But the missile hadn’t killed or maimed all of them. Several Cazadores had survived the inferno unscathed and stood their ground on the outer edges of the tree grove. They aimed weapons at the sky and opened fire on the divers.
Michael dropped another smoke grenade, then pulled the laser rifle from the sheath over his back, taking care not to tangle it in the suspension lines.
He pulled the right toggle to turn his canopy and give him a field of fire on the soldiers near the drop zone. His robotic trigger finger took the shot, and a single blue bolt flashed through the chest of a man crouching and firing into the air. He slumped over, smoke rising from the smoldering hole in his rib cage.
Michael moved to the next target: a soldier hiding behind a clump of red lilies. He sprawled in the foliage, a bright red tunnel glowing in his side. The next soldier lost an arm, just as Michael had.
With the drop zone mostly clear, he put the laser weapon back in its scabbard and checked his HUD.
Alexander, Trey, and Les had pulled their chutes and were coming in fast behind him. Les knew what to do, but both Alexander and Trey seemed wobbly.
Michael looked away, grabbing both toggles and steering toward the sunken stadium. He passed over more gardens and a pool of water, but he wasn’t here to admire the beauty. He had come for one thing only: to kill these barbarians and save his friends and his people.
The arena of sand rose up to meet his boots, and he pulled the toggles to slow his decent. Flexing his knees slightly, he did a two-stage flare. He hit the dirt a little hard and ran out the momentum.
Gunfire lanced into the ground, kicking up dust. The two remaining shooters were running away from the burning forest, followed by at least ten more that Michael hadn’t seen earlier.
He crouched down, released the collapsed chute, and pulled out his blaster, leveling it at the nearest Cazador. He waited for the sooty, half-naked enemy to get close. The man bared his sharp teeth like a wild animal and raised a pistol as Michael pulled the trigger.
The blast opened a hole in the barbarian’s chest, and he fell on his face, raising a halo of dust around him. Return gunfire sounded, and a shot pinged off Michael’s robotic arm. He shielded his face, deflecting another round. The soldiers ran at him, screaming and firing their archaic guns.
Michael fired the other shotgun shell into the gut of a man in armor, knocking him down. Then he drew the pistol at his hip and shot each of the other two soldiers.
They slumped to the dirt, giving Michael a moment to gather his gear and pull out the laser rifle. The other divers had landed on his left and right flanks, but both Trey and Alexander had come in crosswind, hit the dirt hard, and gotten wrapped in their chutes.
Les joined Michael, shouldering his assault rifle and laying down covering fire while the other two divers got to their feet.
Michael came back to back with the lieutenant, shooting bolts at the Cazador soldiers who had taken cover behind the trees. In the glow of the burning missile crater, he could see dozens of them, mostly armed with spears and swords.
A shot kicked up dirt next to Michael’s boot, and he fired a bolt through the tree and the shooter behind it. The man gripped his burning midsection and fell sideways into a bush.
It took the warriors only a minute to realize that whatever they hid behind was useless against his advanced weapon. One of them, a burly fellow with spiked hair, yelled commands in Spanish to the soldiers. Michael took off the crown of his head with a laser bolt.
Shouts came from behind the divers, and Michael turned to look for the source. Across the rooftop, men streamed out of a small building on the roof of the airship. Two hatches had swung open, disgorging silhouette after silhouette of Cazadores who had climbed the stairs from the tower.
“Don’t let them flank us!” Michael shouted. He looked for cover, but the DZ was on bare ground between the trees and the building. The only place to run was the spectator booths above the recessed stadium.
The warriors still holding position in the forest seemed to hesitate, not knowing what to do now that their leader had fallen. And then, all at once, they screamed and ran out of the forest, straight at the divers.
Trey and Alexander were by now on their feet and firing their weapons, cutting down the charging Cazador warriors. The two divers backpedaled as they fired, nearly running into Michael and Les, who had turned to engage the soldiers piling out of the open hatch.
Team Raptor formed an armored phalanx, with enemies closing in from all directions. There was only one way off this airship roof.
“Kill them!” Michael shouted. “Kill ’em all!”
TWENTY-FOUR
After swimming to exhaustion, Rhino and X had made it to the remains of the fishing boat. Its wooden hull still burned, and one of the sails lay stretched out in the water, like a broken bird wing.
They searched in darkness through the debris field and found a bag and a few planks of wood, but nothing that would help them stay afloat.
At least, the sharks hadn’t found them.
Yet.
X kept treading water. He was drained from swimming, and one calf was cramping. Though he didn’t have his armor to weigh him down, he was struggling to keep his head above the surface.
It seemed that some monster was always trying to eat him, or some human was bent on killing him. All he wanted was a simple life and a place to settle down somewhere and live out his years with Miles.
Was that too freaking much to ask?
He kept searching through the flotsam for anything that would help him get back to his dog and friends.
Some people in this world had an intense will to live, coupled with the skills to keep them alive. X knew he was one of them. What he didn’t understand was why he continued to live.
What made him different?
Not some stupid prophecy, that much was certain. The fairy tale that Janga had preached for years on the Hive was nothing but bullshit. She wasn’t much better than the woman from the trading post who had sold herbs to his wife when she was dying of cancer.
A destiny foretold wasn’t the reason he had survived long enough to reach the Metal Islands in the Sea Wolf. Certainly, he wasn’t any stronger or smarter than Cazador warriors like Fuego, Whale, or Wendig. He wasn’t stronger or smarter than the Hell Divers who died before him, either. Not Commander Rick Weaver, Aaron Everhart, or Erin Jenkins.
Maybe he was just lucky. And maybe that luck was running out.
“Hey, you see that?” Rhino asked.
X brought his rambling mind back to the present and looked in the direction the Cazador lieutenant was pointing. It was a dark night with only a sliver of moon, but in the intermittent flashes of lightning, he saw the outline of what looked like one of the Cazador skiffs, and someone was standing inside.
“Shit, is that…”
Rhino was already swimming in a front crawl toward the skiff. For a man of his size and dense muscularity, he was a damn good swimmer. X fell behind quickly, too tired to do anything faster than a breast stroke.
A voice called out at the halfway point.
“¡Hola, hola!” Rhino yelled.
The figure in the boat turned toward them. A Cazador soldier had survived after all.
But rather than respond to Rhino, the man ducked down in the stern near the motor. He was trying to start the engine, X realized.
X kicked harder, breaking into a crawl. Memories of the swamps back in Florida surfaced in his mind. Giant octopuses weren’t the only monsters in the sea.