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

“Hey!” Rafe shouted. “That’s a detonator!”

Esparza smiled. “Good eye, Rafe.” He kept his pistol pointed in Rafe’s direction. “One step closer and I shoot.”

If Esparza used that detonator, they’d both die anyway. “You can’t do this. Too many people will die up there!”

“Everyone dies, Rafe.” Esparza kept walking, waving his detonator around and watching the red light on its tip. “Not everyone gets to die for a good reas—”

Esparza’s fist jumped straight up as the detonator flew from his hand. Esparza’s glasses visibly collapsed upon his nose as Esparza was bowled backward by some invisible force. Esparza fell on his ass as his pistol landed and slid away, spinning.

The detonator landed with a plastic clunk and rolled beneath a pipe, out of reach. Above Esparza, standing over him, Jan pulled off his mimetic hood. “Hello, Commander.”

Rafe sighed in relief as Esparza rolled to his feet, wiped his mouth, and spit blood. He tossed his wire-rimmed glasses aside. “The Sabato out there was a holo-projection.”

Jan smirked. “Obviously.”

“You can’t escape,” Esparza said. “Even if you make it out of here, Ryke, the CSD, or someone else will hunt you down.”

“Perhaps,” Jan said. “You, however, will almost certainly be executed, after a magnificent trial. I imagine you and your senate financiers will be found guilty of treason. Let’s all hope they don’t hand you to the Advanced.”

Esparza crept forward. “I know my soldiers shot you yesterday. I’m surprised you can even walk.”

“You could beat me in a fair fight,” Jan agreed, as a stunner emerged from his mimetic suit. “Could.”

Esparza lunged. Jan fired his stunner. And a legendary former Patriot of Ceto, the man known to his loyal soldiers as the Commander, collapsed in a drooling heap.

Jan stepped over Esparza’s crumpled form and reached for the discarded detonator. Just behind Rafe, someone hissed in quiet pain. Rafe turned in time to see Sergeant Kast, wounded and bloody, raise her rifle and point it at Jan’s back.

Rafe howled and dived straight at her.

The bang took his breath away. Rafe sat, clutching the new hurt spreading across his chest. Kast had shot him directly in the chest. It sure hurt getting shot in the chest.

Yet as Kast raised her rifle once more, bloody teeth bared, a knife spun past Rafe’s face and thunked straight between Kast’s eyes. Her eyes crossed before she dropped, dead. Rafe only then remembered that Jan still had his throwing knives.

Boots thumped, and then Rafe was on his back, staring at Jan, who was staring down at him with a frown that might convey genuine concern. Maybe. Rafe couldn’t be sure.

“She, uh ...” Rafe waved one bloody hand in Kast’s general direction. “She was gonna shoot you, mate.”

Jan knelt beside Rafe. “Thanks.”

“You heard me yelling about the detonator, right?”

“Yes,” Jan said. “We knew Esparza likely had a remote detonator hidden somewhere. I planned to follow him to wherever he’d hidden it, then take it from him once he produced it. Hence, why I’m here.”

“Oh,” Rafe said.

“Still, I appreciate the thought.”

“Sure,” Rafe said, and he felt better for a moment until he realized his chest still hurt. “Sorry.”

Jan glanced past Rafe and Kast, then back. “For?”

“I sold you to the Supremacy. I put you in prison.”

“You just saved my life, Rafe.”

“Right, that’s why I jumped on her.” Jan wasn’t listening. “I sold you out. I thought I could break you out later, but I was stupid and selfish. I can’t ever make up for that.”

Jan held his gaze. “Not all plans go as we expect.”

“I know you can’t forgive me, but please—”

“Rafe.” Jan took Rafe’s hand in his own. “I forgive you.”

Rafe blinked. He was dreaming. “What?”

“I forgive you, Rafe.”

Rafe smiled. He really smiled, for the first time in what felt like years. He’d done the unforgivable, then and now, but Jan had stopped it. Jan had saved him, again, and Star’s Landing, apparently. Or maybe they both had. Rafe wanted to think he had helped some, just a little.

“I lied to you about Cliffside, too,” Rafe whispered. “I wasn’t deleting data.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“It was a job for Esparza. He asked me to retrieve files that the Patriots of Ceto had hidden there, the location of some mini-nukes they managed to steal from the Supremacy.”

Jan pursed his lips. “That does make sense.”

“There’s more though, mate. I found multiple nukes.”

“The Truthers have them?”

“No,” Rafe said, before another cough racked his body. “They said they needed them for research, but I figured, you only need one for research. Right?”

“So you lied to them.”

“Yeah.” Rafe coughed. “But we still need to get those nukes somewhere safe.” He coughed again. “They’re buried in ...”

His throat seized up. Everything tasted salty. Someone very heavy was standing on his chest, and it was growing increasingly difficult to breathe.

“The maglev tunnel,” Rafe whispered. “Beneath the Sledge.”

Jan squeezed Rafe’s hand. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Just don’t ... go yet?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

There was nothing more to say. Rafe really was going to die down here, and he hadn’t prepared for that. He didn’t want that.

But at least he’d die holding hands with his best friend.

17: Pardon

“Well,” Lieutenant Jeffrey Coffman said, as he watched his loyal CSD soldiers picking through the mess of rubble, collapsed piping, and bodies between them and a concealed but possibly active mini-nuke, “this is a fucking mess.”

Captain Varik’s Vindicators stood nearby, out of the way. Coffman hated seeing the Supremacy down here, but they had been authorized by Senator Lozano. Why Lozano thought she had the ability to authorize a foreign military operation in