“No, we never saw the cockpit open up on the thing. A few minutes after you went down, the tall man was standing over you.”

  That was impressive, I thought. With almost all telepresence I had seen, there was a small lag. Just enough to make it impractical in an actual battle. Acevedo’s bot had been on point and just as lethal and quick acting as the man himself. “He’d have to have a VR room, and it would probably be close to where he took me. Have you seen it?”

  She shook her head. “The estate is huge, but Sumo and I went through checking every room and outbuildings, but admittedly, I did it fast.”

  “What about you, Ada, can you pull up plans or track the wiring? A purpose-built space like that should stand out on the layout.”

  “Working on it, nothing in the original plans, but those were almost two hundred years ago. VR node room technology is only a few decades old. Sorting through building permits and contractor bids.”

  My AI was speaking aloud, so Damiana could follow along.

  “What does finding his node room do to help us find Carlson?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I may have it,” Ada said. “A DOD contractor out of Virginia did work with Hammer Industries twelve years ago on an undisclosed location.”

  “Undisclosed doesn’t help,” Voss said.

  “The mileage expenses from the contractor to this location match well enough. Going through the building specs, and it is obviously subterranean. Also, some reqs for materials for very specific granite and bluestone. Likely to match what was already here.”

  The patios and veranda were all paved in the local bluestone, and the foundations of the main house and storage buildings were granite. “Time for a field trip.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SIX

  It wasn’t simple; we spent several hours looking for the VR bunker. Several times, one or the other thought we had it, only for it to be an old wine cellar or maintenance door. Sumo was the one that finally located it, right in plain sight. A section of connecting wall between the carriage house and a media room. The rock-work looked precisely like the surrounding masonry, but the dog hit on a scent that had to be Acevedo.

  I used my suit’s sensors to scan the walls for control panels, hidden voids, or anything that might be a way in. Voss stood back ten yards and just watched me. I was on my third pass using a type of advanced lidar to peer beneath the outer layers of the wall.

  Voss walked up, held out a small comms devise, and within minutes, a small panel clicked out of an adjacent wall. This had a card slot and a bio reader.

  “Ada,” I began, then stopped. Voss had detached a card from the comms unit and dropped it into the reader, then affixed her thumb to the print reader.

  “Quantum based scanner. Goes through billions of frequencies and codes in seconds.”

  “Why didn’t you just start with that?” I asked. “And where can I get one?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil your fun, and honestly, I was expecting a mechanical system. This guy seems old-school, you know?”

  The door clicked, then swung inward on silent hinges. The security access panel slid back into the wall.

  “Sumo, blind search,” I whispered. He moved down the steps and into the interior at a run. I wasn’t expecting booby-traps or tripwires, but my dog always knows to be extra careful, whereas I tend to just bulldoze through shit relying on luck.

  “Room is clear, Prowler,” my AI said seconds later.

  We descended the stone steps and entered, my Rattler MK4 sweeping the room anyway. I’d had enough surprises this week. Compared to the rest of the house, the subterranean space was rather modest. It was thirty feet long and half that wide. The standard zero gravity VR rig hung loosely from the ceiling beam. The telepresence hand grips hanging limply like a tired scarecrow. What I was looking for was in the adjoining control room, which was even smaller. I withdrew a small cable from my sleeve computer and plugged it into an access port. “Ada, take everything.”

  “The other places he connected to?” Voss asked intrigued.

  “And the actual conversations, up to a point. The buffer is small, and its encrypted, but like your device, my girl Ada is impressive as hell.”

  It took nearly fifteen minutes for her to download the files and begin decryption. I didn’t want to hear or see what they said. I wanted useable intel—who were they speaking with, and where was Carlson heading? Admittedly, he probably wasn’t using telepresence for all of that, but we might get lucky.

  “One other thing, Ada, see if you can get command authorization on the Decimator unit and anything that might let us know how these fucks are controlling the other nightmare beasts.”

  “I do not yet have control but have a visual feed from the Decimator sentry unit. Prowler, you may want to see this,” Voss said.

  “It’s her, the WitchWalker.”

  I didn’t know which one of us had coined that term, but it seems totally fucking appropriate. The lone, wolfishly thin girl was standing in the road looking toward the house… toward us. Ada zoomed in until I could see her face; sallow cheeks and haunted eyes sat beneath jet black hair that blew wildly in the strong ocean breeze. She wore a simple dress, the color long since faded to a muted grayish brown. The most striking thing wasn’t the girl but the literal army of beasts that seemed to accompany her.

  “You sure it’s the same one you saw?” I asked, thinking about the blonde girl in Texas description that sounded remarkably similar.

  “Why, do you think there are more of them? I’m not positive, but I’d lay good odds on it.”

  “She made damn good time then. That was what, almost a hundred miles away,” I said, still studying the packs of mutant beasts behind and to both sides of her. None approached her nor came any closer to us than the girl.

  “I haven’t even seen a lot of those creatures, the mutations seem to be getting even more bizarre,” Voss said, her tone flat and analytical.

