“Clear!” one of the others yelled.

  The lieutenant offered me a hand up, then abruptly let me go as soon as he had my weight in his grip. He laughed and walked off.

  “Asshole!” I yelled at his retreating form.

  “Saved your life… again.”

  “Did not,” I replied, knowing full well he had.

  “Boss, why did Command not bother to tell us this was another one of those damn bio labs?”

  Seemed like every other mission was getting to be something like this. Gene editing had been around for half a century, but these bootleg labs were now beginning to make designer monsters. Some had no human DNA in them. They were supposedly based on a synthetic DNA; the lab geeks were calling it XNA.

  “Command tells you only what you need to know, which is where to fight, where to shit, and where to sleep,” Hinge added, staring at the open mouth of an enormous cavern.

  “That’s just wrong, man,” Bayou said, using the toe of her boot to roll the remains of the creature’s head back and forth.

  “See anything else hiding in the dark, Boss?” I asked, moving up in a covering position while I tried to catch my breath and regain a fraction of my combat effectiveness.

  He shook his head but was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Pulling back out of the cave, he held a hand to his temple, a reflexive but totally unnecessary sign he was talking to someone on a private channel. More shit from RDT Command, I was sure. The polarizing tint on his visor hid his mouth. Otherwise, I could have seen the level of shit he was probably giving them. This was supposed to have been a ‘cake-walk’ – right?

  “Some days, I wish you were still the one in charge, Prowler,” he said, looking at me with a grin.

  We both knew that wasn’t true. Hinge was a natural leader and a brilliant soldier. I had jumped rank on him, more than once actually, but my extracurricular activities kept me dropping those same ranks faster than picking them back up. I had a habit of being reckless and not following orders I disagreed with. A fact that I cared little about but infuriated my father to no end, I might add.

  “Careful, you know who is watching.”

  “You’re up, Bayou.”

  Riggs hit me on the shoulder as she passed. I fell in, rifle up, sweeping the opposite side of the corridor. Hinge moved up on our six.

  This part of the mission we were ready for. Hell, we were the best at. Banshee was always tops in the RDT mission reports. Tops on kills, tops on intel recovered, and tops on fewest casualties. Space Force doesn’t give out medals for just showing up… well, that’s not true. Some of the fleet officers get the shiny bits for doing nothing, but the Drop Team is the toughest job in the service and the one with the shortest life span.

  At one point back in World War Two, tail gunners in bombers supposedly had less than a one in four chance of getting home. RDT teams weren’t all that far behind that, mainly because in the early days we tended to have 100% losses. These days it was better, but we still took our licks. Condo was our last guy to buy it, his pod augured in a hundred miles from the target LZ back in December. Before that… let me see. Oh yeah, the Danger Twins both got caught in the same explosion when they unknowingly tripped a proximity mine while rescuing some civilian hostages in Mexico City.

  Banshee had been basically the same guys for almost a full three-month rotation. This was the last drop for this cycle, and some guys always thought that was bad luck. I put little stock in luck. I trusted my blade, my armor, and my Glisson Mark IV Rattler.

  Suddenly, without warning, another of those fucking beasts came charging at us. Bayou lit him up with a steady stream of impactor rounds, but I’d already seen how ineffective those were up close. I switched to something that would raise the gore level appreciably.

  The twin plasma flechette rounds punched out and through the angry creature. The next two cleaved part of the head from the neck. It still ran for a half dozen more steps before wobbling then crashing down to the dirt.

  “Carnage rounds, really?” Hinge asked as he bent to examine the thing.

  I caught motion as two more of the things entered from the far side. Bayou was already engaging. I turned back briefly to check on the others and saw the animal I’d just downed twitch.

  Then one of the incoming monsters’ arms flailed wildly, hitting Hinge full force on the chest plate. He flew backward, impacting a rock wall with a thud that reverberated through me. His broken body sagged to the ground. Rollo ‘Hinge’ Hanson’s health symbol on my visor went from green to red, then black.

