Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  Passerini nodded. “Now she just has to hang on until we get some support in position.”

  Graves just stared at the screen as it flicked to a different camera angle, this one following Nealon as she broke into a run, heading for her car. “I don’t think she’s going to hang around and wait, sir.” A subtle beep highlighted something changing, and Graves looked down at it. “Thirty minutes to impact.”

  “Gonna be tight,” Passerini said, watching. This was the tough part. What he would have given to be in one of those planes—not an F-35, but maybe F/A-18E, heading in hot over the Revelen border right now. Hopefully they’d make it in time to give her a hand, though by his watch … it was going to be awfully damned close.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

  Sienna

  I didn’t have time to take one of the surviving Russian T-72s and navigate it through the streets of Bredoccia. It was an old European city, one that predated the invention of the automobile by centuries, and that meant narrow roads, especially in the old town, where I was heading. Tightly packed buildings blew by at sixty miles an hour outside my latest car’s open window as the air rushed in, rifle sling cinched around my shoulders and my belt squarely back around my waist.

  I slewed around a corner and popped the e-brake, mimicking something I’d seen Angel do … when? Last week? When we were outrunning cartel thugs. Man, I lived an eventful life. My tires caught the cobblestone street, and I was off again, back up to sixty down a main thoroughfare, the castle rock rising ahead as the buildings in old town got shorter and shorter.

  “You know you’re going to hit resistance soon,” Cassidy’s voice piped from my belt, where I’d strapped in the old lady’s stolen phone after I retrieved it and my guns. It was not a question.

  “I assume so,” I said. “You mind giving me a heads up when I get close to real trouble?”

  “Heads up,” she said, about a second before the tank shell went whizzing over my hood and into the building to my right.

  It exploded the storefront; brick and glass showered the sidewalk and into the street, fragments pelting the side of my car and spider-webbing my front window. I brought the car into a slide and looked right.

  A T-72 was parked in an alley and had fired as soon as they’d seen me. Meta reflexes had forced the shot to go off a little prematurely, like they hadn’t practiced aiming and firing since gaining powers. I jerked the car into a one-eighty spin that ended with my driver side colliding with the building just past the alley mouth, my hood exposed by a couple feet.

  “Oh shit, oh shit!” I lunged over the center console and out the open window just as I heard the boom of another round being fired. Quick reloading.

  The front of the car exploded as I was leaping out the window, and the shock of the detonation sent me tumbling. I hit the ground rolling and the frame of the car flew into me, sending me to the ground as it bounced and went airborne, rolling over me. It missed crushing my body and head by about ten inches or less. It still stung like hell, slamming into me like that, at least bruising my ribs, if not breaking them outright.

  I had zero time to think about any of that and hurriedly pulled myself to my feet as the tank rolled free of the alleyway, turret swinging toward me. I had a couple seconds before it could fire again. At the top hatch, the cupola, manning the anti-personnel machine gun, the soldier swung it toward me with meta speed—

  My hand was already on my AK-74 pistol grip, and I whipped it up, catching the foregrip with my left, settling the sight picture on the soldier just as he brought it to bear on me.

  I fired first.

  He fired not at all, his brains exploding out the back of his head and painting the alley wall behind him.

  Like he was slipping beneath the waves on stormy seas, he disappeared back into the tank, falling into the top hatch as the big turret gun zeroed in on me. They’d missed with one shot, but if this one hit, it’d kill me a hell of a lot quicker than a machine gun.

  I leapt for it, rolling as the air broke with the thunder of the main turret firing. A building across the street exploded, and I cursed into the ringing in my ears, agonizingly loud. Tears stung my eyes, partly from the pain of the loudness and my injuries, partly from the sheer indignation at these bastards for killing civilians all willy-nilly with every shot they took.

  My patience for these senseless, evil, mercenary bastards? Zero.

  I scrambled across the ground between me and the T-72, swearing up a storm the whole way. It halted in its tracks, the turret swerving to try and track me while the main gun reloaded. I leapt the last ten feet as I swiped at my belt, grabbing one of the frag grenades there, yanking the pin out, and cooking it as I moved.

  It reached the four count as I crested the cupola, and I threw it into the open hatch, heard it thud on the body of their dead gunner, then ducked behind the lip of the hatch.

  Boom.

  The screams were fierce, and the surge of heat that bled out of there was hotter than any fire my grenade could have started. It was enough to convince me that I needed to get the hell out of there, so I did, leaping off the tank and hauling ass up the block.

  The T-72 exploded, their ammo cooking off and annihilating the facade of the buildings on either side of the alley. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened, just someone familiar with pain and meta powers. One of the mercs inside had been a Gavrikov, a new one, and when he’d been filled with fragments from my grenade, he’d done a perfectly normal Gavrikov thing and lit off, which had in turn ignited the tank’s magazine of ammo.

  Bing, bang, boom. Finally, some luck had gone my way.

  Except … now I didn’t have a car, and it was still a mile to the castle.

  “Shit,” I said, and looked at the road wending up the mountainside. Even at meta speed, a one-mile uphill run was going to take more time than I had. I shook my head, cursing again at the delay, and started looking around for another car to steal.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  Dave Kory

  TIME TO PLAY! Dave’s phone declared, and he looked around, subtly, to see if anyone was paying any attention to him.

  They weren’t. Everyone was riveted to the action on the screen, the tank vs. Sienna Nealon battle that had just occurred. “I want that livestream up, Caden,” Dave said, sparing a glance at him.

