Dominant Predator (20 page)

The radio in my pocket crackled as Armise shifted position. Since taking out the last Committee member we had decided to keep it switched on and in our possession at all times.

I heard a sound off in the distance and cocked my head to get a better read on what it was. Within seconds I knew what was coming at us, though, and I yelled for Armise to take cover.

The telltale thump of a Thunder heli echoed off the steep mountains. The wind whipped wildly around us, driving the rain into my face with icy determination. I skidded to a stop and searched the area, sighting the heli dropping rapidly to the ground in a clearing fifty metres from where Armise, Manny and I were hunkered down behind the jagged boulders of the mountain.

Even though the side of the Thunder was emblazoned with the green and yellow sun insignia of the Revolution, I pulled my rifle across my chest then shouldered the weapon, training it on the door in preparation for whoever emerged. Armise did the same, dropping back a step and sliding away from me to cover a different angle.

The rotors of the heli slowed, then stopped and the door opened. I recognised the person immediately despite the winter parka, the tilt of his head as he examined me giving him away.

But I didn’t drop my rifle from the firing position even as I stood. “What do you want, Simion?”

“I come all this way to see you and this is how you say hello? Come on, old friend. How about a hug?”

That was when I noticed he was walking with a limp.

I stepped from out behind the boulder. “What happened?”

“Caught in the aftermath of a reverb in the DCR.” He pulled up his pant-leg revealing a semi-transparent polymaterial shell around a titanalloy synth. “The doc’s got this new kind of surge. Works pretty effectively to mask the phantom pains, but leaves me relatively filterless.”

I frowned at his attempt to make a joke. “You’re out of commission.”

He shrugged. “Reserve, technically. But yeah, I don’t think I’m coming back from this. So that’s why you’re graced with my presence today.”

“How did you even find us?”

Manny and Armise emerged from behind their boulder and Simion smiled at Manny.

“It was a generous offer,” Manny said with a shrug.

Armise whipped his rifle around to his back and stalked off.

“He’ll be back, right?” Simion probed.

I watched Armise retreat for a moment then turned back to Simion, my rifle still shouldered. I didn’t care if Manny had been the one to lead us here or that I’d known Simion more years than I hadn’t. I couldn’t trust anyone right now except Armise.

“Yeah. Now, why are you here?”

“You going to put the gun down? I am disabled.”

“Right. You’re pretty far away from home and we’re supposed to be untrackable. Call it paranoia or instincts, but I’m not putting it down until I know what’s going on.”

“The President needs you back in the States,” he replied succinctly.

“What the hell is he still doing in the States?”

“The DCR is too unstable. Neveed won’t let him go in. He moved to his house on the West Coast for a while, but word got out quickly where he was and the Opposition moved on us. He’s back in the bunker now.”

“The bunker?”

“The analysts were given intel by the PsychHAgs that is credible enough to make us think an assassination attempt is imminent. I know we can protect him, but Neveed wants more than just reassurances. He wants someone there the President trusts.”

“He wants me to come back in.”

“Both of you.” He gestured to Armise, who was walking back towards the three of us. “Neveed wants to regroup. Talk strategy. We’ve been notified of three Committee member deaths, but that was months ago.”

“It’s all we’ve been able to locate and eliminate,” Armise confirmed.

“This takes precedence then. We’ve got time to get to the others.”

I crooked an eyebrow in Armise’s direction and he rolled his eyes, then punched Manny in the arm. “You owe me, fucker.”

Manny laughed at that. “Will work for cash,” he said with a smirk.

We left Manny at the meeting spot and climbed into the massive heli. It took off once all of us were situated for the hours-long flight back to the Continental States.

The Thunder cut swiftly through the clouds and was over the ocean before I knew it. I stared out the window and took in the vastness of the choppy waters as sight of the UU receded. Despite the length of the flight I knew I wouldn’t sleep.

