“I trust her, Pops.”

  “So, you two are fucking? Shit, Junior, there’s no hope for you, let me talk with the dog.”

  “I hate to um… wrap up this feel-good call, Pops, but do you happen to have anything useful for me?” I asked. Even though it was stupid, the colonel still had connections that were better than anything I could match. Even though yelling at his kid was his way of spending quality time.

  “Yeah, Joe, I just think you should keep the dumbfuckery ideas down to a minimum on this mission, you know? Fucking your teammate definitely falls on which side of the stupid scale?”

  “Sorry, Pops, I didn’t know there was going to be a test.”

  “A test, a test? Life’s a fucking test, moron. Look, kid, this isn’t about you. I just don’t want one of my old buddies coming up to me in the club joking about the stupid shit you did, okay? I have a legacy to protect.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “for the concern.”

  And he was already gone, nothing useful…again.

  “Your dad?” Dami asked.

  I had my helmet up, so she couldn’t have heard the conversation, but I guessed that she knew that was who it was. “Yeah. He was… wishing us luck.”

  Her face scrunched into a smile that let me know she wasn’t buying it. Maybe she had met my dad. She was back in control after her call earlier. She hadn’t shared any details, but I desperately wanted to know more about her sisters.

  We’d abandoned the bike at the edge of the national forest and had a twenty-mile hike to the target location. Voss was understandably quiet, and I wanted to give her whatever space she needed. I used the time to make one more call. One I wasn’t looking forward to. I had my AI connect me to the ship and the comms officer got Jordan Hauk on a private comms channel.

  “Captain,” I said several seconds later when the call connected.

  “Yeah, Captain, what can I do for you?”

  I wasn’t even sure he knew that I was no longer aboard the Stone Mountain. “How’s your men, Hauk?” Red-7 had suffered a staggering number of losses on the HVI retrieval mission. I knew that was where his concern would be right now.

  “Good, all receiving excellent care in the med bays. A few are even getting over the space sickness. Myself not included,” he added with a laugh.

  “It’s not for everyone, sir. Look, I have some intel that concerns you on a personal level. I would rather give you the news in person, but that’s simply not possible.”

  The silence grew for several seconds. I knew the hardened veteran expected bad news when getting a call like this.

  “Logan?” he asked, offering his brother’s name. He was the only close family listed in the captain’s files, so it was probably not that hard of a guess.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “KIA, MIA?” he asked. “I tried to get through to him after Last Day, but shit…”

  “POW.”

  Jordan had not been expecting that. “Who in the fuck are we fighting that is taking prisoners?”

  “Captain, do you have any idea what your brother was doing on Last Day?”

  “Honestly, Kovach, I don’t even know who he’s working for. He was a damn fine soldier, but I think he was truly gifted on the clandestine side of things.”

  That seemed to mesh with the paltry information Ada had retrieved. I offered him what we had found.

  “What am I supposed to do with this, Master Sergeant? I am 200 miles up on your ship right now. Half my platoon is out of action, and being on the ground is near suicide.”

  “I’m just passing the information along, sir. I am not sure what the best call is, but if I was in your shoes, I would want to know. No one else is calling the shots for us anymore, Hauk. Yes, there are other battles we probably should be fighting, but family still matters.” I looked over at Voss who was running hard, her face still a mask of grief and fury. “Maybe more than ever.”

  It took a moment before the man responded. “Thanks, Joe. You’re a good man, sorry if I may have judged you otherwise at any point.”

  “It’s okay, Jordan. My dad always said I could grow up to be anything I wanted. So, I became an asshole.”

  He laughed, the first I think I ever heard from the man.

  “Look, if you decide to make a play, have Bayou access all the intel available. You can get resupplied from ship’s stores, and the dropship can have you in France as soon as the Stone Mountain is in position. Bayou will look after any of your people that aren’t mission capable.”

