Killer Edge: Navigator Book Three Read online

  Killer Edge

  (NAVIGATOR Series BOOK THREE)

  SD TANNER

  Killer Edge

  Copyright © SD Tanner 2016

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by law.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to Mousey

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: Knight moves (Jonesy)

  CHAPTER TWO: Oh, baby (Ark)

  CHAPTER THREE: Only half crazy (Dayton)

  CHAPTER FOUR: On the edge (Bill)

  CHAPTER FIVE: Off message (Boris)

  CHAPTER SIX: Knighted (Jonesy)

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Peekaboo (Steve)

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Match point (Ark)

  CHAPTER NINE: Friendly fire (Boris)

  CHAPTER TEN: Blind love (Lexie)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Blindsided (Leon)

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Tiny killers (Ark)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Yellow brick road (Jonesy)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Lost Army (Hood)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Working for the woman (Christine)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Hey ho, hey ho (Survivors)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Flawed sight (Steve)

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: False dawn (Leon)

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Death by critter (Jonesy/Knight)

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Ladies first (Leon)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: See no evil (Steve)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Fairest of all (Ark)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Good call (Bill)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Born to fight (Hood)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Mousetrap (Steve)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Hail Mary (Jo)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Sucker punched (Tank)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Space invaders (Leon)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Friends like these (Survivors)

  CHAPTER THIRTY: Breached (Hood)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: One wrong move (Ark)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Last stand (Survivors)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: On the line (Hood)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Lucky baby (Ark)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Free the mind (Cassie)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Calling a win (Leon)

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To keep the action exciting this story is told through multiple points of view. Please see the character name in the Chapter heading to know which person is narrating.

  For other series by SD Tanner, please check out the Hunter Wars series, Hunter Wars Series.

  I really hope you enjoy the Navigator series. All four books in the Navigator series are now available.

  PROLOGUE

  He scanned the inputs from his weapons, finally finding a deep forest surrounded by many unguarded people. A truck drove by with one of the large metallic men. Its strange eyes and bulky body sat high on the moving vehicle and he knew he’d found what he was looking for.

  It was threatening his dominance and it had to go.

  CHAPTER ONE: Knight moves (Jonesy)

  “Whatdaya see?” Sean whispered hoarsely.

  “Why are you whispering?” He asked incredulously. “They’re a mile away. They can’t hear us.”

  Sean lowered his binoculars and gave him a sheepish look. He really missed Jas. She had an instinct for this sort of work, whereas he was finding Sean and Dean were enthusiastic amateurs. They could shoot well enough and, thanks to Stax, they were paranoid about every little thing, but neither of these attributes replaced a natural born instinct for dealing with dangerous situations.

  Ally was sitting with her back to the town and sighing impatiently. “Are we ever gonna do anything?”

  Where Jas had followed his lead, Ally was more like a racehorse waiting to be let out of the gate. She was a brawler, of that he was sure, but he preferred to fight with his brain first and his muscles second. He might be willing to die killing the critters, but that didn’t mean he intended to be slaughtered by his own stupidity.

  The visor vision was frustrating. He couldn’t see anyone’s expression and, until now, he hadn’t realized just how much he’d learned from the way a person looked. Sighing to himself, he focused his visor on the critter mounds acting as turrets for the fence they’d built around the small town. Someone from Stax’s prepper network had radioed that they were in trouble, and somewhere behind the critters’ fence was an underground shelter. Stax had asked him if he could assess the situation and tell them what they could do to help them. Using his visor, he’d concluded that there were at least a hundred or more people trapped behind the ring of critters surrounding the small town. Some were inside of the buildings and others were walking the streets. The critters were moving amongst them, but it didn’t look like the people were under attack.

  The critter fence was really only mounds of dirt sitting ten to fifteen feet above the ground. They were about twenty to thirty yards apart, connected by underground tunnels that ran two feet beneath the surface. If anyone tried to walk out of the invisible circle, a critter would burst from the earth and bring them down. As fences went it was pretty effective, and he guessed the prisoners quickly learnt not to walk between the mounds, but despite these obvious difficulties, he had a plan.

  Sitting on the truck behind him were several large propane tanks. He figured that if they flooded a tunnel between two of the mounds they could explode an entire segment of the fence. It would make a hell of a noise and hopefully the townspeople would take advantage of the temporary breach. Sean and Dean had brought six of their fellow preppers with them who would shoot at the critters from a safe distance. Several buses were parked next to their two trucks, and he and Ally would do their best to give the escapees a safe passage. Critters didn’t tend to attack moving vehicles, and anyone who made it to the preppers would be loaded onto a bus. He knew they wouldn’t free everyone in the town, but even if only some of them managed to escape it was still worth trying.

  “Don’t be impatient, Ally,” he replied. “We’ve never tried this before and we need to take it one step at a time.”

