“Oh, she is.” Nathan agreed. “She is a redhead like you.”
“Mother,” Shannon said, giving the word an Irish lilt, “said that all redheads shared the same two weaknesses. The first is a bad temper.” She traced the fingers of her left hand gently over Nathan’s scar.
“And what,” Tanaka asked, finding himself, to his amazement, a bit breathless, “is the second?”
By way of an answer, she covered his lips with hers, feeling his strong arms slipping around her once again, but this time for a purpose far beyond comfort. Without another word, Nathan lifted her in his arms and carried her back down the darkened hallway to his room.
It was, he thought with a quiet chuckle, the traditional thing to do.
Chapter Eleven
“Manhood is the ability to outlast despair.”
Kennedy was dead. Even as the thought passed through his mind, Jason realized the dark humor of it, but it was an accurate statement. Looking out from his rooftop perch over the burned-out, looted wreckage that was once the largest and fastest-growing city in the star colonies, McKay felt the weight of isolation pressing down on him.
He remembered the look on Valerie’s face when he’d left her and the Mendoza family in the rover behind a repair garage at the outskirts of the city.
“Take this,” he’d said, handing her the autorifle they’d taken off Filipe back at the farmstead.He’d decided to leave the weapon with her and keep one of the autoshotguns with him, since he didn’t have too much confidence in the ability of the scattergun to take out one of the Invaders and he didn’t want to leave them helpless. It was bad enough he had to leave them at all.
“Do you have to go?” she’d asked him again. He’d looked at her sitting in the front seat of the rover, his overshirt drawn around her, and a shiver had gone up his spine. The words, spoken in that context, should have been a plaintive appeal, full of the fear and apprehension he knew she felt at being left alone. Instead, the plea had been delivered in the same flat monotone she’d fallen into since the fight at the farmstead.
It was her eyes that really got to him: they’d become as dead and lifeless as one of those Invader trooper’s. If he didn’t find a place for them to rest soon…
He’d just said: “I’ve got to.”
“But what will happen to us,
“I’ll be back,” he’d promised, shutting the driver’s side door and turning to leave. Behind him, he could hear the quiet sobbing of Carmella’s children, a haunting sound that still echoed in his mind as he leaned against the roof parapet high over Kennedy.
He’d come up there, to the highest building in Kennedy—an hotel, ironically—thinking that he might catch sight of some kind of human activity: that some of those who’d fled during the invasion might surely have returned now that the Invaders had pulled out most of their forces. But the only thing moving in the debris-littered streets were aimlessly wandering bands of abandoned Invader troopers. He’d narrowly avoided being spotted by one group of them on his way into town, and had watched from the cover of a shadowed doorway as they opened fire at a wind-blown piece of paper.
They were out of control and unguided, and he was only now beginning to appreciate the extent to which the troopers were some kind of automatons, rather than fully-sentient, autonomous beings. The fact that they weren’t independently intelligent didn’t make them any less dangerous if they spotted him, though. They seemed to him like maggots infesting the body of the rotting corpse that was Kennedy: moving about the dead streets, through the hulks of buildings already picked clean of anything useful, down to the holographic signs over the doors.
Feeling suddenly depressed and very vulnerable, Jason backed away from the edge of the roof in a crouched duckwalk, holding the autoshotgun across his chest. This, he thought bitterly, had been a waste of time, just like every move he’d made since the invasion. Now, they had no choice but to head for one of the other, smaller towns and repeat the process.
Far enough away from the edge to avoid being seen from below, Jason straightened and turned back toward the stairwell, mind still full of dark hopelessness. So preoccupied was he with their predicament that he nearly ran smack into the chest armor of the Invader trooper advancing up those same stairs.
“Jesus!” McKay jerked the trigger of the CAWS reflexively even as the trooper started to bring its rifle around.
The scattergun bucked wildly in Jason’s unprepared grasp and he staggered backward as the three-round burst caught the Invader in the chest. Most of the charge ricocheted off the hard armor plating, but the impact rocked the Invader back, leaving it balanced precariously on the first step of the stairs.
Realizing the uselessness of his shotgun, Jason dropped the weapon and threw himself into a flying side kick that caught the trooper full in the faceplate and sent both of them careening down the first flight of stairs, arms and legs akimbo. With the hard surface of the first stairwell landing rushing up at them, Jason somehow managed to land feet-first on the Invader’s stomach, bending his knees to absorb most of the impact. Rolling off the trooper, McKay ignored the blossom of pain in his left knee and ripped his pistol from its shoulder holster, pumping a double-tap through the Invader’s faceplate before the thing could get to its feet.
As Jason was rising from a crouch, a chattering barrage of rifle fire from the landing below punched into the wall just above his head, spraying him with stone chips and sending him diving to the floor. Another pair of Invader troopers were advancing up the steps abreast, hosing the landing above them with their assault rifles as they came. Hugging the floor, Jason shoved his handgun out in front of him and fired down the stairwell, emptying the magazine at the troopers.
Two of the slugs caught the left-hand Invader in the throat, jerking it backwards down the stairs with a crash of metal, while the rest of the rounds ricocheted off the other’s chest armor at an angle and tracked downward, finally impacting the receiver of the trooper’s rifle and shattering the bolt assembly. Scrambling to his feet, Jason threw a body-block into the Invader, grabbing the railing at the last moment to avoid following the armored trooper down the flight. The out-of-control Invader flailed wildly as it flew head-over-heels to the landing below, smashing into the plasticrete beside the corpse of its comrade.
Not waiting to see if the trooper survived the fall, McKay reloaded his pistol on the move, taking the stairs three at a time despite the flare of agony in his leg. He knew one thing from watching the Invaders from the roof: they tended to congregate in large groups, as if searching for some purpose to their continued existence. He had to get out of the hotel before the gunfire drew dozens of them and cut off his line of retreat.
Putting speed above caution, McKay careened headlong down the stairs, left hand sliding along the railing and the right holding his pistol out in front of him. Jason was half-convinced he would run straight into any of the troopers that came along with no advance warning, but the stairwell was empty of further threats, empty of everything but the thud of his heartbeat and the wearied rasp of his breath. He hit the exit to the stairwell close to collapse, hyperventilating, his knee on fire. He had to risk a few seconds’ rest at the door to bring his heart and breathing under control before he pushed it gently open and emerged into the lobby of the Kennedy City Hilton.
“Rated Finest Hotel in the Colonies by Republic Traveller’s Association!” a holographic marquis splashed boastfully across a wall pockmarked by bullets. Glancing at the charred remains of the lobby furniture and the blackened holes blown in the front wall, Jason judged that the RTA would probably have to update that rating.
“Hello, room service?” he muttered softly, quickly scanning his surroundings. “Could you send up an automatic weapon?”
The lobby seemed clear, and Jason was about to make a dash for the front entrance when he caught a glimpse through the blown-out doorway of more of the Invader troopers moving about in the street outside, probably seeking the source of the gunshots.
“Damn,” he hissed. Too late: they were flocking to the hotel already. He’d have to try the side exit, if he could find it. Ducking out of the stairwell door, he made a hobbling dash past the devastated reception desk and
