It took us hours to make the drive, moving with lights out slowly through the Kublaren mountains, the hard pan, and out around the zhee village set up on the north side of their temple, the towering height of its walls serving as a buffer to the wind storms that regularly blow in from the south. After that, my team and Hopper’s team parted ways to make our individual assaults per the battle plan. Each of us has to scale opposite temple walls before clearing the compounds inside.
“I can see ’em,” Abers whispers through the comm. He’s far enough away that he doesn’t need to whisper, hiding in the rocky folds of a big stone hillside eight hundred meters away. But it’s a nerves thing. It’s psychological. You keep your voice down until you can’t. “Hang back for a while so I can take out the one without the other noticing. They’re too close right now.”
I stare up at the stars. It’s still dark, but light is only a few hours away and we need to be gone without a trace by then. “Roger. Standing by.”
We wait for a full minute before the comm in my ear comes back to life. But it isn’t Abers, it’s Hopper from the opposite end of the square temple compound.
“Alpha One to Bravo One, how copy?”
“I hear you, Alpha One.”
That’s at least one thing I appreciate about this op. We’re falling into tighter comm discipline. I haven’t heard from Brisco yet, who would be most likely to foul things up on the comm. But I’m not sure if I will since everything seems to be running through myself, Hopper, Surber, and the koobs waiting somewhere out in the desert. So at least for one night, things are back to being professional. It feels right and comfortable. What I was trained for. What I signed up for.
“We’ve secured the wall and are preparing to move on Alpha Target Two,” Hopper says, his voice barely a whisper. I have no doubt his team is en route even as we speak. Alpha’s Target Two is a colonnaded building separate from the temple itself that intel believes to be a brothel. It should be quiet, if not empty, but Alpha’s job is to clear it of any zhee hostiles. There’s no telling what they’ll find inside, though.
“What’s your status, Bravo One?”
I look up to the top of the walls. I can see the elongated ears of one of the donkey-like zhee guards and I’m pretty sure I can dust him if I step back and line up a shot.
“Should be up the walls in a few,” I say.
“Roger. We’ll try not to steal all the glory once we move on to T-3. Alpha One out.”
I push my tongue against the inside of my mouth. At this rate Alpha team will be dusting the zhee inside the temple before we get our butts to the top of the wall. I key in Abers on the comm.
“How’s it looking, Abers?”
“At this range, I’m not sure I can get two shots off in time. I can drop one for sure, but the other guy will probably have time to drop down out of sight.”
“Roger. I can tag one of them from my position.”
I step away from the temple wall, the eyes of the rest of my team on me as they crouch in tense silence. I shoulder my suppressed blaster rifle—Mel R.—and thumb a switch on the attached ultrabeam so it sends up an IR laser beam that I can see dancing on the body of the donk stationed above me.
“Painting my target,” I tell Abers.
“Copy. Okay. Say the word and I’ll drop the other.”
I take a few short breaths. “Go.”
I send three suppressed shots up toward the zhee. The sound is something like a soft wick and the flash is hidden by the sizeable suppressor screwed on to the end of my blaster rifle. The light of each bolt is like a glimmer of moonlight shimmering up the walls—not the sort that will harshly brighten up the darkness like a blaster bolt shot at full power.
The trade-off is that I have to be close enough to the target to get a kill. And I am. The three bolts hit center mass just as a similarly dim bolt races across the quarter-moon sky and strikes the other donk on the distant parapet. Abers’s shot makes a slight buzzing sound, like an oversized insect as it races at subsonic speeds across the distance to make the kill. Not an easy shot, but Abers makes it look simple.
“Target down,” the sniper says coolly.
“Roger. Target down,” I say. Even though he knows it; saw the whole thing.
In the pregnant silence that follows the death of the two sentinels, as my team strains for sounds of trouble, I pull out a small drone and send it up to the top of the wall. The little bot reaches its zenith and hovers, sweeping for targets with a miniature holocam that sends a real-time visual to the smartwatch on my wrist.
“Looks clear,” I say. “Winters, you’re up.”
The young merc nods and then adjusts his gloves and boots. He presses a button on a sort of console strapped to his arm and the slightest sound of vibration hums into the night. The gloved fingertips have these little nanite claws which can dig into a wide variety of surfaces, same as on the toes of his boots.
Winters reaches up, grabbing a seam in the wall, which is built of massive cut stones stacked on one another, and begins to climb his way to the top.
My back to the wall, I watch my holofeed, wanting to see any potential trouble that might be in store for the kid. But things look quiet. And why wouldn’t they?
Big Nee picked an ideal night for this op—the festival of Kash the Unrepentant. Most of the donks would be blackout drunk, except for those unlucky souls fated
