Syndicate Wars: The Resistance (Seppukarian Book 2)

by Kyle Noe

  “We’re almost there!” Hawkins shouted.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “The place where we’re gonna prepare a little surprise for our friends!” he shouted, jabbing a finger toward the sky.

  The trucks swerved off the main road, Eli grabbing Samantha and preventing her from rolling out of the truck. The four machines thundered down over a dirt road shrouded by a bunching of sheltering trees.

  The trucks plowed across a shallow stream and up an incline before coming to a jarring stop in the middle of the trees. Three Syndicate gliders sliced past overhead, wavering the overhead branches.

  Everyone dismounted the trucks and ran raggedly for several hundred yards. Samantha hesitated and watched Hawkins slide one of the alien munitions—the metallic canisters—into a backpack that he shrugged on with some effort. Then he clutched a machine gun and signaled for the others to follow.

  Seconds later, they’d crossed the dirt road, taking cover in a windfall. The area was full of felled trees at the edge of a thick wood. The windfall, which was the size of a football field, contained hundreds of trees that looked as if they’d been flattened by a gigantic hand.

  The timber looked to be old-growth, some of the trunks a hundred feet long and more than six feet in circumference. There was a wide swath of fallen wood, the trees lying across one another, creating a natural barrier between the forest and the road as well as pockets between the trees where a person or persons could easily conceal themselves.

  Samantha and the others crawled into the middle of the windfall and secreted themselves in the pockets, ducking down and then looking up to search for the Syndicate ships.

  “We’ve found they have trouble maneuvering in terrain like this,” Hawkins whispered.

  “What does?” she asked.

  Hawkins pointed to the sky. “The big boys. The largest drones they’ve got.”

  “How do you know they’ll use them?” Samantha asked.

  “Because they are the preferred weapon for snatch-and-grab ops.”

  Samantha peered up as a glider slowly circled over the area. The underbelly of the craft opened and seven oversized drones dropped down through the air on uncoiled metal leaders. They were the largest that Samantha had ever seen.

  “Rat lines,” Hawkins whispered to her. “The goddamn things ride those metal wires all the way to the ground.”

  The drones rode the metal leaders to the ground, thundering to earth, antenna sprouting from their bulky turrets.

  “Look at the guns on those bastards,” Eli said.

  Several distinct beams of light pulsed from the tops of the drones. The drones pivoted in every direction, the red beams lancing out across the darkness.

  “They’re looking for us,” Samantha whispered to herself. They’re looking for you, a still, small voice muttered somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind.

  She dropped to the ground and watched the other resistance fighters crawl through the nooks and gaps that lay between the downed trees. They moved out, encircling the drones.

  Hawkins pulled up his old-school “over-under,” a machine-gun that had been bolted to a 40-mm grenade launcher. Samantha watched him insert a red shell into the launcher and rack it into place. She noted red slashes down the stock of the gun. Her finger pointed to these and Hawkins silently mouthed, “drones.” It was clear that this was not his first rodeo.

  A whirring came from nearby, and Samantha looked through a gap in the trees to see the drones moving forward. The lead machine eased back, its massive front foot testing the edge of the windfall like a child dipping its toe in a pool to test the waters.

  Long seconds later came a tearing sound followed by a shudder that ran through the wood as the drone’s huge tread rose and then smashed down through the first tree. The ground shook, and Samantha swapped a quick look with Eli. She wondered whether she’d made a huge mistake in rejoining the resistance.

  The pumping of the pneumatics on the drones grew louder. The machines moved slowly, taking their time, pulping across the trees as they searched for prey.

  Hawkins used hand gestures to signal to the other fighters.

  One of the fighters—a bald, black man—reached into a pocket and pulled out several balloons along with a minute inflator hooked to a metal cylinder. The man blew up the balloons, and Eli’s brows converged as he leaned in close to Samantha.

  “What is this? A birthday party?”

  The fighter released the balloons into the air.

