Ambasadora (Book 1 of Ambasadora) (44 page)

Markus took fire to his shoulder.
David had dropped Sean and grabbed his rifle.

Sara threw her cenders to the
ground. She ran to the front of the fray, rage and pain controlling her mind
and body. Blasts sizzled around her. Standing in the middle of the heated
onslaught and staring down the oncoming transport, she held up her palms, not
certain the convertors in her wrist implant would absorb the incoming cender
energy and not really caring anymore. Her body shook. Her heart raced. The
energy compounded until she labored for breath. She staggered backward.

From the corner of her eye she
saw David rush at her, then stop and simply watch. She was watching, too, from
somewhere outside of her body, watching and crying.

Blinding light emanated from an
orb at the center of Sara’s palm. She screamed with the effort to control the
energy. The pitch of her voice melded with the squeal of overcooked cenders and
the ringing in her ears. She smashed her palms together, forcing the light into
one large, quivering orb and launched it at the contractors.

Glowing hot light blasted through
the men and women. Sara dropped to her knees and covered her eyes. She expected
silence like when she had first witnessed the orb weapon used on Palomin’s rim,
but the sounds of battle never relented. She opened her eyes to watch the last
dying flash reveal the contractors’ charred bodies.

As she pushed to her feet,
fragger boarders dropped in around them, surrounding the group. The low whir of
their boards was nearly lost in the noise of battle. Each fragger wielded dual
cenders, the modded kind like she had seen in the V-side.

“Don’t fire.” A female
fragger, her long blonde hair whipping around her face, jumped from her board,
her eyes hidden by dark shades. She held her palm screen up to read from it.
“Fragger idents.”

Her attention snapped to Sara,
honing in on the bio-lights peeking around rips in the dark sleeve. “Nice
to finally meet you in the Realside, Ambasadora Mendoza.”

Sara stumbled forward. Her eyes
crinkled at the corners and her nose scrunched up from the pain, but she stood
tall when she reached the fragger. When she asked, “Who are you?” her
wispy breath barely carried the distance between them.

“Yadira, but you know me as
Cuzco,” the small woman said. “Yul is waiting for you. And Zak.”

“What about the rest?”
A boarder in back pointed a cender at the Armadans.

“They’re with us,” Sara
said.

Several fraggers dismounted and
attended to Sean. Sara wondered if any of them were in the V-side with Cuzco
that day, not that she would recognize them without their avs. Cuzco/Yadira
said, “We’ll go two per board and make the run for our ship.”

“I don’t like this.”
Lyra’s grip remained tight on her weapon.

“Mount up, Lyra,” David
interrupted. “You know better than to refuse aid from allies.”

“You trust a bunch of
fraggers?” Lyra asked.

David looked at Sara. “Do
you trust them?”

“Yes. They came here for
Sean. They didn’t have to.”

“There’s your answer,
Lyra,” David said. Tamasine stepped forward to stand with him. Sara didn’t
miss the scathing look Lyra gave David, nor the way he ignored her.

A rumbling explosion woke Rainer.
He tasted blood in his mouth. Unable to pull a full breath, he realized he was
lying on his chest. Before he moved his head, he tried moving his fingers in
case he’d suffered neck or spinal trauma from the fall. He remembered the fall,
the explosion on the catwalk, shoving Sara out of the way.

Confident he had full use of his
limbs, he pushed himself up onto his knees and took inventory of his injuries.
Some broken ribs, to be sure, and a cut to his forehead—that explained the
large amount of blood since head wounds tended to bleed more—but aside from the
bruising and general all-over pain and stiffness he could expect from falling a
hundred meters into a cargo crate, he was fine.

And he was alone. He wouldn’t let
himself read too much into that thought. Looking down the side of the crate
stack showed nothing but darkness. Even the scant light from the ceiling and at
ground level had been extinguished. He grabbed for his cenders. His holsters
were empty. They would be; he’d had his weapons drawn when the catwalk
collapsed. He searched for them among the crate debris, but they were gone.

