Prayers get answered. Just not always the answer you want, Manda.
She shrugged off the hood, flicked open the knife, and plunged it into the throat of the shadow closest to her. She felt it puncture cartilage and then pipe. Pushing in easily at the last. Windpipe. Heard a hot breathy gurgle as clear as day above all the shouting and the blaring alarm deafening everyone in the stairwell.
Prayers…
The stairwell was bathed in the bloody red light of murder.
Lopez was right next to her.
No one even noticed the guy she’d just stabbed in the throat falling into her, flailing and bleeding. They were busy on comm. Checking the stairs below. And the route out to the convoy and Loth, who was supervising the loadout.
There were two others above her on the stairs, but one was leaning over the well, pointing his blaster down onto the landings below. The other just had a look of fear on his face. Like he wasn’t there.
She let go of the knife and pulled the blaster away from the dying man bleeding all over her. She was trained on how to handle it with her hands bound. She fired the new weapon at both men. Fast. Gunfighter fast.
The frightened one got it in the gut and grunted on the other side of the blaster’s whine. The one aiming down onto the level below, leaning over the rail, turned to her and she blew off the bottom of his jaw because her aim was somewhat constricted. In a perfect world, at this intimate up close and personal range, she’d have drilled his skull.
The guy whose mouth was shot away bent over the railing and slid down it past her as he died.
Amanda pivoted with the weapon and fired at the two men on the landing below as the dying man slid their way, what remained of his face a smoking horror show coming straight at them. Both shots missed, but they got her captors’ attention.
And what they saw was a pissed-off marine with murder in her eyes.
This was no Dodge Ridge Shootout like people read about from back in the stellar frontier days. No stand and deliver at point-blank range like Cassandra’s Folly. Both of her new opponents were pros and they knew cover was more important than return fire. The first one dove head-first down the stairs to get away from her fire. The second one dropped to his knees and tried to put the railing and the dying man between himself and the killer marine who’d somehow obtained a blaster.
No matter.
Amanda shot him a second later and didn’t bother to add any finesse in the targeting. She just started squeezing, filling the guy’s jerking body with blaster bolts. Watching it twitch and jump and getting a grim sense of satisfaction out of the whole experience in some distant background app in her mind.
The revenge app. Brought to you by Nemesis and Elektra.
Then Reaper training kicked in and she was the shepherd. The good shepherd who protects her flock from wolves.
Keep the boys and girls on the ground from getting hit by a shooter they can’t see. Reaper training. Dad, too.
Death on demand from the deck of a SLIC.
She grabbed Lopez and dragged him back up the stairs and through the first landing door she came to. To his credit, the legionnaire remained on his feet. And that was the best any badly wounded leej could do.
She could hear her remaining captors in the stairwell behind her. They were shouting. The surprise had passed and now they’d come to kill her in the hopes they could still take the legionnaire alive. And kill him later.
Sometimes life is only guaranteed from one second to the next, Manda. So make every second count, Reaper.
Dad. And Reaper instructor.
55
The stories-high mech was within three blocks of the target AO Rechs had identified for the little Nubarian gunnery bot. Bring a distraction in—and the bot felt it had really come through there—and provide overwatch while “the captain” extracted the prisoners had been the orders, and that was exactly what the little bot was doing when Captain Hess stopped the HK-PP in its tracks.
You didn’t get to be the commander of a Nether Ops tip-of-spear kill team without skills. Hess was that rare House of Reason–appointed officer who was more than capable as a legionnaire also. Despite the fact he was entrenched in the appointed officer’s typical self-aggrandized thinking.
The marine SLIC gunship variant had hit the HK-PP with its full complement of AGMs. The air-to-ground missiles had sidewindered in and struck the walking beast all across her upper frame.
Inside the bot’s interface compartment, the little machine rerouted motive power to extinguishing fires breaking out inside the hull. Not because there was a pilot on board to save, but because damage to the electrical systems that powered and controlled the mech’s actuators were threatened by an out-of-control fire.
In front of the bot’s control section, where the driver would strap in and move the machine forward with guns blazing, a sudden array of electrical sparks exploded in all directions.
The bot whooped digitally and tried to engage the retreating SLIC within its forward blaster turrets, deciding the threat overrode Rechs’s orders not to fire on military craft or personnel. Which was dangerous, because it meant the bot was crossing that line where its programming began engaging in behavior defiant of its master’s orders. That was typically met with a memory wipe and system restore. Something the little bot had avoided ever since it came online for the first time.
Sensing the maneuver, the SLIC retreated as the mech suddenly turned to the right and sent forth bright fire. Explosions ravaged an old condemned apartment tower as the speeding SLIC dropped away down the canyon of buildings.
Stay on target, the little bot reminded itself, and it sent the mech forward toward the target AO once more.
A moment later Captain Hess’s SLIC reappeared from its evasive maneuvers, coming in from a different angle
