Free Black Guard, The by C. R. Daems

his face a
bleached white. Another man stood next to him, eyes darting around the room,
frozen in fear. His gun discharged, shattering the door frame—an uncontrollable
reflex. I shot both in the head. When I stood and exited the room, Nadel held
up two fingers as she exited the study.
    I stopped to rip off the servant
clothes and tear off a piece of cloth to tie around my forehead. Nadel did the
same for her hand. I noticed a shard in my hand also, but it wasn’t bleeding
enough to worry about now. We headed for the stairs. At the bottom, Corporal
Kott lay on the floor in a pool of blood, clearly dead. Catz was farther back,
shooting every time the man’s weapons-grade gun appeared out of the doorway.
Now with Nadel and I on his right and Catz on his left, the man couldn’t peek
around the doorway without exposing himself. But we couldn’t breach the door
without getting killed.
    The room was on my left and the door
opened to the left, so he was probably on the wall to the right of the door. I
sprinted for several meters, dove past the door, and rolled to a standing
position next to Catz. The man had fired as I flew past but too late to hit me.
I tapped the release on my whip and signaled Nadel to get ready as I inched towards
the door. I stopped a meter away from the door and my whip whistled over my
head. It shot out, through the door, and around to the right. A man screamed,
and I heard what sounded like a gun drop as I moved closer to the door. Again, my
whip snaked into the room. A gurgling sound, then nothing. Nadel dove past me
into the room. Silence. When I looked, a man was lying on the ground. His upper
arm was cut through to the bone, and his neck cut so that it barely supported
his head.
    "Most of us thought those whips
were for show," Nadel said, looking down at the man on the floor and
poking his head with her boot. "Looks like we were wrong."
    When I emerged, Haber was coming out of
an open area, and Glick and Lipkin were coming out of the laundry room with our
equipment.
    "What happened, Corporal
Catz?" I asked. She was limping and bleeding from her hand.
    "Someone alerted them we were
coming, because they caught us by surprise. Private Jaffe entered the open bay
where most of the seriously wounded rested. A sergeant had a rifle under his
blanket and shot her in the face. Private Haber killed him and the rest.
Corporal Kott and I took the servants’ rooms. It was difficult going, but we
were making progress until Kott opened that door. He shot her in the chest and
has been holding me off for the past five minutes."
    "Suit up," I said, strapping
my Mfi to my arm and the Mfw and laser to my thighs. "Private Lam, grab
what medical supplies you can and meet us outside. Our men probably miss us. We’ll
retrieve Kott and Jaffe when we return." We found a large ground vehicle
that accommodated the six of us and headed for the Ming Tree forest. Each of
the Guard had special training in some specialty or another. Corporals Glick
and Kott’s specialty had been medical.
    As we drove, Glick worked on each one
of us, removing shards and repairing open wounds. It turned out to be an
interesting experience when combined with bumps and turns at two hundred km/h.
    "Found it, Judt said, turning
sharply off the highway onto a narrow road, spraying dirt and gravel as the
wheels fought for traction. Several vehicles could be seen about a klick away.
When we reached the area, there were five skimmers and eight ground vehicles
scattered around. Off in the distance, I could hear faint shooting. We were all
functional, if not in prime condition, as we began making our way towards the
sounds. Sections of my body seemed to be taking turns complaining each time I
stepped, turned, or jumped over something. Only the thought of my team fighting
for their lives drove me half running through brush and over dead limbs in the
heavily treed forest. I and the others fell several times in our mad rush with
our battered bodies. What seemed