An AK-armed Ikhwan is in Dawn’s sights, the red dot in the center of a hemispherical holographic sight aimed at the center of his mass. He’s one of three currently loitering around out front. He’s dressed in a black tank and loose sun-bleached jeans and a ratty bulletproof vest that only provides protection on the morale front. To his left is the dude in the Barcelona Paolo Jimenez jersey and a Skorpion machine pistol and to his right is a guy in an olive polo and grey basketball shorts with a wooden semi-auto, maybe an SKS or a Chinese Type 63.
That detonation was loud. Neither Dawn nor Jake couldn’t get a visual from their perch – he had to clamber up eight sets of stairs to see what it was so Dawn can only imagine the panic that a regular Mosuli is feeling. Hell, she can see it; they’re scrambling every direction except outside, returning to their homes or jumping into nearby shops hoping that a roof will provide some modicum of protection against a Raytheon-constructed ground-attack missile.
The Republican Army-looking soldiers have their vehicle parked outside; some hundred-year-old Humvee pulled out of storage. It’s almost a miracle that it runs as well as it does. Then again, people in the States still drive around original Model Ts but it’s in the air how ‘original’ they really are. Real ‘Ship of Theseus’ situation.
Then a buzzing rings through her back pocket and snaps her from her sighting. She goes to her watch and sees ‘TECUMSEH SHERMAN’ projected a millimetre above the watch’s face along with his exceptionally handsome headshot – he’s tall and dark and sharp with deep brown eyes. Jamaican-born, that’s what he says, but he was trained at the British Imperial Academy in the middle of London. Explains the accent.
Dawn picks up.
“Everything good, Tech?”
“Not particularly.” His voice never wavers; for as long as she’s known him he’s about as reliable as an atomic clock. He never messes up, he never bends, never breaks, even though he’s earned the ability to make mistakes.
“What was that explosion?”
“The damn bridge went up. No clue how.”
“Anything from Xiuying?”
“Nothing.”
“Eva or Sophia?”
“No.”
Dawn exhales. The worst comes to the forefront of her mind and she quickly pushes it back to the dark recesses.
“They’ll be fine.”
“I know. I’m calling about the ship.”
“Anything?”
Dawn hears soft footsteps behind her. A quick turn of her head reveals Jacob returning from his sightseeing tour. His helmet is over his head, the visor black and an ocular attachment over his right eye; he tells her that it helps with range-finding and wind directions, humidity, etc. Dawn could never imagine wearing one. She isn’t even wearing a helmet today, just the jawguard. She’d rather put her head in an oven.
“We found some live cargo. It’s complicated.”
“Like, dogs?” She thinks they’re luxury designer mutts. French bulldogs. Samoyeds. Poodle mixes.
“People. And there’s two who say that they’re Janissaries.”
Dawn pauses for a moment.
“Hold-hold on a minute.”
“Listen, there’s a dozen people who need help at the docks sharpish. I’m going to call Davison, I just wanted to key you in.”
It sounds like there’s a helicopter flying nearby over Tech’s location.
“Right,” Dawn replies. “Search the ship’s bridge for any manifests. If they put down that they’re trafficking people they’re fucking morons so look for anything that might be code. If they have weapons that’s good too.”
“We’ll get it done.”
Kills him to say that. Someone his age shouldn’t be deferring to someone who turned 23 in May. But Dawn is with C-SPEAR and Tech is only an auxiliary, an indefinite rental.
Tech signs off and Dawn returns to her sightings, waiting for the signal. She sights the Ikhwan group in front of the station, meeting with what appears to be a returning patrol. Not Army but heavily armed, professional looking, probably a paramilitary. They have fatigues but not for desert environments – grey and red and splotchy, probably surplus Russian ones. They have bandannas around their face, black, and no helmets. Baseball caps, plain and grey and so non-discrete they become discrete because nobody wears a fucking all-grey baseball cap. Put a fucking logo on the goddamn thing. One of them wears a bandolier of bullets, almost certainly a spare belt for his RPD machinegun. Another has a beard so large it can’t hide behind the bandanna. Paramilitary for sure.
Her phone buzzes again, Davison this time.
