Seconds ticked past with no reply.
Fairchild saw Bryce cut a glance in Dane’s direction. He masked his concern, but not completely. He was worried about his woman. So was Fairchild. So was Dane.
“Rook,” Dane repeated, “do you copy?”
Nothing.
“Shit,” the team leader muttered under his breath. “Okay, let’s move it. And be ready for trouble.”
Fairchild hoisted the governor with one arm and tossed him over her shoulder, keeping her other arm free to use her gun if she needed to. She knew it probably wouldn’t do much good for the man’s ego getting carried to safety by a woman, but he was too slow to keep up with her and the other Mercs on foot, and she wasn’t about to wait around in this deathtrap any longer than necessary.
***
They raced back down the main corridor in the same formation they’d used on their way in—Dane in front, Bryce in the rear,Fairchild in the middle with the governor. They were almost to the exit when they spotted the first enemy.
The man came charging in out of the snow, screaming like a banshee. He managed to squeeze off a couple shots, but they flew wide and sparked off the wall next to where Fairchild was standing. Dane dropped him with a quick double tap to the head.
“There’s more of them behind us!” Bryce said over the com.
Fairchild kept charging forward with the governor. She could hear the blurt of the enemies’ guns behind her, and the softerphut-phut-phutof Bryce’s suppressed rifle. Then she heard him grunt in pain.
She spun and took out the last of the attackers with her rifle, but Bryce was down, and he didn’t look good. A slug had caught him in the knee, and the lower half of his leg was hanging on by a bloody thread.
Dane rushed past her toward their fallen comrade.
“Get the package out,” he said. “I’ll get Bryce.”
“But—”
“That’s an order, Fairchild!”
Right. Of course. The mission took precedence over everything else. That’s what the Mercs were known for. They got the job done—or they died trying.
Fairchild turned again and raced down the remainder of the corridor, her speed only marginally hampered by the weight of the man flung over her shoulder. She hit the exit at close to thirty miles per hour and burst out into the freezing night air.
Rook was sprawled on the ground by the exit, face down in a circle of red snow. There were a dozen bullet holes through her back. Fairchild wanted to stop, but she knew she had to keep going.
How the hell had these untrained terrorists gotten the drop on a Merc like Rook?
How?
Fairchild didn’t have time to think about it. She needed to get the governor to the extraction point, and she needed to do it before hypothermia set in. She had to fulfill the mission objective.
Fairchild reached the fence in seconds and pushed through the gap Bryce had made with his lascutter. Once she was on the other side, she whirled around to check on her surviving teammates. Dane was still inside the facility, charging down the corridor with a wounded Bryce slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Bryce was firing his gun back at a group of pursuers.
They were almost out when the world turned to fire.
Flames belched from the corridor like dragon’s breath, consuming the running Mercs in heat and light. Then the concussion hit, roaring upward out of the earth, splintering steel like matchsticks. The shockwave rippled the snow and threw Fairchild hard to the ground. Above her, the fireball unfurled into the night sky, a miniature mushroom cloud with a burning halo whirling within its depths.
Then the debris started raining down around her—clods of scorched earth and steel and bits of burning flesh that hissed as they hit the snow.
CHAPTER 2
6 months later…
Fairchild woke in the sweltering dark, and for a long moment she could not remember where she had gone to sleep, or why. Sweat streaked down her bare torso, and the soaked sheets clung to her skin like some sort of parasitic monster. Her mouth tasted like she’d spent the night sucking on a used bar rag. Her brain fucking hurt.
It came back to her in bits and pieces. Bastion-5. Hotel. The cheapest she’d been able to find, right on the edge of the so-called Joy District. Pink neon filtered in through the half-closed blinds, an electric mockery of the sunrise that never touched this deep within the urban ravine. The clock by the bed informed her that it was 1100 hours on the dot. The fist slamming against the door was the reason she was awake at this ungodly hour. From the sound of it, whoever was out there had been knocking for a while, and they were getting tired of waiting.
