Department 9 Page 3

  They were the capital’s lunchtime office workers. Kaylingen University lecturers. Tourists.

  Except for one person. There, at a cider stall, was the young human woman Lily had been searching for, seemingly weighing her choice of lunchtime drink.

  Damn! Vetch had been right, after all. The thief had held up her side of the bargain.

  The briefest of glances passed between the two women.

  Lily faced forward and tried to catch Vetch’s attention.

  He was marching at the front, alongside Sward, both looking chunky due to the civilian clothes stuffed under their jackets. His beret wasn’t standard Militia wear, but local cultural norms insisted that uncovered heads were immodest for humanoids of all descriptions.

  Behind them shuffled the young Zhoogene, Carnolin Indoh. Barefoot, head growth on full display, wearing garments more befitting a marathon runner than a convicted criminal, she walked with wrists crossed in front of her.

  They weren’t bound, though. Nor were her ankles shackled as was the usual practice. Not for Carnolin. Not today. That would have proved awkward.

  Enthree and Darant marched behind her, with Lily taking up the rear.

  “Vetch,” she said. “Vetch!”

  He fingered his polished war hammer. Tense. Alert. But completely oblivious to her.

  Typical of the deaf ape.

  “Sward,” she tried, raising her voice a little. “Tell the big lump next to you that our distraction is here.”

  The big sniper tapped Vetch on the shoulder and passed on the message. Thank goodness for the wonders of Zhoogene hearing.

  Unfortunately, the same sensitive ears meant the girl, Carnolin, heard too. First, she tensed in the jerky way of her kind and then she began trembling like green shoots in a breeze.

  Lily found herself trembling as well.

  Am I scared?

  Over in Execution Square, a drumbeat started.

  Don’t be stupid.

  She’d never considered herself brave, and, if she appeared fearless, it was only because she’d been cruising on borrowed time for so long, each second was an unexpected bonus.

  Vetch halted.

  The Restitution Street crowd cheered, misjudging the unexpected stop, thinking the condemned was being presented to them for their pleasure.

  Poor Carnolin shook like a leaf at the howls of derision hurled at her by the degenerate assholes.

  The weird thing was, Lily shook with her.

  The arse-skraggs terrifying this poor girl, she said to herself. Are they so different from others elsewhere in the Federation?

  Many of the condemned who were marched at lunchtime to Execution Square had been set up. The details changed from execution to execution, but the moral example of the Churn never wavered. Facts didn’t matter, only the story. And the story chosen for Carnolin was that of a rich fool, smug in her entitlement, who had to be torn down and made to confess her sins. Publicly. Only then would society be at peace with itself.

  Stripped of the surface details, Carnolin’s story sounded familiar. It was no different than Lily’s.

  She shuddered, flinching at the jeers aimed at Carnolin.

  As far as the sector marshal was concerned, Captain Lily Hjon had committed a heinous transgression against the Militia officer corps. She had dared to honor her vows to serve the people of the Federation.

  Rho-Torkis…Eiylah-Bremah…The sector marshal intended them to be Lily’s public humbling. Vetch and the others were just unfortunate enough to be caught up as support actors.

  That bitch had gotten her convicted as a deserter. How much lower would she have to sink before the marshal decided it was time for the troublesome Lily Hjon to be hanged? Knowing her, the marshal was already lining Lily up to take the fall as a child murderer or some such evil.

  The putrid lies people told themselves to justify their actions.

  Human.

  Zhoogene.

  Littorane.

  Pryxian.

  Gliesan.

  Lily had yet to find a humanoid species that operated any differently.

  More drums began beating in Execution Square, thundering their message through the ground to be picked up by the crowds thronging the road, stamping their feet in time.

  Vetch led the execution party onward.

  In the square, civic scolders awaited their chance to read the condemned’s crimes. A professionally produced holo-vid would be shown in which actors performed the key moments in the concocted bullshit story.

  Which would prove awkward if Carnolin was presented to the baying crowds.

