Allegiance

FOUR

“Everyone else but the team leads, stay put!” Magnolia shouted.

Michael and Alexander had already dived off the platform, and Edgar followed her into the black, leaving the new divers inside the launch bay with X, who had run over wearing nothing but his ripped T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. The doors sealed the other new divers inside with the living legend.

If he’d had his chute on and was suited up against the negative five degrees Fahrenheit, she had no doubt that he would have jumped out to see that Ted made it safely to the ship.

The reckless greenhorn had already gotten a few seconds’ head start, and Magnolia couldn’t see him in the darkness below. At thirty-two thousand feet, they had only two to three minutes to make sure he wasn’t in a tailspin and could deploy his chute properly.

She could kick herself for even letting him onto the airship in the first place.

Scanning the black emptiness, she saw no sign of his battery unit.

Shit, he must be in a suicide dive.

“Ted, get into stable fall position now!” Magnolia shouted into the comm.

“I got this, Mags! See you on the ship!”

This time, she cursed out loud. “Stupid son of a bitch.”

There was no denying that Ted had cojones, but big balls coupled with inexperience was a dangerous mix that got people killed. Still, she couldn’t deny that he was a bit like her rebellious younger self.

What Ted didn’t have, however, was speed and agility like hers, on the ground or in the air. She just hoped he could hold the dive all the way to the surface. If he hit turbulence and spun out of control, there wasn’t much they could do unless they caught up to him fast.

Lightning raked the clouds in the distance, and her HUD flickered from the disturbance. She checked the digital map and reached down to her wrist computer to switch from Team Wolf to Team Angel.

Four other beacons blinked, representing the heartbeats of the three team leads above her, and Ted, a thousand feet below.

They crossed the twenty-two-thousand-feet mark—a third of the dive already behind them. Magnolia was almost to terminal velocity, her arms tucked back against her sides, body straight as a Cazador spear.

Thunder cracked like a rifle shot in her ear, distracting her for a moment. Her eyes flitted to a dazzling display of lightning to the east. Here on the edge of the storm, the new boots could get a sense of what a real dive was like, without getting zapped. But Les had maneuvered them close enough to test their nerve.

Another skein of flashes lit up the sky. Magnolia searched the black anvil below, hunting for the glowing blue dot of Ted’s battery pack.

“I don’t got eyes,” she reported.

Michael came up alongside her in a nosedive. Alexander and Edgar spread out, flanking them. Static broke over the comms, then a scream.

Magnolia felt the first jolt of turbulence tugging her sideways. Biting down on her mouth guard, she pulled the falling dart that was her body into a horizontal position.

She finally saw the erratic blue strobe of a battery unit—Ted, cartwheeling through the sky. Catching up to him would require serious skills and extreme caution.

She had to maneuver carefully, or the turbulence would throw her off course too, and send her crashing like a fish on a cresting wave.

“I’ve lost it!” Alexander shouted over the comms.

Magnolia could see in her mind’s eye what was happening. The turbulence had knocked him out of his dive. Edgar was next, tumbling out of control, but Magnolia managed to keep her orientation through the shear.

Michael shot past on her right, his armor glowing red from his battery unit.

A hundred feet out, another red light caught her attention. Cricket was tracking the tumbling bodies, but there was nothing the two-armed robot could do now. Maybe if Michael had been able to replace the other two missing arms… Without them, the bot could only monitor, not assist.

The blue light of Ted’s unit vanished as the cloud cover thickened and, with it, the turbulence. Magnolia tried to maintain her core tension but finally succumbed to the forces lashing and tugging on her body.

She held in a scream as she pitchpoled sideways, end over end.

The lightning seemed to come from all directions.

Perhaps it was a good thing, Ted doing what he did. If the other greenhorns had hit this pocket, it could have resulted in crashes and potential deaths.

She fought her way back into stable position, belly down with knees and elbows bent at ninety degrees. Her suit rippled violently in the wind.

