“We’re in, Boss.”

  The down ramp showed a darkened space at the bottom. Her suit picked up a foul smell and faint sounds, both of which evoked a primal urge to flee. Dammit, Joe, what have you gotten us all into?

  “Bring in the Wulf.”

  Water dripped from cracks opening overhead. Gi stepped around the debris with the precision of a cat stalking its prey. Ahead, a flash of movement showed he and Sumo were thinking the same way. That woman had led them to this sub-level, but he hadn’t seen her again. She was cunning and capable. A small voice whispered warnings in the back of his brain. He knew it could be a trap. Still, he had to follow orders.

  Most of his missions had been straight combat. Suppression skirmishes when one faction or another started getting out of hand. He’d heard some tales of Banshee, Red-7, Viper, and X-Squad. Shit, who hadn’t? He’d always assumed they were largely fabrications. Now… he wasn’t so sure. This op showed all the signs of the world coming apart at the seams and all of its buried secrets about to spill out across the floor.

  Ahead, Sumo stopped at a cross tunnel and waited for Gi’s signal before moving on. The dog started, then stopped, his enhanced hearing picking up on a faint sound. Gi followed the dog’s look, and he, too, heard it. Music, very faint and very poor quality, like a scratchy record played on an old-world phonograph. There had been one in the village where he’d grown up. The song was in French and very old and very much out of place in this weird scenario. Slowly, his suit’s audio picked up enough of the faint music to offer a title and artist. Edith Plaf’s Non, Je ne regrette rien. He knew enough French to understand the significance of the song. “No, I do not regret anything.” He shuddered involuntarily. Whatever happened here had been done on purpose.

  Gi slipped into the next room to clear it before moving deeper. The music was louder here. It took several minutes to understand what he was seeing through the night optics view his HUD was showing. This was a weapons cache of sorts, but some, hell, most of these he’d never seen before. Instruments of battle that he couldn’t understand how to even hold, much less use. Giant curved- edge bladed weapons with no safe place to hold. Heavy clubs that must have weighed a few hundred pounds. But others appeared better suited for a human warrior to wield. If this was a production facility, who were they building these for? Then he knew the question should be ‘what?’ not who.

  He cleared the room and was about to exit when two items caught his eye. Picking up an enemy’s weapon was rarely a smart move. This one, though, he knew, might come in handy. He marveled at the exquisite craftsmanship. It seemed to hold a place of honor among all the other killing devices here. He reconfigured the back slots on his armor and reverently raised it, felt its balance, its heft, then dropped the sword into the slot on his back. Swords were always associated with the Japanese, but they had fascinated him since childhood, and he’d been a master by his early teens. He moved to the opposite side of the case and retrieved its twin. Seconds later, he left the room with slightly more confidence that he would find success this day.

  Gi and Sumo had Voss cornered in a series of corridors that seemed to go on forever. The constant tapping was a constant pressure on his concentration. He’d hated to leave his partner, his commander, behind, but the stakes on this mission seemed much higher than simple survival. The dog charged ahead in a classic pincer movement. Gi smiled and moved to counter it on the woman’s opposite side.

  Instead, something peeled off the wall and seemed to fly at him. He pivoted and sliced down expertly with the sword. It felt natural to grab the weapon, and it was perfect for this space. The creature literally seemed to disappear into nothingness. That had to be the Wraith that Kovach had described. He searched both ways up and down the rough-hewn tunnel. A scrape of foot on rocks caused him to duck just as something fast impacted the wall where he’d just been.

  Gi did not panic. That was one thing the ROK got out of its operators. You faced every battle head-on. The shape in front of him was not the woman. It slowly resolved itself out of shadow into a horrific creature, more nightmare than reality. The thing was only vaguely humanoid, although the face was clearly that of a man. He looked Middle Eastern, with dark hair and a beard. The arms were mechanical; Gi could see the artificial tendons, the joints, even an odd kind of fluid running through small pipes, not blood… not even red. The chest looked more like that of a bear, or perhaps a gorilla. It was too large, too dark to be anything natural.

  His soldier’s mind tried to put all the separate parts into some logical assembly and utterly failed. Clearly, this thing should not exist. He noticed an ID badge clipped to the damn thing’s chest fur. It was part of the staff… or once was. The face on the plastic card matched, so it hadn’t just taken it from a body. He heard metal on leather and saw the beast had drawn a knife from a hidden sheath. Gi knew he should switch to his Rattler but already had the sword, and it still felt right.

  The man-beast smiled an evil looking expression, then it charged. The Korean had to make a split-second decision on whether to stick to defense or attack. He chose to attack, then opted to go low as the mechanical arm came flying toward his throat, knife-hand expertly extended. Gi slid through the creature’s legs, slicing up and into the thing’s groin with the sword.

  The beast looked down; blood was cascading over a pair of relatively normal looking legs. It did not seem to register the injury with any great concern. It spun and attacked once more, this time wiser to its prey’s tactics.

