My life savings would have been instantly transferred onto a more global crypto via a formula Ada and I had worked out months ago. Mostly likely WorldCoin or even the original Bitcoin. Something with a global presence and wide acceptance. Ada would also activate several emergency accounts to secure cash, gold, and some rare coins and hard assets. These would have courier instructions to transfer to specified locations in various small towns. Have I mentioned that I am paranoid as fuck?

  “Ada, are you safe?”

  “My processor is organic, but my cloud storage and online access will probably go down. So, I will be fine, but likely limited in functionality for you, Joseph. Depending on where this attack is centered.”

  I saw multiple streaks, and the ground shook again as somewhere off to the northeast got blasted. The impact felt like a minor earthquake. To the east, I could see a blue glow lighting up the darkening sky. The capital, I guessed, had also just gotten hammered. I glanced at the remnants of the shipping label still clutched in my hand. Lab N4, and the Washington D.C. address. The country was under attack, but… realization slammed into me like a gut punch. I likely had just over six weeks to live.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  BANSHEE

  “Any luck?”

  “All comms channels are still down or being routed for priority traffic only.”

  Ada seemed peeved with me. I couldn’t imagine why; I’d only asked her the same question a dozen times. The bright blue glow over D.C. had been joined minutes later by several more in other directions. An enormous one to the northeast that I assumed was New York City. Several more to the south, possibly the naval yards at Norfolk or the state capital. Ada had made some calculations and judged the one that came close to us was heading toward Louisville. Primary targets would likely be financial, government, and military centers. Major cities and transportation hubs next, then possibly more secondary cities. Those assumptions came back to me from my war college days. That was assuming we were now fighting a conventional enemy. As the PetroChem Wars taught us, we couldn’t really count on that.

  “The Darkstar design was an outdated model,” Ada had said. Probably purchased on the black market. That might be good news, especially if they didn’t have enough of them to hit all U.S. major targets. Still, I had clearly seen missiles launched heading away as well. The United States had responded to someone.

  Ada had managed to send an alert to members of my combat team just before the attack. She’d done that just based on the code phrase my father had used. I was still shaken but sat down and looked at the box still sitting in the safety container. Sumo had been pacing in and out the open door. He’d sensed something bad was going down, too. Sitting here in the hills of West Virginia, we both felt useless. As much of a pain in my ass as my dad was, damn, I’d love to hear from him again.

  “Keep trying,” I said, my mind already racing through what protocols I should follow. The one ever present thought was the ticking clock inside my body. The meds I took were specifically designed for me—for the organ replacements—anti-rejection drugs, then some special compounds to keep the rest of the repairs and upgrades functioning mostly in harmony with my natural body. My doctors had made it abundantly clear what would happen if I stopped taking them.

  So far, I’d only had two close calls, the last just six months ago. Banshee Team was in Indonesia tracking down one particularly nasty asshat who had a habit of trafficking in young white girls from America and Western Europe. I was nearing the end of my six-week window when we finally located the douche bag. I called for a replacement team, but Command said it would be a simple snatch. Another cakewalk. Three days in and out.

  The cakewalk turned into almost two weeks. On Monday of the second week, I was four days past my expiration date. Until that point, I’d felt fine. I had pretty much convinced myself it had all been a ruse. Something the lab rats and DOD had done just to keep me close and quiet about, well… about stuff. Stuff I’m still not supposed to talk about. Not even to my dog. Definitely not to you.

  Hoofing it through that miserably hot jungle, we were closing in on Mister Sunshine. That was our name for the target. Midmorning on that Monday, we came under heavy fire. I knew I’d been shot. Even through the armor, I could tell my shoulder and arm had taken heavy damage. I went down like someone had landed the knockout blow. My vision started blurring, and I had stabbing pains in my stomach, then my heart seemed like it was beating out of my chest. My head felt like it was filled with a thousand bees. Halo and Darkman were standing over me by then, the firefight having moved on. Or maybe they’d killed them all, I didn’t know. I heard Halo say, “He’s seizing.” I felt my body go rigid, then I lost control of every muscle in my body and remembered nothing else for two and a half weeks. It was only afterward I learned that Ramirez, call sign Robot, had taken my place at the front of the spear and then gotten nailed by the damn proximity mine.

  Darko, a.k.a Jack Smith, told me later a military drone dropped some emergency meds in once they found our location. Our medic Highsmith got the IV started, but my heart had already coded multiple times by then. They airlifted me out the following morning. After that, it was more desk duty. The new protocols were not to send me out without an emergency supply and never that close to my six-week deadline. Space Command, obviously seeing my limited usefulness, sent me out less frequently. Bayou started taking on more missions without me. Still, the government didn’t like giving up on its expensive toys. And yep, that’s what I was.

  I looked again at the box; I was due for the next treatment in three days. Then, somewhere around forty-five, hell, let’s be optimistic, fifty days from now I’d get to recreate that little scene one last time.

