The shot pierced the air and the tension like a full stop marking a sharp end to the exchange of sarcasm and unimaginative threats.
Jeanne felt her eyes go wide at the thought that she may have pushed her harasser three steps too far.
She felt her heartbeat stop at the horrible thought that she might have just ended her own life by a simple impulse.
She felt the tears welling in her eyes as her life flashed before her eyes: the first time she saw her parents’ faces, and she was comforted by the thought that she might be reunited with them soon; her first day of school, the pride she felt writing her name on the front of an exercise book for the first time, and she felt nostalgic realising how quickly the novelty had faded; the friends who had made her childhood so much more...Pierre, Louane, Camille...Tom...she would be seeing him soon, too; the horror she had felt when she heard that her parents had been killed after taking part in the human blockade of a Parisian munitions factory – and of course she hadn’t fully understood their sacrifice at the time - and her apprehension at her papa’s friend Francois’ suggestion that she could come to live in a ‘safe place’ in Lyons; but of course Tom had run away from home to go with her, and she was immensely grateful for his help in getting through the difficult time after her parents’ death and in settling into her new environment; her teenage years living among the rebels, learning to carve wood; the time she had demanded to be allowed to strike back at the corporation which had killed her parents – whose deaths she had just discovered had not been accidental after all - and the guilt she felt in the aftermath of the first mission she had been allowed to participate , having killed another person for the first time; her first kiss shared with Tom, which she could never have forgotten even though they had agreed that it could never be repeated; the friends she made over the years, and those she had lost to disease, accidents and the enemy; her grief a few years earlier on an mission into Paris shortly before she came to Manchester when she had picked up a newspaper and seen Louane’s name in the obituary – she had apparently fallen victim to cancer; the loss of her left foot in a recent raid on a Corporate prison after she ran back into the unstable building to rescue the last prisoner they had discovered was still trapped inside, strapped to a bed in the ‘medical’ wing, and a wall had collapsed on her foot – she had had to sever it herself in order to get her and her charge out before the rest of the building came down on them; her dismay and disbelief at seeing Tom’s writhing body shredded by the explosion of an enemy grenade.
Strangely enough, the one thing Jeanne did not feel was a bullet rupturing her innards. She almost cried with relief when she realised that this was because the shot had not been aimed at her.
Hearing the single, solitary gunshot which rang out across the warehouse and the stunned silence that followed, Sam shuffled towards the closed door of the war room, intrigued. He swung his blastgun around to his waist in his right hand, still strapped to his shoulder, placed his right hand on the cold metal door handle, and pushed the door open slowly.
Jeanne’s relief, she quickly realised, was premature. The case was not that the army pig had declined to shoot her. He had just not shot her yet.
“Time to die, bitch,” he declared as he staggered back to his feet, blood from the mess that had been his nose dripping on the filthy, badly maintained pistol he shoved in her face.
She caught a glimpse of someone vaguely familiar appearing in the doorway as adrenaline once again launched her prosthetic foot from the ground, catching the soldier’s gun hand not quite fast enough. The bullet caught her in the left shoulder and drew a small grunt of pain; the follow-up shot tore a hole from the wall half an inch from Jeanne’s ear as her attacker also screamed, his face twisted in agony and surprise, and fell to his knees with a thud, barely audible over the beating of Jeanne’s own heart.
Morgan, hearing gunfire, turned towards the source as he let Director Adams’ body drop limply to the floor, and saw one of his men – one of his trusted men! – shoot an unarmed woman with bound hands. He heard her cry out as blood spread from the wound on her shoulder. Still seething from Adams’ order and certainly not calmed by this sight, his arm moved on its own, and his trigger finger needed no instruction when it sent a bullet impacting into Private Donut’s back. Donut screamed and fell forward, his second shot going wide.
“Aww,” a new voice groaned from the direction of the door from the warehouse floor, “I wanted him to meet my baby.”
Morgan spun around, mimicked by most of his troops, bringing his gun to bear on the newcomer with the large Martian-looking weapon. “Now if you’d be so kind as to let me get the hell out of here,” the newcomer continued, hastily reconsidering his situation in light of the large number of gun barrels pointed unambiguously in his direction, “I won’t fry you all.”
