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

  “Working on it.” Taia’s voice was calm, infuriatingly so, given their situation. Almost as if she didn’t notice that he hurtled toward a full-speed collision with the steel-and-glass exterior of the Yamatori Building, which was coming at them bloody fast.

  Gritting his teeth, Nolan summoned every shred of strength and twisted his torso, straining against the unresponsive wings in a desperate attempt to course-correct. He tried not to think about how fast they were headed for the skyscraper or what would happen if he crashed into that steel filament-reinforced architectural smart glass at full speed.

  His Silverguard training kicked in and the harsh, growling voice of Master Sergeant Kane, his old Warbeast Team commander, echoed in his mind. “Work the problem, Garrett!”

  Nolan’s mind raced. No normal RPPG would short out the suit’s electronics; plasma grenades did nasty things to flesh, bone, and metal alike when their built-in generators exploded on impact, but there was no electric pulse. German French’s goons had to have been using REMPs—rocket-propelled EMP explosives. More IAF hardware they bloody well shouldn’t have.

  Yet he had no time to think about that. Only one thing mattered: survival.

  Without power, his combat suit was little more than a hardened metal sheath—his body would still be turned into bloody pulp the moment it hit something hard. Either the side of the Yamatori Building or the permacrete streets of New Avalon would do the trick.

  But the EMP couldn’t fry everything. If Taia, shielded by a Faraday cage lattice of durasteel, could survive that blast, there was hope.

  “Taia, redirect power from the boot thrusters!” The shielding protecting his feet from the ion engines in the boots had to have blocked the EMPs effects.

  “Already working on it.” Even as the too-calm chirp sounded in Nolan’s ears, the HUD lights flickered and winked back to life. A heartbeat later, the wings began to respond to the movements of his body. Sluggish at first, but faster as a surge of power flooded the combat suit. Myriad sensations—millions of droplets of rain, the shrieking rush of the wind howling across his suit’s exterior, and the gut-wrenching smell oozing from the boiling clouds above and the steamy city below—washed through Nolan’s mind as he once again regained control of the suit.

  Instantly, he twisted his upper body and the wings responded. He sliced through the air, banking hard to the left, barely missing the neon-lighted glassy façade of the Yamatori Building. The smiling computer-generated face of the girl advertising Yamatori Gaming’s latest combat sim game seemed to wink at him as he zipped past.

  “Company on your five, six, and eight.” Taia brought up three split-screen images on the HUD display. Three pairs of German French’s goons had found him, courtesy of those damned Spotter drones, and locked onto his signal.

  Damn it! In the interest of a clean getaway, he’d purposely avoided using the boot thrusters—the heat trail left by the miniaturized ion drives was far too easy for even basic combat suit targeting systems to track. He didn’t need to ask if Taia was certain the goons had spotted him; the pair at his five o’clock shouldered REMP launchers and took aim.

  “Looks like we’re going with Plan B,” Nolan growled. With a thought, he snapped the wings back into their place in the combat suit’s pack.

  His forward momentum continued unabated, but he once again plummeted in freefall through the darkness. Overhead, a massive BOOM reverberated through the air, and shards of glass and steel rained down around him. The neon lights of the nearby skyscrapers flew past him in a blur. Numbers ticked down at a terrifying speed on his HUD, counting down the meters until he hit the ground.

  Taia counted. “Two, one, now!”

  The wings snapped out again, catching the air and whipping Nolan around to his right. He glided between two smaller skyscrapers, his boots nearly scraping off the glassy windows, and hurtled into the darkness.

  “Any chance we lost them?” he asked.

  By way of an answer, Taia popped up the split-screen images again. His sudden turn had caught one of the pairs of goons by surprise, but the remaining four still had a visual on him. He didn’t need to have Taia hack into their comms to know they’d already be relaying their new trajectory to their comrades.

  But it would take them a minute or two to catch up. That was all the time he needed.

  “Elysium Telecomm, coming up on your right,” Taia chirped.

  “Gentle landing this time, please!”

