“I’m great, Voss, no thanks to you.”

  “Never know,” she said.

  Her tone made me wonder if she knew something I didn’t.

  “You’re on-planet.”

  “Okay,” I said noncommittally.

  “Texas?”

  “Jesus Christ, Ada, does everyone have access to my data feed?”

  A red question mark icon appeared in my visual overlay. My AI had no clue what I was talking about. Just like my dad’s calls, she didn’t seem to be able to listen in on Damiana’s either.

  “What do you want, Voss?”

  “Can we go back to me being Dami?”

  It was hard to concentrate jogging down the side of the road in full battle kit, but yeah… no. “We definitely can’t go back there,” I answered. I was pissed, this woman had used me to get something and then killed me. Maybe I was being petty but that’s a hard thing for me to get past.

  “Okay, Kovach, look. You mentioned a name when we were at Ranier. Nevis Carlson, do you recall that?”

  Why was this woman not surprised I was still alive? “Yeah, of course.” My upgraded mental facilities seemed to have near perfect memory recall now. Strangely I hadn’t thought about Magnus mentioning that name until now. Doctor Magnus Reichert was the man who’d overseen my own enhancements and apparently the development of some of the mutant shit we were now fighting.

  “Is he behind this? Did you find him?

  There was a long pause. “Not exactly.”

  Xero sat on the hard bench listening to the sound of a bird off in the distance. The cooing echoed through the horribly misshapen pines lining the shoreline.

  A memory surfaced from her past, the bird was a mourning dove. Mourning for the loss of a loved one, a mate, or maybe for the entire world. It was all gone now, wasn’t it?

  “It’s gone,” she whispered to the wind.

  The world we knew is no more. Her world had disappeared when Valyn was transferred from Houston to Luna. No… if she were being honest, it was when she filed her report on the internal hacks.

  No one in power wanted to believe anyone on the inside could be doing all this.

  The dove’s mournful song came again, carried on the wind along with the intense smell of rot.

  She was so tired and had already seen so much death. All because of her. If Captain Hauk hadn’t come to her aid, she would have been gone weeks ago, now nearly half of his team was dead. They called her a high-value target, but to her, she had no value… not anymore.

  “I tried to warn them,” she whispered. “I fucking tried.” All she ever wanted to do was make a difference. She had a broad base of genius level knowledge, yet maintained it inside the shell of an antisocial misfit. One that turned off most people; no one cared what she knew.

  My hand held a cup out in front of her.

  “Drink up, Xero. Damiana Voss said we need to finish our talk.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  She sipped delicately. Her eyes never seemed to move away from me. It was not like she was into me… more like she was studying me… every inch of me. I didn’t feel like I needed to guide this discussion, so I waited on her.

  “Is it active?”

  Intuitively, I thought I knew what she meant, but I wanted clarification. “It?”

  “The enhanced battle AI.”

  “Joe,” Ada said softly, “I believe this person is one of my original programmers. She was a contractor used by the DARPA lab Magnus was attached to.”

  “She is,” I answered Xero’s question.

  She smiled. It was unexpected and radiant. “Can I speak with—her?”

  “Hello, Xero, I am called Ada.” Ada’s soft voice came out of my suit’s speaker and inside my own head.

  “You programmed her?” I asked Xero.

  “I was one on the team. I developed several of the core algorithms.”

  “Joe, she was key,” Ada interrupted speaking internally. “Her programming architecture allowed for fluid development and the fully integrated operating state an embedded AI must be able of adapting to.”

  “It sounds like it has been a success,” Xero said.

  I honestly didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t think of Ada as a program or app. She was more a part of me and a partner. Truthfully, I couldn’t imagine life without her.

  “She’s a dumpster fire,” I said. “Total incompetent.”

  If Ada was human, she would have shot fruit juice out her nose she laughed so hard.

  “We manage,” my AI said laughing. “Joseph is still in training.”