“Ted!” she shouted into the comms. “Ted, where are you?”

The blip representing Ted on her HUD was blinking sporadically, which told her he was still spinning. Worse, he was over two thousand feet wide of the DZ. No way in hell would he make it to within a quarter mile of the target ship.

Ted was going to land in the black ocean, and even if he managed to get his chute open, he could easily drown, entangled in the shroud lines, or be easy pickings for all sorts of voracious sea creatures, while waiting for a boat to pick him up.

She resisted the urge just to give up on the rescue and let fate take its course. And the Magnolia of twenty years ago might have done that—maybe even the Magnolia of ten years ago.

But diving was in her blood now, and despite Ted’s flagrant insubordination, she couldn’t just let him die if there was a chance of saving him.

Straightening her legs and pulling her hands in to her thighs, she became an arrow again, angled to meet his runaway trajectory. Another glance at her HUD told her she didn’t have much time.

“Ted, listen to me!” she shouted. “Put your arms and legs out and arch your back, just like we taught you!”

The muffled reply was indecipherable.

She checked her HUD again. Six thousand feet to the surface, but she had closed the gap between herself and Ted. The glow of Michael’s battery unit confirmed that he, too, was gaining on the out-of-control greenhorn.

“Alexander and Edgar, continue to the DZ,” Michael ordered.

“Copy,” Alexander said.

After a slight delay, Edgar acknowledged.

“Mags, stay back,” Michael said. “I’ve got this.”

“But…”

“That’s an order.”

“Roger that,” she replied through gritted teeth.

A moment later, she got a visual on Ted’s battery unit. He was tumbling and not responding to Michael’s hails.

Holy wastes, is he unconscious?

Another wind shear sent both her and Michael spinning out of control.

At three thousand feet, it occurred to her that the rookie diver may have doomed them all.

“Mags, pull your chute as soon as you’re in stable position,” Michael ordered.

“You pull yours!”

She could see that they would never get to Ted in time now. The best they could do was to save themselves by deploying their chutes as soon as they could.

Michael was the first to recover, and Magnolia managed to get steady a few seconds later. At two thousand feet, they broke through the cloud cover and had their first view of rough seas.

Lights blinked on the surface where the ship and motorboats waited. One of them seemed to be moving toward their location.

“Pull your chute now!” Michael yelled.

She pulled the pilot chute from the pocket along her right thigh, held it out, and let it go. It caught air and dragged out the main chute, yanking her out of free fall.

Michael went next, and as their parachutes seemed to pull them skyward, they could only look on as Ted tumbled toward the endless expanse of whitecaps below.

“TED!” Michael shouted.

It was no use. The diver was out, insensible to his impending doom.

At just over a thousand feet, Magnolia closed her eyes, unable to watch him slam into the ocean.

“What the…!” Michael gasped.

Her eyelids popped open to see a green light shooting diagonally through the dark skies. She nearly spat out her mouth guard when she realized it was X.

He had somehow managed to suit up and catch up to them. But how was that possible unless he had somehow held the nosedive through the turbulence?

Cricket swooped down to document the miracle.

Moments later, X pulled his legs in and extended his arms, slowing his approach speed toward the unconscious diver. At eight hundred feet, he wrapped his body around Ted, clipped his carabiner to Ted’s harness, and pulled his own pilot chute.

Magnolia let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

“Got ’im,” X said over the comms.

She looked over at Michael, who was steering his canopy toward the ship below. X was trying to do the same thing, with his left hand on the steering toggle, and the other arm wrapped around Ted.

The ship’s deck rose up to meet Magnolia’s boots. She performed a two-stage flare over the rusted old Cazador ship. Right before touching down, she glimpsed X and Ted in the distance.

They splashed into the water as she stepped out of the sky and onto the deck.

She spilled the air from her chute, released it, and handed the wad of bright-yellow nylon to a crewman. Then she hurried over to the edge of the boat, where someone had already tossed a buoy into the water.