  A flicker of movement on the screen confused me until I recognized it for what it was. The Wraith was very near the WitchWalker, the almost iridescent wings catching the afternoon sun.

  “We need to talk to her, we need to know how she is controlling the creatures,” Voss said, an emotional edge creeping in now that she’d seen the Wraith as well.

  “And how do you propose we do that?”

  It was a good question; I had no intention of going out there and being slaughtered. In fact, it didn’t look like we even had an escape route away from this place now. The green zone that had been the manor’s grounds had jarringly shifted over to the side of the wastelands.

  “The Wraith can bring her in.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and let Voss take over. Clearly, I did not understand the relationship between her and her pet monster. The damn thing had tried to kill me, but ultimately, had also helped ease my pain. Damiana obviously could communicate with it somehow, but that was not anything she wanted to share. I still hadn’t even seen the thing up close, not that I wanted to, and it always seemed to be in camouflage or like now, nearly transparent.

  “Don’t go out there or do anything stupid,” I warned.

  Ada began showing me the most relevant findings from the telepresence links while my new partner did her thing outside on the edge of the massive lawn. What was ‘her thing’ you ask? I have no fucking idea. Must be a Sisterhood, talking to the animals, Disney movie kinda shit.

  “Carlson was a busy little fuck.” None of the sessions were prior to Last Day which meant either they had been wiped, or this node was not used until then. So likely, none of the planning was here. “Okay, track back any of Acevedo’s connections but limit it to ones after the last one of his boss.”

  “You assume the man would be checking in with Carlson, and that might offer a location?” Ada surmised.

  It did not. The hitman, it turned out, wasn’t much of a talker, not to his employer at least. There were several connections to what I would describe as underlings in France. I had Ada index those; Voss might want to see them later.

  She began playing back more of Nevis Carlson’s video of each connection. Ones she had tagged as most relevant. I had her increase the speed until I was processing what I was seeing at over ten times the normal frame rate. The audio was badly distorted at that speed, but Ada flashed subtitles up, and I was able to interpret the conversation and slow down when I wanted to review an exchange in more detail. One of these stood out.

  The connection was a call out, so the VR environment was the recipient’s node room, not Carlson’s. I scanned the link address and, to no surprise, found they had used triple-level masking to cover the location. The person was unknown to me and was using one of the weirdly popular filters that shifted their appearance to mimic faces from famous paintings. I found the whole thing distracting as hell, but neither Carlson nor the other man seemed to give it a second thought. What was most strange was the environment, using a technology that allowed you to virtually appear to be anywhere. This person seemed to have put no effort at all into the meeting space. Where some might want it to appear to be an outdoor café on the Rue des Martyrs in Paris, or by the marina in Santa Monica, this host was using a very basic iteration of the standard room scene that Sony shipped with all their virtual rigs. It first got my attention more through its ordinariness than anything. Then I listened more closely to the conversation.

  “I believe we were assured that the eradication protocols would not extend beyond the original target zones,” the other man said.

  “Indeed, my friend, we were.” Ada had identified that second voice as Nevis Carlson, the bland face of the thumbnail view in the upper right backed up my father’s unflattering assessment of the man. “The Sisters interfered, and some of our containment efforts were negated.”

  “Goddamnit, Carlson. Your only job was to handle that. Are you too fucking incompetent to take care of the simplest of tasks? You wanted a goddamn seat at the table—well, you got it, and now you fucked up already!”

  Silence hung in the air a bit too long. In fact, now that I was listening in real time, something was clearly off. There was a slight delay, a lag in the comms. It was one I was intimately familiar with. The other party was off planet, possibly on a ship, or maybe even the moon.

  “Carlson, you understand that none of this matters if we don’t have a planet to inherit when the dust settles.”

  “Sir, this was a final option, let me remind you that we did anticipate certain problems.”

  “Subject Zero?” the anonymous man who now appeared as Van Gogh in his self-portrait growled.

  “Taken care of,” Nevis said.

  “What about his pet?”

  Nevis clearly paused on this one. “He or it is in the wild. Our intelligence is obviously spotty in the affected areas.”

  “Well, fuck!” the man said spitting out the words. “Proceed with the next phase. And after that, thankfully, your involvement will be done. Your incompetence to this point has not gone unnoticed.”

  The generic background went dark, and I clearly heard Nevis say, “Fuck you” and something else before he switched the terminal off.

  “Ada what was that last bit?”

  It took her a moment to zone in on that section of the audio track. “Badly garbled, I can try to reconstruct but not a lot to work with.”

  “Give it a try, and let’s move on to the next one.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yes, Ada.”

  “We have a problem.”

  I stared at the terminal window from the Warbot outside. Voss was moving slowly toward the woman. “Goddamnit, I told her…”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Packer are you in the bus?”

  “Yes, LT,” the pilot responded, noticing the uncertainty in the woman’s voice.

  “Tactical is sending you the coordinates, go get our boys. Do not linger, do not do a sensor sweep.”

