Fatal Blade (Decker's War#3) (30 page)

“Oh but I’m very interested in you.  My commanding officer has this notion that you might be Fleet, though I told him a proper spy wouldn’t be advertising his affiliation by carrying a fine pathfinder blade and a re-chambered Shrehari gun.”

“So?  Maybe I used to be in the Service.  What do you care?  I was just minding my own business in Kaholo when your fucking thugs shot me.”

She slapped him again, hard.

“Name, rank and serial number.”

“Bite me,” he muttered.

Slap.

“I’ll find out eventually.  We’ve sent your biometric data to Celeste where the National Guard will plug it into the various connections it has.  If you’ve served in the Fleet, we’ll find out.  If you’re still serving, we’ll know.”

Good luck with that
, Decker thought. 
They turned me into the man who doesn’t exist before we left on this mission.

He let his head drop against his chest and closed his eyes.

“Hey,” she grabbed him by the chin, “it’s not polite to fall asleep when you’re talking to a lady.”

“Sure, but you’re no lady.”

Slap.

“Maybe I should geld you after all.”  Kozlev walked over to the table where she’d carefully piled his weapons and clothes.  “Your blade seems to be sharp enough for the task.”

“Or,” she continued after pulling the dagger from its sheath, “will the physical shock suffice to trigger your conditioning’s suicide mechanism?”

“Try it and see,” he replied with a tired grin.  “I’m not getting out of here alive anyway, so now would be a good a time to go.”

She locked eyes with him, looking for anything that might confirm the truth of his words.  Whatever she saw must have been enough because she placed the dagger back on the table and dropped into the chair that Kari Takan had occupied the previous day.  For what seemed like an eternity, Kozlev studied him.

“Somehow, you managed to make it through the night without looking like a wreck,” she finally said.  “I guess a man your size can take a lot of punishment before he starts crumbling.  Mind you, everyone has their limits.  I intend to find yours.  If I can’t practice my art on you in conventional ways, I’ll have to find my entertainment through other means, but rest assured that I will savor every minute of it.”

She got up and opened the door.

“I expect some fresh business later today, folks we know are associated with Larn Takan, so you’ll be taken to a cell for another musical interlude.  We’ll talk again soon.”

Kozlev gave him a little wave before leaving the interrogation room.  He heard the click of her heels fade in the distance, then Otto and his buddy entered and carefully released the seat restraints one by one before shackling his arms and legs together.  Then, they escorted him down the corridor to a small, two-meter square cell with nothing but blank walls.

“I hope you enjoy your accommodations, asshole.”  Otto shoved him through the door.  “Try to keep things clean this time.”

He barely had time to lie down on the cold floor and prepare himself for another meditative trance before the discordant music and flashing lights started up again.

***

“Rise and shine, asshole.  Her ladyship wants you back in the big room.  I guess you two have a hot date tonight.”

When Decker didn’t move, Otto turned towards his buddy Rennie, who was waiting in the corridor.

“He’s passed out.”

“Shit.”

The two guards entered the small cell and stared at him.  Otto kicked Zack’s leg, and when that got no reaction, he kicked him harder in the kidneys.

“Well, at least he’s breathing, so there’s that.”  Rennie knelt beside Decker’s head and pulled up an eyelid with his thumb.  “Totally out of it.”

“Shrehari opera will do that to you I guess.  But it doesn’t excuse us from doing what Kozlev wants.  She comes down, and he isn’t sitting in his chair, we’ll be lucky if we don’t get to try it ourselves.”

“Fucker’s so big it’ll be a bitch to carry him.”  Otto leaned down to grab Decker by the shoulders and lift.  “Shit.  It’ll need both of us.”

Rennie grabbed Zack by the feet, and they tried again, but his body sagged in the middle like a sack of mud and they let go.

“We’re both going to have to lift him at this end and drag,” Otto said, grimacing.

“Ain’t going to work unless we take off the wrist restraints, and each grab an arm.  I figure you and I are going to have to get in cozy with his armpits.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”  Otto’s homely face twisted into a grimace of disgust.

