>> I have reviewed the schematics. There is an air filtration system box large enough to hold an assassin twelve feet to the left and three up from where you are presently looking.<<
Bethany Anne flung her empty hand back like a pitcher at a baseball game. When her hand was all the way behind her, a red ball of Etheric energy popped into existence and she flung it toward the location ADAM had described. The energy streaked across the room to slam through the metal, causing something behind the grate to explode. Parts of a body were expelled, raining down on the crowd below.
Bethany Anne realized she was hearing weapons fire. Her face crackled with energy, the red lines etching into it, eyes blazing and hair flying on a wind of her own as she sought the location of those attacking.
While she might not have a weapon, they did.
And soon her people would be armed as well, with weapons taken from the corpses of those stupid enough to fire on them.
Especially since they had been warned by Nathan’s team months ago. “It’s about damned time!” Bethany Anne yelled, glancing quickly at John. He had a bad burn on his leg, and it looked like the beam had made it into muscle. She was sure it was healing, but it probably still hurt like a son of a bitch.
Two attackers came through the main doors holding what looked like some kind of submachine guns. She focused on the guns and pushed energy to heat them. The mercenaries dropped their weapons, screaming in pain and frustration as a couple of their friends bumped into them from behind.
One had bad trigger control, and ripped a few rounds off right into his buddy’s back.
They must be newbs. She grabbed the swords that had lain on the table and yelled over her shoulder. “Scott!”
The erstwhile New York policeman turned toward her, seeing the sheathed sword already halfway to him in the air. He reached up with his left hand, caught the sheath, and pulled out the katana with his right as he twisted. He continued his spin, swinging the sword to slice off the arm of a mercenary who had come through a side door.
Scott kicked the screaming Noel-ni back through the door, shattering it as he bent down to grab the attacker’s pistol.
“Behind you!” Darryl called.
Scott flipped the sword and jabbed it backward while keeping his head low, and he felt the sword hit flesh. He turned to see a Leath, who had decided to jump into the fight. “Hold this a moment,” he told the Leath, who was staring in confusion at the sword through his body.
Scott pulled the fingers and hand off the recovered pistol and dropped the severed arm, gripping the pistol in his right hand. With his left, he grabbed the hilt of the sword. “Thank you, I’ll take this back now,” he told the Leath, and lashed out with his boot, kicking the Leath off the sword.
He smiled in glee. Now he was doubly armed!
He looked around to make sure Bethany Anne was safe and found Darryl fighting to her right, blazing away with two pistols. “You greedy ass!” Scott shouted. “How did you get two?”
Scott heard John to his left and turned to see what the commotion was, then ducked the body flying over him.
“Don’t kick the Gott Verdammt leg!” John was yelling at the alien, who landed in a five-foot-diameter potted plant as he spoke. The vase cracked, and so did the alien’s skull. “It fucking hurts!” he finished.
Scott raised the pistol and shot three times through the small side door, then turned and ran toward Bethany Anne.
>>Bethany Anne, there have been a number of distress calls from the engine deck.<<
“What the hell does a hotel need with an engine deck?” she asked, casually shooting two more mercenaries who poked their heads into the room. She looked at Darryl. “That’s fourteen and fifteen!”
“Seventeen!” Darryl answered, grinning from ear to ear. “You failed to kill this one!”
“What?” Bethany Anne asked.
>>The hotel floats using the power from the engine room.<< ADAM reminded her.
“Oh shit! These cock-juggling root-juice-loving fart-box tongue-punchers are trying to drop the hotel,” she bitched as she shot another enemy.
She looked to her left. “Eric! Keep it safe here with John. I’m taking Scott and Darryl for a little R and R.”
He nodded.
“Oh, fuck a duck,” Scott kicked a pistol lying on the floor toward his team. “Reconnaissance and Retribution tasking, here we come.” While he was making his smart-ass comment, he and Darryl had hot-footed it over to Bethany Anne, who grabbed them both and disappeared.
The three mercenaries who had seen the three humans disappear gawked. One immediately died from a slug through the skull. It blew out the back of his head, which splattered one of the female hotel staff who had been standing frozen near the wall with the others.
She fainted, slumping to the floor.
John noted that some of the Leath who had realized the humans weren’t the cause of the commotion were busy killing mercenaries. Like Bethany Anne, he appreciated that the mercenaries had finally attacked so they could be done with the charade.
He hadn’t appreciated the assassin. That person had done well, hiding herself. As long as the effort to drop the hotel didn’t work, they would be ok. Bad Company had provided good information, but it seemed they had been short on a few important details.
The beam had been ablated by the armor he had wrapped around his legs, but it hadn’t been enough to reflect or stop it.
His leg got cooked, and frankly he didn’t have time to deal with the mess healing was going to make of the armor right now. Getting that shit out of his skin was going to require a trip to the Pod-doc.
Better than no leg, he mused as he shot another mercenary. That’s when Peter decided to join the party with four of his Guardians, and the Leath realized they weren’t the only aliens who could roar.
Peter got the message regarding the assault in time to palm two knives and notify his team, who had been tasked with stopping any attacking force from coming into the hotel.