  Because, funnily enough, she wasn’t actually the condemned.

  Not today.

  Carnolin wasn’t even the right species.

  Vetch had a fistful of alternate plans, and all relied on them never making it to Execution Square.

  Lily looked behind her.

  Vetch’s Plan A relied on the girl by the cider stall, walking away and trying to lose herself in the crowd.

  She was the one they were supposed to be escorting to the gallows’ noose. Not Carnolin.

  An explosion ripped through the air, echoing off the four-story buildings to either side of the road and shocking the crowd to instant silence.

  Three bangers left by a master thief inside a barrel of hot cider punch will do that.

  A plume of hot punch erupted high into the air, blowing chunks of citrus fruit and sweet coco-chili roots like a cloud of shrapnel.

  Lily saw no sign of the grateful thief who’d planted the grenades. She had disappeared, her debt to her unlikely rescuers paid in full.

  Lily let the crowd worry about the cider bomb. Her attention was on the buildings looking down on the street.

  Sward had alerted them to the possibility of snipers. Too much silence, he’d said, after the first of their sorry lunchtime escort duties.

  A few days later, Darant had spotted snipers watching over Execution Square.

  Militia? Police? Their allegiance was unknown. Sloppy, though, to allow themselves to be seen.

  Were there any in the street? And would they shoot?

  She scanned the upper levels of the buildings on both sides, her blaster rifle charged, but she was unable to take comfort from that in this hideously exposed position.

  Her body itched to dive behind cover, but to go to ground would be fatal. They had to move quickly. The best way to do that was to mingle with the crowd, but Vetch had been adamant they not use the citizens as shields.

  Lily hadn’t agreed. The sick skraggs lining the road didn’t deserve their protection. The Kaylingeners could go to hell for all she cared.

  “We’re clear,” Vetch bellowed. They all knew it was a highly optimistic assessment. “Go. Go. Go.”

  Eyes still on the phantasm snipers, Lily led the team back the way they’d come.

  “Take cover!” yelled Sward.

  Damn! Knew it’d been too easy.

  Lily threw herself to the ground and rolled beneath a pastry stall, a bullet gouging the street behind her.

  On hands and knees, she scrambled beneath the next stall, praying she was hidden from the sniper’s sight.

  She was.

  Four bullets drilled through the stall behind in a spray of splinters and shredded pastry.

  “What’s going on?” asked a terrified citizen crouching on the ground, blocking her way to the next stall.

  Lily grabbed him by the shoulders and stared into his face. “This is it,” she told him. “It’s the revolution.”

  He looked at her in horror, but, possibly, it was as much the sight of her tattooed face as anything else. The metamorphic ink had ditched the bleeding roses she’d grown accustomed to and replaced them with geometric antlers erupting from her eyes.

  She tore off her beret and pulled up the hood concealed underneath her uniform jacket. It was a risk, but she stuck her head out of cover to check the situation.

  Carnolin was cowering on the ground beneath the cider stall, Dara
nt kneeling over her protectively as he threw blaster bolts up at the buildings overlooking the road from the north.

  Sheltering behind the cover of a broad carjacker tree, Vetch and Enthree joined in with a volley of their own. Already, they had discarded their Militia jackets and berets.

  So too had Sward, who sprinted under the covering fire to join his two comrades behind the tree.

  It looked as though the sniper fire had come from the buildings fronting the broad sidewalk on the north side, but where exactly? She didn’t want to present her back to the buildings on the south side, but if Sward was ignoring them, so would she.

  With her head on the ground, she craned her neck to watch the windows and rooms, looking for a target.

  “What do we do now?” asked an angry voice.

  She had forgotten the citizen sheltering with her. “You stay under cover and leave it to us,” she said vaguely, her mind on the sniper.

  “Come on,” she hissed at the enemy. “We can’t hang around.”

  Movement!

  Fourth story. Third window in from the west end of the street where it entered the square. Slatted wooden shutters were half open, and she saw a Zhoogene with a camera strapped to her head take in the scene below for half a second.

