In The Wreckage
Hailey Turner
IN THE WRECKAGE
Copyright © 2017 by Hailey Turner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Kasmit Covers.
Edited by Jersey Devil Editing.
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Contents
BEFORE
Prologue
AFTER
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
NOW
Chapter 18
INDEX
Author’s Notes
Connect With Hailey
Other Works By Hailey Turner
BEFORE
2281
___________________
Prologue
Spiral Down Into the Devil’s Arms
The fire licking at his feet didn’t hurt nearly as much as the inferno burning through his body.
He blinked slowly, almost lazily, up at the once white ceiling of a high-security biolab, trying to find the gut-deep determination he knew he needed to survive this mess, but failed. He sucked in air and coughed out what felt like embers, the metallic tang of blood coating his scorched dry mouth. It tasted how the world smelled along contested borders nowadays, countries lost to the ravages of climate change, war, and bitter politics.
He breathed smoke, felt his entire body choke on it.
“Kilyusha!”
He closed his eyes against the strangely dancing flames and wished things were different. Wished they’d left him his rifle or his 9 mil and a couple of rounds to put himself out of his misery. But the weight of his weapons had long since been lifted away, and he could curl his fingers all he wanted, but his hands were empty of a trigger to pull.
In all his dreams and nightmares, he never thought he would die like this.
“Kilyusha!”
First time for everything.
AFTER
2284
___________________
1
Eye In the Sky
Ground level in the Chicago megacity was a humid, crowded mess on the best of days. When a mafia-backed terrorist group led by metahumans waged war against law-abiding citizens, Chicago became a shitshow of the worst kind not even the police could handle. Which meant the best counterattack came not from local authorities, but in the form of government-backed metahumans.
“Where the fuck is our cover fire?”
Jamie Callahan ducked back behind the questionable cover of the northern Michigan Avenue bridgehouse as a spray of automatic fire pitted the ground near him. He glanced over at his second-in-command and communications and infiltration specialist as Sergeant Ekaterina “Call me Katie” Ovechkina dropped down beside him, biolocked AKR-75 assault rifle gripped in her hands. He could barely make out Katie’s blue eyes through the shifting schematics on her helmet’s tactical goggles HUD, but the tight smile curving her mouth was annoyed.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Katie said by way of greeting.
“You’re telling me,” Jamie replied.
“How the fuck am I supposed to shoot at someone I can’t even see?” their temporary sniper snapped over Alpha Team’s encrypted comms channel.
“Tank gave you the target’s position,” Jamie replied coolly. He long ago got used to the embedded nanotech comms against the bones in his head amplifying everyone’s voices on the battlefield even if he had yet to get used to the idiots washing in and out of their overwatch position.
“Well the target ain’t there!”
Jamie glanced up at the building across the Chicago River from them, eyeing the general area their sniper should have made his nest. Jamie tilted his head at Katie and tapped at the side of his own helmet with two fingers. “Tell me Eagle has eyes on us.”
“You know what happened the last time I telepathically scanned for him? He screamed like a little girl and Bones almost took a .50 cal to the ass. You really want to risk that again?” Katie retorted.
“No LOS!” their sniper said, sounding more than a little frantic. “No LOS!”
As far as Jamie, a Recon Marine captain turned captain of the Metahuman Defense Force’s Alpha Team, was concerned, if a soldier on secondment couldn’t stomach working with metahumans, then they shouldn’t be on his team. After three years of training and field deployment under the MDF banner, Jamie thought the powers that be should have figured that out by now.
“He’s gone after this,” Katie said flatly, looking Jamie straight in the eye.
“The second we get back to base,” Jamie promised before shifting the position of his own biolocked AKR-75 against his shoulder. “Tank, you got eyes on the target?”
The deep voice of Alpha Team’s transport specialist came through the comms loud and clear from his position on the other side of the bridge. Donovan Williams sounded beyond thrilled to finally finish the damn fight. “Fucker hasn’t moved and neither has the bomb.”
“Looks like they armed it, but I can’t see a timer, and they dropped the remote detonator in the river when we dropped their aerial transport with an RPG,” Madison Chan reported. Their demolitions specialist sounded way too cheerful about that fact. “Permission to move in, Apollo?”
“Negative, Nova,” Jamie replied. “Wait for Bones to get in position.”
“What are you freaks waiting for down there?” their sniper snapped over the comms in an agitated voice.
Jamie narrowed his eyes, cold anger at the insult flung toward his team coursing through him. Katie leaned in close beside him and murmured, “Orders, sir?”
Fuck it, Jamie thought. He was done with catering to a xenophobic asshole. The brass could write him up for dumping the latest idiot they’d assigned his team in the middle of a fight for all he cared. Not like a black mark on his record would be detrimental career-wise with the MDF as it would in the Marines. Metahumans, especially military-trained metahumans, were difficult for the MDF to come by. They wouldn’t want to give him up over something like this.
