Midnight City by J. Barton Mitchell Page A

little of the sky he could see through the treetops. It was still night: the half moon had risen high above them, raining silver light downward on everything.
    He heard it again. Above and to the west, coming fast. More cannon fire. With a grimace, he reached behind him and yanked the SIG from his back. Max was next to him, whining slightly, sniffing the air suspiciously. Holt reached out to pet the dog …
    … and a blue and white Raptor gunship screamed by overhead, visible for half a second through the canopy. Two of its engines were burning, trailing smoke behind its signature crescent-shaped wings. Max barked angrily up at it, but Holt just stared in awe. He had never seen a wounded Raptor, not even during the invasion when the military had mounted its brief, lackluster defense. What could have done that?
    A second later, he had his answer.
    Two more Raptors roared by above, plasma cannons flashing, firing after the first gunship. They were gone in a second, but there was something different about them, and Holt knew what it was immediately. Every Assembly aircraft or walker he’d ever seen had one thing in common: They were all painted blue and white. The patterns differed sometimes, but the colors never did.
    But the two Raptors that just whipped by had not been blue and white at all.
    They were a solid red.
    Holt listened to the sound of the cannons as they became fainter, and then heard the rolling boom of another crash several miles away. The damaged Raptor must have finally gone down.
    He clutched the rifle tightly, breathing heavy, thinking.
    “Did you see them? They were red!” Mira yelled down at him from the tree on the incline. Holt frowned. She almost sounded excited. “ Red! What’s going on?”
    “Good question,” he answered. “Heard rumors of different-colored Assembly down south, but I never put much stock in it. And I definitely never heard about Assembly firing on each other. ”
    The sounds didn’t return. All was silent in the woods and in the night air. Maybe that was the last of—
    A flaming, spherical Assembly ship exploded through the trees right above them.
    Holt rolled, scrambled, and leapt clear before the thing hit, pulling Max with him. When it hit, it hit hard, plowing through the middle of the forest, tossing aside trees and foliage and leaving a gully sixty or seventy feet long. The impact sprayed debris and flame in a vicious sphere. Mira screamed from her tree, unable to move as debris flashed through the air all around her.
    When it was over, Holt stayed motionless a long time, staring at the smoking crash site and the large round ship, its metal surface painted blue and white, as he was used to.
    But while the color was familiar, nothing else was. He’d never seen a ship like this, a huge metallic ball. Flames burned lightly around it, starting to consume the nearby trees, but the vessel itself was no longer burning. It was, however, cracked completely open. Smoke poured out of its shell, blocking his view of the inside.
    “You still alive, Hawkins?” Mira shouted through the thick clouds of dust and smoke. He couldn’t see her through it, but he could hear her coughing.
    “Yeah!” he shouted back. “Sure you’re relieved.”
    The crashed sphere nearby groaned as something inside shifted. Holt’s gaze snapped to it. Max growled low at the sound, the hair on his back standing straight up.
    Something there was moving. Something inside was still alive.
    Holt stood still, thoughts racing in his head. He’d never seen one of the Assembly. As far as he knew, no one had. They had always stayed locked up tight inside their armored walkers and ships.
    Holt forced himself to be calm, to think. The red Assembly craft might be headed back. Or worse, they could have walkers moving in on his position. At the very least, the blue and whites had reinforcements headed this way. The prudent thing seemed to be to leave. What good was investigating an Assembly ship if he got carried