  By the time Lily trained her blaster on the window, the sniper was gone.

  “We’re…we’re surrounded!” wailed the man cowering beside Lily.

  “Stay under cover.”

  “And you’re only Militia. Not real soldiers.”

  Furious, Lily turned back and struck the irritating man a bruising blow on the shoulder with the butt of her rifle. “Stay under fucking cover!”

  He gawked at her, wide-eyed, then broke away, sprinting for a narrow alley that cut through the row of buildings at the far side of Execution Square.

  A rifle shot rang out. The man screamed and stumbled but did not fall.

  This time Lily was faster.

  She put half a charge pack through the sniper’s position. Not the window where she’d seen the Zhoogene, but the next one. Darant fired, and, together, they blasted off the wooden shutters, sending fragments of flaming wood tumbling to the ground, followed by the sniper. The dead man still gripped his PAS-4 sniper rifle, its barrel twisted from the intense heat of their barrage, as he fell into the crowd below.

  By then, Lily had put the other half of her pack through the window where the Zhoogene had appeared. An observer, she assumed.

  Why wasn’t Vetch’s group firing?

  As she swapped in a fresh charge pack, blaster fire blazed from beneath the tree where Vetch, Sward, and Enthree were sheltering. They weren’t aiming at snipers. They were firing in the direction of Execution Square.

  They were answered by angry shouts and a few rifle rounds that pinged off the sidewalk nearby.

  Shit!

  An eerie silence fell upon the street.

  But only for a moment.

  Someone was barking orders a short distance away in the square.

  “Darant! Lily!” Vetch shouted. “Suppress those snipers.”

  Lily squeezed shots into the sniper positions.

  As the screaming bolts of induced plasma lit up the air, Enthree used the cover to run through the cowering crowd, parting it like a laser torch through butter.

  When her insectoid comrade had safely reached the base of the buildings, Lily ceased fire and made a quick decision.

  “I’m not Vetch,” she told a woman ten feet away who was kneeling on the sidewalk with her hands clasped over her head, still clutching a cream-filled pastry.

  The woman looked at her, perplexed.

  “I don’t forgive,” Lily explained. “Not how you’ve treated the condemned like stars in a damned freak show.” She sighted along the entire upper story, unleashing bolts through every window, leaving Darant to fire on the known sniper positions. Maybe enemies were lurking behind those other windows. And maybe they weren’t. Maybe civilians were sheltering there. No matter. Whoever was in those rooms was learning to keep their heads down. That, or they had been shot. Lily didn’t care either way.

  Enthree was fully using all six limbs, gripping onto the vertical surface with her hoof-like hands as she climbed. How someone of her bulk could scale surfaces like a fly was a mystery, but she did. Within twenty seconds, Enthree was level with the sniper positions.

  From Vetch’s tree, her comrades fired another volley west toward Execution Square.

  “Take cover!” screamed a Militia officer.

  Lily chanced a look at what was heading their way from the west.

  Troopers were behind the walls of the archway into the square, risking occasional peeps out of cover to see what was happening in Restitution Street, but not daring to follow up with rifle barrels. Beyond, the citizens were milling about in panic, trying to find a safe route out. Several were climbing ropes hanging down from an upper story.

  She expected to see fresh Militia corpses laid out beneath the arch, but there were no obvious casualties.

  “Idiot,” murmured Lily, aiming her disdain at Vetch who had clearly ordered Sward and Enthree to fire over the heads of their enemy. “We’ve crossed the line. Do you still think, after this, we’ll kiss and make up with the sector marshal over tea and crumpets?”

  Meanwhile, high on the wall in front of her, Enthree had drawn short swords from her back and was bunching up to spring into a shattered window a couple of positions over from the sniper’s post.

  Lily fired three bolts into the room.

  Enthree quickly followed.

  Lily turned around and scanned the buildings behind to the south.

