Page 27 of Darken
“Come back to me. That’s all I ask.”
“That’s my plan, sweetheart.”
“I love you.”
“And I love you.” Darken broke the connection. He would not say goodbye.
“You and the captain are lucky bastards,” said Stalker. “What I wouldn’t give for a female of my own.”
“It could still happen; they get new profiles into the system every day. Captain Savage found his own.”
“You going rogue, Darken?” Shadow Hawk asked.
“Not rogue. This is tied into Gina’s kidnapping and the disappearance of people from my territory.” Darken told them about Gina tying Wayne Stockman to Devlin White.
“Oh, yeah. Count me in,” said Max Steel followed by Falcon Rader. It was unanimous.
“We’ve got nothing better to do. It might be fun,” said Falcon.”
With that, they all mounted their sky cycles and headed north to the coordinates Darken had shared with them.
They traveled at breakneck speed and reached Devlin’s compound in about half an hour. They did several flyovers, scanning and recording what they saw. There was a new Quonset hut like the one in the desert set off from the mansion at the compound's center, housing about a hundred people. Beside it, the missing transport was parked.
Darken knew it was the same vehicle because he recognized its electronic signature when he pinged it. He’d only hovered above it for seconds when an ion rifle bolt whizzed by his head. Only it was no ordinary ion rifle. It was a stationary ion repeater mounted on one of four towers.
They know we’re here. Let’s go!As eager as his cohorts were for action, Darken reminded them they had no jurisdiction. This was strictly recon.
Only, just as Darken was about to gun his throttle, two bolts hit him in the back. Max and Stalker pulled their rifles and took out the shooter and the whole tower.
Holding on to consciousness by a thread, Darken sped away into the night, and the other four members of his team followed. They made it to the mountains in Enclave Territory before Darken’s cycle landed, and he fell to the ground, landing flat on his back unconscious.
Stalker was the first to reach him while the other three landed nearby. A quick scan of Darken’s diagnostics revealed severe damage to his right lung, left kidney, and liver.
Stalker opened the emergency pack on his belt and shot a full bolus of auxiliary nanites up Darken’s nose. He took out a second bolus, turned his friend over, and pumped more nanites into the gaping wounds. Had Darken not been in full armor, he would probably be dead.
As things stood, Darken had lost a lot of blood, enough to render him unconscious.
“We need to get him out of here. I tapped into one of our satellites, and flyers are heading this way,” said Max.
“Help me get him on his cycle and strap him on it. I’ll set it to fly him home, then we’ll take care of the flyers.”
Darken woke several hours later when his sky cycle set down in front of his and Gina’s home. The flyer's body retracted, and he blinked at the bright sunlight until his eyes adjusted. He withdrew the safety harness and started to stretch when he felt some residual tightness in his back.
Then he remembered getting shot and the initial pain. He didn’t remember anything after that, but a message was waiting in his CPU from Stalker, explaining that he’d given him emergency nanite injections and sent him home.
Darken was glad the team went with him; otherwise, he might still be lying on the ground by his ride. It might have taken two days for his internal nanites to repair him enough that he could administer the emergency healers.
He frowned for a moment as he thought about his wounds. Those weren’t simple ion rifles mounted in those towers. A normal ion rifle should not have pierced his armor. But this was a tower repeater with bigger and more powerful bolts. He probably should have updated his armor when he ordered Gina’s. Thinking of Gina took his mind in a different direction as he anticipated holding her again.
He’d just climbed off the cycle when Gina shut off the cloaking hologram and ran out the door to greet him. He thought she would take a running leap into his arms, but she apparently saw something in his expression that stopped her several feet from him. She looked him up and down before her gaze fixed on his.
“You got hurt. What happened?”
Darken sighed, closing the distance between them, and hugged her. “I’m okay now. Let’s go inside, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
Inside, he returned to the weapons room, stowed his weapons and belt, and retracted his armor into its compact form. That left him naked.
Gina gasped behind him. “Omigod! What happened to your back?”