  “I have a connection,” Ada said.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  CAROL

  The distant boom was quickly followed by a much closer concussive blast, which shattered windows and sent glass shards flying like a fleet of tiny daggers. Carol Reynolds was rattled, but professional enough to remember the crisis plan. Terrorist attacks were a common enough problem that every company had a disaster plan. Even though she was in one of the more hardened data rooms, she got a chill as the lights blinked off. Her hand trembled as she ran a palm around the underside of her desk, trying to activate the emergency data dump.

  Bomb, plane crash… whatever was going on, the sensitive data in her department’s files had to be protected at all costs. She glanced out of her office through the opening to the outside where the window had been. Jagged fragments of the glass cladding now were all that remained in the frame.

  Her son, Lux, would be scared. She tapped her comms to call him, then remembered he was at his dad’s this week. Her comm set was dead anyway. She activated the office phone only to see it was dead, too. The system’s backup didn’t seem to be working either. The entire system was on an ungodly expensive UPS power system that should have kept her computer working, no matter what. Even the emergency power failure alarms on the system were silent. She glanced nervously around the open office. There had been a lot of downsizing lately, consolidating teams. Now she hardly knew anyone, and most people still worked remotely on Wednesdays; the place had been nearly deserted, but she’d barely noticed—until now.

  “The place was attacked, Carol. What are you doing?” She tried talking herself out of the shock of the moment, but her rattled nerves were still trying to piece together something that made sense.

  Her ears finally registered the obvious. Everything was deathly silent. Something had happened, a bomb she assumed, but where were the sirens, the car alarms? Hell, where were the screaming people? Her offices were in Virginia, a half-hour flight from the capital. Triple that or more by ground, even on a good day. She checked the other workstations. Everything was dead. Nothing electric was working.

  She was trying to make sense of everything or of anything. They had a utility room down by the server racks in the basement. No, she needed to get through to her son. First, she ought to make sure no one here was badly hurt. Ultimately, that one won out in her confused mind, but she still went to the server room. Her office was on the outer wall and had daylight for illumination. The inner offices were a darkened labyrinth. She’d opened the door and called out, but no one answered.

  The offices were a maze of overturned furniture, sparking light fixtures and collapsing ceiling panels. One large holowall screen had fallen, crushing a desk, one she was certain had been occupied earlier. Who had done this? Was it one of the other labs? Had an experiment gone wrong?

  Carol gingerly continued down three floors before she got a response to her call outs. It was muffled and weak but sounded to her ringing ears like a man. The blast damage seemed to have been much worse lower down. The concussion wave must have hit the ground and spread out. Why am I thinking this? That was simple, because that was what she did. She analyzed data, she collected the clues; she searched for patterns. Her mind’s default state was to try to unravel the seemingly unknowable.

  On the floor ahead, an arm was sticking out from a cubicle. She reached to check a pulse, then noticed in horror the limb wasn’t attached. The former owner, or what was left of her, was lying in a heap several yards away. Blood coated the downed partitions and workspaces. She had not been the one calling for help.

  “Where are you?”

  No one responded, but she heard something from up ahead. A sound like fingers on a keyboard was coming from the darkness. She moved toward it, her heart pounding in her chest. What in the hell has happened? Wires dangled from the ceiling along with pieces of ceiling cladding. Parts of the back wall of the office seemed to have buckled inward. She wasn’t even sure it was safe to be in here. The databanks be damned. If it all collapsed, they were finished. Did buildings collapse like that anymore? she wondered. Didn’t they make them stronger or something after 9/11?

  She found him a minute later. Someone she knew, although not well. He worked in logistics and lived in her subdivision, so they spoke often, although mostly on the comms. “Tom, can you hear me?”

  The man just stared at her and touched his ears in incomprehension. “Your hearing is…” She didn’t want to say gone, although it probably was. Blood was trickling down from his right ear, and the other side of his face looked like he’d hit the wall behind him hard. “Temporary hearing loss,” she said, mouthing the words in an exaggerated fashion. Tom was tapping on a broken keyboard, probably the same things he’d been doing when the blast came. He was going into shock. That much was plain to see. She checked him over quickly; she had rudimentary first aid skills from school, but nothing more. He seemed mostly ok to her except for the massive bruising and a head wound. It’s probably a concussion, she thought. So, yeah, definitely not ok. Also, his other arm felt… off. Maybe a dislocated shoulder, maybe worse. Well, not as ‘off’ as the other woman, but it was likely broken.

  “I’m going… I’m going to try to get help,” she said loudly.

  His eyes were looking glassy, but they seemed to finally focus on her. He tried to speak, but nothing came out but a croak. His eyes were darting back and forth. No…not back and forth. Down and back up to meet hers. Down to his hand, the one holding the keyboard.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

  He shook his head. The movement caused him to wince, and he looked on the verge of passing out. He looked down again, and she watched his fingers fly across the keyboard. U T R U N G E T O U T

  “Get out,” she said aloud as she read the words. “Run?” She leaned back. “You need help.”

  The keys tapped three more times. She didn’t need to look down; she knew he was saying it again—Run! Then she remembered Tom no longer worked in logistics, they had moved him to… to special projects.

  “Oh, shit!” Her only thought was of getting out, getting to her son. She stood quickly, then leaned back down and patted the man. “Thank you and… and good luck.” She felt horrible but was already at the exit stairs as she called out her goodbye. This man knew Iron River’s secrets.

