Page 7 of Alien Mercenary’s Wife (Lathar Mercenaries: Warborne #7)
The transit car was half-empty, typical for mid-morning travel between sectors. Office workers heading to late meetings, students with datapads, and a few maintenance technicians in coveralls. Normal people living normal lives, going about their daily business.
She used the reflection in the window to scan the car behind her, a habit from her service days that had saved her life more than once.
Most of the passengers looked authentic—tired commuters, bored travelers, people absorbed in their own business.
Nothing set off her internal alarm system, but she remained alert as the train pulled into Sector 7.
Café Luna sat on a busy corner, three blocks from the transit station, exactly the kind of public place that should have felt safe.
Glass windows offered clear sightlines to the street, multiple exits, and heavy foot traffic that would discourage anything overt.
Reese approached from the east, keeping to the crowds of pedestrians as she studied the area.
The café was busy, filled with the usual mix of office workers grabbing lunch and students nursing single cups of coffee while they worked on datapads.
She scanned the faces, looking for someone who might be her contact—nervous, probably older, showing signs of the stress that came with being hunted by corporate assassins.
No one fit the description.
She checked her chronometer. 1105 hours. Five minutes late, but not enough to explain an empty meeting. She found a position across the street, pretending to read on her datapad while keeping an eye out for anyone who looked like they were waiting for someone.
Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen.
Her contact wasn't coming.
That should have been her first warning, but it was the woman in the business suit who triggered her real alarm.
Mid-thirties, professional appearance, sitting alone at a corner table with a clear view of the café entrance.
She'd been nursing the same cup of coffee for twenty minutes, and her attention kept drifting to the street from the datapad in front of her.
Yeah, she was definitely watching for someone.
Ice shot through Reese’s veins as she looked around and spotted the second watcher…
a man in maintenance coveralls sitting on a bench near the transit station entrance, ostensibly waiting for transport but actually scanning everyone who passed.
When he shifted position, she caught a glimpse of the comm unit in his ear.
Coordinated surveillance. Multiple assets positioned to track anyone coming to or leaving the meeting. Her lips pressed together. The meeting was a setup.
The smart play was to abort immediately, but she forced herself to wait another five minutes, maintaining her cover as another pedestrian checking messages on her datapad. She needed to be certain before she made any moves that would confirm she was their target.
A third watcher revealed himself when he checked his chronometer and spoke quietly into his collar comm. Corporate security, probably. Definitely not military, and nowhere near good enough to fool her. No, these were goons hired to make an inconvenient problem—her — disappear.
She sighed.
Shit. That meant her contact was either dead or had never existed in the first place. Either way, this meeting was blown.
She flicked her datapad off and headed for the transit station, moving at a casual pace that wouldn't trigger anyone’s attention—just another pedestrian going about her day. The cramp in her left leg tightened with each step, but she ignored it. She didn’t have time for her body’s shit. Not today.
Turning the corner, she glanced into a window ahead. The woman in the business suit was tailing her. Great, they’d made her. Reese didn’t alter her pace, using the windows of the shops around her to try and spot the other two. But nothing. Just the one tail.
Where had the other two gone?
She entered the transit station, and the skin between her shoulders crawled.
Now the other two at the café made sense.
They didn’t need to tail her; they already had people here.
Questions rolled through her mind as she made her way down the stairs to her platform.
How many watchers did they have in place?
How long had they been planning this operation?
The platform was crowded, filled with the usual mix of commuters and travelers. She positioned herself near the middle of the crowd, leaning against a pillar where no one would be able to sneak up behind her.
Two minutes until the next departure. The platform looked normal—commuters waiting, conversations, the usual urban transit atmosphere.
Nothing obviously wrong, but something still felt off.
Maybe it was the way the maintenance worker near the entrance kept glancing at his chronometer, or the subtle wrongness that prickled along her spine.
Whatever it was, her instincts screamed at her as the train approached the platform with a rush of displaced air and the familiar hum of magnetic propulsion. The crowd surged forward in anticipation of boarding, but she hung back.
A chill crawled up her spine. Every survival instinct she had told her to get away from this platform, this train, this entire situation. Right now.
Instead of boarding with the rest of the crowd, she turned and ducked through the crowd, keeping herself low to avoid being spotted.
She was almost at the top of the stairs when the train exploded.
The shockwave hit her. The floor shaking beneath her feet, dust and debris raining from the ceiling as alarms began to wail. Behind her, screams pierced the air, along with the crash of falling glass, the electrical snap of severed power lines.
She spun around to see smoke pouring from the platform she'd left. The train she would have boarded was a twisted wreck of metal and flame. Emergency lights flickered on as the primary power grid shut down, casting everything in harsh red shadows.
"Attention passengers," a calm voice announced over the emergency system. "Please evacuate the station in an orderly fashion. Emergency services are responding to a mechanical failure on the main platform."
Mechanical failure. Right .
She joined the crowd running for the exits, her mind. They'd tried to kill her. She knew that without thinking. An explosive device, probably planted in the maintenance cart or hidden in the infrastructure somewhere. If she'd boarded that train like any normal commuter, she'd be dead right now.
Reaching street level, she yanked off her cap and threw it in a bin, shaking her hair out as she kept walking. She needed to put distance between herself and the station. Around her, emergency vehicles were already converging on the scene, their sirens adding to the chaos.
She yanked out her datapad and checked the headlines: Metro Explosions Rock Multiple Transit Stations. Not just here, but stations for Sectors 5 and 8 had been hit as well—every possible route she might have taken to return home.
Her blood turned to ice.
They'd tried to kill her no matter which train she chose. The only reason she was alive was her decision to change her escape route.
Which meant that whoever had sent that message about meeting at Café Luna was either dead or working for the people trying to kill her.
The smart thing would be to run. Disappear into the underground, abandon the lawsuit, try to survive long enough to die of natural causes rather than corporate assassination.
Her jaw tightened. But that meant that people would have died for nothing.
Good soldiers who had done nothing more than their duty, and they’d been screwed over by the very people they should have been able to trust. Their deaths were evidence of a conspiracy that reached into the highest levels of corporate and government power. One she intended to uncover.
So she walked deeper into the city, away from the emergency response teams and smoking transit stations. Her left leg sent spasms of pain up her spine with each step, each cramp a reminder of her deteriorating condition. But despite the state of her body, her mind was clear.
If Nexus Dynamics wanted her dead, she’d make the fuckers work for it.
Because one way or another, the truth about those neural implants was going to come out.