I took aim at the lead man and selected the one on the right as a secondary target, whom I briefly realized was a woman, not that it mattered. I squeezed the trigger, and the MK4 gave a distinctive reverse ‘pong’ sound as the devastating carnage round left the rifle, and simultaneously the lead man’s body was sliced in half. I swung to the next target, and the gun fired another automatically when it centered on the target. She lost both legs and literally flopped to the ground, her torso still upright as blood began to spurt in all directions. Sumo was back at my side, his face a bloody mess. None of it his, though. Of that, I was sure.

  “One target left,” Ada said. “Do you wish to offer him terms?”

  “Nope.”

  The short man was looking at what was left of his two comrades. I put a standard rail gun slug center mass. He joined the others.

  “Threats neutralized,” Ada offered unnecessarily.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  BANSHEE

  He used the embedded sensors on the rifle stock to adjust the reticle my tiny increments until the mildots were in agreement with what his snipers brain sensed was right. Darko had lain in this blind for hours, his legs ached from muscle cramps and some tropical insect, probably more of the damn biting ants had gotten inside his suit and was now dining on his flesh, one tiny chunk at a time. Still, he was a frozen statue even from a meters away you would have trouble picking him out of the undergrowth and even less likely to identify him as a man…as a threat. That was just one of the things that made him so good. He could reach out and deliver bad news to an enemy from nearly two miles out in the right conditions.

  This was not ideal conditions. In fact, it was horrible, the rain, the wind and heat distortions; plus, he had no idea what he was targeting. It was big…too big. He could see from the movement of vegetation that it had to be larger than a man. His battle AI had already confirmed no local wildlife here that he needed to concern himself with. They were to find the lab, extract the scientist and any data then level the place. The sniper was overwatch, a hopefully unnecessary backup.

  “Contact,” he whispered quietly. “200 meters south by southwest.”

  The double mic click let him know Bayou was aware, she and the others would be scouting the fringes to see what the thing was out there might be guarding. Darko zoomed the scope in and out looking for a detail, a shadow, something that might give him what he needed. Then all at once he saw it, something that shouldn’t be there. A splotch of gray and brown that hadn’t been there moments earlier. God almighty, that thing is ugly.

  He sent three precision high-velocity rounds into the face before consciously even thinking. He followed the rounds as they covered the distance in microsecond. Each was a direct hit. Hi instructor would have been proud; the barrel had moved so little during the shots that he was still centered on the target…only it was no longer there.

  He panned down expecting to see a lump of dead thing on the forest floor. Instead, he saw, then felt a thundering path of destruction heading directly toward him. The thing had zeroed in his location somehow. Clods of dirt, even small trees were sailing out behind the beast as it charged with incredible speed.

  The sniper knew his surroundings provided little cover, slightly raised ground, a ravine twenty meters behind. Several small trees to each side. It hadn’t been good for a sniper’s nest, that was why he was on the ground. It was the best he could manage on short notice. If he couldn’t drop this thing, that mistake was going to cost him. Shit, it’s fast!

  One part of him sensed the panicked calls from his fellow soldiers but he was locked in. He flipped the selector to semi-auto. Even though he no longer had eyes on whatever this thing was he could judge its location by the destruction. He pumped energy bolts into the thing as both the range to target and his ammo count steadily ticked down. Finally catching a flash of the animals front quarter, he realized he’d miscalculated horribly. The blur of movement was on him and gone before he could get another shot off. The massive leg stomping down on his chest, crashing through the armor puncturing his heart and snapping his spine. Darko thought about his family, his mom the fact he couldn’t feel his gun, his hands. Then he senses the creature sliding and turning for yet another run. He wanted to warn the others. The thundering ground shook beneath his faceplate. He couldn’t speak and the shadow of the monster was above him again.

  The object in her hands felt safe. It felt normal—it was anything but normal. Lieutenant Debra Riggs, combat call sign Bayou, glanced up and out at the surrounding scenery. This mission had seemed just like one more of the dozens she went on every year. “A cake-walk.” That was how she had described it to Darko. Now he was gone; it was just her and Priest now. Halo might also still be alive, if the things hadn’t also gotten him. “God, what a fucked-up day.”

  Darkman, or ‘Darko,’ had been a quiet man named Specialist Jack Smith from Virginia. Now she could find nothing but a bloody spot in the forest. No body, not even his goddamn dog tags. “We don’t leave anyone behind.” That was Kovach’s number one rule. It had been hard-wired into him at Ranger school, and now she couldn’t even find an identifiable body part to recover. She’d lost others, Ramirez, a few months back, but this felt different.

  The object she had found was an egg, the thick, dark green shell the first sign it was anything but natural. “Definitely not normal,” she whispered.

  Bayou didn’t like leading missions; her specialty was recon. She could slip in unnoticed, verify all the key points, and get that intel back to the clearing force. She liked being invisible; she was good at it, but she could also be deadly. Stealth had its advantages in every mission. On this one, it was the only thing keeping her alive.