  “Why? You know what you’re planning to do, so what are you waiting for? There is no good time. We just have to get on with it.”

  Ally’s attitude amused him. After having his eyes replaced with orbs and recovering in the CaliTech hospital, he’d been quite taken with her. She had no memory of who she was before her accident and no idea that she was stunningly beautiful. With her dark hair, flawless skin, curvaceous figure and long legs, Sean and Dean turned into spluttering imbeciles whenever she spoke to them. Her intelligence combined with a fiery temperament appealed to him. Despite her amnesia and having had her eyes replaced with orbs, she’d taken it all in her stride. He’d wondered what she did for a living before the critters arrived and decided she’d probably been a manager of some sort.

  “We need to carry the propane tanks to the segment of the fence closest to the buses,” he replied. “Sean, you need to have your shooters ready to start firing as soon as that fence comes down.”

  “They’ve all got sniper rifles with scopes, so it’s no problem,” Sean replied.
/>   Sean’s overconfidence worried him. There was a lot that could go wrong. They could be overwhelmed by the critters before they managed to get the propane gas into the tunnel. Sean and his relatively inexperienced shooters could accidentally kill the people as they tried to escape. He and Ally could struggle to hold back the critters. The whole situation could be a hair’s breadth away from turning into a massacre. That thought led him to wonder what the critters would do to the people who didn’t manage to escape the town. Would they take retribution against them? He didn’t know, but if they didn’t try then he figured they never would.

  Walking across to the two 200lb propane tanks, he checked the hoses attached to the outlets. Each tank was three and half feet long and two feet wide, weighing around one hundred and eighty pounds. The propane was under pressure, and providing they opened the valve on the regulator, it should fire out of the hoses with considerable force. Even so, he still planned to feed the hoses into the tunnel as far as he could.

  Over his headset, he heard Ark speak. “People, don’t be so overconfident. You’ve never done this before, so you don’t know what can go wrong yet.”

  “It’s now or never, Ark,” he replied.

  “I know, but go when you’re ready and not when they think they are.”

  Having never worked with Ark before he was finding his steadiness reassuring. Ark told him the needs of the Navigator squad would take a priority on his time, but he’d help him whenever he could. Before he’d left, Bill had taken him aside and asked him to work with the preppers. He believed they could become a resistance army and wanted feedback about anyone who he thought could be trained as a Navigator. Having trained to become a tank and turning himself into a one-man army, the military guys saw him as an independent field operative. To them he was a valuable resource they could use to gain intel about their enemy. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but now he was out in the field, he was starting to appreciate having a team behind him.

  Easily hoisting one of the propane tanks under one armored arm, he said, “Ally, grab the other one. We’re gonna run at fifteen miles an hour. Once we’re at the fence, we’ll have to work fast to feed those hoses into the tunnel.”

  Sean reacted to his order. “Okay, troops, settle in and get ready to start shootin’.”

  The preppers were ten feet apart and had their guns and ammo lined up ready to fire. While the preppers settled into the slight hill, he and Ally began to run towards the fence. While he was running the half-mile distance at fifteen miles per hour, the computer fed oxygen into his helmet. Ally had her propane cylinder on her shoulder, running ten feet to his right and matching his speed. His own shoulders were covered by heavy armor, complete with a grenade launcher and a flamethrower. It had been Tank’s idea to add a flamethrower to their shoulder packs, but he worried he’d just turned himself into the equivalent of a human bomb.

  Within minutes, they were on the turrets at each end of the chosen segment of fence. Ally was at one turret and he was at the other. Scrambling to the top of the mound, he unwound the hose from the tank and began to shove it roughly through the hole in the top.

  “Ally, how are you doing?”

  “Good.”

  Ark’s voice came through his headset again. “Five feet…eight feet….twelve feet.”

  “Good enough. Ally, open the valve.”

  Opening the valve on his own tank, he felt the hose stiffen with the pressure of the escaping gas. After pushing the tank into the hole, he skidded down the mound on his butt. The critters had been ignoring them, but now they were emerging from the top of the mounds further along the fence.

  “Ally! Run!”

  She pulled away from the mound, but then stopped. He ordered the computer to fire a short burst of flame at the top of the mound next to him. With the propane gas now filling the tunnel, it leaked through the hole at the top of the mound and the effect was instantaneous. The underground fence exploded in a spray of dirt, catching the attention of anyone and anything nearby. People who had been wandering the streets suddenly started to run towards the fence. The critters joining them in their sprint were so intent on him and Ally that they appeared not to notice their escaping prisoners.

  “Bring it on, assholes,” Ally shrieked.

  Rather than run away from the attacking critters, she ran towards them, firing as she went.

  “Ally, auto target only,” Ark said in a steady voice.