  Something hit me from behind at nearly the same instant. I knew it was one of the other beasts.

  “Bond!” I weakly yelled for Highsmith. “Check him!” I was down on my knees, my vision tunneling toward darkness, but I could see my friend’s face. He was gone. I knew it. Couldn’t accept it, but I knew it. Fuck this, I thought. Nothing is worth all this crap. I brought my knife out and into the chest of the thing that had just attacked me. Arterial blood sprayed everywhere. The thing fell on top of me. My armor registered 583 pounds of dead weight. Shit, Hinge… Rollo was gone. The thought jarred me from what I should have been doing. “Fuck this!”

  “Up, Prowler,” Bayou said. “You’re in command now.”

  She was cold and professional. Two things I loved about her until that moment. She was right, though, our CO being KIA was not our mission. “Fuck! Okay, on me.”

  “He’s gone, Prowler,” I heard Highsmith say.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Bayou was the second highest ranking member of Banshee, but Drop Teams like Banshee tended to ignore things like that when it came to actual mission command. They wanted whoever could get the job done. I had traveled the rank ladder up almost to captain but was on my way back down, lazily enjoying the double chevrons of a Master Sergeant.

  Rollo was gone. Whatever these things were down here had killed him. I wanted the person who had spawned these evil bastards into existence. Now that I was the commanding officer, the mission objectives automatically uploaded into my HUD. I scanned them, stopping on the fourth objective.

  “No fucking way!” I said.

  “What’s that, Prowler?”

  “Nothing, Bayou. Fall in on our six, leave the Dark Man to look for monsters.” She was always my number two on missions I led. I trusted her fully whether or not I liked her right now. Still, I couldn’t tell her what I’d just read.

  The lab was laid out in very well constructed separate rooms all branching off the main tunnel. We’d raided several genomic workshops over the years. The Third Gulf War had been the beginning, not the end, of the freak research being done by back-alley labs and superpowers alike. Genetic research was now the single biggest line-item expense on half of the developing nations’ budgets. Some of these were noble pursuits in that they only wanted to make something better and hopefully profit from it. Like a facility in western Canada that had created a cold and drought resistant wheat. Others, such as one Banshee had seized in India, were editing the human genome. They were in the business of making copycat humans. By purchasing stolen DNA samples, they created a line of women to look exactly like celebrities from years past. They did this by a specialized gene therapy done on very young girls. The epigenetic changes were hard to regulate and apparently quite painful. Many of the girls died in the process or went insane. A few who survived to sexual maturity were then deployed to seduce and entrap rich or powerful men and women.

  These genetic code slicers were some of the worst of humanity. While I disliked my job, putting these assholes away had always been satisfying, and today would be even more so…. except for that fourth objective. 4. Secure the lab and key personnel, and keep scientific research intact at all costs. Do not question but hold for HVT exfil. Hammer teams…fuck!

  High-value targets for Hammer Industries. We were not working for those guys. Not on my watch. I saw a red notice flash into my visor and brushed it away with a gesture. I didn’t give a shit what the TOC had to say on the matter. “It’s payback time, bitches!”

  I tossed a frag grenade into every room we passed. In the final lab, a room easily 100 yards long, was row after row of clear polyglass tanks, all filled with a greenish yellow liquid. My HUD kept flashing red, but identified the liquid as a growth medium, and as I got near, I could see the shadowy figures inside. Shit… these weren’t more of the bony Neanderthals we’d been fighting. Not yet, anyway. They weren’t using young girls like the lab in India. No... that would have been too predictable, too acceptable now. Nope… these assholes were using babies. They were turning human babies into freaks.

  I moved up beside one tank, Robot close behind. I motioned Bayou and Halo to the other side. The baby in the tank rolled over and stared at me. I couldn’t look away. The mangled face had off cheekbones and a brow ridge that was already grotesquely enlarged, but the eyes and face were still that of a child.