  Again, she wished Kovach was here. He was the pure essence of a warrior. Even though he would never admit it, he was made of the same stuff as his dad. She outranked him and probably always would, but that didn’t matter on special operations teams. Prowler enjoyed disobeying superiors and stating his opinions too much. As soon as he got a rank bump, he’d do something stupid and lose it. She smiled; stupid was not the right word. Normally he did the right thing, the smart thing, it was just often counter to the team’s orders.

  A sound in the distance got her attention. She took a quick pull of water from the tube down by her chin. “Priest, you get that?”

  “Movement,” came the cryptic response from Specialist Bishop ‘Priest’ Taggert.

  Her second in command on this ‘cake-walk’ mission was a few hundred yards farther inland. Acres of thick tropical rainforest separated them. The tall, wiry soldier looked more like a missionary than a soldier, but that wasn’t why he’d gotten the call sign. “Talk to me, Priest.”

  “It’s another one, Boss. Yep, the big ones with the armor plating,” he whispered back over the Milcrypt comms channel.

  “Shit,” she said before removing her knife and plunging it into the green egg she’d been holding. This op had gone fucking pear shaped, and now they were rapidly running out of options. Her conversation with Kovach let her know why the recovery craft had never shown. The country was at war; that meant the Alliance was at war. She didn’t have time for that now. Focus on the mission.

  “Light it up,” she ordered. Enough being stealthy. She wanted to live, and fuck everything else out here that meant them harm. Goddamn gene slicers and biohackers.

  She could hear the distinctive sound of Priest’s weapon. Carnage rounds. Good choice, but it would run the weapon’s power down even faster.

  “Coming your way, Bayou. She’s pissed.”

  His warning was almost too late. The damn thing burst out of the trees again on a straight track in her direction. And it was a big mother, way larger than the one that had taken out Darko. “Holy fuck!”

  “Three minutes out!” Priest called. The sound of his voice clearly indicated he was running flat out to give her backup.

  Bayou leveled the rifle. It felt inadequate in every way. What she was looking at was a fucking monster. A lab experiment cooked up by pissed off guerrilla geneticists simply because they could. It was as large as an elephant, but had sleek, sinewy muscle rippling underneath hardened bone plating that they already knew made the animal nearly bulletproof. If any of her partner’s plasma rounds had any impact on the beast, she couldn’t tell it.

  So far, they had fought against three of the mutant creatures; they had only managed to barely wound one enough to score it as a partial victory. She raised her visor and spit her gum out as she keyed the selector switch on the MK4 to full auto. “Cake-walk,” she muttered in disgust.

  The pulse rifle rattled like an old-style chain gun as it ripped into the charging beast. One round apparently found its mark because the creature slid to a stop. Its two upper tentacle limbs searching its underside for the source of its pain. The massive alligator like head turned toward her, then on past.

  Bayou gave a grim smile of satisfaction. She knew it was studying the nest behind her. What remained of it, at least. Not only had these idiot fucking lab rats cooked up a chimera from someone’s nightmares, but they also gave it the ability to reproduce. Humanity was doing a lemming style run for the extinction cliffs. Playing God had come too easily for the human race, and now we get to pay the price for all that hubris.

  “Sorry, mom,” Bayou said as she, too, changed to the plasma cutting carnage round and aimed for one of the tree trunk-sized rear legs. The blast missed but sawed through several actual trees behind the pissed off creature.

  “Got her right where you want her, right, Boss?”

  In her heads-up display she saw Priest taking up a defensive position on her nine o’clock. “I think she’s having some postpartum depression,” Bayou said, putting several more carnage rounds on target. One sliced into the massive jaws causing part of its enormous head to peel back.

  The enraged beast charged again, desperate to exact its revenge on the lieutenant.

  Priest was pumping hundreds of railgun rounds into the thing’s underside. Bayou had to let her weapon recharge slightly from the high-power rounds, so she began moving rapidly into thicker cover, her battle armor’s servos whining from the additional strain.

  “Move your ass, LT, it’s right on you!”

  She moved between two trees just as the monster rushed by. She could have nearly reached out and touched it. Her finger moved the fire selector to railgun and aimed for a place in the back where the bony armor looked fractured. Probably from where Priest had shot it earlier.

  “Watch out!”

  Bayou saw movement out of the corner of her eye just before the bowling ball knot of chiton slammed into her head and shoulders. She hadn’t forgotten about the old-looking ball on the end of the damn thing’s tail. She’d just hoped the tight cover would have kept it from using it. Debra felt the intense pain, knowing the damage she’d taken was severe, and was vaguely aware she was sailing through the air. She thankfully did not recall hitting the tree or the beast approaching to stand over her before it raised its massive foot to pin her limp body to the ground. It’s ruined mouth dripping oozing blood and mucus as it drove down for a killing bite.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  KOVACH

  “Well, that was fun.”

  Sumo just looked at me, and I was sure Ada was about to suggest counseling… again. “I’m just saying, you know? There are some people that, well… maybe the new world doesn’t need.” The sudden buzzing nearly made me swerve off the road.

  “You’re still alive.” Once again, my father’s voice blasted directly from my secure internal comms.

  * * *

  “Is that a question, Dad?”

  “Hardly, Joseph.” Interference on this call seemed to overwhelm the connection every few seconds.