Magnolia gripped the rail. She was furious at Ted for almost killing himself and others, but mostly she was elated that X had saved the young idiot. Maybe the “Immortal” thing wasn’t a crock after all. Maybe the king was indeed the sky god that some of the Cazadores believed him to be.

Rhino had never liked his Cazador nickname much, but it was better than the first one they had given him: Perrito, or Small Dog. He had known another name before that, but his birth name, Nick Baker, was abandoned after the Cazadores captured his and several other families living in a bunker.

The name sounded weak, and the boy he had been was weak. But the only thing that Cazador warriors respected was strength.

Strength was how Rhino had risen through the ranks. He was no Nick Baker, and he was no Small Dog.

As a teenager, he used physical strength and cunning to best fighter after fighter. In his twenties, he continued to climb the ladder from grunt soldier to sergeant, eventually becoming one of a dozen lieutenants commanding a platoon of soldiers. Then, after the battle for the Vanguard Islands, X had bumped him all the way up to general.

He had proved himself many times over in the wastes, slaughtering beasts that would make most men piss inside their armor. But it had never been enough to earn him the degree of respect and loyalty that el Pulpo had from his ranks. Nor had Rhino earned the respect of Colonel Vargas and the other officers of the Black Order.

Maybe he didn’t deserve it.

Rhino hadn’t been strong enough to protect his team of Barracudas on their last excursion to fight the monsters. They all were dead now, including Wendig, the toughest warrior, male or female, he had ever known.

Rhino stepped into his private training chambers inside the rusted hull of Elysium. The huge vessel was the biggest in the entire armada. It served as the training ground and barracks for new warriors and also as military headquarters.

Colonel Forge, Colonel Vargas, and Colonel Moreto would meet with him at the command center later to assess the new recruits. But first he had his morning training.

He lit the candles on sconces mounted to the bulkhead. The glow spread over a raggedy old mat, a rusty rack of weights, and a wall of mirrors, most of them cracked.

Wearing only a loincloth and sandals, he walked into the center of the space and went to work with the double-headed spear.

The mirrors reflected his movements as his callused hands twirled the spear over his head. He closed his eyes, picturing two enemies trying to flank him on the deck of a boat. The blades slit both men’s throats in a single swipe.

Then he swiped upward at a third imagined enemy, opening a gaping line from pubis to chest and spilling viscera onto the deck.

The vivid images in his mind were not fantasy. They were memories of the time a squad of Cazador assassins tried to kill him so their leader could take his spot as lieutenant. It had happened on a coastal foray to a place once called Georgia.

And but for Wendig, the assassins would have succeeded in their mission to kill Rhino. The ferocious woman warrior had saved his life, fighting by his side against six men.

The memory of the ambush prompted a little surge of adrenaline through his veins. He continued training, recalling almost every swipe, thrust, and parry of that fateful day.

Rhino lost track of time as he reenacted the fight. When he stopped to check the clock, he was bathed in sweat. He opened his eyes, and the memories vanished like footprints before a wave.

Chest heaving, he finally lowered the spear. If he didn’t hurry, he was going to be late.

After putting on his armor, he picked up the spear and climbed the companionway to the weather deck. There, in the faint glow of a crimson sunrise, a group of two hundred had gathered. They ranged in age from fourteen on up to their midtwenties.

Most of them looked like Rhino did at their age: thin and weak. It wasn’t until el Pulpo started feeding the growing Cazador human meat from their hunting trips that Rhino had grown in size. But these young men and women would not be eating human meat anymore. Their diets would consist mostly of vegetables and fresh fish. Their training would be rigorous, six days a week from dawn to dusk, in the baking sun or out in the wastes.

Some of them would never see their families again.

Rhino looked to the west, where the sky was still dark, and glimpsed the blinking red light on the last flying airship in the world. Its launch bay was also filled with young men and women.