  Gi parried the attack, then let it move in as close as he dared, feigning weakness and emboldening the creature to make a mistake. He knew if this battle lasted ten more seconds, he was doomed. No way he would win, no matter how good his skills. He gripped the sword in a crossed two-hand stance with the blade near his own ear. Without looking down, he knew the instant the thing had over committed. It had crossed some invisible line on that dirt floor, now within reach of the long sword. It would never be able to move out of the way fast enough.

  The movement of the sword in Gi’s hands was little more than a whispered blur of motion. Never had he fought with such purpose or precision. He sliced; he did not plunge or hack. The thing was so massive that he might break the blade or get it lodged in the beast’s thick hide.

  One of the mechanical arms struck him from his undefended side, sending him sprawling across the floor, but Gi could see the damage had been done. This was not to be a death by a thousand cuts, but more like seven or eight, all hitting very specific targets on the damn thing’s body. It fell to one knee, the mechanical arms going post rigid to hold the body upright even as the man… or thing, inside finally died. The song was just reaching its crescendo in the background. “Truly epic day,” the Korean said aloud.

  He turned and walked away, keeping the sword out in front. The heads-up display was useless down here, as no battle data was coming in. Still, his instincts as a hunter hadn’t ever let him down. He heard the dog woof from a corner just ahead, readied his weapon again, did a low dash around the corner, and came face to face with Sumo.

  “Where is she?”

  The dog looked just as confused, his head cocked to one side, and then he looked at the wall to their right. The tapping was coming from the other side of the wall.

  “You think she went there?”

  The Korean officer didn’t know what was making that sound, and he was less than eager to find out. A scream came from behind them, several hundred yards back in the direction from which he had just come.

  “That was her.” He was about to order the dog to pursue, but Sumo was already on his way. Gi ran after him. The dog was a truly capable soldier and was quickly earning the man’s respect.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTY-TWO

  KOVACH

  Ada spoke softly, “Whatever’s in those tanks, that does not need to get past you, Prowler.”

  She was worried about the Furies. What about the Decimators?

  “It would be bad. They are mutants designed for war. Seeing what happened to the staff, I think we can assume they are going to be a problem.”

  You did see when the first of the Decimators crashed through that adjoining wall, taking out at least a dozen of the tanks, he said internally. Yeah. Containing them wasn’t going to be easy. I could still see the glistening bodies of the creatures slithering across the floor.

  “Did those things start out as human?”

  “They were likely test subjects,” she said. “The ones that were not completely synthetic.”

  “What, prisoners, captives?

  “Possibly—or volunteers,” she said.

  “Why?”

  It was a stupid question; I was just trying to catch my breath and give her most recent injection of painkillers a minute to work. I knew why. They did it because they could and because no nation on Earth can face the Alliance military in a stand-up fight. Unconventional tactics called for new and unconventional countermeasures The other side ups the ante. We follow suit, or maybe this time it was our side that upped it. Whoever ‘our side’ was. As Bayou had confirmed, this shit was all Hammer Industries designs.

  The thing was, I knew a lot about what the other side had. Hell, I had busted into many of those facilities. This shit seemed decades beyond anything I’d seen that our enemies had. The magnitude of these biological and technological advances seemed all wrong. The equilibrium was off, but then again, someone had just punched this country right in the fucking face… hard. Maybe these… weapons were exactly what was needed.

  Problem was, the weapons were eating the creators. Correction… past tense. They had eaten all of them already, now they were starting on their dead and looking for any other snacks that might be nearby. To make matters worse, the monolithic Warbots simply stomped or drove over whatever was in their way.

  “There has to be a way of controlling them, the Furies and the Decimators. These scientists would have had a final option to prevent a breach. Find it, Ada.”

  I heard a sigh from my AI. Not one of someone who is tired or even sad, but one filled with pity.

  “I don’t think they got that far, Joseph.”

  I was moving again, slipping around an office that had to be Reichert’s. It was pompous and arrogant, just like the man. Filled with mahogany shelves and walls full of awards. My hand ran across a massive live edge desk made of the same material. I missed my workshop. I missed touching simple things like wood without fearing it was going to try to kill me with poison darts.

  My legs buckled, and I went down hard. Pain, fatigue, a body that was giving up. I heard and saw the mayhem that was heading my way. The horror I knew would haunt me and every other living being if these things ever got out of this underground crypt of evil.

  My hand grasped futile for the edge of the desk. Lifting my weight back up to rest on the surface. I saw a scientific journal. I thumbed through page after page of the vibrantly illustrated manuscrip with strange sketches, odd notes that refereed to DNA grouping and names that sounded both fantastical and terrifying. I flipped the journal through multiple times so Ada could record it then slid the whole thing into my storage pack.

  There is a special place in hell for people who create monsters. Every kid who is old enough to talk knows that it is wrong. It’s evil, it’s the way to the dark side. Those instincts aren’t wrong. What I saw out there on that floor could wipe the rest of humanity off the map.

  I couldn’t let that happen. This might be my last day alive, but I was going to do my best to give them hell before I went. Something unexpected calmed me. Not the absolute truth that this was my last day on Earth. Not the fact that I had a team somewhere out there that could not only avenge me but continue this horrible mission for humanity. Not even the ever-crazier one-liners from dear old Dad. What came to me in that moment of absolute darkness were the words of my senior drill instructor at Ranger school. An absolute beast of a soldier made from slabs of muscle forged into an incredibly solid frame.

