“Huh,” Kira said with a smile. “That’s actually a good idea. But you need to pull it off. What progress had you made before you shot us down?”
“Us personally? None. But I understand that the general has gotten his team and the Shadow inside the core. They had breached the interior when we took down your ship.”
On the side panel of the cockpit’s port side was a storage panel, secured by a fingerprint recognition pad. Kira pressed her fingertips against the pad, and it hissed open. Inside was artillery enough to arm a small militia. Kira grabbed the compression whipblasters and tossed them to Kobe and Mig. The heavy-duty tri-blaster went to 4-Qel, who whirred with excitement. Kira grabbed a whipblaster for herself—and had to suppress a gleeful squee when she did—as well as a couple of plasma detonators.
“Okay,” she said, slamming a charge into the whipblaster—an automatic blaster that sported a spinning barrel for the most effective suppressive fire imaginable. “Let’s go find this general of yours.”
* * *
Uninterrupted blaster fire smothered the confined area that contained the financial center’s cluster of buildings. Cylindrical towers erupted as the hail of blaster bolts pulverized their exteriors; it wasn’t that difficult of a demolition, Kira noted, seeing that the exteriors, from the bases all the way to the tops—each of the four towers capped with a gleaming steel spike—was made of glass. Only Praxian architects could be arrogant enough to slap glass over the entirety of a building’s facade, assuming that the planet was untouchable. Yet here they were.
From Kira’s perspective, the financial cluster couldn’t have been located in a worse strategic position. The six financial buildings occupied the core of Aragorn Square, and the area itself was distinguished by the Aragorn Museum, a hundred-foot-tall fortress that surrounded the square on three sides. Praxian forces were currently perched on the top floors of the Aragorn, firing indiscriminately at the financial buildings in order to keep the opposition pinned down. If Kira had to guess, an ancillary team of Praxian ground forces was on its way through one of the city’s lower levels and would soon come up right into the financial buildings and squeeze its enemies into a vise. That’s what she would do.
Assuming whoever was in charge of Praxis’s counteroperation was as smart as she was—Kira tried to at least be open to the possibility—the window to pull this thing off was very, very narrow and closing fast. She had to act quickly.
“The one thing we cannot do is hesitate,” Kira said, instructing both Gunk and the soldier he’d kept with them, Stark. “You both know what to do, right?”
Gunk nodded enthusiastically, but Stark seemed far less certain. This was the problem with recruiting people off the street, shoving a blaster in their hands, and calling them soldiers. She’d seen it too many times in her own revolutionary movement, where the people in charge placed value on warm bodies, even if they had no chance of staying warm for long. Since they still had a little bit of time to kill before her plan kicked into action, Kira explained the strategy one last time.
“Listen,” Kira said, making sure to catch Stark’s attention, “what we’re doing is called a timed advance. Okay? Now look—”
Kira drew Stark’s attention ahead.
“You see that overturned aero barge straight ahead, right? That’s our first stop. Four-Qel, Kobe, Mig, and…” Kira snapped her fingers, trying to remember the name of the soldier who accompanied her friends.
“Qin,” Gunk said.
“Qin, right,” Kira said. “They’re setting explosions on two sides of the museum that will distract the fire directed at the buildings. Not for long, but enough time for us to get to the barge, and then—”
An explosion again drowned out Kira’s words. She looked up to see that a chunk of the museum’s northern wall had been blown out; replacing the seemingly impenetrable fortress’s edifice was a wall of smoke and fire pouring out into the evening air. As anticipated, the sudden, unexpected blast brought Praxis’s suppressive firing to a stop.
“Move! Move!” Kira commanded as she led Gunk and Stark forward, crouching as she ran to the aero barge.
She dove for cover behind the barge and pressed her back against the commuter transport’s metal underbelly, which was still warm. Gunk was beside her and Stark beside him. Kira had no doubt that Praxis would send some of its forces to investigate the blast, but its assault on the financial cluster, after the brief pause, was undeterred.
