“Wait, he missed one?” I asked, just about skidding into a parked Mercedes. Wished I’d stolen that instead of … whatever brand this was. Definitely not German. “Where’s it headed? Please say out to sea. Or somewhere terrible, like Matt Lauer’s sex dungeon.”
“Current vector has it tracking for the Midwest,” she said, kind of airily. “Probably it’ll split and hit Chicago, Minneapolis—oh. Hey. Do you think Hades did that—”
“On purpose?” I clenched the wheel, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yeah. Yeah. I think he did that on purpose.”
Lobbing a missile at my hometown?
You betcha he did that on purpose.
“You better not be bullshitting me, Cassidy,” I said, my brow hardening.
“Hey, I’m not the one launching nukes,” she said. “I’m trying to help you against the person who is.”
I slammed my fist into the steering wheel and a piece of it broke off. “All right. Fine. I’m ready to—”
“Hang on, who is this?” she asked.
I frowned. “It’s … Sienna.”
“Not you, dumbass,” she said. “I’m talking about the person who just dialed me—yeah, how the hell did you get this—oh, of course. Because you just mentally dialed every number until you landed on mine, right?” She sighed. “Fine. I’ll patch you through. Hang on.”
A buzzing screech in my ear almost sent me into a haberdasher whose window was covered in a thick layer of dust from the tower collapse. “Damn, Cassidy, what the hell are you—”
“Sienna,” an urgent—and incredibly familiar—voice broke into the line.
“Harry?” I asked, and almost ran off the road again. “How the hell did you—”
“No time,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got the Secretary of Defense sitting next to me.”
“What?” I asked.
“You have been a busy boy, Harrison,” Cassidy said.
“You can hang up any time, Cassidy,” he said.
“I’m not her secretary, Harry. I’ll keep listening if I want.”
“Ms. Nealon,” came a deep voice, sounding a little pained. “This is Bruno Passerini. Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking quickly. “Naval aviator turned admiral. Now Secretary of Defense. They called you … ‘Hammer.’ Because that was your callsign when you were a badass navy pilot. Something about dropping the hammer on people?”
“You've read my Wikipedia page,” Passerini said. “I’m touched.”
“Harry, what the hell are you doing with Hammer?” I asked.
“Trying to keep this little war you’re at the center of from turning into a nuclear holocaust,” Harry said. “Thanks for not making it easy.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can’t choose your family. You should know; look at your mom, after all.”
Passerini cleared his throat. “I’m not sorry to interrupt, and I’m not going to pretend I am. We have a very serious problem. A nuclear warhead in play. Roughly fifty-minute flight time to target, which looks to be—”
“Minneapolis,” I said. “Cassidy told me.”
Passerini was quiet for a second. “Your secretary told you this?”
“I’m not her secretary,” Cassidy said, irritation rising.
“How does one get a secretary fresh out of prison?”
“I’m not—”
“Anyway,” Passerini said, “We’re backed into a corner here. I’ve chosen to … trust … Harry.”
“With a nuke flying for the homeland, what have you really got to lose?” Cassidy asked, not exactly selling me on this. “Especially since you can’t hack it or otherwise use electronics to drive it off course, and your ABM countermeasures are for shit.”
“Your secretary is pretty knowledgeable about the problem—”
“The next person who calls me a secretary, I’m disconnecting.”
“Listen, Sienna,” Harry jumped in, “Scott just came ashore in Canta Morgana and wrecked Hades’s nuclear sub arsenal, so if you can disarm this last nuke … he’s helpless. It’s game over.”
I tried to puzzle through all the mental calculations on my journey to how the hell I was going to get that done. “How am I supposed to stop this? They have an override switch or something?”
“It’d be the control console from which they launched the nuke,” Cassidy said, oh-so-conveniently. “In the castle. It uses satellite uplink technology, and a real nasty encryption. It’s a black vault, off the internet. I can’t pierce it from this end, but if you can get me close with a phone, I can probably take care of it via local network access.”
“That’s fortunate,” Passerini said, “because there’s nothing we can do on this end. Not with that—Magneto, I think you call it?—keeping a wall up around their country. With him in play, I can’t promise you any assistance. We’re locked out.”
I sighed, turning to look right as I went through an intersection. I thought back to the info I’d co-opted from that soldier I’d killed … uh, more specifically, the one whose memory I’d drained before killing, since I’d killed quite a lot of them by now. “Okay, so basically you’re saying I have to storm the castle and get to the control room.” I mentally visualized that. “Hmm. That … is going to be a hell of an undertaking. I mean, I was going to do it anyway, but maybe a little slower, a little more carefully … but I guess it’s gatecrashing time.”
“Beg pardon?” Passerini asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Basically, I’m modifying my plan cuz I need to get that ‘Magneto’ as you call him, out of the way before I can do shit about the rest of the hired help up there. If I try and go in there guns-a-blazing, he can rip them out of my hand and shoot me right in the head with them. So …” I swallowed. “I gotta kill Aleksy first.”
That gave me a little twinge of sadness. I kinda liked Aleksy, but there were pretty good odds he was sitting up there in the control room right now in front of that radar console, using it to help maintain a no-fly zone over Revelen that was keeping out air support, keeping out my friends …
And that meant he’d been there when Hades had launched the nukes.
