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

it in her probing, arrogant eyes: He had become her equal. A soldier of the Guard, civil rights on par with Chancellors. And perhaps worst of all: Every bit as adept at killing. This simply would not do. Not for Rachel.

Michael wasn’t surprised when she propositioned him. He took satisfaction in her confusion when he accepted without hesitation. He whispered in her ear, “I slept with a Chancellor for two years. You won’t be a step up.”

She wasn’t, but she was good enough that he came back for more. It wasn’t like with Sam. Not ever. But Michael needed those interludes. To breathe. To relax. To forget.

*

The possibility of more such moments – and the hope of looking into Sam’s eyes one more time – steeled Michael for this fifteenth assault by Mongols. He studied the formations of the advancing enemy, listened to the chatter among his team, and realized that something was off this morning. The formation was new, yes, but the body language was …

Now it made sense. He reviewed them again, waited for the order to fire, and thought over the previous fourteen incursions. It was their eyes. Their fucking eyes. He opened an audio stream.

“They’re playing with us,” he said. “They haven’t looked up. Not once. They’re staring at the ground.”

“What are you suggesting?” Nilsson replied.

“They know we’re watching. They’ve seen how we operate. If they show us their eyes, they’ll give themselves away. They always have. We’ve talked about it. They’re scared shitless. Not this time.”

“I believe our newb is right,” Rachel said, her voice dripping in the usual level of condescension. “They have a secret they don’t wish to tell us. Order to fire?”

Nilsson didn’t have a chance to give the command. Lt. Percy Muldoon’s excited voice interrupted.

“Cud! Where did these come from? I’m seeing movement across the northern and southern perimeters. Identifying …”

Michael didn’t have to wait: These Mongols needed to die now.

“Mountain rifters,” Percy said. “Twelve. Three occupants each. They’re coming in from …”

Too late. As the low hum of the personal hover transports echoed through the cedar forest and across the ridge, the three columns of Mongol foot soldiers dispersed in a blink, and three targets became two dozen, all disappearing into brush or behind boulders.

Nilsson didn’t have to say it for Michael to understand: The Mongols adapted at last. They calculated the precise distance at which their enemy would fire and timed both the arrival of their rifters and their own dispersal to the very edge of their extinction.

So much for religious fanatics. This time, they came prepared to kill. As Michael reared up from his protected position and prepared to advance, he did so with the rising concern that this victory was not as certain as all the others.

2

M ICHAEL DIDN’T NEED AN ORDER to know they couldn’t stay here. The ridgeline offered a superior view of the cedar forest and the enemy on foot, but as soon as the team opened fire, they would expose their positions to a flighted enemy. Mountain rifters were both fast and flexible. The high-forest clans had used them for generations.

Nilsson’s order came as no surprise. The flanks – Michael, Rachel Broadman, Kal Carver, Percy Muldoon – were ordered to engage the ground enemy while pulling away as many rifters as they could. The others would hold position outside the base’s sealed entrance and take on the bulk of the rifters. The math wasn’t good, but Michael didn’t care. He clicked on his gravmod boots and remembered how the math insisted he should be dead already.

He mapped his target from inside the DR29 and raised himself into a forward stance, ready to leap. The blast rifle, more than eight hundred flash pegs ready to discharge from a rotating cylinder, wrapped over his right arm. His weapon of choice, the Ingmar Pulse Gun, Model 16, sat firmly gripped in his left hand. The Ingmar served him well on Earth, and Michael refused to part with it until someone took it off his corpse.

“Broadman, Muldoon, Carver, Cooper.” Nilsson laid out his orders. “Execute High Cone. Dispersion fire. Light them up.”

Michael leaped from the ridge and maintained a steady jog as the gravmod boots kept him aloft. Descending at thirty degrees, he kept his eyes on the tree line and the wide, shapely branch where he intended to land. His DR29 followed the approaching targets.

Two rifters approached from the north, laser blasts incoming. He prepared to feel the searing burn, his body armor consuming most – but not all – of the hits. Handheld weapons were firing from secured positions down below. Few would hit their target. He was moving too fast against a pale sky, a deadly shadow in red and gray. And yet, he wasn’t invulnerable. A direct hit on the transition coil at the base of his helmet might kill him instantly. If his gravmod boots took simultaneous hits, he would fall a hundred feet. He doubted these Mongols had such precision, but Nilsson was right: These animals might stumble into a fit of luck.

The first time he practiced this maneuver, Michael remembered the day he, Sammie, and Jamie crossed the Interdimensional Fold and beheld soldiers of the Guard leaping from a Scramjet, descending as if on invisible stairs. Then, he was awestruck. The first time he practiced it, Michael felt like a god. It was a rollercoaster ride that was better than advertised.

Now, he just wanted to kill these bastards and move one day closer to holding Sam in his arms again. He reconfigured his body to respond to enemies arriving from all directions, like Rachel and Maj. Nilsson trained him aboard Praxis.

*

“Never allow your eyes to do all the work,” Nilsson told him in the third week of his training. “This is the mistake we see from the indigos. Not only