CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE
Lydia Rose saw the pack of robot dogs and nearly had a heart attack. They were huge and fierce, and they had all kinds of guns. The dogs were running after Echo Team, fanning out to try and catch them inside a pincer attack.
It scared the living hell out of her.
It also made her furious. Before coming to work as Ledger’s secretary, Lydia Rose had served in Iraq and Syria. Maybe she wasn’t the right physical type to go into combat with Top and Bunny. Maybe she was too short to go toe-to-toe with Berserkers and armed killers and the other kinds of things the DMS faced, but goddammit she could pull a trigger. And those were her friends out there.
She swiveled her seat around and trained the Bushmasters on the dogs that were closest to her friends. The big chain gun fired armor-piercing rounds, and she had a quarter ton of belt-fed ammunition to play with. She also had some rockets and mortars, but she was afraid of using them yet. So she bent into the telescopic targeting sight, adjusted her grip on the joystick, and fired, fired, fired.
Top pushed Bunny and Cole down behind a tree as the autocannon on the Junkyard began chopping at the WarDogs. Three of the brutes went down on crippled legs, leaking oil like black blood. Another exploded as a round struck its magazine, and the blast blew the head off a fifth.
“I love that girl,” said Bunny. “I want to adopt her and name my kids after her.”
Cole tapped them and pointed. The WarDogs were turning to face this new threat, and the pack was moving off to circle the Junkyard. That left the path to the front door momentarily clear.
“Go!” barked Top, and they were up and running, moving fast, guns pointed sideways at the WarDogs, but the pack was charging the Junkyard and had momentarily forgotten about the easier human prey.
“They’re going to get her,” huffed Cole as they ran.
Bunny clamped his jaws shut on anything he might have said. There was nothing they could do to help Lydia Rose now.
By the time they reached the front door, Top had a small blaster plaster out of his pack. He ripped the plastic off the adhesive and slapped it into place.
“Fire in the hole,” he warned as they faded back and turned away to shield their eyes. The blast was a sharp whump, and the heavy oak doors blew inward. “On me!”
Top rushed the door, with Bunny and Cole flanking. There were two men inside, both of them bleeding and dazed. Cole shot one and Bunny killed the other.
“Thermals put the biggest heat signature in the back of the house,” said Top, looking down at the combat computer on his forearm. “Too big for people. Got to be the computers. We need to secure it without damaging it. If they’ve activated that damn nanite thing, we’re going to need to link this motherfucker with MindReader.”
It was an ugly truth. Once the pathogens — particularly the rabies — were released from their nanobot control, they would go wild and billions would die. The latest intel from Auntie was that Calpurnia, the AI system here, was what controlled the nanites. If they destroyed it, there would be no way to save all those people. Though using the computer to control the diseases wasn’t a guarantee that the people could be saved, even if Zephyr Bain and Nicodemus and their organization were stopped. It was the worst-case scenario, because no matter which direction they looked in there was no good choice. Only slightly better bad choices.
They ran along the hallway, moving like a team, even though this was only the second time Tracy Cole had fought beside them. She fit in so seamlessly that Top knew they had made the right choice. A good mind, a good heart, and superior skills. Brave, intuitive, and able to keep her emotions in check. A professional of the highest caliber. It was the kind of skill set that had defined the DMS in its formation. It’s what had made him and Bunny so good, and, remembering that now, even in the heat of combat, was a measure of how far they had gone in the wrong direction during Kill Switch and how far they had come back since then. It felt good to be himself again.
There were guards in the house, and maybe they, too, were highly trained. They were certainly well equipped with top-of-the-line body armor and weapons. It wasn’t enough. Top and Bunny didn’t vent anger or frustration on them because of last year. There was not a flicker of that. They moved with cool efficiency, not becoming emotionally invested in any specific moment of the running fight. Everything was a problem to be solved through training, mutual trust, and a clear understanding of the stakes involved. This was the DMS at its finest.
The guards in the house may have been a formidable threat, but today they were simply in the way. It was their bad luck to stand between Echo Team and their mission. Not one of them survived.
Top found the door near the back of the huge property that had to be the right one. A kind of airlock that was used on computer clean rooms. There were no authentication devices — no retina or hand scanners, no key-card slots. Instead, there was an electric camera sensor and a microphone grid.
Cole said, “How long’s it going to take to bypass that?”
“Not long,” said Top, and he slapped a blaster plaster above the door lock. They ran for cover. The explosion ripped the steel door from its frame, spun it like a penny, and dropped it into the middle of the floor. The three shooters covered the opening, stabbing red laser sights through the swirling smoke.
Nothing moved in there.
Behind them a voice said, “You should not have done that.”
They spun, swinging their guns, putting the red dots over the heart of a man who stood in the hallway through which they’d just come. He wore a silk bathrobe and a bad smile. In the smoky light his eyes seemed strange, the colors swirling in shades of brown and green and black.
“Hands on your head,” ordered Cole. “Do it now.”
There was a sound, like squelch, high and piercing. Bunny pivoted toward a bulky shape that loped toward him from a side hall. Another sound caused Top to turn back to the hole he’d blown in the wall as another of the WarDogs stepped out with a peculiar delicacy. Its eyes glowed a hellish red.
Outside, there was the boom of an explosion that was too big to be another of the robot dogs. Had the Junkyard blown up?
“Doesn’t matter what they do,” said Cole. “I’m going to put you down first.”
Which was when all the lights in the big house went out.
Tracy Cole fired her gun, but the muzzle flash revealed an empty space where Nicodemus had been. And then she felt hands on her. Hard, powerful, and so terribly cold. And then the pain was all that she knew.
It became her entire world.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX
I stopped running and spun, drawing my gun as I put my back against the trunk of a massive oak tree. The ground sloped down toward the shadows beneath the vast canopy of leaves and visibility was for shit. Maybe sixty feet. There were so many shrubs and bushes that it looked as if I was surrounded by monsters.
But they weren’t the monsters I was afraid of.
The real monsters were coming.
They’d learned caution. That was freaky in its way, but I knew it to be true. They were like animals. Feral but cunning, learning caution through the deaths of others of their kind. Darwin would be impressed. Horrified, too, but definitely impressed. Pretty sure the burst of squelch they sent when they died must have been as much about how they died as where.