  The combat wings extended and Nolan caught the air, gliding up toward the roof of the one-hundred-and-thirty-five-story skyscraper. Yet without using the suit’s built-in ion boot thrusters to slow his momentum, there was only so much even the AI could do to soften the impact.

  He hit the ground with bone-jarring force and dropped into a forward roll. The combat suit bore most of the brunt, yet the impact still sent waves of pain shuddering up his spine. His knees would have shrieked in protest, he knew, but he hadn’t felt them in the better part of five years. Hadn’t felt much of anything since that shard of durasteel shattered his T9 vertebra.

  But years as a Silverguard had taught him to live with the pain. Ignoring the twinges radiating from his back and shoulder, Nolan rolled to his feet, heavy combat boots skidding on the bitumen roofing, and reached for the Balefire Mark 2.1. The rifle detached from its magnetic holster the moment his gloved fingers closed around the stock.

  “DMR mode!” he shouted as he dropped to one knee, whipped the gun around, and slammed the stock against his shoulder.

  Instantly, mechanisms within the Balefire whirred to life and the gun began to morph. The barrel shortened, the clip expanded, and the energy-charging mechanism hummed. He didn’t need to give the command to switch to semi-auto fire—Taia had already done it for him as she triggered the change in the gun.

  Nolan pressed the scope to the special slot in his helmet’s right eye socket and stared through the crosshairs at the oncoming goons. The bastards were coming on fast, burning ion in pursuit, too damned eager to catch up to him before he lost them in the darkness beyond New Avalon’s high-rise district.

  His eye twitched as he caught sight of the suits they wore. The IAF hadn’t used that model of combat armor for six years, and suits like that ought to have been gathering dust in some government warehouse. Something else German French’s Rücksichtslos cartel thugs shouldn’t have had.

  One more detail to push to the back of his mind and log for later analysis. Right now, nothing but the targets at the end of his crosshairs mattered.

  He drew in a deep breath, held it, exhaled. Felt the rain spattering against the top of his helmet, the east-west wind slicing through the high-rises around him. His barrel tracked the movements of the two goons, leading them as Taia fed calculations of their speed and trajectory into his mind.

  One shot, one kill. The mantra flashed through his thoughts as he caressed the Balefire’s trigger. The barrel spat a needle of light that zipped toward the nearest of the two flying goons. Impact, right in the suit’s energy pack.

  A cloud of brilliant white and gold brightened the darkness as the goon—and the REMPs he carried—exploded. The white-hot flames and the concussive wave slammed into the goon’s companion, accompanied by an invisible surge of electromagnetism. Instantly, the burning boot thrusters flickered and winked out as the EMP fried the electric-powered ion engine. The wings locked up, the energy pack on the goon’s back died, and the lifeless combat suit plummeted. Nolan imagined he could hear the man screaming as he crashed into the side of the skyscraper. Another explosion, smaller this time, rocked the night.

  Satisfaction thrummed within Nolan. Even Master Sergeant Kane would have appreciated that one.

  Taia’s voice in his ear cut into his thoughts. “Warning! IDF alerted and three minutes out.”

  Nolan grimaced. The Doofs shouldn’t be that fast; the Imperial Defense Forces’ standard response time was closer to half an hour, unless properly motivated. Then again, explosions in the high-rise district co
uld be the one thing to light a fire under even the pudgiest and most tight-puckered of bureaucratic asses.

  He paused only a heartbeat to consider his best course of action, then leaped to his feet. Whirling and holstering the Balefire in one smooth move, he raced toward the far edge of the skyscraper. Four goons in castoff IAF armor might not give him too much of a fight, but mixing in the IDF just added a degree of complication he’d rather avoid.

  “Looks like we’re on to Plan C.”

  “Exactly how many plans are there?” Taia asked.

  “As many as we need!”

  Nolan leaped and snapped out the combat suit’s wings, catching an updraft rising from the smoke-clogged streets below. He glided east, heading away from the neon-lit skyscrapers of the Silver Towers high-rise district. The darkness of the Shipyards beckoned to him; he’d have no trouble losing his pursuers in the massive warehouses near the Imperial Planetary Port, and the goons would be far less likely to use REMPs so close to Imperial property—and the Strongarms that guarded it. Given what they wore and who they worked for—or had worked for, until five minutes ago—they’d likely want to evade official notice as much as he.

