Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2) Read online

  Desperado

  Book Two of Murphy’s Lawless: Watch The Skies

  By

  Kevin Ikenberry

  PUBLISHED BY: Beyond Terra Press

  Copyright © 2021 Kevin Ikenberry

  All Rights Reserved

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  Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

  and discover other Beyond Terra Press titles at:

  https://chriskennedypublishing.com/

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  For My Girls

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  Cover Design by Shezaad Sudar

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About Kevin Ikenberry

  Find out what’s coming from CKP!

  The Caine Riordan Universe

  Excerpt from Book One of the Chimera Company:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy:

  Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War:

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  Chapter One

  Imsurmik

  R’Bak

  Tucked against a low, tilted plateau rising from west to east, the town of Imsurmik sparkled with life in the early evening twilight. The days approaching the Sear grew ever warmer. Working outside, even to feverishly harvest the last of the seasonal crops, grew more difficult to endure, and its citizens slowly transitioned toward nocturnal schedules and events. Typical human behavior was one of the first casualties of the rising temperatures and radiation. Across the city, its inhabitants worked tirelessly to secure their own survival. Some settlements planned to migrate north in search of cooler climates. Others expanded their underground refuges and fortifications. For all of them, the plan was the same: endure the Sear.

  Her eyes on the glowing city, Aliza Turan made her way up the curving road from the farmlands toward the central fortifications. Around her, farmers returned from the fields after gathering their crops. Miners carried tools and dust-covered implements from the long hours of digging before the nightly feasts. As she passed through the gate, groups of women and children carried water from the central spring to fill artificial reservoirs. She paused there and washed the thick, protective paint from her exposed skin. Without it, skin cancers were common on R’Bak. The cool water felt heavenly. Excited voices chattered around her in a myriad of dialects. The buzz of general activity wound deeper into the city where the bazaar, nearing the end of its needfulness as a trading center, transformed nightly for what could only be called a party. The town’s collective excitement grew as the crops approached harvest, but something special was in the air. Tonight, and every night for the next two weeks, would be the Festival of the Kr’it.

  Aliza stepped into the mud and rock home she shared with a group of friendly migrants to change her garments for the evening’s festivities. All the women greeted her with smiles and barely contained excitement as they too prepared for the night. Everyone’s spirits were higher than she’d seen before. She’d known and lived among the migrants for months. They’d agreed to smuggle her into the town so she could gather information as long as she played her role and worked the fields alongside them. Moving into town had been easy, even if daily life was difficult. Now, there was a different energy in her surroundings with the approaching festival. With full darkness settling across the countryside, there would be no need for the thick, preventive face paint to cover their exposed skin. Nor would the locals need the traditional robed and hooded garments. While she appreciated the cover they provided, she was more than happy to let her dark hair blow free in the relatively cool evening breeze.

  Like the others, Aliza prepared a basket with large, flexible handles that could double as shoulder straps. Before she tied it shut, she checked inside and carefully laid the few tools they would need for the harvest atop a concealed parcel. She glanced at her olive drab Timex watch, tucked underneath the long sleeves of her garment, and saw the time was much later than she’d expected. While the harvest was a significant and time-consuming event, the Festival of the Kr’it was casual by comparison. After nightfall, the lack of urgency in Imsurmik’s citizens surprised her. The hours in total darkness on the planet were limited, yet everyone around her appeared content to wait until the night air was as cool as it could get before moving to the thermal pool.

  One woman, the one the others called Momani, looked at her sternly. “Patience, young one,” she said. A thin smile grew across the woman’s leathered face.

  Over the last several months, and with considerable time and practice, Aliza had become fluent in several dialects. You’re a regular chameleon, Bo had said proudly. Prisoner, survivor, teacher, and now officer. Is there anything you can’t do?

  The military lifestyle of their band, the Lost Soldiers, hadn’t come easily to her. Yet she’d been assimilated and become one of them as much through shared experience as through actual leadership. Colonel Murphy’s desire for her to identify medicinals and teach soldiers how to ride the whinaalani, the lizard-like mammals who served as beasts of burden and skilled combat mounts, had led her to a life she’d never imagined. All of it felt strangely perfect, even if there were some finer nuances she hadn’t quite nailed down.

  “I will be late, again.”

  The woman shrugged as if to say things would happen in their own time. For a people so concerned with their survival through the Sear, their almost laconic response to the pressure of time surprised Aliza, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Maintaining her cover meant keeping such emotions in check. Following the crowd had always been difficult for her, and being late reporting to Bo, and subsequently to Colonel Murphy, wasn’t her only concern.