I sat back on the creaking, uncomfortable seat of the heli, the beat of the rotors thrumming through my body.

Since neither Armise nor I had comm chips, we were fitted with helmets with internal mics so we could speak to each other over the insistent beat of the Thunder. The heli pilot was someone I didn’t know and Simion sat up front with him, leaving Armise and I in the back alone.

I shifted in the seat, trying to find a spot that didn’t press against the scar on my back. Even though it had been months since getting the tattoo, it was as if I could still feel it. I’d never been as aware of that wound as I was since getting that mark in Amsterdam.

Armise hadn’t asked me about the meaning of the tattoo or why I’d chosen the images that I had. At the time I had gone by instinct, but even I wasn’t emotionally bereft enough not to realise the deeper meaning that the mark held for me.

A knife, a bullet, a rope.

All items that could kill. The tools of my survival. Of my success.

But more than that, they were permanent reminders of the events that bound me to Armise in ways I was just starting to admit to myself.

I wasn’t ready to speak any of this aloud to Armise. Hell, maybe I never would be. But I knew that what I felt for Armise was unlike what I felt for anyone else in my life.

“Dragged into your darkness again, Merq?” Armise’s voice came over the helmet speakers, his accent thick and his tongue twisting over the Mongol dialect he used so that only he and I could understand what was being said.

We’d spoken of darkness before, but my mind had been in a very different place then, even if it was only months ago. His words in the bunker came back to me.
People need love, Merq. Why else fight?

I shook my head, grinned. “No. Pretty far from it, actually.”

Armise furrowed his brow and grumbled into the mic, “I will never fully understand you.”

I chuckled at the defiant set of his shoulders, and the way he crossed his arms and turned his body away from me, staring out the window. For once, maybe there was a piece within myself that I knew existed, but that Armise couldn’t yet see.

Through the clarity of what I could only define as being settled for the first time in my life, the sensation that something was off persisted in me.

I was quite sure we were willingly walking back into hell—the death threat on the President, the remaining Committee members, our search for Ahriman, the rallying of Opposition forces…

But at least I would have Armise at my side through it all.

I was that bullet. Armise was that knife.

And we were unstoppable as long as we were bound to each other.

Also available from Total-E-Bound Publishing:

The Borders War: One Breath, One Bullet

S.A. McAuley

Excerpt

Chapter One

Year 2546

The Dark Continental Republic

I hated the heat of the desert.

The mask on my face was confining, filling with the condensation of each breath I dragged into my lungs and forced back out in shallow gasps. The goggles over my eyes should have protected me from the yellow and grey cloud of Chemsense the Dark Continental Republic Army had unleashed on our battalion, but I could feel my eyes watering, the liquid gathering in pools that threatened to make my skin too damp to maintain the protective seal.

I was on my knees and I couldn’t remember when I’d stopped walking. I wasn’t far enough away yet. The shouts of the DCR soldiers—and the sonicpops of their weapons as they picked off States soldiers—were muffled but still too close. My body tilted, and I planted my hands into the sand without thought. I collapsed into the dune when my right shoulder ground together, bone against bone, tendons ripping. I thought those DCR goons had only managed to dislocate it, but this pain was worse than that—a grinding impact of racking, vision-blackening pain that didn’t ebb even when I flopped onto my back and let my arm lie unmoving in the scorching sand.

My mantra, pounded into me through years of training, repeated in my head as I consciously stilled my body.

One breath.

Inhale.

Hesitation is my enemy.

Solitude my ally.

Death the only real victory.

Exhale.

A ferocious hot wind whipped around and over me, driving sand into my open wounds, like a million simultaneous pricks of a pin. If the wind kept up like this it was going to drive away the lingering cloud of Chemsense. And I needed the thick, toxic cover if I was going to make it over the dune and out of sight of the DCR forces.

If I was going to survive, I had to keep moving.