  “Thank you,” he said uncertainly. I knew he was thinking how off the rails a rescue mission might be. Hell, France was a foreign country. But it wouldn’t be the first time the man had broken the rules to go save his brother. Thinking again about Voss, I had one more idea.

  “If you go, I might be able to introduce you to some friends that might be instrumental to you.”

  “I appreciate it Joe, I’ll take any help I can get. Logan is the kind of hero the world needs right now. I hate the thought of him rotting away in some warlord’s prison cell.”

  I had no idea if it was a warlord that took the man or something worse. Perhaps this could be connected to Nevis’s organization. As I disconnected the call considered the other name Ada had given me, that had made me think that Carlson’s involvement might be a possibility, but right now, the idea fairy had yet to show and grant me any wishes. So it was just a vague hunch.

  Voss slowed, then stopped and quickly dropped. I followed her example, strained my vision, and engaged my suit’s optics to better see what she had spotted.

  Well, fuck! A goddamn Decimator Warbot standing in the middle of the road. Its triangle gun turret head pointing directly at us.

  “I guess we are here,” I whispered. Sumo turned his head toward me quizzically, but Dami had already moved somewhere out of sight.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FOUR

  Lieutenant Deborah Riggs had reached the end of her rope essentially with everyone onboard this ship, her ship–at least for now. All the goddamn petty problems had to take a backseat while she, Xero, and Packer worked on ways to defeat the ship that was shadowing them. A ship that Xero confidently believed was actively hacking the Stone Mountain’s navigational and propulsion systems.

  “Halo, report.”

  “Still nothing, Boss. Weapons bay is still dead.”

  She shook her head. Point defense lasers were still functional, and in fact, the bridge fire control was still operational. If the ammo caches and missile defense batteries located in the lower bowels of the ship wouldn’t arm or even release armament for firing solutions, all they could do was point the lasers at targets and say, “Pow!” At least they had missiles again. The armory printers had been going nonstop, and the SE crews had built dozens of them already.

  Xero and Otero were working on it, but Bayou’s patience was gone. Too many competing interests on board and out there. Plus, Kovach running off for some idiotic mission leaving his pseudo-girlfriend up here asking questions about his location that Deb had no way of answering.

  “Ma’am?”

  She turned, anger flashing across her face before she saw who it was.

  “Hey, Captain.” She pulled out a chair and lowered herself into it motioning Jordan to do the same.

  “You look like I feel, Deb. What’s going on?”

  She rubbed a hand across her jaw and tried to see where to start or even if she should. “I’m good, Jordan. Nothing that a hot shower and some fresh coffee wouldn’t solve.”

  He placed a broad hand over hers on the illuminated map table. “I’ve known you a long time, Riggs. Don’t blow me off, and I know coffee isn’t your drink of choice. What’s wrong and can I help?”

  So, she told him; she told him all of it, from Kovach jumping back dirt side, to Xero finding the ship, to the admiral ordering her to return to Gateway base, and the assholes on board who wanted to complain about every fucking thing imaginable.

  “One woman literally demanded I stop and listen to her list of grievances that she has been singularly more abused than everyone else because of her political views. The world ended for everybody—bitch! Not everything is about you!”

  The career Army man studied her and smiled. “Ever wished you had stayed home and taken over your family’s seafood business?”

  She was surprised he’d even remembered that. They’d briefly been an item, but that was many years ago. “Every day, Jordan… every day. My sister and I couldn’t wait to get away. I enlisted after two years of college, and she got a full-ride scholarship to NYU a few years later.”

  “I heard about Liz. I’m sorry, Deb.”

  Tears filled her eyes, but she held them back as best she could. “Thanks. Still hasn’t sunk in yet. What about Logan, any news on him?”

  That had been the reason he came to talk to her, but getting into that now seemed like a shit move. He knew he would need her help for what he was planning but held on that for the moment. “He was overseas when the shit went down. I haven’t heard from him yet, but Kovach has given me a possible lead.”

