Michael Anderle - [Heretic of the Federation 03]

by Time to Fear (epub)

  “Let’s not do that too often,” Remy muttered. “I will need some serious re-plating once this job’s done.”

  “Are you compromised?” Ted asked and his voice carried a sense of urgency.

  “Not at this stage. Next time, it will be a different story.”

  “Next time, activate your shielding.”

  “That is one of the things that will need to be replaced,” Remy told him.

  “I thought you said you weren’t compromised,” his uncle protested.

  “I’m not. It’s only a flesh wound,” he argued, then added as he slowed, “We’re here. Try not to break anything.”

  Amaratne shed the fat suit and stepped clear of it. “That had its uses,” he remarked, “but all I’ll miss will be the pockets.”

  “Tell me you’re wearing body armor,” Remy said as he moved behind one of the servers and found a data point.

  “I never leave home without it,” the admiral retorted, took two of the larger pistols out of the suit, and transferred the grenades and stickies to his harness.

  “And don’t blow anything up until I’m done,” his teammate added.

  “Only the bad guys,” he promised.

  Remy rolled his eyes.

  “Do you see what I have to put up with?” he asked Ted as he started his upload. “You did this to me.”

  Amaratne moved away from the android, keeping an eye on the four doors leading into the central core. “Tell me when you’re done. I have some welcome packs to distribute.”

  He trotted to the first door. “Ted?”

  “It’s clear,” Ted told him reluctantly, and the admiral punched the access panel.

  Taking half a dozen scramblers from their pouches, he programmed them quickly, set them on the floor, and flattened himself against the wall as he watched them climb to the corridor ceiling and distribute themselves along it.

  Once they were in place, he closed the door and set a sticky over the edge. Whoever opened it would get one heck of a surprise.

  He set a second one on the ceiling above the door and marked where it was before he moved to the second door.

  “Ted?”

  He’d repeated the process at the second and third doors and was advancing on the fourth when Ted spoke.

  “Incoming. Stand clear of the door.”

  Amaratne stood clear and scooped another half-dozen scramblers out of their satchel. “Give me proximity,” he said and pitched them through the door the minute it opened.

  Several startled shouts rang out in answer, and someone pushed through the door in a panic. Their harness snagged and they tried to yank free in uncoordinated movements.

  The admiral shot them in the head and pushed on.

  “Talk to me, Ted.”

  “You have incoming in three vectors,” the AI informed him.

  Explosions and screams came from Corridor One.

  “Two vectors,” the AI corrected.

  More explosions and screams followed.

  “One vector. You are clear.”

  “You know that will never buff out, don’t you?” Remy asked from the corner.

  “And I thought you were busy,” Amaratne snapped.

  “It’s hard to focus when someone’s having that much fun.”

  “I promise, I’ll share what’s left when you’re done.”

  Amaratne found a position that gave him cover and the ability to change direction easily, then realized he could fit one of the last three stickies to the ceiling above the fourth door.

  “How many of those did you bring?” Remy asked.

  “Not enough,” he answered. “Why didn’t I bring more?”

  The third door exploded, and he opened fire as soon as shadows appeared through the smoke. He found cover behind one of the stacks and began to pick off security guards as they arrived.

  “How many of these guys are there?” he demanded as the last man fell. “I counted another eight guys here!”

  “The communications center has its own company attached to the facility,” Ted replied, “and they seem to have woken up.”

  “What? All of them?”

  “Only those who were off-duty and asleep,” the AI reassured him. “It’s not that many.”

  “And how many were already awake?”

  “It’s hard to say—twenty at the facility and more on the orbital.” Ted paused. “They are preparing to come down.”

  “And Talents?”

  “Ah…” Ted said, as though he’d forgotten something and went silent. “I believe you will have some of their company shortly. I am still trying to ascertain their numbers.”

  “Which way, Ted?”

  “Are you all right?” John asked as he slid behind one of the communications stacks after Ivy.

  He watched as she settled into the cramped space and jacked the tablet in.

  “Sure, I’ve got this.” She waved her fingers toward the main hub. “Go play while I get to work.”

  “And you can get to the pods if you need to,” he pressed.

  She glared at him.

  “Humor me.”

  With a sigh, she jerked out a hand and pointed to the left. “Four feet that way, blue button in. Red button out. Parachute.” She turned pale. “Is that good enough?”

  He nodded.

  “Good enough,” he confirmed.

  His eyes lit with yellow fire as he turned, and fury rolled through his face.

  “John?”

  Blue fire rimmed his body and lightning arced in tiny tendrils around him. One word leaked to her on the edge of a snarl.

  “Becca.”

  The blood drained from her face and she fumbled for the drive connection. If she didn’t get this code uploaded very, very fast, there might not be an orbital left to get it uploaded through!

  John reached the end of the stack without being seen and sent his consciousness through the station. This was one trick he’d learned from Stephanie that he’d never thought he’d use.

  Now, he had the perfect reason.