Biting her lip to suppress the pain of the bullet wound, and for the time being, putting aside the implications of what had just happened, Jeanne saw that the dead trooper’s gun was very close to her. Seeing that his friends’ attention was now unanimously glued to the newcomer, she edged towards it, doing her best to ignore the chunk of led lodged in her shoulder and the corpse draped heavily across her lap which if the smell was anything to go by, must already have been starting to rot.
She immediately forgot about the gun, however, when she heard a click and whirring sound from the door and saw the end of the gun tucked under the newcomer’s arm begin to glow bright pink. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Have you ever seen what happens when plasma from a fully-charged blastgun, travelling at several times the speed of sound, rips through a room full of people?”
A wave of panicked murmuring spread through the room, and even the hardened warriors shifted uneasily. “Oi,” Jeanne for her part snapped at the newcomer, her French accent becoming more noticeable because of the stress, anger and fatigue also clearly present in her voice, “dat eez stooped! Don’t do somezing dat stooped!”
The soldiers’ commander took a step towards Sam. “You see all your comrades behind me? None of them are armed. They are all bound at the hands. Do you really want to stoop that low?”
“Mate, I’ve been that low,” he replied. “I wouldn’t really call them comrades either – more like a means to an end.” He ignored the shocked, indignant looks on the faces of some of the more naive of the noobs sat on the floor that actually knew him (or at least, thought they did). A low hum continued to emanate from the blastgun as the charging coils gathered plasma.
“You really are scum,” the soldier grumbled through gritted teeth. “I’ve never met scum like you, and I’ve been up close to Martians.”
“Scum. Special forces. Take your pick.” That drew a raised eyebrow , Sam noted smugly. “Now, d’ya want to get out of my way, or do I turn you into molten slag?”
“You just want to move through? Okay men...” Morgan conceded, lowering his pistol and turning to what remained of his platoon, his martial pride mortally wounded, “I think we’d better let him go.”
“See, you army regulars do have some common sense,” the man smiled slightly, pushing what must have been his weapon’s charging lever down as far as it would go, and the hum and glow of the blastgun subsided. He walked towards the fire escape, smirking at each of the soldiers as he passed.
Then one of them, a tall cleanshaven man who had lost his helmet in the battle, shot the stranger in the back as he reached the outer door.
“FUCK!” the blastgunner yelled as the pulse burst struck him in the back. “Note to self,” Morgan heard him mutter as he spun around and fell backwards, wincing, “never, ever, trust an army guy.” As he said that, he yanked the charging lever from its 0 setting to beyond where it had been before.
Morgan shot off the blastgunner’s trigger hand before he could fire the blastgun, and turned his attention to his shooter. “Private, we do not shoot people in the back. Is that clear?”
When he received no response, Morgan fired, narrowly missing the offender’s junk. “Is that CLEAR, Private Simmons?”
“P-p-painfully so, sir.”
The blastgunner was more accurate, introducing Morgan’s own groin to the effect of his pulse pistol, which he had produced along with a torrent of curses. “Teach you, cock-bite,” he said, smiling sadistically at the smell of Morgan’s burnt flesh before passing out from his own pain.
Sergeant Johnson caught Morgan as he crumpled, clutching his crotch in agony.
Private Griff, who had been keeping a lookout via what was left of the equipment in the room, came running over to the middle of the room where Johnson and Morgan were - "Sir! The Martians have broken through the line, and there's a column headed straight here! They must have detected the weapons fire!"
"Alright", Morgan croaked. "Men, cut these people free, and help the wounded walk. We're getting out of here."
"Uh, sir?" Johnson asked, part puzzled and part hopeful "Does this mean we're switching sides?"
"Yes Lieutenant, yes it does.”
Behind him, Morgan heard a gun whir, he turned to see Griff's pulse rifle in his face.
"Sir, I'm afraid I have to relieve you of command," Griff stated, gruffly. "I'm arresting you on the charge of treason.”
