Assassination Protocol: An Intergalactic Space Opera Adventure (Cerberus Book 1) Read online

  ASSASSINATION PROTOCOL

  ©2020 ANDY PELOQUIN

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  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by Luciano Flietas.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2020

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

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  Chapter One

  One shot, one kill.

  The words echoed in Nolan Garrett’s mind, a mantra hammered into him by his old Imperial Assault Forces drill sergeant.

  One shot, one kill.

  An absolute must when the enemy on the barrel end of his rifle was a Terran League mech pilot shielded behind four inches of plasma-proof permaglass. An errant shot meant the Jackboots had a chance to fire back—and their explosive shells rarely missed.

  But staring down his scope at the back of German French’s bald, wrinkled head was nothing like sighting on the tiny viewing window set into the front of a thirty-foot tall mech. For one thing, the entire wall of his one hundred and ninety-second-floor penthouse suite was glass. And not permaglass, but the shitty crystalline Old Terran stuff that the wealthiest of Exodus VI bought for its “antique” value.

  From where Nolan crouched in the pouring rain on a rooftop two hundred and eleven stories up, his target was a mere eight hundred meters away, just inside long range. Any of the rifles he’d carried during his days as a sniper in the Imperial Assault Force would have done the job. It almost felt wrong using the Balefire Mark 2.1 for this.

  Almost.

  When the Protection Bureau wants to send a message, it damned well makes it a clear one. The Protection Bureau could have spiked his drink with something to trigger his epilepsy or simply made the man disappear. It wouldn’t be the first time. But Agent Styver had made it clear: German French’s death needed to be messy. Taking out the Rücksichtslos’ number one guy would make one hell of a definitive statement.

  Nolan adjusted his grip, shifted his position slightly to ease the tension on his spine. Remaining motionless had always been his least favorite part of the job. He’d been damned good at it—you had to be to get drafted into the Silverguard—but the standing or lying still always gave his mind too much time to work. To remember things he’d much rather forget.

  “Not to hurry you or anything,” a voice chirped in his ear, “but the storm’s not getting any better.”

  Nolan snorted. “Careful, Taia. Impatience is a human thing.” He didn’t look up from the scope; he didn’t need to. The HUD in his helmet displayed an image of the storm swirling overhead. The roiling clouds had turned that dark, ugly purple—a strange mix of phosphorus, ion, and ozone in the upper stratosphere of Exodus VI—that signaled things were about to get a lot worse.

  “Just do one last scan to make sure we’re in the clear,” Nolan instructed.

  Taia—or, more accurately, T.A.I.A., the Tactical Assessment Interface Advisor—sent a little spike of electricity through his ear lobe. Just enough to be irritating without throwing off his aim or concentration. Yet another of the surprisingly human traits she’d developed in the last few months.

  Long seconds of silence passed. Nolan hated the silence almost as much as the motionlessness. He ached to pull off his helmet and take one good, deep breath of the air around him, noxious, sulfuric fumes and all. The oxygenated air pumped into his helmet tended to grow stale and cloying after a few hours. He wanted to feel the rain splashing on his head, soaking his hair, and slithering down the back of his heavy combat suit.

  But doing that this high up—on the rooftop of the two hundred and eleven-story Diamond Pinnacle—would prove damned near fatal. If the lack of oxygen didn’t kill him, the stink of New Avalon below and the lethal quantities of ozone would.

  The best he could do was switch on the external sensors. They transmitted the contact of every raindrop and every gust of wind straight into the chip in his brain, registering them as millions of tiny electrical impulses. It wasn’t the same as feeling—truly, honestly feeling—but it served his purposes now just fine.

  “No sign of the IDF,” Taia said in his ear. “The storm’s got the Doofs all cuddled up indoors and out of our hair.”

  Nolan grunted acknowledgement. No IDF meant his exfil was clear. Time to pull the trigger.

  He shifted his position, just a hair, enough to compensate for the north-blowing wind that had kicked up in the last minute. The newest Balefire model had all the electronic auto-fire bells and whistles to hit a nose hair accurately from up to five kilometers away. But that had never been his style. He’d learned to shoot the Old Terran way: clear eyes, steady hands. Years in the Silverguard hadn’t changed that. Even the latest software and hardware upgrades could fail—he knew that better than anyone—but skill never did. Last time he’d bothered to check, his record of verified kills remained unbroken.

