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  ONE MAN’S WAR

  ©2019 STEVEN SAVILE

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

  Published by Aethon Books LLC.

  All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property of the author and Aethon Books.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. TEMPTING FATE

  II. The Death Of Fate

  III. Twist Of Fate

  IV. Tempted Fate

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Prologue

  There is no good way to prepare yourself to die.

  But that’s what we did every time we took on a gig. We made peace with the fact that there’s every chance one of the crew wouldn’t make it out. That’s one of the reasons they paid us the big bucks. Randall Fate is the other one. Or was the other one. It was hard to think of him being gone, especially because of some stupid, stupid mistake. If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him. Seriously. He shouldn’t have been making rookie mistakes. He wasn’t some wet behind the ears kid. He was the best of us. Him dying was like a punch in the dick.

  It had all started to unravel when the four of us went into Africa to hit Akachi Corp for GenX. It was supposed to be a simple in-and-out, no hanging around. Minimal risk. Fate had done the recce and had it all worked out. We trusted him. He was the man with the plan.

  Now he’s the man in the box they’re shoveling dirt onto.

  It’s not exactly a poetic end, but live by violence, die by violence. It’s the only way.

  I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to come. I really didn’t want to. I was done with him long before the gig went south. He was bad news. That’s why I went for the compromise. I could see the graveside but wasn’t there with Martagan and Swann pretending to be broken-hearted. I lurked beneath a weeping willow, off in the shadows of the crematorium’s furnace. They couldn’t see me. As far as they were concerned, I’d flaked and was out of my mind in one of the district’s Beetle dens. I’ve always figured it got the name Beetle because it makes your skin crawl on the comedown. In truth, they wouldn’t have been far off. I wasn’t in a good place and hadn’t been since before Africa. I’d been looking for a way out. That’s the thing about this life, the bigger the job, the more money it paid and the greater the likelihood of failure. Our crew had a good reputation. We’d done some profile jobs. No one wanted to go up against us. But that becomes a problem, too. You never want to be the best gunslinger in town. When you are, all the young punks come looking to take you down, but that’s how reputations are made. It was no different when we were starting out. Fate identified the kind of crews we wanted to go up against to make our name, then made sure we tendered for the right jobs.

  It should have been raining.

  It was supposed to rain at these things.

  It wasn’t supposed to be bright sunlight.

  Sweat crept down the back of my neck and gathered at the base of my spine, sticky and uncomfortable.

  I’d never realized the old man was religious, but they gave him a proper send-off, black-clad priest, prayers and promises of the afterlife and all. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down, eventually. Martagan stooped over the hole in the ground and tossed a handful of dirt inside. Whatever she said didn’t carry to my hiding place. I knew I should just go over there, make my peace with everyone and move on, but I never got the chance.

  The first gunshot rang out.

  For a moment Martagan seemed to teeter on the edge of the open grave, then whatever threads held her to this life were severed, and she went down.

  They came out of the shadows. Four men. They moved fast, with military precision. They broke right and left, dividing Swann’s focus. Not that he could’ve done anything. The second shot took him in the knee. He clutched at the shattered joint, screaming. There’s nothing in the world like the sound of a gunshot. It sends a cold chill right to the listener’s core with a promise of what that crack is delivering. Four more shots came in quick succession, their reports echoing around the canyon of the cemetery and out, hitting the high glass walls of the skyscrapers overlooking the bone garden. His body jerked and twisted, kept up momentarily by the bullets. A single shot to the left shoulder turned him one way, one in his right jerked him back the other way a split-second later another to the gut doubled him up for the coup de grâce, a headshot, put him down.

  I couldn’t move.

  I wanted to.

  Honestly.

  But I couldn’t.

  It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had, that was the grim reality of it, so I stood there, still half-hidden by shadows, and watched my friends die. I felt sick. I had to get out of there, but before I could, I made a second hit squad, meaning eight men had been sent to take us out. It was flattering in a way. There were only three of us. With surprise, they should have ended us in five seconds flat. Making their move as Martagan said her goodbyes was smart. She never saw it coming, and Swann didn’t have time to react. They had a sniper up on the rooftop of the lowest building overlooking the cemetery covering the one gate into the place. Another spotter had taken up position behind one of the mausoleums. The light reflected off his rifle’s sight. It was a rookie mistake. That just made the fact that his bullet was the one that took out Martagan all the more insulting. It’s one thing to die at the hands of a stone-cold killer, it’s another to be taken out by an amateur. She’d have absolutely hated that.

  They had all the angles covered. If I’d tried to do something, they would have cut me down before I’d made it halfway across the graveyard. And I couldn’t leave. All I could do was watch as one of them stood over Swann, placed the barrel of their gun against his forehead and delivered a double-tap, opening up a baseball-sized hole in the back of his skull. They weren’t taking any chances. His body twitched for a couple of seconds, and then that was that. My entire crew wiped out in the time it took to say ‘forgive me, father, for I have sinned.’ Not that I was in the mood for confessing anything.

