Morning Star полностью

The door light flashes. And the thick metal doors that separate us from a platoon of the Jackal’s elite hiss open. Two glowing stunGrenades zip in and clamp to the walls. Beep. Beep. And Holiday pushes the device’s button. A deep implosion of sound ruptures the elevator’s quiet as an invisible electromagnetic pulse ripples out from the spherical EMP at our feet. The grenades fizzle dead. Lights go black in the elevator, outside it. And all the Grays waiting beyond the door with their hi-tech pulse weapons, and all the Obsidians in their heavy armor with their electronic joints and helmets and air filtration units, are slapped in the face with the Middle Ages.

But Holiday and Trigg’s antiques still work. They stalk forward out of the elevator into the stone hall, hunched over their weapons like evil gargoyles. It’s slaughter. Two expert marksmen firing short bursts of archaic slugs at point-blank range into squads of defenseless Grays in wide halls. There is no cover to take. Flashes in the corridor. Gigantic sounds of high-powered rifles. Rattling my teeth. I freeze in the elevator till Holiday shouts at me, and I rush after Trigg, hauling Victra behind me.

Three Obsidians go down as Holiday lobs an antique grenade. Whooomph. A hole opens in the ceiling. Plaster rains. Dust. Chairs and Coppers fall through the hole from the room above, crashing down into the fray. I hyperventilate. A man’s head kicks back. Body spins to the ground. A Gray flees for cover down a stone hall. Holiday shoots her in the spine. She sprawls like a child slipping on ice. Movement everywhere. An Obsidian charges from the side.

I fire the pistol, aim horrible. The bullets skitter off his armor. Two hundred kilograms of man raises an ionAxe, its battery dead, but edge still keen. He ululates his kind’s throaty war chant and red mist geysers from his helmet. Bullet through the skull-helm’s eye socket. His body pitches forward, slides. Nearly knocks me off my feet. Trigg’s already moving to the next target, driving metal into men as patiently as a craftsman driving nails into wood. No passion there. No art. Just training and physics.

“Reaper, move your ass!” Holiday shouts. She jerks me down a hall away from the chaos as Trigg follows, hurling a sticky grenade onto the thigh of an unarmored Gold who dodges four of his rifle shots. Whoomph. Bone and meat to mist.

The siblings reload on the run and I just try not to faint or fall. “Right in fifty paces, then up the stairs!” Holiday snaps. “We’ve got seven minutes.”

The halls are eerily quiet. No sirens. No lights. No whir of heated air through the vents. Just the clunk of our boots and distant shouts and the cracking of my joints and the rasping of lungs. We pass a window. Ships, black and dead, fall through the sky. Small fires burn where others have landed. Trams grind to a halt on magnetic rails. The only lights that still run are from the two most distant peaks. Reinforcements with tech will soon respond, but they won’t know what caused this. Where to look. With camera systems and biometric scanners dead, Cassius and Aja won’t be able to find us. That might save our lives.

We run up the stairs. A cramp eats into my right calf and hamstring. I grunt and almost fall. Holiday takes most of my weight. Her powerful neck pressing up against my armpit. Three Grays spot us from behind at the bottom of the long marble stairs. Shoving me aside, she takes two down with her rifle, but the third fires back. Bullets chewing into marble.

“They’ve got gas backups,” Holiday barks. “Gotta move. Gotta move.”

Two more rights, past several lowColors, who stare at me, mouths agape, through marble halls with towering ceilings and Greek statues, past galleries where the Jackal keeps his stolen artifacts and once showed me Hancock’s declaration and the preserved head of the last ruler of the American Empire.

Muscles burning. Side splitting.

“Here!” Holiday finally cries.

We reach a service door in a side hall and push through into cold daylight. The wind swallows me. Icy teeth ripping through my jumpsuit as the four of us stumble out onto a metal walkway along the side of the Jackal’s fortress. To our right, the stone of the mountain surrenders to the modern metal-and-glass edifice above. It’s a thousand-meter drop to our left. Snow swirls around the mountain’s face. Wind howls. We push forward along the walkway till it circles part of the fortress and links with a paved bridge that extends from the mountain to an abandoned landing platform like a skeletal arm holding out a concrete dinner plate covered in snow.

“Four minutes,” Holiday hollers as she helps me struggle across the bridge toward the landing pad. At the end, she dumps me onto the ground. I set Victra down beside me. A hard skin of ice makes the concrete slick and smoky gray. Snowdrifts gather around the waist-high concrete wall that fences in the circular landing pad from the thousand-meter drop.