  That thought, as always, brought back the flashes of memory. Exploding faces. Bursting brains. Men and women roasting from the inside out as his dragonfire rounds tore through their bodies. With effort, he pushed them away. He wished, as always, they were like his HUD, something he could
switch off and on whenever he wanted. The best he could do was let Taia block them out.

  And she did. A surge of electricity coursed through his skull and the memories faded, pushed down by whatever the AI chip did with the wiring of his brain.

  The tingling faded, replaced by utter calmness. Cold, calculating, sharp as the razor edge of his combat knife, Nolan’s mind settled into that dark place he always went whenever his eye pressed up against the sighting end of a scope.

  A deep breath in, hold, and exhale. He blinked once, twice, moistening his eyes and giving the muscles a momentary rest, then focusing on the magnified image visible through the scope.

  German French’s room was as garish as the man himself, a mess of bright patterns and colors with far too much ornamentation in the form of gold, silver, and glittering ethernium gemstones. Every free surface was cluttered with empty bottles, needles, condom wrappers, and trays of half-eaten food.

  No sign of his Rücksichtslos bodyguards, though. Like an idiot, the fat bastard had locked his goons outside his room and now sat with his back to the window, arms splayed across the ridge of a plush velvet couch and his legs spread wide enough to make space for whatever unfortunate call girl had been summoned from one of his many brothels to service him. Nolan couldn’t see much of the girl beyond the bright red curls bobbing up and down above French’s lap, but he spared a moment of pity. Not just for her current, truly awful task. Her night was about to get a lot worse.

  Nolan paused to let the external sensors register any final changes in the wind and rain. All clear. The crosshairs remained unwavering, the Balefire rock-steady in his grip. Another deep breath, in and out, and he slid his gloved finger into the trigger slot.

  In that moment, the world faded around him, drowned out by the icy chill flooding his mind. The wind and rain, the feel of the rooftop beneath his feet, the ever-present ache in his lower back, the taste of the stale air in his helmet. Everything gone, until only the crosshairs at the end of his scope remained.

  He tightened his grip on the trigger, pulled it to the break point. The low hum of the Balefire vibrated through his helmet, his cheeks, his jawbone. Deep breath in, out, and one final inhale. Hold, immovable as stone, crosshairs locked on the skin folds on the back of German French’s head.

  One shot, one kill.

  He squeezed.

  The Balefire didn’t so much as twitch in his grip, courtesy of the stabilizing hardware and software integrated into the gun. The only change was the sudden hiss of the energy charge shooting down the barrel. A tiny needle of white-hot light zipped toward his target.

  German French’s head exploded in a fountain of pink mist and a gout of flame hotter than an engine’s burn.

  Nolan didn’t pause to watch the body slump forward. Whirling from his sniper’s perch, he sprinted across the rooftop toward the southern edge of the Diamond Pinnacle. The security AI integrated into the windows of German French’s penthouse would have already tracked the vector of his shot back to his current perch; he needed to be well away before—

  “Shit sticks!” Taia had picked up on his habit of cursing—a very un-AI thing to do, yet he found it oddly comforting—but she had yet to master its nuances. “They’re damned fast.”

  An image flashed across his HUD, and Nolan growled a silent curse. German French’s headless corpse had sagged forward atop the shrieking, blood-soaked escort, the walls painted a vivid dark red with his blood. Yet in the two seconds since he’d pulled the trigger, the door had already burst open and in poured a flood of the dead man’s bodyguards. No Rücksichtslos thugs wielding cheap guns and sporting ugly face tattoos; these armored figures moved way too fast for the sort of thugs German French usually employed.

  “Jump!” Taia called.

  The AI-controlled smart steel fibers integrated into his combat suit’s legs propelled him ten meters from the building’s edge, and darkness and open air greeted him as he dove off the side of the Diamond Pinnacle. Like a stone, he plummeted head-first toward the muddy, smoke-choked streets of New Avalon hundreds of meters below. As he fell, he whipped the Balefire around behind him, snapping the rifle into place on the magnetized holster on his back.

  Another visual popped up on his HUD: the dead man’s armored bodyguards tearing open the windows and leaping off the penthouse balcony.

  “Damn!” Nolan growled. “You didn’t tell me they had combat suits!”

  “Hey, even I can’t see everywhere,” Taia protested. “Even my hacking algorithms couldn’t get around his protective measures, and that’s saying something!”