  Xero smiled again; it was a good smile. She enjoyed meeting some of her work now that it had matured. “I’d love to do an exam on you at some point. See how the neural network has evolved.”

  I think she was asking my computer, but I answered for both of us. “Ok, but later. First, I need to know what you know. Nevis Carlson,” I said as a way of kicking things off.

  Xero looked puzzled, then contemplative. “He was the director.”

  “Of?”

  “The DARPA oversight committee. He…” her voice trailed off. “Are you suggesting he was behind the Zero Day attack?”

  “I am. He is one possibility. I need to know why eradicating the planet would have appealed to him.”

  She looked off momentarily, then started to speak but seemed to think better of it. Finally, she said, “He was in a key position, I suppose it could have been him. Very well off, highly placed, but…”

  “But?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He just seemed, you know… sad. Not really capable of something like this. He was a bureaucrat, a manipulator sure, but not sure I can buy into all this being on him. More of an aging frat boy with a trust fund and insider connections than a terrorist mastermind.”

  “Ada, send Xero our files from the Nightmare Factory.”

  “Done,” came the nearly instant reply.

  “What you did and the things you probably saw with Reichert in the labs was only a small portion of what was going on. I know you realize that,” I said. She nodded. Thanks to Ada, I now knew her background in ethical hacking and some of what she had uncovered on the days leading up to the attack. “If they had only listened to you. All of this might have been avoided.”

  Her deep, brown eyes were filling with tears. I understood her frustration. It was too late for ‘what-ifs,’ though. Far off, I heard a night bird cooing.

  The discussion lasted long into the night, and for once, I had more data than I could sift through. Interesting thing about having received newfound mental intelligence, it didn’t make you smarter… not immediately and not in very many obvious ways. Ada explained it as if my brain was a local library. If they tripled, or hell, quadrupled its size, it would hold tons more knowledge, but it would still be a library. My brain was still a brain.

  “So, we agree that Nevis Carlson is a likely target but not the top guy. We also have no clue if he is still alive or where he is.”

  Xero nodded. She had the anxious look that told me she needed something. A fix maybe. “What’s your crutch?” The bourbon was no longer enough.

  She shook her head, “You don’t wanna know.”

  “Come on, weed, juice, oxy…we need to get through this.”

  “Sex.”

  Hmmm… I did not see that coming.

  She smiled. “Sorry, I have a hypersexual condition due to increased hormone levels. Sometimes… often, I just need a fix.” She held up the empty cup. “The bourbon helps, though. Another shot?”

  I poured. She was smart and cute, and I liked the shit out of her, but I wasn’t crawling in the sack with her. I told her she should go see Jordan.

  “Captain Hauk?” she asked, both eyebrows raised in surprise.

  How is it that they attach the most brilliant minds to some of the dumbest people? Dumb as in reading others, common sense, understanding social norms. It constantly amazes me.

  “Yeah, I think he has a thing for you… pretty sure, in fact. Ada, do you concur?”

  “Totally has the hots for you, Xero. Not sure how comfortable he is with it, but Joe is accurate.”

  Xero tossed back the two fingers of whiskey and wiped an arm across her mouth. “Damn! Didn’t see that one coming.”

  I smiled. “Pay him a visit tonight. I think it will do you both a world of good.”

  I sighed and looked off into the darkened sky.

  “One last thing… tell me what you know about Voss.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SAFEZONE, SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The man crouched low and belly crawled through the low dunes. He’d been trained in Russia and various TWC terrors camps, including the Yemen Special Reserve. He was confident, skilled, and ruthless. Still, this night he was apprehensive.

  The world ending less than a month ago could certainly be part of his nervousness, but Allah would prevail. The end of the world was basically like any other Wednesday back in the village of his birth.

