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“No!” Michael yelled. “No!” He grabbed at one of the soldiers who tried to move past him toward the house and shoved him away. “Damn it, back the fuck off!” He glared at them all, waving all six hands. “We’re going back. You hear me? We’re done here. We’re done.”

The old woman moaned on the floor. He could see other people inside the house, watching and too afraid to come forward. “I’m sorry,” he told them. “I’m sorry . . .”

They didn’t understand. They only stared at him with hatred diluted by fear. At him.

The Abomination.

Just Cause: Part III

Carrie Vaughn

ARABIA

HOT, EXHAUSTED, SWEATING RIVERS inside her Kevlar vest—this, she had decided, was a Kevlar situation—Kate looked out the helicopter window at the desert sliding past below her. In a few minutes, they’d reach the pumping station in Kuwait, twenty miles from the coast of the Persian Gulf.

This was their second stop of the day. At the first, they’d spent six hours keeping a crowd of sullen locals at bay while technicians started the wells pumping.

Not a single person on either side had been happy to be there. This wasn’t like Ecuador, where the lives they saved stood right in front of them. Hard to see the lives they were saving here.

Her phone beeped—incoming text message.

One word: FUBAR. From Michael.

“What’s wrong?” Lohengrin said. Somehow, even in the heat and sand, with everyone around him boiling, he managed to maintain his cool, almost arrogant demeanor.

She showed him the screen. The German ace raised an eyebrow.

“From DB? He wanted to come here,” he said. “He shouldn’t complain now.”

This wasn’t complaining. Complaining was bitching about the heat and the food, pouring sand out of your shoe and yelling at your teammates for nothing at all. This was different.

It wouldn’t do any good to argue with Lohengrin. He’d just look down his nose at her with the sort of condescending pity people used on children with skinned knees.

The helicopter landed on a concrete pad outside the station in a whirlwind of grit. Like Simoon. Ana had called from New Orleans to tell her about the weird ace who showed up channeling the girl’s ghost. Kate was happy enough to not be there dealing with that particular mess. She shook the thought of the fallen ace away. She and Lohengrin piled outside first. Despite his confidence, he wasn’t taking any chances—he already wore his armor.

They were in a dusty valley, a bowl of sand ringed by rocky outcrops. Some grasses clung to the wasteland, tossing in a constant breeze. The station itself was an industrial complex covering acres. Dozens of wells were marked by steel trees thrusting up from the ground, attached to angled collections of pipes and valves. More pipes, a twisting maze of them, connected various stations of hunched machinery of arcane purpose. It was a sci-fi landscape from some depressing post-apocalyptic future. The air smelled thickly of oil, sulfur, and waste. Kate sneezed.

Sun glared off everything. Even with sunglasses, Kate’s face felt like it had frozen in a squint.

A control building and a collection of prefab barracks lay off to one side. But nobody was here. No workers had gathered to block the gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the site. No crowd milled around the barracks. She should have been relieved. The whole place was quiet, still.

Throwing a pebble, she blew the padlock and chain securing the gate. Still nothing. Maybe the place had been abandoned. She waved back at the helicopter, and the team of technicians, with their bright blue UN vests and helmets, ran to meet them.

“Keep your eyes open,” she said to Lohengrin.

“You think I would let down my guard?” He sounded offended.

You’re sleeping with Lilith, aren’t you? “Of course not,” she said.

They followed the team to the main building. Their attention was out, looking for trouble. The helicopter’s motor was still running, just in case. A trio of UN soldiers stood near it, also keeping watch.

“Curveball!” one of the techs called from the door. He was middle-aged, British, and had a weathered look to him. “It’s locked. Care to do the honors?”

She kept looking at the barracks, waiting for someone to lob a grenade from there. “Yeah. Sure.” She pulled a pebble from the pouch over her shoulder.

“I could cut the lock off,” Lohengrin said.

“Yeah, but people like it when things go boom.” She smiled. The techs chuckled. “Stand back, guys.”

She almost didn’t look at the door before making her pitch, but she lowered her arm at the same time Lohengrin said, “Wait a moment.”

They both approached, their attention drawn by a thin line of discoloration at the top of the frame. Like a bad paint job, or a place where someone had tried to patch a crack. It looked almost like caulking.

“Bill?” she said to the British tech. “What’s this look like to you?”

He joined them at the door and studied where she pointed. It only took a second for his expression to turn slack, his eyes growing wide.

“Bloody hell,” he murmured. “I think it’s plastique.”

“Set to detonate when the door opens? A booby trap?”

“Probably.”

They all backed away.

“What do we do?” Lohengrin said.

“We call it in,” Curveball said. “Go back to HQ. This isn’t worth blowing ourselves up over.”

The technicians trotted back toward the helicopter without argument. She and Lohengrin brought up the rear as they’d initially led the way—watchfully, looking over their shoulders.

They heard the machine-gun fire before they saw the gunman.

Instinctively, Kate dropped as squibs of sand burst around her. Then a weight fell on her. Lohengrin, in full armor, including bucket helmet with decorative wings, playing human shield. She couldn’t move to reach her pouch.

“Get up!” she hissed, elbowing him. He did, just enough for her to slip out, take shelter, and take stock.

The firing continued. Bullets pinged off Lohengrin’s ghost steel.

There was only one of them. A basic-model automatic rifle. It was coming from the corner of the control building. She was actually getting experienced enough with this to discern that much from a noisy burst of gunfire.

Golf ball in hand this time, she cocked back and threw over Lohengrin’s shoulder. Didn’t have to aim, because she steered the projectile, sent it rocketing around the corner. She hoped that would silence the weapon.

It impacted with all the power of her surprise at the turn of events. People shooting at her brought this out. This anger. It translated well, and that side of the prefab building went up in a crack of thunder, a burst of dust and debris.

But he’d already run. Lohengrin pointed, and she caught a glimpse of someone peering out around the corner of the other side of the building.

Still just one of them. No army bearing down.

A second explosion blew out the front of the building. Fire ringed the door—the booby trap. Her detonation rattled the door and set the bomb off. Shit.

Billowing flames swallowed the building. She ducked, Lohengrin hunched over her, and debris pummeled them. Pieces of siding, of corrugated roofing, furniture even. Sheltered by Lohengrin’s body, she felt the impacts against him.