Enemy One (Epic Book 5) (3 page)

Now, Esther stood by the open bay door awaiting her drop off on the roof, her stare once again on the embattled captain. After several seconds of this, Natalie took notice. The two stayed motionless, several feet away from one another with their eyes locked, before Natalie finally asked, “What?”

Esther pursed her lips before answering. “I was just thinking of how useful you could be on the rooftop.” She paused. “I could use a good shield.”

“Bite me.”

“And do you the pleasure?” Esther turned back to the door. “I think not.” Bending her knees, the scout, alongside Jayden, leapt from the warmth of the
Pariah
into the frigid, battering rain.

The moment Esther came to her feet, she gasped.
“Frigid!”
Smoothing her hair back and with her dress clinging to her skin, she bolted after Jayden, who was running to the corner.

As Scott sunk back to reload, the Texan’s voice emerged through the comm static. “Got about a dozen EDEN operatives headin’ to the building!” The crack of a sniper rifle echoed over the storm.

“Try not to kill any of them!” said Scott.

“I’m not—just givin’ ’em a reason to pause.”

Next to Scott, William unleashed a fiery burst from his hand cannon. The projectile soared through the rain and slammed against the police car, which lurched upright and sent the police behind it scattering. The car fell back to the street with a crash.

Looking across at Rashid, Scott said through the comm, “You guys go back and stop that EDEN advance! We’ve got this.” The Turkish fulcrum affirmed the order as he, Rodion, and Feliks disappeared around the corner and out of view.

Next to Scott, Becan cleared his throat. “We’ve got this, eh?”

“Well,” said Scott, his focus returning to the street before them, where local militiamen were joining the police. “It’s a goal.”

Meanwhile, Travis was flying the
Pariah
at near-street level and had taken to maneuvering it sharply through the cityscape valleys in an effort to outrun a pair of military helicopters that were in pursuit. Jerking the stick while Tiffany held on, Travis sent the
Pariah
’s underbelly flinging upward as its nose whipped around an intersection.

The move sent everyone in the troop bay flailing, from the few operatives who remained, to Flopper, whose paws were digging out desperately, to Ju`bajai, the Fourteenth’s newly-acquired Ithini female. Centurion groaned loudly as his body slid against the wall. David placed his hands on the giant beast. “Easy, big fella. We’re just hitting some turbulence.” He snapped a glare at the cockpit. “Watch it, Trav, we’ve got valuable cargo back here!” Next to David, Boris slammed against the wall completely upside down. The Russian tech slid headfirst to the floor. “And Boris, too!”

Rain tattering against the rim of his cowboy hat, Jayden fired another shot at the approaching team from EDEN, who were now aware of his location and taking pot shots at him from around their cover. As a burst of E-35 fire peppered the concrete roof guard, the Texan ducked down into cover. Adjusting his black eye patch, he called out to Esther, “I can’t do much more over here!”

As if on cue, Rashid’s voice emerged through the comm. “We have arrived at the back of the building—engaging EDEN now.”

“Try not to kill any of—”

“Target down,” said Rashid and Rodion simultaneously.

Jayden sighed then engaged once again.

Esther’s hands were shaking uncontrollably as she knelt down over a rooftop hatch at the structure’s center. The soaked and freezing scout’s lips were blue as she tried desperately to operate the hatch’s ancient, corroded handle. Whipping the wet fringe of her bangs out of her eyes in frustration, she screamed into her handheld comm,
“The sodding handle is rusted!”

“Bullets are a universal cure-all!” Jayden said.

“Bullets are a universal cure-all,” Esther mocked back. Holding out her handgun and leaning away, she closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The lock sparked and came apart. She grabbed the hatch’s side and strained to lift it, screaming when her shoulder, injured during their escape from
Cairo
, flexed its muscles. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she finally shoved the hatch open. She readied herself atop the ladder it revealed. “Going down,” she said as she descended, leaving Jayden behind to hold the fort down on the roof.

Ducking back behind the taxi cab as shots ricocheted around him, Becan looked at Scott and said, “We’ve got a problem, Remmy! EDEN, twelve o’clock.”

