The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

both eliminated, Michael needed a new destination. Now. And they had to land quickly enough to abandon ship and take defensive positions before the assassins caught up. It seemed impossible.

Time to take charge, Rikard told him before the evacuation. Lead these people to safety. Kill the enemy until you can’t.

Therein lay the solution. It turned his blood frigid, but he wasn’t going to lose these pursuers, and he needed to give his people a fighting hope.

I’m a sorry pilot, but I know how to kill people. He glanced aft. We all do, more or less. He worried about Helene Yaffetz, the Pynn cook who joined the Solomons on a whim. Did she even know how to fire a laser pistol?

“Listen up, folks,” Michael said. “Bigtime change of plans. I can’t make blind flight, and we got twelve minutes till these assholes blow us out of the sky. We’ll never make the rendezvous. We’re gonna have to make a stand. I’m sorry.”

Amid the groans and panicked stares, Maya Fontaine maintained the same placid tone that comforted him during their mountain exile.

“It’s OK, Michael. You did your best. What are our options?”

“We’ve gotta land, get as far away from this ship as we can, and force them to come after us on the ground.”

Carlos unmoored himself from the still-seat and came forward, along with Maya and one other.

“If we ditch right now,” Carlos said, “where will that put us?”

“Somewhere between nowhere and ass-end of nowhere.”

Carlos studied the aerial topography map.

“In other words, we fight these bastards in the forest in the middle of the night. Might even up the odds.”

“The cover of darkness,” Maya said, “can be a weapon.”

A new male voice entered the fray. “But most of us will surely die,” said Nell Kusugak, who accompanied Michael on the ill-fated scouting trip to the outpost perimeter earlier that afternoon. “We will have no support, little real hope of eliminating the enemy. If we do win, it will be by attrition. There are ten hours of darkness ahead of us. We must be practical.”

“I’m down with practical,” Michael said. “Anything in mind, Nell?”

Nell, a descendant of the last tribal family never to migrate to Inuit Kingdom, raced his hands through the holofields and pointed to a new destination a hundred kilometers west.

“Harrisboro Prefecture. We can make it in less than eight minutes.”

Carlos acted as if Nell grew an extra eye. “A city? There’s more than a million people there. We’ll be too exposed.”

Michael realized how stupid he was to overlook this option.

“Dude, seriously. You’re brilliant, Nell. Sure. Harrisboro has a Solomon cell and a weapons locker. When Rikard was listing the NAC cells, he made a point about the underground being strong there. Enough weapons to equip a small damn army.”

Carlos winced. “Not bad, but are they in hiding? Will they help us?”

“If they don’t, dude, then they don’t believe in what we’re fighting for. Ain’t no point in hiding anymore. The damn Guard’s gonna be on Earth any time now.” He turned to Nell.

“You know anybody in Harrisboro?”

“A woman. We go back many years. If she’s still alive and I can stream to her, she’ll see it done.”

Michael saw one possible course, and he intended to give these people the best chance to survive the night.

“One thing,” he told them. “If Harrisboro is thick with our fighters, then there’s bound to be a few assassins already there.”

Maya hummed a short tune Michael didn’t recognize.

“The city is our best chance,” she said. “The most places to hide, easiest access to tech and personnel. So long as we also understand this: We will almost certainly cause civilian deaths.”

“Not if we’re careful,” Michael replied. “Street fighting is nasty shit. Back on first Earth, there were these civil wars where dudes pretty much wasted whole cities. People buried under rubble. A fucking nightmare. We focus on our enemy, it won’t come to that. Nell, try streaming your friend. Tell her we’re riding in hot. I’ll pull up the Harrisboro schematics. Link her into me, and I’ll do the rest.”

Nell returned aft to work his magic, but Michael committed to the plan, support or not. Fighting in the streets, hiding in the sewers, sniping from third-floor windows … it all seemed surreal. Like the battles he saw on cable news from Syria, Iraq, and northern African countries whose names he couldn’t keep straight. Those fighters always struck him as equal parts heroic and suicidal. What did they ever truly accomplish? How many innocent lives did they take with them in defeat?

No. This wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. If they drew out the partisans in Harrisboro, and word spread to other hesitant cells … would the Admiralty reconsider? Surely, they’d never drop energy slews on Chancellor cities.

He calculated a new course and turned to Maya and Carlos.

“Settle in. Soon as we land, we high tail from this bad boy with every gun we got. This shit is gonna get ugly real fast.”

Michael told Carlos to hold up before returning to his still-seat.

“Listen, dude. About that shit you pulled at the creek this afternoon. I came this fucking close to shooting you myself.”

“Michael, he was …”

“No, he wasn’t. He was a goddamn pawn, and you knew it. I got no problem when you kill the enemy. But we ain’t about to waste innocent people. Killing the bad guys is one thing, but we gotta draw the line. I’m drawing the line. Rikard put me in charge. We can’t be like the Chancellors. You get my speed?”

Carlos turned red-faced. “I do, Michael, but this is war. We can’t always play nice.”

“No, we can’t. But what we do out there has to mean something, or we die for nothing. I’ll be at your side, dude. You’re my brother in this