It wasn’t much of a choice.
“Moving,” muttered Bowie. “Keep ’em off me.”
“We will, Jack.”
Bowie made it about ten meters up the street before the shooting started. The shooting at him, to be specific.
Zhee clustered in the street. Beating some people, shooting others, rifling through the bodies of those alive and lying terrified and prone. Other aliens, and several humans, were either running or simply cowering in disbelief at the zhee who were behaving exactly like zhee.
Most of these types were the people who’d never actually encountered any zhee, and relied on information from the old propaganda mills of the House of Reason–supported media groups who campaigned ceaselessly on behalf of the “much maligned” zhee. The standard line had always gone something to the effect that the galaxy had a long way to go to overcome the inherent speciesism in galactic human-centric culture.
Or, the truth wasn’t the truth. It’s what we say it is.
Bowie swore under his breath and pulled out his holdout blaster once more as he started up the street. He didn’t even bother to try to disappear in order to get up Sentinela unnoticed.
He shot the first zhee he came to. A big one hunched over the body of a man in a suit who’d had his face bashed in by a discarded lead pipe nearby.
The pipe was covered in blood.
Bowie casually shot the zhee in the back and moved on, knowing the other zhee would figure out what was going on in the next few seconds anyway.
The only bonus out of this, thought Jack Bowie as the zhee moved in on him, is that those they were menacing are free to flee, or drag their wounded away somewhere to hide.
Consider it a small service to the galaxy, he thought as he selected his targets and decided who needed to die next.
Bowie fired at two zhee on the street, the only ones carrying blasters, weapons that had just been used to commit murder. Then he began to move at a jog up the street. If the other zhee, most of them armed with improvised hand weapons, were deterred by the sudden death of three of their own in the last thirty seconds, it didn’t show. They shadowed him, looking for any opportunity to close rapidly and do him harm. Shoot enough of them and he’d run out of charge and have to swap packs. That would be the moment to rush, Bowie could almost feel them telegraphing to one another.
Some ran at him from odd angles, weaving through abandoned private sleds on the street, stranded and blocked from going forward by the improvised barriers the donks had thrown up to stall traffic for better looting. Others came straight at him once they’d made the sidewalk he was on. The whole moment had an almost determined, quiet madness. An is this really about to happen inherent disbelief within its quiet vastness.
In very short order Jack Bowie was going to have to fight about fifteen or so of the hairy brutes at very close range.
He was beginning to not like the number of verys that were accompanying every motivation.
Then they began to die.
“Jack,” said Elektra over the comm, “hold your position and don’t move a sec.”
“Can…” he was just about to ask if he could shoot back when the incoming zhee began to take fire from above. One donk got hit at a dead run, a high-powered blaster shot practically drilling straight through his hairy husky body from above. Another had its head explode in bone and brain matter from a blaster headshot. Two more died in a sudden fusillade of more blaster fire coming from across the street. A closed business that had been occupied by another ambush team.
Bowie could see the dropship hovering over a nearby rooftop, two snipers firing from the cargo deck. Both private-contractor types.
“Start moving again, Jack,” said Elektra over the comm once more. Her voice calm and businesslike. All the zhee weren’t dead, but the ones who’d tried to run were shot down as expertly as the ones who tried to close on Bowie.
“Two more blocks to go,” updated the shot caller. “Then turn left.”
22
Boom Boom Killah and his convoy of tricked-out sleds moved into the Green Zone, blasting thump-and-blur, the music all the disaffected youth of the zhee were listening to that long hot summer on Kublar, and many other worlds.
They blew past the first Zone Security checkpoint, a soft entrance that merely scanned idents via transponder to enter the less-restricted areas of the secure zone. There was no way they were getting into the actual Green Zone where reports were coming in across all the channels, social and comm, ones the zhee monitored, that the target of the Bind-Torture-Kill was currently in the high-end Prominence shopping district.
Or at least the Feral Jacks weren’t getting in the Green Zone without a firefight. The security watching the inner checkpoints was military-grade. And they were armed for bear. Enough donks and the zhee might bust through and run amok, a dream many of the priests had promised would happen one day, but no plans had been made for that day to be today. And so it wasn’t happening.
But… things could always change.
They were only told it would be soon, and sooner than they expected. And that the mares promised for eternal nirvana would be the muskiest of all.
Now they were getting reports that the infidel-target was moving out of the secure Green Zone.
Boom Boom Killah called a halt while the speakers brayed about mares and drugs and power. The young thug crew leader checked his device and brought the map feature up. Reports from neighborhood tribe spotters, usually umwas, or old mares past breeding value, had the target moving up along Sentinela.
Nice street,