Unlike the Cazadores, they worked mostly in the darkness, diving into the abyss to simulate what they would face out beyond the barrier surrounding the Vanguard Islands. Today they were returning from their first mission outside that barrier.

Seeing them reminded Rhino that the sky people had a lot more in common with Cazadores than he had ever thought. To fend off extinction, the Hell Divers, too, had fought on extreme terrain against mutant beasts—maybe even more than his own people had. Unlike here, where there were no electrical storms or radiation, living on an airship required constant maintenance just to keep from falling out of the sky to certain death on the poisoned surface.

He looked away from the airship and walked out onto the deck. A group of veteran Cazador soldiers in armor waited for him.

Colonel Vargas had also shown up to look at the new recruits. He remained in the command center in the ship’s island tower, watching like an eagle from its nest. The man was known for observing, with his own eyes and through the spies under his command.

Rhino had warned X about that, too, but as long as the spies stayed off the capitol tower, X was satisfied. And so far, the militia had kept any unwanted visitors away.

Vargas’s protruding eyes met Rhino’s. The colonel didn’t even bother trying to hide his resentment.

Rhino turned away to have a closer look at the newly recruited teenagers talking amongst themselves. Some of them sat on the deck with their heads propped up in their hands, trying to grab some sleep.

He woke them up with his booming voice.

“Get up, shark bait!” he yelled in Spanish. “You got two seconds to get into position before I start tossing you overboard!”

All side conversations stopped as the youngsters snapped to attention. All but one.

Rhino immediately gravitated to the biggest recruit, a kid with tattoos all over his muscular arms and legs.

A hideous crab image covered his shaved head from the widow’s peak to the nape of his neck, its stick eyes just two inches above his own.

The young man was Felipe, son of Whale, who had perished with the rest of the Barracudas. Rhino could almost hear Whale’s spirit screaming from the hereafter at his disrespectful son.

“Get in line!” Rhino yelled.

Felipe ignored the order.

The other teenagers watched, eager to see whatever was going to happen.

So this is how it’s going to be…

“Did you not hear me?” Rhino said “You got crabs inside your head, too?” He strode up to where the young man sat. Felipe showed his sharpened teeth.

Rhino sensed that this was due to bad blood, and he was right.

“Why should I listen to you?” he asked. “You got my dad killed.”

“You’ll listen to me because I will feed your nuts to the crabs if you don’t.”

Felipe unfolded his arms and stood up. “You could try, but you’re past your prime, old man.”

Rhino would have laughed, but Felipe was half right. Now in his thirties, he was indeed past his prime. Sofia, almost six years younger, didn’t agree when he worried about his age, but she didn’t know what it was like to fight against fit, cocky young men like Felipe.

They were quicker and more agile and had the fearless heart of youngsters who thought themselves invincible. Over the years, Rhino had seen hundreds of Felipes perish in the wastes for that very reason.

“Fall in line,” Rhino said.

“Fuck you.”

Rhino swung a left hook, but the boy easily ducked the blow. He then jumped into the air and kicked Rhino in the chest. The force of the blow knocked him backward, but he quickly regained his balance.

Laughter erupted all around as the recruits fanned out in a circle to watch the fight.

The Cazador veterans moved in, but Rhino shook his head. He tossed his spear to one of them, then unbuckled his chest armor. He let it clank to the deck and quickly shucked off the rest of his armor.

Vargas, who Rhino had expected to challenge him long before someone like Felipe, had moved out of the command center and stood at the railing, looking down.

Felipe smiled as he bobbed and weaved, throwing punches like an old-world boxer.

Cocky little shit…

Whale would be ashamed, and now Rhino was going to teach the kid to respect the old-fashioned way.

Felipe strode forward and threw a punch that Rhino allowed to land on his clenched jaw. The crack was audible, but Rhino just laughed and spat on the deck.

Several voices broke out around them.

