shooting out of his chest. It hits the wall opposite with a wet thunk.

  No tears, only yearning.

  Hunger.

  For More!

  The silversmith’s storefront explodes out into the main square. Sienna ducks the blowback of brick splinters and shattered glass. In the village square, the crater made by the exploded gasoline tanker still burns. It forms a ring of fire, as if someone slit the navel of the Wandering Desert to let the intestines of Hell peek out. There are no more shots. All the gunmen are dead or incapacitated.

  Recklessly, Sienna launches herself over tumbling rubble. She is thirsty, possibly severely dehydrated. She can’t stop. She’s getting good at stacking her shots up to three in each hand at once. Acrid smoke from pooled machine oil smells like air drifting across the clear, wide lake near her North Carolina home. Brimstone contrails of her bolts add gentle incense. Venturesome licks of fire find a home on shattered timbers. To either side of her, these flare and crackle. Nothing moves. Nothing living dares make noise as she walks, slowly now, down the smoldering avenue.

  To her left, movement. More nourishment for the insatiable? Her hands charge up with power, now as natural for her as drawing breath. Ready to rend flesh and deal death in an instant…

  She stops.

  In her sights is a trembling, filth-encrusted man. A desperate beggar. He sees her and stops searching a fallen body for some meager allowance that will allow him to survive one more day. He recognizes his peril. So does his companion, a bony mutt with a pitifully tattered coat hanging over jutting ribs. Only one of the man’s legs will bend. He kneels on the one that works in supplication to Sienna. His dog adopts a similar posture, lowering its head to the ground.

  Sienna meets the beggar’s wide-open, bloodshot eyes. Her arms are streaked with soot, her hair trails ash. Embedded fiber optics glow. She must appear to be a spirit, an elemental goddess of destruction.

  ENOUGH!

  NEVER!

  They’ve had enough.

  No!

  Sienna recalls herself and is suddenly, utterly exhausted. She looks at the beggar. He is a cripple wandering in a merciless land, forced to loot from the dead. But even he has a friend and loyal companion.

  Enough.

  Seeing it will receive no more sustenance, the coiled thing inside her retreats. Hissing and snapping its greedy jaws, it ebbs—for a time.

  Sienna’s racht passes.

  She is alone.

  Destroy is all she can do. As for mercy, the most merciful thing would have been never to come to this place. She surveys the devastated settlement. A full-on air raid could not have done more damage.

  The locals. They’re beaten. There’s nothing left to destroy. What little they had, gone. The shop fronts of what used to be the main drag are burned out. Khalid’s men, all dead. The village’s fighting men have been killed or crippled, leaving it vulnerable to roving bandits or the designs of hostile clans. Seeing the smoke, displaced fighters from all over the Six Hills will be incoming soon. They will see an opportunity to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the sudden passing of Artuk.

  Her knees fall onto the dirt of the street. Small puffs of dust rise. She does not have the strength to find shelter and collapse. Wreckage of buildings and vehicles flare spates of flame. These daytime torches illuminate the last three players on the stage of her Armageddon-themed morality play—the beggar, his pet, and her.

  Improbably, inside an overturned Jeep, the radio has switched on. A woman’s cheery voice chirps.

  “…and now back to BBC International News, updates from around the globe with Jeremy Greffer.”

  “Thank you, Christy. News from the world of science tops our stories today. Correspondents in Europe are still sorting out the somewhat conflicting reports coming in from the Lichtstrom. Eye witnesses have reported some kind of glitch during the super collider testing of the artifact popularly known as the Ansible.

  “And while we wait on those updates, we can happily report a major advance in unmanned space exploration. Have you ever wanted to get away from it all? Well, today the probe launched by China’s CNSA, which they’ve appropriately named Adventurer, landed billions of kilometers away from Earth on Eris. Named after the Greek goddess of Chaos, this lonely planetoid is as far as you can go out in space and still be in our solar system…”

  32

  I am a trapdoor spider.

  Sweat-stained folds of a kufeya headdress frame a window into a blasted wasteland.

  You’ll never see me till I want you to.

  Every small movement sends dust motes swirling out into the steady rays of the sun. Every exhalation pulls precious moisture out of her body. For some reason—maybe successive blows to the head—she thinks of heat blasting from a pizza oven. A specific pizza oven. A place in Fayetteville where she worked one summer. From shin to shoulder, the cooks all had symmetrical burn scars from each of the six heavy doors. If she passed by while these were open she’d have to hold her breath. Heat. Unbreathable. The broiling inside would blister a hand in seconds. Now she’s in the center of one hundreds of miles across.

  An hour ago, her ride bled out. Cracked hoses impossible to patch, it was a goner. She got far enough to see the Six Hills from the other side. The low mounds float off the ground on a cushion of heat waves. Behind them, a small trail of smoke fades up into Khorasan’s callous blue sky. This signal of distress did not go unnoticed.

