The Museum of Kublaren History was mere moments from being set ablaze when a combined force of human contractors and Kublaren city-dwellers stormed the chaos at the museum and began shooting down the zhee.
The mullah’s operatives quickly called for backup and a major firefight erupted outside along the frontage of the new museum. The Kublarens and contractors were holding the roof of the exhibition hall and the front doors.
The zhee had time to send in a mass wave of their own, backed by snipers and improvised bomb throwers from the nearby alleys.
Thirty seconds into the attack, the Kublarens, firing their nifty new Black Leaf Arms automatic weapons, cut the wave of homicidal zhee, easily outnumbering the defenders, to shreds.
The overwhelming firepower was catastrophically violent.
For all intents and purposes the valuable antiquities, the Kublaren cultural heritage, and the building were held back from zealous destruction. A small fire was extinguished and the zhee were defeated.
A number of similar incidents were either wrapping up, kicking off, or would occur in the next few hours as the now well-armed Kublaren militia, backed by private military contractors from a nebulous corporate entity, engaged in street to street fighting to drive the zhee from the city.
Even ZQ was not safe.
By the end of the day it would cease to exist. Soob City was now firmly in the hands of the Kublarens and their mysterious new allies.
Bowie drove straight through a street battle where both sides hurled everything they had at one another. Donks threw chunks of duracrete and improvised flaming objects at what, to Bowie speeding past in the stolen sled, looked like Kublarens with state-of-the-art automatic weapons.
Not mere blasters. But also not the usual slug throwers they carried. Something else.
The roar of chemical based firearms erupted like sudden strings of titanic firecrackers. Ghostly rounds ripped through the air as Bowie mashed the accelerator just to get through the violent firefight. They snapped and also seemed to make a zipping noise. Donks surging into the street were riddled with sudden explosions as blood spray and brain splatter painted the sides of the dirty walls they fought with their backs to.
A second later Bowie was turning onto the last street and heading for the Kublaren embassy ahead. He gunned the accelerator and raced into an intersection, hearing the whine of Boom Boom Killah’s turbo-inducers too late at the last second.
Both vehicles collided, and the force of the cobalt sled drove Bowie’s ride straight into a looted pharmacy.
Bowie curled up, catching the incoming speeder out of the corner of his eye, and rolled with the impact. For a moment there was nothing but the violence of crunching plastic, screaming metal, shattering glass, and a series of vicious impacts as both vehicles crashed into the storefront.
But by then Bowie was out.
Maybe thirty seconds passed. Debris was still falling inside the store. Ceiling tiles randomly raining down in the darkness and dust. The whine of the sled’s engines spooling as the systems malfunctioned and went offline.
Bowie climbed out of the twisted sled, dimly noting that he’d almost been brained by a collapsed beam within the store.
Everything hurt. He’d been violently thrown about in the impact, and it was a wonder his neck wasn’t broken or his spine fractured.
His brain bell was good and rung too. And he was pretty sure he was seeing double. He’d also lost the holdout in the wreck. But his vision was all messed up and he couldn’t see straight to find it.
He stumbled into the daylight and tried to orient himself on a street that rocked back and forth like he was standing on a dinghy at sea.
A moment later he heard the powerful war-bray of Boom Boom Killah and felt the donk land a solid kick right into his lower back.
Bowie went down hard. Right to his hands and knees. His mind trying to make sense of what was happening, and what was about to happen, to him.
Team Nilo…
Honey…
Employment…
All that went away as his training surfaced and told him what he had to do right now to go on living. That other stuff wasn’t important. Not right now. He’d been trained by the best hand-to-hand experts the Repub Marines had to offer.
He was in a fight now. His mind cleared away the damage of crash and impact and signaled that message loud and clear. Attention on deck! You are getting your butt kicked. That was the only thing that mattered. He was in a fight whether he liked it or not. And the only way anyone won a fight was to want it worse than the other guy.
He saw the shadow of the donk come in close now, iron-shod hooves sparking strikes on the hot street. Saw the outline of the shadow raise one leg like it was going to kick him again.
“Take this, Sket—” Boom Boom howled.
Then Bowie grabbed the incoming donk kick and twisted what he had ahold of violently, knowing there was nothing else in the universe but this thing he had to do. His desire to force the leg he had, and mainly the knee, in a direction it did not want to go. He felt the break a second before he heard it.
Then the young violent donk screamed, backing away from Bowie, limping and stumbling, two playing cards in his hands. Swinging both in violent swipes made all the more deadly by the enraged pain.
The air whistled as the cards cut through the space between them.
Bowie surged off the ground, because momentum was the next thing that needed to be taken away from his enemy, and slammed into the wind-milling donk. There was no hesitation in the one-two combinations that went straight for the donk’s muscled solar plexus in the desperate seconds that followed.
Bowie threw punches wildly and with everything he had, just to cause as much damage as he
