Enemy One (Epic Book 5) (2 page)

“Hey, this was on me! I told him what to do!”

The voice on the speaker repeated. “Mark Remington, report to the green room
immediately
.”

His own words shaking, Mark said, “Yes, sir!” as loud as he could. Grabbing his helmet, he ran full speed in the direction of the grid entrance.

Jason was trotting there, too, at a pace slow enough to allow Mark to catch up. “Mark,” the fourth-semester soldier-in-training said to him, “I’m gonna tell ’em this was on me. Don’t worry.”

Within seconds, they were approaching the entrance. Ahead, a pair of EDEN officials awaited. Gabriel Woods, the instructor in charge of the exercise team, stood with them. The well-built black man looked gut-punched.

One of the officials spoke before Mark or Jason could. His eyes were solely on the cadet combat medic. “Mark Remington?”

Mark huffed as he drew to a stop and came to attention. “Yes, sir.”

“Is your brother Scott James Remington?”

Confusion hit Mark’s face, followed immediately by panic. Beside him, Jason blinked. “Yes, sir,” Mark said breathlessly.

The officials swapped a glance before the second one addressed him. “We need you to come with us.”

“Is he okay?” asked Mark without pause.

For several seconds, neither official answered. They simply stared at each other, then back at Mark. Finally, the second one replied, the abruptness in his voice fading away. “Son, you just need to come with us.”

Mark hesitated for a moment, then he stepped forward. As the two officials made their way out of the green room and away from the arena, Mark followed behind them.

Once they’d gone, Jason looked quizzically at Woods. “Sir, what’s going on?”

The instructor’s gaze followed Mark and the officials until they were out of view. Still facing away from Jason, he answered, “Get back to your last position. Your training’s not done.”

“Yes, sir.”

Walking up the stairwell next to the green room, Woods returned to the observation deck to join the exercise evaluators who were standing before a large one-way mirror that allowed them to look down upon the grid. But not one of the evaluators was looking in that direction. They were focused on the wall-mounted television and the talking heads vehemently discussing the soldier whose photo was displayed in the center of the screen. And to the word “Terrorist” that was captioned beneath it.

And to the terrorist’s last name—Remington.

Saturday, March 17
^th
, 0012 NE

0936 hours

Six hours after
Cairo

Krasnoyarsk, Russia

PIVOTING AROUND the cover of the doorframe, Pyotr Alkaev raised his E-35 assault rifle and fired a burst of 5.56x45mm rounds—his last—into the open street toward the police stronghold. Obscured behind sheets of freezing rain, the police officers took cover behind vehicles parked on the opposite end of the street. Shrinking back inside, he looked at one of his Nightman comrades. “Magazine!” Rushing in Pyotr’s direction, the indicated Nightman tossed a fresh magazine at the door. Pyotr snatched it and slammed it into his weapon. From the door corner opposite him and through every window on the building’s face, more Nightmen released volleys of suppression fire.

This was, by leaps and bounds, the worst situation the nineteen-year-old Pyotr had ever found himself in. With General Thoor and The Machine having fallen to EDEN, every city with a Nightman presence was in open rebellion. The dark warriors were being pushed out by an amalgamation of law enforcement, local militias, and EDEN supplementary units. With the threat of the Terror gone, a full Nightman purge was in effect. No city was purging more fiercely than Krasnoyarsk.

Like all of the Nightmen around him, Pyotr was a slayer. There had been a fulcrum—the title of designated Nightman leaders—assigned to Pyotr’s building, which was a safe house. Unfortunately, the fulcrum had been among the first to fall in the attack on their location. There were numerous safe houses throughout the city, none of which were staffed by particularly high-ranking Nightman officials, as the need had simply never been there before. Only a few in the city knew the safe houses existed. But when the purge began and the first waves of Nightmen were taken into custody, the disclosure of the safe houses’ locations happened quickly and liberally. Without Thoor to protect them, the Nightmen were in full panic mode. The dangerous gleam of their black armor was gone.

Pistol fire ricocheted around the frame of the door, forcing Pyotr and one of his companions back. In the same retaliatory burst, one of the slayers in the window fell backward, struck in the head. The police force, growing in size with every minute, moved closer.