“Chief?”
“We’ve scrapped the Dingo plan.”
Dawn is silent for a moment.
“Was that its name?”
“Yeah. It’s not important. We found a pilot, but, you’know, the lift bridge exploding pushed the timeline forwards.”
“Anything from Xiuying?”
“Ash got a text from Sophia. They’re fine.”
“Did you tell Tech?”
“Not yet. He’s been busy.” She can only imagine how relieved he’ll be.
Dawn exhales, changing gears in her head.
“Got it,” she says. “Clocking in.” She’s doing more than that. She can almost taste the gunpowder that’s yet to be in the air. Its like plugging herself into some giant, city-sized machine; her eyes see more details, the cracks in the walls and glass, the rust on the RPD of the paramilitary, the stupid-looking engraving on the wooden barrel of an AK. She hears people yelling from inside the building and the clanking of a loose bolt of the Mosin-Nagant that a paramilitary carries and for a moment she takes it in, overwhelming her, drowning her, dragging her out to sea stuck in a tsunami. Then, all at once, her brain autonomously sorts it out; what’s important stays, what isn’t flies out the window. It uses tremendous amounts of adenosine triphosphate but the reward is staying alive. It’s a high, comparable to nothing but the purest of cocaine, and not just the regular stuff. The stuff mixed with powdered aether. The five digits per kilogram stuff. The stuff cartel lords keep for themselves.
The four paramilitary-types enter the building. The Republican Army Humvee is still parked outside, the soldiers presumably still within. Must be doing some strange business.
“Dawn?” Jake asks. She hears it through her headphones. The spoken words are otherwise so quiet that her brain filters it out as background noise even though he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with her.
“Count us down?”
“Please.”
There’s silence for a moment. Dawn rolls her neck, hears the bubbles between vertebrae pop. It’s time to dance. Finally.
“Three.”
“Two.” Jake this time.
“One.”
They both hesitate, letting it cook for a moment longer. Savouring the power of an unaware man in their sights. Then they speak at the same time.
“Pull.”
ꙮ
They take their shots in sync, Dawn’s G3 and Jacob’s .303 Enfield both dropping their targets – for Dawn it’s the guy in the black tank and for Jake it’s the guy in the olive polo with the wooden SKS and they drop like a sack of bricks. Jacob cycles the bolt on his rifle and Dawn pivots to the confused Barca fan and drops him too, a bullet clean through the side of his head. That’s for last year’s Champions League.
Before the third hits the dusty cement Dawn’s moving, left and down the stairwell as Jake’s rifle rings out again taking out some poor bastard with a gun who stumbled into his line of sight. When she reaches ground she can see through the glass of the hotel’s dilapidated double-doors and sights another pair of Ikhwan running out; not the paramilitaries or soldiers. She aims and fires thrice at the Ikhwan on the left and the one on the right raises what appears to be a .22 Marlin rat-hunting rifle at her until the top of his head is torn off by an .303 round.
She barges through the shattered glass doors and drops to a knee and speaks into her TACPAD.
“Go.”
“Got it. Two coming to your left.”
Just as he said, a pair of Ikhwan appear out from behind a rust-stricken car with tyres worn into racing slicks, wearing mag-vests over sweat-stained t-shirts. One of them has dust-covered Nikes and the other wears kneepads and shin guards. Dawn sights the guy in the Nikes and drops him, two to the chest and one to the head for security and the other jumps and hops and zigzags like a crazed ferret towards the Republican Army Humvee and she exhales and waits on empty lungs until he tries her. She makes him pay – the first bullet slams into the engine block but the second flies straight through his head.
“Behind,” Jake says. She feels Jake tap her on the shoulder with a gloved hand. “Go.”
She does and moves quickly across the street until she hears the pump of a pump-action shotgun to her right. She drops and turns that way and brings up her gun only to see Jake separate one half of his face from the other.
Then, the door to the station squeals open and the four paramilitaries from before step into the open, ready for a good fight.
Dawn, still low to the ground, sights one with some sort of submachinegun, maybe a local model. She fires three times at him and he drops and she pivots to the one with a raised Mosin-Nagant and does the same to him and he drops like the rest. Two down.