The first two mercenaries with unveiled weapons were gifted with diamond-tipped throwing blades to their skulls.
They had barely hit the ground when Todd, who had refused to be left behind even though he couldn’t use guns, went to their bodies and grabbed both weapons. “God,” he said as he cycled one of the weapons and made sure he understood how it worked, “now I don’t feel so—”
“Downnn!” Peter yelled, and Todd ducked, another blade flying over him to hit an alien disguised as a waiter in the gut. The mercenary dropped his weapon to grab the hilt of the knife, but his head snapped back when Todd drilled him through the skull.
“Wow, aims high,” Todd commented as he swept the area, one knee on the ground, looking for those not screaming their heads off. Tourists and guests were escaping outside. Todd pointed the loud weapon into the air. “Get down!” he screamed and squeezed the trigger twice to emphasize his command.
He wasn’t sure what the aliens heard when he screamed in English, but a substantial number hit the deck and the humans were able to fire at those wielding weapons.
Something slammed Todd’s chest, throwing him off his balance and causing him to roll as he cursed up a storm.
Peter was next to him in a moment, one hand checking his friend, the other grabbing the extra pistol. “Stop laying down on the job!” Peter grunted, and lifted his friend.
“Takes a punch and keeps on ticking,” Todd gasped.
“Timex?” Peter asked, firing two shots, not sure where the round that had hit Todd came from.
“No, my heart,” Todd answered. “That shit packs a wallop!”
“I don’t see any more. Let’s join the crew inside,” Peter directed, and Todd shouted for the team to pull back while he sent the command over their comms as well.
Once they knew the mercenary group had been hired, Bethany Anne’s team had requested a VIP tour of the facilities. They had purchased rooms dispersed around the hotel’s various structures so that if Bethany Anne needed a rapid reacti
on force she could grab someone and leave.
And she had.
They hadn’t really expected the mercenaries to go after the engines, but they had developed a plan for that eventuality.
It involved Bethany Anne, a couple Bitches, and a massive amount of mayhem, especially since the team had secreted weapons in a room near the engines. There wasn’t going to be any opportunity to get past them. And, as her father liked to say…
If you weren’t cheating, you weren’t trying.
17
Noel-ni Planet Sertjal, XerpresciechCoth Hotel
Kraaz and the team slipped through the back hallways, which were used for monitoring and supporting the infrastructure of the massive hotel away from the eyes of the customers.
Reaching their third crossing, he stopped and looked around the corner, then pulled his head back. He held up a hand and put up two fingers.
Behind him, P’kert flicked his weapon to stun, took two steps around Kraaz, and shot both of the hotel support staff. Their general goal was still to kill everyone, but they were stunning the staff down here in case they happened upon someone from Engineering and needed them alive for knowledge or passwords.
They would kill them later.
Bethany Anne, Scott, and Darryl appeared in the middle of the cheapest room in the hotel. Cheap because it was on the lower decks near all the equipment and noisy. Perfect for her people.
All three went to the weapons cases, popping the locks and opening them. They slipped on the armored jackets and donned the HUD helmets, locking them down to the jackets. They pulled out the Jean Dukes pistols and holsters, sliding their arms through the straps and seating the equipment, and lastly reached for Jean Dukes’ version of submachine guns. These still used standard gravitic power, but their slugs were bigger and made of a softer material, so they had punch but wouldn’t go through too many pipes or walls. They didn’t want to bring the hotel down unnecessarily in a random firefight by destroying the very equipment they were trying to save.
All three lids slammed shut at the same time. Darryl flicked his eyes to the display that provided him access to the camera they had placed outside the door.
The hallway was clear.
Darryl exited first and took a right outside the door, then Bethany Anne and finally Scott left the room. All three ran down the hallway and did a quick jog through an “employees only” room to come out in a service hallway.
“Left!” Bethany Anne called. She was connected to ADAM, who was monitoring the mercenary team through the hotel’s video and other security infrastructure. “Right, then two hallways and we’ll be in front of them!”
The three raced through the concrete halls.
Kraaz felt the difference in the air and put up a fist to halt his team. He looked behind him, then down the hallway in front.
Something didn’t feel right.
“We got trouble?” P’kert asked from behind him.
Kraaz nodded. “I don’t know what it is, but something is ahead of us.”
“Shock?”
“No.” Kraaz shook his head. “Trouble, and we’ll need to go through it.”
“That’s why we are paid the big bucks,” P’kert commented, sliding his pistol into a holster and pulling out a larger beam weapon. It was a twenty-shot Kellen D3, and it could drill through walls and make organic life wish it had never been born.
He loved this gun.
Kraaz chuckled. “I’m pretty sure we’re being paid the big bucks because we have to jump out of a falling hotel and successfully not die at the end of the fall.”
“That’s just a bonus,” P’kert told him. “Now get your Shrillexian ass moving.”
Kraaz just nodded and flipped his own pistol’s safety off.
Sia was tucked behind a large potted plant, completely focused on the different video intakes from her four drones…
Scratch that, three drones now. Someone took offense at one of them and shot it down.