  It was on one particularly rough day of Ranger training. My face buried in steaming hot red Georgia mud, bugs eating me from every corner of my wrecked body, exhaustion that would have made the Virgin Mary weep. The DI knelt beside me and bent his head close to my ear. Sergeant Adders, in a voice that did not match his outward appearance at all, said, “Rangers, lead the way.”

  It wasn’t shouted; it was not boastful… it was not a question. Simple statement, simple fact, and I had carried those words carved into my very soul that afternoon and through nightmare after nightmare since.

  I said the words—said them out loud. “Rangers, lead the way!” I needed that warrior’s strength right now, his fighting spirit, because my own was broken and lying somewhere below in a crumbling elevator shaft surrounded by monsters.

  Yeah, it was cliché; it was corny, and no, I was not instantly imbued with super fighting strength. I did, however, finally manage to get back to my feet. Wobbly… sure. Sometimes… most times, that is what really makes the difference between winning and losing, just getting back up one more time than your opponent.

  My opponent today was not as impressed with my resurgence as I was spotted almost immediately. One of the Furies leapt on me from somewhere high above. The impact nearly dropped me, but my battle suit’s internal stabilizer kept me upright. The scythe-like arm was closing down on my left arm, my injured arm. I twisted my wrist, causing waves of agony to burst in my brain. By doing so, though, I brought the thickest part of the armor, where my forearm bone was, inside the creature’s grip. Something clawed at my side, causing me to howl in pain. I twisted and heard something snap. I wasn’t sure if the sound came from me or the Furie.

  I felt its vice-like grip begin to crush the composite armor, knowing that once the suit failed, that bladed hand would cut through my wrist like soft butter. For her part, Ada was throwing everything she could into the fight. She enacted an electrical discharge from special panels built into the suit that should have fried the beast. It had no effect. She emitted high-intensity strobe lights that turned the cavern into a horror movie scene, with each of us appearing to move in a horrifically comical stop motion. Nothing helped until she started going through an audio spectrum.

  Having a super intelligent computer in your head does come with a few nice advantages. She had evaluated every nuance of the creature in the files. Apparently, there were many iterations of the Furies that the staff science team had undoubtedly tested for weaknesses and tweaked the genetic code to eliminate them one after another. Still, Ada assessed all of this data in seconds and produced an oscillating sound that was thankfully not within the hearing range of humans, although I could faintly detect it. I am, after all, not entirely human. Not original equipment human, at least. It reminded me of the music I had heard earlier.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t cause the creature to race back into the shadows or make its head explode. It did suddenly change its attention, its large dark eyes furtively glancing around the space, following the sound waves as they bounced off solid surfaces. It seemed confused. The one advantage it gave me was the grip on my wrist loosened.

  Not by much… just enough.

  I whipped my Heidelberg blade out of its sheath and across the Furie’s throat as I jerked my trapped arm free, doing my best to ignore the obvious damage it was inflicting for the moment. A gout of very red blood spouted out of the thing’s throat, covering my visor and much of my suit. I threw the giant body off in disgust.

  As suddenly as one was gone, another took its place. This one tried to bite me… on the neck. This bite had force, too. Those lips that looked so wrong held fast to the collar of my Rivex underlayer as the thing kept trying to get through my crunchy outer shell to the gooey, nougat center underneath.

  As my shoulder ruptured and more bones broke, that part of me that had been a warrior got pushed aside. In that instant, Joseph Kovach stopped being a man. A man would fail at what came next. I knew it; the monster knew it. Instead, I became the thing I needed to be in order to get out of this fucking fight alive.

  The rage, the fury in my own mind surfaced and exploded. I, too, became that thing I feared most. I was a monster.

  With a growl that even Sumo would have appreciated, I flung the thing off of me. “Suck on something else, asshole!”

  Instantly, it was coming back to finish me. I pivoted and launched myself, driving a mechanically augmented knee up into its groin. I followed that up with a hard elbow into the thing’s ugly ass face. I hit it so hard I could feel the cartilage tearing and bone splintering.

  Great gouts of blood were covering us both. I knew we both had significant damage, but I could see his. Mine was contained for the moment, packed down and waiting for later. Ada could still help use the suit where the man was too broken, but she was not me. I was in the zone; my purpose was singular. Fiery pain radiated throughout my body. Still, it was fighting back. It was as unconcerned with its own safety as I was. I reached for my blade, but it had disappeared in the fight. What I saw was a piece of the other Furie’s claw still buried deep into my suit. Pulling it out, I realized it was not just embedded in the suit. I felt every serration as it carved its way back out of my abdomen.

  I stomped back over to the creature, its back spines radiating menacingly. It leapt just as I drove the fragment of sharpened claw deep into one of its hideous eyes, bursting it into brown goo. Then I launched a hip throw, launching its writhing body back into the darkness.

  My left arm hung loosely, covered in blood and virtually useless, the wrist and hand feeling like they were still being gnawed off by an alligator. My sidearm was gone, as was my knife. I had no idea where.