Free ARISEN, Book Twelve - Carnage by Michael Stephen Fuchs

she’d seen only one was operating.
    Which made this feat of flying even more terrifyingly virtuosic. With asymmetric thrust, trying to spin the helo into backward flight without stopping… well, Ali was in a position to appreciate how truly badass that was. But she only had a couple of seconds to admire it. Because once it was back to within a hundred meters of them, but nose-to-nose this time, and matching their speed, the left-side cockpit window flipped out and up, and out of it leaned…
    Vasily. The motherfucking Spetsnaz sniper.
    And his SV-338 rifle was already leveled out, pointing right in Ali’s face – or, rather, in the face of Cleveland, the pilot, beside her. And Ali realized with a shock of ice-cold horror that this evil sonofabitch was simply going to do exactly what he had done last time – shoot the pilot to death, and then probably the co-pilot, too.
    Wait, I’m the co-pilot, Ali thought, as she remembered she was occupying that seat.
    And then down they would all go.
    And the cocky bastard might actually do it right through the same fucking bullet holes he made the first time.
    * * *
    As Ali stared into Vasily’s yawning muzzle, and struggled to get her own weapon up in the tight confines of the cockpit, time massively slowed and dilated for her. This was one of the secrets of her success – being able to operate, to move and shoot, in what was effectively her own personal bullet-time. In the crucible of combat, her senses got jacked up to maximum sensitivity, and everything around her slowed to a frame-by-frame crawl – in which she could pick and engage targets before they could react, move before she was seen, and think six moves ahead in the high-speed chess game, the lethal geometric dance, that was gunfighting.
    But there was only one target right now, there was absolutely nowhere for her to move… and all she could think about in this frozen moment was:
    It was him – and it had been all along. She fucking knew it. She’d known it was him skulking around that mountainside forest. It had been him on the dark side of the Orca in the Stronghold, shooting like a boss – even as his own boss stole P-Zero out from under them.
    And it was him now.
    And, utterly beggaring belief, he was about to do the exact same shit he did on the day they first tangled over the south Atlantic, also in dueling helicopters.
    Ali had let herself get beaten that time. And everyone on her crew had paid a terrible price – all of them killed or grievously wounded, down to the last man. Everyone except her. And even she had ended up lying flat on her back down on the deck, just waiting for the aircraft to hit the Atlantic and come apart, and kill her. Just waiting for what was coming. Well, that wasn’t fucking good enough. It hadn’t been then, and it definitely wasn’t now.
    And that shit was not happening again.
    Because, right now, sitting behind Ali were Handon, Fick, Henno, and Reyes – all her brothers, all men she loved. And at their feet lay the key to saving everything that was left of humanity.
    She jammed her rifle barrel through one of the old bullet holes in the windscreen and aimed across a hundred yards of turbulent air at Vasily’s face, and she shot like she had never shot before – even as she could already see, hear, and feel his incoming rounds landing on and around her. And as she fired, she wondered why the hell he hadn’t just taken out their tail rotor from behind. His rifle was a hell of a lot smaller than 30mm, and there was nothing stopping him. He could have forced them down, with no risk to himself or his aircraft.
    And then it hit her: this guy didn’t just want them. He didn’t even just want Patient Zero. He wanted her – Ali, personally. That other cocky Spetsnaz bastard they’d captured then executed back in the clearing had been telling the truth before he died.
    That Vasily was out here looking for her.
    And now he’d found her. From his backward-flying helicopter,