  BOOM! Alarms blared in Nolan’s ears. He was suddenly jerked to the side as if yanked by a giant towing cable. A twinge raced through his neck as another explosion blossomed in the air on his left.

  “What the hell?!”

  An image of his combat suit’s specs popped up on his HUD, and red lights flashed on his right wing. “Compromised wing structure,” Taia said. “Either you go down now, or you’re going down!”

  “Then find me somewhere to land!” Nolan’s heart hammered in his chest. He struggled to keep the combat suit on course; the damaged wing responded sluggishly, and he could feel it stiffening with every passing moment.

  Taia called up a grid of the city in black and blue lines, scanning through the Shipyards too fast for his eyes to follow. “Here.” A red dot appeared on the map. “Empty warehouse, just vacated last week and between owners.”

  “Perfect.” Empty warehouses were rarely patrolled by the Strongarms, the Shipyards’ private security forces. “Get me there before this damned thing comes apart!”

  “I’ll do what I can.” Once again, Taia’s artificial voice sounded way too calm given the circumstances. As human as she might have become over their last few years together, she wasn’t yet capable of understanding the heart-pounding, gut-twisting fear that came with the promise of impending death. That was an utterly human thing.

  With a thought, Nolan called up the rear-view on his HUD. The burn trails of German French’s goons had gotten far too close for his liking—they were half a klick behind him and closing the distance fast. If any of them was a half-decent shot with an automatic rifle, Nolan and his compromised combat suit were in trouble.

  As if on cue, bright purple blaster fire zipped toward him, accompanied by the much larger burn trail of another damned REMP. The computer-controlled rocket flew straight toward him, doubtless locked onto the sparks shooting out of his damaged wing. He had only one choice.

  “Jettison wings!” he called.

  “Are you sure?” Taia asked. “Without wings, it’ll be a hard landing in—“

  “Do it!” Nolan shouted.

  With a loud hiss, the wings of his combat suit detached. “Warning!” the HUD displayed in bright red letters. “Warning! Wings inoperative.”

  Yeah, thanks for the heads-up! Nolan grimaced. No longer gliding, he fell straight toward the dark, solid outline of the warehouse Taia had marked on the map for him. He glanced at the power level indicator on the upper right corner of his HUD.

  18%, it read. Power levels critical.

  The roof of the ten-story building rushed up toward him at sickening speed. He gritted his teeth and counted down the seconds until—

  “Boot thrusters, now!”

  The ion engines in his boots flared to life, and Nolan poured a burst of energy into the propellers. He flipped heels over head, compensated, and gave one surge of power—his last—into the engines to slow his descent. The thrusters, depleted to re-power his suit, gave a terrible hacking, spluttering cough, spat out a tongue of blue flame, then died.

  His plan worked. Barely. The last surge of energy slowed his descent, just enough that he crashed into the roof at just under terminal velocity. He’d aimed for a weak spot in the roof, right between the metallic beams supporting the metal flashing, and crashed straight through. He slammed into wood and steel crates, which exploded beneath the impact, knocking over three rows of shelving and scattering dozens of empty crates in all directions.

  But the flying debris and his combat suit saved his life. Air burst from his lungs as he collided with something solid—a metal support beam—and pain radiated up his spine, through his back and shoulder. He fell, hard, crashing to the ultracrete floor ten stories below. Coughing and in agony, but alive.

  “Company in two minutes,” Taia chirped in his ear. “Might want to dust yourself off and get out of sight.”

  With a groan, Nolan levered himself up to his feet. The mechanisms of his combat suit’s legs whirred and moved as his brain relayed signals through Taia, controlling it in the absence of control over his own lower body. “Stealth mode,” he muttered through clenched teeth as he staggered away from the scene of his destructive entrance.

  The darkness of the warehouse enveloped him, but he knew it would only serve to hide him from the physical eyes of his pursuers. If they scanned the warehouse, they’d spot his heat signature instantly.