  Taking the orbital’s speakers and sending his voice into every mind he sensed, he began to speak.

  “You have been wicked in your efforts, unjust in your judgments, and unfair in your treatment of others and now, you have been found guilty of crimes against all humanity. She is coming, and I am her Apostle!”

  The Talent on the other side of the data center looked around wildly and froze when he decloaked. She reacted with a small shriek of surprise at his appearance and died an instant later.

  The second Talent and his handler had barely enough time to look at her corpse before they fell beside her, and John moved down the stairs.

  When he reached the bottom, he didn’t bother with the door and simply removed the wall in a single blast of power that let him look out over the work center and arrivals lounge.

  Several comms techs looked up from their desks. A dozen more dived under them. Half a dozen ran to the elevator car and five security guards appeared out of their office.

  The young mage laughed and launched a wave of blue that rolled across the station to flatten people to the floor or plaster them to the walls. When the first guard recovered enough to raise his blaster, he pinned him to the wall with a skewer of ice and unleashed bursts of blue lightning.

  Computers exploded and monitors vanished in bursts of brown smoke and slag. The coffee machine hurled shards of metal in every direction. The next guard to raise a weapon tore apart in a storm of blue light that lashed out in all directions to electrocute everyone around him.

  “Justice,” John snarled when no one moved, “has been served.”

  He turned and started up the stairs.

  When she heard the wall explode below her, Ivy paused. The upload was running without her, but the surveillance feeds would be a problem.

  With a few quick commands, she had the cameras slaved to the server. After a brief search, she found the Regime population broadcast channel.

  Several commands later, wha
t was happening inside the communications orbital went out in a single stream to every channel in the world—but not before she’d found the point where John’s voice had started coming out of the speakers.

  The broadcast started a few seconds prior to his announcement and ran from there. Playing it back, she had to smile.

  “Nice speech, baby!” She smirked as the broadcast continued and checked the upload for the satellites to make sure the link to the communications array below was secure.

  Next, she had to make sure some of those satellites would land exactly where Amaratne needed them to. They came with little thrusters. Who knew?

  Her smirk would have been a smile if she could have seen the CIO’s face.

  David Thomason was not amused.

  In fact, he sat in his seat and gaped at the main viewer that filled the opposite wall. John’s words echoed around him.

  “You have been wicked in your efforts…”

  “No!” he shouted and pushed his chair back.

  “…unjust in your judgments, and unfair…”

  The Regime leader rose from behind his desk. “No!”

  John’s voice continued despite his protests. “And now, you have been found guilty of crimes against all humanity.”

  “No!” the CIO screamed, and he hurled his cup at the young mage’s face.

  “She is coming, and I am her Apostle!”

  “You are a dead man!” he shrieked in answer and advanced on the screen with his forefinger extended. “Dead!”

  The young Talent clearly didn’t hear him because he blasted the three people in the upper room and destroyed a wall on his way down the stairs.

  “Dead,” David repeated, as people fell and equipment began to explode. He turned to his communicator. “Get me Aurora! Get me Deverey! And will someone stop that damned broadcast!”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “We understand your anger,” Captain Thiele said placatingly as the first Dreth came onscreen. “We have come to aid you.”

  “You are guilty of murder,” the female Dreth declared and drew herself to her full height. “I am Dreth’s Fleet Admiral, the Speaker for their Council of Families and the War Leader of the Clans, and I carry their judgment with me.”

  He looked taken aback. “We are— Are you saying the Regime slaughtered the people of Hrageth’s Run? But…why would we—”

  His viewscreen went live with footage of Regime ships leaving the ruined world, of the wasteland they’d left, and of the—was that a ghost?

  The last part of the admiral’s broadcast was the last piece of the puzzle, an intercepted communique with the orders for the outpost to be destroyed.

  “Where?” He gaped.

  “Some of your spies need retraining,” Jaleck told him and gave him a predator’s smile. “Or they would if they were not already serving their sentence in Tegortha’s ever-boiling gut.”

  She continued before he could find the words to refute her.

  “Dreth finds the Regime guilty of piracy. Worse, it finds the Regime guilty of the murder of the people of Hrageth’s Run, including seven hundred and fourteen of their own human civilians.”

  Her dark eyes glittered angrily. “People who were not guilty of treason and who were not guilty of anything more than mining resources, a levy of which was earmarked for payment to the Regime.”

  “But—” Thiele tried to get a word in edgewise.

  Jaleck rolled over him. “As such, the Dreth Council of Families accepts the Regime’s desire for war.”

  “Incoming!” the scanner operator cried as the admiral spoke the last syllable. “Sir! We have multiple missiles inbound.”

  “Shields!” he ordered. “Ironsides, take us in. We outnumber them and reinforcements are on their way.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  By ordering the younger man to lead, Thiele had surrendered the lead in the battle, but he wasn’t worried. The Dreth were outnumbered and were about to pay for their lies with their lives.