“He’ll still be shackled at the ankles.  Where do you expect him to go with those?  It’s only for thirty seconds or so anyway, and he’s not about to come out of his opera-induced coma.”  Rennie chuckled.  “Opera-induced coma, I got to remember that one.”

“Okay.”

Otto bent over to remove the wrist cuffs and hooked them to his belt.  Then, he and Rennie heaved Decker up.

It was the moment Zack had been waiting for.

THIRTY-ONE

The moment Decker’s feet were on solid ground, his limp body became a rock-hard mass of angry muscle.  Before the guards could react to their prisoner’s sudden awakening, he’d placed his right hand, fingers outstretched on the side of Otto’s head and his left hand on Rennie’s, and rammed both together in a bone-crunching collision.

The militia troopers dropped to the floor without uttering a sound.

Zack crouched beside Otto and put the man’s thumb on his leg shackles’ biometric reader.  They clicked open and fell away.  He briefly checked the guards.  They were alive, barely and likely suffering from a severe concussion.

He poked his head out of the cell door, relieved to find the corridor empty.  Any moment now, the lazy bastards manning the surveillance cameras in the operations center were going to realize something wasn’t right in the basement; he had minutes, perhaps only seconds before the alarm went off.  The moment that happened, he’d be forced to create utter havoc so he’d have a chance of escape.

After closing up his former cell, now holding the two unconscious men, he quickly found the interrogation room and his personal effects.  Running naked through militia headquarters might make enough of the buggers hesitate just long enough, but he didn’t relish the vulnerable feeling that came from letting it all hang out.

Decker pulled on his pants and tunic, stepped into his boots and tucked the dagger into his waistband.  He checked his blaster’s magazine and power pack, then began searching for Kari Takan’s cell.

The first one he opened held a man whose vacant look spoke of a mind probe that gone on for too long.  His soul would likely never find its way back into his body and Decker couldn’t afford to encumber himself with a zombie, even for the best of reasons.  The next three cells were empty, but the fourth held a frightened, cringing young woman whose wide eyes spoke of a mind that still functioned.

They’d put Takan into prison coveralls and shaved her hair in preparation for a probe.  But whether it was because she’d started to talk on her own or Kozlev simply hadn’t gotten around to her yet, the girl’s scalp was devoid of the small lesions Decker remembered seeing in a mirror a few years earlier, after his own brush with mind rape.

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” he said, holding out his hand to help her up, “but I’m a friend of your parents, and I was sent to get you away from the militia.”

When she didn’t move, he stepped into the cell, bent down and picked her up.

“Apologies for the familiarity, but we don’t have long before someone comes down to check on us.  This is our one chance of escape.”

The sound of booted feet hurrying down the stairs told him time was up.  With Kari slung over his left shoulder and the blaster held in his right fist, he waited, partially hidden inside the cell.

A green-uniformed shaped appeared at the far end of the corridor and Decker’s weapon coughed twice, the first shot drilling a smoking hole in the man’s face where his nose had been and the second through the left eye.  He crumbled to the ground, dead.

Zack sprinted towards the stairs, the girl feeling light as a feather to his adrenaline fueled senses, and took the steps two at a time.

An alarm siren began blaring and behind him, a steel door cut the basement off from the rest of the building.  A few seconds slower and they’d have been trapped, likely gassed and then he’d have been a dead man walking.  Sociopaths like Kozlev were unforgiving when someone dared to thwart their will.

He burst onto the ground floor in the midst of scurrying militia troopers driven to action by the siren, most of them not very effectively if the aura of chaos was any indication.  They looked like they hadn’t practiced the escaped prisoner drill very often, if at all, and had no muscle memory to take over when the shit hit the fan.

Though it felt like shooting hatchlings in a nest, he began firing as he ran towards the door leading to the outside.  Green uniforms collapsed to a cacophony of alarmed shouts and agonized screams; the odor of burnt flesh, blood, and voided bowels quickly filled the air, turning a quiet office building into an abattoir.

