Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (43 page)

We chorused our affirmation, and waited for his “Go.”

“Frank?” Chunhua poked me in the brain.

“Yo.”

“I just sorted this out with Shawn. We should approach the hangar together, but casually, no rushing.”

“Why?”

“Psychological warfare,” she explained. “We want to show them we’re not concerned about their resistance. We came to win and take their heads home for ashtrays.”

“We don’t smoke.”

“Stop being a smartass. Follow my lead.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The Osprey’s rotors tilted, and we hovered for a moment before touching down at the end of the Air Force Base’s jet parking lot. The hangar in question was dead ahead, less than 100 yards away.

“Cooper, Stewart, Yan: go!”

We disembarked, sorted ourselves out into a casual line with Chu in the middle, and started our stroll. Shawn had his AK-47 out, resting against his shoulder, with his finger off the trigger. I mirrored him with the Man Scythe.

At 50 yards, I got a familiar ping in my head.

“Stewart, this is Riley. Hold where you are or we will start killing hostages.”

FUCK!

“Hold up,” I broadcast to everyone on our little mission, “they have hostages. Can we get confirmation before we make another move?”

“Affirmative, Stewart. Conferring with Base Command now.” Major Kenney was on the ball, in his element, and I was grateful for it.

“Taking hostages is not nice,” Chunhua snarled out loud before switching to broadcast mode. “Riley? Just what is your goal anyway?”

“Miss Yan. You’re a surprising addition to this conversation,” Riley answered us, with an undertone of derision. “Our goal is simple: get home and release Sharma’s nanotech into the population. Then we will kill every undead bastard in the UK. From there: Europe, and so on until the job is done. The rest of you can sit on your arses.”

“You do realize,” Chunhua retorted, “you are no better than Warren Hightower, releasing life-altering technology on unsuspecting people. I hope you are sane enough to understand this.”

“Extreme situations call for extreme solutions, Miss Yan.”

“Oh no, Riley. You need to have a better rationale than that. Every dictator, mass murderer, and genocidal maniac uses that one. It is as old and crusty as Frank’s boxer shorts.”

My eyes bulged a little, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Your morality does not impress me, and neither does your attempt to leverage my emotions. Do it again, and a hostage dies before his time.”

I watched Chunhua’s face harden in response to Riley’s intentions, and it was an unpleasant sight. I got the distinct impression I wouldn’t be the only person placing a premium on hollowing out that bitch’s skull.

Major Kenney’s voice broke our concentration.

“We’ve got a report on as many as ten hostages, or as few as four. You three stay where you are, keep them engaged, and Alpha will go for getting the hostages out. Once they’re clear, you have clearance to fuck Bravo Euro to hell and back. Clear?”

“Clear,” I replied.

“Clear,” Chu sent.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Shawn broadcast.

I motioned to my companions that I’d pick up the chat with Riley next. Chu gave me an unhappy “after you” gesture, and Shawn tossed a thumbs-up my way.

“Riley, I am not going to try to appeal to your better nature. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have one to appeal to.”

“You’re a fine one to judge, Hightower Junior,” she shot back at me.

“I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with my father’s fucked up decisions, but it really doesn’t matter now. You want to deal?”

“Oh, you’re so influential you can make our demands reality?” Bitch did not like me.

“I’ve got my own motivations. That sick fucker you cut a deal with is who I want to kill. Standing here, shooting the shit with you means I’m not out hunting his ass.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Buttons then.” She actually laughed. “Did he do something unpleasant after we left?”

“Can you see me from where you are, Riley?”

“Yes.”

“Notice the arm and the eye?”

“Very Goth of you.”

“I lost them in the explosion. These are what grew back once we got new nanotech online. That was, as you say, ‘unpleasant’, but what he did to Charlie was worse.”

“Do tell.” She laughed, and every little chuckle drove another nail into her coffin.

“He cut her womb out, killing our unborn child, and left her for dead.”

“My goodness. That was a cold, cold thing to do. You have my condolences, and I hope it teaches you a little about the pain others have suffered thanks to your family.”

I snapped.

I started to walk forward, and I was dimly aware of voices in my mind telling me to stop, stand down, hold, and all manner of silly words equaling “cease moving.” I ignored them. Someone behind me, Shawn I believe, peppered the tarmac with bullets in an effort to impede my progress.

Chunhua fired her side arm, chewing a hole in the concrete off to my left. I didn’t stop. It was too late to stop.

“Keep coming and I will have Baz kill a hostage. Do you want an innocent man’s death on your conscience?” Riley screamed it in my head, just as the building came into range of my internal sensors.

She was lying. There weren’t any hostages. The only signals in the building were Bravo Euro.

The next words to come out of my mouth were broadcast to everyone who could hear me in their minds, too.

“Liar.” I smiled. It was a bitter expression. “Liars get punished, Miss Riley, you obnoxious sack of shit.”

“Fucking shoot him,” she screamed to her people, and broadcast to the rest of us. I wonder if she thought it would stop me–too late for that, dearie.

I kept walking.

I saw Lance Barker and Paul Fletcher raise their weapons as if I could see through the hangar walls, and calculated the passage of their projectiles without skipping a step. It was as if I could feel them tense to squeeze the triggers, and I propelled myself forward into a roll.

The projectiles tore through the air where my head had been, collided with one another, and shattered into dust. Me? I stood up and marched forward.

Chunhua took a shot, and I knew that Lance Barker had become an icky pink mist just beyond the metal wall of the hangar. One down.

Walk on.

Dodge another slug.

Walk on.

I felt it before I heard it or saw it, just like before, and flattened myself to the ground. This time it wasn’t a whistling shriek and pop. It was a noise that ought to accompany the end of the world. My ears bled from it.