And he’d done nothing.
“Okay, I’m on it,” I said, decision made.
“Uh … do you need any additional guidance?” Passerini asked. He sounded tentative.
“Nah, I got this,” I said. “Already got a plan and everything.”
A long pause. “Any chance you’d like to share?” Passerini asked. “I have to brief the president and I’d like to give him something other than, ‘I talked to Sienna Nealon and she says she’s on it,’ you know?”
So I told him what I had in mind.
When I was done, he let out a low whistle. “Well … that certainly exemplifies the level of batshit crazy I’ve come to expect from you, Ms. Nealon. No offense. I’ve been known to do a little ‘batshit crazy’ myself, in my time.”
“None taken,” I said, “Hammer.”
“Before you go,” Passerini said, “is there anything we can do … for you?”
“Just keep watch,” I said, swallowing heavily, “because this shit right here …? This is maybe going to get me killed, if it goes wrong. And if it does …” I choked down a couple things I wanted to say, and more than a few things I felt. “… Harry?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said, quiet.
“Just … look away if you see it coming, okay?” I tried not to sugarcoat it, but I didn’t want to get all weepy, either. “Don’t watch.”
Harry didn’t respond for a minute, and when he did, his voice sounded thick. “Understood.”
“All right,” I said, braking into a turn. The last one I needed to make before I got to my destination. “Then watch this shit, boys. Sienna Nealon—out.” And I hung up the phone.
I always wanted to say that.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
Dave Kory
“SIENNA NEALON IS SAVING YOUR WORLD FROM DESTRUCTION,” the voice blared out of the TV, electronically altere
d, a little crackle/hiss in it as it flashed to the scene and showed the streets of Revelen, Nealon in her car racing along them, dodging a pedestrian here, avoiding an abandoned car there.
Dave chewed his thumbnail, watching. The thumbnail was a big bastard, usually took a few days of working on it with his teeth to get it to start breaking loose, but if this Sienna Nealon situation carried on much longer, he was probably going to break it off today, dammit, because—
“Wow,” Holly said, a little whisper that could be heard in the silence of the office. “She’s really doing it.”
“Come on,” Dave scoffed. “You cannot actually believe that voice on the television.”
“I don’t know,” Holly said, shifting around in her seat, probably remembering the reaction the last time she’d gone against the crowd. “She’s kicking the ass of this Revelen army, and … I mean, Dave, they literally just launched nukes at the US.” She pointed at the screen. “I mean, look.”
The screen had switched again, as it tended to do, to a tracking picture that showed a world map. One giant blob was heading over the Arctic Ocean to the east, with a little white-letter REED next to it, oh so helpfully telling everyone watching where Nealon’s brother was, while a single dot was still tracking forward.
The picture zoomed, showing the trajectory coming over the Arctic toward Canada, terminating in a split somewhere north of the border. From there, six different tracks proceeded to every major city in the Midwest, from Chicago to Minneapolis to Des Moines. Multiple warheads descended on Chicago and Minneapolis, while only one hit Iowa’s foremost city. Dave thought that annoying; he liked Chicago and didn’t care for Des Moines. Minneapolis he didn’t really have an opinion on.
“It sure looks like her brother’s saving us,” Holly said, “getting eleven of those missiles, because you just know one was aimed at New York, and …” She turned back to the screen. “Now she’s trying to stop the last one.”
“Why?” Alyssa Brewer asked.
Holly just stared at the screen. Her answer was a whisper, again, but the TV was silent and everyone heard it. “Because that’s what heroes do.”
“‘Heroes,’” Dave said, dripping scorn. “Listen to yourself. She’s a killer. A murderer. There’s your ‘hero,’ okay? There’s no such thing. Next you’ll be saying there are gods.” He shook his head.
“Isn’t … isn’t the guy running the country Hades?” Alyssa asked. “You know, like God of Death? From Percy Jackson?”
“I thought he was in that really stupid movie, Clash of the Titans?” Mhairi said
“I heard about him in the God of War games,” Caden said.
“Uh, yeah,” Mike said, “that’s because he’s from the religion of ancient Greece. All that other stuff is based on … well, him.”
“So … gods kinda do exist, then?” Holly asked. She glanced at Dave for just a second, a very brief challenge before pulling away.
Mike seemed to think about it for a second. “I guess. You could almost say they’re the superhero legends of the old days.”
“Whoa, what’s she doing?” Caden asked, drawing everyone’s attention back to the screen.
“Something completely insane, I expect,” Dave mumbled under his breath. Every eye was riveted to the screen. He looked at the click traffic. They didn’t have a live feed, so it was down—way down. And no one was writing anything anyway. He turned his attention back to the screen, though, unavoidably, because, like everyone else, he couldn’t take his eyes off this unfolding spectacle, either.
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
Sienna
“Hello, boys,” I said, driving my stolen car into three gawking soldiers who lacked the brainpower to save their own lives by dodging the hell out of the way. “You didn’t miss me.” They disappeared under the bumper, bodies slamming against the road and the undercarriage, bounced like sacks of flesh and bone and spit out the back of my car as I skidded to a stop just past them. “Or, rather, I didn’t miss you.”