Following the Irishman’s indication, Scott caught sight of a cluster of EDEN operatives diverging behind the various obstacles in the street. The element of surprise that he, Becan, and William possessed was now gone. Snarling, he too ducked back. “How’s the extraction coming?” he asked through the comm.

“Ask me later!” Esther answered.

“We don’t have later, Ess, we need to extract the targets
now
!”

“Bloody hell,” Esther said as she trotted down the maintenance hall, handgun ready to fire as she rounded corners that were composed of giant, jutting pipes and decrepit walls. Out of the storm but still shivering, she carried on until she came to a metal door. Aiming her handgun at the knob, she squinted her eyes and looked away. Then, she stopped. Eyeing the knob suspiciously, she lowered her weapon and gripped it. It pulled open without a hitch. “All right, then.”

Outside the door was a small stairwell that led up to another one—this one wooden. Weapons fire racketed behind it. Pistol at the ready, Esther opened the door, where she was met by the wall of a hallway that ran in both directions—toward the front of the safe house, where the majority of the weapons fire was coming from, and toward the back, where the intermittent sound of Rashid and his slayers could be heard as they engaged EDEN in the back alleys. Her back against the wall, she tracked toward the front of the safe house.

The
Pariah
was flying like its tail fin was on fire. Its rear thrusters kicked in at full blast as it weaved through Krasnoyarsk’s city valleys, slowing only to make hairpin turns that kicked the ship’s underbelly completely sideways. Behind it, the pair of helicopters were in pursuit. Tiffany’s free hand held onto the cockpit handrail with white knuckles as the momentum of the ship’s turns jostled her.

Engaging the
Pariah
’s vertical thrusters for the sake of turn assistance, Travis once again brought the battered Vulture around an intersection.

In the troop bay, David was barking out orders to Boris. “Grab that harness. We need to strap him down!” Centurion was sliding all over the bay, the colossal beast growling in pain with every slam against the hull. “Travis, could you possibly fly any
less
vecking erratic?”

“Sure!” the pilot answered. “One missile impact and we’ll all be resting peacefully!”

*
      
*
      
*

EDEN Command

The same time.

THROUGHOUT HIS military career—one that spanned almost four decades—Leonid Torokin had experienced a wide variety of situations. He’d been in the midst of the Georgian Revolution of 0035 OE, when he was a seventeen-year-old militia member in Karachayevsk. He’d been a part of the Soviet Reclamation, where he spent fifteen years rising from front-line infantryman to Spetsnaz GRU captain. He was one of eleven men who formed the original Vector Squad when the Alien War began. He’d seen children firing assault rifles, a terrorist-led hostage crisis, and the gaping jaws of charging canrassis.

But this was a first.

From across the Council’s oval table, Judge Javier Castellnou was slamming his fist and shouting something about outdated Vindicators in
Nagoya
. Torokin wasn’t really listening.

EDEN Command had just removed Ignatius van Thoor from power in
Novosibirsk
, felling the Terror in one of the more shocking and decisive victories in modern history. In a single blow, The Machine had been brought to its knees and unceremoniously executed. Thoor was vanquished with a whimper at the hands of Torokin’s comrade and friend, Klaus Faerber. It was the kind of sweeping victory that folktales were made of. And in the span of a single message from EDEN’s base at
Cairo
, it had been completely overshadowed.

A Nightman named Scott Remington had infiltrated the Egyptian base with a handful of his
Novosibirsk
agents. He’d escaped with two alien prisoners, leaving a massacre in his wake. All signs pointed to a conspiracy involving the Nightmen and extraterrestrials. Whether Remington was the mastermind or a pawn was yet to be determined. That he was a traitor was indisputable. But it was even worse than that.

Scott Remington was a Golden Lion.

Torokin remembered the mission that had thrust the young EDEN soldier into the spotlight for his fifteen minutes of fame. Remington had led the remnants of a decimated unit into the heart of an alien stronghold, capturing a Bakma Carrier without taking a single casualty. Though he was far from a household name, all it took was the mention of, “that guy from the
Battle of Chicago
,” to conjure up recollection. At that time, he’d been hailed a hero. Now he was conspiring with the very forces EDEN was defending Earth against. How had a Golden Lion fallen so far? It was embarrassing and infuriating.