I rolled over, and saw the thing I hoped I wouldn’t: a larger Progeny craft. This one was as wide as the tarmac, hovering thirty feet in the air. The manta-ray shape of the thing blotted out the sun, throwing everything under it into shadows.

A moment later it belched a beam of sizzling energy at our ride, the V-22 Osprey. Unlike White and the guards at home, the aircraft didn’t burn to carbon. It exploded and fused into a molten lump with the equally molten concrete. The heat was so intense I could feel it 75 yards away.

Three Predator drones swept in from various directions, firing missiles at will. I couldn’t tell if any of those shots did any damage, being underneath the craft, but I hoped they did.

The drones didn’t get an opportunity to make a second pass. With three quick bursts, the Progeny shot them down, adding more molten lumps to the landscape.

Someone off to my right shot at the huge black thing with one of our rail guns. I could see where the slug hit, cracking the shell and spilling thick blue juice on the ground. I wanted to cheer, but the noise died in my throat as the hull knit back together.

Whoever took the shot didn’t get an opportunity to take another. The craft spat a wide stream of crackling energy and played it across the probable location of the shooter. Four flashes signaled the end of four lives.

The next target to get some love was Bravo Euro’s hangar. One shot reduced the right side of the structure to a series of glowing pools. Riley’s scream of rage drowned out everything else in my head–her ill-gotten pod of nanotech and supplies had been stacked there.

I giggled at her frustration, silently thanking the alien invaders for saving me the trouble of ruining her little plans.

Seconds after half the hangar melted, the Progeny vessel revved up, and tore the air asunder with the noise of its departure. My freshly healed eardrums ruptured, and I rolled around on the ground, howling until the pain went away.

When I stood up, I saw Chunhua and Shawn huddled together about fifty feet away to my right. Their ears were bleeding, but all the other vital signs were within the normal range for seriously freaked out human beings. They’d heal.

“Status report!” Major Kenney shouted in my head, clearly not a victim of the enemy’s surgical strike.

He got what he asked for. I chimed in, along with Shawn and Chu. I stopped listening when Group Alpha reported their losses. I had more pressing matters.

A quick tap inside my skull gave me the names of Bravo Euro’s members who were now part of the metal cooling on the ground. James Frost. Paul Fletcher. Andrew MacGillivray.

Only three of them bought the farm–more for me then.

Who am I to complain when I can legitimately vent my rage?

I snapped the blade of the Man Scythe open, and checked how it felt in my left hand as I walked towards the half-a-hangar. Smiling, I decided I could live with using my old favorite in my off hand. The new right hand had other things it could be doing, and I was not about to let that opportunity pass me by.

Shawn and Chunhua caught up with me as I hopped around the melted corner of the building. We stalked in side-by-side, weapons of choice free in our hands. For just a split second before the surviving members of Bravo Euro started shooting I swear the three of us had theme music... nasty, bass-pounding, phallic, industrial theme music–complete with angry Teutonic men spitting on the audience. Fuck! It was a fantastic split second!

We split up, our moment of Hollywood splendor spoiled by incoming hyper-velocity slugs at close range.

Shawn dodged like Baryshnikov dances. I caught a glimpse of his artistry as I scrambled, and wondered how someone so solid could flow like water.

Chunhua took out Peter Lewis in his position atop the staircase, creating a unique Jackson Pollock-style mural across the flat gray wall. The effect was only slightly altered by the whirlpool shape of twisted metal made by the slug passing through the wall. Truth be told, it was a gorgeous meditation on peace through superior firepower.

Hashim El Baz got the drop on me, but I was too close for him to raise his weapon, so he lashed out with a kick that would have killed a normal human several times over. I couldn’t block the kick, so I took a short trip through the air, spraying blood as I flew. The landing knocked the Man Scythe out of my hand, and more blood out of my lungs.

He closed the distance as I tried to sit up, looking to take my head clean off with another kick. As he cocked his leg for another impressive strike, I learned something about my right eye: it doesn’t need to be pointed at you to see. My peripheral vision is perfectly acute on that side. I saw him coming and had time to react.

I leaned back and reached to the sky with my right arm as his kick came around. His foot never connected with my head, but an impressive spray of blood did. The foot in question, severed by my right arm, continued across the hangar floor. El Baz howled, and dropped, clutching at his leg.

When I looked over at him, all I could think was how sad his leg was already healing. He saw me watching him, and went pale when I smiled.

“I take a very dim view of people fucking us over when we’ve been hospitable, Mr. El Baz. I am not keen on folks trying to kill a friend of mine. Nope. Not at all.”

Talking to him was a calculated risk on my part, designed to do one thing: lure Siobhan Riley out of hiding. It worked. Before I could twitch, she had the barrel of a rail gun against my temple.

“Cocky fucker. You think you’ve won just because the Progeny helped you out?” She ground the metal against my head. “You’re our hostage now. I could kill you where you sit.”

“Bitch, please.” I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re surrounded.”

“No! You’re the God-forsaken golden boy! They won’t move an inch as long as we have you!”

“Hey, Ginger Cunt!” Shawn yelled from somewhere behind me, giving me a case of the giggles. “Let Frank go. I got your pal Rebecca Howard-Spence right here.”

Inside my head I could tell he wasn’t bluffing, because the heads-up display confirmed their locations. I decided to take the chance, and looked in that direction.

Sure enough, Shawn had her in a painful-looking arm lock with his sidearm under her chin. Her face was wet with tears, and I had no idea if it was the hold inspiring the moisture or some internal conflict. Not that it really mattered. I was waiting for something else.

The thing I was waiting for arrived in the form of Hashim El Baz turning into an unhappy splatter, thanks to a tidy shot from Chunhua Yan.