Fort Liberty, Volume Two (18 page)

It sits, and it burns, because Logan’s seen it. He's all traces of Niri consumed by something she can’t fight, her eyes lit with the glow of alien thought, her fingers stroking the plastic of his visor as if she’d never seen him before.
Still there. She’s still there.

Kazak is negotiating a path around destroyed desks, coming straight for him. “Is she in that pretty birdcage out there on the rocks?”

Buy time. Buy time.

“It didn’t work,” Logan says, knowing his position is about to get discovered anyway. He unzips the suit’s hood and pulls it back, sucking in debris particulate and gun smoke. “It didn’t work. She’s not compatible.”

Kazak moves the way an experienced fighter would, with the intention to charge in hard and assert control. The guy’s on top of him right away, bent forward, rifle muzzle glaring down. He squints, breathing too hard. Logan can see the sweat glossing his forehead. Not as cool as he sounds, amped up and ready to make bad decisions.

Logan lifts his hands in view. “She’s not compatible. Nothing happened.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes.”

“They
let
you see it?”

“Yes.”

“The full indoctrination?”

“Whatever. She passed out and woke up. Nothing changed.”

“And so that means we leave?” Kazak scoffs. “They train you to be that stupid, kid? Where is she?”

“I don’t know. They took her.”

“Who took her?”

“We didn’t exchange names.”

Kazak curses, steps back and jams his boot into Logan’s stomach. The force nearly lifts him. His insides lurch, his body contorting to protect itself. He gasps air, and it feels like nothing, like he’s going to suffocate.

Kazak kicks him again, raging. “Who the fuck are you? To try and fuck this up? You’re going to lose your head now, boy. That’s what we do to Assaulters. We’ll cut it off your shoulders and take it to that alien bitch so she knows what’s coming.”

Kazak starts to punch him, blow after blow, Kazak’s anger so much larger than the man himself, psychotic. Logan feels bright stinging bursts, his lip torn, that fist crunching his jaw. Blood fills his mouth. A flash, impact to the eye, and he’s blind, coughing, struggling. No use trying to protect himself. Somewhere in the middle of it, he sees Voss, a father from another life…slipping away.

He tries to hold onto it, and everything goes surreal.

Gunfire explodes from the upper deck. Rapid. Controlled.

Imagined?

No. The guys on the stairs are screaming. Some are hit, but the gunfire doesn’t stop. It keeps going, full auto, vicious.

It chews everything on the stairs and sprays into the large observation windows, webbing the cracks all the way through.

Kazak stops hitting Logan and stumbles back.

A nightmare version of Voss drops in from above. He lands on a desk, and it busts apart beneath him, sliding him onto the floor beside Logan. Voss rolls up, armor charred, visor cracked. He’s taken an enemy weapon---probably from the wounded in the hallway----and he raises it toward Kazak.

He pulls the trigger and gets an empty click.

He tosses it, drawing out his knife.

Kazak’s trained on him, but Voss doesn’t care.

Voss lunges forward.

Kazak’s shooting, but the shots go wild. A round blows a piece off Voss’s armor plate, flinging splinters.

Voss plows into him and keeps charging.

All the way to the windows.

Kazak starts screaming, but Voss is an old soldier, and there’s no stopping him. This is death. This is revenge.

They crash through the windows together, dropping into the glow on a burst of crystal glass shards. Logan seals the hood of his suit, still spitting blood. The smell of it fills the suit, his breathing loud and wet.

He staggers up, limping to the broken window. The cave spreads out beneath him, it’s ledges and pools dancing with frenetic thought, bright yellows and greens. Alarm. Fear.

Voss appears below, pushing up from the rock, and grabbing his knife.

Kazak is flat on his back, convulsing as he tries to breathe toxic air. His body is broken, his back, his right arm.

His eyes are wide with fear.

Voss has no sympathy.

The colonel kneels beside the man and grips the knife handle with both hands, jamming the blade through Kazak’s skull.
Crunch.

Kazak’s body jumps.

Blood spurts across the rock, .

The colony softens its hues, deep blues, deep thought.

Voss crawls away from the body and rests forward on his arms, his head bowed. He looks back at Kazak, then away, as if he’s struggling to lock it down, force it into the box where his own inhumanity hides.

Logan watches him, overwhelmed. He catches movement on the rocks below and realizes that Niri is there too.

She’s standing on a ledge, patterns of light moving over her white gown.

She watched the fall.

She watched Voss kill Kazak.

He expects to see some trace of fear, shock, horror. But it’s not there. She gazes at Voss, and she’s completely calm.

No, it’s more than that.

She’s fascinated.

 

Petra can’t see him. He’s disappeared from all the screens, but she can see his medic, alive and well on the observation deck. The kid is staring out the large windows, stunned maybe, but in no particular grief, which can only mean that his commanding officer is decidedly not-dead.

Jared.

The skimmer’s tracking alarm sounds. “Aircraft inbound. Arms detected.”

“Designate aircraft as Enemy,” Petra says, and feels it swelling up, the fear building as that blip on the tracking screen jumps closer. It’s the same panic as before, only the memory of her previous defeat now adds to it, her body wrung through, and unsteady in anticipation of further damage.

No more captures.

No more torture.

The odds aren’t stacked in their favor. Looking out the skimmer’s shattered cockpit, Petra can see Wyatt moving into position, climbing to the top of the transport wreckage with a rifle nearly longer than he is. He’s going to try to take out the pilots if they get close, but it’s not so easy under gun and rocket fire. He’s too exposed to survive either of those for long.

His subordinate is already kneeling by the hangar entrance, his armor a black shadow against the hot glow of atmosphere shielding. A rocket launcher is balanced on his shoulder, pointed into the chill of Martian daybreak, waiting for that fat transport to slip into effective range.

