Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2) by Kevin Ikenberry (any book recommendations txt) 📕

This Yukannak, where does he live? Who knows him? Where is he going?

Aliza tried to quiet the questions in her mind and merely observe him from a distance. He might be no one, but a feeling in her gut made her press on.

The outsider left the bazaar and made his way toward the dwellings tucked beneath the eaves of the cavern. Aliza followed him at a distance. Soon they approached a staircase cut into the stone. Aliza saw with mild astonishment that the guards who typically manned every checkpoint into tunnels and dwellings were conspicuously absent. It was an opportunity she could not pass up. Careful to stay a good hundred feet behind the man, Aliza followed him up the stairs and among the dwellings.

If the dichotomy between the Outer City and the Inner City struck her, these dwellings almost froze her in place. While the exterior walls of the buildings were rough, the interior streets and what she could see of the surrounding dwellings displayed opulence on a scale she’d never seen before. The shaded lanes held none of the trash and detritus of the other parts of the city. Everything else on R’Bak was at least somewhat dirty, and yet these dwellings, far inside Imsurmik, were almost spotless.

There were two streets running the length of the dwellings, paralleling the inner cavern wall in a gentle arc about a half-mile in length. Intersecting streets, perpendicular to the cavern wall, were evenly spaced and framed the predominantly two-story buildings into an orderly array of rectangles. The outsider ducked around the first set of buildings, making for the inner thoroughfare. Aliza came around the same corner and watched him open the door of the second, innermost building and walk inside.

Got you.

Satisfied, Aliza turned around to retrace her steps to the staircase. At the bottom of the rough-cut stone, she saw the dark-haired boy and two older soldiers. The boy pointed excitedly at her.

Shit.

Aliza spun on her heels and made for the inner thoroughfare and, potentially, the tunnels beyond. She risked a look over her shoulder and saw the two soldiers in pursuit. The entrance to a tunnel appeared between two of the buildings on the inner wall.

Aliza ran for that dark opening.

Aliza discovered she was not in a tunnel, but at the top of a spiral stone staircase that went down into the plateau’s cavern system. At the top of the stairwell, tucked into a winding crevice, was a tight maze of tilting and toppled trash bins. Instead of descending the stairs, she slipped over, around, and past them into the concealing darkness beyond. Squatting down, she pulled one of the mostly empty bins farther back to fully shield her presence. She pulled a loose lid over her, and her head rested on her knees as she waited for her pursuers to—hopefully—pass.

Only a few seconds passed before footsteps approached and raced down the stairs. The soldiers didn’t bother to investigate the bins, either because the clutter looked too tight to wriggle into, or because of the noxious odors of what seemed to be the local equivalent of a composting site. Aliza smiled to herself. For her, the smell wasn’t terrible. She’d smelled far worse in Dachau, after all.

In the darkness under her hood, she glanced at the luminescent hands of her watch. The time was a little after what they called 1800 hours. She took a deep breath and raised her head off her knees to listen and wait. Over the course of the next hour and a half, as the cold, stone floor chilled and seemingly prodded her “fourth point of contact” as Bo called it, only six people used the stairs. They’d come at nearly precise thirty minute intervals and always in pairs. Patrols. Possibly searching for her. And there was no sign that they might relent.

Aliza leaned her head back down and wondered how, or even if, she could escape. Or if Bo’s attack would succeed. Or if, even now, Harvester ships were approaching silently, fatefully through space. In the end, Aliza decided she could only be sure of one thing regarding her existence on R’Bak:

It was better than Dachau. Infinitely better.

She listened for the patrols and hoped for the best.

* * * * *

Chapter Seven

Plateau Above Imsurmik

Moving through the dark didn’t sit well with Lieutenant Johnny Stewart. With a military occupational specialty of 11C, indirect fire infantryman, he’d only had to hump a few night patrols before moving to the battalion’s fire control center. Math came easy to the young soldier, and he was one of the few to really have his talents identified once in-country. Mortarmen still patrolled occasionally, though, and when he’d made sergeant, the cadre had tasked him to help train the replacements—especially in night patrolling.

Each walk through the lightless jungle had been more fearful than the last. During his earliest days as a new replacement to the unit—what the older and more experienced troops called an FNG, or fucking new guy—night patrols hadn’t really bothered him. He was more concerned about how his peers regarded him and not so much about the enemy hiding in the darkness.

But by the third or fourth time he went out on patrol, Stewart was scared to death. The dark and unfamiliar rainforest was full of noises far different from anything he’d heard on the family farm outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Stories and gossip ran rampant through the ranks as more and more units were engaged by the Viet Cong under the cover of night.

Mortars didn’t put him as far behind the line as he’d hoped, either. Patrols became necessary. Even as he progressed in rank and started leading his own fire team, Stewart had still disliked moving in the dark.

Light years from Earth and more than a hundred and some