He had no choice but to take his
chances on the ground. Each movement on his climb down sent electric jolts of
pain up into his groin, through his back and neck, and settled in his damaged
ribcage. Muffled sounds of heavy weapons fire bounced along the exterior walls.
Maybe Prollixer had gotten wise to their plan and called in the military. Maybe
Dahlia had told him everything.

At the bottom, he flicked on his
palm screen to light his path through the carnage of a battle. It looked like
the contractors had gotten the worst end of it. He noted a prompt on his palm
announcing a message waiting for him from Dahlia.
Stalling take off.
It
was sent twenty minutes ago. No follow up. He sent back,
On my way. No cure.
According to their prior arrangement, she would know to bluff Prollixer. If
Dahlia decided to turn on Rainer, he would lose completely. Not just the cure.
And not just Sara. But his life, his family honor.

He considered searching for
Sara’s body among the burnt and cracked contents of upended crates, but he knew
in his gut she wasn’t dead. She had made it inside the stairwell before the
blast. When his mind wandered to darker possibilities, Rainer repeated to
himself that she had made it. She was alive.

He picked his way through
crumpled bodies and still burning table linens and broken dishes meant for the
ballroom upstairs, then had to detour around large engine parts and crushed
ceiling lights. His focus returned again and again to a pink emergency exit
light hanging above a doorway where the door itself had been blown from its
hinges.

His head throbbed with each
exertive step.

He felt the air rush at him,
carrying the scent of the recent flood. The sounds of a full-scale battle
boomed louder. When he rounded the corner, he saw the right side of the
building had a ten meter gouge which opened it to Palomin Canyon. Rainer stood
at the edge and witnessed war raging outside.

Perhaps because he was still
dazed from the fall or because he held tight to his stoicism for focus, he
watched the brutal battle between fraggers and contractors as though it were a
Media vid. In the back of his mind he contained the small fear that one of his
brothers or sisters could be fighting for their lives or already lying in the
mud at the bottom of Palomin. Or worse, one of his amours. The idea that his
line, his family, could be destroyed, if not in this particular battle, then
one like it that was sure to come after today, cemented itself in a primal spot
within his brain. He had lost sight of his priorities, given into emotion, and
he would pay for that indiscretion.

His reporter buzzed with an
incoming message. Dahlia responded,
Hurry.
That one word, coming from
his seventh amour, the woman carrying his thirteenth child, a woman he had all
but ignored except to conceive and to plot with her, gave him hope like he had
never felt before.

He sent back,
Soon.

The easiest way to the transport
pad was the obliterated catwalk or the internal elevator. Both ways were cut
off now. He’d head for the stairwell.

At the end of the featureless
hallway, Rainer signaled a door control with his reporter. It ignored him. He
pounded it with his fist. The decorative cover split open, spilling a busted
responder and fingers of twisted cable, but the main door remained shut.

He carefully played two wires
against one another, short-circuiting the electronic lock, but the door jammed
after opening only a crack. He used his leg as leverage and pried the door
open. Centimeter by centimeter the gap widened. Sweat mixed with the dust that
coated his face and hands. He pried the door a little further and wriggled his
body through, catching his side against the door frame. The pain shot through
him. He closed his eyes to it, trying to breathe.

He pushed open the door to the
stairwell and started his climb up forty flights. Each time his boot slapped
off the concrete, he heard its echo and felt its jarring in his body. Each step
ate through his stoicism. He fought the onslaught of emotion at first until he
stumbled on tired and bruised legs, falling against the grey wall like a child
just learning to walk. His anger boiled to the surface, and he welcomed its hot
flush like an amour’s touch. Someone would pay for all of this.

When he pushed open the door onto
the launch pad, his stride was purposeful, concealing his pain and extent of
his injuries.

Dahlia and the Sovereign waited
for him by an Embassy ship.

The access iris above the
transport pad remained closed. The sounds of the fragger bombardment outside
would necessitate waiting until a moment or two just before lift-off to open it
to the sky above.

Prollixer’s face split into a
crazed smile. “Contractor Varden, I knew I could count on you. Please,
give me my cure.”

