* * *
Amanda crouched as she ran along the rooftop, carrying her issue sidearm exactly as she’d been taught during the CQB phase of the marine sniper course. Just because you can reach out and put the touch on someone from three thousand meters, as the instructors liked to say, doesn’t mean it don’t occasionally get up close and unfriendly.
Targets had a way of wanting to hunt down and kill those who stalked them.
Being a sniper, she was authorized to shuck her carrying harness and standard BDU. But she always kept the blaster strapped to her thigh and three charge packs stacked in her cargo pockets, along with a bunch of other tools she’d learned snipers needed over the course of her two enlistments.
The door leading down from the roof was hanging half-open, listing lazily on old-fashioned hinges. She kicked it in with a swift strike from her oversized combat boot and pointed the blaster pistol down into the dark well using as much of the opening for cover as she could.
Nothing. And no one.
She hit the stairs fast, feeling the worm-eaten wood, tired with age, give as she pounded down to the next level. She was five stories up, but close to the two wounded legionnaires on the ground. If she could get to them and pull them back inside the building, then maybe they had a chance to avoid detection until Kirk could put down on the roof and pull them out.
Maybe.
At the third level the stairwell was gone, disappearing into a shadowy pit from which the ruins of the rest poked out. Smoky orange light filtered down through boarded-up windows and occasional cracked panes of grime-laden glass. The building had obviously been condemned, but it seemed no one had gotten around to the demolition part.
Chances were she’d meet some squatters in here. It seemed that kind of place—at least, judging by all the entertainment streams she’d ever watched. She didn’t really know. Slums, cities… none of that had been her reality growing up. She was raised on farms and in rural communities. The planets set aside to feed a galaxy. Places with smaller planetary populations than the city populations on the core worlds they fed.
But that had been a long time ago and another life.
Running down the decrepit third-floor hall, checking corners and rooms at the end of the blaster’s sights as she moved, she reacted quickly when the wounded pro in red-and-black ninja kit stumbled out from the door that had been flung open as he crashed through it. He was holding a Ross 224 medium-range engagement blaster. Trick scope and heavy vented barrel. Good for dropping armored targets at the one-fifty mark.
She knew weapons.
Part of the job.
She shot him as he looked at her with a pained face, feebly trying to bring his weapon up and engage.
Hit, he twisted away from her and fell across the hall. She approached him quickly and double-tapped him, just as she’d been taught, fighting against the training as a sniper to fire once and disappear. She had to be sure he was dead in case she came back this way with the two leejes.
That the Soshie made it up here was a good sign. It meant there was another stairwell—or some other way up and down.
She knelt, took the man’s weapon, checked the charge, and holstered her sidearm, preferring the new model. It would do just fine. Good to have some firepower once she made the street. If she had to, this would help keep the rioters back and off the two wounded legionnaires.
If they were still alive.
“They’re alive,” she told herself.
Because this is damn foolish if they ain’t.
She could almost hear her grandpa telling her that. The same voice that had told her all the other ways she’d played the fool in her life.
Damn foolish to break that mustang, Panda.
Damn foolish to marry that boy, Panda.
Foolish to have a kid so young yourself, Panda.
She made the ground floor and stopped. There were people on the street. More rioters, stripping the weapons off a few of the dead pros. These weren’t mercs—they looked like kids. Amateurs who thought a weapon would even up the fight against the marines and legionnaires out on the streets this afternoon.
Not likely.
“That’s foolishness,” she muttered.
She gave them a chance and fired the heavier medium-engagement blaster into the ceiling of the entrance foyer she found herself in. Dust and plaster sprinkled down from the ceiling, spilling all over the worn-out checkered floor pattern that must have looked like something special back in the day.
When she looked out the dirty windows, holding her position and not breathing, she saw that the scavengers had retreated. The sound of blaster fire had scared them off.
Imagine if they actually had to face incoming.
No one tested her as she raced from the building to the courtyard. The place was littered with the wounded and dead. Both of which were stripped of whatever they had of value.
That had been fast.
It wasn’t even five minutes since the furious firefight. Amanda had seen war, but was taken aback by the number of dead bodies she found. They were everywhere, but especially near the one big legionnaire who must have been shot at least twenty times.
They’d tried to pull his armor off, but it was too ruined, too difficult to disconnect. Someone had cut off his bucket, though. And his head. The bloody stump of his neck oozed out onto the dry cracked pavement of the old courtyard.
Command would have to deal with that. She had come for the living.
Blaster up, she followed the front sights out of the courtyard and into the alley, tracking an ominous trail of blood that had to have been left by the legionnaires. Sure enough, three quarters of the way down its length, dark figures were dragging the two leejes away. She
