fingers down the grenades and gear packs clipped to his webbing vest, mentally ticking them off one by one. Then, he blink-triggered the
diagnostic subroutine for his augmentations; the legs and the arm, the optics, the feed-forward system, reflex jack, all of it. A line of green dots
superimposed on his vision told him he was at full operational status.
He drew a breath. "All right, boys and girls. Get ready. Everyone, take your jabs now. I don't want any of you getting the shakes or coughing up
blood in the middle of this." He pulled a rod-shaped injector pen from a pocket and waggled it at them. A line of frowns and grim nods greeted
him, and his team mirrored his action as he dosed himself in the wrist of his one meat arm. The injector nipped at the flesh and he felt a brief,
cool rush through his veins; the drug load inside the pen was a cocktail of battlefield medicines—pan-spectral antigens supposedly strong
enough to counter any standard combat toxins, antimalaria meds, and a light measure of stims, all topped off with a dose of high-strength
neuropozyne. The nu-poz was a necessary evil for anyone with a body full of augmentations. Without it, normal human cellular function would
eventually coat any implant tech with scar tissue and corrupt the interface between meat and metal; Saxon had seen the results of it, the jitters
and the pain that could turn even the toughest cog-head into a palsied wreck.
He took a moment to have a sip of tepid water from a canteen on his belt and swilled it around his mouth. They'd been in the Australian theater
now for more than six weeks, and Saxon could not get used to the dusty taste the country put at the back of his throat. He glanced at Sam
Duarte, the most recent addition to Strike Six, a former gangbanger from the barrios of South America. Covered in complex street thug
iconography, he looked less like a soldier and more like a stickup man—but Duarte had proven himself a lot better than just a street-corner
gunsel after the team had been caught in an ambush out at Coober Pedy.
It was Duarte who had explained about the dust; it was the trees. Up north, where the Free States forces were running wild, they were
torching whole swathes of countryside, sending plumes of acidic ash into the sky. What drifted down toward the southern regions was what Saxon couldn't wash out of his throat.
Belltower had been a part of the Australian conflict from the outset; at first they had just been corporate security, working for a petrochem
conglomerate from Victoria drilling test wells in
Aussie-held Antarctica. No one had expected them to find the biggest strike of the century under the ice shelf—and where there was oil, there
was power. Fossil fuel's grip on the world still hadn't slackened, even as the fourth decade of the second millennium fast approached.
The political tensions that were already in place across the nation ground against each other, and soon the north was siding with Chinese
interests after the same resources, while Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, and a handful of other territories hastily formed the South
Australian Federation off the back of their black-gold bonanza.
And now there was a line of red across the middle of the continent, with car bombs and IEDs, camps and threats, and a conflict that would burn
slow and long. While the north got on with ex-People's Republic hardware and "advisors" flown in from Beijing and Taiwan, the south had newly
deep pockets, and Belltower had been right there to pick up the payday. A third of the Australian conflict was being waged by private military
contractors, and the lion's share belonged to Saxon's employers.
Today they were going to earn their pay.
The mission's code name was Operation Rainbird; it was a multiple-level strike package comprising aerial bombardment of several northern
forward posts and drone attacks on staging areas down the line from Cunnamulla to Quilpie, setting a column of fire that would be seen all the
way to Fortress Brisbane. Strike Six had a special objective that fell into their more "direct action" remit, however—they were going to an
insurgent training camp near Mount Intrepid to raze it to the ground.
Saxon and his men took the mission because they wanted it. The insurgents trained at Intrepid had killed the man whose place Duarte had
filled, and they had tried to kill them all at Coober Pedy. For Strike Six, this had become personal.
Personal. The word echoed in Saxon's thoughts and he looked away. He'd been in this so long, letting Belltower take him from conflict to conflict
—Brazil, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Turkey, Iceland, and all the others—that the days blurred into one. The missions ... The mission and the
mission and the mission, one after another, eating up his life, keeping him in the place where he did what he was best at.
But then the paper came. Real paper, a real letter, not some e-doc in his data stack. Belltower's top echelons liked to do that kind of thing, he
remembered. They liked the old, traditional ways, all of them blue bloods out of Sandhurst or West Point, holding on to cap-badge rituals and
honors. Personal, embossed on the envelope in bright red ink.