He hoped.
“Apollo to Eagle, stand down. I say again, stand down. We’ll handle this problem without you,” Jamie announced to the team at large and their misbegotten add-on specifically. “Icarus? You’re taking overwatch.”
Any further insults their temporary sniper would’ve shouted over the comms were blocked by Katie’s smooth intervention. She cut him out of the team’s encrypted comms channel with a swipe of her finger against the rugged, curved control screen strapped around the underside of her left forearm.
“Copy that. Y’all couldn’t’ve cut him out earlier?” Annabelle Brown drawled.
The former Night Stalker pilot sounded only mildly irritated. Anyone else would’ve been spitting nails, as she liked to say. Annabelle rarely deviated from her calm-under-pressure attitude, but when she did, Jamie did his best to fi
x whatever it was that pissed her off. Jamie was always happiest when his team was happy.
“Yeah, like last month?” Donovan muttered.
“Cut the chatter and focus,” Jamie said. Katie moved up beside him, both their weapons primed and held at the ready. Katie used a quick series of hand signals to inform Jamie of her preferred position and he nodded silent agreement.
“I got eyes on the bridge. The bastards hunkered down at their makeshift perimeter ain’t movin’,” Annabelle said.
Jamie scanned the sky for a few seconds, finally locating the small, human-shaped speck that was Annabelle hovering next to a skyscraper somewhere near the ninetieth floor. He trusted Annabelle in the overwatch position over the idiot assigned to them, but giving her that task took her out of the main fight for the remainder of the mission.
“Wounded are secure. I got eyes and a shield on the bomb,” Trevor Sanchez said twenty seconds later.
As their resident medic and telekinetic, Jamie had tasked him with protecting the civilians against any stray Sons of Adam attack and getting them out of the line of fire before rejoining the main fight. Alpha Team had enough firepower, both in the form of weapons and metahuman enhancements, to hold off the enemy while Trevor handled the wounded. Care for civilians always got them top marks on the news streams, and Jamie knew enough about handling the media that good press was better than any press, especially when it came to the MDF.
They were going to need a lot of good press after today.
“Copy that, Bones. Tank, relay position of the target to Nova for a hard strike. On my mark.”
Jamie listened to the stream of chatter over the comms with one ear while he mentally ran through the revised plan on the fly. They had a limited window of time to pull this off without incurring any further casualties to the civilian population or damage to the surrounding buildings. The Sons of Adam had deployed only one metahuman for the fight, but when that one metahuman could turn invisible, it made everything all the more difficult.
Alpha Team excelled at overcoming difficulties.
“Execute! Execute!” Jamie snapped in between a lull of gunfire from the terrorists.
He dropped to his knees and went low while Katie went high, the both of them quickly edging around the bridgetower corner to aim at the barricade of smoking vehicles the terrorists were using as cover. More than a few had their heads sticking out now that the sniper fire had stopped; he and Katie eliminated them with an accuracy that came from long practice. His HUD display went red for a split second in warning when they left cover before switching back to normal parameters.
Through the haze of smoke still streaming through the air from the crashed helo in the Chicago River, Jamie could just see Madison flipping herself over the railing of the bridge to land a few meters away from the deadly do-it-yourself-looking bomb. She threw a punch at the empty air in front of her that wasn’t quite so empty. Donovan’s enhanced vision had accurately led her to their target and the blindingly bright flash of energy exploding from her hand knocked the metahuman back into existence for everyone else.
MDF teams wore top-of-the-line tactical body armor when in the field, the lightweight combat uniform underneath made out of military-grade spider silk and nanoengineered material for increased maneuverability. It provided a high degree of protection to the entire body and could be modified to work around a metahuman’s individual power.
The terrorist metahuman had been outfitted with bulky gear by the Sons of Adam, capable of holding up against the bullets fired their way by the Chicago Police Department earlier in the day. It wasn’t strong enough to survive a close-range energy blast with the equivalent force of a minefield tucked into one dainty fist.
Madison blew a literal hole in the metahuman’s torso, turning the body into so much meat that splattered over the bridge and the telekinetic shield surrounding the bomb.
Jamie and Katie advanced on Madison’s position, watching her six as Trevor temporarily disengaged his telekinetic shield in order to let her through. Smoldering cars were in their way, wedged between both sides of the bridge to form a barrier that hadn’t been enough to shield the terrorists. Jamie approached the nearest car and crouched down to grip the bottom edge between the wheels with gloved hands. He grunted as he stood, lifting the car easily as he did so. His enhanced strength made picking up a several-ton vehicle and flipping it out of the way look like child’s play.
