Razor’s Traitorous Heart

Chapter 2-1

2

“What was this city called?” Razor asked the human pilot sitting beside him.

He glanced down at the darkened ruins. Cutter, his second-in-command, had given him a report on it, but a new issue on the way to the area had taken priority. He had arrived earlier that day to meet with other members of the Alliance council.

He had been furious to discover the number of details that had been deleted from the previously submitted reports. Badrick, the Usoleum council member who had formerly been in charge of this star system, had a lot to answer for as far as Razor was concerned. Badrick was lucky to be alive after he discovered the bastard had approved many of the falsified reports submitted to the Trivator generals and the council over the past six years.

Badrick’s interference, compounded with his incompetence, was a big reason the Earth was still in such a mess. It was only because most of the evidence was circumstantial that he was unable to remove Badrick and ship him off-world. Badrick had done an excellent job of blaming others for his decisions. It was a slow process, but Razor was working on unraveling the Usoleum Councilman’s lies.

“Chicago,” the pilot responded through the headset. “Colonel Baker is in charge of this area. There are two groups of rebels fighting for control. The fighting has heated up over the past few months. They’ve divided the city in half between the north and south by building a huge-ass wall, reminds me a bit of the Great Wall of China only it’s made out of rubble. We call it the Great Wall of Chicago,” the pilot joked.

Razor didn’t reply. He could see the twenty foot high by thirty foot wide wall that cut the city in half. The ghostly figures of cranes towered over sections of it like silent sentinels in the night. There were dots of light, probably from small fires, glowing faintly in the dark. He silently calculated how long it would take to level the city if the two opposing sides refused to lay down their arms.

“How much further to the base?” Razor asked.

“About forty-five minutes,” the pilot replied.

Razor was silent. He would have preferred to have brought his own transport, but an emergency pickup for several wounded Trivator warriors was needed outside the city. He had ordered his own pilot to assist with the evacuation. The commanding human officer on location had offered the use of their own transport so that he could continue to his meeting with Colonel Baker. A journey that should have taken a few minutes had stretched into over an hour so far.

He slid his finger over the tablet in his hand to read over the report Cutter had given him. A picture of Chicago before the destruction showed a fairly modern city for the level of advancement of this species. He skimmed through the facts. Two men, Colbert Allen and Destin Parks, controlled the region. Intel suggested the men had at one time worked together before splitting. Allen took the southern half of the city while Parks took the northern half. The fighting had intensified over the past six months.

He touched the screen and a new image appeared. Several pictures, taken with a long distance, high resolution imaging device showed several groups of people. The top one was marked as being Colbert Allen. He was a tall, slender male with short blonde hair and cold blue eyes. He was surrounded by several men that reminded Razor of some of the lower class miners and pirates he had encountered during his years as a warship commander. His gut feeling told him the male would not be easily persuaded to lay down his arms.

His eyes moved to the next image. A dark-haired male, shorter than Allen stood surrounded by a group of men who were listening intently to whatever he was telling them. Destin Parks was the direct opposite of Allen, not only in coloring but in his expressions. Concern, intelligence, and something else - Razor enlarged the image so he could study the male’s face more closely. He raised an eyebrow in surprise - sadness - if he had to guess, he would say the male was sad.

A dark frown creased his brow as the shadowy face of someone standing off to the left of Parks suddenly caught his attention. He would have missed the person standing in the shadows if he hadn’t enlarged the image. He touched the screen again to enhance the face of the human.

Shock ricocheted through him as the delicate features of a female came into focus. She had a rounded face framed by short, dark hair. He bit back a silent growl of frustration. She was standing too far back in the shadows for him to make out the color of it. It was either a dark brown or black like his.

Her eyes were focused on Parks. A dark intensity in them told him that her eyes probably were the same color as her hair. She had a small, smooth nose that was surprisingly appealing to him. Her lips were firmly pressed together in a straight line that told him she wasn’t happy with whatever Parks was saying. He couldn’t see what the rest of her looked like as Parks and his group blocked her body. He focused back on her eyes. This time the growl of frustration he released wasn’t silent. Fear and worry shone clearly back at him.

“What?” the pilot started to say before a curse escaped him as an alarm sounded. “f**k! The son-of-a-bitches have fired on us. Hold on.”

Razor’s eyes jerked up to the primitive display. The tracking of a ground-to-air missile moved across the softly glowing display. His mind was calculating the time to impact even as he was calling out a warning as the dark frame of a crane appeared in front of them. The pilot, intent on using defensive measures to miss the missile coming at them, had swerved to the left and reduced altitude. He tried to correct their flight pattern, but Razor knew the machine they were in would not be able to react in time.

“Brace for impact,” he growled out as the helicopter violently shook.

The sound of screeching metal on metal echoed loudly through the helicopter. He gripped the bar near his head as the aircraft swung crazily around before it tilted and started to fall. He ignored the sickening feeling in his stomach as he stared out the windshield as they began falling toward the ground. His body jerked forward when the tail caught in the cabling of the crane. The straps holding him to the seat strained as he hung face down. He thought for a brief second that he might actually live through the crash unscathed. That slim hope disappeared when the air-to-ground missile struck the top of the crane holding them. The explosion above ripped through the metal, sending small, deadly fragments raining down around them. The hot shards sliced through the thin metal skin of the helicopter. An explosive curse burst from his compressed lips as the jib of the crane crumbled under the heat and weight, sending them plummeting downward. The helicopter rocketed into the remains of a skyscraper. Darkness descended as his head slammed into the windshield.