  They hadn’t traveled fifteen feet when the drones opened fire. Rounds from the machines’ chain guns ripped through the night air, eviscerating the balloons.

  Samantha palmed the alien pistol and watched Hawkins close his eyes and silently mutter something to himself. Then, he rose and fired at the drones with his grenade launcher.

  The round from the launcher broke apart halfway over the windfall. Samantha had expected a tremendous blast, but instead, the munition released a great cloud of smoke.

  Visibility instantly dropped to a few feet, and two things happened almost at once. The drones began wildly firing, and the resistance fighters hurriedly moved on their bellies through the crevices that lay between the fallen trees.

  Resistance gunfire soon rang out, and grenades were tossed. The lead drone was disabled, its right leg splintered by a sabot round that sheared off its hydraulic cables.

  The other drones barreled past the wounded one, rising to their full height on the wood and firing down into the places where the resistance fighters were shooting back.

  Samantha watched the drones flash up into the air, hopping between bunchings of timber like flightless birds.

  One of them landed, and two resistance fighters slapped sticky explosives against its feet which blew apart, showering the windfall with shrapnel.

  The fighters set upon the stricken machine only to be gunned down by another drone that riddled the area with chain gun fire and a smattering of small rockets. The two fighters were quickly stitched from groin to forehead with Syndicate fire until their bodies were no longer recognizable.

  One drone was destroyed, one was crippled, but five more were blasting at anything that moved.

  A Hafnium rocket was fired off to the right, but the missile detonated ineffectively against a reinforced section of the drone turret, skittering off into the darkness like a bottle rocket.

  More rockets were fired by the drones, and Samantha saw a female resistance fighter blown apart as she crawled over the trunk of a moss-slicked tree. She watched the blood, shiny and red under a quarter moon, arc across the woman’s shredded torso.

  Samantha gritted her teeth. She wanted to do something, she had to do something.

  “Stay cool, girl,” Eli said, reading her body language. “This ain’t our fight.”

  She considered this and then, after listening to the cries of a wounded resistance fighter, rose from her hiding spot and fired a shot from her pistol.

  The ball of light from the gun’s barrel shone as brightly as the wrath of God.

  It slammed into the closest drone, creating an immense pillar of fire that rose into the sky. The drone was turned to ash, and the blast set the adjacent jumble of wood on fire. In seconds, a wall of flames was moving across the windfall.

  Samantha smiled, and a hand grabbed the pistol and pushed it down.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” Hawkins demanded, reappearing over the far side of the windfall.

  “Saving your ass,” she barked back.

  His jaw locked, and he grabbed the pistol away from her.

  “Hey! That’s mine!”

  Without responding, Hawkins rose and straddled the trunk of the nearest tree. Samantha was pissed beyond all measure, but followed him anyway. She wanted her gun back.

  Eli shouted for her to stop in the background, but she didn’t stop.

  Instead, she eased into a run and measured her weight, running down the trunk as the drones emerged from the fireball and smoke, guns still
ablaze.

  Samantha felt the kinetic force from a drone chain gun round as it snapped past her head. She ducked and darted and fell into a gap between the trees. The darkness in the gap was absolute, and for a moment, she couldn’t see anything. Hawkins had vanished, but she could hear the battle raging all around her.

  She grabbed the edges of a tree and pulled herself up.

  There was Hawkins, maybe sixty feet away, taking the pistol. He slid it into the backpack he’d been carrying. Directly next to the alien bomb he’d hidden inside.

  Hawkins’s hands fished inside the backpack and then hoisted the backpack and hurled it out near the drones before diving for cover. She dropped low, and within seconds, Hawkins was visible, pulling himself through the spacing between the timber.

  His eyes went wide when he saw Samantha. “What the hell are you doing?!”

  “You stole my gun, dude!” she shouted back.

  He fell into the gap where she was hiding and used his body to shield hers, then yelled, “Get down and cover your head!”.