  That was when I realized they’d never have made their move if they didn’t know I was in there.

  I looked down and saw the red dot in the middle of my chest.

  Part One

  TEMPTING FATE

  Fate played his hand.

  The first card he laid down was the family one. I knew it was coming. He was like a broken record.

  “Come on, Guerra, we’re brothers. We’re in this together.”

  “Don’t say all for one or any of that crap, Randall.”

  “The money’s good,” he said.

  “The money was good last time. Ask me if that makes the colossal screw-up any easier to take. Go on, ask me.”

  Fate shook his head. “I don’t need to. I get it. I do. But I’m asking you to trust me. Can you do that? Can you trust me?”

  “No.” Honest and to the point. I’ve never been big on bullshit. It wastes a lot of time. The stunt he’d pulled in Rio had angered a lot of people. That, by itself, wouldn’t have been so bad, but he’d committed one of the cardinal sins: he’
d got wind of a gig going down in the city and put us between the contractors hired by the corporation to do the job and their prize, effectively poaching the gig and then holding the corp to ransom. Not big. Not clever.

  We were in Fate’s place on the thirty-second floor of the Wan Chai plaza with a view of the sky church across the square. No one was looking out through the windows. There were fifty-two floors above us and a communications mast that could have tickled the Divine’s ballsack if he bent over. We are talking prime real estate. Fate picked the place up at north of thirty million, one for each floor.

  Lisl Martagan wasn’t watching. She only had eyes for the monarch butterfly that had somehow gotten loose in the atrium and was fluttering from place to place, never landing for long. She tracked it across the room, watching its shadow flit across the wall, before anticipating where it would land next and splitting it in two with a deft backhanded flick of the wrist that sent a small silver star on its lethal trajectory. I knew better than to expect the butterfly to fly off. Martagan didn’t miss. Ever. She didn’t see me looking at her. She looked good, not sexy, not pretty, just good. Dangerous. Martagan wore her silver-white hair close-cropped, the fringe feathered across her forehead, accentuating her sharp features and sharper nose. She looked like a woman you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

  “Think about it,” she said, not looking at me. “You owe it to him, Marco.”

  She always called me Marco, not Guerra. We’d had a thing once, back in New Delhi. It had been her doing. So had ending it. She stopped short of calling it a mistake, but it was the kind of mistake I’d happily have made a second time.

  Swann put his ZEK-39 on the glass table and spun it with his index finger, halfway between a game of spin the bottle and Russian roulette. “I’m with Guerra. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s hot out there. We should wait ’til it cools down a bit.”

  He wasn’t talking about the weather.

  “He’s got a point,” I said. “The smart thing to do would be to lie low for a while. There’re a lot of people out there who aren’t very happy with us. People who happen to have an awful lot of money and aren’t used to having things not go their way.” There were a few too many negatives in that sentence, but everyone knew what I meant.

  “We can handle whatever they throw at us,” Fate assured me.

  And he genuinely believed that.

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “We shouldn’t have to. If we’re taking a job, we need to be one hundred percent focused on it, not sleeping with one eye open or looking back over our shoulders as we go in. That’s how mistakes get made. I’m not happy about this.”

  “Duly noted,” Fate said. “But it’s a good job. It’s simple. And they’re willing to pay top dollar because it’s us. Because we are that good.”

  They call people like us Bleeders. We bleed for our corporate paymasters, literally, not in some sort of glorified romantic sense of loyalty. It’s an insult, not a term of endearment, but we’ve laid claim to it. I’ll happily call myself a Bleeder, after all, we’re paid to be shot at and cut up, fragged and generally battered until we’re shitting blood. It’s not exactly pretty. Because of that, reputations count for a lot in this game. You’re only as good as your last gig. Ours had been an utter bollocks job, to be honest, but we’d still got it done which is more than a lot of crews might have done. We’ve got a saying in this game: any gig you can walk away from is a good gig. That’s pushing it a bit, but for anyone keeping score that meant we were batting forty-nine not out. From the outside looking in we were that good. You didn’t last long if you weren’t. It wasn’t just about fancy apartments and fast cars. Sometimes something as simple as staying alive was a good way of measuring a crew’s success.

  “Talk me through it,” I said. “But I’m not making any promises.”

