Here, here, here, and here – the targets. Communications systems. Surveillance cameras. Radar. Missile launchers. Guard posts. Mobile guards on rotation.
They went through it again and again. Then it was time to go.
They launched the small inflatable boat. Thirty yards out Nakamura subvocalized a command, and the sub sank silently behind them, swallowed back up into the sea. Status updates scrolled across his retinal display as the sub set off on the next stages of its mission.
Ahead of him Sam and Feng sat on either side of the small boat. They were all in top-of-the-line chameleonware, their battle systems linked by short-range IR laser. Nakamura’s goggles painted them as translucent green outlines. He stared at Sam’s ghostly shape, and something tugged at his chest.
I hope you can forgive me, Sam, Nakamura thought. Someday.
Sam scanned the horizon as they moved in.
Her goggles picked out cameras on the house at the top of the cliff, drew red circles around them, around the guard post at the top of the cliff, around a soldier moving on patrol.
Radar swept over them twice as they approached. The combat display in Sam’s goggles alerted her, identified the sources, offered firing vectors to neutralize them.
The house and cliff ahead of them were augmented in her vision, 3D topology subtly enhanced. If she chose she could zoom in, pass through those walls and into schematics compiled by satellite and drone data, zoom through the key locations for their plan. Her teammates were arrows at the periphery of her visual field, their proximity high and their statuses both showing green.
God, I’ve missed technology, Sam thought.
Feng interrupted her thoughts. Do you trust him? the Confucian Fist sent her.
Sam didn’t turn, didn’t look at Nakamura, didn’t show any sign that Feng was speaking to her.
Feng continued, He’s not going to take Kade back to the CIA?
Sam hesitated. Do I trust Kevin? Really?
Then she felt ashamed of herself, ashamed for not trusting the man who’d run into a burning building, who’d picked her up off of that floor, who’d jumped from a third-story window to save her, who’d raised her as much from that point on as her foster parents had.
Yes, she sent it back to Feng, firmly, clearly. I trust him.
They brought the inflatable boat ashore on the narrow strip of tumbled rocks at the base of the cliff, in a ripple of the rock that would hide them from the view of the guardhouse.
Sam shook her left shoulder out. It was stiff, but her posthuman genetics had healed most of the damage left by the bullet a week ago. She stretched, then took point on the climb, with Feng behind her and Nakamura in the rear.
The cliff was granite, vertical but run through with cracks and irregularities. Her combat goggles painted green contour lines on it, showed her every indentation and protuberance, animated a path forward for her, gently flashed location of every hand and foot hold that would keep her out of view of guards and cameras.
Sam put a hand on the cliff, and the gecko grips in the palm of her glove adhered her to it. Then she started to climb, strength and skill and technology eating up the three-hundred-foot ascent, chameleonware turning her into little more than a faint distortion against the rock.
Above, the children waited.
Feng climbed, his eyes on the rock. His body was sore, still aching from the wounds he’d taken, but better than it had been days ago. Posthuman genes, ample calories, and the medkit Nakamura had given him access to saw to that.
Feng focused his eyes and hands on the climb, but part of his mind still spun. Nakamura. Would the man truly allow Kade and Feng to go? Would he betray his CIA masters that way?
No, he thought. Nakamura had told Sam what she wanted to hear. He would double-cross them in the end, do his best to deliver Kade – and likely Feng – to the Americans.
Feng wasn’t about to let that happen.
He climbed on, his senses attuned to the man below him, his mind running through scenarios.
Nakamura paused at the top of the climb, still on the rock, just below the lip that would put them on the walkway atop the cliff. To his left the transparent outlines of Feng and Sam clung to the stone.
His retinal display tapped into the laser-delivered feed from the circling surveillance drones. They flapped their bird-like wings hundreds of yards away from the island and zoomed in their robotic eyes. Two men in the guardhouse a hundred feet north along the cliff. Another was passing by on his mobile patrol now.
Nakamura bounced instructions to the sub’s above-water antenna. Status rolled across his eyes. An aerial map of the region came alive in his senses. Out at sea, half-a-dozen green icons blinked in his vision, in a loose ring around the island, a thousand yards out from shore.
Positions, check.
Weapons, check.
Target locations, locked.
Nakamura turned his head slowly to his compatriots. Feng nodded. Sam nodded.
It was time.
Kevin Nakamura pulled a menu down with his eyes, clicked on an item, clicked again to confirm, and phase one of the assault began.
80
BRAVE GIRL
Saturday November 3rd
Ling cried for hours. She had never been so frightened in her life. Not even when her mommy’s body had died. Not even when they’d shut her off from her mommy and she’d been alone for the first time. She’d been sure it would end soon, that she’d have her mommy back and not be alone any more…
But now they were going to kill her mommy. Kill her dead, the way that humans died. She tried to reach out her mind for Feng again, for Kade again.
FENG! FENG, PLEASE! FENG, HELP ME!
Nothing.
KADE! KADE, I NEED YOU! KADE, PLEASE!
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Ling was alone. And only she could stop the humans from killing her mommy.
She cried curled up in a ball, the ampule and injector from the freezer clutched in her hands. She cried as softly as she could, so her father wouldn’t hear, so he wouldn’t know that she knew.
She watched her father in the house monitors. He was asleep, his breathing slow and regular. In just hours he would rise to murder her mother. Unless she did this. Did it now.
Ling Shu rose. She wiped her face with her dress, did her best to stop her sniffles. She was a posthuman. Maybe the only posthuman if her mother died. She had to be brave. She had to do the right thing.
The house opened the door to her mother’s room for her, and Ling crept out, slowly, quietly. Outside the floor to ceiling windows of the penthouse, Shanghai was alive with light, a city pretending that nothing had ever happened to it. The electronic face of Zhi Li stared at her, a thousand times larger than life, ruby lips smiling, green eyes winking. Ling hated her then. Hated her with a fury that she had to struggle to keep in check.
Ling took a deep breath, then a tiny step, then another, and another, illuminated only by the light of the city and Zhi Li’s porcelain glow, until she stood before her father’s door, the injector in her hand.
The door was locked, the apartment told her. He locked it every night when he retired to his room. But this apartment was hers, not his. Ling reached out with her thoughts, and the door unlocked itself for her with a quiet snick.
She held her breath then, waited, watched her father through the cameras in his room. He didn’t stir. He breathed deeply and slowly.
Ling reached out with her thoughts again. The door opened for her, and Ling stepped into her father’s room.