Jake’s Enfield roars and punches a hole through the neck of the bearded paramilitary, his bandanna eternally a size too small now and blood pouring both ways from his neck.
The last paramilitary sees the rest of his team cut down in seconds and, instead of retreating, decides to try his luck.
Dawn puts three bullets into him and he stays upright, unfazed. He’s wearing a full-faced helmet now, one of those Russian ones that vaguely resemble a welding mask. Dawn imagines him smiling in the split-second of calm, baring his fangs. He wears his bandolier over a newly acquired white windbreaker. Armoured, heavy. Jake’s rifle roars again and the bullet knocks the man backwards. Dawn follows up once and her gun clicks empty – out. Twenty rounds go by quickly; she pushes the mag release with her left thumb and the clip falls to the ground and clatters on the empty ground and she slams another into it. One down, two left. Tech’s always a stickler about this because someone’s gotta reorder spent ammunition.
The last paramilitary’s machinegun roars its own roar and both Janissaries scramble – Dawn sees Jake retreat back into the hotel and Dawn dives behind the Humvee.
Heavily armoured. Less a fight, more a high-stakes puzzle. Janissaries like her are made to solve such puzzles. What are the odds that the guy decided to armour his legs?
She intends to find out. Jake’s Enfield fires again. The paramilitary screams.
A war scream. A real bellow. He’s not backing down.
Dawn figures Jake’s close to empty and the paramilitary turns the hotel’s façade into rocky confetti with a tremendously long, eighty or ninety round burst. Gotta be empty.
She drops to her stomach and sights the man’s legs and fires twice at each. Bullets cut through his fatigues and slam into some sort of plating. Dawn only sees that there’s no blood. Interesting.
There aren’t any sounds of reloading. Usually reloading an RPD is an arduous process, long and intensive and annoying. There’s half-a-dozen steps involved and she hears none of them on the other side of the Humvee. Jake’s rifle fires again. Still alive.
The paramilitary fires until his gun clicks empty. Now.
Dawn sweeps out from behind the Humvee as the paramilitary lowers his RPD. He notices her just as she notices him and he reacts accordingly, dropping the machinegun and going for a sidearm, a machine pistol of some sort given the extended magazine sticking out of the end of the holster and Dawn sights up his right hand and fires twice, two striking concrete behind him but one punching through his palm just above his wrist. No armour there, fucker.
He reaches for the gun with his left hand and she repeats herself, four bullets this time to really make sure. One hits his wrist, the other the metacarpals of his middle and ring finger, two missing and bouncing off his armour.
With both his hands disabled Dawn rises and walks him down, closing the gap and firing until her G3 clicks empty and she draws her Hi-Powered with her right hand and empties all thirteen rounds into him. Bullets find the cracks that her battle rifle made in the armour. And he’s still standing. Fuck me.
Gonna have to do this the hard way.
The Enfield fires again and the paramilitary is knocked to Dawn’s left. She drops the G3, its reinforced, dark-olive carbon fibre frame bouncing stiffly off the ground and reloads and then holsters the Colt. Each hand independently goes to a sheath; she carries two knives on her person at all times. One is a short stiletto for stabbing, the other is a wickedly curved kukri she took off some poor Maoist rebel in Napal that could decapitate someone if she swung hard enough. Gotta get under the helmet.
Jake fires again and she sees him mantle over the window, the shattered glass breaking under the Chrysomallos gloves. The rifle is slung over his back. He’s got the same idea.
The paramilitary roars under his helmet. If this is his moment, he’s ready for it. But he’s going to make them work for it. Good candidate for Valhalla. The head of a tomahawk glimmers in the sunlight on Jake’s hip. No holster needed. If you cut yourself it’s because you’re not good enough.
It’s a dance now, but her dancing partner couldn’t do much but swing haymakers with broken hands and fractured wrists. It really isn’t a fair fight. She closes the distance and ducks under a wild right and spins the knives in her hands, the stiletto three-sixty and the kukri five-forty, one to stab and one to slash.