Maybe the kid gets it right with the first shot. Maybe he blows that transport to pieces. Maybe he saves the station by blowing her crew---souls that mean everything---into the sand along with their captors.

Maybe. Maybe not.

It’s her blood on the floor of the skimmer, her pilot and crew maybe trapped inside that vessel. And she’s supposed to not be Petra, in a situation that clearly requires a suicidal criminal bent on justice?

The system flashes a warning light. “Enemy at three kilometers, and closing. Heat spike detected in weapons systems.”

“Flight panel,” she murmurs. “Engine start. Manual Control.”

Power surges through the vessel. The monitoring screens vanish in holo, replaced with a wrap-around flight console. The engines charge up, snapping with electricity before issuing their bizarre buzz.

“Caution, caution, caution,” the skimmer starts streaming its damage in one window, flashing system failures, fuselage breaches, and inoperable life support. “Caution---”

“Override all,” she says, reaching for the pilot mask and securing it over her face. “Power gun.”

“Gun not responding.”

She grimaces, glancing up to see Wyatt gesturing angrily at her. The message is clear.
What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

No time for explaining. Not that she would anyway

The extract ship breaks into effective range on the tracking screen and begins firing it’s gun. Bullets sear through the atmosphere shielding. The hanger lights up. Rounds blast through the wreckage, tracer fire bouncing off rock walls, and slicing through metal.

The young Assaulter lets the rocket fly, but it blasts into heavy fire and bursts apart on a clap of fire. Pieces rain inside the hangar.

The kid ducks under cover.

Wyatt can’t take the shot.

Petra grabs the flight stick and jams it to down-stop. The skimmer launches forward and catches a line of bullets in the side. She skates it in the air, taking tight left corner in the hangar.

The transport appears in front of her, a bloated delta wing, it’s gun barrel kicking up in her direction. The cockpit is angled, and the pilots are invisible behind clear shielding and strips of rivets. Still, they’ve got to be surprised.

Fuckers
.

She blasts out of the atmosphere shielding. The skimmer shudders, blind and filled with holes, heading straight for the enemy.

It’s an instant, no time for thinking, or regrets.

She grits her teeth, and the skimmer crashes through the transport cockpit. The skimmer’s shielding busts apart. The plastic rips away, and the storm howls in, dust lashing over her.

She yells, feeling the transport flipping backward with the impact, set to pitch the skimmer high into the air.

Keep it. Keep it!

She vectors the engines. The skimmer’s overpowered by design, so it goes tail down, and hooks deeper into the transport. She swings the small craft around, hurtling the transport through the atmosphere shielding.

The big ship clips a wing on the hangar entrance and crashes onto the tarmac, ramming the wreckage already there. Petra’s skimmer is locked to transport’s cockpit, but it kicks loose on impact, jolted to the side and slammed between the old aircraft and the hangar wall.

Machines stop moving and start smoking.

Petra pulls off the mask.

The transport’s pilots are clearly dead, but noises echo from the cabin. A Bounder appears through the broken windows, dragging a bag of equipment and cursing. One of them catches sight of her trapped in her seat and raises his weapon, its muzzle squaring on her chest.

She winces.

Two pistol rounds pop off from the tarmac, and the Bounder falls away. Wyatt and his young subordinate appear from under the skimmer.

The sniper heaves himself up, negotiating the debris to her position. He reaches down to pull her out, his teeth bared with the effort, eyes squinting. “Stupid, but well done,” he mutters. “You hurt again?”

“No.”

“Stay here.”

She nods, then shakes her head. “My crew.”

Wyatt ignores her, moving toward the transport’s broken cockpit. He signals his subordinate and they drop into it together.

Shots sound inside the transport, hollow barks falling to absolute silence.

“Clear,” Wyatt says.

“Clear,” the kid agrees.

Petra wets her lips, body numb and full of shock. She finds footholds in the transport wreckage and climbs to the smashed cockpit, then pauses before looking, as if an extra breath is going to help.

Wild thing.

She ignores the dead pilots and climbs into the aircraft. “Coming in.”

“Make it quick,” Wyatt answers.

Clara.

Petra slips between debris and crawls into the cabin. It’s dark, cargo ties sprung, crates loose, a few Bounders done and dealt with.

The Assaulters are together. Wyatt’s kneeling beside a bench. “Over here,” he says, though there’s nothing she can tell by his tone.

“Clara!” she calls out, breath coming up short. “Clara!”

She steps around a pallet, and there’s her pilot, still alive.

For the love of---

The older woman blinks, clearly knocked out of better sense, and bleeding from a deep cut above her nose. Her wrists are locked in restraints, and her eyes are dulled out, but the damage looks survivable, and nothing’s missing.

Petra drops beside her, and Wyatt moves on to help the others.

“Thought you passed on,” Petra says in a rush, smudging tears away before anyone else can see them. “Heard you bitching at me inside my head when I was bleeding, and thought you’d gone to the other side.”

“What?”

“Thought you were giving advice from the afterlife.”

The pilot stares at her. “And you took that advice?”

“I did.”

“So you only listen when I’m dead? That it? Fine. From now on, we’ll just pretend I didn’t make it.”

“It was Kazak,” Petra says. “Earth Kazak. Butcher Kazak. Took us all hostage so that Voss wouldn’t shoot him out of the sky. He brought his crew all the way to Red Filter to kill Niri.”

“And your colonel stopped him?”

“From what I saw on vid.”

“Killed him?”

“Said he was going to.”

“Still the hero,” Clara sniffs. “Going to pin another medal on him, of course, though pirates with black eyes will be left off the banquet list.”

Petra frowns, lifting her gaze to focus on the damage around them. For the first time, it looks like high cost instead of hard-earned victory.