  “Prowler, this is Command. Secure the lab and stand down.”

  I’d fucking secured it. Yeah… Command was thousands of miles away, but they monitored every away mission. They would know about Hinge, they would have seen all of this. They would have seen my trail of destruction getting to this central lab. I was going to have some ‘splaining’ to do.

  A man stepped out, his hands raised.

  “Are you in charge?”

  He nodded, a smile creeping across his dark face. “I am doct…”

  My gun fired without me pulling the trigger. No, that wouldn’t work. His head just fell off all by itself. Nah, that was no good either. Shit, I had no good reasons for why I had just killed the man. Then I looked around at the hundreds of fish tanks full of hybrid children, and I no longer cared about objective four, the military, or the scientist, or my career. Dad was going to have a shit.

  The explosions started along the back wall and raced toward us. “Clear, clear, clear!” I yelled. The bastard must have had some sort of dead man’s switch. He was going to bargain his way out by promising not to destroy the place. I saw Bayou make it into the tunnel just as the explosions reached the row of tanks I was nearest to. I heard screams of children, babies. I saw parts of them flying by me. Blood mixed with the artificial amniotic fluid coated me and every surface. I was just going to make the exit, then I slipped on the wet floor just as the last two rows of tanks went up in a massive fireball. I felt something hit me in the stomach and part of my armor disintegrating under the force.

  My last sight was of a steel rod and what my addled brain thought might be a baby’s leg—both objects sticking out of my abdomen at odd angles. I felt hands grabbing the drag handles built into the shoulders of my battle suit, then my world went white and soundless.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The morphine hit with the force of a hurricane. I felt movement then my mind was somewhere else entirely. This couldn’t be death…it looked too much like junior high.

  “Sit down and stop talking, Mister Kovach!”

  Mister. How could she make something as polite as that sound so filled with venom and hatred?

  She had been my eighth-grade teacher. Ms. Vanderhal. A onetime Teacher of the Year in Suffolk County, but that had washed away along with all her humor and humanity. The lesson had been to debate the merits of both sides of the discussion on using genetically modified food stocks in an attempt to alleviate world hunger. Beth Simpson had opposed it, saying God would take care of his faithful and nothing artificial could be condoned by any good Christian. They all knew she could have substituted good Republican instead and made the same argument. Both groups were still denying the climate change was in any way man-made.

  I didn’t care. I’d made my point loudly. “Do starving kids care about how the food they get was made?” That was back before the commercial food synthesizers, but still… it was such a stupid debate. If I’d only known five years later, my dad would be fighting a brutal war that broke out over those same topics. Most wars had been fought over things, stuff that one side had and the other wanted. Sometimes over purely ideological reasons, but even then, resources were a key factor. Just over sixty years into the 21st Century and the planet was ripe for a new kind of war. One fueled by corporate greed, government overreach, dwindling resources, and sheer panic as mass casualty events escalated worldwide. It started out with a dozen different names. The Okyuk uprising in southern Asia. The Basque independence fighters in Spain, The Crimea Liberation Occupation. Ten years later, they were collectively known as the PetroChem War or Gulf War 3. Eight years of the most constant global fighting since World War Two.

  The reason was simple enough: the ‘haves’ like the U.S. and Western Europe had what the others wanted. No, not wanted…needed, with much of the formerly fertile agricultural regions quickly becoming drought-riddled, arid wastelands. Drought resistant grain crops became a staple. These could only be grown by using genetically modified seeds. Seeds that were patented to just a few companies. Those countries that couldn’t afford the seed licenses, which were often ten times as much as the original, began to starve. At the same time, OPEC disbanded as the need for crude oil disappeared almost entirely. With most of the easy reserves pumped dry, no one could afford to go after the more difficult pockets of petroleum. Most of the developed world made the final moves away from fossil fuels, although too late to help the planet. The former oil capitals who had spent a century of wealth on personal excesses instead of anything more lasting, like education, research, and infrastructure, quickly saw their empires collapse. The Islamic world, which was directly tied to the billions brought in by the oil wells, fractured into more and more radicalized offshoots.