  “The job’s in Africa. It’s a simple in-and-out, no hanging around. GenX are offering us double our usual fee because they want the best, and in case you haven’t noticed, that’s us, my grumpy friend. They’ve got us covered for a drop ship into Akachi Corp territory. Our target’s a lab where they’ve been developing some sort of hybrid chip. Our guy at GenX wants it because he thinks he can reverse engineer the tech to use in some new process they’ve been developing to overwrite personalities for the Justice Department. Ours is not to wonder why.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Overwriting personalities? Sure, I could see the argument for protecting the populace and ordinary decent people having nothing to fear, but the reality was a handful of corporations ruled the world, not governments, not royalty, and their only loyalty is to the shareholders. Piss off the wrong corporate master, and they schedule you for a rewrite? No thank you. The world’s going in directions I don’t like. There’s the augmentation brigade, the transhumans who believe they’re more machine than man and visit back-street chop shops of illegal operations to switch out pesky human parts for robotic replacements. There’s a brisk trade in body parts. Call me old fashioned, but I kinda like the idea of being the only one who can get inside my head and see what I’m really thinking. We’re not talking PG-13 thoughts most of the time, for starters. Giving the corporations access to my innermost fetishes and those dark midnight thoughts where I dream about settling a few old scores with a good old oxy-acetylene torch? Hell no. I’d be first in line for a rewrite.

  “We’ll need to breach their security, which is where Swann comes in,” he offered a self-deprecating smile. “Then once we’re inside it’s a case of locating the biochem labs and finding the prototype chip, then we make like shepherds and get the flock out of there.”

  “You make it sound easy,” I said, wryly.

  I should have known better.

  Nothing in this life is easy.

  We made the rendezvous point at oh six hundred hours. The transport was waiting for us on the hard stand. An Anaconda X-11, about forty thousand kilos of steel, vertical take-off thrusters, capable of low earth orbit. It was more than just a plane. It was a flying fortress. “I see we’re going for the element of surprise,” I joked.

  Fate scratched that little patch of skin behind his ear. He did that when he was nervous—meaning he’d been holding something back. Looking at the Anaconda’s cargo bay doors, I had a sinking feeling.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “We’re good.”

  “I’m not entirely sure we are.”

  “No. We are. You have my word.” He might as well have said he had diamond mine he wanted to sell me. I knew when he was spinning.

  Swann came wandering over. He moved well for a man with a broken back. That was because of the exospine he was wearing. It was like a giant millipede that had anchored itself on his back, teeth sunk into the base of his neck, tapping into the brain stem. He controlled it with his mind. No one would guess he’d been paraplegic for fifteen years, his spine unilaterally severed between the T8 and T9 vertebrae. The exospine dispensed carefully regulated pain meds, too. He owed his life to tech developed by GenX in Brazil, meaning he owed his life to GenX. We never talked about what happened. I knew it was my fault. He knew it was my fault. We’d long since made peace with it.

  I saw the spare chute in his hand, his own already on his back.

  Thermal goggles hung around his neck. He had his ZEK-39 strapped to his thigh and a G1 Jackal assault rifle to complete the ensemble. Very much the chosen look for the mercenary about town in the 22nd Century. The scary thing was even with the frag grenades I knew he was packing it wasn’t overkill. We were going to need all the firepower we could muster no matter what Fate reckoned.

  “Please tell me we’re not jumping out of that thing?”

  Fate smiled at me.

  The bastard.

  “Don’t think of it as jumping so much as hurtling toward the ground if that helps?”

  Swann laughed. He was enjoying himself. He knew I wasn’t good with heights.

  I shook my head. “That’s the p
oint. We’re talking about four maybe five minutes completely exposed up there. It’s a long way down, and we’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “Oh, yea of little faith, Marco,” Fate said, still grinning. He held out his hand like a magician doing a reveal. In the middle of his palm was a small black puck with a small pressure plate in the center. A cloaking pack. “We free-fall for sixty seconds, then trigger this bad boy when we deploy the parachutes. No one will see us coming.”

  I didn’t want to point out the obvious flaw in his plan, but I felt obligated to. “You do know that those things don’t negate our thermal signature, right? And even if they shield us from the naked eye, they won’t make us invisible to the equipment and sensors Akachi will have watching the skies.”

  “It’ll do what we need it to do, besides we’re not dropping right on top of them,” Fate said, stubbornly. I was seriously getting fed up with his pig-headedness these days. He was starting to believe his own press. Always a mistake. How many death certificates should have had hubris written on them as the cause of death? I was seconds from walking away. I really should have. You get a sense for when jobs are bad. We’re not talking flashing lights and sirens. It’s subtler than that. But when you’ve been around the block as many times as I have, you can just tell when something’s rotten. It’s got its own unique stench. And this, this reeked.

  But I got on that plane because we were a team.

  Still.

  Just.

  We buckled up.

  Long gone are the days of that thundering charge along the runway to get airborne. Now the pilot simply sets the vertical thrusters to take-off, and it’s like going up in a great glass elevator. There are a couple of gut-wrenching seconds when the buildings of the city lurch away beneath you, then it’s only sky, up and up, a cacophony fit to raise the dead never mind forty thousand kilos of steel. Up, up and away.