  She did, but caught sight of a tentacle that dropped from a glider overhead, a metallic hook that slammed down on top of Hawkins’s backpack. The hook retracted and pulled the backpack up into the belly of the glider.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “That thing stole your backpack! You hear me? It just reached down and—”

  CRACKBOOM!

  An explosion rocked the glider, shunting it sideways.

  Samantha looked up, her feverish eyes fixed on the sight of the smoking glider. The bomb hidden inside the backpack had chewed a sizable hole in the bottom of the glider. She could hear metal grinding on metal inside the glider, the sound of engines locking up. The mighty machine hiccupped and dropped before powering itself back up.

  Hawkins grabbed and tossed Samantha over his shoulder, and they were on the move again.

  Hawkins ran with the practiced grace of a dancer, somehow able to dash across the top of the trees without falling or getting gunned down.

  He dropped back into the original hiding place where Hawkins dropped Samantha off into the arms of Eli. She fell, kicking and screaming only to have Eli place a finger over her lips. Her eyes roamed up, and she watched the partially destroyed glider retract the five remaining drones on the ratlines before blasting off into the sky, trailing ribbons of smoke and fire.

  “My God,” Hawkins said softly to himself. Then, he turned and, with more vigor, he said, “We did it! We beat the bastards!”

  Samantha stood and looked back to see the remaining resistance fighters emerge from their hiding spots, triumphantly raising their weapons. The wreckage of the disabled and destroyed drones still burned, but the Syndicate had abandoned the field of battle. The aliens had actually ceded ground to the humans. Samantha had never seen or heard of this happening before, and neither had any of the others judging from their reactions.

  Still, there was something that unsettled her. The voice she couldn’t shake. The still, small one from before that whispered, You fool, Samantha. They used you.

  10

  FRIENDS BECOME ENEMIES

  The Marines exited the arc glider in the desert outside of Las Vegas, carrying only small arms and rucksacks. They thundered over the parched landscape under cover of darkness. The area ahead was silent, the only things visible were the eyes on a small congregation of deer that spooked and ran off.

  Quinn led the others onto a ribbon of asphalt. It was an old industrial road that curled toward downtown Vegas, the once sprawling city that now lay partially ruined and without electricity under the skull-colored moon.

  Renner tapped into the still orbiting radio satellite and cued up an old Elvis tune, “Viva Las Vegas,” which seemed entirely appropriate as the Marines drifted through the gloom like dark cutouts.

  The asphalt soon turned bumpy, then devolved to gravel and finally dirt. The Marines ducked through stands of Creosote bushes and thickets of Yucca. Quinn navigated via the information on her HUD which beamed down status updates and real-time imagery while illuminating the fastest route to the target. For a moment, she ran out ahead of the others and popped three pills of the drug Black Sunshine that Cody had given her before. She could feel the capsules dissolve on her tongue and could sense the granules of the drug being absorbed. The effect was almost instantaneous as Quinn looked up and started running so quickly the other Marines shouted for her to stop.

  Quinn stopped only once. She threw up a hand and gestured for the other Marines to study the partial wreckage of the city from a quarter mile away. The infrared ghostings of what Quinn assumed were resistance fighters were visible, peering down from inside the remains of what had once been the city’s tallest buildings.

  “You seeing that?” Quinn asked Milo.

  “A blind man could see that,” Milo replied. “Question is whether we’ve been compromised.”

  “They’d be firing if we were,” Quinn replied.

  Combat-running down through a desert wash, the Marines were soon covertly moving across a cement culvert that once bisected the city’s main thoroughfares. They slipped over the ruins of the wall that had once surrounded the city, the only reminder of a terrible time decades earlier when whole sections of the country had been overrun by gangs of people addicted to a myserious drug.

