Dark Omega

CHAPTER 15 - HEART OF THE SNIPER

They kept to the main road leading out of the compound, only taking a small detour to retrieve Haides's cached slugthrower. He considered leaving it but didn't know when he'd be back this way. The pistol was the only weapon he had access to, and much too valuable to abandon.

Haides was pretty sure Luca wouldn't be bothered by the gun. He was right—the veteran soldier didn't even blink. Instead, the man asked pointed questions about gun handling as they walked—and proceeded to give advice on how to carry, aim, fire, reload, and care for a firearm. The exchange made young Haides realize just how little he knew of weapons and survival—and how valuable Luca could be if he played his cards right.

Luca also talked about caring for the weapon's umbra. Like the technomancers, Luca believed everything with a neural chip had a spirit, a ghost in the machine. Caring for the machine's umbra sounded a lot like cleaning and lubricating to Haides, but Luca insisted that it made the weapon less likely to jam or otherwise misbehave. Which of course it did: a well-maintained piece of equipment would always perform better than a rusted, decrepit machine. Superstition was what it was, but Haides didn't call the sniper out on it. Luca knew a lot about guns, Haides very little. It was better to let the man talk, learn the useful bits, and ignore the nonsense.

After getting the slugger, the pair went up to Red Square. That's what the GIs called the Plaza of the Hallowed Dead. Haides couldn't blame their choice of name: the plaza was a vast open space with at least a hundred towering statues made of akite—a reddish, marble-like local mineral—arranged in three concentric circles. The figures depicted mostly old men, with a few young heroes and a handful of women in the mix—Akakio's hallowed dead, the local equivalent of the Conclave's paragon-saints. Most of the statues had been damaged or outright destroyed—some during the actual battle for Thira, but mostly during the occupation—leaving the square covered in red rubble.

Red Square was about halfway between the compound and the Forbidden Zone. If you wanted to go east from the square, you had to first go north or south, bypass the Zone and then resume your original heading. South was longer, but safer. North was shorter, but snipers from both sides liked to take potshots at passersby. Sometimes there were bombings, and the Coalition would go there in armored columns occasionally. It was an area best avoided in Haides's opinion.

Mother would have gone south, the longer but safer route, so that was their route of choice as well. Luca suggested they should keep some distance between them. One GI and a local boy would look like an odd couple, sure to attract attention. Plus, they'd be too easy to take out at once. Easy targets were tempting targets, according to Luca. Haides would go first—and the Coalition sniper would follow at a distance.

Haides wasn't fooled. He knew he had been set up as the bait. But that was the way it was. You had to give something to get something. He didn't worry too much. If they ran into trouble, Haides was confident that Luca would become the primary target: a shooter wouldn't want to reveal himself to bag an unarmed child, not when there was a man with a gun walking behind. The kid walking point would be ignored long enough for him to slink away.

They kept going for about an hour before Luca called a break. They'd come around the southern edge of the Forbidden Zone and started to turn east again. The area was, in the sniper's opinion, the most likely place something—he didn't say 'bad' out loud—could have happened.

Haides didn't like the implications—that Mother could be injured, dead even—but said nothing.

The odd couple took cover in the ruins of a shattered commercial building. One half of a fallen info-sign said 'Garad,' but Haides had no idea what kind of business that might have been, and with the Grid down, there was no way to check the infobanks. Haides ate the energy bar he'd gotten from Colonel Joaquin back at the compound, and they shared water from Luca's canteen.