Rechs stepped out in the hall and was greeted by three dead men. He slapped in a new charge pack and advanced on the maintenance room.
A second later, two fraggers bounced out to greet him from the maintenance room and exploded, devastating walls and doors and sending fragments into Rechs’s armor. The blast knocked him back and spun him round into a wall.
His HUD went down for a second, but he held on to the blaster. Mind wonky and reeling, he stumbled to right himself and moved toward the door, knowing he’d taken a hot burning fragment in the forearm. He entered the maintenance room shooting because there was no other choice. And no time left.
The guy on the comm who’d said he was going to handle it had gotten there first. He was calling in status reports, telling the team of pros that they had contact. He had two other men with him. The three in the hallway had been insurance.
Rechs dropped all three men the moment he swung into the room, spraying them with bursts from the Jackknife as if flinging drops of water from wet hands. They fell as one, and the guy who’d come down to arm the bomb looked at the bounty hunter with terror in his eyes.
Rechs shot him a dozen times, his blast-rattled mind reeling and distant as his eyes took in the one most salient fact among the carnage.
The bomb had already been armed.
Its countdown clock read seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds… six… five…
“Damn,” muttered Rechs.
The device was top-grade. That was for sure. He could already see a three-phase-redundancy arming trigger. That would take far too long to hack.
Get out of the building. Now.
The armor was already applying pressure to the fragment wound and hitting him with localized painkillers. An option appeared for more heavy-duty stuff along with some anxiety suppressors to deal with the wound. That meant it was possibly serious.
But it would degrade his ability to perform.
Scanning the room, he spotted a master building alarm panel. He ran through it quickly and found the failsafe building locks override. He hit this—and knew that every door, no matter how hard it had been locked down, would now force open. Unless it had a localized locking source outside the grid itself. But the doors Rechs had inspected hadn’t had that, meaning the prisoners should be able to at least open the doors of their cells… assuming they weren’t bound.
The bounty hunter then pulled the fire alarm. The building’s sirens began to wail. He hadn’t been sure they’d still work. A deep automated voice, calm and professional, began to advise everyone to evacuate the building immediately. For their own safety.
He hoped that would give all the prisoners time to get out.
Assuming, again, they hadn’t been tied up.
It was all he could do for them.
He stumbled toward the door and into the still-smoldering hallway, again dropping in on the pros’ comm. Listening for their movements.
He’d try to hit them on the street.
That was all there was left to him now. A hard capture against a lot of blasters, supported by at least two QRFs and several sniper teams.
He gave himself a twenty percent chance of success. And a zero percent chance of survival for the leej and the marine if he didn’t rescue them now. This was the last, best shot they’d have.
So… he went for it.
54
In the hours leading up to Rechs’s assault on the Excelsior, Amanda had lain there, next to Lopez, in what had once been a pantry inside one of the upper-level apartments. Just a few floors below the penthouse Loth had commandeered for his headquarters.
Lopez was all but passed out due to the drugs and meds they’d given him. Things she’d traded information for. Information that would probably get her court-martialed on the back side of this fiasco. After all, the beating they’d given her, and some of the torture, hadn’t been that bad. She could have just refused, or even held out a little longer. But when they’d started talking about going to work on Lopez… that’s when she’d begun to trade. She hadn’t been able to save all them of them in that alley, but maybe she could save just this one. Not as a sniper, a Reaper bringing death, but here, as a prisoner.
She’d prayed to anyone who could hear her while they tortured her. Anyone who could’ve helped her. Even though she didn’t believe in anything, she’d prayed all the same. Not for herself. For some way to save the legionnaire.
Yeah, sometimes you pray even when you don’t believe.
When they finished with her, promising more later, they left her and Lopez in the pantry. Sealed in with a lock and alarm. She heard them entering a code. Still, she’d gotten to her knees, restraining a groan from where they’d twisted her wrist to the point of breaking during the early part of the interrogation, and checked to see if maybe that locked door would open. If maybe someone out there in the galaxy was listening.
It was locked.
But she could hear them talking on the other side.
She went back and checked Lopez’s breathing. Slow and shallow. Not good.
But alive.
She went back to the door and listened again.
Things were coming to a head. She could tell that much. Beers had been executed. They’d shown her the stream just to make clear how serious they were about what they were doing. Chances were they were going to do it again. Maybe not now. Maybe not in the next few hours, or even days. But they’d do it again. They’d kill Lopez.
Why?
Because taking lives is power.
And power is intoxicating.
Part of Reaper school screening was that you couldn’t have that thrill-kill gene, whatever it is. Gotta be wired differently to be that kind of lifetaker.
To be a Reaper.
More like a shepherd, they’d said. Subtlety. “We’re the good shepherds,” one of her instructors had once told her. “We take care of the wolves.”
She felt for the knife
