Cursing, Darling jerked around to see Drake pulling out a fresh round from a pocket on his leg and loading it into the launcher that was attached to his right wrist.
“You didn’t really think you’d hogged all the chemistry and engineering genes, did you?” He locked his weapon and lowered his arm. “I managed to pick up a few things from those diagrams you left laying around the house.”
Darling had a whole new respect for his brother’s abilities. Drake was right. He wasn’t a baby anymore and it was time Darling acknowledged that fact.
“All right. You win. You’re an adult who can kick ass on his own. Now get behind me and cover Maris.”
Maris laughed. “Face it, babe, you’ll always be five years old to your brother. Now get back here with me before I spank you.”
Drake returned to Maris’s side. “I’m not afraid of that threat, Mari. My fear is that you’d do it and enjoy it.”
“I would, but not for the reasons you think… And only because a good spanking for you is a long time overdue.”
“Incoming!” Darling snarled as a rocket came at them from somewhere inside the prison.
While Maris and Drake dove for cover, Darling returned the attack with one of his own.
Hauk moved around to Darling’s front so that he could lead, and the two of them did what they did best.
They kicked ass, took names, and nailed that list to the foreheads of their enemies.
Moving forward as a single unit, they tore a hole through the prison big enough to drive a freighter through it. Nykyrian and the rest shouldn’t have a bit of trouble getting in here and extracting the prisoners.
Smoke billowed around them as they went through the prison systematically taking out any threat to the others. Soldiers, assassins, androids, unmanned canons… everything.
Because of the extreme heat, it interfered with the enhanced vision in their helms. Darling switched his optics as Syn’s voice navigated him through the halls, toward the cells where his people were most likely being held.
“We’re right behind you,” Nykyrian said.
League soldiers poured out into the halls as alarms blared everywhere. One of their techs must have brought part of their system back online.
Ignoring the intense, piercing sound, Darling concentrated on confusing their enemies as much as he could.
He took a number of shots straight to his body from their blasters, but so far nothing had penetrated his armor. While those shots bruised and hurt, they didn’t wound. And so long as those shots didn’t wound, he could do major damage.
An assassin came out of the smoke on his right. Darling threw the explosive in his hand in the opposite direction, then tackled the assassin. They went for each other with everything they had.
Darling wrenched the man’s arm and sent him to the ground at the same time Maris came in behind another assassin and cut his throat before the assassin could shoot Darling.
As Maris dropped back, Darling realized his friend was alone.
“Where’s Drake?”
“With Nero.”
Good. Nero would make sure nothing happened to his brother.
As they blew through the first doors to the holding cells, Chayden cursed through the link in Darling’s ear. “They’ve split the prisoners up. There are more in the basement and on the first, fifth, and eighth floors.”
“We’re heading to the basement,” Darling told them. That would be the heaviest fortified area where they would most likely be keeping the gerents and Resistance leaders. And from down there, his explosives could do more structural damage.
It’d be easy to set the charges that would bring down the whole damn place.
This is for you, Zarya.
“Get everyone out,” Darling told them.
“Trying to. Promise I’m not scratching my butt.” Chayden’s words were punctuated by blaster fire.
Darling didn’t comment as they made it to the stairs and blasted open the door off its hinges. He listened to the others who were making good progress extracting his people and running them to the transports.
They were all taking heavy fire, but so far no fatalities and very few went down who couldn’t get back up.
Completely calm, he lobbed three more charges down the stairs in front of them to handle anything that might be waiting as a surprise. They were bio-charges that wouldn’t detonate anything inorganic such as the stairs they were using.
However, if you had flesh on your body…
You didn’t want to be near them when they went off.
At the bottom of the stairs, they stepped over the remnants of several guards.
Darling pulled up short when he saw the holding cell area and realized how bad it was down here for those prisoners. Whoever was being held in those cells was extremely important to the League. All the assassins had fallen back to this area to protect it.
This was most likely where Zarya had died.
That knowledge almost sent him to his knees.
Suppressing his agony, Darling started to go forward, but Maris caught him and whirled him around, then pinned him to the wall.