This was not going to last. Pyotr could see the end drawing nearer. An EDEN squad was heading their way from a street to the north, and several helicopters could be heard making their approaches. There was nowhere for them to run, nothing they could do. Decimated and out of ammunition, Pyotr mentally prepared for his imminent capture.

Then came the booms. Shrinking back instinctively, Pyotr and the slayers watched as heavy cannon fire erupted against the concrete, forcing law enforcement back as a wall of orange streaks lit up the street. An abandoned vehicle parked in the center of the street exploded as gunfire struck it. The slayers retreated from the windows.

By the time Pyotr reoriented himself and looked back to see what had happened, one of his comrades was already looking out of the window. Hovering onto the scene was an old, war-torn Vulture, its nose-mounted cannon blasting at the police officers’ stronghold and forcing them into a temporary, but full, retreat. Whipping his head back to the others in the room, the stunned slayer at the window shouted, “It is a Vulture!” He looked back at the window again as the Vulture’s tail fin came into view. Gasping, he returned to his comrades. “It is the
Pariah
!”

*
      
*
      
*

SCOTT REMINGTON SHOUTED through his mechanized helmet, “Rashid, go! Rodion, go! Feliks, go!” As the troop bay door lowered, whining against its cables, the three Nightmen who’d been a part of the
Cairo
rescue team readied their assault rifles for disembarking.

Bullets popped and pinged across the
Pariah
’s hull. “Taking
heavy
fire,
heavy
fire!” Travis pushed the stick forward, sending the
Pariah
’s nose pitching down. With his other hand, he reached up to adjust thruster control, yanking Tiffany’s handcuffed hand along with it.

“Yow!”
the blonde exclaimed. “Watch it, nerd, you’re killing my wrist!”

“Handcuffs were the worst idea, ever.”

Her eyes rolled. “Fitting that the worst idea ever came from you.”

As the rear bay door fully lowered, the Nightmen leapt onto the street. Scott rushed out behind them. “Becan, Will, you’re both with me!” As the Irishman and demolitionist took to his sides, Scott felt another hand grab the back of his shoulder. David.

“Be careful down there!” David yelled over the roar of engines and gunfire.

“How about
quick
?” asked Scott.

The older man nodded. “Quick works, too!”

Gritting his teeth against the throbbing pain in his right thigh, Scott leapt from the
Pariah
’s door to the rainy street below.

The Fourteenth had flown from Egypt on the wings of a prayer and little else. By technical measures, the extraction operation in
Cairo
had been a success. Centurion, one of the Ceratopians from the
Interspecies Conflict
in Siberia, had been recovered. “The Archer betrays you,”
were the words uttered to Scott in German by H`laar, the Ceratopian whom Centurion had been assigned to protect. In the specific task of protecting H`laar, Centurion had failed. H`laar was dead. But the mere fact that Centurion was still alive kept a flicker of hope burning that the meaning behind H`laar’s message could be discovered in full.

The battered, black-and-green Ceratopian had received severe damage in the escape from
Cairo
. Though the alien’s breathing patterns had normalized during the flight, there was no debating that if Centurion didn’t receive medical attention of some kind—medical attention no one in the
Pariah
knew how to give—he would perish. And if that happened, then all of this was for nothing. Making sure Centurion lived
had
been priority number one—at least, until an Antipov redirect to land in Krasnoyarsk had been thrust upon them.

As soon as Scott landed and regained his footing on solid ground, he bolted for the cover of a nearby taxi cab, followed by Becan and William. The Nightmen—Rashid, Rodion, and Feliks—found cover around a building corner on the opposite side of the street. The three Nightmen were the last survivors of the extraction team
for
the extraction team: the Nightmen whom Antipov sent to pull Scott, Esther, Jayden, Boris, and Auric out of
Cairo
. The extraction team members were among the least injured of the Fourteenth’s crew. Because of that, they were assuming the role of primary offensive force.

Rashid Faraj, the old, Turkish fulcrum, was as no-nonsense a player as Scott had ever worked with. Despite his taking a back seat to Scott’s command in the aftermath of
Cairo
, Rashid made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t the “blindly follow orders” type. He questioned, he challenged, at times he even scoffed at Scott’s pre-Krasnoyarsk planning. All three were qualities Scott appreciated. At a time like this, when they simply could not afford mistakes, a cross-examiner was a godsend.