Decker stopped counting after the first four, shooting through open office doors to add to the pandemonium.  His eyes found Steiger, prone under a desk and he hesitated.

Because she hadn’t given Kozlev his real identity, he held his fire, to her evident relief.  Then, she mouthed the word ‘skimmer’ and pointed to a door on the other side the squad room.  He nodded once, shot her office mates twice, then ripped the door open and stepped out into the early evening twilight.

There, parked for the night, was an armed militia combat car.  Its side hatch opened smoothly at his touch, and he dropped Kari in the back before jumping into the operator’s seat.

Militia troopers began streaming out of the building he’d just left and from the ones forming the other three sides of the hollow square.  He shot a few who’d made the mistake of approaching without covering fire before he closed the hatch.

The skimmer’s reactor came online instantly at his command, and he sent the fans spinning when he goosed their motors, creating enough lift to get the heavy vehicle off the ground.

Small arms fire began splashing against the lightly armored hull, and he caught a glimpse of someone setting up a heavy machine gun at the far edge of the square.

Skimmers weren’t flyers.  Though equipped with anti-gravity modules, they relied on fans to create the air cushion upon which they rode.  However, they could jump over low obstacles if the driver was willing to redline the motors.  Since he didn’t much care about the vehicle’s lifespan beyond the next few minutes, Decker did just that.

He aimed them at a two-story office block directly ahead and pushed the revolutions per second to the limit.  Screeching and shaking as if it were about to fall apart the combat car left its comfortable air cushion and rose on a shallow arc towards the building’s roof.

Then, he was over the peak and down the other side, leaving a gaggle of militia troopers firing at an empty, rapidly darkening sky.

Decker turned hard towards the nearby river.  Their only hope was to get upstream well ahead of any pursuit and ditch the vehicle by the rapids east of Tianjin before vanishing into the thick forest.

At first, the skimmer was too low over the water and left a giant rooster tail in its wake, then Decker adjusted their altitude and set the autopilot to follow every meander, treating it like a dry highway.  The bridges upstream of Iskellian should have enough clearance to let the low-slung vehicle pass.

He activated the remote weapons station and slewed it aft, looking for any indication of pursuit on its targeting sensor.

He found it.

They hadn’t made it quite far enough to lose the city lights in the distance when six bogeys appeared on the horizon.  Two settled over the waters of the Yangtze River while the remainder split up along both banks.

Given that the pursuing skimmers were identical to the one Zack had stolen but had more experienced drivers at the controls, it was just a matter of time before the militia ran them down and it turned into a firefight.

At six to one odds, Decker would quickly discover whether or not the Takan girl knew how to swim.

He examined the controls more closely, looking for something, anything that could give him an edge when the time came.  His ammunition locker was full, but then so were the ones in the six pursuers, who likely also had troopers with a lot of trigger time on the guns.

Zack’s eyes lingered over the commo unit for a few moments, then he shrugged.

“Won’t know if it works until I’ve tried, right?”

He glanced over his shoulder at Kari and grinned, then quickly tuned the radio to the frequency Catlow had told him the rebels monitored day and night.  Decker hoped that someone would think of handing Talyn a microphone instead of ignoring a guy whose voice no one recognized and who didn’t have the proper codes.  If he made it sound outlandish enough, the duty tech in the ruined fortress might twig.

“To anyone on the freedom road, this is Rookie Trooper wanting a chin wag with Phoenix.  I’m headed upriver in a stolen militia car and have six more of them on my tail looking to score.  I’ve got a lovely young lady with me who wants to see her momma and poppa.  Over.”

Then, he set the message to repeat in an endless loop and waited, watching small dots grow imperceptibly larger on his screen while they ate up the kilometers separating them from Tianjin and the highlands.

***

“Sir,” the radio operator held up his hand to catch the duty officer’s attention, “I’m getting a strange message on the emergency channel.”