Rainer walked past him and
straight up to Dahlia. He stroked her cheek and pulled her into a tender kiss,
then whispered, “Thank you.” While he nuzzled her neck, he slid his
hand down her thigh to her holster. He pulled out her cender, drawing in
shallow breaths of her rosy scent. It smelled better on her than Sara.

“Where’s my cure?”
Prollixer clasped a hand on Rainer’s shoulder. Rainer elbowed him in the jaw,
knocking him to the ground.

Then he fired his cender into Prollixer’s
face. The Sovereign’s head jerked back and settled against the concrete floor.

The pilot rushed down the
gangway, cenders drawn. Dahlia drew and fired, dropping him as he stared at the
Sovereign’s dead body.

Rainer saw her with new eyes. She
had stood by him when abandoning him would have been easier.

She trained the cender on Rainer.
“I need to know if you did this for her.”

Rainer looked into Dahlia’s
cender barrel. Mourning filled him, mourning for a life he was afraid to ever
want in the first place.

“I did it all for her. But
now it’s time to move on.” He walked past her and into the ship.

As he started the lift-off
sequence, he figured Dahlia would either shoot him or slide into the seat next
to him.

She followed him into the ship,
then stood over him, almost like she still didn’t know which she’d choose.
After a tense moment she settled into the seat and buckled her restraint.

Rainer opened the ceiling and
held his breath. The transport pad began to rise.

“Where will we go?”
Dahlia asked.

“Somewhere safe. Somewhere
together.”

The transport cleared the pad.
Turbulence rattled the hull as shells from the fragger conflict exploded and
echoed throughout the canyon. Rainer deftly maneuvered the Sovereign’s ship in
the opposite direction, leaving the fighting behind him, only to seek comfort
in the darkness ahead.

“He’s so cold,” Sara
said. Her body shook as she tried to rub life back into Sean’s arm. “Will
this work?” She looked at the three swivel boards lashed together into a
makeshift stretcher.

“We’re only going a few
hundred meters. It’s risky, but our only choice,” Yadira said.

David hoisted Sean into a sitting
position on the boards, lashing his back to the middle boarder’s legs. Sean was
completely unresponsive. The rest of Sara’s group doubled up on boards.

“Ready?” Yadira reached
a hand out to pull Sara onto her board.

Sara forced herself to move forward.
A wave of pain forced her to her knees. She collapsed into the mud and vomited.
Her vision blurred; she pounded her fists into the ground to keep from
screaming. She felt the blood trickling down her thighs. A crazy vanity inside
of her was thankful no one could see the proof of her suffering, of her loss.

David kneeled beside her and
pulled her into a hug. He pushed the sweat-soaked hair from her neck and
produced a stim patch from his pocket. “You should have told me earlier
how bad you were hurting.” He pressed the patch into her neck.

“This is faster
acting.” Yadira handed David an injector. He held it against Sara’s neck.
Its air-forced needle jabbed into her skin, delivering the entire dose at once.
David helped her onto Yadira’s board. Sara wrapped her arms around the tiny
woman’s waist. The boards moved out, and though the pace was excruciatingly
slow due to their overload of cargo, Sara still had to close her eyes from time
to time to quell her sickness.

Blasts of music alternated with
the gunfire until they became part of the same composition. Exploding rockets
echoed off the canyon walls and the hulls of burning ships. It was a cacophony
of death, but also the birth scream of a new system, conceived in discontent
and born naturally into the raw, naked glory of war.

Overheated cenders popped and
smoked, making breathing difficult. Each cough wracked Sara’s body with pain.
The system could eventually return from this violence, but she wasn’t sure she
could ever return from sterility.

The boards carrying David and the
healthy troopers arrived at the ship first. Yadira held back, sweeping the area
while the boarders carrying the injured crawled into the ship. A sudden lurch
forced Sara to the ground. A rocket exploded in front of them and rained down
dirt and stone.

Sara crawled through the swirling
dust and smoke. A hand on her arm helped her stand.

“My propulsion’s shot,”
Yadira said. “Run for the ship. I’ll help the others.”

Sara scrambled after Yadira
through the clearing dust. She could only run doubled over, her arms holding
her mid-section. Coming up on her left, she saw a trio of crumpled boards still
lashed together with bodies sprawled around it.