As the sky outside the operations office darkened, the Rangers withdrew from their posts, shaking hands with the men who relieved them. Smiles and jokes were exchanged, and, in Ray’s case, phone numbers. Solemn promises were made while good fortune was beseeched for all. Thandi even had a short prayer circle with her fellow believers.

Kayla found Gaz, sitting alone near the building’s lobby.

“You happy with everything we discussed?” she asked, referring to the squad’s escape plan.

“If Whist plays his part, then I guess everything will go okay,” Gaz said. He took a moment to meet her eyes. “Next time I see you, I’ll be in a jail cell, I guess.”

“Our intel team is already making contact with your safe house. They’ll keep you updated once you’re on the inside.” Kayla smiled. “Don’t want you to feel like we’re just going to forget about you.

“Technically speaking,” he said bitterly, “abetting the escape of a murderer makes you an accessory to the crime.”

Kayla’s smile vanished. “Listen Gaz, we might get you and your guys out of a Helvet jail, but that doesn’t mean you’re going free. I don’t give a shit about Rackeye— you committed that act on Calderan soil. My soil. The colony that raised me made damn sure I understood that our society was based on the rule of law, with no exceptions.”

Gaz shrugged. “I get it. I forfeited my rights and now I’m just a pawn. I don’t know if you remember, but that was my job description for a while.”

“Yeah well, you might prefer to sit and stew in your cynicism, but I suggest you take the opportunity of your confinement to think about things. Colony magistrates don’t like to see the sad sack approach in defendants. Might be time you start thinking about how you can prove yourself a trustworthy contributor to your new home.”

Gaz didn’t respond as he let his gaze drop to the floor. After a moment’s pause, he jumped to his feet and offered his hand. “Good luck with everything. I hope you kick Rayker’s ass into the next dimension.”

They shook, and Kayla turned to leave.

“Kayla,” he said quickly.

She looked back.

“Thank you for what you said. I will think about it.” Then he winked. “Sometimes all a man needs to hear is the advice of a beautiful woman.”

Kayla raised an eyebrow, gave him a curt nod, then headed for the stairs. She made it to the next floor before the wild grin broke through her controlled expression.

Night fell, and the Rangers waited patiently on the roof. Ray had briefed them on the planned movement, and all were ready. All that was missing was the signal from Whist.

“But, what I’m saying,” Sal said, his quite voice drifting through the silence, “is that it’s probably a rare event, right? Because, according to smugglers, the Night Stalkers hit several ships a year. I mean, that must be overexaggeration.”

“That number seems a little high to me,” Ray said, “but I’m not in that unit; I don’t know how often they have to do that kind of thing.”

“I mean those freighters are just death traps waiting to explode,” Sal continued. “And the crew are drunk half the time, so, you have to expect a high probability of shipboard accidents.”

“It seems reasonable,” Ray said patiently. “But again, our unit doesn’t really do that, so…”

She was trying to seem disinterested, but Sal was relentless.

“It’s obviously clear that some of the stories are real,” he said. “But there is a baseline level of professionalism needed to travel in space safely, and the cartels cut corners everywhere—"

“Got movement,” a Marine’s voice said on the radio. “Looks like one team coming in from 2 o’ clock.”

Kayla nodded, and tried to ignore her singing nerves. If anything went wrong with the stunt they were about to try, they would all be back to square one.

Beside her, the waiting Rangers shuffled into a single file, and tensed themselves.

“Second team at ten o’clock,” said another voice.

Then confirmation came that the perimeter at the back of the building was starting to thin. The police units were low crawling towards the building from two angles, and Whist had been told to suggest shifting the visible force nearer the front to draw attention. Of course nobody would try to escape at the back, went the logic proposed to his fellow officers; where would they have to go, the river?

The Marines had duly complied, moving near windows around the front of the building, to observe and prepare for their enemy’s latest maneuvers. Whist’s removal of snipers had caused some friction, but it allowed him to more effectively control the placement of infra-red observation devices to suit the plan. With the building’s flanks now apparently free of activity, the tactical units—so they believed—had gained the perfect opportunity to install microphones and cameras.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

And so, events were set in motion that would give Kayla and her squad the seconds they needed to escape without anyone noticing. For her part, she had a very simple action to perform. But as with all such high-pressure moments, she found that fear of a screwup grew fantastically large in her imagination.

In the gardens between her and the river, only a pair of vehicles remained more than a hundred yards apart. It was a perfect gap, and she focused her mind, committing the spot, and the nearby roof edge, to memory.

“Okay twenty yards now,” called the observer. “Looks like number four in the stack bribed his way on the team, see the way his butt’s up in the air?”

“Rookie error,” another voice said with a chuckle.

Kayla smiled, then reached for her own mic. “Raven three, go for release,” she said, then knelt into a sprinter’s crouch.

The response was as cool as the night air. “Copy, Viper, weapon’s away, splash in twenty.”

Overhead, a group of bombs fell away from their drone carriers as their seeker heads swiveled onto preprogrammed co-ordinates. Kayla lifted her hand into the air, then dropped it.