In plain and simple words the paper told him his contract was about to end. Another month, and the blood that Ben Saxon had spilled for them
would evaporate. He would be free to take his pay and his shares and leave his guns behind, free to take a different path at the crossroads.
His gaze turned inward, and Saxon's lip curled in cold amusement. How could they ever expect him to do anything else but reenlist? It was a
joke that they would even ask him. What purpose would a man like him find in the civilian world? The truth was, half the augmentations in him
were classed as lethal weapons in more than a dozen countries. If he stepped out, what would happen to him? Would he be stripped down,
defanged? A predator hobbled so it could fit in with the outside world?
Saxon had never connected to anyone outside; his family was long gone. He had no life beyond the unit, no loyalty to anyone but the unit. The
paper made him angry. Offering him the choice was almost an insult.
"Jefe?" His attention snapped back to the moment; Duarte was speaking to him, and he'd tuned the young man out.
"What is it?" He covered his moment of reverie by checking his rifle once again.
Sam ran a hand over his shorn scalp, across the wine-dark lines of an intricate angel design, wings spread across his temples. "These northern
guys, they're tough, yeah?"
"Not so you'd notice."
The words had barely left his mouth when the deck of the veetol tilted sharply without warning, and a scattering of loose items tumbled away.
Saxon grunted as the bulkhead at his back pressed into him, and the straps holding him to the acceleration rack pulled tight, forcing air from his
lungs.
The countdown clock read one minute twenty-six; they were still a long way out from the drop point. Another second dropped away and the
cargo bay was filled with the dull bray of an alarm.
Amid the sound of it, every member of Strike Team Six heard the fear in the voice of the pilot as he broadcast over their mastoid comms.
"Drones!"
Saxon's gut flooded with ice. Flying low and fast kept the veetol well out of the detection envelope of any surface-to-air missiles, but drones
were a different story. Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, the northern forces had taken to layering them in sleeper pods along the line of
the border, where they would sit dormant until something that didn't match their preprogrammed library of friendly silhouettes passed
overhead.
But this sector had been swept for drones. Belltower's near-flawless intelligence corps
had given
Saxon the briefing. No drones. A clear run. Direct line of assault.
"What the hell?" Kano snarled, doubtless mirroring Saxon's train of thought.
He turned toward the African in time to see the first of the heavy rounds from the attack drone's cannon puncture the hull and the tall man's
chest. Blood misted the cabin's interior as more armor-piercing shells ripped fist-size holes in the fuselage and flight systems.
Acrid smoke filled Saxon's lungs as he felt gravity snare the veetol and pull it toward the ground.
CHAPTER TWO
Georgetown—Washington, D.C.—United States of America
Anna rose up from where she had fallen, her arm tight with pain in a line of new bruises, all along the points where she had collided with the
heavy planters. She felt woozy and her hearing was flattened and woolly from the concussion of the grenade blast. She could smell smoke and
dirt and the cloying scent of crushed flowers.
The agent made it up to her knees and blinked; her optics were blurred like a poorly tuned video image, the delicate subsystems of the
augmetic eyes cycling through a reset mode. Her vision hazed from black and white to color, and she saw her pistol lying among a drift of
broken window glass. Anna loped forward, and stooped to gather up her weapon, eyes darting around.
As her fingers tightened around the butt of the Mustang automatic, she felt a sharp jerk at her back that dragged her off balance. Kelso saw the
hood of the stalled town car coming up to meet her and she brought up her hand just in time to block the new impact. Slipping down over the
crumpled fender, cursing, she saw her assailant.
It was one of the figures from the car, dressed head to foot in black combat fatigues with a zip hood that closed like a mask over his face. The
man was easily twice her body mass, and protruding from the ends of his jacket sleeves were hands of dull machined metal. Her hearing was
coming back by degrees, and she heard his combat boots crunching on the glass as the attacker balled a knot of her expensive Emile jacket
between those steel fingers and hauled her off her feet. She struggled, but her arms felt like lead.
Blank eyes, shark-black and wet, measured her; this bastard was playing games, tossing her about like a rag doll—but now that was going to
end, now he was going to kill her. The other hand came up and clamped around her bare neck and squeezed like a vise. Anna tried to scream,
but the sound died in her throat, trapped there. A cascade of warning icons rained down across the inside of her eyes, fed from the implanted
biomonitor tracking her vitals. She heard her bloodstream thundering in her ears.