Then there was the former numerically-named duo, a pair of slayers that Scott knew next to nothing about beyond their names: Rodion “One” Sayankov and Feliks “Four” Petrukhin. What little he
did
know had been gleaned from
Cairo
—that they were dangerous.

“
Junction Eight
, this is Rashid Faraj of the Fulcrum Elite,” Rashid said through the comm. “We are here to assist you.”

Scott grimaced. That was as cold a lie as Scott had ever heard, because they weren’t there to assist anyone. They were there to retrieve someone valuable, then leave as quickly as possible. Leaning around the far corner of the taxi cab, Scott fired a volley through the sheets of rainfall toward the police force, which was moving back into position now that the
Pariah
was drifting away.

A panicked reply came through the static. “We see you, Fourteenth! We are inside!”

Rashid cursed loudly. Scott could hear him from all the way across the street. The whole purpose of Rashid being the voice of the Fourteenth was so that nobody would
know
it was the Fourteenth. So much for that. “They were going to see the collar, anyway,” Scott said to Becan and William as he got on the comm. “Travis, what’s the view?”

“We’re only gonna be able to do so much with the ammo we’ve got!” answered the pilot. “We might need to conserve some in case EDEN shows up in the air.”

Based on our luck, you can count on it.
“Drop Jayden and Esther on the roof. See if Ess can find a way inside from above. We need to get inside that building as quickly as possible.”

“Seriously?” Esther asked, her face deadpanned as the
Pariah
moved back in over the structure. The disheveled scout was still wearing her black maxi dress and pearl earrings from her blazing trek through
Cairo
Confinement and the Anthill.

“It’s just a little rain,” answered Jayden.

She crinkled her nose. “Says the man wearing a hat.”

Readying his sniper rifle, Jayden trotted toward the rear bay door, Esther at his side. Neither operative had any armor available, a detriment shared by all of the
Cairo
team with the exception of Scott, whose gold-trimmed armor had been brought to Egypt by Rashid and company. Fitting his brown cowboy hat—the lone personal item he’d retrieved from the base—over his head, Jayden raised his sniper rifle and peered through the scope with his one good eye. “All right, I’ve got some kind of group movin’ in on the building from the alleys in the east,” he said through the comm. “Veck, man, it’s EDEN.”

Esther gripped the handrail next to the open door as her glare bore a hole through Natalie Rockwell. The captain of the Caracals was sitting against the wall, her hands tied to a pipe with strands of strewn-about chestnut hair falling over her face. Auric, whose busted knee had disqualified him from joining the others on the ground but who could still point a pistol, was keeping watch over her.

Initially, Natalie had been as simmering and confrontational as anyone would have expected for a woman betrayed then kidnapped for leverage. Every effort made by the Fourteenth to talk to her was met with seething silence and a turn of the head in the opposite direction. The Caracal captain had not been in the mood to listen.

Until a dead man showed up.

A subtle shift occurred in Natalie the moment Antipov relayed to Scott his new assignment: retrieve Colonel Lilan and the survivors of Falcon Platoon from Krasnoyarsk. EDEN had said that Lilan and company were dead. EDEN was supposed to be the good guy in this scenario. Good guys weren’t supposed to lie. Then again, Scott was supposed to have been a good guy, too.

Though she said nothing outright, the change in her demeanor was apparent. Deliberate attempts to flare her nostrils and look the other way were swapped for all-too-obvious attempts to eavesdrop and pick up anything and everything the Fourteenth discussed about Falcon Platoon. So noticeable was the change that it even prompted David to make a remark to her imploring her to consider their side of the story. Expectedly, she met his words with silence, but the message had been received. Her emerald eyes looked more frightened now than before.

Of course, not everyone was eager to appeal to her sense of discernment—her primary antagonist being Esther. More than once, the British spitfire had been caught mouthing off to “Venus,” much to the chagrin of her comrades in the Fourteenth, who made their disapproval clear. Esther simply shrugged.