  Nolan didn’t bother retorting; he’d expected a fierce response from French’s goons and, like every good Silverguard, had come prepared for the worst.

  “Deploy tracking countermeasures,” he said. Even though she could pick up mental commands, he preferred vocalizing them. Old battle-formed habits died hard.

  “Activated.”

  The instant Taia’s reply echoed in his helmet, Nolan caught a glimpse of movement in the distance. A dark shape sped through the night, a blur barely visible in the glow of the massive neon lights and billboards filling the upper heights of New Avalon with dazzling multi-hued light. To the naked eye, it appeared to be a figure in a stealth suit gliding through the shadows. It would be more than enough to deter the sensors integrated into the helicopter German French’s goons had waiting on the rooftop helipad. No way an aircraft like that had the kind of tech capable of picking up his trail before he ducked into the towering structures of The Cyberwarrens.

  BOOM!

  The side of a nearby skyscraper exploded in a sudden burst of plasma fire. Shards of permaglass and steel rained down from the one hundred and sixty-fifth floor of the Yamatori Building, joining the falling acid rain to deluge the muddy streets far below.

  Yet the dark figure glided on, unfazed.

  Then another appeared, this one gliding in the opposite direction. A moment later, a third materialized to Nolan’s left, heading west, skimming along the exterior of the superstructures dominating the city.

  “Let’s see if they take the bait.” Nolan grinned. “How much longer?”

  “Twelve seconds,” Taia replied. “And that’s cutting it damned close.”

  Through the external sensors, Nolan felt the prickling sensation of wind rushing past his skin at terrible speeds. Less than twenty seconds—that’s how long it took to fall two hundred and eleven stories. Less than twenty seconds to turn a man into a splatter of flesh, blood, and shattered bone on the streets.

  “Three, two, one,” Taia counted in his ear. “Deploying wings.”

  Nolan braced himself for the inevitable jolt as the wings of his combat suit snapped out. He went from falling headfirst to gliding downward in an instant, and a quick twist of his body sent him soaring to the side and upward. The sudden arrest of his downward momentum jarred every bone in his body. Those he could feel, at least.

  “Get us to exfil,” he snapped to Taia. The glittering lights of The Cyberwarrens to the west promised more than enough places to shake his tail. “We’ve got seconds before they’re onto us.”

  “No we don’t.”

  A massive pillar of fire blazed bright in his HUD as French’s goons took out the side of another skyscraper in their hunt for the gliding figure. No sooner had the phantasm appeared from the explosion than it fragmented, cracked, and winked out of existence. There one moment, and gone the next.

  Nolan’s gut twisted. Damn, their counterhacking algos are good! His brow furrowed. Too good. No one outside the IAF should have been able to detect and disable the holo-images Taia had coded into the AI-controlled glass of the skyscrapers. Unless they had—

  “Spotters!” Taia’s voice blared in his ear.

  Nolan cursed. He didn’t need the HUD-displayed image to recognize the round, fist-sized drones hurtling toward him. Every Silverguard and IAF sniper knew them on sight. Not even the most advanced stealth camouflaging could hide from those tiny red-eyed bastards
.

  How the hell did they get Spotters? Nolan wondered. That’s IAF-grade hardware!

  He had no time to ponder; the alarms in his helmet went off with ear-splitting force. “Incoming!”

  Nolan didn’t need to bark an order; Taia’s chip was implanted in his brain and could sense his commands before he voiced them. Before he could give the command to dive, the AI took control of his combat suit and twisted the wings, sending him straight down—fast.

  Just in time. A pillar of fire burst into blinding brilliance not two meters above him as an RPG slammed into the building. The force of the explosion crashed into him with the force of a giant’s fist, hurling him downward at a terrifying speed.

  A wave of heat and electricity crackled over his combat suit. The protective carapace kept the explosion from scorching his flesh, but suddenly the lights within his HUD began to flicker.

  No!

  Horror drove an icy dagger into Nolan’s gut as the HUD winked out. Darkness consumed the interior of his helmet, and the oxygenation pump fell silent. The external sensors died, the wings refused to heed his command, and his legs were locked and immobile. Nothing moved. Nothing worked. The explosion had shorted the combat suit’s power supply.

  Like a falling star, Nolan plummeted toward the streets of New Avalon.

  Chapter Two

  “Taia!” Nolan didn’t need to scream—the AI was fully capable of picking up non-verbal commands—but screaming was what one did when falling a hundred and fifty stories to their death.