  After the battle, scores of bandits from the Six Hills descended on the crippled settlement. Like eager ants and flesh-hungry beetles, they came singly at first, then all at once. The community she tore apart lay like raw carrion left on the edge of the scouring maw of the Wandering Desert. Nothing would go to waste. As unsavory as Artuk’s successors are, her fight is not with them. She found a working car and this time had the good sense to drive away. Lucky for the invaders.

  Besides avoiding hostiles, her priority was to find a satellite phone. One that worked. One whose plastic housing was not melted into the fingers
of a rudely severed hand. That didn’t happen. And the best choice of working vehicles did not last long under the relentless assault of heat and dust of the open road. It’s only use now is as bait.

  She takes a small sip of water and thinks on ways to continue her sojourn away from Dodge. One method would be to let herself be captured and do the old “Surprise! I’m a railgun and you’re dead” trick. But she hates repeating tactics. There is also the nagging problem that the story of her violent escape must have hit the terror chat channels by now. That would scare her pursuers. Scared people shoot first, then send dogs in to bite the corpses. Then they shoot again.

  The battered egg-shell blue car slumps in a roadside depression. Only partially hidden, dirt randomly covers shiny parts, and the roof is topped with dry twigs. Sloppy and dumb. Perfect. It looks like someone incompetent tried to camouflage it.

  Her real ambush dugout has a decent view of the winding road and even a good patch of sky to watch for friendly aircraft. From the outside, the viewing gap is just another crack in a brittle landscape. She crouches, sips water, and does anything to distract herself from the one thing she dreads: looking at herself.

  She rolls up the light cloth covering her arm. It’s still there.

  Was it just going to disappear?

  Maybe it will come off with a good scrubbing, using sandpaper if necessary. She runs her fingers over her arm, along the seamless join where her flesh meets the border of deeply set something. Cyan and magenta and iridescent silver, those are the colors the stuff reveals.

  Something’s been bugging her. The RAPTEK magnetics are only supposed to work on metal. She picks up a car key bauble. The garish lips-and-tongue trinket is a pretty racy accessory in this part of the world. The owner was risking a flogging for the sake of personal style. It’s made of only plastic. Sienna thinks about closing her fingers. Only thinks about it. The bauble floats, starts to bubble and melt. It becomes a tiny, Daliesque icon. Before it can scald, she flings it.

  Okay, then.

  Next, she checks the improvised bandage covering the spot where the Chechen went all Dr. Zhivago on her arm with his bayonet. The area is scabbed but not infected. The gouge is closed and raised. Tender. Could it be healing? Equipment doesn’t regenerate. It works until it breaks or gets junked.

  At least the power plant didn’t blow. One item stuck in her mind from her glance over the instruction manual. There was no maximum amperage or voltage. Perdix and his bunch hadn’t analyzed all their Ansible-based invention could do. They were more concerned with keeping it all a big secret.

  Boy, were they gonna get all grumpy when she showed them what was left. Was it such a big deal? They must have the blueprints somewhere. And they could always clone more power chips.

  The weapons system… the power source… the Ansible.

  My accident. Could they be connected?

  What really happened in Europe at the Lichtstrom on March 19? First home, then answers.

  Sienna waits.

  The sun slides down the inverted bowl of the sky like a fiery eye, staring, greedy. Sand scuttles down the rim of her hide. Like an itch in the back of her brain, she’s teased by the notion the sand grains are being kicked back by the spiny feet of a scorpion. A scorpion which has become so much a part of the landscape it is now invisible to self-aware observers.

  No. No scorpion. But yes, movement.

  Vibrations. Farther off. She feels them moments after the sand sensed them. And right after that, she hears. A motor. Coming closer. A truck. She remains motionless in her spider hole.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, Sienna is still an unfulfilled carjacker. The armed men on the road below her position are not cooperating. They just sit in their truck. And chat. They look at the badly hidden car. Look at each other. Look in their empty back seat. But they don’t get out. They’re supposed to get clear so there’s no chance of her replacement ride getting damaged during the double helping of mayhem she wants to serve up.

  They sit. In the heat.

  The longer this goes on, the greater the chance they’ll call reinforcements. For now, they’re just talking and smoking. Exhaled fumes billow out the half-rolled-down windows. The truck is a fly ride. It looks in good shape, with plenty of water and gas. Well worth stealing, T-Rex would say. They must be trekking somewhere special, maybe a marketplace.

  I can’t let it get away.

  Sometimes a bat-crap idea can result in a good plan. It better, because her next move probably involves a bullet hitting her.