  It was moot point when Ally began grabbing critters in her path and tearing their skinny limbs from their bodies. He was so surprised by her aggression he almost forgot to defend himself. Ordering his computer to auto target, he used his other arm to slam the attacking critters to the ground. People were running through the fence by jumping over the trench their makeshift bomb had created. Seeming to know the hail of gunfire was there to protect them, they zipped past him and ran in the direction of Sean and his preppers.

  The critters must have understood they’d created a diversion to allow people to escape and some were already turning back towards the town. It at least thinned the number they were dealing with, but he realized they would herd the other prisoners away from the breached fence. People continued to streak past him, and even as he fought the critters, he noticed some of them were children.

  “Jonesy, time to go,” Ark said. “Ally, go, go, go.”

  Looking ahead into the town, he could see why Ark was telling them to leave. More critters had appeared from other segments of the fence and were heading towards them. Ally wasn’t listening to Ark and was angrily tearing at the critters. While he continued to fire at the oncoming critters, he stalked across to her throwing more out of his path.

  “Go now, Ally.”

  “Why?”

  “Ally, follow your orders,” Ark said forcefully.

  With a petulant moan, she turned and followed the escapees running towards Sean and his shooters, still ripping at any critters that came too close to her. Letting her lead, he followed and watched her six, thinking she was as crazy as she was beautiful. The critters were hard on his heels and he turned, opening fire with his belt-fed machine gun. It fired depleted uranium-tipped bullets at four hundred rounds per minute and nothing was left standing. A part of him worried he’d probably hit people as well as the critters, but he set the concern aside and focused on helping those he could save.

  By the time he reached the trucks, Sean and his preppers had already loaded the survivors onto the buses and pulled out. Their own trucks were now slowly driving down the road behind them. Ally was on top of one of them, using her auto targeting to shoot at any critters that were following him. Without paying attention to what was behind him, he caught up with the other slow-moving vehicle, pulling himself into the truck bed. Now able to look at the town again, the critters had formed a guard across the breach in the fence and were restoring control.

  “Ark, how many people did we get out?”

  “Around fifty people, including about half a dozen kids.”

  “But there were over a hundred people in that town.”

  “You did good,” Ark replied firmly.

  Sean’s ecstatic voice came through his headset. “Nah, ya did awesome, dude. Now I can see why Dad calls you the Knight.”

  CHAPTER TWO: Oh, baby (Ark)

  An image of the underground nest was suspended in the air, with the base of its pyramid-shaped top at least thirty feet above the ground. Below the surface were vast caverns and tunnels, but they couldn’t see any further than twenty feet, and beyond it there was only a greyish swirl of nothingness. Bill was standing next to Dunk, and while they studied the three-dimensional image suspended in the training hangar, both men wore a look of complete dissatisfaction.

  Bill screwed up his face even further. “Is this all we can see through the visors?”

  “I didn’t design them to see any further below the ground,” Dunk replied. “There are technical limitations to shrinking scanners to fit on a helmet.”

  Rolling h
is chair forward until he was underneath the three-dimensional image, he looked up at the hollow cavern and tunnels leading from it. To his right, there was a dark hole that was clearly a tunnel leading deeper into the earth, but the scanners couldn’t see beyond it. It was impossible to guess just how deep the nest went, or what was buried so far under the earth.

  The image flickered as he wheeled himself through it again and closer to Bill and Dunk. “What do you think is at the bottom of it?”

  “Why does there have to be anything at the bottom?” Dunk asked.

  “It stands to reason. We know around two hundred thousand of them went there from Albuquerque and built a pyramid and tunnels. When we went back, they’d built an entire city around it with even more tunnels. It implies they’re protecting something.”

  Listening to their discussion, Jo walked across the floor towards them. “Maybe they just like to live underground.”

  Seeing they were now convening at one end of the hangar, Leon, Tank and Lexie joined them. The seven of them faced the enormous floating graphic, studying it critically.

  “I can’t believe this is all we know about the nest,” Bill said unhappily. “Have we been able to see it through the satellites?”

  He’d spoken to NORAD and they now took detailed images of the nest whenever they could. The pictures showed the critter city was spreading for half a mile around the main pyramid. It appeared the critters were shoring up their defenses, only further convincing him there was something they valued inside of it.

  “Yeah, we have a timed sequence of images and they show the city is spreading. There are even more of the smaller mounds around it. It’s becoming quite the metropolis.”

  “Why would they be doing that?” Jo asked.

  Bill sighed deeply. “It means there’s something really important inside of it, plus they’re cottoning onto what we can do, otherwise they wouldn’t bother.”

  He agreed with Bill’s summary and they desperately needed more information. According to the images NORAD had sent him, there were a lot more of these nests, but none was so heavily defended as the one in Pueblo Pintado. It meant whatever was inside of it was very important, or the critters were worried they might be able to penetrate this nest and not the others.