  He was not surprised when the fleet split in half before him. “Take the starboard,” he commanded before Ironsides could hesitate. “It holds their Flag.”

  Thiele listened to the younger captain relay his orders and specify targets for each flotilla. The Dreth wouldn’t know what hit them.

  None of them expected the enemy fleet to split a second time, although the fleet captain should have expected the attack that came from the half that had veered away to port.

  His own flotilla suffered the first casualty, and Rogers was soon under attack from two sides. Canavan began to laugh until his outermost ship took damage.

  Ironsides didn’t wait for Thiele’s next set of instructions but took the fleet through and brought them around.

  “It’s a shame to waste a good captain,” Jaleck mused as she listened to Ironsides’ orders. “If that’s what he is, but he’s on the wrong side so I guess we’ll never know. Pride and Maw, the lead ship is yours.”

  As the two battleships moved to obey her, the scanners picked up movement. More ships now appeared from where this fleet had first arrived.

  “We have company,” her scan team informed her.

  “Make sure no one flies with their back to that new fleet,” Jaleck ordered and her eyes glittered as she studied the battle screen.

  They’d been outnumbered before, and now there were more.

  She needed to annihilate as many as she could before they brought her fleet down.

  John had returned to the server room in time to see one of the Talents climb painfully to his feet and move toward Ivy’s corner.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said, and the Talent turned while balls of lightning formed in his hands.

  “The Witch is coming,” he told him. “You don’t have to fight for them anymore.”

  The man hurled the lightning at him.

  “No Heretic shall walk this plane.” He snarled and summoned more lightning.

  John didn’t reply. He blocked the incoming attack and absorbed the power into his shield before he fired a swarm of jagged lightning bolts into the Talent’s chest.

  “Pity,” he said. “She would have shown mercy.”

  He turned, chose something that didn’t look attached to what Ivy was doing, and launched another lightning swarm.

  The tower of boxes and flickering lights exploded.

  “Hey! I could have used that!” The protest came from Ivy’s corner and he chuckled.

  A frustrated growl answered. “There is no need to make my job harder than it already is!"

  Movement caught his eye and he pivoted. Power arced over him as a door in the far corner opened. The first man through wore Regime pants but his weapons belt and jacket were gone and he was unbuttoning his shirt as he ran.

  He grinned at John, an expression torn between terror and jubilation. The Talent who followed gave a short cheer as she bolted to the stairs.

  The young mage let them go and watched as they disappeared down the stairwell. He heard their gasps when they saw the carnage on the next floor. When he stalked to the door, he heard their footsteps clatter across the concourse as he looked through the aperture.

  A corridor ran the perimeter of the server room with offices and storage facilities on the other side. As he looked both ways, he heard boots and saw two Regime Enforcers jogging toward him with two Talents running behind them.

  More boots heralded the arrival of another team from the other direction, and Ivy’s quick, “John, behind you,” warned him of the other door he’d missed.

  He backed away and positioned himself so her hiding place was behind him. Her fingers clattered as she worked and he hoped she was almost finished. There was far more security on this station than the reports had revealed.

  Pulling a shield of blue around him, he glanced from one door to the other and waited for his opponents to appear. A bolt of lightning sparked against his shield as he looked one way and he turned.

  “It’s about time you got here,” he said and fo
cused on the two Talents who stepped purposefully out of the corridor to face him.

  Their handlers followed, and John smiled as the first of the other teams arrived from the other direction. He caught the movement of one handler’s throat as he swallowed and saw the man’s face pale.

  “Isn’t he supposed to be afraid?” the man asked and nudged his companion.

  The other handler nodded and glanced at the stairwell. He’d barely taken a step toward it when John jerked a hand up and yanked the gun from his grasp.

  He stared with startled eyes as his weapon landed in the young mage’s palm and started to run when the boy’s hand closed around the grip. His body dropped across the stairwell entry as his head exploded.

  The other handler dove into the corridor, his last words flung over his shoulder as he fell.

  “Take him down!”

  The patrons of the Four-Leaf were oblivious to what was going on over their heads. They ordered their pints, nuts, and fries without a clue to the havoc John was causing as they watched the last match being dissected on the sports channel.

  Ivan and Caleb arrived unnoticed, their work clothes not out of place in the busy pub. The day had not run smoothly.

  Caleb nursed his head with one hand while Ivan listened sympathetically.

  “I tell you,” Caleb whined, “whoever is doing the damned work with the explosives, it’s giving me a headache!”

  “I hear—” Ivan’s sympathetic reply cut off abruptly as the game scene died and was replaced by the sharp reports of a pistol and the snap of magic. “What the—”

  He tapped his friend’s shoulder and turned him toward the screen, but John’s voice came clearly through the speakers before he could say anything.

  “You are human,” he declared, and the screen showed a young man with unruly hair shrouded in blue who confronted four older Talents with lightning in their hands.

  “You were born human,” he continued. “The fact that you’re a human who can tap into the energy of the world does not negate that.”