“Take my rifle.” She grabbed the Invader weapon off the floor and shoved it over her shoulder at him. “I’m going to open the hatch on the right and come down between Nathan and those enemy troops—I need you to cover me while I go check on him and the other guy.”
“But…” Glen started to protest, holding the rifle gingerly as if it were about to bite him, but thought suddenly of what Tanaka had said to him. If he didn’t do it, who would? He looked at Valerie, saw her staring back at him. “I’ve never shot a gun,” he told her, but in a tone that surprised her, as if he wanted her to teach him.
“Safety’s off,” she explained quickly. “Just pull the butt in tight against your shoulder, line the front sight between the two rear blades and in the center of your target and give the trigger a quick squeeze—only for a second at a time; you don’t want to empty it in one burst.”
He only nodded, not understanding it all, but knowing there wasn’t time for more. Shannon hit the hatch control, and brought the flitter almost straight down, nearly bouncing it off the pavement only a couple meters away from the body closest to the wrecked Hopper. Shannon scrambled through the partially-open hatch, pistol in hand, and Glen leaned out behind her, resting the barrel of the rifle across the side of the flitter.
The Invader biomechs, their armor blackened and pierced by the strike-fighter’s earlier attack, were a bit sluggish in their reactions, clumsily bringing up their weapons and firing an off-target burst at Shannon. Bullets ricocheted off the pavement around her as she ran around the nose of the flitter. Glen gritted his teeth and pulled the trigger. The rifle battered his ears and kicked painfully against his shoulder, the muzzle raising as he held the trigger a breath too long. He quickly let his finger slack off and brought the weapon back on target, seeing—much to his amazement—that he’d actually hit one of the troopers: the thing was down, a line of holes from its sternum to its shattered faceplate.
The other biomech turned, spraying its rifle at the side of the flitter, and Glen had to duck away with a startled cry as the shots ricocheted off the armored side of the police hovercraft.
“Glen!” Valerie screamed, covering her ears at the ringing of the burst on the hull.
Mulrooney swung back over the edge of the hatch and brought the rifle back to his shoulder, emptying the magazine in a long, frantic burst at the Invader. The biomech danced backwards, twenty of the thirty rounds Glen fired punching through its chestplate, and it finally collapsed, still trying to move but unable to.
Glen let out the breath he’d been holding, letting his death-grip on the rifle relax. He’d actually killed something.
On the other side of the flitter, Shannon ignored the firing, all her attention focused on the singed, smoking form face-down on the ground in front of her, the pistol-grip of his rifle still grasped in his blackened right hand. She heard a low moan and her heart jumped as she thought it had come from Nathan, that he was alive. Then she realized the noise had come from her own throat.
Steeling herself, she grasped the bodyguard’s shoulder and turned him over. She gasped, despite her mental preparations. There was no blood—but only because the heat of the blast had cauterized the massive wounds. There was nothing left of his chest and throat but a mush of charred flesh and metal fragments, though his face was miraculously untouched. His eyes were opened, staring out with such clarity that she thought she could see the life and the strength behind them.
But he was clearly dead. She choked back the tears that welled up in her eyes and stepped away from him, moving on to check Agent Klesko. She couldn’t fall apart yet. Klesko was injured, but alive. The whole right side of his body had been singed by the blast, and a hunk of metal from the Hopper had buried itself in his right hip, but even as she approached him he groaned in pain and rolled onto his left side, hand searching blindly for the machine pistol laying beside him.
“Take it easy,” she told him, grabbing him under his left arm and dragging him to his feet. He tried to struggle for a moment, but settled down as he pried his eyes open and saw who was carrying him.
“What…” he croaked, barely audible. “What happened to the other fellah?”
“He didn’t make it,” she told him coldly, afraid to show the slightest emotion lest the dam burst and she devolve into a blithering idiot.
Glen Mulrooney had climbed out of the flitter and ran up to help her carry Klesko into the car. She saw, not without a touch of amazement, that both of the Invader troopers were dead, but her mind was too numb to fully appreciate it. She was dimly aware that Valerie was speaking to her as she and Mulrooney laid Agent Klesko across one of the rear seats.
“Where’s Nathan?” she was asking.
Shannon couldn’t answer her, couldn’t say it again, couldn’t even think about it.
“He’s dead, honey,” Mulrooney answered for her, getting in the copilot’s seat beside Shannon.
“Jesus,” Senator O’Keefe whispered, face pale. “Not Nathan, too.”
Shannon fed power to the lift fans and took the flitter up, gunning it directly out of the city, not wanting to run into any more surprises. Beside her, she could see Mulrooney staring at her, curiosity evident in his eyes.
“Where are we going?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, feeling dead inside, as if she’d left her soul behind on the floor of the plaza.
“I know a place,” Agent Klesko said from the back compartment, wincing as Valerie tried to jury rig a bandage from his jacket. Shannon twisted around in her seat, saw the man looking at her, pain evident in his blackened and burned face. “I’m Agent Charlie Klesko, Presidential Security detail,” he told her. “There’s an old American military base west of here. It’s been empty for over fifty years, but we keep it stocked as an emergency strategic base for the President. If we can get to the communications equipment there, we can…” He grunted, wheezed as Valerie tightened the bandage. “We can contact Fleet Headquarters.”
“And tell them what?” Shannon asked bitterly. “They probably know we’re being invaded.”
“I saw them!” he insisted, pounding a fist against the padded seatback.
“Saw what, son?” Senator O’Keefe asked him, easing the agent back to the seat with a hand on his shoulder.
“When they took the President, I saw them,” Klesko sighed, settling back, eyes closing. “Not the armored troops—these were different. They came in separately to take him prisoner while the other things killed the Senators. They thought I was dead, but I saw them.” His eyes opened abruptly, filled with anger and confusion. “They were human.”
Chapter Seventeen
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
“Where the hell are we?” Glen muttered, staring out the flitter windscreen into the moonless night.
They’d been flying for hours, heading steadily southwest, following Agent Klesko’s directions. Over the last hour, the agent had slipped in and out of consciousness from the blood loss of his hip wound, but he’d managed to give Shannon a final compass heading and distance before he’d passed out. They’d avoided the megopolises and even the smaller cities which still existed in the Midwestern U.S., keeping an almost uninterrupted blanket of woodland beneath them. Here and there had been the antique wooden frames of historical landmarks, but most of the land had been allowed to return to the wild.
“Near as I can figure,” she answered Mulrooney, “we’re somewhere over southern Ohio.”
“Do you think we should try the radio again?” Senator O’Keefe wondered.
Shannon glanced back at him. The politician had been uncharacteristically silent for most of the trip, especially since they’d tried using the flitter’s comunit to monitor the news networks. The networks were off the air—Shannon suspected because the orbital antennae farms had been taken out. They had listened in on the police and military frequencies for a while, until those too had gone dead.
Everything was chaos, and no one seemed to know what was going on ten kilometers away from them, but by listening in they’d been able to piece together a picture. The Invaders had taken control of Capital City, the outlying defense base, and the civil communications center, and were shooting anything or anyone that came near
