Andy Wong’s sprawling estate lay on the outskirts of San Pajita on five hundred acres of cleared forest. A massive fifty-foot wall enclosed lush cultivated lawns, Olympic swimming pools, and a gigantic mansion the size of a state capital building and built to resemble exactly that, complete with rising steps, columns, and dome. Scattered around the property lay twelve huge artillery embankments, swiveling turrets designed to shoot at anyone invading from either land or air. Now those dozen cannons turned to point directly at Kate and Nick.

  Kate gripped her control sticks and grinned. “Bring it on, punks.”

  The artillery opened fire, their tracer rounds scorching long trails across the grounds. Kate yanked her sticks back and forth in an arhythmic pattern as she depressed both foot pedals, sending her mech charging forward in a zigzag pattern that dodged most of the enemy fire and left heavy footsteps crushed into the manicured lawns. The massive caliber bullets shredded both the air and foliage around her as Kate fought frantically to stay ahead of the tracking fire. Nearby, Nick did the same, launching himself on a parallel course to Kate as the two pilots split apart to run along opposite sides of the perimeter toward the main house.

  Kate raised her pistol. “Suck on this,” she crowed as she squeezed the trigger on her right joystick. The enormous pistol recoiled as 20mm rounds blazed from the barrel. Her first shot missed the nearest cannon, but she corrected and her second shot slammed into the gunner’s dome behind the massive barrel. The bullet ricocheted harmlessly from the armored defenses.

  “That plating is thick!” Kate said with surprise.

  Her comm crackled as Nick’s voice rang through her cockpit, barely audible over the thunder of artillery and the zing of near misses. “The Blood Sparrows were one of the first three gangs to gain a political foothold in San Pajita. Andy’s been one of the more paranoid crime bosses since he killed his brothers and took over the family business.” Kate’s side cameras showed Nick battling his own emplacements, leaping from spot to spot to avoid concentrated fire as he plugged away with his own pistol. “I wouldn’t be surprised if armored embankments are the least of his surprises today.”

  “Then I’ll just have to improvise.” Kate lifted her mech’s left arm and unracked the elongated silver tube from her back. Her mech held it in its left hand like a staff, and when she pressed a glowing green button on her console, a curved telescoping blade sprang from one end to form a long naginata polearm as tall as her whole machine. With the pistol in her right hand and her polearm in her left, Kate charged the nearest emplacement.

  Tracer fire tore up the air as the gunner centered on her, and her reckless forward charge left her open to his aim. The embankment’s barrels thundered and spat heavy rounds at her, most of which chewed up the air around her mech, but many pinged off her chest plating and robotic face.

  The cockpit jostled as Kate’s mech absorbed its first real damage, but the blonde pilot grinned savagely as she closed the distance and punched a final button on the side of her left stick. The polearm blade vibrated wildly, its molecules buzzing with a tremendous amount of energy, and heat shimmer rose from the blade. She slashed the naginata through the embankment and left a burning trail of molten metal in the blade’s wake. The embankment fell silent for a second, then ruptured as the artillery inside exploded in a spectacular thunderclap which hurled shrapnel across the lawns.

  Kate charged a second emplacement as the turret’s guns punched into her chest. Her heads-up display warned her of mounting damage to the plating, but she raised her polearm for another strike. Her cameras showed some of the gunner’s crew abandoning the emplacement as she swept her superheated weapon through the armored dome and detonated the turret in another massive explosion.

  A section of the lawn nearer the house lifted straight up into the air, exposing a twenty-foot gleaming trap door. An enemy mech painted blood red with a huge gold feather rising from its helmet slid up on an elevator. The pilot unracked a huge broadsword from the combat machine’s back and charged Kate with the blade raised high overhead.

  Kate twirled her left stick and pushed, parrying the broadsword with a stroke of her naginata. The two weapons, each longer than a limousine, scraped and flung sparks across the already decimated lawns.

  “Kate,” Nick called out, “do you need me to come help?”

  “Negative, Warrant Officer Sharpe,” Kate growled. Despite the tension humming through her body, she smiled and her eyes gleamed with a dangerous light. “I’ve been waiting for a battle like this my whole life.”