I backed up and ran them over again, just to be safe. This wasn’t a moment to take chances. I made sure and planted a tire on each of them, and when I got out of the car, only one was moving, and barely, at that.
“Okay,” I said and looked around. The castle was visible to the north, up on its high hill, the fortress walls gleaming in the midday sun. It was less than a mile away, but I couldn’t quite tell the range from here.
This was going to require a little planning to get right.
I was standing in the middle of what was unhelpfully called a laager, a word used to describe a wagon fort in the days of old, back when wagons were the military mobility unit of choice. They'd updated the term since then, and this laager did not contain any actual wagons, and these were the only three soldiers on duty. The rest had presumably been called out to deal with the chaos I’d caused elsewhere in Bredoccia, which was fine by me.
Because the dumbasses had left their laager basically unguarded, and all their oh so valuable “equipment” behind.
“Clock’s ticking,” Cassidy piped up from my pocket.
“Right.” I tossed the phone into the open car. Then I unslung my rifle, took off my belt, and tossed both into the vehicle. I’d move it out of the way last. Scouring the ground around me, I saw nothing but churned-up grass where they’d moved through on mighty treads, ripping up everything and unearthing—
Pebbles. Rocks. Tons of little rocks.
“Perfect,” I muttered and stooped to get to work.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
Passerini
“What the hell is she doing?” Passerini asked as Sienna squatted down a few paces from her car, one of the dead soldiers still twitching in the foreground of the security camera shot.
“Preparing,” Graves said a little, well, gravely. He was back to manning the console because Passerini really couldn’t spare him. “Don’t worry. She’ll take care of it.”
“I hope so,” Passerini said, and the clutching, clawing feeling of being in way, way over his head settled in again. Revelen had effectively blocked their every attempt to strike back at this new threat, and that didn’t sit well with Passerini. In the War on Terror, he’d learned to manage expectations about finding his foes and delivering the kill shot, because the bastards were such effective hiders, but here, with this?
His enemy was sitting in plain sight, high up on a hill in that forsaken country, and he couldn’t even pump a Tomahawk missile through the bastard’s window because of that magnetic barrier surrounding the country.
“President calling, sir,” Graves said, and sure enough, five seconds later, the phone rang.
“Mr. President,” Passerini said.
“Where are we with this … plan of yours?” Gondry asked.
“She’s working on it, sir,” Passerini said. And that didn’t sit well with him, either. Because it required him to actually sit, not seize the initiative with the bombers and fighters and helos and support aircraft he had stacked up all around the invisible line surrounding the nation of Revelen.
Gondry was real quiet for a second. “And you’re sure there’s nothing else we can do?”
Passerini swallowed heavily. “They’ve destroyed everything we’ve sent across the border, sir. There’s no reason to assume that’s changed in the last ten minutes, but if she doesn’t manage something in the next fifteen minutes, we can try again.” And steadily draw down our aircraft numbers in the process, Passerini didn’t say, because it was obvious.
Besides, there’d be nearing nothing to lose at that point. NORAD’s missile tracking had the bearing of the ICBM closing in on the Midwest, and it continued to sail, unimpeded, across the skies.
“I hate that it’s come down to this,” Gondry said, and the man’s prickishness had all evaporated. Was that the start of humility? If so, it had been hard won, coming in well under the president’s guard. His academic lecturing, his intense smugness, it had all been washed away with the immediacy of a nuclear threat to the US homel
and.
Well, there was nothing like having your every assumption washed away in a miscalculation so great it might cost the lives of millions of your own fellow citizens. Passerini didn’t imagine Gondry would have an easy time explaining that one during the re-election campaign, especially if the truth about his seesaw behavior regarding the threat or his utter disregard of its seriousness in the buildup in favor of pursuing Sienna Nealon came out.
“I know exactly what you mean, sir,” Passerini said, as the video feed fuzzed out and a PLEASE STAND BY came up on the screen with a funny circular symbol reminiscent of old 50’s TV network symbology popped up. “What the hell is this, Graves?”
“Cassidy cut the feed so Hades and company wouldn’t see what she’s up to,” Graves said, and he was wearing a ghost of a smile. “Don’t worry. She’ll pick it up again in a minute, once events are already in motion.” Now he smiled wider. “And trust me … it’s going to be a hell of a show.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Sienna
“I’ve cut the feed.” Cassidy’s voice brayed as I slid into the seat. I jumped a little, startled. I wasn’t in my car, after all, and had left my phone and all my guns behind when I had pulled over about a block away, getting it well clear of the laager where I was about to go to work.
“Who are you feeding?” I asked, drawing on the stock of knowledge I’d ripped out of that Russian merc’s head earlier, flipping switches and moving around to get the machinery going. The satisfying rumble of a diesel engine starting up filled the air, and distantly I could smell the exhaust, a sharp, distinctive tang wafting in from the open hatch. “Did you open a buffet or something?”
“I’ve been livestreaming your adventures today,” Cassidy said. “To the whole world.”
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