Of Blood and Angels (The Two Moons of Rehnor, Book 3) (10 page)

“I know,” I said.

“I went to Kalika-hahr with the building
inspectors and we marked the corners of all the buildings and we poured the
roads and parking lots.  I didn't go back there for six months while we waited
for permits.  When I finally did, the property looked much like it does now. 
The trees weren't as tall but they were there.  The grass and the flowers were
there too.  The soil was black and fertile.  The lake was there.  There were
birds in the trees and squirrels.  I didn't know how it happened.”  Thad
shrugged.  “So I said to Ron, ‘What'd you do to this place?  Reverse nuke it or
something?’  He told me he was using a special blood meal fertilizer.  I
believed him."

"Very clever," I remarked drily.

“Shit, Katie.  Karupatani is a huge continent,
not a business park.  Do you have any idea why he's doing this?”

“No,” I replied.  “He just says he has
to.”

Thad shook his head.  "Maybe you can
talk Ron into coming over to my dad's place and dumping some stuff on his
tomato plants.  Bigger tomatoes might make the Admiral less crabby."

"That'd be nice," I snorted. 
"Especially since I am the brunt of his crabbiness six months out of the
year."

"Oh no, you're not," Thad
laughed.  "He's all sweetness and light with you, his surrogate daughter. 
I'm the brunt of his crabbiness, especially since my worthless brother lives 9
light years away.  Hey, what’s that?”  Thad pointed at a light blip in our
upper right quadrant.

I adjusted the scans and guessed it to be
a spaceplane.  Curiously though, it appeared to be on an intercept course with
us.  I modified my track, switched vectors and sped up.  The spaceplane
adjusted as well.  We were obviously his target.

“You think it's Loman's boys?” Thad asked.

“Or Akan's,” I replied and veered hard to
starboard, causing the ship to roll a bit.  I heard Jerry swearing from the
passenger bay.

“He always yells like that,” I said,
noticing that all color had drained from Thad's face.  “You get motion sick?”

He nodded.  “That's why I never joined
Spaceforce, among other reasons, like your totally lame uniforms and lack of
good food in the cafeterias."

“Get a barf bag,” I advised.  “It's going
to be a bit wild from here on out.  I'm guessing that Mishnese plane doesn't
have cool neural networking control systems.  We're going to give them a run
for their money and take this baby up to her limits.  Strap in back there,” I
announced into the passenger cabin.  “We're hitting some turbulence.”

Thad used the barf bag.

“Can we just go back to Rozari?” he asked
when he came up for air.

“Too late,” I said.  “We're closer to SB
37.”  I hit the afterburners and we took off at LT +2 on a 342 degree vector. 
Jerry was cussing all over the place and Thad lost his breakfast, lunch and
dinner from the last week.

“How can you do this?” Thad gasped.

“Just watch the course track,” I replied,
noting that the Rehnorians were still on intercept.  I sped up another +2 which
was about the max this plane would go.  Spacebase 37 was less than 4 clicks
away so we should have been able to get there before I burned up the engines. 
I shifted course track 180 degrees and though it caused Thad to heave
everything else, the Rehnorians were above and behind us now.  Then I ran
another 180 degrees and headed out in a whole new vector.

“Two more clicks, Thad,” I said.  “I'm
going to swing under the base and then up and around to the docks.  Once we are
in the bay, we need to get ready to bolt into the airlock as soon as the
pressure light goes out.  We're going to have to run for the lifts and go up
four floors to the Spaceforce docks.  The Discovery will have a shuttle waiting
for us.  Once we are aboard their shuttle, we will be in the clear.  We can
move LT -1 in those shuttles and carry enough to blow a couple of those
spaceplanes away.”

Thad nodded.

“Just watch the course line.”  I pointed
at the grid.  “Keep focused on that.  Don't let your eyes try and follow our
movements.  Hold on tight!”  I yelled to the back.  “Here we go!”

Chapter 6

Caroline

As soon as Katie rang, I readied the ER
and then headed out to the Spacebase.  I waited above the docking bay, pacing
by the windows, fretting and worrying.  In what seemed like just about forever
but was probably less than a few hours, a plane came soaring into the bay at
double the speed of everyone else and nearly slammed into the dock before it
set down.  There was a huge SdK logo on its tail.  I ran for the airlock. 
Jerry and two guys came right through it pushing Ron on a gurney and Jerry
holding an IV bag. 

“Move Caroline, move!” Katie screamed at
me while she and another guy took up behind us.  “Get to the lifts.”  Just then,
I saw another ship approaching the docking bay going nearly as fast as she did
and it wasn’t an SdK plane or anything that I recognized.

“Move, move, move!”  Katie yelled, pushing
us all into the lifts. 

