Ahead, Bowie could see the light of day coming from the loading dock, but the straining electric engine of the lift sled was closing on him fast. At the last second he threw himself off the dock, hugged the briefcase to his chest and went sliding into some recently arrived containers. He curled and took the landing on his left shoulder. It didn’t dislocate anything, but it did jar something deep within his spine.
No time for that, he thought as suddenly the loading dock was filled with the clamor of a sudden catastrophic crash. The lift sled had gone off the dock at full speed into the back of a small transport sled waiting to be unloaded. The mare hanging on had been crushed. The driver couldn’t be seen now that lift sled and transport had become one. Whatever had happened to her, it was clear she wasn’t going anywhere in the lift anytime soon.
If she was alive.
Bowie grunted and got up off the floor of the loading dock.
A bot trundled over and informed Bowie that this was a restricted area and asked if he could please return to the main shopping areas for his safety and shopping pleasure.
“Sure thing,” muttered Bowie and stumbled out into the daylight at the back of the loading dock, entering a back-alley side street that served the stores.
20
It had been less than fifteen minutes since the zhee issued the Bind-Torture-Kill decree for Jack Bowie, and already murders in Soob City had gone up three hundred percent. Most of those homicides weren’t reported. Dead bodies lay in the street and a frozen emergency services system had yet to respond beyond the most protected areas of the Green Zone.
Across town, near the Kublaren tribal embassy, three diplomats enjoying a kaff in the new corporate store that had just opened two weeks before, were suddenly murdered by a zhee hit squad who’d been waiting for two weeks to pull the reprisal killings for some vague declared injustice last month.
With the Bind-Torture-Kill in effect, anything and everything was on the table for the unstable and chaotic zhee. The more mayhem tied up local security forces, the more likely it was that their Infidel-Target would be caught, hurt, and murdered.
Mass bedlam and wanton violence was always a win for the zhee. Pandemonium was their preferred pallet.
So, while three Kublaren elders were being blasted down on the sidewalk, a jewelry store back in the shopping district suddenly got hit by a zhee crew working for Boom Boom Killah. They’d been tasked with robbing the store sometime later in the week. The plan had been to hit the store and then disappear back into ZQ with loads of bling and loot.
Now everything was out of control so the crew decided to go for it. They took along a small yet powerful self-replicating chemical incendiary bomb. One they’d planned to use to cover their backtrail by leaving an apartment tower in flames, thus diverting any attention focused on their capture into rescue efforts as various world diplomatic residences within the upper floors were incinerated.
Entering the store, the three zhee criminals who’d actually do the heist started slitting throats just to get the fun stuff out of the way right off the top. The guard first. Then the two jewelers. That was in the first thirty seconds right as Jack Bowie was pushing himself up from the ruin of the shipping floor and the bot was heading over to advise him of the warehouse safety protocols currently in effect.
One minute to bag up everything in all the display cases, one zhee smashing glass while the two others greedily grabbed everything they could get their paws on, and thirty seconds after that they were at the front door, flinging behind the crude incendiary device as a parting gift. The heist team reached the door of the getaway sled, themselves awash in the heavy bloom of the chemical propellant they’d used for the bomb when it ignited inside the store, producing a sudden terrible blossom of wild flame, destroying everything it touched.
The fleeing robbers would have been cooked too had they not shut the panel on the getaway sled as the driver mashed the accelerator and took off down the street amid a roar of engine and blast of street grit.
The firebomb worked fast, spreading in a self-replicating gel nutrient that would multiply and ignite for the next two minutes. By then the first of the upper floors of the apartment tower above would be aflame, as were all the escape and emergency exits.
That would make things more difficult for city services, the zhee had reasoned. And thus easier for them. What did it matter? Those being burned alive were Unclean anyway. That particular tradition stayed with the youths.
This and many other murders of opportunity occurred all across the Security Zone where the zhee had been trusted to be on their best behavior so that a new future, involving them, could be forged together.
Or so the government types had been vowing as the zhee slowly took over Soob City and, increasingly, the inland territories of the planet.
With the Bind-Torture-Kill in effect, the zhee awakened enthusiastically to their most basic of primal calls, something older than any of the galactic civilizations if all the old House of Reason’s propaganda was to be believed. Zhee mares wildly stabbed shopkeepers and alien coworkers. Even neighbors who’d unwisely chosen to live anywhere close to the murderous donks found themselves fighting for their lives. Desperately. With no police forces anywhere near to assist.
Bind-Torture-Kills had been covered up and apologized for by the Republic and the House of Reason in the past. It was considered a cultural trait by scholars and multi-cult apologists… and really, who was anyone to tell the zhee to conform to the galaxy’s human-centric sentiments about civilization?
Zhee males were reporting in to their tribe leaders while moving through the streets, exacting as much petty revenge as they could while stealing