  She does not have any firearms. There were no serviceable bolt guns. Even loading up a semi-auto mag could lead to unwanted and explosive results. No matter. Using rocks and pieces of metal bare-handed, she had as good a range as she’d have with any gun.

  Sienna wraps a stick in a cloth. Exhaling, she tightens the straps of her salvaged torso armor. It is wraparound articulated rhino-skin armor, rated for multiple hits. Hopefully, she will not have to test its limits. An empty water bag filled with hydraulic fluid completes her outfit. She prepared it with notions of spattering the windshield of a passing car or mixing it with the diesel to signal friendly aircraft with a multicolored smoke smear. The fluid is red. She can use it.

  Bursting out of cover, she accelerates a small rock. The projectile makes a hypersonic crack and impacts just in front of the stopped truck. Two men wearing track suits jump out. To them, she’s a figure on the ridge who has taken a badly aimed shot with a weapon bundled up against sand exposure.

  This could work.

  Incoming bullets kick up sand around her.

  Or not.

  Sienna pretends to be frightened by the overwhelming force her assailants bring to bear, and flees. She keeps her head down and runs straight away from the gunmen. Only the upper A-zone of her back presents a target. A near miss makes her grimace and duck her head lower.

  Spak!

  Wide. If she pretends to be hit, they won’t believe it.

  Elbows in. Head down… Okay, where did these two learn to sh—

  Crack!

  Right above her kidney, an impact like a horse’s kick sends her sprawling. She eats sand.

  Freaken AKs. Why can’t they shoot each other with 5.56s like polite folks?

  Sienna makes sure her fake gun is still bundled and flung well away. She squeezes the bag of hydraulic fluid; it dribbles out of the ragged hole over her back. Then she sprawls her hands out, clutching loose sand as if in a death grip. That should be unmistakable.

  Sienna keeps her breathing shallow. Tense seconds tick by. One of the guys approaches. Only one climbs up the dune. Good. The other stays guarding the truck in case she’s a distraction for a larger group.

  She can’t risk looking back. In front, all she can see is the shadow of a man. He stands, tense, ready to fire at any movement. She stays still. The moment passes. The shadow man looks back to check on his friend, then slings his rifle backward. He prepares to use both hands to search her for valuables.

  He’s closer, then closer still. When he’s good and close, she turns over. And gets a blast of sunlight in her eyes. When she formulated her original bat-crap plan, the sun was higher in the sky! She can’t see anything. There’s a soft clatter as the startled attacker reaches around for his weapon. The stone she prepared flies out of her fingers too soon. With a snap and a whistle, it flies off. No time to fish for a new one, Sienna uses what she has. A handful of sand.

  A stream of tiny particles jets in the direction of the silhouetted head of the gunman. His face gets sandblasted to the bone. He collapses back with a strangled cry from a lipless hole. Sienna blinks at black spots in her vision. She can see well enough to bring the stick down good and solid behind his ear stump.

  Right then, the second belligerent decides to join. Sienna tries to drop him with the piece of wood. It only careens off the sand, totally missin
g its mark. Too big. Her opponent kneels and aims carefully. Body armor or not, this fellow will not stop shooting until she’s full of holes and leaking real blood.

  She dives forward as though she were on the grass field on some school ground, lurching for a touchdown. The first burst of incoming bullets misses, though not by much. He eases off the trigger to get her back in his sights.

  There’s no cover.

  A mess of gravel-sized stones score and cut her palms. She clenches them in her fists and accelerates them the twenty-odd meters at the crouching enemy.

  Tiny rocks whiz through the air like a hundred shotgun pellets, peppering the antagonist’s chest, arms, and torso. Some debris flying at supersonic speed must also have lodged down the barrel of his weapon. Sienna can tell, because when he fires at her again at point-blank range, the rifle’s breech explodes. The shooter’s headgear, scalp, and a good chunk of forehead bone burst up and out.

  The echo of the AK breech rupture eddies between escarpments along the road. It fades into a malevolent silence. Sienna scrambles to the lip of the sand precipice and looks down. No movement on the road. There is no third guy.

  She sits down. This hurts. So she lies down. That also hurts, as does breathing.

  Close. Way close. The ceramic inserts over her back are cracked. One more good hit…

  Forget about that. Like Carlos Hathcock said, a miss is as good as a mile. Of course, the famous jarhead rarely missed.

  On your feet, McKnight. Gotta get away from here before more of them show.

  Fake blood runs down her leg. It joins with her enemy’s genuine gore and the mix is lapped up by omnivorous sand. She lets the harness holding her body armor fall. The lightening of a few pounds throws her off, makes her dizzy. She has to brace on one knee. Maybe she’s more dehydrated than she thought. Or else this thing, the thing she does, takes her energy as well. Either way, she has a working truck. Side-stepping down the dune, a fresh bruise welling on her back gives a sharp pinch with every step.