  But that was where his suit differed from the IAF cast-offs they wore. His had the latest-model hardware and software, complete with heat-cloaking panels and a generator that produced just enough cold air around him to fool heat sensors.

  Let’s just hope they don’t have those damned Spotters. Things would get a lot more complicated if they brought the drones into the warehouse.

  Nolan’s suit masked any hint of sound as he raced up the metal stairs toward the catwalk overlooking the warehouse floor. Operating in stealth mode drained the suit’s power fast—he had just 6% charge left after using the boot thrusters. He needed to get up high, settle into a comfortable perch before—

  The loud, fiery hissing of boot thrusters shattered the silence of the warehouse. Brilliant light gleamed through the hole in the roof as two figures descended slowly into the darkness.

  Growling a silent curse, Nolan slowed his climb, dropped to one knee, and brought the Balefire up to sight on the two goons. He didn’t even need the telescopic sight; from four hundred meters away, he could hit a bitefly’s wing with his eyes closed.

  He squeezed the trigger, paused, and squeezed again. Two needles of light zipped toward the two figures dropping through the hole. One hit center-mass and tore through the first goon’s chestplate, incinerating the man alive within his suit. The next, a heartbeat later, caught the next one right in the visor. The man’s helmet exploded, and the concussive blast sent his headless torso shooting off into the warehouse to crash into the pile of debris Nolan had left with his hasty entrance.

  Drawing in a deep breath, he waited for the next pair to make their entrance. Two quick shots and he’d be in the clear. He might have to take the long way home, but it would be worth it for a clean getaway.

  Cool calm settled over him as the sound of firing ion engines drew closer to the roof of the warehouse. He pulled the trigger to its break point, sighted on the hole, and prepared to fire.

  The first pair of boots appeared in the hole, and Nolan pulled the trigger.

  Click. No burst of energy, no sizzling bolt of white-hot light.

  He tried again, only to hear that little click. Crap! The firing mechanism must have been damaged in the fall. Or one of the myriad explosions that had nearly brought him out of the sky.

  Biting back a curse, he swung the rifle onto his back and reached for his pistol. He half-drew it, then froze as he remembered who he faced. More accurately, what he fac
ed. His sidearm couldn’t punch through even old-model IAF armor. Those military-grade combat suits could shrug off most small arms and light weapons. Shooting at them with his pistol would do nothing more than reveal his position.

  Time to go old school, then. Grimacing, he reached for his Echoblade and drew the knife slowly, smoothly, without so much as a whisper of rasping metal. The impossibly sharp twenty-centimeter blade was Echosteel, a mixture of steel and reverbium, a rare element found and mined on the Nyzarian Empire’s capital planet of Genesis. Reverbium was so sensitive to resonance that, when set vibrating, it could literally slip between molecules and cut anything short of the thickest space-grade durasteel.

  Rising from his kneeling position, he crept up the staircase toward the crosswalk, his eyes locked on the two goons descending into the warehouse. He had no need for the IR night vision built into the helmet—the bright blue flames of their boot thrusters was the only light source in the massive warehouse.

  The two goons dropped toward the ground floor, using their thrusters to slow the descent and land lightly. Their heavy assault rifles—modified Machnikov X-ARs, judging by their bump stocks and high-capacity magazines—swiveled in every direction as they moved with surprising coordination and efficiency through the shelves.

  Almost like trained pros. Nolan cocked an eyebrow. No way they’re Rücksichtslos. Former IAF, maybe?

  Military-trained grunts working for a drug kingpin like German French. Just one more impossible piece of a puzzle that shouldn’t exist, one he’d have to give due consideration when this was all over. For now, it was enough to know that they wouldn’t go down easy. If he didn’t get the drop on them, he’d have a fight on his hands.

  Creeping along the catwalk overlooking the warehouse, Nolan tracked the two goons’ movements. They kept close, formation tight, aware of each other while making steady progress in clearing the rows of shelves.

  Yet they made one fatal mistake: they didn’t look up.

  Nolan clipped his carabiner onto the railing, tested it once to make sure it was secure. “Ready to voice-project?” he asked in his mind.