by Rachel Aukes
This is what happens if you betray the Iron Guild.
Joe winced. “Hey, Kit. The good news is, I’ve found your exoshield.”
“Great. Wait. Good news? What’s the bad news, then?”
“You’re not getting your shield back. It’s been shredded. You know, I don’t think Cat likes you very much.” Kit’s ex-boss was living proof that a small person was capable of carrying a very big grudge.
Kit responded with a string of curses, then said, “I’ll get myself a new shield, and then I’ll shred both Cat and the Iron Guild.”
Joe resumed his journey toward the far door. “Good luck with that. Okay, I’m at Cat’s office. What’s the code?”
“Same as the outside code. Two-Tee—”
“I remember it.” He entered the code again, but the red light didn’t change. He frowned and reentered the code, but had the same result. “The code’s not working. I’m moving to Plan B.” He reached for the weapon harness crisscrossing his chest plate to retrieve a grenade, but paused when Kit’s rushed voice came through his helmet speakers.
“Traffic coming in hot from the east. You must’ve triggered an alarm. Get out of there.”
“That’s an awfully fast response. Copper Gulch is over ten miles from here.” As soon as Joe said the words, the pieces fell neatly into place: the code working for one door but not the other, the loud music, the speed at which the Guildsmen were responding… It was a trap, and he’d walked right into it.
“It’s a trap,” Kit echoed Joe’s thoughts. “Get out of there, Joe.”
“Good idea.” He grabbed his blaster instead of the grenade. The door in front of him slammed open, and a bounty hunter in an exoshield leveled a blaster at Joe.
Joe fired without hesitation. While exoshields offered protection against blaster fire, they couldn’t block a point-blank shot, and the hunter collapsed while squeezing off a shot that hit the ceiling. Tiny bits of debris peppered Joe’s helmet.
“Too late!” He spun to see several more hunters jump up behind the bar and aim their blasters at him.
“Freeze!” one ordered.
Joe dove across a table and used his weight to knock it over. Laser fire blackened the wall where he’d been standing a nanosecond earlier. At least one shot went clean through his crimson cape.
“Hang in there. I’m coming to get you.”
“Hurry!” Joe exclaimed, ducking behind the table for cover, and fired in the direction of the bar. Return fire burned through the table. He rolled to his feet, ready to dive behind the next table when a hunter stepped in front of him. Joe tackled him.
A familiar icy burn bit into his shoulder; a shot had penetrated his armor. He wrestled free of his opponent, only to feel the thud of a barrel against the back of his helmet.
“You move, you die, Havoc,” a familiar female voice said.
Joe froze while the remaining hunters closed in. One relieved him of his blasters. The hunter holding the blaster to his head moved so that he could read the callsign on her chest. He then understood why her voice sounded familiar, why she’d known his callsign even though she was behind him. They’d both worked for Iron Guild’s competition, the Haft Agency.
“How does it feel to switch teams, Wilco?” Joe asked.
“Better than how you’re going to feel in a couple of minutes,” she replied.
“We have Guild cutters pulling up in front, so I’m going around back. Try to get as close as you can to Cat’s office—there’s an exit there.”
The Iron Guildsmen in the room with him would hear anything he said to Kit, so he had to choose his response carefully. “This is quite the party you threw for me.”
“Thank you, but you weren’t invited.” A petite woman emerged from an office, stepping over the body of the first hunter Joe had shot.
“Hi, Cat. I see you still have your whiskers,” Joe said, referring to the stylized horizontal streaks tattooed on her cheeks.
“All right. I’m coming in. Get ready to make a run toward Cat’s office,” Kit said through Joe’s helmet.
Cat frowned. “I was expecting Turbo. You’re not Turbo,” she said, referencing Kit’s callsign.
“You’re right, I’m not. I’m prettier than him,” Joe said.
She read the name printed on his chest plate. “Ah, Havoc. I should’ve guessed. You two are thick as thieves, aren’t you? No wonder you both have outstanding tickets. I’ll enjoy cashing the ticket on your head today. So tell me, where’s Turbo? He and I need to have a little chat.”