My body was drenched in sweat—mine and the ripe remnants of the soldiers I’d fought hand to hand. My ribs on the right side were crushed and with each breath I wondered if this would be the inhalation that sent a spear of bone into the soft, vulnerable flesh of my lung, collapsing it and killing me before backup could arrive.

I ripped the transport chip out of the hidden pocket where it was sewed into my tattered uniform. My thumb hovered over the button as my mind warred with the instinct just to press it. But I couldn’t simply transport out of this clusterfuck. The transition would be too much of a shock to my mangled body.

If I was going to succeed, I had to keep moving.

The thought was all that propelled me. There was no desire to survive left in me. No want of more from life. It was my orders, my mission, that forced me to sit up, shift to my knees and stumble to my feet.

My right arm hung loosely at my side. My firing arm. Without it I could never be a sniper again. And that should have been the least of my concerns, but I couldn’t silence the part of me that contended that death would be preferential over never shooting my rifle again.

I staggered, then caught myself before falling again. The pain of my disconnected shoulder was almost too much to bear—a jolt of red, angry agony that sliced across my vision with each step forward. Silver droplets swam in my peripheral eyesight, a sign that my already throbbing head was on the verge of erupting.

I trudged through the unending sand of the DCR desert because I had no other choice. To stop was to fail. And I didn’t fail. The sand felt thicker than the detritus of an American Federation riverbed. My feet sank deeper than into the suck of a United Union bog. I moved slower than the day I’d taken my first tentative steps off the hospital bed in the States when I was five years old and my legs had nearly been taken by the sonic explosion that had destroyed the only home I would ever know.

And I knew this desert was worse than all of those places because I was dying.

I was closer to death than I’d been in the People’s Republic of Singapore the night Armise took a blade to my throat.

Armise
.

The name rushed through me like endorphins, heating my already boiling blood. I barely had enough brain cells left active and firing to stand, let alone move, but my hate for Armise fed me like a vial of surge emptied into my bloodstream.

That I’d fucked him more times in the last year than I wanted to count didn’t matter.

That there had been a part of me anticipating he would be on the ground in the DCR when I arrived was like a psychotic practical joke.

He’d had the infochip I was seeking the entire time.

It had been inches from my fingers when I drove into him last night. But he had waited until my soldiers and me were trapped in a standoff with DCR forces—sonicrifle to sonicrifle—to let me in on that vital piece of intel.

I wouldn’t let him so easily get under my skin again.

I might not have eliminated him, but I’d obtained the infochip I’d been sent to extract. And I’d taken Armise’s finger in the process. I choked on the laughter that bubbled up in my throat. Too bad the missing digit wasn’t on his firing hand.

If nothing else, I would survive to kill him.

Whatever this was between Armise and me ended here. Now.

But even in my haze I was aware of how irresolute that promise sounded.

I kept moving.

Until I wasn’t anymore.

Blackness overtook me in an uncontrollable instant.

* * * *

There were snippets of fading consciousness. Voices, all male except one—floating, flying—how was that possible?—hands, caresses—water, fresh not treated—fingers poking, exploring, and I was unable to protest or question their invasion. My throat was on fire, my tongue thick, desert dry and swollen. Then the distinctive beep of a hand held medical sensor. More voices, never speaking directly to me. Then pain. Singeing, harrowing, mind-imploding torment. I tried to scream, but couldn’t make a sound. My chest burned from the effort. My body arched off the table—bed?—and then someone was there, at my side, plunging a needle into the curve of my arm. The medicine—surge or something else?—was cool water dousing the fevered burn. Inch by soothing inch, the elixir travelled through me.

My vision swam as the medicine slammed into my consciousness and tried to drag me under. I fought to keep my eyes open, to see where I was and with whom. I no longer wore my goggles or my respirator. The air I dragged in between my parched lips was clean, free of the sickly sweet tinge of Chemsense or the choking thickness of urban pollution. I didn’t know if I was a prisoner or among allies, but I had to assume I was still in the DCR.