  “Copy that. I’ll take out the embankments, you handle the enemy mech.”

  Kate squealed just a little. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to say that to me.” She slapped the pistol back on her mech’s hip and seized the naginata with both hands as her foe leaped at her with another brutal slash.

  She raised her blade and the two weapons clashed again. Her enemy surged forward with its elbow, slamming into her mech’s chest and jostling her cockpit like an earthquake. Kate gasped as her harness restraints dug into her flesh, and she glared at the enemy machine filling her forward viewscreen.

  “Okay, asshole, you want to play rough?” Kate lunged forward with her superheated naginata twirling. The enemy pilot leaped back and raised his blade to parry, but Kate lashed out with a flurry of attacks, striking from high left, high right, straight down, middle left. She shifted her hands to get a wider grip on the weapon, shortening the distance she needed to move on the end of the polearm. Her mech’s fingers got so close to the superheated blade that warnings appeared in her heads-up display, but she ignored them. She twirled her back hand as she slashed with the front, increasing her attack speed to beyond what the enemy could manage with his hulking broadsword.

  Kate’s attacks slipped past her enemy’s sword. He raised one hand in a desperate attempt to stop the blade, but Kate sheered it off at the stump and plunged through, slamming her blade into his armored chest with a vicious thrust that cut into the cockpit. Flames erupted from the gaps as superheated metal contacted fabric and flesh. The enemy mech shuddered, then slumped and fell still, the tip of its heavy broadsword thumping into the lawn.

  Kate glanced around to see Nick finishing off the last embankment with his own naginata. The turret exploded, and Nick walked his mech free from the debris cloud toward the main house. “You ready to interrogate some gangsters, Kate?”

  “I sure am.” Kate stomped her forward pedals and sent her mech sprinting toward the main house. Gangsters in red suits flooded the front lawn and fired automatic rifles at her, but Kate kicked them viciously, sending their broken corpses flying dozens of feet across the grounds. One mobster fired a rocket at her, and though it struck her cockpit, she barely felt the impact. She stomped him flat with one titanic foot and left only a greasy red crater behind.

  Kate deactivated her superheated blade, racked her polearm, and seized the house’s ornate dome with both hands. With a mighty lurch, she tore the massive structure apart and hurled it across the lawn. It rolled to a stop near the disabled red mech. Kate stared down inside the exposed palace, her cameras scanning for targets.

  The missing dome had covered a multitude of sitting parlors, boardrooms, and bedrooms. Most of the occupants were goons in red suits, pleasure girls in various lingerie outfits, and a few soldiers firing at her with handguns. She smeared the latter with her thick metal fingers, then gasped when her cameras caught a man in a red suit trimmed with heavy gold jewelry sitting at the head of one of the boardroom tables. His fat, jowly face and slanted eyes were instantly familiar to her. He tried to run, but she seized him with her mech’s relentless hands and raised him up to the machine’s face so he’d be fully visible in her cameras.

  “I’ll watch your back,” Nick told her over their comm. His mech stood nearby with its pistol raised. “Make it quick.”

  Kate grinned and flicked her console button for external speakers. “Travis Wong. Andy’s cousin, if I’m not mistaken. How you doing?”

  Travis shook like a leaf in her forward monitor. Kate could almost feel the vibrations through her control stick. “Wh-what do you want?”

  “I’m here for the man your troops took from an apartment over on the upper side of town. You’re gonna give me his location, or I’ll squish you like a grape.”

  “I don’t know! I swear!” Travis sounded hysterical. Kate idly wondered if the CDF would charge extra to wash urine off her mech’s fingers. That little inconvenience is never mentioned in the games, Kate thought with a grimace.

  “You sure?” Kate asked. She squeezed just the smallest amount with her mech’s hands, not enough to shatter Travis’ spine but enough to send him into a howling fit.

  “I swear! I swear! Please! Aaargh!”

  Kate frowned. He’s so panicked right now, he’d probably sell his own mother. Or maybe he’d do that anyway. Guess he really doesn’t know. “So where’s Andy?”

