His mind was still whirling with those thoughts and feelings as he and his sister were pushed through the door and into the palace again.
A brush of motion raised the hairs on his skin, but Brennan had no time to react before a hot splatter of liquid hit the back of his neck and a blaster lased a round off right behind him. He flinched, twisting out of the suddenly slack grip of the man who’d been holding him, and saw the armsman fall with blood gushing from his throat.
The man holding Lydia had taken a lase round at point-blank range to the head, and without much blood to absorb the energy, it looked like his head had popped like an overripe melon. A glimmering hand dropped over Lydia’s eyes and turned her away from the sight as a second matching hand gripped a blaster, lasing off several more rounds.
It was over in a second. The four men who’d taken them were cooling on the ground as Brennan stared at the glowing Cadre armor standing there, holding his sister.
“Kayle?”
The armor faded, and his brother nodded. “Come on. We have to get you two out of here.”
“Kayle, they said that father …”
“The reports are that father was killed by Corian,” Kayle said. “I know. Come on.”
He got them moving, heading down the stairs, only to stop as the sound of heavy boots came up to them from below.
“They called for an escort when they caught us,” Brennan said.
“Damn,” Kayle swore, turning them around. “OK, back to the roof.”
“There’s no way off the roof!” Lydia protested as they ran back out onto the roof and the private landing platform.
“There’s the skimmer,” Kayle corrected, nodding toward the flyer as it came into sight. “Wasn’t that your plan?”
Brennan nodded. “Yeah, but, Kayle, the skimmer only takes two people.”
“I know,” Kayle said as he ran them over to the skimmer. “That’s why you’re going to get in it and fly your sister out of here.”
“What about you?” Lydia protested, fighting him as Kayle pushed her into the rear seat.
“Don’t worry about me,” Kayle said. “Bren, do it.”
Brennan grimaced but finally shoved the flyer’s seat into position, locking his sister in before he dropped into place and pulled the restraints down over himself.
“Take this,” Kayle said, handing him the compact weapon Brennan recognized as Cadre issue. “My Bene will protect you.”
“Kayle? This is your Armati?” Brennan was confused.
The Armati were deeply secretive weapons of the Cadre, and they were the one type he’d never been tested on. Brennan didn’t know much of anything about them, but he knew that a Cadreman didn’t just hand his over to anyone, not even family.
“I’ve enough weapons to do what I need to do,” Kayle smiled easily, handing his blaster back over the seat to Lydia. “Now do as I said and get your sister out of here. Find William, if you can, or one of your old teachers.”
He stepped back, pulled the shielding cover down over Brennan, and slapped the clear visor twice as he stepped back.
“Go on!” he ordered again, turning around and running back to the door.
Brennan gripped the controls in both hands, thumbs on the launcher studs, but his eyes were glued to where his brother was kneeling near the door and picking up one of the fallen armsmen’s carbines. He started firing down into the hall beyond almost instantly, and ionized traces could be seen flying back in return.
“Bren? We can’t leave him there!” Lydia objected.
Brennan’s grip tightened around the twin sticks, knuckles whitening as he stared unblinking.
An explosion rocked the door, throwing Kayle out and back. The armored Cadreman hit the roof in a skid that brought him halfway back to the skimmer. Brennan threw off his restraints and popped the canopy, but before he could get out Kayle turned over and waved violently at him.
“Get out of here!”
As men came pouring out of the door, Kayle flipped back over to his feet, charging them with his armor glittering brightly from internal light. Brennan winced as carbine blasts shook his brother’s form, barely slowing his charge.
At the last moment before Kayle reached the armsmen, blades of hard light erupted from every facet of his armor and he dove into them. The blood spray was nightmarish as the fight turned to extremely close combat, brutal in ways that ranged fighting never could be. Men fell to the roof, sometimes minus limbs, losing life’s blood with alarming speed.
In the middle of it all, Kayle seemed untouched by any of it. His armor gleamed, clean and pure as the sun. Blood couldn’t stick to hard light projections, and any damage he’d taken had already been repaired … on the outside at least. He spun, tearing a man’s throat out with a bladed elbow, then snapped a kick into another.
A carbine blast from behind the men took Kayle in the shoulder, driving him back a step, then another holed through his armor and lower abdomen. The moment of lessening pressure was enough, and the armsmen regrouped.
The flurry of blasts drove Kayle back to the ground, and men poured out of the palace onto the roof, one of them pausing to put a single round from his carbine into Kayle’s head before turning to the waiting skimmer.
Brennan didn’t remember saying anything, though he could hear someone screaming. Maybe it was him, maybe Lydia. He couldn’t tell. It might have been both.
He jabbed his thumbs down on the launch studs and the twin rockets on either side of his skimmer roared, launching the sail line into the air. A thousand feet up the rockets activated their projectors, casting a light sail across the sky; far below it the skimmer twisted with the wind and began to slide along the rooftop of the palace.
Men ran after them, but no one seemed to be firing as Brennan drew in the line and lifted his skimmer into the air.
On the rooftop, a squad leader skidded to a halt and held out a hand demanding a radio.
His sub handed the device to him, and he quickly got in contact with the strike coordinators.
“A skimmer just launched from the palace … No, do not fire on it. Track it and force it down,” he ordered.
There was a pause and a mostly garbled response.
“Because the Imperials are on it! The general wants them alive!”
Another rapid exchange, some garbled sounds from the box, and he growled and took a breath before replying.
“Just do it.”
He shut the radio off and handed it back to his sub, shaking his head before looking back to the fallen Cadreman who’d held the door. He sighed, “Find out who that was and locate his Armati. The general wants them all under his control.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Bren … ,” Lydia whispered weakly. “Kayle … he …”
“I know. I saw,” Brennan croaked back, hands working the controls of the skimmer automatically.
He was riding the low winds, a river of air that moved a little over a hundred miles an hour between seven hundred and thirteen hundred feet above the surface. They were generally predictable and easy to navigate, mostly because they’d been mapped for over a century. Brennan continued to winch in the line, dragging the skimmer up closer to the sails, which increased his altitude and speed as he reduced line drag.
“What are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Brennan admitted. “I just don’t …”
A shadow crossed his canopy, causing him to turn and spot a military skimmer coming in hard from his left side. He could see the lights flashing, a signal code ordering him to put the skimmer down.