by J. J. Green
He’d reached her.
“I’m glad we agree,” she said, stooping to take her other knife from her boot.
She grabbed the man’s hair, pushed the knife tip into the dip between his windpipe and neck muscle, and jerked him in front of her.
“Lose the gun,” she ordered.
The woman’s gaze flicked from the blade to Taylan and then to the man’s eyes.
One hand full of his hair and her other around the knife hilt, Taylan urged him forward and moved with him. As her right leg was forced to bear some of her weight, she ground her teeth.
“Wh-what should I do?” the woman asked.
“Whatever you do,” replied the man, “don’t shoot.”
“Should I—”
“Lose it!” Taylan ordered.
Another shove of the trembling man, another hop.
The woman’s expression hardened. She lifted the rifle higher and squinted through the viewfinder, probably imagining Taylan was so close now she could take her out without harming the man.
Wrong.
Taylan jabbed the knife. In and out. Blood gushed from his neck. Giving him a final, hefty push, she sent his dying body toward the female Crusader.
Her eyes popping in horror, the woman stumbled backward.
Taylan sprang forward on her good leg, knocked aside the rifle muzzle, and threw herself on the woman. Another jab of the knife, and the final Crusader’s lifeblood began spurting freely from her neck through clasping fingers.
The pain of her wound overwhelming her, Taylan collapsed. She waited. When the waves receded a little, she lifted her head. A quick survey of the landscape told her she was alone with the three bodies. But things might not stay the same for long. The dead Crusaders could be members of a larger group.
On the plus side...she pulled the blood-stained rifle away from the dead woman...she was armed. But her leg was bad, and she had nothing more than a simple first-aid kit stashed in her backpack a mile or more away in the wood. She crawled, favoring her good leg, to the knife she’d tossed away. After wiping both her blades clean on the grass, she replaced them in their sheaths.
It was time to start moving.
Chapter Five
How old had Patel been? Twenty? Twenty-one?
Wright guessed the EAC must have spotted his team entering the department store and anticipated where they were going. Patel hadn’t stood a chance. If only she’d waited, been more cautious, but she was young, too young. He should have taken her over-eagerness into consideration and left her in the street with the others. It was his fault she’d died.
Elphicke had been married with a family at home in Australia.
Had he put too much responsibility on his sergeant by asking him to find an underground escape route? Maybe he should have led the attempt himself.
Maybe he should be dead, not Elphicke.
Crouching behind a dumpster, Wright wondered what to tell his platoon. He couldn’t lie and tell them reinforcements were on their way, that all they had to do was hold out until their rescuers arrived. Unless...
Opening a comm, he asked Lieutenant-General Carol, ‘Sir, are any BA forces near our current position?’
Seconds passed as he waited for an answer.
‘Negative, Major. SITREP.’
Wright gave his report.
There was a pause before Carol replied, “I’m sorry, Major. If there was anything I could do...”
“I understand, sir.” He cut the comm.
Gritting his teeth, Wright peeked out from the dumpster he was using as cover. The EAC approaching from the rear had become bolder, and sniper fire from windows beyond the barricade was scoring plenty of near misses. It was only a matter of minutes before they were overwhelmed. After a short analysis of the facts, he told his surviving Marines their next move: an all-out offensive on the barricade. It was going to be their final and only chance of survival.
Swinging out from his cover, he joined the assault. The Marines were running at full tilt toward the barrier. Pulse fire exploded from windows and the gaps between the vehicles. A stray bolt destroyed the facade of the ice-cream truck so all it read was Jamaica and Stop.
Someone was climbing up the side of a personnel carrier. As soon as he reached the top, a flash erupted on his breastplate and he crashed to the ground. But another Marine was also climbing. As he clawed his way onto the roof, he was already firing. A third man joined him.
A group had their shoulders against a jeep and were trying to push it out of the way, but distorted steel beams from destroyed buildings ran through it. The small gap they created was soon alive with pulse bolts.
Wright scaled the other jeep one-handed, holding his rifle in the other. A chunk of masonry came loose and tumbled to the ground, nearly taking him with it. As he reached the top, he came face to face with a Crusader. The muzzle of his rifle happened to be pointing in the right direction. Reflexively, his finger closed on the trigger and the pulse exploded on the Crusader’s visor. He disappeared.
One for Patel.
Scorching heat emanated from his neck and shoulder. He’d been hit. He looked up and caught a glimpse of a figure in a blown-out window. Aiming, he fired. The pain became too great, and the hand he was holding on with opened involuntarily. He fell backward onto pavement.
Despite the protection of his armor, the impact knocked the breath out of him.
He struggled to suck air in.
Above him, flashes lit the sky.
He briefly thought the C-RAM had started up, but its staccato report was absent. The flashes were pulse fire, and...he managed to lift his head a little...they were coming from beyond the barricade.
The EAC were fighting on ground they held?
He turned onto his front and staggered to his feet. The number of downed Marines had increased, but the overall number was fewer. Some had made it over the barricade. Perhaps that was the source of the pulse fire he could see. But it seemed too much for his platoon to account for it. He could barely move his left arm, but he decided to have another go at getting over the barricade.