  “One of his four secret pleasure palaces,” Travis screeched. “I can tell you where they all are! I’ll do it!”

  Kate tisked. “That will take forever to search them all. You can’t tell me which one he took the prisoner to? I’m getting a little frustrated here, and when I get frustrated, I can’t control my mech’s fingers. They just might squeeze too hard.” She gave the fingers another small squeeze, just enough to bruise the sniveling weasel.

  “I don’t! I really don’t, please!”

  An electronic song suddenly burst through Kate’s speakers. She furrowed her brow in confusion, but quickly realized it was Travis’ cell phone ringing in his coat pocket. “Do you have Andy’s number?”

  “Yes!” Travis cried.

  Kate smirked in satisfaction. She cut off her external speakers and switched to her private channel with Nick. “Nick, could the CDF equipment trace a cell location if we called Andy from a trusted number?”

  “Easy as pie,” Nick said. “We’d just need ten seconds.”

  Kate smiled and pushed back from the palace with the howling slimeball clutched in her mech’s hand. “I’m sure we can convince Travis to betray his cousin for that long.” She turned and strode across the blistered lawns toward San Pajita in the near distance.

  Chapter 22

  Get to the Chopper

  As the dead of night lay heavy over the lush island prison, Max, Hank, and Johnny lugged a massive tree through the forest toward Andy Wong’s compound. Hank carried two rifles slung on his shoulders while Max and Johnny wore pistols tucked into their waistbands.

  Johnny groaned as he dragged the splintered back end of the twenty-foot tree. They’d cleared most of the branches off and left footlong ragged stumps dotting the length of the bole, so it looked like a centipede on steroids. “How’d I let you talk me into this, Cain? We’ve been walking for an hour.”

  Leading the procession, Max panted. “I still say it’s our best shot. We gotta get over that wall first, and we can’t very well waltz in through the front gate.”

  “Stop complaining.” Hank held up the center with ease, his enormous arms straining but totally free from sweat as he strode casually along. In truth, the dark-skinned titan bore the majority of the weight. “All the breath you guys have wasted bickering could be better used getting us there faster.”

  At last, as the three laborers crested a short hill, the lighted compound came into view a few hundred yards away. Max called a halt and peered at the dusty compound visible beyond the twenty-foot wall, with the massive ziggurat rising behind it. “I still can’t see an airfield, but I’ll bet it’s behind that big old eyesore.”

  “Plenty of guards,” Hank commented. With a thick finger he pointed out four guard posts visible along the top of the wall, tiny shacks perched atop pillars with red-clad soldiers staring out through narrow windows. “Looks like a prison.”

  Johnny pointed to their left. “The groundskeepers got lax over there, where the forest grows almost right up to the wall. Probably our best bet.”

  Max groaned as he hefted the load and headed left. “Let’s get this shindig rolling.”

  Together, the three men passed the last few hundred yards. They slowed to minimize their crunching footfalls and snuck right up to the wall. Max planted his splintered end, the thickest, in the dirt and braced it with his foot while Hank and Johnny walked the other side up. The tree smacked against the wall with a weak thump.

  “Let’s do this,” Max said. He crawled up the tree like a squirrel, using the stubby remaining branches as ladder rungs. The leaning tree was just a couple feet short of the wall but he easily reached the top and pulled himself over. The peak of the wall was only a foot wide and provided no cover, so Max quickly leaped over, dangled from his hands, and dropped to the dusty ground inside. He rolled to ease his landing. Fortunately, the section they’d entered was a fenced-off vehicle depot. Black jeeps and big work trucks filled a packed lot lit only by a bright orange bulb thirty feet away on top of a tall metal pole.

  Max took shelter behind one of the pickups and waited. Hank dropped next, his massive landing giving off a loud thump. Max spotted movement as two guards over at the depot’s narrow gate glanced around, but they both shrugged and went back to talking in hushed tones. Max spotted knives and pistols on their belts.

  Hank took cover next to Max, and Johnny came over the wall next. With the three of them reunited, Max whispered to them. “I’m on point. Two guards on duty means I’ll need a helper for a stealth kill. Hank, you’re enormous and could snap someone in two with no problem, but how are you for stealth?”