Rhino feinted with his right, then threw a left uppercut that caught his opponent under the chin, knocking him to the deck.

The kid got up faster than Rhino had expected. Now it was Felipe spitting blood. He wiped a smear off his face.

Rhino moved in to finish the fight, but the younger warrior jumped and kicked at his face. Raising an arm, Rhino deflected the blow.

Felipe moved quickly to flank him, but Rhino went low and threw an elbow, narrowly missing Felipe’s ribs. He kicked Rhino in the back of the knee hard enough to bring him down on his other knee.

A kick to the back of the head nearly knocked Rhino to the deck.

Head spinning, he staggered to his feet.

The onlookers went wild, but Rhino ignored them. Felipe was dancing again, moving quickly, and for a fleeting moment, Rhino worried that he might lose this fight.

If he did, he was doomed. No one would follow him into battle.

He needed just one well-timed blow to knock the kid on his ass, where he belonged.

Felipe came at him again, kicking air. Rhino hammered down on his thigh, stuffing the kick, and threw a roundhouse punch, which Felipe ducked.

A golden rind of sun peeked over the horizon, making Rhino squint. In that instant, he took a blow to the diaphragm, knocking the air from his lungs. He gasped for air, and Felipe moved in.

That was his mistake.

Rhino was not as shaken as he looked, and as Felipe cocked his leg for another flashy jump kick, Rhino strode forward and threw a punch that caught him in the ribs.

The blow sent the young man flying. He hit the deck hard and stayed there.

Rhino loomed over him, chest heaving. When he looked up at the railing, Vargas had folded his arms across his chest.

“You want to dance, too?” Rhino shouted up.

Vargas flashed his sharp teeth.

The crowd quieted, and a sergeant brought the spear over. Rhino took it and held the tip to Felipe’s throat. Blinking, the boy tried to move, then gave it up and settled on his back.

“I didn’t get your dad killed,” Rhino said. “But if you don’t shape up, you’re going to follow in his footsteps.”

Felipe bared his sharp teeth as Rhino pressed the edge just enough to draw blood. Then he pulled the spear back, twirled it, and said, “You have to decide. Will you fight and die with honor like your old man, or keep being a shithead until it gets you killed?”

Rhino let Felipe think on it a moment and then reached down. After a moment of indecision, Felipe grabbed the offered hand.

“Good choice. You will do much better as a warrior if you learn from your mistakes.” He hauled the boy up onto his feet, gave him a good hard pat on the back, and pushed him back into the crowd.

The recruits had stopped watching Rhino and Felipe. Some of them were pointing at the sky. Rhino squinted at a green glow descending toward the ship. The light trailed a Hell Diver in free fall.

A parachute blossomed and began to spiral gently down toward the deck.

“¡Viene el rey Xavier!” Rhino yelled, repeating it in English. “Here comes King Xavier!”

Everyone fell into orderly rank and file, including Felipe.

Rhino walked over to greet his friend and their ruler as X touched down gracefully on the deck. He quickly released his chute, grabbed it up, and stuffed it back into the pack. Then he took off his helmet and walked to the assembled recruits.

Many of the youthful faces eyed X suspiciously. Rhino knew what they were thinking: How could this old man have killed el Pulpo? Many of them probably thought it was luck, but Rhino knew better. Scanning faces, he noticed several gazes locked on the new king, showing the same anger and bloodlust that he had seen in Felipe a few minutes ago.

Before long, Rhino wouldn’t be the only one with a challenger.

The question was how challengers would go about trying to take X down. Would they come at him like the assassination squad that had come after Rhino years ago, or would they challenge him to a match, as Felipe had just done?

Time would tell, but Rhino knew one thing for certain: King Xavier Rodriguez didn’t need luck to fight his enemies. He had the heart of a lion, the skills of a seasoned warrior, and, when he needed it, the ferocity of a shark.

The fool who challenged him would be the one needing the luck.