Before he could clamber onto the jeep, however, someone began pulling down the debris piled on top of it. Someone on the other side.
The Crusader snipers were still firing, but they were firing at their side of the street. As Wright watched, the sniper fire lessened.
In another ten minutes, it was all over.
The barricade was torn down, Wright’s platoon helping. He watched, confused, the pain from his wound increasing as his adrenaline ebbed.
The Crusaders had been neutralized by an unexpected, unknown ally.
A mound of debris crashed to the ground and a jeep shifted position, opening up a gap.
“Major,” someone comm’d him. A Marine beckoned toward the break in the barricade.
The obstacle that had thwarted him for... how long? It had probably been no more than twenty or thirty minutes, though he felt like hours had passed. The obstacle had finally been overcome. But he didn’t know how. Maybe Carol had managed to organize a relief force after all.
The windows in the buildings on the far side of the barrier were black and empty. The snipers were gone, probably dead. The cultists usually preferred to die rather than fall into enemy hands.
He stepped through the gap.
A man approached him, dressed in armor of a style Wright hadn’t seen for a decade and carrying a similarly outdated rifle. The answer to his confusion popped into his mind.
It was the Resistance. The Jamaican Resistance had come to their rescue.
Wright raised his visor and held out his hand. “I can’t thank you enough.”
The man’s hand remained by his side. He replied grimly, “We don’t want your thanks. We want you to leave our country. You aren’t welcome here.”
Chapter Six
The fruit seller had a securibot. If you didn’t approach the stall from the front, like an honest, regular customer, it would shoot you with a laser beam. The be
am could penetrate cloth and burn skin. Kala knew this for a fact. She had the scars to prove it.
But she was hungry.
The fruit stall was one of the few places in the market that displayed its wares within easy grabbing distance. Things had been tough lately, even for people who had jobs and homes—an increasingly small minority—and the stallholder probably wanted to tempt customers to part with the meager contents of their bank accounts. When food was a luxury, fruit came last on shopping lists.
Kala wasn’t fussy about what she stole to fill her belly, providing the securibot didn’t get her.
The device hung from the rear of the stall, a metal sphere dotted with small, flat lenses and spikes that shot laser rays. The vendor was standing with his back to her, busy serving customers from the front. Her gaze moved from the securibot to a display of peaches, plump, pink, perfectly ripe.
Her stomach growled.
From among the general chattering of the shoppers, two voices grew louder. Too late, Kala looked up. She was just in time to see a heavy-set woman in a dark overcoat before the woman collided with her. Kala’s small body bounced off the large-framed lady and as she fell she cracked her knee on the curb. The impact tore her skin open. Blood dribbled from the cut. The woman had stumbled only a little, but she cursed and berated Kala for being ‘in the way’ though of course it was her own fault. She hadn’t been looking where she was going. She’d been too deep in conversation with her tall, wispy-haired friend.
Kala lifted her upper lip in a snarl and spat into the muddy gutter. The heavy woman’s friend grabbed her elbow and guided her away, complaining how the street rats were becoming a real problem nowadays. Kala pulled the sleeve of her dirty sweater over the heel of her hand and dabbed at her knee. The graze wasn’t too bad, but dirt from the gutter had got into it. She would have to wash it and ask Jon the Apothecary for something to smear on it to stop an infection. He would help her. He was a soft touch.
She returned her attention to the securibot.
Was it watching her back? Probably. It would be programmed to detect suspicious behavior, and her loitering would have alerted it. But it wouldn’t fire unless she got too close.
Her knee ached. Blood had broken out afresh and was cutting channels through the mud on her legs. Her stomach hurt too.
Ah, mud.
She looked from the patch of mud where she’d fallen to the glass camera lenses on the bot. Squatting down, she began to scoop up the gloopy dirt. If she had a good aim, she could—
“Kala, can you hear me?”
She paused and looked up and around. Shoppers passed by, uninterested in the little girl playing in the mud. Concluding she must be mistaken, that she’d misheard a snatch of conversation, she dipped her hands into the mud again.
“Kala, it’s Morgan. If you can hear me, try saying something in reply.”
She shot up. The mud oozed from between her fingers and dripped onto the wet pavement. Morgan? Who the hell was Morgan? She looked around again. No one was paying any attention to her.
Kala’s head began to ache. The pain started behind her eyes but quickly spread until it felt like someone had fastened her skull in a vise and was tightening it. She put her filthy hands to her temples and squeezed her eyes closed, trying to shut out the agony, but it only increased. Her brain was a fireball, burning out through her orbits.
She screamed.
She opened her eyes upon darkness. The faintest of vibrations and quietest of hums nibbled at the edge of her consciousness. Where was the street market, the securibot, and the peaches? Where was the mud?
And Jon. There was something significant she’d forgotten about Jon.
The pain was receding. She heard herself panting, but her breaths were growing longer and deeper. Understanding flowed into her mind, and the years between her childhood and now came flooding back. She was the leader of the Earth Awareness Crusade and she was aboard the flagship of her space fleet, the Belladonna. Morgan was here too—the hated Morgan le Fay she’d unwittingly released from captivity—as well as Perran. She’d retreated to space, specifically Earth-Sun Lagrange 5 after the terrifying attempt on her life at the ceremony to launch the invasion of Ireland.