“A chat? Really?” Joe laughed. “By the looks of what you did to his exoshield, I’m guessing you want to get a bit more up close and personal with him.”
“I intend to get very personal with him,” she snarled.
“Then leave me out of it. I don’t want to be dragged into any lovers’ quarrels. That’s the problem with relationships. They start off all nice and steamy, but then one of the pair usually ends up bloody—or dead.”
Her eyes narrowed. “We’re not—” she caught herself. “He’s a Raven. You’re a Raven like him; you still wear the red banner. I bet you were also there when my brother was killed.”
The Ravens, the military unit Joe and Kit had served in through the Revolution and two armed conflicts, had earned quite a reputation. Much of it was an exaggeration, but just enough was true to spur rumors. “Did he have whiskers like you? If so, I can’t say I remember him.”
Her jaw tightened. “I bet you were there. Tell me, did you watch Turbo shove his sword through my brother’s heart?”
“Stay clear of the back door in three, two, one.”
Joe leaped the instant before the explosion rocked the building. He slammed into Cat, knocking her into Wilco. The other hunters hesitated to shoot, given Joe’s proximity to Cat, which bought Joe the time he needed to sprint to her office.
Smoke filled the smaller room. The nose of a vehicle—Joe’s cutter—protruded through a fresh, massive hole in the far wall, and he started toward it. When he caught sight of a sheathed sword hanging on the wall, he pivoted, jumped onto Cat’s desk, and pulled it down. Sword in hand, he leaped from the desk and landed clumsily on the hood of his cutter.
Blaster fire and shouts followed him, and he slid across the hood to grab the roll bar. Kit reversed, and Joe struggled to keep from being thrown off. As soon as the cutter slowed to change direction, he opened the passenger door and tumbled inside. Kit swung the three-wheeled vehicle around. Laser fire illuminated the air around them and deflected off the cracked windshield. The single rear wheel had a pair of drag-reducing fenders to keep the cutter upright, but they were currently slowing their progress as they scraped against chunks of the collapsed wall. Kit made S-turns, picking his way through the debris. With every turn, the fenders cut lines into the ground—the signature marks that had earned three-wheeled vehicles the “cutter” nickname.
Once clear of rubble, Kit increased power and drove alongside the building, leaving the hunters, still shooting at the fugitives, stranded.
Joe sighed with relief and put the sword down between them. “There. Now we’re even.”
“I saved your life. You got me my sword back. That’s not close to even,” Kit said as he shrugged off his dark red jacket, a perfect color-match to Joe’s cape.
“Sure we are. I nearly died getting that sword back for you. Even.” He checked his shoulder to find that the blaster shot hadn’t, in fact, penetrated his armor. It’d only charred a joint. Experience told him that the skin underneath would be an angry red.
They reached the end of the building. A cutter, concealed around the corner, rammed into the driver’s side, sending the vehicle spinning. Even without an exoshield to blunt the impact, Kit smoothly piloted through the blow without slowing, and the cutter—which Joe had lovingly named Monster—accelerated. Kit was the best driver Joe had ever met, though he’d never admit it to his friend, who already had more than enough hubris to spare.
Kit eyed the dashboard panel.
“I count three cutters on our tail.”
“There should be more. Seemed like the entire Guild was there waiting for me,” Joe said.
“Cat must’ve had most of them park in Copper Gulch to make the place look abandoned. She’s sneaky like that.”
“Hopefully, we can be clear of these clowns before they get the rest of their cutters.”
“We will be,” Kit said with confidence.
Joe reached behind him for a blaster. “I knew Cat didn’t like you, but I didn’t realize how much she wants to see you dead.”
“Right? And I didn’t even sleep with her,” Kit said.
“She seems to think you have something to do with her brother’s death.”
Kit’s features didn’t change. “He died on Black Night.”