She waits for an opening. He gives him one real quick, a desperate straight that she parries and catches and pulls him towards her just as much as pulls herself towards him. The stiletto shines in the midday sunlight, thirsting for blood. She brings it up in a looping sort of uppercut that reaches underneath the mask and cuts straight into his neck. The paramilitary hisses in pain and she twists the knife and brings her kukri horizontally across, aiming for the tip of the stiletto. The Nepalese blade cuts clean and smooth and sends crimson ichor spewing from the cut, some painting the concrete below, some onto her.
He's done. He knows it, she knows it. But he gives one last, gurgling roar-
And falls forward, onto her. She catches his weight – he’s big, six-six and built like an offensive lineman. She redirects her momentum to her right and slides out from under her and sights a tomahawk sticking out of his back, perfectly between his shoulder blades.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Jake stands a good twenty feet away. He’s barely breathing. Why should he? She did all the hard work.
“Could’ve helped!” Dawn yells. He walks over, quiet and smooth, and grabs his tomahawk.
“You had it covered,” he replies. It sounds like he’s smiling underneath. Strange. He doesn’t smile. “Looks like we’re clear.”
Clear. For some, undiscernible reason, it ignites a fire within her. Clear. Like they didn’t just spark a prolonged firefight on riverside Mosul. Like she isn’t just fucking coated in blood.
She looks down at the dead paramilitary. Valhalla might be for the Norse. He’s in his paradise now, wherever it is. Hopefully its better there than it is here because here it’s a hundred and thirty and humid.
“There’s gonna be a dozen more in the fucking building!” Plus those Army fuckers!
Jake unslings his Lee-Enfield, starts the lengthy process of reloading it. The rifle’s internal magazine can hold ten bullets, but that means if you’re out of stripper clips you have to hand load all ten rounds and jam up the knuckles of your thumb. Jacob doesn’t have stripper clips.
Dawn walks over to the Ikhwan with the wooden SKS, more out of curiosity than anything else. Her G3 shoots 7.62x51mm NATO rounds, incompatible with the SKS’s 7.62x39mm Soviet bullets. It has a crack in it’s wooden furnishing and the sights are all off and the top-loaded internal magazine holds ten and swings open from the bottom, even if the joint squeals in protest. It belongs in a museum. She empties it and tosses it to Jake – he’ll figure out something to do with it. He catches it smoothly by the barrel and slings it around his back. Dimitri might like it.
Then she scrounges for any matching ammunition. She’s down forty rounds, two full magazines. One mag left. One of the dead paramilitaries wielded an old FN FAL, straight out of Belgium and the Cold War with an ACOG scope atop its frame. A quick inspection yields her a mini-mag, ten rounds, made for sharpshooters. Something about weapon balance; Jake would know. Hard to complain about extra ammo. She reloads and slides the shorter mag inside the gun’s well instead of fishing around the belt around her thigh.
“Lost your touch?” Jake asks.
Behind her jawguard, Dawn bites down on her tongue. Her jaw clenches tight. She inhales and exhales. It steadily unclenches.
“Let’s get moving,” Jake adds. The conversation is over. Back to the grind.
Dawn keeps her G3 in her hands – it’s her baby, pulled from the dead fingers of a dead Los Atlántico cartel sicario during the first phase of her final exam six years ago, maybe more maybe less, and rebuilt from the ground up with a new frame and firing mechanism and foregrip and dot sight. Jake slings his bolt-action over his shoulder, draws a bullpup Israeli Tavor modified to fire those super-high velocity Short Magnum rounds.
They move to the leftmost wing of the building – if we use the hotel’s shattered glass double doors as an origin point – and stack up at the edge. Dawn peeks around and quickly sees a pair of Ikhwan, too scared to move. There was a lot of noise around the corner, what if we get killed? Turns out the noise is coming to them.
She signals with her hands. Two fingers. A longhorn hook ‘em. A grey wolf, too sweet. Two enemies, lightly armed, take them out.
They move simultaneously, Dawn taking the guy on the right and Jake the one on the left. One of them has an AK, the other a double-barrel shotgun and neither get the chance to raise them. They’re dead before they even realize the threat.
She considers taking the double-barrel. Really considers. Close quarters coming up, it’d be loud but they’ve already made enough noise to make it meaningless. Jake probably has more ammo than her, too.