The Mustang was heavy and dead in her grip. It was a block of iron, dragging her down. It took all her effort to lift it, her exertion ending in
stifled gasps.
He saw the movement, and tried to deflect her, knock the gun away. Anna jerked the trigger by reflex and the pistol roared. The first discharge
missed, but the muzzle flash flared bright across the killer's eye line and he snarled; for a moment his grip slackened and Kelso pushed away,
turning. When she fired again, the round hit him at point-blank range through the base of his jaw. Her assailant dropped like a felled tree,
trailing a stream of blood from the back of his head.
Anna went down with him, landing hard for the third time. She pushed away and came up in a crouch, turning away from the mess she'd made
of him. A crawling, itchy gale of static was gnawing at the base of her skull—she'd lost the mastoid comm from the blast. Putting the dead man
out of her thoughts, she moved off, low and quick behind collapsed tables and fallen chairs, wincing with pain at each step.
There was thick smoke everywhere; all of Q Street was wreathed in it, the drifting haze of gray mist put out by the distraction grenades
churning with the dark black pall from the burning limo. The rebreather implant in her chest stiffened; she'd use it if she needed to. A strident
chorus of pealing car alarms was crying up and down the street, warning lights flashing. She glimpsed Connor lying at the curb, his torso a red
ruin of bullet impacts. The agent's eyes were lifeless, staring into nothing.
Anna kept moving. The crackle of automatic rounds sounded nearby, and she heard someone call out. The words were lost to her, but she knew
Matt Ryan's voice when she heard it. She could make out the vague shape of the SUV—he had to be there, with Skyler. The Secret Service's
first priority was always to their principal, and Ryan would be doing everything he could to get the woman out of danger.
A figure moved in the smoke, and she called to it, stifling a cough. "Matt?"
The gunshot that answered her struck Anna in the gut and she cried out. Burning, white-hot agony seared her belly and she recoiled, stumbling
against a low wall. Her legs turned to water and she slipped down, a blossom of stark crimson blooming across the white silk blouse beneath her
jacket. The round had gone straight through the Kevlar undershirt and buried itself in the meat of her. The agony was like nothing she had ever
felt before. Her hands tightened into fists; her pistol was gone, spinning away out of reach. She felt a tightness in her chest as her biomonitor's
active response system released protein threads into her bloodstream, racing to the source of the injury.
The SUV's engine rumbled, and the taillights glowed white as the gears shifted; they were going to get away, get Skyler to safety. Kelso felt
panic rising in her thoughts. She was going to be left behind.
The haze was thinning, and for one random moment, a breath of clear air passed before her. She saw Byrne and Ryan with Skyler between
them—the senator was slack, semiconscious—trying to maneuver the woman into the back of the SUV and keep a watch for the assailants at
the same time. Dansky was staggering after them, pressing a bloody kerchief to a nasty wound on his face.
Anna tried to get up, but the pain flared in her torso like another bullet hit, and it forced her back down. She was gasping for breath when she
saw the figure again.
Like the one she had killed, he was broad and thickset—a linebacker profile, black-clad and lethal. He lacked the obvious cyberlimbs of the dead
man, but he moved through the smoke without pause; he had to be tracking his targets with a thermographic implant. In the assailant's hand
was a large frame automatic, the length of it doubled by a cylindrical silencer.
Dansky caught sight of the armed man and cried out; the gun replied with a metallic cough and the executive went down. Anna's heart
hammered in her chest as she saw what would come next. She shouted Ryan's name, the pain rising with it, and he turned toward the sound,
pushing himself in front of Skyler to shield her from attack.
The next shots took Byrne in the throat and the face, ending him before he hit the asphalt. Ryan returned fire, his rounds going wide.
Anna's legs felt numb and unresponsive. She lurched forward, but the limbs were dead meat. The coppery stink of her own blood filled her
nostrils and she gagged. She wanted to look away. She wanted to, but she couldn't.
The assailant went in for the kill and Ryan threw himself at the figure. There was a scuffle, and the agent tore open the zip hood. Kelso got a