  Debra sat heavily into the captain’s seat, which took effort in the low shipboard gravity, the weight of what she now knew was a burden she was totally unprepared for. She rubbed a hand over her chin and stared up into the network of conduit and metal that made up the ceiling. “How in the fuck did we get here?” she whispered.

  “Ma’am?” her nearby communications officer asked.

  “Nothing, Johnson, just been a long day.”

  They had removed one threat only to have it replaced by something even worse. Something she couldn’t even tell her own team about.

  “Sergeant Gi, do we have a body yet?” Riggs needed to concentrate on something else, and a mutant monster running around the ship was a good secondary priority.

  “Negative, ma’am, blood trail stopped on the aft hatch of E-deck. Xero’s now running wide spectrum scans to help narrow its escape route. It was injured…”

  “Do I hear a ‘but’ there?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Xero feels like these things may be able to rapidly heal most injuries.”

  Well, fuck! “Roger that. I’m sending the remainder of Banshee to help on the search. Do we know if we can contain it to a certain deck?”

  “They are at least as capable as humans, ma’am. They open hatches, climb, and seem to have a rudimentary ability to shift their own coloration to better hide. These are not monsters, they are weapons, and a single one on the loose aboard this ship…”

  The Korean didn’t need to finish the thought; she got it. Sighing in frustration, she took the datapad from its sleeve on the arm of the seat and studied the ship’s path. They had propulsion and navigation back, as well as weapons, including the two ship killers they had launched. She recalled them soon after the strange call she’d received. They were now stowed back in the armament racks with safeties reengaged.

  “Nav, place us in parking orbit over this location as soon as the dropship is back. I’m going to get some chow.”

  The ensign nodded and repeated the order, another part of Space Force protocol that had come over from its naval roots. She found it cumbersome but accepted it like much of the newness of this strange role. Right now, it was just about the furthest thing from her mind. She needed someone to talk to, someone to help her develop a plan—some way of saving the ship from a threat none of them had expected. Unfortunately, the two people she felt she could rely on were off limits to her. Hauk was looking for a ride down to save his brother, and Joe… well, Joseph Kovach wouldn’t handle this rationally.

  She punched the door open to the ship’s gym. Riggs wasn’t hungry for food, she wanted to rid herself of this tension and anger. Slipping into her workout clothes, she began her rigorous daily routine of weights, resistance training, and then high-impact cardio, including a virtual Muay Thai match against the gym’s robotic opponent.

  The lieutenant kicked, pivoted, and snapped off another kick to the thing’s virtual head before ducking low and punching into the groin area. Riggs pushed herself to exhaustion and beyond, ignoring the pain and the tears streaming down her face.

  The noise she was making masked the thing’s approach. The tentacle-filled mouth could taste the odor of sweat coming off the human. She would be an easy kill and feeding again would help speed up its own healing process. The arm extended, the leathery fold of skin contracting back to reveal its own weapon, the claw.

  Deb was facing a mirrored wall, but the room was dimly lit. Through her tears she could not see the camouflaged beast as it inched closer. Except for the claw that almost seemed to hang in midair, and when it registered in her mind, she was already turning to face the creature shimmering into view just feet away. The thing swiped up, and Deb felt muscle and tissue give way in her abdomen.

  Damping down the pain, she attacked, pummeling the thing’s head with her gloved fits. Strong arms flung her off, and she hit the wall with a thud. She had broken bones and was minutes away from bleeding out. All she had been through, and this was how it would end.

  “I don’t think so, bitch.” Her fingers closed around a steel bar, one that she’d been planning to load up with dead weights. Now she had something else in mind for it. The Furie sprang, and Deb drove the rod into the creature’s oversized belly while wedging the lower end between the wall and the floor. It pierced the thing’s hide but not deeply. Still, the scream of rage from it was unmistakable.

  “Hurt’s, doesn’t it?” Deb teased. She was using one hand to help staunch the flow of blood from her wound and to keep her insides in place. The other grabbed the bar again. She could feel her strength waning; it wouldn’t be enough, but she was determined to go down swinging.

  The beast’s eye blinked, the weird, horizontal eyelids flicked. Bayou remembered Joe thinking these things had once been human. She couldn’t see it. Deb felt consciousness ebbing away. This had to end now. Apparently, the Furie had reached the same decision. They both charged the other, meeting with a colossal test of strength and will. The thing was injured, Deb could feel its chest breathing and its rapid heartbeat as they battled hand to hand. Then, the claw came up and swung down again and again. Deb saw the darkness closing in, knowing she had failed.

  “Good to see you. We can use the help.”

  “Just tell us where we can be the most use, G-Force.”

  “Priest, take my security team and cover engineering. We can’t let this thing get to any of the ship’s critical systems. Halo, you’re on point with me. I have a group of Marines holding ground at each end of the deck,” the sergeant said in his near flawless English. While he was still relatively new to the team, he’d already earned the others’ respect.

  “Anything we should know?” Bishop asked.

  “Shoot nothing that isn’t a Furie,” the Korean said before adding, “Tactical ROE, but seriously, watch your down range fire.”