Ah. The darkest, most violent night of the entire Revolution, and the Ravens were the cause. It was a night Joe wished he could forget, but it had defined him—Kit, too. It was the night they had morphed from soldiers into assassins.
Joe, Kit, and the rest of the Ravens had snuck into Zenith State’s headquarters and slaughtered everyone they came across. There had been no room for mercy that night. Black Night had changed the course of the war, and was thought to have saved tens of thousands of lives, shortening the war by months, if not years.
Before Black Night, the Ravens had been just another MRC fighting unit on the front lines, serving the rebellion’s unifying leadership. After that night, they were portrayed as assassins, and treated as such. Joe hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since, and he knew Kit fared no better.
Joe didn’t press for more information. Instead, he spun his seat around, opened his side window, steadied his arm on the frame, and returned fire at the cutters behind them, even though the odds of hitting a critical component not protected by a cutter’s hull, windshield, or alloy wheels were incredibly low. Still, shooting back was better than just sitting there.
“Your cutter’s a dog. If I had the Shark, we would’ve lost them already,” Kit muttered.
“I wish you had the Shark back, too, because if you had your cutter back, Monster wouldn’t be being shot at right now,” Joe countered.
“The new dents and scorch marks don’t seem to be hurting anything. Besides, it’s not like this wreck can get any uglier.”
Joe flinched when a shot whizzed by his helmet. “Hey. You’ll hurt her feelings.”
“I think naming it Monster was enough to hurt its feelings if it had any.”
“Monster’s a better name than Silver Shark. I mean, really, how corny is that? It’s a cutter, not a superhero,” Joe retorted.
Kit hit a switch. The wheels transitioned, becoming tracks, and the cutter peeled off the road and into the desert of the Salt Flats.
Their pursuers slowed to transition to tracks, and Joe continued firing since his blaster was nearly at full charge.
“These clowns don’t seem to be too bothered that I’m shooting at them. You have a better idea of how to get these guys off our tail?” Joe asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do. You still have some grenades handy?”
Joe patted his weapons belt. “Yeah. How many do you need?”
“All of them.”
Chapter Three
Joe gave up shooting and spun his seat around. “What’s the plan?”
Kit pointed without taking his hands off the yoke. “There’s an old tunnel through the hills a couple of miles up that way. No one uses it anymore because it’s unstable. Most folks don’t even know about it.”
Joe searched the horizon. Dawn’s gray fingers silhouetted a long ridge of rocky peaks like the jagged brown teeth of a massive beast. It was too dark to make out the tunnel. “But we’re going to use it anyway.”
“Exactly. The blast from your grenades should bring the hill down on them.” He grimaced. “And hopefully not on us.”
“I was hoping you’d have a good idea, not a suicidal one,” Joe complained.
“It’s only suicidal if we die.”
“Semantics. How do you know if the tunnel’s even passable? You said it’s unstable. For all you know, it could’ve collapsed a long time ago.”
Kit grinned. “I drove through it just last month.”
“Of course you did,” Joe said wryly. Something cracked behind him. One of the solar arrays had just snapped. He grimaced. “They cracked a panel. You know how much that’s going to cost to fix?”
“Relax. We’re almost there.”
Joe tugged all the grenades off his belt—four in total. They were small black orbs, smooth except for a single line around the center. The window was still open, but Joe felt no breeze through his armor. Blue and green blaster fire shot by, but the Guildsmen weren’t gaining, which meant that Monster—even under the current abuse—was holding its own, buoying Joe’s pride. Kit could eat his earlier comments about her.
The emotion was quickly smothered by adrenaline when he made out the black maw in the mountain before them. The mouth of the tunnel was smaller than Joe expected, since roads built before the fallout were often overbuilt. Then he realized that half of the opening had collapsed, leaving only a narrow entrance.
Kit didn’t even slow as they approached, though he retracted the fenders. The cutter tore into the tunnel. A boulder scraped along the solar array, a sound like a thousand rats scratching through a wall at the same time. Joe cringed. It was going to take months—and credits he didn’t have—to get Monster back in shape.
