Steven D. Fisher - Fragger Sparks 01 by A Ranger Leads the Way

Author:A Ranger Leads the Way [Way, A Ranger Leads the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-03T13:27:06+00:00

CHAPTER 25

The three men stood rooted at the top of the caldera ridge. Two of them stared at Fragger.

What the hell just happened here? the Ranger wondered, amazed that he was still in one piece.

There was no time for Fragger to figure it out. The Ricer trooper shook himself out of immobility and struck again with his sword—twice.

And missed.

What the devil? The Ranger swore in disbelief while he tried to figure out how the impossible had happened. An expert warrior had missed a point-blank target.

The Ricer trooper lowered his weapon and paused for a moment before asking over the commlink,

“Fragger Sparks?”

Fragger shook his head in the affirmative.

“You owe me a life,” a somehow familiar voice said.

Fragger gestured openly with his hands, indicating he didn’t have a clue as to what the man was talking about.

“You owe me three lives.”

Watanabe! the Ranger realized.

“Why don’t you speak?” Watanabe asked. “Aren’t you glad to see an old enemy?”

Buurk broke into the conversation to explain, “He can’t speak.

He broke his jaw, and it’s wired shut.”

Watanabe broke into raucous laughter. “I’d expect nothing less of Sparks!”

Why is he calling me by my name all of a sudden? Fragger asked himself in suspicion. All he ever called me before was “Rerun.”

“What do you mean?” the medic asked.

“Sparks is a survivor, aren’t you, Sparks? He may get bent or broken, but he always survives.”

Buurk threw a puzzled glance in Fragger’s direction. “How’d he do that? Avoid having you separate his head from his body, I mean.”

Yeah, how? Fragger asked silently.

“Sparks is a very special person, Martian.”

“I can see that, but nobody survives an armored trooper, especially unarmed opponents. Yet Fragger did!”

“He did, indeed,” Watanabe said. “And he doesn’t know any more about why he’s still standing than you do.”

“Explain.”

“Damn it, we haven’t got time!”

Fragger jabbed a finger repeatedly at the ground to show he wanted an explanation as much as Buurk did and wasn’t going anywhere until he got it.

Watanabe cursed them hard for their stupidity, but relented.

“All right, all right. Just wait a moment.”

The sergeant issued a command over his commlink, nodded when he got confirmation of the order, then turned his attention back to Fragger and said, “All right, I’ve called for an extraction team. Get down out of the line of fire and while we wait, I’ll explain. Sparks, do you remember Leery, the Revival Technician on Khanwat?”

Fragger nodded.

“Our intelligence people broke the encrypted data on the files I retrieved when I hauled your naked ass out of the lab. The spooks said there was a lot of rambling on ad nauseum by Leery about how he wasn’t appreciated and so forth, but after they waded through his self-pity, they found he was more than a Revival Technician. He was a scientist, a research scientist and a very eccentric and obnoxious individual, but one with a lot of ideas. He had the misfortune to have a supervisor more than willing to take credit for those ideas. When Leery started making noises about theft, the supervisor labeled him a crackpot and a trouble maker.

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