“I’m going to take it from you, Kelly,” Tom said, his voice shaking. He had to concentrate to keep from thinking about his family. Where were they? In school? No, it was Sunday…they might be safe if they went to the grocery store or…but if they went to the park, they’d be out in the open…oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…“Listen, man, you don’t have to kill thousands of people to make your point,” he went on. “Once the world finds out what you’ve done here, they’ll all want to know about your beef with Kingman and TransGlobal. That’s the best way to get your message out. If you kill thousands of people here today, you’ll be nothing but a terrorist. No one will ever listen to you.”
“I don’t care about that, Tom—I only care about hurting Kingman. He’s the target. Now get out of here.”
“I’m reaching up to your hand, and I’m taking that detonator.” His hand touched Kelly’s. They looked into each other’s eyes. Tom must’ve seen something akin to surrender in the other’s eyes, and he thought it meant that he would give him the detonator.
“You’re a good guy,” Kelly said. “You didn’t run. Maybe you would have made a good trooper. But we’ll never know.” And Tom watched Kelly’s eyes go blank, and then close…
…just as his own thumb closed over the button to the detonator. Kelly did not struggle. Tom was able to take it out of Kelly’s hand, his finger firmly on the button, keeping it safe. He did it.
Just then, Kelly’s eyes snapped open. He grinned at Tom, winked, then yelled, “Open fire!”
“No!” Tom yelled, but it was too late. The two young security guards drawing down on Kelly opened fire, their M-16s on full automatic. Slugs ripped mercilessly into both men. Tom remembered through the pain and dizziness to keep his thumb on the button, keep his thumb on the button, keep his…
…and then as a slug entered his brain, and he died, the world disappeared in a blinding flash of white-hot light…
Multipurpose Range Complex, Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort
Polk, Louisiana
That same time
With a tremendous “CRAAACK!” as if from the world’s largest and meanest bullwhip, the lightweight thirty-millimeter projectile disappeared from view as soon as it was launched. The radar trackers on the instrument range followed its flight path flawlessly. “Good shot, J,” Dr. Ariadna Vega, a civilian research engineer assigned to Fort Polk, reported, checking the range telemetry data. Ariadna was in her early twenties, dark-haired, slender, and beautiful, and seemingly very much out of place on this muddy tract of land in central Louisiana. “Launch velocity…seventeen hundred meters per second. Awesome. Range two point three-five kilometers…two point four…two point four-seven kilometers at impact. Not bad.”
“I can do better than that, Ari,” her partner, Major Jason Richter, responded confidently. “Reset the sensors and throw me another ball.” The two were very much alike and could have been mistaken for brother and sister. Not much older than Vega, tall, lean, and dark-haired, Jason Richter too was an engineer, assigned as the special project office director of the U.S. Army Infantry Transformational BattleLab, a division of the Army Research Laboratory, tasked with developing new ways for infantry to fight on modern battlefields.
“You got it, J,” Ariadna said with a proud smile. She reactivated the radar scanners briefly to scan for any vehicles or unwanted observers in the area, then reset them to track another projectile. “Range is clear, sensors reset and ready.” She reached into a padded metal case beside her, withdrew an orange object, ran it under a bar code scanner to log its size, mass, and composition, and tossed it to Jason. “Keep your head down.”
“I got this nailed,” Jason said. He put the orange projectile on a golf tee, leveled his “Big Dog” composite driver—slightly modified for these experiments and definitely not PGA tour–certified—addressed the projectile, brought the head of the driver back, paused just for a moment on the back side, then swung. They heard another loud whip-crack sound, but this time with a much less solid, tinny tone. Just a few hundred meters away, an immense cloud of mud and standing water geysered into the air, and the projectile could be seen skipping across the ground, soon lost from sight.
“Told you, J,” Ari said, resetting the range telemetry sensors again. “You’re bringing your head up and topping the ball. Head down.”
“All right, all right,” Jason murmured dejectedly. “Toss me another one.”
“This is the last one,” Ari said, tossing him the last orange projectile from the case. “Make it good.”
Jason reached up and snatched the ball from mid-air—but it was not his fingers that grasped it. The fingers belonged to a three-meter-tall robotic figure. Its arms and legs were thin, covered in composite nonmetallic skin. Its shape was like a human, with arms, legs, a head, and torso; its bullet-shaped head was an armored sensor ball that swiveled and moved in all directions; its joints were fluid and massive, matching strength with dexterity. But for its size, the machine was incredibly agile—its movements precisely mimicked a human’s movements in amazing detail, even to subtle movements of its shoulders and hips as it precisely, casually placed the orange projectile on another golf tee and stepped back, ready to hit it downrange. The robot parted its feet and centered up on the ball—it was almost comical to watch, like some weird child’s caricature doing a completely human thing.
“No using fire control sensors now,” Ariadna reminded Jason. “You said you wanted this completely manual.”
“I’m not using fire control,” Jason said. The robot was fitted with a variety of sensors—millimeter-wave radar, imaging infrared, and laser—that fed a computer that could steer weapons with zero-zero precision, or the data could be uplinked to other aircraft or forces in the area via satellite. Jason smoothly brought the club back, paused, relaxed his “body,” and began his swing…
…just as a cellular phone rang. The robot’s head jerked up just as the club head made contact. The projectile veered sharply right, ricocheted off a steel revetment with a sound like a heavy-caliber gunshot, then blasted through a concrete range officer’s building a hundred meters away just in front of the vehicle assembly area. “Dang!” Jason shouted. “No fair! I want a mulligan!”
“The range officer’s going to be pissed—again,” Ari said as she reached for her cell phone. “Hop out and help me get packed up—that was the last projectile.”
The robot tossed the golf club toward Ari, then assumed a stance with one leg extended back, the other knee bent, leaning forward, and arms extended back along its torso. An access hatch on the robot’s back popped open, and Jason Richter climbed out from inside the machine. He was a little sweaty and his face was lined with ridges from where the oxygen mask and sensor helmet plates sealed on him, but he was still grinning from ear to ear like a schoolkid who had just hit a home run in a Little League game.
Ari opened the flip on her phone. “Vega here.”
“Put Major Richter on, Ari.” She recognized the agitated voice of the staff NCO, Army Master Sergeant Ted Gaines.
Ari held out the phone to Jason. “It’s the Top, and he sounds weird,” she said.
Jason barely finished saying hello when Gaines asked breathlessly, “Are you listening to the news, sir?”
“You just ruined my last test shot, Top. I was…”
“Turn on the radio, sir! Houston has been bombed!”
“Bombed? Bombed by whom?” Jason motioned to the Humvee parked a few meters behind them, and Ariadna flipped on the satellite radio receiver and turned it to SATCOM One, the all-satellite news broadcasting station…and in moments, they were both stunned into absolute speechlessness. “I…I can’t believe this,” he finally stammered. “Someone set off a nuke near Houston…?”