Once they were through the entrance, the tunnel widened, though rocks littered the crumbled pavement. If Kit hadn’t transitioned the wheels to tracks, the vehicle would’ve become stuck more than once. As it was, without the fenders extended for stability, the terrain forced them to slow down to keep from rolling over. The tunnel continued for what seemed to be another half-mile at least. On the screen in front of Kit, Joe saw three blips—the three Guildsmen cutters—follow them into the tunnel, though they’d been forced into a single line by the entrance. That didn’t stop any of them from shooting, though.
He couldn’t fault their optimism.
The first of the vehicles was closing the distance. It was narrower than Monster, and had its fenders extended. He counted his grenades by touch. “Get ready to speed up. If we don’t blow it soon, they’ll get out.”
Kit’s eyes flashed from the screen to the grenades to the distance before them. “Okay. Do it.”
Joe took a deep breath, then twisted the two halves of the first grenade. The line around the middle lit up and began flashing. He flung the orb as far as he could. He did the same to the remaining three grenades, activating and throwing them as quickly as possible. The first concussive explosion echoed through the tunnel, sounding like an ominous bellow from a giant.
Acceleration pushed him into his seat as Kit suddenly sped up. The noise from the following explosions was swallowed by a deep rumbling. Clouds of dust and falling debris engulfed the third cutter, then the second cutter disappeared.
“Faster!” Joe yelled.
The collapsing tunnel engulfed their last pursuer, no more than twenty feet off their rear, but the end of the tunnel was still at least fifty feet away. A falling rock caught Monster’s tail, flinging the vehicle’s nose upward before rocks and debris crushed them.
Chapter Four
Joe didn’t lose consciousness, which gave him plenty of time to be surprised he was still alive, since they were buried under millions of tons of rock. As he regained his bearings, he could see flecks of dawn just visible between the rocks on the hood. The good news was that the rocks only went halfway up on his side of the cutter, which meant the tunnel hadn’t completely collapsed. He ran a health check through his exoshield—no broken bones.
Just shaken up.
The bad news was…
“Kit?” he asked.
No answer.
“Kit?”
Still no answer.
He activated his night vision. In the dim light, he examined Kit, slumped
over the yoke. The driver’s side had been bent inward by a huge boulder, leaving very little space for Kit, who was, miraculously, still alive. If he’d been wearing an exoshield, he would’ve come through just fine. Without one, his bleeding head injury looked to be serious head trauma, and his left shoulder looked shattered—and that was just what Joe could see. Kit likely had even worse internal injuries.
In a rush, he reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out the first aid kit. Taking out a nano-shot, he carefully moved Kit to lie against the back of the seat and injected the entire contents into his chest. The technology-laced serum would triage the injuries and begin repairing the most critical ones—and, hopefully, stabilize Kit until Joe could get him to a hospital. Next, he tore open a bio-wrap and placed it over Kit’s head wound. The bandage contained coagulants, along with a cocktail of antibiotics to fend off infection. Kit might still die, but at least Joe could make sure it wouldn’t be from blood loss.
He felt helpless. There was little else he could do as long as they were buried under a mountain. He considered his options for several long seconds before he tapped the armlet wrapped around his left forearm. The computer came awake, and he sent an emergency message to a fellow disavowed hunter who happened to be the only person Joe trusted and knew to be within a few hours of Copper Gulch. “I know I’m going to regret this,” he muttered and activated his geo-locator.
A response came in under three seconds: Never fear. On my way to save the day, Josey boy.
Hopefully, help would arrive in time for Kit. Relief was tempered by the knowledge that he now owed a very big favor to someone who would not fail to collect.
He reached over to the yoke and pressed and held the cutter’s system reboot button. The screens flashed, and there was a hum as the systems powered up and ran diagnostics. It looked like there were more things broken on the cutter than working, and since cutters—like all vehicles—used solar power, the faster Joe got them out of there, the better their chances.
