Steel Beneath the Skin by Niall Teasdale

It would be a shooting gallery and they know it.’ Something shifted in the undergrowth and she turned her head to look at it, frowning. If they come in, they have to funnel through the gap in the minefield. I’ve killed… several of his prospective soldiers and we hold the bulk of their weapons. The T-shirt was too small and the shorts were only held on by a belt, and the entire outfit was far less revealing than Ella was used to wearing, but at least she had clothes. She had managed to find a T-shirt and a pair of shorts in a locker at the back of armoury. ‘Why don’t they attack in force?’ Ella asked from the inner door at the bottom of the stairs. Unfortunately for them, they had to hit her dead on and she was behind cover since the steps behind the big, metal door sloped down, and she was using a grenade launcher. Occasionally one of them would take a shot at her and then she would fire back. From their postures they were watching her with binoculars or some similar form of high-tech vision aid. There were men in the bushes at the treeline.

It would be my considerable pleasure.’Īneka sat in the doorway of the bunker watching the undergrowth about a hundred metres away. Pushing herself up from her position leaning against a desk, Parry smiled and unzipped the jumpsuit she was wearing. ‘Andromeda, would you be so kind as to demonstrate how to kill a couple of women?’

Hunter turned sharply to where Andromeda Parry was cleaning her long fingernails with a combat knife. The minefield around the bunker is still active…’ Another fifteen when she opened up with a mini-gun. ‘Sir… She used frag grenades on the barracks. ‘A thousand year old woman and an archaeologist have taken over our primary operations centre and armoury? Is it too much to ask that you remove them?’ Hunter’s throat had the red shade to it that people who knew him had learned to recognise as a sign that they should be elsewhere.

‘She’s holed up in the bunker with Narrows.’ His eyes darted from Hunter to the woman near him with the kind of nervous look a man got when he felt the messenger might end up strangled with his own entrails.

‘It’s the Jansen women, sir.’ The Humanity First soldier who had landed the job of explaining what had happened to Charles Hunter was not happy about it.

Steel Beneath the Skin by Niall Teasdale