If the zhee sensed he was heading for the embassy, then no doubt they were filling the direct route with their version of a kill team.
He was running fast now because it was important to get off the street as quickly as possible. He vaulted a low concrete wall, sprinted across a mostly empty parking lot, and made the high security entrance to the nearest circular tower in the office park.
It was clear the building hadn’t been occupied yet by any galactic corporate entity, but it looked more than ready for move in.
Bowie opened up with a burst of fire from the Jackknife and felt the thing barely even jerk from blaster recoil as it dumped at least twenty shots in half a second across the entrance door made of heavy secure-glass. Rated to stand up to riot, but not high-powered heavy blaster fire.
Go figure.
The glass wall shattered and Bowie stepped inside the climate-controlled building, getting hit by a refreshing blast of nice cold air. The construction workers probably kept it on for themselves. Bowie didn’t mind their indiscretion.
He crossed the lobby and hit the call button for the elevator. One of the sixteen in the bank of lifts opened and Bowie stepped inside, scanning the panel for the floor he could access the skybridge on.
A moment later the lift was headed up at an almost unsafe rate of acceleration. Someone still needed to adjust its controls before building occupation.
24
Boom Boom Killah and the Feral Jacks had just had their first major street engagement against the nebulous new security company that had been showing up on the fringes of Kublar. And won.
Some of the donks had been calling them the Shadows. A security presence that had begun to assert itself in recent weeks across Soob City. Carving out districts and neighborhoods, or even just blocks, for itself. Now, they’d had their first fight against what the zhee had assumed was another gang, cartel, or some heavily funded paramilitary org. They’d encountered such before.
There were even reports of paramilitary guerrillas operating against the koob tribes out in the sticks near the zhee holy sanctuaries that had been established out there to project influence and run smuggling operations.
Boom Boom Killah and his crew had reached the intersection where the firefight with the dropship would take place with just minutes to spare. He was following reports over zhee social media channels that indicated the target was headed this way. And at the same time, he noted the unmarked dropship shooting down into the streets.
“Ha…” he brayed, still enthroned on the back seat of his sled and tapping his datapad while the rest of the crew flooded into the streets and businesses, suddenly commandeering them as fighting positions to intercept the infidel.
“Ha! Shadowies be all tricky-like, muley braddas!” crowed the basso-voiced donk crew leader.
Then he nodded solemnly at Little Six, his right-hand donk, and gave the orders he wanted obeyed immediately.
“Get da flyswattah outta dey trunk, you dumb muley bast.”
Little Six had responded rapidly, and with the smooth professionalism of any trained soldier. He popped the trunk on Boom Boom Killah’s ride and had the Repub Marine man-portable Longbow Air Defense System in hand within its clamshell. Several thousand had gone missing in the last days of the Republic, and word was that an entire supply unit had sold off tons of military-grade hardware, including one HK-PP, to finance their retirement in lieu of casting their fate to the Republic paymasters. Best to control what you could while the evolving galactic economy assumed its new form.
And so they took off for the edge of the galaxy to live like kings.
Meanwhile, a few of those LADS ground-to-air intercept systems found their way into donk paws on Kublar. Because Boom Boom Killah “ran dey show,” as they liked to say on the streets of Soob City, he’d acquired one.
Unlike the aero-precision launchers, there was no locking mechanism. Point and shoot only. But Longbows were capable of firing four missiles at an airborne vehicle in rapid succession. The LADS had been used as the dropship snipers began to engage the donks on the ground in the intersection Bowie was heading straight toward. It was Boom Boom and his lieutenant who’d ducked back inside a koob kebab store and set up the system using the no-brainer instructions to attach the munitions canister interface to the main firing rail. A moment later the firing interface was flipped out and the toggle for Active Scan engaged.
That easy.
You could take out a commercial freighter with one of these, some liked to say. All you had to do was aim and shoot.
But the dropship pilot had flown a lot of legionnaires into hot LZs across the galaxy. Any other civilian, or even a mere transport pilot who’d never flown combat missions, wouldn’t have been minding the missile sensors too much. Might have even adjusted the ship’s display settings to move that system to passive and Imminent-Only detection.
Imminent-Only detection would have given nothing more than a pulsing shriek that an inbound missile had just been launched. With the dropship operating no more than five stories up, and the kinetic mag-rail launched missile using chemical boost to accelerate quickly to penetration speed, live and in the air, reaction time to evade the incoming missile would have been nonexistent.
But the pilot of the dropship had been watching the Ground-to-Air scan. He was ready on evasive, chaff, and flares the moment the missile went live and the intercept alarm began to shriek frantic mayhem.
Boom Boom Killah swore a blue streak when he missed the first one and almost threw the launcher through the plate glass window of the kebab