  He clicked on the tracker; it signaled a drone in VLO, or very low orbit. That was when his nerves always ratcheted up. Like most professional soldiers, he feared his clients as much as his targets. Once he switched on that he was in position, his client held the ultimate high ground. One deselected uranium slug to the back of the head fired from very low Earth orbit left little traceable evidence behind.

  The target was sitting on a chaise lounger overlooking a perfect, azure pool. The island resort of Majorca. If there had been a world ending attack, he, nor the resort, seemed to be taking any notice. He signaled the rest of the team.

  The sun had disappeared many hours earlier, now it was well past midnight. The bartender had already issued last call three times, but the lovely woman and several others nearby were ignoring his pleas to go to bed.

  Through his special Steiner optics, the man eyed the long-legged beauty. She was offensive to his Muslim beliefs in so many ways…. still, she made him have thoughts he preferred to ignore. Her Western cut swimsuit left little to the imagination, but he caught glimpses of something wrapped around her right arm. A bracelet, or bangle, perhaps. She would be dead soon, that was all that mattered. He clicked the comm twice to advise he had eyes on the target.

  Suddenly, a foot caught him in the side of the head. He moved to swing his sound-supressed Silka 88 up, but a fist slammed into his nose with tremendous force. Blood sprayed out, and his eyes watered. He could no longer see the assailant. If he could have focused those eyes, he would have seen his target still lounged by the pool. Her friends still joked and carried on, oblivious to the violence taking place a few hundred yards away.

  Damiana Voss was very, very good at what she did. Despite her striking good looks that still turned heads, she had mastered the art of blending in anywhere. Here, in this opulent and exclusive desert oasis, it had been a challenge to not be noticed. There were only a few hundred guests and nearly as many staff. The five-star enclave was a pit stop for the uber rich; even celebrities had to wait for an opening to get a reservation.

  As her mother would have said, this place smells of old money and superb wine. She sat back on the bed. The sheets had a thread count so high they should get a nosebleed. Yes, the world had ended a few weeks ago. Monsters now ruled much of the planet, but the rich hadn’t yet taken notice. Well, not all of them.

  Voss jammed the taser into the man’s neck again and used the setting that would produce tremendous pain without causing unconsciousness. He spasmed violently, his arching body straining the bindings that held him tight to the antique chair. Nevis Carlson had taken the bait, just like her mother had thought. “He is a weak man, a weak man who doesn’t know that he is,” she’d said.

  Now let’s see what this assassin knew. She slipped a small item out of a zippered pouch. It was no larger than a postage stamp and appeared just as innocuous. Peeling back the thin polymer liner, she carefully placed it to the man’s throat and pressed the center releasing the serum. A mixture of drugs the Sisterhood had been developing for decades absorbed quickly through the skin and into the bloodstream. It was a truth serum of sorts but had other uses as well.

  She studied her smartwatch as the timer ticked down from three minutes. She checked his pulse, then opened both eyelids to verify that the intravenous agent had indeed latched on to the appropriate neural receptors. If he tried to answer dishonestly or not answer at all, the serum oils would activate various pain receptors with no other action from her.

  Damiana squeezed the man for every crumb of information he possessed. “What do you know of Nevis Carlson?”

  The assassin struggled to answer, then grimaced as the negative response triggered a lightning bolt of pain throughout his system. His violent response was every bit as bad as when she had tazed him, but this time, she hadn’t needed to lift a finger.

  “You…you can’t torture me,” the man struggled to say. Spittle ran down his face from a mouth that was sagging slightly on one side. He was Middle Eastern, perhaps Lebanese. She would know for certain in a few minutes.

  “I could,” she began. “I might even enjoy it, but torture is unreliable. There is only so far you can push someone with physical or even mental duress. Eventually, they will simply tell you too much, they will admit to anything. That does me no good. The biological I just dosed you with is triggering your pain receptors with no physical damage. So, despite your suffering, you can actually endure this all day… assuming you are half as tough as you think.”