Then she feels a nudging at her shoulder.
“You good?”
Dawn nods. Too in my head. She moves on without the shotgun. Probably old anyways.
The follow the wall until they find a door, small and unremarkable with a long-dead EXIT sign over the door. There’s no alarm when they open it from the outside and they slip inside to find a stairwell. All of Dawn’s synapses tell her that every enemy is on the ground floor; nobody above. Must be for a good reason.
The two take that chance anyways only to find huge holes in the floor. You couldn’t even levitate over this shit. If they tried the second-floor spectacular the only thing spectacular would be their crashing to the ground in a ball of dust accompanied by the sound and fury of failure. Back down the stairs.
For a moment, Dawn doesn’t know where to go. The hallway goes left or right. Jake says left, away from the remains of the paramilitaries, so they go left. They encounter a pair of Ikhwan patrolling and cadaver them. One of them has a dusty MP7, well-taken care of, a silencer screwed onto the barrel. Full magazine of 30 9mm Parabellum. Maybe bought from surplus, maybe stolen from a dead mercenary. The system is old-fashioned and bordering on obsolesce, but there’s no such thing as a truly obsolete firearm. Even a musket can kill people.
She brandishes it for Jake. His body language looks unimpressed. She’s a kid with a really cool bug showing her bug-averse parent. She hears footsteps down the hallway, the bug turns back into a highly lethal MP7. Two more Ikhwan turn to look for the commotion. Dawn silences Jake, takes them down herself. The silencer hisses loudly and smoke pours from it after two five-round bursts. These two are carrying AK carbines, nothing worth requisitioning. She moves forward with Jake behind until she stops, puts an arm out to stop Jake.
An empty magazine flies out from behind a statue of some kind. Looks like some old, mid 21st century politician that’s been worn and shot to the point of Picasso-like abstraction. Jake fires a warning shot and is greeted by a hail of blind fire from the statue. They drop as the bullets go over their head and another empty AK magazine tumbles out. What a fucking pussy!
The two retreat behind a corner.
“Fucking place is a maze.”
“That hallway leads to the foyer. We take three lefts we end up at the station’s cafeteria.”
“You have the blueprints or something?”
Jake calls up the blueprints on his TACPAD. Of course. He even has a route through traced, just gotta get to the front door.
“Just in case,” he says.
It’d be easier if there wasn’t a prick in the way. Neither of them have grenades.
But Dawn has a plan. It’s simple but most plans really are. Jake is going to obliterate that post-modern neo-futuristic dead-tech statue and smoke the guy out. Dawn is going to go in for the kill.
Jake steps out first, fires four shots and turns the head of the statue into pebbles. A gun sticks itself around the base, a pair of hands holding it. He re-aims and the bullets shatter the old, fragile automatic. Dawn takes this as her queue and charges and the enemy steps out in front of her. His hand leaks blood, his young face is etched with fear. Maybe her age. Maybe younger. Sorry kid, just business. She puts five Parabellum rounds into him and drops a shoulder like a running back.
She stops when the guy hits the floor, motionless. There’s chatter from further inside, Arabic.
<
<
<
<
It’s good that the Ikhwan are second guessing themselves, but Dawn can’t stop thinking about the Republican Army soldiers. Even if it’s just regular, low-level corruption, a Republican Army solider has certain kind of training, a level of sociopathic bloodthirstiness, and the knowledge that the current socioeconomic status quo benefits them that the Ikhwan don’t.
But there’s nothing else that her brain thinks are important. Rest of the place must be empty.
“So, what’s the plan? The usual?” she suggests.
“I’d prefer not.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause you get shot.”
Dawn pounds her chest twice.
“I can take it.”
“You can’t.”
“I’m built different.”
“You’re not.”
Dawn sighs. He’s no fun.
“Do you have any other ideas?”
Jake hesitates for a moment. Two. Bingo.
“So it’s the usual.”
Jake doesn’t react. He knows that the usual has worked well enough for the last few years. They walk onwards, following the path in the blueprints, past peeling paint. Her left is the first but as she turns Jake lingers for a moment.