  Hank grinned sheepishly. “Like a gassy elephant covered in brass bells, man. Ain’t no way.”

  “No problem. Johnny, you’re with me. Let’s sneak up there, check to see if the guards will be missed, and take them out. We’ll need to synchronize so neither guard gets off a shout.”

  “Easy enough,” Johnny grunted. “You take left, I take right.”

  “Done. Hank, wait for us here.” Max slipped forward, weaving through the trucks and jeeps, with Johnny close on his heels. The two men crossed the forty feet to the front depot gate and stood hunched in the shadows six feet behind the guards. Max could see into the wide compound beyond, and though the open space was dotted with orange lights on poles, vast pools of shadow lay draped over the bare earth. The guards on the walls appeared focused outward, and he didn’t see anyone close enough to raise a fuss if these two guards disappeared for a short time.

  “Can’t believe the premo stuff I scored this time,” the left target said as Max crept up behind him.

  “You gotta share that shit, Dave,” the rightmost guard whined as Johnny Legion’s meaty hands reached for his neck.

  Max and Johnny seized their targets from behind. Max slapped a hand over his guard’s mouth while ripping the long knife from his enemy’s belt. He stabbed the guard in the chest three times, piercing his lungs and heart, and the man shuddered and jerked in his grasp. Before he was even fully dead, Max dragged the guard back into the shadows and laid him down beside a truck. Johnny did the same with his corpse, and together the two stuffed their targets under separate vehicles. Max stripped the pistol off his target also and stuffed it in his pocket but kept the knife in his hand. When he was done, he looked over at Johnny. “Good work. You’ve killed before, haven’t you?”

  Johnny Legion almost laughed at the joke. “Once or twice. Never to help a cop.”

  “Ex-cop,” Max muttered. He waved Hank forward, and the big man lurched between the parked vehicles until he reached their location at the front of the depot. No one cried out after the missing men, so Max crept from the shadows and slipped out of the depot into the night, stopping to take cover behind a stack of metal shipping containers fifty feet away.

  As Johnny and Hank hustled to join him, Max tapped lightly on the shipping container. “Wonder if this is where the kidnapped girls have been sent. We assumed they all went overseas to the slave trade, but I’d bet a ton of them dropped into Andy’s private collection.”

  “For sure,” Hank agreed. “I seen a lot of different chicks up there on his platform. Seems like new ones every time. The girl we saved probably got rotated out of his favorites already. Don’t know what happens to them when he loses interest.”

  “Nothing good.” Max looked grim. He turned away from the shipping container and slid to the end, with the wall to his left and the main compound sprawled out behind the metal box. When he reached the other side, he poked his nose around the corner to glance around.

  Two more guards stood fifteen feet away, right on the edge of a pool of light. Each man wore a knife and pistol on his belt, same as at the depot. Both of them scratched their arms repeatedly as Max watched.

  “Junkies,” Max whispered back to his crew. “Get in the shadows and be ready to grab them. Make it fast so they can’t scream.” He poked his nose back around the corner and hissed at the two guards. “Hey, guys.”

  Both men turned around so fast it looked like they’d get whiplash. Before they could draw their guns, Max continued.

  “Dave’s got the premo shit over here. Want some?”

  The two men shared a look for a long heartbeat, glanced around to make sure no one was watching them, then hurried toward Max. The Reaper leader turned around and hurried away, fully in sight of the two guards as he walked back along the length of the shipping container.

  As the two men turned the corner, Johnny and Hank lunged from the shadows. Johnny stabbed one guard in the throat, while Hank simply overwhelmed his target, seizing him in both hands and snapping his neck in the air. The two dead guards dropped to the ground in a heap.

  “Hey, where’d you guys go?”

  The loud call chilled Max’s blood. He peeked around the back end of his shipping container to see a group of four guards with submachineguns walking in a patrol formation. They’d just come into sight of where the two junkies should have been, and their leader looked confused. He hadn’t raised the alarm, but he and his team started toward the empty spot.