Closing his eyes and rubbing them tiredly, Torokin listened to the sound of his counterparts yelling. Yelling at each other, yelling at the situation. Coming undone.

“It’s not the Council’s fault that we don’t have enough Superwolves to make a sweep of the whole vecking eastern hemisphere,” said Richard Lena from Torokin’s right. “It’s a matter of realism and logistics. We just sent that half of the world to
Novosibirsk
!”

At the far end of the room, pacing with his arms folded but attentively listening, was Captain Klaus Faerber of Vector Squad. Still clad in his purple and white armor, still stained with the blood of General Thoor, he bore the distinction of being one of the few humans on Earth who could invite himself to a Council meeting without having to ask for permission. Leaning against the wall behind him was Vincent Hill, Vector’s second-in-command—the only combat medic in EDEN to hold such a distinction for such an elite unit. He was the only Vector to accompany Klaus into the meeting. Both men had, for the most part, remained quiet.

It had been discovered that one of the transports that had shot down Falcon Platoon and slain Klaus’s son, Strom, belonged to Remington’s unit, the Fourteenth of
Novosibirsk
. Though transfer logs confirmed that Remington was at
Cairo
at the time that the interception of Falcon Platoon took place, there was no reason to believe that he wasn’t involved to some degree. It was his transport, his unit. He must have been knowledgeable to some extent.

That Klaus was partaking in this meeting was troubling to Torokin. Despite the German’s icy exterior, Torokin knew Klaus was in the middle of an emotional undertow. Remington was involved in the murder of Klaus’s son. Tracking down Remington and the Fourteenth was important for a variety of reasons. Revenge was not supposed to be one of them.

The conference room speaker phone crackled as the Indian voice of Jaya Saxena—Kang Gao Jing’s protégé in Intelligence—broke through. “President Blake, we have an urgent situation!”

Blake’s focus shifted to the speaker immediately, standing and snapping his fingers to indicate his request for silence. As the chatter died down, he said, “We’re listening, Jaya—”

The young woman cut him off. “We’ve located the Fourteenth, Mr. President.” The Council collectively held their breath. “They’re in Krasnoyarsk.”

“Krasnoyarsk?” asked Lena.

“Krasnoyarsk is a supposed Nightman recruitment city,” said Torokin, looking at his American counterpart, then the rest of the judges. “Our agents learned this while they were in
Novosibirsk
.”

Immediately, discussion rose again. Blake raised his hand to silence it. “Jaya, are we
positive
the Fourteenth is in Krasnoyarsk?”

“Yes, Mr. President—confirmed by visual and radio chatter. I am in the War Room and awaiting your arrival.”

“On our way!” Blake said. Without a second’s hesitation, half of the room rose from their chairs to follow him.

*
      
*
      
*

Krasnoyarsk, Russia

THE CRACK OF Jayden’s sniper rifle resounded over the firefight below, his shot once again impacting concrete in an effort to stave off the EDEN operatives without killing any of them—a moral conflict unshared by the three Nightmen below, who had already felled six soldiers. Raising his rifle, the Texan peered through the scope farther down the street, where a larger group of EDEN operatives was en route. “Oh, man, we got trouble! More EDEN personnel on the way. Looks like another dozen or so.”

“We can hold our position,” said Rashid. “Diminish the ranks of those who approach.”

Grumbling in irritation, Jayden switched over to Esther. “Girl, you gotta get ’em out quick or I’m gonna start havin’ to shoot some folks!”

“And?” Esther asked.

“And—” The Texan growled. “Never-freakin’-mind, just get ’em out quick!” He cut the comm off and shot at the concrete once more. “Man, I run with a rough crowd.”

Esther could see the Nightmen at the front of the safe house, some firing their weapons out of the open doorway and windows while others fell back to reload or reorganize. Focusing on one Nightman in particular—a younger-looking, blond-haired slayer who had taken off his helmet to adjust it—the British scout approached him from behind. “Hey, you!” Flinching at the sound of a female voice, the slayer turned around to find Esther’s pistol aimed at his face. She glanced at his nametag. Alkaev. “Falcon Platoon. Where are they?”

Wide-eyed, the slayer stuttered, “They—who are you?”

“I’m your worst sodding nightmare, so take me to Falcon Platoon
now
!”