  Something was bothering her, but she wasn’t sure what.

  Then she heard them. Drones!

  They were directed by a Gliesan, kneeling on the roof. He was looking down at her and giving a thumbs up.

  Cheeky blighter!

  She shouldered her rifle and sighted on the drone operator.

  But then she looked again.

  The Gliesan was smartly dressed, in local Kaylingen fashion. He was no Militia trooper.

  “Press,” Lily shouted. “They’re press…Don’t…fire.”

  But Sward already had. The finest shot in Raven Company had obliterated both drones.

  “I know,” he said. “Well done for realizing that with human eyes.”

  “Clear!” Enthree shouted from the scorched opening the sniper had fired out of. “The entire floor is clear.”

  The big Muryani was shaking her head from side to side as she did when excited. She waved her gore-coated short swords.

  “Bloody little insect, aren’t you?” muttered Lily. If it ever came to war with the Muryani, as many insisted it must do one day, the Federation would be utterly screwed.

  She hollered at Darant, “Get the girl out of here. Make this count for something.”

  “Go on!” yelled Vetch. “All of you, follow Darant. I’ll cover you.”

  With Vetch directing fire over the heads of the Execution Square troopers, the others sprinted for the alleyway that threaded through the row of buildings to the north of the street—the exit route they’d planned. Meanwhile, Lily set to work. Fast as she could, she tipped over the sturdiest looking stall tables and turned them ninety degrees, so they faced the attack from the square.

  It didn’t exactly constitute hard cover. The jumble of stalls was more of a baffle to make it unclear where she was firing from, and that might buy her a few seconds. She wasn’t running for the alleyway yet, and when Vetch did, someone needed to cover him.

  She crawled through her cover and sighted the archway through a narrow gap between the tables.

  Looked like the troopers were getting ready to rush them.

  An eager young Zhoogene face filled her scope.

  She took a calm breath and eased back the trigger.

  Damnit!

  At the last instant, she’d lifted the barrel, sending the bolt whining over the youngster’s head, taking his beret with it.


  It wasn’t like taking out the snipers who’d fired on them first. The troopers she was engaging now had been pulling the same execution guard duty as Lily and the others.

  The fact that she’d fired over their heads would make no difference if Lily were ever caught.

  But it mattered to her.

  Bolts screamed out from the friends behind her, aimed at the archway.

  Vetch seized the chance to break for the alley.

  Unfortunately, the Execution Square troopers picked the same moment to gather up their courage and assault.

  Lily fired rounds over their heads, but they had grown wise to the tactic.

  She rolled away and took up a new firing position.

  A fusillade of bullets and blaster bolts lashed the street and its broad sidewalk, shredding the stall tables around Lily in clouds of splinters that ripped through her clothes and flesh. She kept shifting position.

  Vetch grunted in pain, and a Zhoogene screamed. Sounded like Sward. Human civilians were also screaming, mostly in fear, but some in agony.

  “This planet is really pissing me off,” Lily bellowed, then loosed a flurry of bolts at the advancing troopers. Single shots. Center mass.

  She scrambled back along the line of tables behind her, then popped up from cover to drop two more troopers.

  Now that the shit had gotten real, with Militia casualties, her former comrades were stung into action. Some advanced stealthily up the jumble of stalls. Others broke into buildings on either side of the street, seeking decisive firing positions.

  Lily had to fight back the gnawing emptiness in her heart. She’d never believed it would come to firing upon other troopers.

  There was no coming back from this.

  But agonizing wouldn’t keep her friends alive.

  Bullets flew over her head.

  She moved. Fast. Back up the street. But now she was moving away from the alleyway. She dove behind a broad tree, somehow dodging the rounds sent her way, and landed on the ground.

  Ahhh! The impact drove in splinters all over her front. Worse, she felt the rumble of gravitics through her belly. Skragg! Something heavy was approaching from the east. Whatever it was, it hadn’t yet come into view, but when it did, they would be trapped and slaughtered!