  “How bad is it down there?” I asked.

  “No time for small talk, Son. Ready to go to work?”

  I looked at my hands gripping the steering wheel. The bloodstains appeared brown in the fading light. My dog and I had killed half a dozen people in the last half-hour.

  “What kind of work?”

  “Goddamit, Son, I thought you were a soldier!”

  I decided to fuck with him. It was kind of a hobby the two of us had with each other. It was pointless and a time waster, but cheaper than therapy. “I’m tired of soldiering. I want to retire and work with a giant tech company and play golf in Florida like you did.”

  “Look, Joseph,” my dad said with a tone of genuine concern. “I mean this with all the love I have. I mean, I’m no doctor or anything, but you could be a pussy.”

  “Ok, Pops, you win. What’s up? How did south Florida fair?”

  “Parts of it are still here. I’m still here. What else matters?”

  “I mean, what do you know? You always have sources.” He’d gone to work with a tech start-up after he retired from the military. Even now, my dad had to be the best-informed civilian in the country.

  “The coasts are toast. That’s what I’m hearing. The shit they hit us with, fucking Sapphire warheads. You see that shit? Yeah, some nukes, too, mostly tactical stuff just to get our attention, but the goddamn Sapphires. They loaded some EMP cluster bombs on the old Darkstar hypersonics. That was likely just to disrupt communications and take down the financial markets. The biologics, though, they hit all the high value targets with those. I’m sure D.C lit up like a fucking Christmas tree.” He paused for a few seconds to get himself under control.

  “The working theory is that the nukes and the EMP disruptors were simply used as cover. Disable our response capabilities, so they could get those slower Sapphires on target. Whatever those were carrying is the real danger. We know they’re biologic capable, viruses, nerve toxins, who knows what else.”

  “Sounds like a shit-show, Pops.”

  “So, where are you now?” an element of actual concern showing up in his voice.

  I decided to test a theory. I had a working premise that my father had my comms system lo-jacked when they implanted it in my skull. “Kansas.”

  “Don’t lie to me, kid. Why are you going to the capital?”

  “I knew it. You bugged my comms, didn’t you?”

  “No, your grandpa’s old truck is still on one of my monitoring systems. I thought you might have to use it. I was right, too. Now answer the fucking question.”

  “The protocols, Dad… the meds… I only have a few weeks supply.” The line went silent for so long I thought we’d been disconnected.

  “Maybe you should have stayed on base instead of out in the damn nether regions.”

  “I like where I live, Pop. If I had been on the base, I would probably be dead.”

  “Shit, no one could hit that place. It’s a geographical oddity... two weeks from everywhere. Do you have any idea how much shit lies between you and those labs?”

  “I…” I began before I realized how foolish my admission was going to sound. Something about speaking to Colonel Jackson ‘Bones’ Kovach always made me feel like a ten-year-old who’d just gotten beaten up by one of the smallest kids in class.

  “You have no idea where the lab is, do you?” he said, clueing in way too quickly for my comfort.

  “I’ve got a mailing address.”

  “No, you do not!” His voice cut through the bullshit, the same way he had done with his troops and COs alike. “You have a postal mail stop somewhere. It’s a damn DARPA black site laboratory, dumb ass. You think they’re going to put that on the fucking box?”

  “Look, Pops, I know it’s stupid, but I figure I can’t wait. If they have a supply, I need to find them… to get to them before someone else does.”

  “Yeah, you need your fucking meds, otherwise you’ll be shitting yourself and making me look like I gave you bad genes or something.”

  “Yes, Dad, let’s do try to make this all about you.”

  “Stop being a smartass, Son. I’m trying to help you here.”

  I’m the smartass? How does he do that? “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “I’m sending Ada an address. It’s in Virginia. That’s where you need to go. Fuck D.C., nothing there but dead politicians and those pricks at the Pentagon. Maybe the Sapphires turned them all into zombies… no wait, that would actually be an improvement.”

  “You worked at the Pentagon for twenty years.”

  “Yeah, and I was a prick then.”

  But not anymore? I thought it. Hey, I didn’t say it, okay? “Okay, Virginia.”

  “Son.”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Listen to me now, okay? Get your team together. You guys are going to be needed.”

  “Who hit us? Was it the Russians?”

  “They’re working on it, but no. It wasn’t them or the Chinese. They were both hit too, worse than us. So were the French and India. Several strikes in North Africa even. This was well funded and precisely planned. They hit the normal stuff but also wiped out food distribution centers, shipping docks, and transport hubs.”

  “Terrorists? Terrorists with the funds to acquire that much high-tech armament?” I asked.

  “A new player. That’s what they’re thinking. None of the missiles had significant range. That’s why they mostly launched from sea-based platforms. It was old inventory. Surplus stuff really, but the warheads were all heavily modified.”

  “How hot are the coasts?”

  “Major cities will be uninhabitable for years. Depending on the payloads in the Sapphire bombs, the smaller ones may have increased biohazards for even longer. Interior of the country is fine, but almost eighty percent of the population is immediately affected. Casualties may already range into the hundreds of millions. So, yeah, find a seat for that little fact to sit on.”