Saxon recoiled, trying to fall back before Namir forced him off balance. He heard the snap and click of machined parts and saw Barrett's face set in a feral grin as his cyberarm reconfigured, growing a length of cannon barrel, rising up to aim at him.
'No,' Namir ordered. 'I'll finish this.' The Tyrant commander's face turned to fix Saxon with a cold, determined glare. 'The responsibility is mine. As it always was.'
Namir snarled and surged forward.
Anna struggled in Barrett's grip, but he was inflexible, inescapable. She strained to breathe, watching Namir lead into his attack on the soldier.
The mercenary moved with unnatural speed, his limbs twisting on hydraulic shocks that made him more agile than anyone she had ever seen;
Saxon seemed lumbering and slow by comparison.
Namir went low and threw out his legs in a blur, sweeping around in a swift spin-kick that almost took Saxon off his feet, but the soldier did not allow the attack to put him on the reactive. Instead, Saxon launched himself at his opponent as Namir regained his balance, charging into him.
Legs pounding, Saxon gathered up Namir and shunted him bodily across the sky deck in a fast tackle, driving him into a support stanchion with a heavy crash.
Anna heard the grind of fracturing bone and the dense thuds of metal fists on human flesh as Namir struck at Saxon's neck and torso, his hands blurring as the apparatus in his arms went into machine-fast retaliation. He punched at the bloody patch on Saxon's belly, drawing a howl from his opponent.
Fluid spattered from the soldier's mouth as he let the mercenary commander drop, and Saxon engaged him with a flurry of punches and kicks.
Strikes went back and forth between the two men, some blocked and parried, others hitting home.
The two opponents seemed evenly matched-at least at first sight. But Jaron Namir had come fresh to this fight and possessed some of the most advanced combat augmentations in the world; Ben Saxon was already on his reserves, his stamina running raw, fatigue poisons turning his bloodstream into acid, the knife wound in his gut weeping red.
Momentarily dazed by a snap-punch, Saxon shook it off and threw a heavy blow that knocked Namir back. The Tyrant turned with the strike and pivoted on one leg, whipping up the other limb to plant a heavy combat boot in Saxon's jaw.
Anna saw the blow flash home, but at the last possible second, Saxon snagged his former commander's leg and twisted it, arresting the momentum. He pulled Namir in with all his might and dragged the other man off- kilter.
Namir stumbled and Saxon snatched at him, arms curving up around his shoulders to lock behind his neck. In a heartbeat, he had the Tyrant in a breaker hold, and he squeezed, drawing a howl of pain from the other man. 'I never should have trusted you,' Saxon grunted, applying lethal pressure.
'I was about… to say the same thing…' managed Namir.
Saxon felt the other man's augmented arms squirming in his grip, and it was all he could do to hold on. Just a few more seconds, and he could end this- Namir's arms went rigid and turned forward. Before Saxon could recognize what was happening, the limbs shifted and moved against the balls of their joints, twisting opposite the true and folding back against the lines of flexion. Dislocating the cybernetic arms, Namir swiftly inverted the chokehold and tore himself free, snapping his head back to crack Saxon across the bridge of the nose.
He felt a hard shock of pain and blood gushed from his nostrils. Namir snaked away and snapped his arms back to a more human mode, lashing out with a cross-handed blow. Saxon tried to block him, but Namir pushed in and caught his left arm-his human arm-in a steely vise.
Saxon cried out as the humerus bone snapped with a wet crunch, agony tearing up his nerves in a burning wave. With a savage wrench, Namir pulled him aside and threw Saxon at the fuselage of the flyer. Unable to arrest his motion, the soldier slammed into the blunt prow of the black helo and collapsed to the deck near the body of the dead pilot. The pain was blinding, and the impacts from the storm of punches had cast scatters of static across the vision field of Saxon's optic implants. He dug deep, reaching for a last reserve of strength even as he knew he had little left to give.
The attack at the airport, the fight with Hardesty, and now this
… Saxon was tapped out, running on vapors.
He heard Namir coming up behind him. 'Time to end this,' said the Tyrant commander. 'No more distractions.'
And then he saw his last chance, lying there before him. He reached for it.
Anna choked back a gasp as Saxon struggled to his knees, trying to bring himself back up from the deck. Namir stood over him, and cast a quick, frosty glare toward her and the other Tyrants. 'We fix our own mistakes,' he told them.
He turned back to meet Saxon as the soldier came up on one knee, releasing a roar of pain and effort. Something metallic glittered in his hand and he cracked it across Namir's face with brutal intent; a pistol, torn from the holster of the dead pilot.
The mercenary was knocked away, blood streaming across his face. Saxon rose, the gun in his machine arm, and he fired three bullets into
Namir's chest from close range. The shots would have killed a normal man, but the Tyrant commander wore a tac vest lined with armor inserts, and beneath that he carried dermal shell implants capable of stopping any low-caliber rounds that made it through; still, Anna felt a ripple of pain-memory as she recalled a bullet from a similar gun that had cut into her.
Barrett was shouting as Saxon raised the pistol's muzzle a degree higher and laid his aim on Jaron Namir's head.
The big man's grip on her neck tightened again, enough to draw a strangled scream from her lips.
'Saxon!' bellowed Barrett. 'You kill him and the woman dies next!'
Namir lay in a heap on the deck, scarred and wheezing. He looked up, one eye gummed shut, the other the bright lens of an augmented optic.
'Go on, then,' he panted. 'That was a very clever recovery, Ben
… It's one of your best skills… The ability to evaluate and exploit a tactical opportunity. You're quick that way.' He coughed up a string of bloody spittle. 'So do it. Kill shot.' He tapped at his cheekbone, under the undamaged eye. 'Right here. I'll die, and you'll have what you want. Your payback.' On the lower tiers of the yacht, glass portholes shattered as the fire continued to spread, waves of heat radiating up through the floor of the sky deck. 'Icarus burns,' said Namir, chuckling painfully at his own joke. 'And so will all of us, one way or another.
What's it to be?'
'Drop the gun!' Barrett shouted. Pushing Federova aside, he dragged Kelso to the front of the upper deck and shoved the woman until she was half over the guide rail. 'You test me and I swear to you, I'll drop her into the fire!'
The muzzle of the pistol wavered. He thought of Sam and his men, the ghosts he had seen in the gloom of the field hospital. He owed them this, this last bullet. This measure of justice.
'Shoot me,' Namir demanded, 'or save Anna.' He shifted, dragging himself to his feet with slow, agonized motions. Blood was streaming from the wounds in his chest, but he never broke eye contact with Saxon. 'You're aggrieved. You've been lied to and used. But that's the world we fight in. That's who we are.'
'Not me,' Saxon bit out. 'I'm not like you. I never was.'
'Then you have to decide.' Namir gave a shrug. 'Is your need for revenge worth another innocent life?'
He would never be this close again. Saxon knew it with ironclad certainty-if he did not pull the trigger, Namir would slip away, the Tyrants would vanish into the shadows cast by the Illuminati, and all the deeds they had done would go unpunished…
And the cost would be only one innocent life. Just one single person. Another name on the endless roll of sacrifices laid down for the ideal of the
Illuminati's draconian one world order. Anna Kelso's death in exchange for Jaron Namir's, a man whose soul had to be black with all the horrors he was responsible for.
