A separate fire ignited inside of me. Pure white-hot rage!
Tennet caught the whole thing on camera and for a moment our eyes met. His face was white with shock but his eyes were alight. Adrenaline can do that. Even at the worst of times it can make you feel totally alive.
My rifle was gone, lost under all the debris, so I pulled my sidearm.
The room was a melee. The gunrunners badly outnumbered us and two of my guys were down. Dead or hurt I couldn’t tell. The rest had taken up shooting positions behind pieces of machinery, and they’d littered the deck with bodies. But the numbers were bad. The gunrunners had a variety of weapons — flares, hatchets, wrenches, hand-welders. No guns, which was kind of weird. They worked in teams, two men holding up a big piece of plate steel and moving it forward like a shield while others crowded behind it, throwing stuff, popping flares over the barricades behind which my guys hid. We had the better weapons, but they sure as hell had the numbers. And I could see more men pouring into the room from the far end.
I tapped my comlink and called for Zulu Team, but the unit was dead. It was smashed along with most of my helmet.
I pushed Tennet behind me and took up a shooting posture, legs wide and braced, weapon in a two-hand grip with my arms locked in a reinforced triangle. I fired careful shots and dropped six men with seven shots, and for a moment it stalled the rush of the gunrunners. I was at a right angle to their advance, which created a nice cross-fire situation. If I conserved my ammo we might pull this out of the crapper.
Then something occurred to me and it jolted me so hard that I took my finger off the trigger.
“Christ! These aren’t gunrunners,” I said aloud. I turned to Tennet. “Does your com-link work?”
He lowered his camera and tapped his throat mic. “No…it’s malfunctioning.”
“Fuck. We have to get word to the fleet. This is a clusterfuck. These aren’t gunrunners. Look at ‘em. They’re machinists, factory workers. That’s why they called me a pirate. They think we’re the bad guys. Shit.”
Tennet picked up a length of steel pipe and held it defensively, then abruptly pointed past me. “Sergeant! Behind you!”
I whirled around. There was nothing. I heard a voice behind me say, “I’m sorry.”
It was Tennet, and it was an odd thing to say.
It was even odder when he slammed the pipe into my head.
I could hear the bones crack in my head. I felt myself fall. The taste of blood in my mouth was salty sweet. Sparks burst from the wiring in the machines and fireworks ignited in my vision. I fell in a pirouette, spinning with surreal slowness away from the point of impact. As I turned I could see the gunrunners renewing their advance on my remaining men. I could hear the chatter of gunfire from the other end of the room. Was it Zulu Team? Had they broken through? Or was it the gunrunners with Zulu’s guns?
As I hit the deck I wondered why the gunrunners didn’t have their own guns. It seemed strange. Almost funny. Gunrunners without guns.
And why had they called us ‘pirates’?
I sprawled on the ground, trying to sort it out. Trying to think. I felt blood in the back of my nose. I tasted it in my mouth.
I wanted to cough, but I couldn’t.
A shadow passed above me. Raising my eyes took incredible effort. I couldn’t manage it. But the shadow moved and came around to bend over me.
Tennet.
His eyes were still wide and excited…but he was smiling. Not an adrenaline grin. I’ve seen those. This was different. Almost sad. A little mean. A little something else, but I couldn’t put a word to it. My head hurt so much. Thinking was hard. He dropped the pipe.
He bent close. The noise around us was huge but it also seemed distant, muffled. My left eye suddenly went blind.
Tennet was speaking. But not to me. His camera was pointed past me.
“…as the shootout rages on, the brave men of Jigsaw team are clearly overmatched by the determined resistance of the gunrunners.”
Firefight. That was the right word, but though my mouth moved I couldn’t get the word off my tongue.
He clicked off the camera and looked down at me.
“Thanks,” he said.
I shaped the words ‘for what’?
“Ratings, Sergeant. This is sweeps week. This story will get me back in the big chair. I’ll be an anchor again before your bodies are cold.”
“The…tip-off…” I managed.
He nodded. “Good PR for everyone. Your bosses will leverage this for increased funding. The militia will get more money for security. And I get an anchor’s chair. Everyone’s a winner.”
I was sinking into the big black. I could feel myself moving away from the moment, sliding out of who I was. “You mother…fucker…” I gasped with what little voice I had.
“Hey,” he said, “you told me at least twenty times that you never get to pull a trigger, that good soldiering doesn’t require heroes. That’s a sad epitaph for a career Free-Ops agent.” He bent even closer. “I just made you a hero, Sergeant. I just made you a star!”
I wanted to grab him by the neck and tear his head off. I wanted to stuff his camera down his throat. I wanted to destroy the hard drive and all its images of my men fighting and dying.
But I didn’t have anything left.
So, with the gunfire like thunder around me, and the screams of good men dying on both sides, I closed my eyes. I knew that he’d turn his camera back on, that he’d film my last breaths. That he’d use my death — and the deaths of my men — to get exactly what he wanted.
But what the fuck. That’s show business.
Shit.