The Honour of the Knights, Stephen J. Sweeney [reading women .txt] 📗

down. He remained where he was for a few more moments before he pulled back from the door and grabbed Kelly's hand, hauling her up off the floor.

“Enrique, what's happening?”

“Soldiers!”

“What?” Kelly said as he dragged her down the corridors and back towards the morgue. She tried to stop him pulling her in its direction, but he was holding her hand tight. “I'm not going back in there!”

“Given the choice, I don't think you'd prefer to be out there, either!” Enrique answered as they continued running. Moments later, they reached their destination.

“Imperial soldiers!” Enrique shouted, as he and Kelly sprinted in through the mortuary doorway.

Kelly saw her other three companions, still standing around Barber's body, jerk around. Chaz was holding something small and silver. It appeared to be a scalpel.

“What?” Dodds said.

Enrique gave Kelly a look that said he was tired of that question. “Imperial soldiers have just entered the port!” he panted. “They're armed and firing on the refugees! One is coming this way!”

“Imperial soldiers?” Chaz said. “You're sure?”

“Positive,” Enrique said. “Saw them through the window. He looked straight at me. I'm not sure if he saw me, but they were...”

“What are they wearing?” Chaz demanded, not waiting for Enrique to finish.

“Huh?”

“Enrique, what are they wearing?” the big man raised his voice.

Recovering her breath, Kelly saw something that made her feel the most unsettled she had all day: it was the look on Chaz's face. It was a panicked expression. The man was worried. Very worried.

“Black uniforms,” Enrique said. “Completely black, with these bright red visors or eyes, and...”

“Hide!” Chaz said, putting the scalpel down on Barber's belly, gathering up the sheet and hurling it back over her body.

“But, there are five of us...” Estelle started, sounding confident that all of them would be able to handle the new threat.

“Believe me, Lieutenant, we should hide,” Chaz said, in a grim voice.

Dodds glanced around the mortuary, before turning back to Chaz incredulously. “Where?!”

XXII

— Dead Man Walking —

Pushing open the last examination room door before he came to the mortuary, the black-clad soldier scanned the interior from the entrance, keeping his shotgun raised. After confirming there was no immediate opposition, he stalked into the room to carry out a closer inspection. He checked under the examination table, up against the wall; within the wall-high storage cabinet; and then above him, looking for air vents and other out-of-the-way hiding places. Just like the other rooms, this one was empty, no-one seeming to have fled in here.

He backed out of the room, spinning around as he stepped back through the entrance, anticipating an attack from the corridor. None came. He then started towards the mortuary. He was confident that somewhere in the medical unit he would find his prey. The doors to the medical unit itself had been locked from the inside, though a single shot to the external control panel from his pistol had been enough to grant him access.

* * *

The sight that greeted the soldier as he opened the door to the morgue was nothing out of the ordinary. Six bodies, covered in sheets, lay on gurnies lining the walls. Two were bloodstained.

Keeping his shotgun raised, he inched through the door, halting as more details of the inside of the mortuary came into view. Several roused his suspicions: the first was the presence of five objects that resembled propulsion packs, bundled into a corner next to a locker; the second, a small pile of random items, including two pairs of boots and socks, stuffed under one of the bloodstained gurnies; and the third, a round reflective object, resting under another. It looked like a flight helmet. Still, he saw no-one.

He turned his attention to the bodies on the gurnies, moving to the one with the many items deposited beneath it; the one closest to the door. He reached down and snatched aside the linen cover, momentarily distracted by a tinkling sound as he did so. Discovering the source of the noise to be nothing more than a small surgical instrument, he trained his weapon back on the body on the trolley. The woman's eyes were closed, her skin pale. Her face seemed to lack warmth. He studied her for a moment, searching for signs of life, before then nudging the face with the barrel of his gun. There was no reaction; the woman was indeed dead. Even so, he would check the others. He circled around the woman's gurney, coming to stand by the next in the row. Shotgun still poised, he extended a hand to remove the pure white sheet...

A bumping from a locker at the far end caused him to swing around and he returned his outstretched hand to beneath the shotgun, steadying it in preparation to tackle the threat. The sound appeared to have come from the same locker the propulsion packs had been dumped next to. The locker, however, now stood still and silent. He nonetheless watched it closely. Moments later, there was another sudden bumping sound, followed by a soft groaning.

He paced forward, keeping his weapon trained on the locker the whole time, ready to counter any attack that might come from within. He took up a ready position in front of the door and flung it open, his hand flying back to steady his shotgun as he saw the figure hiding within lunge forward to attack him.

He discharged the shotgun at point-blank range, sending the man back into the locker from whence he came. The man crumpled down like a puppet that had just had its strings cut, stiff limbs dropping. The soldier kept his eyes on the man, preparing to fire once more if there was another attempt to attack him, or if the first shot had not done its job of downing his opponent.

But the man made no further movements, and the soldier bent down over the body to examine it. Like that of the woman he had seen lying on the gurney, the man's skin was pale and there were no signs of respiration, the blank eyes already staring ahead. He realised that his attacker had been dead all along, and that he had just shot a corpse. With the deception uncovered, he rose and turned back just in time to face a new attacker.