  By 2047, clean water was nearly as scarce as food in three quarters of the globe. Yet the U.S., in its seemingly protected isolation, felt none of that. Americans existed in a bubble of presumed freedom, safety, and isolation. We watched the world burning from one skirmish after another with an abstract interest, like watching the World Cup after your team has been eliminated. It had all come screeching up to our doorstep a few years after Ms. Vanderhal’s history class, I thought. Man, had it ever.

  That was why we’re now part of the Alliance. Supposedly a global alliance, but more accurately, it was what NATO had morphed into. It wasn’t a bad organization, although it was fraught with infighting and distinctly unequal variations of equality. It also ignored vast swaths of the planet it deemed too unstable, too uncivilized, or too expensive to add. Like almost every instance of power in humanity’s past, it was great if you were a ‘have’ and it sucked if you were a ‘have not.’ The countries that were in seemed to make sport of exploiting the lower tier states. That’s why the TWC, or Third-World Coalition, came into being. They were a loose confederation of groups, some countries and some religious, some ideological zealots with a wide array of goals but one focused target: The Alliance Nations.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  KOVACH

  “That is the offer,” the man said. No hint of any expression on his face.

  This was no offer. Say yes to the enhancement or die. Sell my soul to the military industrial complex for as long as I am useful… or breathing. “And if I refuse?”

  The older man offered a sad smile. “You will die, Mister Kovach. The trauma your body has endured may already be too much.”

  Dr. Reichert had pulled me back from the comatose state to offer me one chance. Not for redemption, but for life and the ability to serve once more. “Put me back under,” I growled.

  The man’s head shook sideways, one time, very slowly. “That is not one of my options, Son. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the legacy of your father, we likely wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You disobeyed a direct order, your CO was killed. Invaluable intel was lost.”

  That fucking stung. I suppose it should have been obvious, but my damaged brain wasn’t working optimally. “You can’t prosecute a dead man, right?” Technically, I realized that wasn’t actually correct, but… well… fuck it. I’m not at my best right now, ok?

  The man had nervous hands; he was fiddling with a small black object, moving it from hand to hand. I didn’t like nervous people; seemed to me they were usually hiding something, and this ass clown probably had all the secrets. I thought I recognized the logo on his ID badge.

  “Master Sergeant, the choice is quite simple. Do you want to live?”

  What they had described so far didn’t sound like much of a life. They wanted to experiment on me. Not just keep me alive because, well, I knew I was a fucking mess. The blast had scrambled my insides, turned many of my internal organs to jelly. It had sloshed my brains around dangerously and apparently destroyed major parts of my nervous system and left at least one arm nearly useless. That, along with the burn damage, broken bones, and, well… I was barely alive, anyway. The tubes running in and out of my body and the numerous monitors were doing the actual living. I was just along for the ride. I was definitely going to sue the maker of my battle armor. Hammer Industries—yeah, they gave me a defective suit.

  “We could patch you up enough to stand trial,” the doctor said, stiffening as he glanced around the room. “Your court-material could be done by holoconference, and we could transfer you to Leavenworth after your conviction. Doubt you’d make it more than a month, but it’s an option.”

  Not even an ‘If convicted,’ I mused. The man was quite confident, or more likely had already been told what the outcome would be. No one cared to even hear my side of the events. Hinge was gone, Banshee was being broken up. All of it had gone sideways when that fucking lab blew up, and yeah, some of it was my fault—okay, a lot of it. This was why I never held onto rank very long. I tried to remember what was below master sergeant… staff sergeant… no… technical sergeant. Shit, that would be a pay-cut. Of course, I’d never been busted more than one rank at a time, but this one seemed a bit more serious.