  She doubted Bo would be too upset with her. While she held the rank of first lieutenant, Bo had been promoted to major and was technically her commander. Yet they were a couple. They’d shared the same bunk since the operation they now called the J’Stull Job. Fraternization, once frowned upon by leaders in modern militaries, wasn’t a concern. For the lot of them, despite the differences in their lifetimes, experiences, and even countries, they were the only friends they had. Moreover, they’d become family. Each of them carried the weight of their previous lives. For some, it was easier to start over than others. Aliza was resilient and independent, yet she’d come to learn she not only needed those around her—she loved them. They filled a void and salved each other’s pain to whatever extent they could. Even in their bunk, Aliza and Bo Moorefield felt the sum of each other’s fears and the uncertainty of the past they had left behind.

  Aliza often laid awake at night wondering if she could’ve saved Ben Mazza during Operation Markolet in Palestine;
they’d been young, careless, and brave. What she wouldn’t give to go back and stop them and tame their foolish bravado. Ben had died a few meters from her, and she couldn’t save him. And then, as if to underscore the finality of her powerlessness, the Ktor had taken her almost two hundred years into the future.

  Bo’s path had been no easier. She knew Bo laid awake at night wondering if he could have saved his marriage. Neither one of them had had the chance to resolve their relationships before fate took the opportunity out of their hands. It weighed heavily on them both, yet Aliza framed the experience differently after her time in Dachau. During the height of the Holocaust, she believed even the worst possible life beyond those walls would be easier than surviving within them. Human relationships were simple things, comparatively. There was no need to complicate the ideas of love and hate with what Bo called baggage. As long as they both looked ahead, instead of into the past, the rest should have been easy. Yet, both of them struggled.

  Things weren’t easy, and she knew better than to assume they would be. The mission was inherently dangerous, and they leaned on one another as best they could. Bo could be quiet, almost sullen at times. She knew he took criticism personally and dealt with lingering doubts about himself and the marriage he’d lost. When those times came, all she could do was weather it and hold fast to the truth of the pattern: Bo would forgive himself, and his smile would return. It was dumb luck he was in the unsmiling phase when she’d had to leave. The order from Colonel Murphy had come in the middle of the night almost a month ago. Aliza quietly gathered her things and set off for the perimeter to join up with Momani and her band, ostensibly just another worker going to the city to take part in the harvest.

  Bo had met her at the gate astride his whinaalani, Scout. The whinnie cooed a greeting. Bo’s hand touched the brim of his boonie cap.

  “On patrol for the night?” Aliza stepped up next to the whinnie and patted its muscular neck.

  Bo nodded. “George Patton said to never ask your troops to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  Bo smiled at her. “I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me.”

  Aliza took a deep breath. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I can’t say anything right.”

  “And you think that’s better than saying nothing at all?” Aliza kicked at the dirt and tried to rein in her rising frustration. “Let me love you the way I can.”

  Bo glanced up at the distant horizon for a long moment. The way he did when trying to formulate his words. Aliza kept quiet, making him reply. He started slowly. “Maybe I could say the same about loving you. I do my best, but I stay quiet so my words don’t get in the way. Past experience tells me I screw things up when I talk. I clam up so I don’t sound like an idiot and upset someone I care about. There’s so much I want to say, but….” He ended with a shrug.

  Aliza stared up at him. She knew he cared for her, but it was so damn hard to get him to say anything. “You’re not an idiot, Bo. You know that, and you know I love you, yes?”

  His eyes bored through her, and his face was still as stone. Standing at the gate, she waited for him to climb down from Scout and wrap her in his embrace. When it was apparent he would not, she tried not to frown and dammed the tears trying to leak from her eyes. “One of these days you’ll have to tell me what’s on your mind. Be safe, and I’ll see you soon.”

  He touched his cap again. “I will. I love you, too.”

  Aliza realized she’d frozen halfway through dressing herself. She drew in a quick, sharp breath as the humble and familiar walls of the house seemed to suddenly reappear around her. If any of the others noticed, no one said anything. Aliza quickly finished her preparations as to not have them waiting for her. Dressed and carrying their woven packs, the women exited into the small thoroughfare near the artificial canal running west to east through the Inner City. The group emerged into a festive atmosphere. There was music from an otherworldly instrument. Its screechy chords and earsplitting crescendos intermixed with a constant warbling sound, but it sounded joyous rather than morose. They joined several women along with more than a few young boys decorating their hair with blossoms of the extravagant indigo donmaar flowers that grew near the river. The Festival of the Kr’it seemed quite the affair.