“They don’t take much of a break, do they?” Gunk asked. “Very diligent, those Praxian soldiers.”
Kira craned her head around the barge and spotted the concrete block that housed one of the spotlights that were placed in the square’s four corners. It was a straight shot from their position but a lot longer of a haul than it had been to the barge. “We’ll just have to be faster, then.”
“If they spot us—”
“War’s a whole lot of ifs, Gunk. Deal with it.”
Another explosion pulverized a block of the museum’s exterior, this time on its eastern face. Kira wasted no time sprinting to the spotlight. It was farther than she would have liked, but there was nothing she could do about that, so instead she dug every footfall deep into the ground and propelled herself forward as hard as she could. Small bits of metal and rock crunched beneath her feet, and she could smell smoke and blaster fire in the air. All she could do was push through it, hoping she would reach her destination before the never-ending blaster fire that was pulverizing Aragorn Square’s buildings turned on her.
But that’s exactly what happened.
She, Gunk, and Stark were just ten yards away—the longest ten yards of her life—when she felt the first blaster bolt crackle over her head. She gasped like she’d been punched in the chest, but she didn’t stop. They were target practice, Kira knew it, but she also knew that the hardest target to hit is a moving one.
Stark, being young and untrained, tragically didn’t possess the same knowledge.
Kira didn’t know what caused her to turn around, but she whipped her head over her shoulder just as Stark was drawing his tri-blaster. She had no idea what he intended to do. Praxis was shooting at them from at least fifty yards away, and even Kira only had a vague sense of the shooters’ positions within the museum. But fear of death didn’t listen to reason or logic. Fear of death only knew survival, or at least what it thought was survival. For Stark, survival meant fighting back.
Before Kira could scream at Stark and order him to keep moving—why hadn’t she reminded him while they were at the barge?—a blaster bolt drove directly into his chest. Stark remained still for just a moment, though it felt like hours to Kira. She could see the confusion behind his eyes as his arms went limp. He shuffled two steps forward and dropped to his knees. Even though every part of her screamed for her not to, Kira wanted to race back and pull him forward, to get him out of harm’s way even though she knew the damage had been done. Just as she was about to turn, Gunk’s body slammed into hers; he drove them both to the ground as a stream of blaster bolts rushed overhead. Side by side, as bolts scorched the ground all around them, they crawled behind the spotlight’s housing and were safe. For the moment.
Kira turned to Gunk. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Total accident; I tripped and you broke my fall.”
“Oh boy,” Kira huffed.
War was all around. Kira felt it on her skin; she sucked it in with every breath she took. It made her feel dirty, and not just in a literal sense. Who knew how many lives, like Stark’s, would be lost in this relatively small skirmish? Who knew how many irreplaceable Praxian artifacts and pieces of art would be destroyed? It was almost as if one of the tenets of war was to demolish both the future and the past by killing off so many youths and decimating remembrances of generations past. That way, there’d be too few people who remained to describe the terrible things they’d endured, and nothing would be left to learn of the past’s mistakes.
“We’re in trouble,” Gunk said.
<
br /> “We’ll be fine,” Kira said as blaster fire tore into the other side of the concrete block, bringing bits of rubble down on their heads. “Just wait for it.”
Kira shut her eyes and took a deep breath, and as if she’d willed it, the shooting stopped.
“Okay, now!” Kira said, grabbing Gunk and darting around their shelter. She looked up at where she assumed the Praxian shooters had been positioned just as one of them was flying out of the window. 4-Qel poked his head out of the same open space and wiped his hands clean.
“But what about the other shooters?” Gunk yelled.
“Bad angles to hit our building’s entrance. That’s why I planned it this way!”
With Kira leading the way, she and Gunk made it into the square at last. The remaining shooters opened fire, but just as Kira had said, they weren’t in position to hit them; shots ricocheted off buildings and landed errantly by a good measure. As they neared the building where Gunk’s general was supposedly located, Kira tore her whipblaster from her back and opened fire. The force of the blaster’s recoil almost knocked her off her feet, which Kira found exhilarating, but she was able to stay upright as she decimated the building’s glass facade. The whipblaster’s spinning dual barrels covered a much larger area than she needed, but Kira didn’t mind the cushion. Nor did she mind indulging in the whipblaster’s destructive capacity.
