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we must save ourselves !”
    That, of course, was when the Scorpions kicked the door down.

    #

    The bouncer at the door reeled back - first from the shock of the door bursting open, and then from the stun batons the first red and black uniformed thugs employed gleefully. Amiri slid her chair away from the table, right up against the wall to both keep her out of view and clear her to move.
    Six Scorpions with stun batons cleared a space around the door, followed by six more carrying the familiar shape of modern stunguns. Equipped with advanced SmartDarts, the stunguns were much less likely to do permanent injury than the batons.
    Which, of course, said everything one needed to know about the Ardennes Special Security Service.
    The crowd was still angry, and Amiri doubted she was the only one in the bar with a weapon. Unlike most people, however, she was still paying just as much attention to the speaker from the Freedom Wing.
    He was trying to slip off the stage towards the back door - but didn’t make it before the last Scorpion entered.
    The officer was a blonde woman who approached Amiri’s own intimidating height, and she surveyed the room with eagle eyes. The Scorpion knew exactly who she was looking for, and her gaze settled on the Freedom speaker.
    “Mikael Riordan, you are under arrest for treason,” she snapped. “The rest of you will disperse.”
    As the crowd grumbled and started to shuffle, Amiri cursed silently. Apparently the speaker hadn’t just been a shill - Riordan was on the list of potential contacts she’d scraped from Ardennes’ planetary databases when she’d arrived. Her research suggested he reported directly to Alpha - the mysterious leader of the Wing - himself.
    The crowd clearly didn’t move fast enough for the Scorpions, who started pushing their way forward. Amiri watched in fascination as the workers responded by being less and less willing to move, the very effort by the Scorpions to force their way through making their progress harder.
    Riordan took advantage of the confusion to dash for the back door - but the Scorpion officer had been expecting something. The rebel made it four steps before the crack of a stungun echoed across the bar, and the Freedom Wing speaker collapsed to the ground twitching.
    “Clear the room!” the officer snapped to her men. “Use whatever force is necessary!”
    The men with the stun batons grinned evilly and stepped forward, the ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons swinging freely.
    Amiri didn’t see who threw the first beer bottle. She did, from her hiding spot on the edge of the room, get a very clear view of one of the Scorpions being disarmed by a five-foot-nothing redheaded girl who proceeded to feed the thug his own weapon - on full power.
    It went downhill from there.
    The bounty hunter had no illusions how the brawl was going to end. The dozen Scorpions were outnumbered four to one, but had support outside and firearms. It would rapidly degrade to bullets, but many of the workers were armed and it wouldn’t be a clean win for the Scorpions.
    Riordan, on the other hand, was already down, disabled by the automatically tailored electronic charge of the smartdart.
    The situation was a nightmare - and her best chance to make contact with the resistance.
    A second wave of troopers - this bunch with more stunguns - charged through the door, and Amiri made up her mind. Hiding behind the chaos, she slipped along the wall to the door Riordan had almost reached.
    The rebel was heavier than he looked, but still light enough for the tall and muscular woman to easily drag him out the unlocked door into the alley. Practice in bringing in bounties unobtrusively helped her do so without attracting notice from anyone who’d care.
    “Stop right there!”
    Of course, there were Scorpions in the alley.
    She let Riordan fall to the dirty floor as she faced the pair of red and black uniformed men. They held stunguns and had uneasy looks in their eyes - probably the