  There’d been a series of tremendous explosions there, likely a Syndicate bombing run that had upturned whole city-blocks of cement and earth, bodies in various states of decay lying all about. Ahead, there were titanic craters and sinkholes, the blacktop choked with burned out, gridlocked cars, and the moonscape was littered with bits and pieces of ordnance, including a few bombs that had failed to detonate. Strangely, while the outer ring of Vegas appeared to have been targeted, the downtown sections looked relatively unscathed.

  The Marines trekked past dormant casinos and hotels and places where revelers had once engaged in all manner of illegal and illicit commerce. They ducked under fallen billboards and shimmied under rusted out light poles, making good time through the close-packed urban canyons.

  Soon, they stood before it. If the intel was correct, it was the oversized cement and steel cover that should have opened to reveal a ladder that descended to the tunnels that crisscrossed under the city. There was a magnetic lock fastened to the cover.

  “Can it be opened?” Quinn asked.

  Renner dropped and looked it over. The lock was thick and rusted over, impossible to maneuver around. He looked up at Quinn and shook his head.

  “I’ve got the key right here,” Milo said, holding up a wide-barreled Syndicate pistol the Marines referred to as a “bulldog.”

  Milo threaded a silencer onto the end of the pistol as the others took cover. Two shots obliterated the lock.

  Renner jimmied his fingers under the edge of the cover and grunted, heaving it open.

  Quinn’s sense of smell, on overload from the drug, was spiked by the funk of biological decay from the other side of the cover. Her head snapped back, and her nostrils filled with the unmistakable odor of fetid water and death. The other Marines smelled it, too.

  “The hell is that smell?” Quinn asked.

  “Renner’s ass?” Milo offered.

  Renner killed the music and flipped Milo a middle finger. “That there is sewer gas,” he said, scrunching up his nose. “I’d say fifty percent methane, and the rest a smattering of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Thought the methane part is odorless, it’ll kill ya if you breath in too much of a concentrated amount.”

  Milo squinted, considering. “And you’d know that how?”

  “The man was raised by rats for Chrissakes,” Quinn said.

  “Nope, but I do have an appreciation for what is a complicated little bouquet,” Renner said, grinning and pointing down into the tunnel. “That is one of nature’s perfect time bombs, just waiting for someone to light the fuse.”

  “Damn.” Milo adjusted his helmet and pressed the gas mask to his face so that his voice came out muffled. “Good think these he
lmets are adaptable as shit.”

  “Weird simile to use here, brother.” Renner held up a small butane lighter. “One flick of this down under and there’s gonna be a righteous fire that burns all,” he said.

  “Gimme that goddamn thing,” Hayden snarled, taking the lighter from Renner.

  Other applied gas masks, some pressing the button to cause the masks to close over their faces and keep the exposure completely away from them. If there was one benefit to being a Marine with the Syndicate, it was their adaptable armor.

  Quinn looked down into the open hole, her HUD providing enough illumination so that she could see the metal rungs that had been bolted onto the side of what was quite clearly a six-foot length of cement pipe.

  A schematic appeared on her HUD, and Quinn could see that the pipe connected to another, larger section of pipe, more like a tunnel, that branched off like a spider web under the city streets. Somewhere down underground was a resistance rat tunnel, a section of conduit large enough for men and equipment to be ferried through. The area where the resistance was purportedly amassing an inordinate number of weapons and ammunition.

  One by one, the Marines grabbed onto the metal rungs and lowered themselves down into the tunnel. Quinn was the first one off the ladder, dropping down and scattering a small delegation of rats that were as large as small dogs.

  The bottom of the tunnel was algae-slicked and covered by a coil of putrid water, the entire space reeking of decay and death. Guided by the map on her HUD, Quinn set off down the main tunnel, which was nearly six-feet tall.

  The tunnel branched a thousand feet in, and Quinn hooked to the left, stepping over bodies of resistance fighters or civilians that she surmised had been killed in the initial invasion. She ambled to the right as the tunnel spooled down into the ground.

  The Marines moved briskly when a red light flashed on Quinn’s HUD. There was something up ahead, a thin length of wire that was positioned across the tunnel at ankle height.