03 - The Weeping Millions
A QUICK WORD OF INTRODUCTION
Welcome to The Winter Palace. If you’re new to this free, serialized sci-fi fantasy novel, click here to start at the beginning.
So where’re we at in our story?
The battle of Siberia has begun. Our hero, Carmen, fighting against the wicked Glaive Empire, has just launched a moonshot attempt to kidnap The Red Duke Salvador Inness, leader of the Empire.
Running toward an enemy base, traversing a wall of gunfire, her next step could be her last . . .
The Weeping Millions
With everything in her, from the darkest pit in her heart, she ran. She was a gazelle, the fastest runner of the three by far; she’d make it at least five seconds before the other two.
The Whistlers hit their mark: soft orange flashes burst on the horizon, followed by massive booms. They’d keep the soldiers on the base too busy to shoot back…
Can’t stop.
A cloud of dust erupted ten feet in front of her — a mortar? She plunged through it. The dirt and snow flew into her eyes; she kept them open.
Can’t stop to see if I’m blind.
Bright dashes whistled over her head, then drifting, slowly danced toward the sky: tracers from a machine gun turret, its gunner missing spectacularly.
Can’t stop to ask if I’m still alive.
Dash-Dash-Dash’s volley of Whistlers popped and boomed in the distance ahead.
Great Scott. For two Whistler salvos to strike successfully was a miracle.
The Glaive base — what she could make out — was a smoking mess.
A thousand yards away —
She kicked her foot right under a bramble and was thrust face-first into the snow.
Psst. Psst. Psst. Psst. Snow was tossed up all around her… they were firing back. She jumped up, wiped the wet from her eyes, ignored the sharp burn on her face. She took a step, and it was as if her femur had transformed into a double-edged sword: searing, acute pain from top to bottom.
She planted her heel into the ground as hard as she could — she needed that pain right now. Move!
No time…
She ran, hoping her leg would work itself out.
Rounds impacted the ground, all of them at least a hundred feet away. They didn’t know what they were shooting at yet.
Carmen wiped her eye, scanned the horizon for her target. The Red Duke was on his knees, alone, his palms covering his ears. Fifty feet to the Duke’s right, a grey-streaked mech wobbled, its pilot still incapacitated by the flash-bang rockets.
Her field of vision transformed into bright orange lines; the snow exploded. She glanced up, kept running — it was the plane they had seen earlier, the Lisunov, tracer rounds spewing from a hole in its passenger door. It was too low to keep up that rate of fire; the plane disappeared behind a tower.
Probably a nearer miss than I thought.
Smack! Her feet hit the pavement as she ran toward the Duke.
Fifty yards —
Salvador Innes, the Duke, lean and broad-shouldered, now walked in circles, trying to open a black leather gun holster at his hip. She saw him undo the clasp, revealing the black rubber hilt of his famous nickel-plated Makarov. It was engraved by Mossimo, gifted to the Duke the day he had conquered Glaive. She got in range, jumped, roundhoused, was pretty sure she knocked his jaw out of joint when she connected.
He twisted, fell, landed on the palms of both hands, jumped back up surprisingly fast, but she was ready. She drew her Ka-bar, and she brought it down through his shoulder patch. The first sound she heard was hisa scream, throaty and deep, ashen and horrific. She let go of the knife and palmed the hilt as hard as she could, jamming it deeper, then punched it with a closed fist. His face went purple.
She hit a valve on her right arm, let pressure escape to a fentanyl ejector that tubed through her arm.
Pop! Pop! Pop! A rifle report, less than ten feet away, but Carmen recognized it: it was Dash-Dash-Dash’s M1. She turned around and saw a pair of Glaive soldiers drop to the ground. Dash-Dash-Dash’s hawk-eyes were on her. He screwed a grenade on to the end of its barrel.
“The mech!” he shouted.
A low-pitched whir from the T-990… its torso swung toward them. She looked at its pilot, blank-eyed through yellow-tinted goggles. It was like a moment her dad had once described: when a baseball player takes a swing at the ball, connects, and knows instantly that the ball is headed for the stands. She lifted her rifle and put a round through the pilot’s forehead, his face immediately obscured by spider-webbing in the glass cockpit.
