Gamma Nine (Book One) by Christi Smit Page B

steel-clad
wolves he was about to face were a different kind of animal. Lost
in his own thoughts he almost missed Locke’s first few words.
    “The first
exercise is very simple. Mark all of us before we take you down.”
Locke said, pulling back the slide of his rifle.
    “Mark you?”
Christian asked.
    “Yes, by any
means necessary, by bullet or blade.”
    “You want me to
shoot you?”
    “Well, you
might want to, seeing as we will be shooting at you.”
    “To try and
kill me?”
    “Of course, the
hostiles you will face out there in the galaxy,” Locke pointed to a
random side of the pit, pointing at some invisible foe beyond the
hull of the ship, “will definitely not ask you out for dinner.
Everything out there, even some humans, wants you dead. And you
learn better by doing, in this case, being hunted by the best.”
    “What if I kill
one of you?”
    That brought on
roaring laughter from the other three Wolves standing close by.
    Rivers was the
one to answer his question. “Then you deserve to be here kid.”
    “Now go,
Quinn.” Locke did not move. He just watched Christian, waiting for
him to comply with his order.

Chapter
Two.One
Hunted
    “ If I ever had to fight one of them, I
would piss myself before curling up into the fetal position.”
-Private McBride, Arkelis, Survivor
    Christian
turned, showing his back to the squad, leaping over the nearest
obstacle. He sprinted away from his hunters, unclipping his rifle
from his back. In the short walk to the pit from the armoury he had
attached an unknown addition to the underside of his rifle. It
looked like an electromagnet, covered in spools of wire, there was
a half-moon trigger at the base of the attachment, and above it a
bar of green lights with the word charge below it.
    Great, he
thought, I brought a taser to a gun fight.
    It would have
to do, the radio was silent, and like true hunters they stalked him
without a sound. He kept running, waiting for the first of his
predators to show themselves.
    Xander was the
first to, appearing out of thin air behind an obstacle ahead of
Christian. He was faster than Christian, covering the same distance
and having time to set a trap in the same time Christian had fled
from his hunters.
    He saw the trip
wires in time, jumping over them without losing speed. But it was a
ruse, Xander’s second, and main trap was sprung the moment
Christian leapt over the wires. A motion mine hidden behind the
edge of an obstacle to Christian’s left armed and detonated the
same exact moment he had passed it. Xander hat calculated the speed
of the sprinting Titan perfectly.
    The motion mine
was a custom design, it was not meant to kill, it was only meant to
scramble his suit OS with static interference. The explosion’s
bloom caused Christian to wince, static filling his ears and vision
for a split second as the suit OS tried to compensate for the burst
of interference. A deafening sound pierced his ears and he lost his
balance, staggering away from the mine’s detonation zone, shaking
his head to clear his disorientation.
    He still held
on to his rifle, banging his left hand on the side of his helmet,
trying to help the suit OS with rebooting its systems. Christian
was aware of that fact that he was basically open to attack, he had
to hurry.
    When his vision
returned he was staring at Xander’s pistol, pointed at him from a
few paces away. Xander shrugged, as if to say sorry for what was
about to happen, he fired without a word.
    Christian side
stepped the first shot and charged at Xander, the explosives expert
fired again, the second bullet ricocheting from his right shoulder,
the third and fourth hitting him in the upper torso. The impact of
the bullets hitting his armour made him stumble, but it could not
stop his forward momentum.
    In a clang of
metal meeting metal the two Titans collided, Christian’s left
shoulder hitting Xander in the middle of his chest. It was like
hitting a brick wall. In the Labyrinth the flesh of the