  “You talked to the Master Sergeant?”

  “Yes, briefly this morning,” Jordan said. “He was just offering an update, no other information.”

  Hauk watched as the woman frowned and chewed the inside of her cheek. It was a habit he’d once called her out on and quickly learned that was not going to be acceptable. He might outrank her, but she pulled no punches in their brief relationship.

  “Something is out there, Jordan,” she leaned in and whispered, clearly needing to change the subject.

  The man’s confused expression was no surprise. She quietly confided in him all she knew about the ghost ship. He didn’t understand why the need for secrecy, no one else was around, but also kept his responses in hushed tones.

  “How do you know they are a threat? It could just be a lifeboat with survivors, people that have nothing to do with what’s going on with your ship’s control systems.”

  “We’ve considered every contingency. That ship out there is clearly shadowing our orbit, and Xero has intercepted part of the tight-band comms signal that is originating from that craft.”

  Hauk looked troubled. He squinted and looked away, almost as if he could see through the dozens of meters of deck plating and hull toward the craft in the distance. “Still, they’ve taken no overt threatening action. I don’t think you can even classify this as an attack. If they cut off life support or tried to drop us out of orbit, maybe.”

  “Jordan—listen to me clearly on this.”

  He knew that tone—he’d heard it only a few times, but it meant Lieutenant Riggs was about to lay down the law. Part of Jordan Hauk recoiled, thinking not for the first time that the inmates were running the asylum. He was a trigger-puller, a soldier, and not used to being part of the team creating the missions.

  “I don’t give a fuck. All potential threats, all our enemies, and hell, any of our friends that impeded our mission of survival will be taken care of before they can do any additional harm. I don’t know about you, but I learned my fucking lesson on Last Day. From now on, we shoot first. They die first, before they can ever strike out. Am I clear on that?”

  “They die first! Crystal clear, LT,” Hauk whispered, leaning back and taking a more formal posture. “How can Red-7 be of assistance?”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FIVE

  KOVACH

  The blast hit nothing and everything. It wasn’t what I expected, but that was undoubtedly more to me living up to my dad’s most recent nickname. I was a dumbfuck. The Decimator had leveled something at me that looked nothing like a weapon. Then, my suit systems went dark.

  It has a tactical EMP weapon—well, of course it does. And since every motherfucking thing in my suit runs on electricity, I was now essentially a tin can full of juicy meat products just waiting to be stomped flat.

  Only thing was, the massive metal Warbot wasn’t stomping toward me like they had in the factory. Hell, it wasn’t even looking my way. I was laying partially on the ground…to be honest, my knees and my head were on the ground, which yes, that is an awkward and also particularly ineffective combat position to be in. My ass was the high point and likely the one part of me sticking above the relatively thick ground cover.

  Ada, who was only nominally tied into the suit’s systems, gave me an update.

  “Hip and thigh servo actuators are down. HUD systems offline. Revix life support offline.”

  “Gee, thanks, can you trigger a flash restart?” The battle suits went in a limp mode if hit with an EMP. Supposedly, they were shielded from the more damaging effects, but honestly, we’d never had a good chance to test them against an actual EMP weapon. That’s probably not true; I’m sure lots of soldiers were in battle suits on Last Day, but I hadn’t been, and that was the only research that actually mattered.

  “Weapons?” I squeaked out.

  “Primary weapons offline, Maglock in safe mode. Auxiliary weapons available,” Ada said.

  Still struggling to get the massive metal leg under me using muscle power alone was proving useless. I could reach my sidearm, though, and felt better with it in my grip, even though I couldn’t hold my metal-clad arm out to aim at anything but the nearby ground.

  All that money they spent on me and the suit, and I was essentially a prisoner of my own tech. The Decimator began stalking toward the north. Its speed was incredible; it had to be going after Voss. I felt a servo motor kick in, then hydraulic pressure charging my hip actuators. The knee lifted, and I maneuvered into a crouch. My systems were slowly coming back to life one by one in order of the AI’s prioritized checklist. Screw that, I needed weapons.