Katie walked through the hole he’d made, still sighting down her assault rifle to clear the area as Donovan and Trevor came up from the other end of the bridge, clearing their area. Katie signaled the all clear, but no one lowered their weapons.
“Status, Nova?” Jamie said as he took position behind a car with its front embedded in the bridge’s railing.
“Give me thirty seconds. Timer’s running down,” she told him tersely.
“Apollo, your nine o’clock. Bogey comin’ in hot,” Annabelle warned.
Jamie turned his attention toward the latest threat flying in low between a tangle of aerial pedestrian walkways. A modified civilian helo, skinnier and lighter than the military ones he was used to, was heading straight for them. He couldn’t see any weapons attached to the body of the helo, then realized it didn’t matter. He knew this kind of crazy. Whether here in a megacity or in the scorched high heat wastelands scattered across continents, every terrorist wanted to die a martyr. That would never change.
“They’re going to crash it on the bridge,” Jamie told his team.
Donovan groaned loudly. “I fucking hate it when they go all kamikaze on us.”
“I’m so damn sick of them wrecking my city,” Katie said irritably.
She glared in the direction of the oncoming helo-turned-missile, gripping her weapon tight in both hands. Shooting them down wasn’t an option, not when any bullets that didn’t hit the helo risked flying into the surrounding skyscrapers. People were sheltering in place and couldn’t evacuate for fear of the bomb being a chemical one. No one in their right mind wanted to die by way of a Splice chemical bomb.
Madison pushed herself away from the bomb and flashed them a thumbs up. “All right, bomb is defused.”
Jamie nodded. “Bones, shield the bridge and the surrounding buildings. Icarus?”
“Read your mind about ten seconds ago and I ain’t even a telepath,” Annabelle replied.
A streak of black flew in under the helo, out of the way of the rotary blades and out of view of the pilot. Annabelle’s anti-gravity power enabled her to fly and her power brought her right up against the side of the helo, keeping pace with its rapid descent. The helo was door-less, which made it easy for her to put a bullet in the side of the pilot’s head.
Jamie watched as Annabelle pitched the body out of the helo and took over the controls. She’d signed up with the Army when she was eighteen, and the second she got her hands on a control yoke she never looked back. Annabelle could pilot anything, even a modified civilian helo with a shitty control board, judging by all the swearing in his ears over the comms.
“Bastards tried to lock the flight path. I can change course a few degrees but the computer ain’t gonna let me land it and I don’t got time to find a workaround,” Annabelle said.
“Aim for the river and bail. Let’s spare Bones the headache of shielding against a high-speed crash,” Jamie ordered.
Trevor chuckled dryly. “Gracias, hermano.”
Katie turned to look at him. “Sure that’s a good idea? The director isn’t going to be happy with us if we do any more damage to the city.”
“It’s my call. I’ll handle the fallout once the mission is completed,” Jamie replied.
Which was about ten seconds later after Annabelle aimed the helo at the murky water of the Chicago River between two of its ancient, ground-level bridges. She bailed before it crashed, flying straight up to escape as the helo’s rotary blades caused the body to flip and hopscotch across the water twice before it started to sink in pieces. One of the rotary blades
broke off and spun through the air before slamming into the telekinetic shield right above their heads. It lay on the invisible barrier, a jagged black line still smoking from the initial impact.
“Nice job, Icarus!” Madison shouted.
Jamie sighed wearily.
Today was Monday. He really fucking hated Mondays.
On the holoscreen, the helo broke apart in a rather spectacular way when it hit the Chicago River, debris flying through the air like miniature missiles amidst the small explosion. The footage, taken by someone’s tablet from inside a ground-level restaurant, had hit the news before Jamie even got a chance to rendezvous with the CPD after the fight. That had been ten hours ago. Returning to Washington, D.C., hadn’t made the situation any better.
“As you can see, you certainly made a mess of Chicago,” Metahuman Defense Force Director Amir Nazari said in a deceptively mild voice. He tapped at the opaque computer display embedded in the conference table and which spanned its entire length, closing the command window. The holographic image of the crash floating above the table winked out.
“The Sons of Bitches started it,” Donovan muttered under his breath. Nazari shot him a quelling look, to which Donovan promptly obeyed and shut up.
Nazari had held the top spot in the MDF for the past five years after being selected by the Department of Defense to oversee it. A three-star general still carrying an active commission with the United States Army, he’d taken up the challenge to deploy the MDF’s limited number of metahumans and other field agents to the best of his ability. He’d achieved major results with limited personnel by way of preemptive strikes over the years, a good quarter of those successes in the past two years borne out by the team of metahumans surrounding him. Nazari gave Alpha Team more latitude than most of the teams under his command, but even he drew the line somewhere. Wrecking an American city did no one any favors.
In the Wreckage: (M/M Sci-Fi Military Romance) (Metahuman Files Book 1) Page 1