She turns back to him. He’s still looking at her for a reason.
“Yeah?”
He hesitates for even longer.
“Nothing,” he finally says. “Just, don’t get yourself killed.”
Dawn nods. “You too.”
The pair separate. Dawn reloads the MP7 and the G3, catching the smaller magazine. Still some use for it.
She hefts it in her hand, tossing it up and down like a baseball. Then she tosses it across the room – the plastic and the metal within clatter and ring and scatter all over the room.
<
<
Dawn lets them wait for longer, draws the piano wire as taut as she can. She readies the MP7 and peeks around the corner. Six left. Two are around the hostages, in t-shirts and jeans and less-than-bulletproof vests. The other four look professional. They’re in fatigues; desert camo. The flag of the Twin Rivers Republic gleams from their shoulder, a light blue crescent on a white background, bands of blue and yellow above and below. The hostages have black sacks over their heads. One stocky and broad, one tall and slim.
Hello, Mister Army.
She exhales and darts out of cover, her gun rising and sighting one of the soldiers. She doesn’t know why they’re here but they’re in her way and if she causes some sort of incident then fuck it. Her gun vomits a burst of 9mm at the first soldier in her sight and airholes him, then pivots to the right and augers six holes in the next with lead bullets and she sees one of the survivors eyeing her dead-center with an M16. She doesn’t even attempt to move, and he fires.
She goes down, hard.
The soldier’s weapon hisses, smoke pouring from the end of the barrel. Other than that, it’s totally silent.
<
The two non-soldiers nervously tiptoe over towards her body.
This strange woman has her eyes closed. There’s no blood pooling on the ground. They’re looking. They’ve already looked for too long.
The head of one nearly detonates. The 20th century roar of the Enfield echoes far into the future and splatters brain matter across a room, the bullet travelling in from the medulla and out his forehead. The survivor turns, panicked, ignores the MP7 moving on its own, tilting upwards from the woman’s supine position. A dead finger pulls the trigger and the weapon spits four rounds through the bastard.
<
Two soldiers left. Jake can handle this. He moves into the room, faster than lightning and as quiet as an owl and with his Tavor and one of the soldiers drops instantly, two holes through his chest and another through his head. The other fires a long burst with his M16, forcing Jake to retreat back to the safety of the hallway.
The soldier pivots – Dawn’s corpse to where Jake went, then back to Dawn’s corpse, then to where Jake went – until he breaks. Not worth sticking around for this shit. He flees towards the hallway Dawn entered from. She can’t get a shot. Home free. Good for him.
And then Jake steps in front of him, the Tavor’s dot sight already raised. He fires twice and the soldier throws himself sideways, quick enough to dodge the second but the first tears through his armour and fatigues and flesh. Dawn sits up and raises the MP7 but Jake’s already on the job.
The army man rises and draws a knife and charges, bellowing a poor excuse for a war cry. Jake intercepts his charge with a 6-to-12 elbow that cracks the man’s lower jaw in half at the cleft of his chin. His right hand reaches to his hip for the tomahawk and he brings it down and splits the man’s face like firewood with a single stroke.
And again, it’s quiet again. She can hear him breathing. Outside, the distant sounds of a firefight float through open windows.
He walks over to her.
“Clear.”
ꙮ
Dawn lies still on the ground once again. Her eyes are closed. She’s out of the sun. The old building doesn’t have AC but its fifty degrees cooler than it is outside. Jake peers over her and gives her a gentle kick to the thigh. More of a nudge than anything else.
“Stop messing around.”
Dawn’s right eye cracks open.
“It’s nice and cold down here.”
“We don’t have time for breaks.”
Dawn sighs. “Maybe you don’t.”
So, Jake bends down and grabs the MP7’s barrel and lifts it. She begrudgingly rises with it. He looks her down-to-up when she’s standing, and he finally decides to take off his helmet.
Dawn, instead of allowing herself to be transfixed by him, frees the hostages. Her kukri easily cuts through the zip-ties around their wrists and each ankle, and she pulls the sacks off of each of them.