  She sprinted down the final two floors and down a corridor, the simple marker for Lab J12 the only identifier. She passed more bodies, one of which was a security guard. She removed his service weapon and ammo belt. No one seemed to know what they actually worked on here, but rumors had spread. It wasn’t good, whatever the case. She’d developed predictive human behavior models. Feeding millions of data points from unsuspecting people all over the world to refine and improve the models to the point they could be relied on with near precision. Here, systems could tell what people were going to do, say, date, harm, buy, or reject long before the target did.

  She stepped over the body of a young woman, possibly a courier. A box lay just out of reach. In one glance, Carol saw hundreds of glass daggers embedded in her tortured flesh. Remarkably, the girl’s face was mostly untouched. She’d been pretty, a daughter, a girlfriend, maybe in time a mother. Carol rushed past, offering a silent prayer for the dead. She was a mother, and she had a son to find.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  BAYOU

  “Where are you?” The comm’s connection was fuzzy and kept fading in and out, but at that moment, I was happy to hear from anyone, especially my second in command.

  “Non IC,” Bayou responded cryptically, indicating that she was not at liberty to say, but she was not ‘in country.’ That meant Space Command had deployed them early. I was supposed to be in the TOC for this mission, yet, again I had been left out of the loop.

  “Good copy, Bayou,” I responded. “You’re aware we’ve been attacked?”

  “Affirmative, Boss. I was online with Command just before all communications with the CIC went down.”

  So, CIC might have been taken out. No way they simply lost tactical comms.

  “What were they saying?” I looked at Sumo whose ears had perked up at the sound of Bayou’s name. She was a dog person and seemed to always have treats, so, yeah… my combat dog now became a big pussy cat anytime she was around.

  “Typical half-assed intel that they were willing to share,” she began. “They were tracking two dozen bogeys from various origin points. Most seemed to be ship-based missile systems, but they had no known military vessels in any of the launch locations.”

  “So, submarine?” I asked before Ada cut in, using her two-way audio.

  “More likely Merchant Marine ships, Master Sergeant. Cargo ships with hidden launch systems and cruise missiles hidden underneath. A clever bit of subterfuge.”

  “Yeah, what she said,” Bayou stated. She was very familiar with my built-in AI but was not overly friendly with it… her… um, whatever.

  “Sounds like a terrorist hit or someone wanting it to look like that. I saw one of the hypersonic cruise missiles, though, an older Chinese model,” I informed her.

  “Seems like it was a bit of everything,” Bayou went on before fading out for a long pause. “Silkworms, Dragon class, some old Russian BKA12s, even a few that might have been French made. Some were obviously carrying nuclear warheads as the interferences with our satellite comms proves that, but others they were tracking, the ones hitting some of the less sensitive targets on the East Coast, apparently had some other payloads.”

  I thought through those comments, unable to make much sense of it. Missile payloads had gotten incredibly sophisticated over the last fifty years. Cluster bombs, smart bombs, cluster rods, and the increasingly nasty ‘special payloads.’ “What kind of detonation?”

  “Varied, although they just had initial reports before they cut out, so who knows? One near D.C. said a big airburst, then a bright bluish violet light.”

  I recalled the blue glowing dome I’d seen building over D.C.

  “You remember what that sounds like,” she added helpfully.

  My blood ran cold. I knew, how could I not have recalled it? “Shit.”

  “Yep, Prowler,” she said, using my call sign. “Just in case you missed the freaky bio hack shit, they may be at it again.”

  “It’s banned, outlawed by the modified Geneva Convention.”

  “Not a conventional enemy, or at least maybe not. They don’t have to play by the rules,” she said.

  “Who was our outbound strike against? I know we bitch-slapped somebody. I saw the launch signatures.”

  “Unknown, Sarge. Maybe you should run that by the colonel.”

  She meant my father.

  “No luck getting through so far.”

  “Sorry,” she said somberly. We both knew what no contact might mean.

  “I have a sister over near Louisville. Can’t get through to her either.”

  Shit, I had forgotten all about her younger sister. “Shit, I’m sorry, Deb. I’ll be glad to try and get down there… see if I can locate her.”

  She seemed to consider that seriously. “I have a question first, Joe… a serious one.”

  “Okay,” I responded uncertainly.

  A burst of static cut in so loud Ada had to dampen the signal before it cooked my eardrums. “What point in the cycle are you?”

  I knew what she meant but hated that it was even on her mind. We’d been through a lot together, though. “Just got a shipment, so full cycle plus one.”

  “So, six weeks, maybe seven, right?”

  Lieutenant Debra ‘Bayou’ Riggs was also an enhanced warfighter, although hers were the more standard military upgrades. Blood oxygen enhancers, regenerative compounds, slight epigenetic changes to her DNA for stamina, eyesight, muscle mass, and more. My path had been a bit more radical. Most of my abdomen had been blown away by the enemy detonation, and, well, my enhancements were to save my life. She knew that the cycle I had to take the anti-rejection drugs was carved in stone.