An armored, tortoise shaped vehicle, smaller than a TVV weaved conspicuously down Routh’s main street. The vehicle turned onto a narrow path separating two small buildings. A top hatch sprung open and figure emerged, nimbly leaping off the vehicle and scurrying deeper into the path’s recesses.
***
Hooper’s enforcers fanned out across the settlement searching for the escaped prisoner. They were aware that additional prisoners had also escaped, but Hooper’s instructions to his people were explicit. Lowtower’s capture was top priority. As for the other prisoners…kill on sight. Don’t waste precious time on their apprehension.
Hooper jumped out of his personal transport and approached the mouth of an alley at the far end of the market district. A group of enforcers were gathered there. A power-suited enforcer pointed an armored finger at the terrain vehicle parked in the alley.
“That’s the vehicle, boss,” the enforcer said with an eagerness to please that percolated through his voice projector. “That’s the one missing from the facility.”
Hooper glanced at the vehicle, but refrained from venturing into the alley. He frowned.
“My guess is, the prisoners exited the vehicle and they’re hiding out somewhere in a four block radius,” said the enforcer.
“That’s your guess?” Something in the way Hooper posed the question caused the guard’s confidence to falter.
“Well…we are inclined…”
“Don’t incline,” Hooper interrupted with a frigid-eyed gaze. “And don’t give me guesses. If you idiots are done with your break you may resume your search.”
The enforcers scattered in obedience just as another terrain vehicle pulled up with Tunnel and three of his people inside.
“When were you going to tell me that Lowtower’s at large?” Tunnel asked with a crooked smile from the vehicle’s front passenger slot.
“Evidently, I didn’t have to,” came Hooper’s sour retort.
“I’ll be happy to lend a hand to the search effort.”
“I want Lowtower alive.”
Tunnel couldn’t say he was surprised by Hooper’s bone headed insistence on Lowtower’s survival. Still…
“Alive,” Hooper repeated with cold emphasis.
“I got you,” Tunnel griped. “But the time will come when you’ll wish he was dead, then I’ll have to step in.” He signaled his driver and the terrain vehicle screeched away from the scene.
No one expected him to return to the ziggurat building, the place of his unbearable captivity. With the bulk of Hooper’s forces combing the settlement town, Dern managed to slip into the ziggurat’s lightly secured rear entrance. He waylaid a pair of the building’s personnel, knocking one unconscious. The other he kept conscious for interrogation.
“Where’s my suit?” He whispered into the frightened man’s ear. Dern verbalized no threat, yet duress was enough to induce the man’s cooperation.
“Thank you.” A precision chop to the side of the head laid the man out cold.
Dern eased his victim to the floor and skulked deeper inside the building.
He burst into a room whose dusty, well-worn appearance suggested it was a storage space. A large table occupied the center upon which his SD suit was laid out neatly. Four engineers surrounded the table poring over the suit with a variety of analytical instruments Dern had never seen before. They looked up at the apparition in the doorway and paused with collective uncertainty.
It took a moment for them to draw a connection between the armor suit on the table and the person glaring rivulets of rage in their direction. It took a moment for the acid-boiled truth to sink in, and when it did their faces transitioned from curiosity to paralyzing fear.
Dern saw his suit in the possession of men who had no business touching it and he felt a deep stab of violation. An SD soldier’s suit was like a second skin. It was his protection, his life.
Dern controlled his breathing, allowing a veneer of calm to dampen his ire. He had the desire, the ability, even the right to rip these engineers to ribbons for laying hands on his property. Instead, he drilled them with a hard, unwavering stare. “You have five seconds to get the hell out of my sight.”
The engineers cleared the room, giving him the widest possible berth in less than four.
Dern walked over to the table, reaching out with some hesitation before taking his battered armor in a firm grip.
Tricked! Hooper slammed the side of his fist into the wall of the TVV he was riding in. He should have known Lowtower would make a beeline to retrieve his suit. He should have damn well known! He jumped out of the TVV when it stopped in front of his headquarters building. A dozen vehicles filled with his enforcers converged on the site. A panicked flow of occupants streamed out of the building when they learned that the dangerous fugitive was inside.
“His suit is depleted of all power,” one of the escaping engineers informed Hooper. “It’ll take at least an hour for it to be recharged.”
“Then we’ll see to it he does not get that hour.” Hooper gestured for a trio of newly arrived enforcers to suit up. It took all of five minutes for the enforcers to encase themselves in their Series A5 armor. They picked up their Tanner assault blasters and pounded toward the entrance. Hooper and about twenty enforcers followed close behind the armored spearhead.
Tunnel’s vehicle parked just beyond the jumble of other vehicles massed in front of Hooper’s headquarters. They had Lowtower cornered. Yet Tunnel could derive no satisfaction from that development. Nothing short of Lowtower’s demise would sate his thirst for blood.
Additional vehicles pulled up, spilling enforcers. They tramped into the building while Tunnel watched. He opted not to go inside since it appeared Hooper and his people had things well in hand…
An ear-bursting boom ripped the air. Gouts of flame jetted from shattered windows. The entire face of the ziggurat building was scoured away in a ravening rinse of fire. A devastating shockwave punched outward from the blast, sending chunks of the building raining on the street below.
Tunnel shielded his head with his arms as fragments of the devastated administration building pelted the roof of the terrain vehicle. Much good that would have done if the entire building landed on top of him.
Profound silence fell over the scene.
Tunnel opened the vehicle door, emerging into a swirling soup of dust.
“Boss...is it safe to walk around out there?” One of his men asked nervously.
Tunnel ignored the question and surveyed the destruction before him with starry-eyed shock. He saw bodies scattered in the open, a few partially buried under debris piles. An enforcer in Series A5 armor lay pinned beneath a two foot thick piece of alloy slab. The enforcer grabbed hold of the slab and pressed it off him with minimal effort.
Dern stumbled down a rear stairwell, feeling like he’d been chewed up by a prehistoric leviathan and spat out. He had rigged his suit to self-destruct. An SD soldier could resort to that option only under the direst circumstances. Dern could think of nothing direr than his current predicament. Little hope he held for surviving on this godforsaken granule of a world. But if he was going to die, he felt it best to go to his grave knowing he would not be leaving behind an intact, high-grade weapons system in the hands of criminals.
Dern rested on a wall close to the second floor landing. Bits of shrapnel were lodged in his body and his head throbbed ferociously from where he struck it after being torpedoed by the blast. He thought he’d cleared the explosion’s radius enough to escape unmolested. Evidently the blast yield of his suit’s micro reactor was a little stronger than he expected. That feature of his suit he didn’t study as much as the others. Then again, he always assumed that if he was going to trip a self-destruct, he would be inside his suit, not trying to flee from it.
After a few seconds to catch his breath, he resumed his descent. The Flare worked in overdrive to keep him conscience. Even so, Dern’s vision blurred and he moved sluggishly, as if on legs made of iron pillars. He hoped he’d created enough of a diversion to give Alita and the others a chance to head for the port. They were hidden in a parked terrain vehicle when he left them at the detention center. He told them to stay put until the big event.
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