“Standby, standby,” Sal said into the radio.

Kayla felt the tension around her thicken, and wondered if her limbs would struggle to push through it as frequently happened in her nightmares.

“Ten,” Raven’s voice said in her ear, then paused. “Five, four, three, two—”

Kayla threw herself forward with all her might. Her legs pounded concrete for a heartbeat, and as her foot found the lip of the roof, she leaped into the darkness.

Her stomach left her body as she flew through the air in an endless moment. Brilliant flashes of light exploded all around the building in a rolling fireworks display. Then Kayla sensed the ground rushing up to meet her, and she dropped into a roll as her feet made contact. Immediately she pushed herself up into a sprint and strained her ears, desperate to hear the impacts of her squad mates over the cacophony of noise. They came one after the other, while Kayla’s veins flooded with adrenaline. What if someone tripped in the jump? What if someone landed badly? What if a cop saw them?

Mercifully, she counted six thumps, and continued her race to the river’s edge. When she reached the bank, she slid onto her knee and turned. The distant operations office was now covered in the smoke deployed from the cartridges that had accompanied the thunder charges. Police spotlights flashed on, drowning the building in light. Of course, that meant that everyone within half a mile would have their vision washed out, creating an impenetrable darkness in the spaces outside the illumination cones.

Six figures flashed past her in a blur, and Kayla cringed at the soft splashes as they sank into the water as carefully as they dared. Everyone’s ears were ringing, and it was unlikely that the nearby police vehicles would be able to pick up the sound. Even so, Kayla feared exposure as desperately as any prey.

Happy that everyone had followed her, she turned and lowered herself into the river, and the sanctuary it offered. It was too dark to see anything underwater, but she dove for the bottom, and traced the slope of the bank to help her navigate. They would swim for ten minutes before surfacing for air, checking their surroundings and each other, then continuing until they left the city limits.

“God damn,” Sal said as he slapped Gaz on the back. “Did you see them go? Real super soldiers huh?”

“Yeah, pretty cool.” Gaz rubbed his head. “Wish we had that kind of stuff.”

The thunder of the fireworks had left him feeling like he was in a warzone, and now he had to martial his thoughts. His men were already yelling obscenities at the retreating police squads, and his job was to go and make contact with Whist. He would demand to know what the police were thinking, while promising that he had plenty more traps set up in case they thought about trying it again. The Sentinel agent would apologize, and Gaz would follow it up with an unreasonable demand. Both camps would settle in for a long, drawn-out siege, before he and the rest of the Marines surrendered themselves for a jail cell. It would be a long time before any of them would get a decent night’s sleep.

The squad worked their way upriver, alternating fifteen minutes underwater with a few minutes of breath. A highway bridge gave them a place to shelter and take stock. There were no signs of pursuit, while all around them the city seemed to be returning to its normal state. Traffic was light, and the occasional police siren drew startled looks from the Rangers, though none came anywhere near them.

Kayla let them have a short break, then urged them back into the water. They had to reach the city limits before daybreak, and their progress against the current was not as fast as they had wished. Weighed down by sodden gear, with weapons and equipment tightly lashed against their bodies, they struggled to maintain speed. It was hard swimming, and their muscles, enhanced though they were, had not been trained for that kind of endurance. Everyone became tired, and their pace slowed as midnight came and went.

Eventually they reached the old town, where both banks sported brightly lit quays and bars that overlooked the peaceful river. It wasn’t a crowded night, but some revelers were already drunk from celebrating their survival of the traumatic day. The Rangers stopped for another, longer break beneath the pier of a tourist ferry.

“Once we get past this last part of the city,” Kayla assured them, “it’s just a little further until we reach a waterfall. We can get out there.”

Dull glances signaled their acknowledgment of the information, but the final stretch was what scared them. They would have to stay underwater to the absolute limit their lungs could allow in order to pass the more crowded area.

“Swim until you feel like drowning,” Kayla said, “then come up for breath. If we can do another long stretch after that, we’re home free.”

“Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal,” Lyna complained. “Anyone who sees us will just think we’re wild party girls.”

“Yeah, then they might want to join us,” Kayla cautioned. “Let’s keep the complacency at bay, and it’ll soon be over.”

What scared her was the possibility that she was pushing them too hard. The time they spent underwater was deceptively peaceful. The river’s direction was easy to sense from the current, and they spent most of their time blind and deaf, wrapped in a cocoon of nothingness. Exhaustion, fatigue and fear were a perfect recipe for blacking out, and none of them would know they had lost someone until it was too late. But could they take the risk? In hindsight, a good length of string would have provided a perfect solution, but nobody had thought about it.

Kayla went first, having asked the others to follow after short delays. Then, when she reached her own limit, she managed to scrounge a piece of trash and draped it over her head as she surfaced. She kept her eyes just below the waterline while she watched for the others. All around the wide river people laughed and talked. Even if they did see her, at least she would be the only one, and could draw attention away while deciding what she was going to do next.