Dash-Dash-Dash turned to her slowly, amazed at her marksmanship.
“The roof, over there,” she pointed. “Then get in that 990!”
In the distance, behind the Duke, a two-story cement building — a head popped up on its roof. The man wore a black-and-blue cap of the Glaive Air Force; she could even make out the red star in its center. The airman lifted something… a tripod-mounted machine gun.
They won’t shoot the Red Duke and me together, she thought.
Dash-Dash-Dash angled his rifle upward and shot the grenade toward the building. A dusty explosion on the first floor… a complete miss.
“Where’s Adam?” Carmen shouted.
“I don’t know. Dead?” Dash-Dash-Dash shrugged, jumping onto the still-running T-990.
She tried to put it out of her head, sensed a movement behind her, swung around, and windmilled the Red Duke as he attempted to rush her. He hit head-first on the pavement.
For a moment, even if she and the team were all gunned down, she had a moment she could take pleasure in. Hurting him. Taking him to his knees.
Carmen pulled a small PVC tube from her belt, held it high, and pressed a button that shot a bright green signal flare into the air. She checked her watch as Salvador Innes rolled over, holding his head.
“Rescue me!” the Red Duke yelled to the sky, to no one.
His first words, Carmen thought. are cries for help.
The Duke’s ride came: the building behind them, the one with the machine gunner, burst open. Through it plowed the burning remains of the the Lisunov airplane that had strafed Carmen moments before. The plane dragged along the ground, skidding, spinning, pulling apart, disintegrating into hellfire.
Carmen walked toward the Red Duke, the fentanyl tube in her right arm at the ready, and pulled a small gas mask from her belt.
A thud from behind her… it was Dash-Dash-Dash — in her mind she could call him Michael again — tossing the dead mech pilot onto the pavement.
She smiled, walked to Innes, stood over him, took a moment of self-satisfied victory.
“You launched… flare…” he said to her, kicking a leg on the ground, trying to drag himself on his back away from her. “Why?”
“So they know where not to shoot,” Carmen said.
Before the Duke could ask who she meant, the sky was covered in silver flying fish — American F-86 Sabres. They were gleaming stainless steel accented with bright yellow stripes, massive black air intakes where their noses should be. They flew low, launched rockets, dropped newfangled cluster bombs that shredded the air strip’s pavement. Structures exploded, the airfield’s tower shattered from top to bottom, a dozen Tu-49s bomber planes on the horizon burst like bubbles, 20mm cannon fire sent sparks leaping thirty feet into the air. The Glaive base had become a wall of fire.
“Hear me, Duke Salvador Innes, the man who would be master of the world,” Carmen said, reciting a script she’d composed in her daydreams.
He scooted back.
She set her rifle on the ground.
“I am the weeping millions — the men, the women, the children. I am my mother, my father, my sisters, my cousins, my country.”
The words came from memory, involuntary, symbolic.
Behind them, the roar of the remaining mech’s minigun. Dash-Dash-Dash — she could call him Michael again — sprayed bullets into the fire, the T-990’s cockpit hanging open.
The Duke kicked back, away from Carmen. The hilt of the knife in his shoulder caught on the pavement. He shrieked.
Carmen straddled him, put her free hand around his throat.
“You warlord, you Antichrist.”
The mask went on her face. She released her grip on his throat. She aimed her right palm at him, then sprayed the fentanyl gas just as he gasped for breath. He inhaled, croaked, went to sleep.
She shot up a second flare — green for success. The silverfish disappeared from the sky, replaced by a half dozen A-14 Havoc Gyrocopters. Four were escorts, two were transports.
One A-14, its nose painted with a green dragon, landed a hundred yards from them, bounced twice, and came to a stop in the field Carmen had just run through. She picked up her rifle and held it skyward as the Army Rangers approached.
She looked for signs of Adam — nothing. She’d hand over the Duke, then look for her teammate. She couldn’t leave without him.
But they had the Duke.
Alive.
She had him.
— — —
Hi all, this is a chapter from a novel I’m serializing online called, The Winter Palace. If you like it, I hope you’ll subscribe. I’ll post a chapter a week.
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