Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

“Where are you, my lady?”

“I’m on the roof.”

“What?” Stephan’s voice was incredulous. “That’s insane! You’re outside the protection of the train!”

“That was implied when I said I was on the roof,” she answered with a wry smile. “Hold position—I’m tracking the enemy position now. We’re seconds from contact.”

“Understood.”

Mira smiled a little wider, noting the distinct lack of honorifics in the sullen words. Apparently she’d finally found a way to get him to stop kowtowing to her.

Should have done something recklessly foolish hours ago.

Her information overlay glared warningly as weapon signatures began to show, and Mira set her jaw. It was showing distinct signatures for weapons designed to counter combat armor.

“They’re better equipped than I expected,” Mira growled low in her throat. “Delsol here. Targets have combat armor rated weapons. Engaging now,” she said over the comm line.

“Delsol? Mira!” Stephan yelled back. “Don’t be a fool! We’ll stop the train! They likely want the prisoner alive. We can use him as leverage!”

“No,” she said tightly. “That murderer is not leverage, and we’re not stopping this train. Delsol out.”

She mentally nudged her projective combat armor and drew her Armati Elan from her thigh holster.

It was time to show the rabble just why she’d been made Cadre.

Projective combat armor was composed primarily of photons entangled into a crystalline lattice, resulting in a “solid light” projection. The system provided for excellent ablative armor, since the projector automatically replaced any sections that were dislodged from the lattice, doing so at the speed of light while also allowing for some other tactical advantages.

The shimmering iridescent wings that erupted from Mira’s back were just one of many such tactical surprises, and she only paused for a moment to anchor herself to the train before leaping up into the air and letting the airstream snap her up and away as she activated her Armati.

The stubby handgrip came to life as she lofted over the train, flying on borrowed power and wings of light, both ends of her Armati extending out on either side of her fist as she haloed the first target in her mind and saw her armor information overlay mirror her thoughts almost instantly.

A line of light pulsed into existence as her fingers caressed the formerly invisible line between the two arched ends of the weapon, and she drew it back with a practiced motion until a bolt of force appeared under her touch. The issued weapon of the Cadre wasn’t, perhaps, the most efficiently designed, but by the time you reached a skill level high enough to be Cadre, almost any weapon would slow you down. The Armati was probably the most versatile weapon she’d ever trained on, quirks and all.

She loosed the photon trigger that cast the force bolt away, already haloing a new target.

Not anything as simple as a laser or focused light, the bolt was composed of linked photons similar to her armor. When they slammed into the ambush emplacement with the speed of light behind them, the lattice holding the densely packed bolt together exploded in all directions with intense radiated and kinetic power. Dirt, steel, and flesh were thrown in all directions as Mira again brought her paired fingers to the catch line and drew a new bolt from thin air.

What the weapon perhaps lacked in ergonomic efficiency, it made up for in combat capability.

Sometimes traditional and elegant didn’t mean old-fashioned.

He supposed that the first sign that things had taken a turn was when the light appeared above the oncoming train, suddenly rising up into the sky. The train was still a long way off, however, so he wrote it off as a flare and put it out of his mind. There was no one within response range, just the train itself and his team. They were halfway between the closest population and the facility, days’ travel for anything short of a hypersonic transport.

The explosion tearing into his ranks, however, made it clear that whatever he was looking at wasn’t a flare.

“Take cover, damn it!” he ordered. “Take cover!”

He didn’t know what was firing on them, but it was clear that they’d been spotted. The train was still a few seconds out of their range, but now it was clearly a race to see whether they’d last long enough to snap the trap shut or be finished by the trap snapping shut on them.

“Sir! It’s a Cadreman!”

“What?” he snapped, turning to the speaker. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, commander, seen them in action before,” the soldier said, nodding to the light above the train. “Not too many see that armor from this side of the fight and live to tell about it.”

He swore, still pushing men to cover.

A Cadreman.

There was only supposed to be one on that blasted train, and he was on their side.

The Cadre were ghosts, monsters that haunted the dreams of the enemies of the empire, and they were vanishingly rare. To have two in one place was almost unheard of. Given that the prisoner they were here to extract was a Cadreman himself, it hadn’t been expected that another would be assigned as a mere guard, of all things.

Any other traitor to the empire would be guarded by anyone other than his former comrades-in-arms.

The fact that there was a Cadreman on the train spoke sheer volumes of the emperor’s confidence in their loyalty and was, of course, a clear political statement of the same.

“The train is almost in range!”

“Hold steady, then! Ready yourselves to fire!” he ordered.

Cadreman or no, they were still just dealing with a human being. There were limits to human beings, and not even the Cadre could shatter all of those.

The hypersonic shock wave of the oncoming train blew through the markers they’d established days earlier to show range, definitively putting the train into the kill box.

“Open fire!”

Mira swore as the antiarmor bolts slammed into the forward shield of the train. The shield held briefly, but it wasn’t intended to hold against military power, let alone real armor killers. The plasma spikes tore through the forward shield with lethal effectiveness and went right on to punch through the powerful engine that ran the whole system.

They were clearly using precision weapons in an attempt to take out the locomotive with as little damage as possible. Mira was glad she’d ordered her men back a few cars, however, because she was well aware that tactic was doomed to fail.

A miracle shot, one that took out the primary coolant system, for example, might result in a controlled decrease of speed, but the odds of such a strike were infinitesimally low, and they’d have to do it without taking down the shield entirely.

Not going to happen, Mira thought.

She could see the shield flicker and start to overload as she pulled back her draw and loosed another photon bolt into the attackers. The train was only seconds from the ambush when the shield failed catastrophically, the hypersonic shock wave rebounding back off the desert floor and throwing the train clean off its quantum-locked rail.

Mira cut her line and flew free as the train wrecked beneath her, trusting the inertics to save the lives of the people on board.

Well, most of them.

Her mission now was to preserve her men and the crew of the train and ensure that the ambush earned the attackers nothing for their efforts.

The wings of light that had erupted from the back of her armor now tightened in close as she leaned into a dive, preparing for what was to come. No longer shielded by the train as she blew through the sonic and hypersonic barriers, the shock wave nearly threw her ass for ankles to the figurative and literal winds, but she held.