* * *

Dodds lunged for the shotgun the black-suited invader still held tight in one hand, attempting to disarm him, just as the soldier made to fire the weapon once more. With the element of surprise on his side, Dodds succeeded in directing the shotgun into the air, where it discharged harmlessly into the ceiling. This it did several more times as the pair tussled, before the soldier responded to Dodds' attempt to separate him from his weapon by releasing his grip on the shotgun and catching the young pilot with a powerful swing of his fist across the face.

Dodds fell to the ground, disorientated by the blow, his vision filling with stars. As he tried to make sense of his world, he heard a short, sharp click, followed by the clatter of several spent shell cases bouncing on the floor close to him. The soldier had begun reloading his weapon, the rapid clicking of fresh shells slotting into place making clear warnings of what was to come.

Dodds was just starting to his feet when he heard the soldier load the seventh and final shell, snap the gun shut, and then cock it. Time seemed to slow. He looked up into the bright red eyes of the eerie black helmet as the shotgun was swung in his direction. A moment later, he found himself staring down the barrel.

He heard a bang, followed by a grunt. The shotgun fell away and the soldier stumbled backward. Three further explosions followed, accompanied by a number of cries of pain from behind the black helmet, before the solider fell backward and crashed down onto the floor. Dodds saw blood glistening on the black suit as it began to pour from wounds and onto the floor, creating a small pool. Despite appearances otherwise, the soldier was clearly not wearing any form of body armour, and the suit had provided him with little protection.

Dodds looked around to see Estelle, panting and steadying a pistol in both hands. He recognised it as the gun that had belonged to Barber and remembered Chaz removing it from its holster inside the woman's jacket, during his search for the data card. Estelle must have picked it up during the scramble to hide. She looked down at him as the others emerged from their hurried and uninspiring hiding places. Her eyes held a mixture of feelings; his, only an apology.

* * *

As Enrique had relayed the warning of the soldier's impending arrival to the mortuary, the Knights had wrenched off their propulsion packs and hidden beneath the sheets of the spare gurnies, feigning their own deaths. Their packs had been thrown into a corner, next to a locker, and each of their flight helmets dropped under their respective gurnies. There had only been four empty trolleys, and Chaz had pulled the raider's body off his table and pushed him into the locker. Though there had been no time to hide any evidence of their recent activities, Dodds, Estelle, Kelly and Enrique had hoped that the soldier would take one look around and then leave; though, from his behaviour, Chaz seemed to have expected otherwise. Their saving grace had come in the form of the raider Chaz had put in the locker. His hurried bundling of the man's body into the storage cabinet had resulted in it crumpling down, knocking against the insides as it did so. The soldier had gone on to mistake the corpse's sliding for someone trying to hide themselves away.

* * *

“We've got to get out of here,” Chaz said, throwing off his sheet. He glanced in the direction of the fallen soldier lying still on the floor, on top of the body of the raider. He hesitated, for a time caught up an internal debate as to which task he should be attending to first. He then headed back over to the gurney on which Barber's body rested, snatching up the scalpel from where it lay on the floor as he went.

The jacket already undone, he used the scalpel to cut apart Barber's bloodstained vest, but stopped short of cutting into her flesh. He once again stared down at Barber's smooth white skin, finding it too hard to carry through the task laid before him. He felt how cold she was as his fingers brushed her stomach.

“Chaz,” Estelle started again, fiddling with the pistol she still held. “If you can't do it...”

“I can. Just give me a second,” he answered.

“... I can do it instead,” Estelle finished.

“I SAID GIVE ME A DAMN SECOND!” Chaz shouted back in frustration at his pending task. He stood breathing for a while, concentrating hard and searching for the will to begin. After just a few seconds of mental preparation, he found it and immediately plunged the scalpel into Barber's belly. He began cutting downwards, working fast and making jagged sawing actions with the blade as he went. The world around him seemed to disappear. He heard nothing and saw nothing but the knife; almost slipping into a trance.

“I'm sorry,” he said under his breath. “I'm so sorry.”

* * *

“Hey, you okay?” Enrique asked as Dodds struggled to his feet.

“Yeah,” Dodds said, even though he was not so sure.

“Your face is really bruised,” Kelly said.

Dodds touched the side of his face, feeling it hot and a little swollen. The power of the blow had been tremendous and he found himself amazed that the force had bowled him over. He was counting himself lucky that he had not been knocked out. He recalled during his struggle with the soldier over the shotgun that his feet had almost been lifted off the floor.

He looked over to where Estelle and Chaz were standing over the gurney. Chaz's hands were already covered in blood and, though she was overseeing the task, he could tell that Estelle was fighting the urge to turn away. Chaz's eyes appeared to be glazed over as he drove the knife deeper.

Dodds found himself compelled to investigate his opponent and wandered over to the soldier's unmoving body. The man still held the shotgun in one hand and Dodds kicked it away before he squatted down. He noted that the soldier's suit, which he had originally mistaken to have been a construct of ceramics, was in fact composed of little else but leather. It was thicker in some areas than others, extra smooth, hardened padding on the shoulders, elbows, kneecaps and other parts of the body, giving the