Supremacy's Outlaw: A Space Opera Thriller Series (Insurgency Saga Book 3) by T.E. Bakutis (top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT) 📗

Jaxon Cole’s toes and shoot him in the chest,” Bharat practically growled. “You are the reason two very large men beat the shit out of me for almost an hour, and worse, you are the reason your best friend went to orbital prison for five years.”

Rafe felt fresh tears pouring down his cheeks, but not from pain. Bharat knew everything. Did Jan know too? And if Jan knew, how could Jan ever forgive him?

“If it were up to me, I’d crush you like a bug and get on with saving your people,” Bharat said, “but I have been blessed with good fortune of late, and Jan asked that I not kill you unless you knew about, and endorsed, Esparza’s plot.” Bharat sighed. “So this day is disappointing for us both.”

Invisible hands eased off Rafe again, and Bharat’s head bobbed backward. “Now. Listen. I’m not here as part of Esparza’s imaginary Advanced attack. I’m here, with Jan and all the others you betrayed, to stop the man you call the Commander from detonating a mini-nuke and killing a thousand people.”

Esparza would never do that. Rafe knew Esparza would never do that. At least ... he thought Esparza would never do that.

A datapad emerged from the nothingness that was Bharat. “Don’t believe me? Fine. Hack it yourself, Mastermind.” The datapad floated Rafe’s way, and Rafe, hesitantly, took it.

Rafe opened the datapad and found it already decrypted. He flipped through True Son files he recognized from his work over the past week, files that were now no longer redacted. The bottom of his stomach dropped out.

Bharat wasn’t lying. Commander Graham Esparza really was going to set off a mini-nuke beneath the Star’s Landing Armistice Day parade, in six hours, and murder thousands of innocent people. Rafe felt like his thumping heart was going to burst.

This was too big a fuckup. No amount of therapy could redeem Rafe from helping with this. This was unforgivable, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it now.

Except Jan. He could always help Jan. Rafe returned Bharat’s datapad and stared. “I’m yours, mate. Tell me what to do.” Rafe trembled at the thought of poor little children dying of radiation. “Please, God, tell me what to do.”

“Dry your face,” Bharat said. As he rose, his head vanished again from view, hidden by the mimetic camouflage hood he must have just pulled back on. “You’re going to lead me to the building you mentioned, and you’re going to convince as many of the soldiers there to leave as you can. We’ll handle the rest.”

“We?” Rafe asked, but no one answered him. He couldn’t even see if anyone was there anymore. Bharat’s mimetic camouflage was that good. Rafe wiped his cheeks, looked around for someone he couldn’t see, and took a deep breath. Then he started walking.

He ducked pipes and slid through narrow openings on the way back to the work site, all the while listening for any trace of Bharat behind him — the rustle of mimetic cloth, the sound of a padded footstep on biocrete, anything. He heard nothing. So either he’d just hallucinated — or Bharat moved really quietly.

Rafe trembled as he walked, because he couldn’t stop thinking about what kids looked like when their skin got burned by radiation. He’d seen it in vids. He didn’t want to let that happen, but he had helped make it happen. Why? Why would the Commander and the others make him be a part of this?

No sound from Bharat as Rafe climbed the first flight of stairs. No sound as he climbed the second. Rafe returned to the job site and saw it with fresh eyes, saw what he’d missed either due to inattentiveness or actively not wanting to know.

All the windows of the old sewage plant’s pump control room were now filled in with biocrete and metal. At least ten True Sons of Ceto surrounded the entirely closed off building, far more than you’d need to guard a security scanner. A single antenna gleamed in the faint light, as did the round, heavily reinforced metal apparatus they’d welded on top of the old control room. It was like a giant inverted funnel.

A mini-nuke exploding in that room would open an enormous sinkhole directly beneath the Star’s Landing capitol building and the streets around it, the epicenter of the parade. That sinkhole would swallow and crush any bodies that were not incinerated in the initial explosion. Neither the CSD patrolling above nor the drones filling the skies would see it coming.

Rafael Garcia knew a lot about bombs. He also knew a lot about explosions — specifically, making them go places. He should have seen what this place was and why it was built the way it was immediately, but maybe he hadn’t wanted to see it.

Maybe he just wanted to be a good guy for once.

Two soldiers moved to intercept him the moment Rafe reached the floor with the sealed-up control room. He recognized the leading woman behind her riot helmet and darkened visor. Sergeant Kast. She’d always been friendly to him, so maybe ...

“Rafe,” Kast said, “what’s the problem?”

Right. There must be a problem, because otherwise, why would Rafe have come up here? He needed to get as many of them to leave as possible.

“I think I heard something,” Rafe said. “Downstairs.”

After a moment of staring at each other, Kast asked, “Could you be more specific?”

“Um. Walking.”

“One of us?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see anyone, actually, just heard walking in the pipes downstairs. But I didn’t think anyone was down there.” He frowned. “Is that weird?”

Kast snapped her fingers and glanced at the other