  The damn Warbots had been virtually impossible to kill, but we had to get past the thing.

  “Multiple enemy contacts converging on this location.”

  “Nature of threat?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Biologics, Prowler.”

  Great! More fucking monsters. These big-assed machines must have a way of summoning or controlling the mutant life. Something I should be able to figure out and take advantage of, but first I needed to survive the next ten minutes.

  “Joe, I am on the other side,” Voss’s voice said in my helmet speaker.

  Other side of what? The field, the Warbot, the realm of the living? I ran, my suit’s systems approaching ninety percent. The Warbot began a sweep, the EMP weapon still pointing out. I’d swapped weapons and now held the Glisson Rattler Mark-IV loaded with the high-impact rail gun darts we had determined to be the most effective in our previous outing. The first shot took off the claw that was holding the weapon. What I had failed to notice was a firing tube located on the midsection. A small rocket launched through the port and impacted directly on my position, which I had barely vacated microseconds earlier. I was tumbling across the ground, rattled but uninjured. Make no mistake, in combat there really is no such thing as a ‘small’ rocket. That’s just a figure of speech, like premature death. If the reaper has your number, it’s just death.

  Needless to say, I came up firing… at absolutely nothing. My HUD was giving me readings that weren’t making a whole hell of a lot of sense. The job of a combat veteran is to be able to focus. To drill down on the absolutely essential elements to stay alive and succeed in the mission. Currently, I was below par on the achievement scale but ready to ace the retake and make my teacher proud.

  My own grenade launchers finally locked on to the hard target and fired. I saw Sumo moving into an attack position against something else that was outside my field of view. Ada was now filtering and feeding me data that she felt was most relevant, and she has a damn good handle on what I want. We’d had time to work out the kinks on many deployments.

  “Second combat droid detected.”

  I could have done without hearing that, but hey, that’s Karma for you. Giving you the dish you deserve… not the one you wanted. I switched to the twin plasma carnage rounds and seared off a sensor grid on the first bot, which was unloading holy hell on a tree line where I assume Voss had gone.

  “Contact, six o’clock!” Ada yelled just before an enormous mass hit me from behind. Well, at least she was adding the location now, just had to work on getting that intel to me just a bit sooner.

  I knew instantly this was not a bot, too many moving parts like claws and teeth. Then a flash of scaly skin revealed the Furie. My right hand dropped the grip of the rifle and whipped my combat blade out of its sheath and down through the thick thigh muscle in one motion. The strike was so vicious I nearly severed the leg from its body. Gouts of the purplish blood shot out, covering me and it, but the thing kept fighting even as its life was draining away. I swatted it to the ground turning just in time to see the metal fist coming for me.

  Getting hit by a Decimator was literally like being hit by a truck. Sadly, it was not the first time for such an occurrence. The scaly monster I had been fighting was instantly compressed into green and purple jelly as the Warbot literally drove me through the thing’s body in an instant.

  “Goddamn!” I felt my innards shifting around inside my body. Having a high impact composite battle shell does little to minimize inertia. Ada was busy using all her tricks, as well as trying to get me moving again. I felt stimulants entering my bloodstream from the suit’s med packs. As I struggled to get back to my feet, I was still woozy. I shifted left to dodge the massive bot’s claw but slipped in the pile of gore that was running down that leg.

  Something else hit me from behind, I ignored it as my main threat was now right in front of me. My eyes tracked across the Decimator looking for damage, any sign of weakness. Then, the targeting reticle centered on a small section of the chest plating and zoomed in. Holy fuck!!

  “Eyes!” Human fucking eyes.

  This thing has a human pilot. As more of his face came into view, I could see he was smiling. I centered my weapon and snapped off multiple shots, but the man’s expression did not change. Not even a flinch when the rounds hit the viewport.