With the ground-level windows out of the way, Kira and Gunk could dash inside the building without pause. They’d finally made it.
“Where’s the general?” Kira demanded.
Gunk wheezed. “Just give me a … let me take a—”
“Praxis is going to be swarming your general and his team at any moment. We’ll breathe later.”
Gunk nodded quickly and led her toward the elevator. “The core’s three levels down,” he said, calling the elevator. “With any luck, the Shadow’s in the system and almost done.”
Kira and Gunk stepped inside the elevator when it arrived. Gunk let out a deep breath, then turned to Kira as the doors closed. “Well, that was terrifying. And look at you, calm as the sunrise. Things aren’t always this crazy with you, are they?”
“No,” Kira replied. “Usually they’re crazier.”
* * *
Down in the frigid subterranean heart of Praxis’s financial cluster, Kira dug her boots into the smooth metallic floor and kept her weapon tight in her grip. She felt the heat of a half dozen tri-blasters trained at her head. But it didn’t bother her. As long as she kept her whipblaster targeted at the one person in the room who mattered, nobody was going to make a move.
“I think there might be some kind of confusion,” Gunk said. He was standing next to Kira and had been frozen there since Kira had pressed her whipblaster against her shoulder, holding it steady. “That’s … that’s the general. He’s the person you wanted to see.”
“Oh, I know who this is,” Kira responded. “But not as any general. No, this is the Warden. Warden Kay.”
Kira’s eyes remained fixed on her target. Still, she couldn’t help but notice, blurry in the background, the Shadow Gunk had mentioned. Kira noted his presence, though it wasn’t much of one. As the tension of an armed standoff mounted over his shoulder, he kept his focus on whatever he was doing. Sitting on his long, gaunt legs that crossed over one another in an unnatural position, the apricot-skinned alien had his hands pressed against the base of a massive tower before him. Kira flicked her eyes up, following the tower that spiked through the building’s center, rising so high it was consumed by darkness before she could see its end. How Shadows corrupted technology was a mystery to the entire galaxy, and seeing one at work did nothing to demystify who they were and what they did. Not that Kira cared all that much; she corrupted tech with detonators and whatever gadgets Mig cooked up, and that was good enough for her.
“Kira Sen,” Kay said. He was standing ten feet directly in front of Kira, his arms casually hoisted above his head. “The girl who escaped.”
Kira considered killing Kay right then and there. It would be the quickest and easiest way to defuse whatever he was really up to. Were her death not guaranteed the second she pulled the trigger, she would have. With murdering the former Praxian Warden off the table, Kira knew she’d have to get him talking—Kay, she remembered, had a passionate love affair with the sound of his own voice—while she came up with a plan B.
“I can only imagine the disappointment you felt when I evaded your plans to kill me,” Kira acerbically snarled.
Kira expected a barb in exchange. She expected Kay to respond with arrogance and disdain. But the Warden only shook his head.
“It’s not at all what you think,” he said. “It truly isn’t.”
There was a genuineness behind Kay’s words that Kira hadn’t expected. Conciliatory, even. It made her pause to study the man in front of her, a man she hadn’t seen in over ten years. He’d at least matured since she’d last seen him. His hair seemed to have darkened to a deeper red, and he’d grown out a thin beard that was graying in patches. He was still broad-shouldered and lean around his waist, but the cocksure way he’d once carried himself had transformed into a more thoughtful posture. Kay was only a few years older than Kira, though the thing she remembered most clearly was him being the perfect portrait of young, brash, and stupid. Under Ebik’s close guidance, Kay had risen through the military ranks at an unparalleled pace, especially for his age. He was leading battalions in his late teens and strategizing the entire ground infantry’s training and tactical operations soon after. A lot of good he’d done with all that drive and talent, Kira lamented. Still, she couldn’t help but detect a weariness behind his eyes, the same weariness she saw in herself whenever she looked in the mirror. On Kira, it revealed someone who’d had everything they’d known taken from them and had to build a new world over the ashes of what once was. She was curious what it meant on Kay.