“Let me listen.”

“To anyone on the freedom road,” the loudspeaker blared, “this is Rookie Trooper wanting a chin wag with Phoenix.  I’m headed upriver in a stolen militia car and have six more of them on my tail looking to score.  I’ve got a lovely young lady with me who wants to see her momma and poppa.  Over.”

“Don’t answer.”

The duty officer went off in search of Verrill.  Standing orders meant the boss had to be notified of anything unusual, and this qualified in spades.

He found Verrill sitting with Corde and Talyn in the all-sources intelligence center next door.

“Sir, there’s a looped transmission on the emergency channel from some joker calling himself Rookie Trooper, wanting to speak with a Phoenix.  Says he’s running from the militia in a stolen skimmer and has a girl with him.”

Talyn sprang to her feet the moment she heard Decker’s nickname, excitement wiping away the weariness she’d felt after twelve hours of digging through the rebel database.

“It’s Zack.  He’s escaped with the Takan daughter.  I need to speak with him.”

“Rookie Trooper?”  Verrill looked openly skeptical.

“A joke nickname he gave himself with the idea that no one in his right mind would want that sort of tag.”

“And Phoenix is obviously you, correct?”  He asked as they headed for the command post.

“Yup.”

Without asking for permission, she joined the operator and demanded that he hand over a microphone.

“Rookie Trooper, this is Phoenix.  What’s your status?”

“I’m ten klicks upriver from Iskellian in a militia combat car, headed for Tianjin and using the water for my highway.  They’ve put six of them on my butt and might have called up more from outlying garrisons, so it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll eventually get me.  If there’s anything anyone can do to give us a hand, it’ll improve our chances of survival.  I’ve got the one I went for with me, and she’s okay.  They haven’t sucked her soul out yet, but if they recapture us, it’ll be the first thing that happens after a charming psychopath called Rika Kozlev slices through my carotid artery, probably after cutting my balls off.”

Talyn started at the name, then turned to Verrill.

“If you have anyone close to Zack’s route who’s capable of shooting down militia skimmers, now’s the time to activate them.  My partner doesn’t know of any better way than the river to get to Tianjin and the trailhead that leads back here.  He’ll skip the odd meander but he can’t afford to get disoriented, and that’s easy to do at night, in unfamiliar territory when you’re going full speed, even for a pathfinder.”

When Verrill didn’t answer, Talyn let herself get livid with rage.

“Zack just saved all of your butts by getting Kari out of militia hands before they mind probed her.  You owe him enough to take the risk of using assets you’ve been keeping in reserve.”

Something in her expression must have broken through the rebel leader’s hesitation.  If it was fear at the Fury who had replaced the calm, emotionless woman previously standing before him, so much the better.

He nodded and then spoke to the duty officer.

“Activate Case Green Three.”  He turned back to Hera when a thought struck him.  “My people will need something to differentiate your man’s skimmer from the others.  You know how it is, at night, going full speed…”

“Touché,” Talyn smiled, her earlier anger gone as swiftly as it had appeared.  She took the microphone again.  “Rookie Trooper, you need to fly the flag.  Blue on blue sucks when it happens.”

There was a lengthy pause, then, “I’ll be the one who’s shipshape by the figurehead.”

“What does that mean?”  Verrill asked.

“Tell your folks that the skimmer with a red light to port, a green to starboard and a white on top when seen head-on is the one they
don’t
want to shoot down.”

He stared blankly at her.

“If you’re looking head-on at Zack’s machine, you should see a triangle with a red light on your right, a green on your left and white on top.”

“Wouldn’t the militia cars show the same thing?”

“And make themselves easier targets for Zack’s guns?”

The rebel leader nodded.  “Makes sense.”

He glanced at the duty officer.  “You got that, Terry?”

“Sure.”  The man smiled.  “I used to be in the Navy.”

“Anything else?” Zack’s voice asked. “Because I need to focus on flying this thing now.”

Verrill took the mic from Talyn.