We started heading up the four floors but
that damn lift kept stopping on every one of them.  While some old purple lady
with red hair wobbled aboard on the third floor, I glanced over at the gurney,
at poor old Dr. Ron all covered in red mud.  Jerry had a drip going through his
abdomen, which was one of the last resort places for doing a drip in my mind. 
The door finally opened on the fourth floor and Katie held up her hand and
stuck her head out.

“Okay, go!” she said.  The purple lady
must have thought Katie was talking to her because she took her walker and
wobbled out in front of all of us.  “Come on, come on,” Katie urged, but Granny
must not have understood her because she took her sweet old time.  One of those
guys that came off of Katie’s plane picked up Granny and carried her out of our
way.  Her little old legs hung in the air, all three of them waving about like
she was riding some kind of bicycle with three pedals. 

In the meantime, we all ran out of there,
followed by Katie and another guy who had a laser in his hand.  Katie had a
Glock and a laser, one gun in each hand, on account of she could shoot both at
the same time, which is a skill that won her a ribbon on more than one occasion
a few years back. 

It was smooth sailing as far as I could
tell but I didn’t know who we were running from anyway.  I found out pretty
quick though because right around the next corner, just before we got to the
Spaceforce shuttle docks, there was a whole bunch of those guys.  These would
be the same guys in the same uniforms swinging the same light swords that
kidnapped Katie last time. 

I guess I must have just lost it right
then because it all started coming back to me now, watching my beau, Elton be
sliced in half right there in front of the Golden Arches. 

Jerry slapped my face and told me to shut
my mouth and duck behind a corner with him and the gurney.  The two security
guys had their weapons out and Katie and the other guy, who Jerry later told me
was Thad, were asking the enemy guys who they were.  It seemed pretty obvious
to me since it was Rehnorians who got her last time and they were wearing these
uniforms.

“What do they want?” I whispered to Jerry.

“They want Ron,” he guessed, even though
only Thad seemed to be able to speak their language. 

Jerry nodded in the direction of the
hallway and then he and I and the gurney slipped away along the security
passage and headed toward the shuttle airlock.  I heard the hiss of those damn
light swords from down the hall and I went shaky and weak and could barely hold
the IV bottle in my own hands. 

There were some laser blasts and I ducked
because one hit the wall right above me.  I heard some gun shots, probably from
Katie's Glock, and I started to pray to the Good Lord that if He got me out of
this mess, I would do everything in my power to transfer off of this damn ship
and work in a VA hospital like I had always planned. 

We were pushing that gurney right into a
stairwell and we weren’t going any further because there were four steps going
up and if we even tried to do it, Dr. Ron would go tumbling down in the
opposite direction.

“Ron,” Jerry slapped his face, “Ron, I
need you to wake up.  Come on, buddy.  You can do this.”  Jerry was slapping
him back and forth and finally he got a groan out of Ron and then he started
mumbling something but it wasn’t in any language that I ever knew.

“Come on buddy, you need to stand up
here.”  Jerry was pulling Ron’s arm and hauling him up as best as he could,
swinging Ron’s legs off the gurney.  I was still holding the IV bottle and
between the two of us, we were thinking Ron could put an arm around each of our
shoulders and we could half drag, half carry him up the four steps to the next
passage.

“Come on, Honey Pie,” I said, hauling him
up. 

Somehow, we did it and we made it to the
passage.  Our shuttle driver was standing there smoking a cigarette as if there
weren’t a fire fight going on just one deck below.  He saw us though and took
over for me and we got Ron aboard the shuttle, safe and sound. 

We took off and left everyone else.  Jerry
called Captain Richard and told him about the Rehnorians attacking and as we
docked back on the Discovery, which I was ever so glad to return to, two more
of our shuttles headed out.  We got a new gurney for Ron but he was
half-conscious by now and instead, stumbled with me and Jerry toward sickbay. 
Ron didn’t seem to know where he was or why the heck he was covered in mud but
he was sure cussing up a storm because I heard a few English four-letters there
among a whole bunch of foreign ones.

We got Ron to sickbay and set him down and
I told him, “Honey Pie, you need to be laying down.”  I saw by now that he was
seriously dehydrated and looked like he lost about thirty pounds.  On top of
all that, he had these strange cuts all over himself, not to mention the mud. 
His eyes were mostly grey and not glowing with their own kind of light which
was how they always were whenever I had seen him before.  The SdK monitor was
telling us that he was low on potassium and magnesium and iron and just about
everything else because he was down about a liter or more of blood.

“Lay down!” I ordered him because anyone
missing a full liter of blood ought to be knocking on death's door not trying
to get up.  He pushed me away though and stumbled back out the door, so Jerry
ran after him, yelling at him to at least drink something.  Ron was heading
back to the shuttle bay.  “Damn!” I cried because I was so foolish that I
followed him too and jumped through the airlock before it closed.  I had just
promised myself to stay on board the ship where it was safe and here I was
flying back to that Spacebase where all hell was breaking loose. 