Their eyes slowly open like they’re being forcibly awoken, adjusting to newfound light. One is about six feet tall, dark-skinned, and always reminded Dawn of a pit-bull. The other is tall and waifish, taller than Dawn, six-four with a heavy dusting of freckles and auburn hair cut short and choppy and asymmetric, parted to the left. Her first action is to sweep it in place to the side. These are her targets. Desmond Okonkwo and Claire St. Laurent. They look shabbier than she remembers.
“What fucking took you so goddamn long?”
Dawn quickly remembers Dez’s powerfully British accent. It’s strong. She presumes it's London, but where in London is a mystery.
“If you don’t say thank you I’m putting the bag back on.” Dawn lifts the bag.
Claire stands up to her full height, an inch above Dawn. They’re almost eye-to-eye because she has a five-head. She usually wears big glasses to compensate.
“Merci.” <
“De rein.” <
The two freed hostages share a look. They both shrug. Jake leaves the room, Dawn follows, and the two follow behind. They reach a stairwell that seems structurally solid enough. Jake waits for the rest of catch up and pulls Dawn aside, letting the two hostages reach freedom on their own terms.
His silver eyes are intense. He examines her collar and pulls out a pair of flattened bullets still stuck to her bomber jacket. They would’ve shattered her collarbone if she wasn’t armoured. He shows them to her.
“Are you really fine?”
“I’m fine!” Dawn replies. Perhaps a smidge too assertively.
He looks at the lead pancakes.
“One of these days you’ll catch a fifty-cal to the chest. Then what?”
Dawn shrugs. Something on the back of her head itches, she scratches it.
“Then that’s it for me. Simple as that.”
Jake exhales deeply. He moves on, following the two freed hostages. Dawn climbs the stairs to the third floor. Desmond and Claire are waiting on the second floor, armed with a double-barrel shotgun and an AK off dead Ikhwan.
“So,” Dawn asks Dez. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Damascus.”
Dez looks at Claire. “We bullocksed it up.”
Dawn adopts her own version of British. “Oh, you proper bullocksed it?”
“One moment, we were trying to have a shipment of weapons delivered to Damascus, and it was going very well until we were asked about aether weaponry.” Claire this time. Her voice is as smooth as cream and cool as ice. So perhaps like ice cream.
“Why?”
“New management wants us to take a harder line against aether weaponry. We were going to try and buy it so that we could destroy it.”
Dawn looks at her skeptically. Really? La Montagne, wanting to destroy a weapon? But instead of that line of thought, Dawn plays nice.
“Did the cheque bounce?”
“I don’t bloody know, one moment our translator asked about aether weapons then the next they fuckin’ blew my mans’ brains out of his goddamn head and they clapped us in ties and shit like we were infidels or something! I thought we were fucked but I guess they wanted to negotiate.”
Dawn shrugs. “I got the call from Beauregard like, yesterday. He said that they were asking for ten million dollars for each of you.”
The pair look at each other. The same thought goes through their heads.
“Ten million?” Claire asks.
“I feel fuckin’ insulted,” Dez adds.
“If not for me you would’ve been worth whatever your organs can fetch if not for us.”
“How much would that be?” Dez asks.
“I dunno, like, fourteen bucks probably. Do I look like the kind of person to know the prices of organs?”
“Yes.” Desmond doesn’t even miss a beat.
“You know I can kill you and say it was the Ikhwan, you’know?”
“But you think I’m nice with it so you won’t.”
Dawn almost gags. “I don’t want to know what you’re nice with.”
Those words are the last that she says inside. The stairwell leads to an emergency exit door which deposits them onto the roof of the station. The remains of the aether explosion are visible, the fortress controlling the middle of the fridge destroyed beyond recognition. Blood-red thunderbolts lash out at empty air.
“Ah.” Claire says.
“So, they wanted to use it?” Desmond wonders.
“Then they must’ve thought that we had some sort of insider knowledge.”
Desmond turns around to the three. He points at the cloud.
“Look at it, this shit’s demonic! And this is the stuff that runs the world?”
Nobody has an answer for him. He knows it well enough. Like trying to scream against the wind.
Jake spends his little rant reaching into the pack strapped to his right thigh and pulls out a short, stubby signal flare. He cracks it open and violet smoke erupts and plumes high into the air. He tosses it on the ground.