As she sat up, her cabin lights came on. Wincing, she said, “Lights, dim.”
She rubbed her temples. The threads of her dream were fading, but she found herself wishing Jon was aboard the ship. He might be able to give her something to help with the...
In her mind’s eye, she saw an image: a pair of feet, one bare, old and wrinkled, and one stuffed into a slipper, swinging in the breeze below a castle window. She shook her head, trying to shake away the painful picture.
It was not her fault.
If Jon had decided to take exception to her methods for governing her people, that was up to him. She wasn’t responsible for his choices. It was not her problem that he hadn’t understood. Yet, no matter what she told herself, the dull ache she’d felt since his suicide would not abate. Her hurt flashed into anger.
Why had he done this to her? He must have known how taking his own life would affect her. She’d lost the only remaining contact with her past, the only person who knew her before she rose to power. The only person she could truly trust. Her only friend.
He must have wanted her to blame herself, to make her look again at what she was doing with her life. Well, he wasn’t going to reach out from beyond the grave and get his way. She refused to give him another thought.
Nevertheless, fury stalked her while she got out of bed and pulled on her robe. After knotting the ties, she stalked stiffly out into the passageway.
Morgan’s cabin was one minute’s walk away, but Kala reached it in half the time. When the door didn’t open immediately, she used her security override and stormed inside.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded.
Morgan was wearing a nightdress made of a fine, clinging material. She sat bent over an interface. Through the open doorway to the bedroom, Kala could see a man sleeping in her bed under ruffled, luxurious sheets, naked from the waist up.
She scowled. Didn’t Morgan understand it was a bad idea to sleep with the crew? She was inviting insubordination, friction, even mutiny.
Morgan hadn’t lifted her gaze from the interface. “I thought you wanted to practice,” she replied mildly. “You said you wanted to practice.”
“Not while I was asleep! You knew I was asleep and dreaming, didn’t you!” It was an accusation, not a question.
Her shoulders rising slightly in a shrug, Morgan replied, “I’m not sure what difference it makes.”
“It makes all the difference. Arghh!” Kala pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and sat on a sofa. “God, my head hurts. Why didn’t you tell me it would be so painful?”
Another shrug. “I’m not sure how I could be expected to know that. I don’t make a habit of teaching humans telepathy.”
When she finally looked at Kala, Morgan’s eyes were narrowed and her features full of spite and peevishness. “If you don’t want to learn, tell me now. I won’t tolerate your complaints when I’m trying to be helpful. Remember, you asked me to do this, not the other way around.”
Kala clenched her teeth and looked down. She had so much to say in reply, but she couldn’t, she mustn’t. Instead, she nursed her aching head. Moving to the comm panel next to the door, she requested medication from the sick bay. Folding her arms over her chest, she said, “I suppose now I’m awake and here, it’s a good time to discuss my next move to ensure my safety.”
Morgan’s gaze had returned to her interface.
“I received a report that one of my search patrols in West BI had gone missing,” Kala pushed on. “They were found a day later, all murdered. They’d died from knife wounds, which makes me think it wasn’t an organized BI Resistance attack. They’re better armed than that, unfortunately. I think Taylan Ellis might have killed them. We know she didn’t arrive in Ireland with the rest of the BA party.”<
br />
“She has remained in West BI to look for her children,” Morgan murmured. “That’s obvious.” She straightened up and looked Kala in the eyes. “She’s dangerous, but she shouldn’t be your focus. She isn’t your greatest threat. She’s a secondary character.”
“Character? You make it sound like we’re in a vid.”
“As I’ve told you many times,” Morgan went on, “Arthur is the one you must focus on.” Softly, she added, “And I must focus on my enemy.”
Who was her enemy?
Kala wasn’t sure she dared to ask. “But Taylan Ellis is the one who hurt me. I want her dead.”
“If Arthur had reached you with Excalibur,” said Morgan, “there wouldn’t have been a thing I could do to stop him killing you.”
Kala shivered and ran her hands up and down her upper arms. “I should never have held the ceremony. It was far too risky.”
“Hiding away isn’t the answer. Your people want and need to see you. They must see you’re unafraid before they’ll follow you. Arthur was never afraid.”
“When he was king?”
“Then, and now.”
“It’s easy to be fearless when you’re impervious to harm.”
Morgan lifted an eyebrow. “And easy to be scared when you aren’t. But Arthur isn’t completely invulnerable. It would have been better if you’d managed to kill him before the Alliance found him.”
“The ship that picked Arthur up in Ireland took him to the Gallant,” said Kala. “He must still be aboard it. If I can destroy the ship, he’ll die.”
In the bedroom, Morgan’s evening entertainment was waking up. He rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out wide. When he sat up, Kala vaguely placed him as one of the cooks. Her nose wrinkling, she yelled, “You! Get out!”
Morgan chuckled again but didn’t object.
The man instantly recognized his mistress’s voice and quickly pulled on his pants. Grabbing his shirt and shoes, he moved out of the bedroom. Kala drew back with distaste as he passed her.