Still, she was giving all her attention to the video she was capturing in three different locations. One outside, and two here inside the hotel. She could feel Giannini’s body somewhere above her, protecting her this time as Sia captured as much good footage as possible.
Sia could hear Giannini commentating, mumbling stuff—Sia didn’t know what, but it would be relevant when they put the video of this attack together and reported it.
Provided they lived.
P’kert was damned handy with his Kellen D3. It wasn’t so much he saw something down the hall as the reflexes honed over multiple battles that told him he needed to fire. Kraaz had already confirmed he thought something was ahead of him.
So P’kert stroked the trigger. He thought he saw a body come around the corner only to get tossed backward before a large red ball of energy streaked toward him. He spun to the side and tried to dive out of the way, but it was too late.
Half of his body was ripped apart when the energy slammed into him, ending his life immediately.
Behind him, Kraaz and the others dropped to the ground when two more flaming orbs of power came shooting down the hallway. One went past, exploding some thirty paces behind him, and the other caught Chr’stepf in the head, melting it immediately, his body convulsing.
Kraaz was firing down the hallway when the floor and walls started exploding. He wasn’t sure what was being used, but the amount of destruction suggested some sort of tripod-mounted devices.
Kraaz’ shoulder exploded in gore as something blew his arm apart, his weapon going who-knew-where as his pharmacope injected painkillers into his system so he could keep his wits and his focus.
In the haze of his pain, he looked at his group and realized that every one of his men had been either killed or substantially wounded like himself. His enhanced healing couldn’t force a non-existent arm to regrow.
“Control,” he snapped. There was no way his team was going to be successful. It was up to Bocklans to figure out what the team needed to do next.
This operation was a bust.
“There is no more Control,” a voice called to him.
Kraaz slowly turned his head back around. The silence in the hallway after all the destruction sounded deafening to him and his heartbeat was louder in his ears than the hissing of the pipes spewing liquids somewhere behind him.
Kraaz’ eyes opened as he fought through the pain to see a dark human, his chest a rumpled mess where P’kert’s beam had hit him, come out of the smoke first, before another figure came into view behind him.
He saw the red glowing in the smoke and swallowed in understanding.
Her eyes flamed red, her hair floating as energy crackled around her, and streaks of power were etched on her face. She wore a red armored jacket on her shoulders and held a helmet in her hand.
Death had come, and he hadn’t even known who she was when he’d watched the Etheric Empire’s Empress for those three days.
Death had been sitting there weaving a spell of confusion, just as she had sung a song of attraction to those who had courted her their whole lives.
Now Death had come to reap their souls.
“Forgive me,” Kraaz mumbled. “Forgive me, Death, for I knew not who I fought.”
The Empress of Death stared at him as he lay on the ground bleeding from the shoulder where his arm has been blown off. Death’s voice was deep, without pity and without anger as she spoke to him in his own tongue.
“Sleep,” Death commanded, and a blue ball of energy formed in her hand.
Then Kraaz knew only darkness.
Across the systems, a second battle was being fought. This time it wasn’t with guns and explosives; it was with words and video, accusations, lies and press releases.
It was a war for the hearts and minds of the empires who did not have a stake in the fight between the Etheric Empire and the Leath. In short, it was a fight to spin the truth of the battle on Sertjal and bring sympathy, or at least antipathy, to the conversations.
The Noel-ni
wanted to blame someone, anyone other than themselves for failing to provide the security they had promised. They accused unknown assailants even though they had the same proof in their possession as the Etheric Empire and the Leath did—the attack had been executed by a hired mercenary group.
Leath reporters blamed the Etheric Empire for hiring the mercenary group that had successfully killed their highest ranking military officer after their own primary had mysteriously and miraculously dodged the assassin’s beam headed in her own direction.
They pointed to the fact that the humans had been armored and had quickly acquired weapons during the fight and killed the mercenaries they had hired as proof that the Etheric Empire had engaged Darkness for Hire.
The Leath had made a big production of the First Line Prime Commander’s funeral, sending video to nearby systems of the massive expense and respect they afforded their fallen hero. He had been a Leath of action, but had died trying to promote peace.
While the Leath as a group hadn’t been much of a known factor before, they were now rapidly creating connections with news systems and businesses and courting relationships with high-ranking politicos in systems large and small.
The Etheric Empire was busy distributing their video of the attacks, tracking back the proof, forcing the Noel-ni government to confirm their findings, and sharing video from the hotel’s own security cameras to counter the Leath’s “lies, lies and more lies,” as the reporters quoted some of the Etheric Empire’s people.
The Leath accused the Etheric Empire of kidnapping their people when almost twenty of their delegates went missing.
The Etheric Empire representatives had shrugged their shoulders and asked how they could misplace their own people.
In secret, the Etheric Empire had accepted anyone from the Leath system who wished to seek asylum for political reasons, not trusting their own government.
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set Three: Books 15-21, Never Submit, Never Surrender, Forever Defend, Might Makes Right, Ahead Full, Capture Death, Life Goes On (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets Book 3) Page 86
