He looked up at her and gave her a wan smile. “Grace,” he said softly. “Mike,” he said to DePresti. “Sit down.” Pham slid to the edge of the bench to give them room.
They both did just that, with Parkowski taking a seat next to Pham, as the senior Aering engineer scanned the pier with his tired eyes. He then turned to Parkowski. “Grace, I wish you had just let it go,” Pham said to her.
“I know,” Parkowski replied. She had prepared for this statement by her boss. “I sometimes wish I had, too.”
“And now you brought Mike into this…” he said, his voice trailing off as he stared off in the distance.
Pham was acting strangely, Parkowski thought. He slurred his words slightly and his eyes were glazed over. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was drunk, but Parkowski knew that he wasn’t a drinker.
“Anyways,” Pham said, “Grace, you were right.”
“Right about what?” she asked.
“About everything.”
“What do you mean?” DePresti asked, speaking up for the first time.
Pham ignored him. “I went to the facility today, I was going to try and troubleshoot the MICS issue we saw yesterday,” he said in almost a monotone. “I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about the mission.”
He took a pause. “The high bay was completely closed, Grace. My badge wouldn’t get me in. I went to talk to the security desk and was told that men in suits with government badges came in the middle of the night and closed the entire ILIAD mission room up. I couldn’t even get to my office.”
“Did they say what agency they were from?” DePresti asked.
Pham answered this one. “No, but I have my suspicions.”
He was still being vague. Parkowski needed to move the conversation along. “Dr. Pham, Jake,” she said. “Can you tell me about Bronze Knot?”
“No, I’m not allowed to, but I need to,” Pham replied. “Like I said in my text back to you, it’s not what you think it is. Bronze Knot is just a cover story for…”
His voice trailed off as he turned his head slightly towards the east.
“Dr. Pham?” Parkowski asked.
Pham didn’t respond. He just stared out ahead towards the entrance to the pier.
Parkowski followed his eyes. She didn’t see anything at first. Everything appeared to be normal; Pham was just nodding off.
Then she saw them.
There were four, walking slowly side-by-side and almost in lockstep as they came from the shops near the pier’s entrance towards where Parkowski, Pham, and DePresti sat on the bench.
She initially thought all were males, but as they got a step closer, she realized that one of the four was a woman.
They were easy to pick out. Like Pham, they were severely overdressed for a casual spot such as Manhattan Beach. They all wore trench coats, two in tan and two in a dark gray, with wraparound sunglasses on their heads obscuring their features.
DePresti saw them too. Parkowski noticed his leg started twitching.
Just like when the dragon appeared in the Venus environment, Parkowski froze. She knew she needed to do something, to run, her lizard brain screamed for her to get away.
But she just sat there, rooted to the spot.
Pham just stared.
The four were about a quarter of a mile away from the two Aering engineers and the Space Force captain when they stopped. The one in the middle-left position raised his arm as they stood in the midst of the tourists, fishermen, and sightseers.
All of the trenchcoat-wearing individuals reached into their coats and pulled out matching metallic objects.
Parkowski couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Firearms.
They were short-barreled and had long, banana-shaped clips jutting out from the lower part of their receiver.
The four individuals fired indiscriminately into the crowd as Parkowski stood up and watched in horror.
An angler went down, his chest a puff of red as the strange assailants’ submachine guns tore into him. A teenager tried to run past the four but a quick burst took him to the pier’s wooden floor, motionless, dead. A woman screamed and put her hands up but was cut down. The shooters were firing seemingly at random at their victims, causing panic as well as death.
It was a massacre.
And it happened in the blink of an eye.
The junior Aering engineer started to react.
DePresti leaped to his feet, staring at the four shooters with his hand over his eyes, shielding them from the sun. “What the fuck—” he said under his breath.
“We need to go,” Parkowski yelled.
He nodded. “Hey, doc, time to go,” he said to Pham.
Pham didn’t respond. He was frozen to the spot, watching in disbelief as the four shooters cut down the crowd as they slowly marched forward.
Then Parkowski made a horrifying conclusion.
The four shooters weren’t firing indiscriminately.
They were coming straight for them.
All four of them had their eyes trained on Parkowski, DePresti, and Pham. They were only a hundred meters away now, leaving a trail of bloody bodies in their wake as they cut down the people on the pier one by one.
“Jake, we
“They’re here for me,” the older man finally said. “You need to get out of here.”