Jerry brought a couple bottles of Hydroade
and Ron drank them which was probably the only reason he was still standing at
that point.  It seemed to revive him a bit because by the time we docked again,
he was running instead of stumbling. 

A whole team of our security people were
jumping off the shuttle and I heard from someone's cell that the fight had
moved down two floors and into the atrium.  On top of that, the base was now on
auxiliary power, so all the lifts were dead.  There were casualties and they
were calling for the medics, which was good because we were already there. 

Immediately, outside the airlock, Katie's
two security guys were dead as well as one of those Rehnorians.  Jerry and I
stopped to check them, but only for a moment because Ron had run off. 

We chased after him.  He headed back to
the stairwell, which a short time ago he could hardly climb up.  We were all
stopped there because the whole damn thing was blown away.  Two stories were
completely gone with nothing left but a bunch of twisted wire and gaping holes.

“How the hell are we going to get down two
floors?” Jerry muttered.

Jerry went with our security team back to
the shuttle for ropes and I can tell you, there was no way I was going to climb
down a rope through what used to be a stairwell.

“Now what?” I mumbled to Dr. Ron who
looked like he was about to jump.

“Close your eyes,” he said.  Actually, he
just about ordered me.  So I did, thinking this was a good sign because he was
speaking English again.  At any rate, I heard this strange whooshing noise and
what sounded like big old wings flapping and the next thing I knew there were
claws gripping my arms and I was dropping through the air and screaming my head
off.  I landed on my two feet right at the bottom of the stairwell.  Dr. Ron
was crouching next to me but he had gone deathly pale and was breathing hard.

“You okay?” I said and he nodded a bit and
started to straighten up, but it was obvious whatever happened had just about
knocked him flat again. 

There was some more shots fired and I
smelled the carbon of those light swords and that all seemed to revive Dr. Ron
a little bit because he was up and dragging his ass down the hall toward the
fight. 

I followed him and discovered one of our
guys lying on the floor with a hole in his belly and next to him, a bunch of
civilians in various stages of distress.  Our guy was coughing up blood but
alive enough to tell us there were wounded in the next corridor too.  I had
sealant in my kit and did my best with his wound, leaving a marker on him so
that he could be evacuated as quickly as the next team could get here. 

I kept my head low as I ran through the
corridors.  Gun shots and laser bursts were flying every which way over my
head.  Dr. Ron was racing ahead of me, not bothering to duck at all and Lord
Almighty, he too had one of those fricking, carbon smelling light swords in his
own hand.  He got to the atrium, way ahead of me, and the door was blocked by a
couple of those nasty Rehnorians.  I don't know if they were planning to let
him in or not but they never got a chance because by the time they were raising
their own weapons, Dr. Ron had already taken off their heads.  I was screaming
my heart out again because there ain't nothing worse than seeing a couple of
heads without bodies rolling on the floor in your direction.  I was standing
there clutching the wall until the rest of our security team came and Jerry
with them.

“What the fuck is that?” Jerry said,
pointing down at those two heads which were way too close to my feet.

“Heads!” I cried. 

He must have figured out right quick that
the only reason I was standing there was because I couldn’t move, so he yanked
me away and I got my momentum back and started running with him again.  We
entered the atrium where a whole bunch of our people were crouched with their
weapons taking pot shots at people and getting shot back. 

Poor old mud-covered Dr. Ron was walking
up through the middle of this as if he was wearing some kind of laser proof
armor.  He was dragging his light sword at his side and he was breathing hard
but he had his sights set on this guy who was wearing the fanciest damn uniform
I ever saw.  The guy was kind of a skinny runt with brown hair going grey but
even so, it was plenty obvious that he was in charge because he had his arm
around Katie's throat and a gun poked in her ribs.  Other guys were surrounding
them with their own light swords raised like they were just waiting for poor,
sick Dr. Ron to take them on.

Dr. Ron started yelling something and then
everyone must have figured this was the time to stop shooting and start paying
attention.  The whole room went silent except for the nasty guy yelling
something back at Dr. Ron.  The two of them were going at it in the verbal
sense while Ron kept moving forward but he wasn’t dragging his sword any more. 
He was swinging it and anyone that tried to stop him got themself cut into
pieces or vaporized.  Ron got about half way across the room when Katie started
screaming something too, trying her best to get loose of the bad guy without
getting herself shot or sliced.  Ron was swaying on his feet and looked to be
on the verge of toppling right over but before he did, he raised that damn
sword and threw it in the air like a javelin.  It lit up the room as it flew
right over our heads and landed at Katie's feet.