Free Rebel's Consort - Phoenix Book 1 by KH LeMoyne Page B

rectangular box, floating two feet from the ground. Sentries shifted at the ready, palming their weapons.
    Quite the show for broad daylight.
    Analena let her hood drop from her face, pushed away from the building, and turned to the nearest transportation pod. A rear image view flashed across her hand device, confirming the sentries had finished stowing the rectangle into a military hovercraft.
    She waited, pretending to fiddle with her hair until the security vehicle descended beneath the road’s surface to the dedicated security transport tunnel. Then she entered a civilian transport pod.
    A quick ride to the next intersecting station, and she exited her pod. Milling with the crowd, she ducked into a service door for the tunnel. Cages ran vertical to the tunnels with stairwells throughout the connecting transit lines for servicing the grid between New Delphi and Down Below. The same service cages also supported the military tunnels. While the military tunnels accessed the major buildings, the destination facility for the child wasn’t on the secure line. The Med Lab’s hover vehicle needed to borrow the public route for its final leg, providing several minutes of delay while it waited for clearance for access to the public line.
    That was her target.
    Cloak whipped off and reduced to a small, flat wafer in airless plastic, Analena tucked it in her back pouch, climbed down one of the flights of stairs, and ran the final leg of the journey.
    Sure enough, the hover transport floated in front of a locked gate, awaiting security clearance. Four sentries accompanied the transport. The two managing the navigation were visible from the front viewport. The others would be guarding the delivery in the back.
    Her thumb activated the button for her dampening field. At best, she had five minutes undetected. Fingers splayed, she covered the security panel at the rear hatch of the craft. Silver rippled along her hand and wove into the panel.
    A bolt of current surged through the panel, locking her to the outside of the craft. Shocked and unable to move, she watched streams of blue light rip from the panel through her skin. Flashes ignited as the blue devoured her flesh, sizzling nanites and her brain’s control over her extremities. Her body jiggled against the hover’s frame as a siren split the air. A bright flash accompanied a pressure that flung her back against the tunnel’s rock wall.
    With a grunt, she slid down the wall, her legs struggling to support her.
    The front hatch of the hovercraft swung up. She concentrated through a daze to lock her laser on the two navigators. Damn. Her transparency cover had been blown with the shock, leaving her exposed to the guards.
    The added shock of the rear hatch opening, exposing an empty craft, cost her precious minutes. A digital image of the cargo box phasing in and out, died away as the lights from the hover gave out.
    A decoy? She’d followed the decoy.
    Darkness didn’t kick-in in time to cover her exit. She managed to regain her footing, intending to head for the caged maintenance handholds, when a heat-guided retrieval harpoon sliced through her abdomen.
    With a guttural cry and a swipe from her laser, she severed the feed line the sentry had intended to use to haul her back. The narrow harpoon rod still in place, she jumped down the hole, her legs splayed to ride the edge of the cage. Her one good arm wrapped tight around the central pole.
    Reaching the next level was a bitch.
    Gasping with pain, she latched a grommet to the understructure of the grid. Nausea and lightheadedness clashed as she struggled to maintain her gloved grip on the repelling line. A laser shot punched by her hand, just missing her. Twelve feet from the bottom, she released her hold. The crash of rocks against her feet jarred her entire body. The collapse of her legs launched her backward to land on her hip. She wanted to pass out from the pain.
    Lights flickered above her on the support column from the