Even so, Kira wasn’t interested in the trials and tribulations of Warden Kaller J. Kay. What mattered were the facts, and she wasn’t about to negotiate the fact that Kay was her father’s personal lapdog.
“So you didn’t aid my father as he imprisoned my mother and tried to murder me? You were the chief Warden, the person directly responsible for the protection of the Barons and their families. Oh, and you just happened to be appointed to that position by my father.”
“I was young, and your father … no one is better at manipulating and using people. You might know that.”
“I do,” Kira sneered, “which is why I don’t buy you as the noble leader of some people’s movement for one second.”
“You think this whole thing is an elaborate game orchestrated by your father?”
“Prove me wrong,” Kira said, wrapping her finger around the whipblaster’s trigger just a little tighter.
“I don’t have to,” Kay said as his face wrinkled into an indignant scowl. “I gave you your moment, and now your moment is done. Any minute now, this tunnel is going to be overrun by gunners, and I plan on having my squad out of here before that happens. We’ve got a job to do; we’ve fought and died to get it done, and if you think you’re going to get in our way—”
Kira’s eyes darted side to side. The six men and women flanking Kay tightened their grips on their blasters just enough for her to notice. Kay had the upper hand—he always had the upper hand, Kira knew—and he was ending this showdown in one of two ways: Kira’s surrender or her death.
“—you’re mistaken,” Kay finished.
There wasn’t much of a decision to be made. Killing Kay and then dying in a hail of blaster fire would accomplish nothing. Even if her instincts were true and Kay was acting as an agent of her father, cutting him down would effectively break the chain, and she’d never find out what Ebik was plotting. And her death would be a significant obstacle to her desire to see the Praxis kingdom burned to the ground. So Kira did the only sensible thing; she lowered her whipblaster.
And then a shot was fired.
Time slowed to a crawl. Kira could only watch as one of Kay’s soldiers’ heads snapped to its side and then recoiled. One moment he’d been standing next to Kay, tri-blaster trained on Kira, and the next moment he was facedown on the floor, bleeding from his head.
It didn’t take Kira long to figure out they all had to run.
“Take cover!” she yelled, turning her whipblaster toward the long, dark tunnel from where the shot originated. She unloaded her weapon and moved toward the tower, a step behind Kay’s squad who were just coming out of their stupor.
“You were saying something about me working with Ebik?” Kay yelled over the hail of blaster fire.
“Defend our position first! Worry about yourself later!” Kira snapped in reply.
Blaster bolts searing the air all around them, Kira and Kay joined what was left of the squad behind the mainframe tower. Another soldier had fallen, leaving just four remaining squad members, plus Gunk and the Shadow. Gunk was nursing a flesh wound on his right bicep, and the Shadow continued his work, oblivious, like nothing out of the ordinary was happening around him.
“Well, the gunners are here,” Kay said as he slammed home a fresh charge into his blaster. “My guess is they’re eight strong with more soon to follow from the other end of the tunnel.”
“Darkness is their friend,” Kira pointed out. “Hard to hit what you can’t see.”
Kira poked the Shadow on his shoulder and was startled to find how cool to the touch he was. He turned to face her, his oblong, ashen-gray eyes wide, like it was the most curious thing in the world to have another sentient creature nearby.
“Hey, can you access the building’s mainframe from here?” she asked.
Kay intervened, carefully taking Kira’s hand off the Shadow’s shoulder.
“He doesn’t like to be touched,” Kay said. “And we need him to focus on his task.”
“We need to thin their numbers. Whatever economic chaos the Shadow is able to cause won’t mean squat if we’re all dead.”
We Are Mayhem--A Black Star Renegades Novel Page 13