  Along the primary thoroughfare, everyone danced. It was celebration and camaraderie Aliza hadn’t seen on the planet since her arrival, and, frankly, it gave her more than a measure of hope for what they were doing. These people had survived for hundreds of years in this hellish environment. The entire town of Imsurmik had once been built entirely into the rock face of the plateau. Over time, its promise drew thousands of others to the mid-latitude city, and it grew outward. Walls were built and defenses prepared. Farmlands were laid, plowed, and irrigated. As Imsurmik expanded, though, so did their social order.

  Carved into the side of the plateau, in a cavity etched into the rock over millions of years, lay the dwellings. Beneath the cover of the overhang, elevated ten meters above the city, were at least two rows of richly appointed homes, with the wealthiest citizens occupying those furthest under the cavern’s lip for protection.

  Below the dwellings, atop a hill overlooking the farmlands, lay the Inner City. Protected by a rough stone and wood glacis around ten meters high, the Inner City comprised the trade and commerce center of the city. The Inner City itself was further delineated. Around the bazaar and thoroughfares were houses and small businesses built around the seasonal trades. It differed from anything Aliza could remember seeing on Earth, but, having spent most of her childhood inside Dachau, she’d barely known the outside world at all.

  Outside the walls and down the slope from the Inner City was the Outer City. She’d been there a few times visiting the farmers’ market, where they sold the fresh produce from the lush, irrigated fields south of Imsurmik. The Outer City was an entirely different sort of place. Agriculturally focused, the city itself in those outer areas was, in some places, in little more than squalor. Every day, migrant parties collapsed their shanties, gathered their belongings, and resumed moving north. Aliza wondered why they would bother coming back.

  The surrounding festival was the first time she’d seen happiness on R’Bak. No one wore the traditional face paint to cover themselves from the intense light of day. Fire-lit faces shone in the darkness far beyond their smiles.

  As they reached the bazaar, the women turned north, pushing toward the cavern and the central bazaar. On the north edge of the squared market, an underground aquifer sprang from the precincts of the cavern dwellings into a man-made canal roughly three meters wide and a meter deep. The water was crystal clear and delightfully cool. The artificial canal directed the water from the center of the Inner City along the cavern wall to the far eastern edge, where it dropped through a spillway in the glacis, creating a fifteen-meter waterfall. Below, the reservoir was easily an acre in size. She did not know how deep it was. The locals said there was no bottom to the pond itself because it was a natural hot spring. The unused water from the city’s aquifer drained there via the artificial canal and mixed with water coming up from the geothermal spring. Without the aquifer’s water, the pool would have been frightfully hot. The engineering feat of joining the water supplies enabled the growth of certain organisms and food sources for the town and contributed mineral-laden water to the fields. With the approach of the Sear, the kr’it rose nightly from the depths to feed upon an abundance of smaller organisms near the surface and along the bank. Kr’it were a delicacy, and the harvest was undeniably special to Imsurmik’s citizens.

  The unexpected joy of the entire town overwhelmed her. More than once on the path toward the waterfall, Aliza found herself swept up in the dancing. The movement, the music, and the atmosphere did more to raise her spirits than she realized. Bo would have enjoyed it, too, and Aliza regretted he couldn’t be there with her. While she doubted he was the party type, he might have enj
oyed seeing her as happy as she was.

  As time dragged on, and their prearranged time for radio communications slid past, Aliza knew Bo would be sitting out there in the darkness on the bluff across the narrow valley, trying not to worry. It couldn’t be helped. No one else in the procession seemed all that intent on getting out to the pond itself. Apparently, there would be ample opportunities to harvest the kr’it.

  From what she understood, the organisms were something between a shrimp and an iguana. They possessed four tiny legs, which allowed them to crawl around the edge of the warm pit, and a long, thick tail for swimming. Each was pale and sensitive to light. She hadn’t seen one yet, and when she did, she wasn’t certain whether she would be revolted or intrigued. But all that mattered, at least to the citizens of the town, was that they were apparently good eating.

  After dark, when the heat waned, the typical activities of the day returned, culminating with the feast of the harvest. The procession of women and children would go outside the walls, wade in the waters around the edge of the pond, and collect the kr’it. As they filled their woven baskets to the brim with the precious creatures, Aliza would use the PRC-77 radio hidden in her basket to report on the day’s activities to Bo.

  Colonel Murphy had given her several key requirements on which to gain intelligence. Given the approaching Sear, outlying stations and militias were banding together in towns and gathering forces under individual satraps. Such was the case in Imsurmik. A growing militia was forming in the town itself, and she was determined to discover its strengths and weaknesses. She also needed to fully understand where the militia leaders were placing their weapons and how they intended to use them.