Desmond and Claire take seats on the ground and deeply exhale. Dawn would give them something to drink if she could. She drank it all the night before.
She notices Jake staring high into the sky, far behind Nineveh. She follows his gaze, spies wave upon wave of aircraft. She recognizes some of them – there’s the B-34s, flying wings stark-black against the blue midday sky, and then there’s the F/B-48s, a P-38 Lightning dragged kicking and screaming into the 22nd century, twin booms and twin jet engines and all, and there are F/A-27s, a splice between the swing-wing F-14 Tomcat and the F-22 Raptor. Daggers, Firestorms, and Diamondbacks.
“I see ‘em,” Dawn tells Jake.
He’s quiet for a few.
“Thinking about something?”
He nods.
“Do you remember where the ‘Dingo’ plan came from?”
Dawn shakes her head.
“Cold War Rhodesia. Exact same plan, exact same name.”
“How do you remember these things?”
Jake just shrugs.
“Made me think. These planes are going to hit homes and factories that Palantir says are building and storing weapons. If they’re wrong, how many people are going to die?”
Dawn nods.
“Feel complicit?” she asks.
Far in the distance, the bombers break into squadrons of three and vector towards their targets. The Daggers stay high, the Firestorms and Diamondbacks drop low, low, low to the ground, their wingtips nearly touching the tops of skyscrapers. They drop lower somehow, skimming along the river, the pilots giving their rides a shower. Then they jerk into sharp climbs, soaring over invisible mountains.
“Yeah,” Jake says after observing. “But I don’t know what to do that won’t get a lot of people I care about killed.
Dawn purses her lips, and redirects her attention to dozens of huge, tilt-wing four-engine shuttles that carry a dozen soldiers each within their fuselages. They’re low over the water too.
“I think…”
Dawn pauses. Rethinks what she’s about to say only to see what seem like parts fly off of the bottoms of the jets. Bombs and missiles. Some fall straight to the ground, powered only by gravity and guided by rudimentary GPS systems and aerodynamic fins. Others rocket forwards propelled by some unholy cocktail of chemicals carrying an even worse cocktail to detonate. The jets fly high into the sky, spiralling and rolling wingtip-over-wingtip celebrating another successful bombing run.
The missiles hit first, slamming into a dozen targets across Mosul. Apartment buildings, stores, warehouses, they all go up in a mighty explosion and a cloud of dust. The bombs hit milliseconds later, hitting different targets. One slams into a warehouse that serves as shipping storage for the entire city and the shockwave nearly blows the Brighton over portside. Glass shatters inward on the bridge. Aren’t Anastasia and Dimitri up there?
Seconds later, those shockwaves reach them. Blending together like being on the inside of a double-pedal bass drum. It’s not just sound, it’s pressure waves and Dawn and co. plug their ears so that their eardrums don’t explode inwards.
And just as quick as it happened, it’s over. Great brown clouds of dust fall to earth upon the ruins which stood tall and proud moments ago. There are no secondary explosions. The shuttles pass overhead. Dawn’s eyes lock onto one on the periphery, white and gold instead of black and grey.
“I think that if I knew the name of everyone we’ve killed I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
Jake looks at her. His silver eyes almost pierce her soul. In another universe, he’s screaming at her about this. In another, she’s the one who cares. In a third, they’re both robots.
But in this one they just share a quick glance, silver against heterochromatic blue and green. Dawn sees two decades of care deep in his eyes, and a nearly infinite void of sadness even deeper.
“But we can’t keep walking out on everything anymore, right?”
Don’t become attached to anything you can’t drop in thirty seconds. The real quote is longer but its one that’s drilled into Dawn’s head. Every head of every Janissary. This is supposed to mean people, ideas, ideologies and beliefs. If you have to become a communist, become a communist. If you’ve gotta be a Nazi, you’re a Nazi. If you have friends, you might never see them again at the drop of a hat. A name? Not really. A home? God no. You have yourself and that’s it. She’s lucky enough to have Jake.
Is it supposed to be this way?
Dawn lets his question linger. She never answers it.