  She patted his knee as she stood and moved to the bed where the meager contents of the man’s pack had been dumped. “You are wondering about the woman… the one at the pool, as well as your other men, I suppose.”

  Damiana saw in the man’s face that he was. The woman was a Sister, of sorts. One that bore an uncanny resemblance to herself, but she wouldn’t give the man any satisfaction of that knowledge. “Just shows how incompetent you are at your job. And your men… well, I paid them each a visit before you. Now, tell me everything you know about Nevis.”

  And so, it began. Just over forty-five minutes later, she left the suite, the drug cocktail inside the man’s veins moving on to the final iteration. Causing the complete organ failure, then erasing itself from the victim’s bloodstream. Not that anyone would bother with forensics these days.

  The man hadn’t known as much as she had hoped. One nugget he had offered was he was not alone. Someone else was on the contract. She slipped into her own suite and eyed the luxurious tub. She could have really used a hot bath and dinner. Instead, she donned her night watch cap and added the man’s rifle to her armaments. Voss needed to go hunting… again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  RED ZONE TEXAS

  I was crawling back to the burning vehicle. This was not how I had expected breakfast to go, but hell, welcome to combat. Days or weeks of complete boredom interspersed with moments of chaos and terror that may define the rest of your life or just as easily end it.

  My mind was racing to fill in the gaps as to what in the holy fuck was going on. The scene reminded me of a mission in Jordan where insurgents snuck inside the line and placed multiple IEDs triggered to go off at morning mess. It had been damned effective and ultimately helped me decide to rotate out to Space Force.

  I ran to a group of people and rolled to a stop near them beside a broken wall. The company’s XO was attempting to contact someone on the Milcrypt Comms. He looked up and shook his head.

  “What… Are… We… Fighting?” Yes, I spoke loudly and slowly as I hadn’t had coffee yet.

  “Don’t know, Prowler, reports of several of those Furie things jumping the front lines.”

  I looked around at everything burning. “Did they bring RPGs?”

  The man looked away. “Some men…”

  I got it, cutting him off. His own men had fired blindly into the compound. “Direction!” I snapped. He pointed. “Secure weapons, if they are not positive of the target, Lieutenant.” I stood and began moving in the direction he’d indicated. It was where the smoke was thickest.

  “Hey, Kiddo, how the fuck are ya?”

  My father’s timing was uniquely horrible, or maybe he did it on purpose. I saw scaly legs moving with incredible speed toward a group of soldiers. I sped up to intercept.

  “Doing good, Pops.” It did no good to be honest with him. I dropped to a knee and fired off several of the carnage rounds praying they hit the damn thing I was aiming at. They didn’t. One cut through a tree and the other sliced part of a support trailer in half. Oops.

  “Sounds like you’re busy, I’ll make this brief.”

  Something slammed into my right side with the force of an autotruck. Jesus Christ! I grabbed at it, but it sailed away. Inertia is a bitch, and now, thanks to my newest upgrade, I could teach everyone the computational physics I was using as I moved awkwardly through the air, I thought again that I should be fucking better at this. The first enhanced super soldier, and I was getting whipped by lizards.

  “I am going to patch in some asshole from Luna. He’s the prick who wants your hidey-hole of a ship. He’s been attempting to take remote command, but so far, has only managed to cut off the comms array.”

  “Roger that,” I said grimacing. My rib was only partially healed from the last time.

  “What’s his…” I heard the hiss and the telltale metronome beep of signals coming in from the moon.

  I saw the Furie that had blindsided me. He was moving toward a downed soldier. I ran at him returning the favor. Hitting it was like hitting a block of polycrete. I went down; it just stood there staring down, its reptilian eyes flicking the lids from each side. Then Sumo hit the bastard in the face. Hell, yes! That’s my dog!

  Vaguely, I was aware of the voice on my comms. “Sorry, could you repeat that?”

  “Is this Captain Kovach?” A gruff voice growled.