Birthright: The Complete Trilogy by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-10-04T18:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Conner:

Deke squatted on his haunches and stared into the face of the dead woman, frowning slightly. The female was fairly young according to the data his headcomp had extracted from her corporate ID chip, not yet forty, with seven years’ service in the Department of Security and Intelligence that had abruptly ended four years ago. Jillian Rosales was, according to her job description, an encryption engineer; but that intellectual pursuit hadn’t stopped her from grabbing a pulse pistol and trying to shoot it out with Deke and Kara when they’d broken into her office suite.

Now, she was folded over herself, crumpled in front of her work-station with a pair of fist-size holes through her chest. Bright red blood stained her impeccable uniform and the floor around her and he could see it pooling around the toes of his boots where they contacted the tile. It was beginning to turn dark now, nearly an hour after her death. Lights still flickering from the damage the breaching charges had done to the dome’s power relays played over the woman’s once-pleasant features, now twisted with pain and panic…forever.

“I don’t think that one’s going to talk,” Kara said, stepping up behind him.

Deke looked up at her, still frowning.

“You’d be surprised,” he said mildly, eyeing her. Kara still wore a suit of byomer armor that matched his own. Skin tight, it hugged every athletic curve of her and nearly broke his train of thought. “Why does a crypto tech grab a gun and run headlong into a firefight she knows she’s going to lose?”

“Who knows why people do things?” she asked with a dismissive shrug. “Maybe she thought we’d kill her anyway.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Deke allowed, finally straightening to his full height, still looking down at the dead woman. “Maybe she thought that. But there were, what, sixty, seventy people here?” He waved around them, indicating the larger base outside the enclosed dome structure.

“Seventy three,” she told him, “according to the last count Robert’s people came up with.”

“And how many surrendered?” The question was rhetorical as he already knew the answer.

Kara scowled and he could tell she wasn’t happy with the answer. “None,” she replied quietly. “We captured five, but they were all taken with sonics or stun grenades.”

“Yeah,” he grunted, finally stepping away from the body. “You want to start working on the systems in this building?”

“I already checked,” she told him, shaking her head. “They were wiped on a molecular level, probably about the time we hit orbit. We’d better hope we can get something from the ones we captured.” She waved at the exit. “They’re about to start now. Wanna come?”

He followed her out of the room, feeling tired. Not physically, but mentally…and, it seemed to him, spiritually.

“This is kind of illegal, isn’t it??” he asked her quietly.

“We’re way past legal, Deke,” Kara said with a derisive snort, stepping over the body of a security officer in the entrance hallway. “We went past legalities when they sent an alien ship to attack a military base.

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