  “Five more minutes,” Caden said, moving his attention rapidly between the TV and his computer. “I’ve almost got the source—”

  “I don’t care how you do it, just do it,” Dave snapped. “Our traffic is dying.” Like Sienna Nealon should have the grace to do, he thought as he slid open his app.

  Funny. He would have said that out loud a half hour ago without fear.

  Now? He found himself holding it back. And he was the boss. He could say anything he damned well pleased, couldn’t he?

  Apparently not, he realized dimly as the app sprung to the chat screen. How had the world changed that fast?

  CHAPMAN: The video is starting to go viral.

  BILSON: The Eden Prairie video?

  CHAPMAN: The new one, yes. The more interpretative one. Kat Forrest seems to have shared it on social media. Gave it a signal boost.

  CHALKE: You said it would die if we left it alone. You swore it would sink beneath the waves of the internet if we didn’t pull it down.

  CHAPMAN: I can’t control everything. Yet.

  BILSON: Then what the hell is the point of you?

  Whoa. That was … strong.

  BILSON: Sorry. Just … salty. This is bad.

  CHAPMAN: It’s not that widespread yet. Just letting you know … it’s starting to break out.

  CHALKE: Can you kill it now?

  CHAPMAN: No.

  Dave drew a sharp breath. Wow. Stunning admission from the head of the largest social network on the planet.

  CHALKE: She’s still in the middle of a hell of a firefight. Maybe this problem will solve itself. If she dies a hero … she still dies. That would serve our
purposes just fine.

  BILSON: True.

  KORY: And it’d be a hell of a windfall for those of us in the business.

  Dave smiled, thinking about that. The clicks would be amazing. He looked up from the phone. “Caden, I want that livestream up.”

  “Working on it. Two more minutes.”

  Everybody else logged off, probably to watch what happened next. Dave turned his attention back to the screen, too, rapping a finger against the hard surface of his desk as his millennial office staff set the temperature for him, exemplifying this weird shift in energy in the room, staring in silence at the incredible feats that were going on just in front of them—and half a world away.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  Sienna

  I opened up the throttle on the sporty little yellow hatchback I’d jacked off the street, tearing up the mountain as quick as I could make it go. Gravity made it shudder as I hit a tight S curve, hoping a tank wasn’t waiting to open up on me the moment I rounded it.

  Nothing waited, thankfully, and I rolled around the curving switchback, preparing myself for the last turn. It would go hard left up ahead, and then I’d find myself faced with the wide tarmac that led to the big doors into the castle hangar. They definitely had tanks up there, but from Aleksy’s mind I knew they had deployed them down in the town, that the laager I had hit had contained at least half of them, and I’d run into another on the way here. I had to hope that his info was up to date, because my yellow hatchback could take a tank shell about as well as Reed could take an insult to his hair—not well.

  The engine got sluggish on the last of the slope, and I found myself wishing I had one of Hades’s sports cars for this particular suicide mission. At least if I caught a round and blew up, I’d be going out in style, not in a European shoe car.

  Ahead, the last curve waited, the rock’s edge approaching closer and closer to even with the rising plane of the road. They could have put a firing squad along that edge and just blasted me straight to hell on approach from the high ground, and the fact that they hadn’t gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, in spite of what Aleksey thought, they actually had deployed the majority of the castle’s defensive troops down into Bredoccia.

  Then I crested the ridge and turned onto the long tarmac leading up to the hangar, and all my beautiful dreams of rolling up and walking in were shot to shit.

  Along with my sporty car.

  It was a terrible sound, a host of 5.45x39mm bullets tearing into the front window, the side mirrors, the roof, the engine. It was like the scariest horde of mosquitos possible, the sound of gunshots distant enough to strip some of the menace from them, but the unmistakable impacts ripping the hell out of my vehicle as I stomped the gas and leaned over, driving blind and using my engine block as a shield against incoming fire. It would probably work.

  Probably.

  I looked up and out the side window to make sure I hadn’t accidentally taken a dramatic turn to the left and headed back for the edge, but no, the castle continued to loom as a fixed point out there, which meant I was thundering ahead at all cylinders. Hopefully across a clear tarmac, because otherwise—

  Boom.

  Whoops.

  The airbag deployed and caught me—mostly—before I could slam into the dash, but it whipped me around against the seats as though I were a pinball in a particularly aggressive set of bumpers. It hurt, and it realigned my spine in a not-so-therapeutic way as the hatchback did a flip and crashed down on its side, lurching as I came to rest with my left arm hanging out the driver’s side window against pavement.

  “Uhm … ow,” I said, feeling it over every square inch of my body, but especially the square inches that had hit seatbelt, airbag and now the ground. The car was sideways, the bottom pointed toward the open hangar, presumably, because the castle was visible plainly out the shattered windshield. Little pebbles of safety glass were in my hair and clothing, and my rifle lay slung across my chest. Fortunately.

  I did a quick inventory of pain and decided that if anything was broken, it was nothing crucial, though my left arm was bleeding profusely again from that cut Aleksy had given me. I clicked my seatbelt and it reluctantly let me go. I landed on that left arm, which let me know through a blaze of pain that it was not happy with me, no sir, and then I crawled through the pebbles of glass out the front windshield and crouched behind the hood, which had … oh so many bullet holes in it.

  An abandoned Humvee sat on its side a little behind me, not a soul in sight, engine smoking and no one moving within the cab. Bastards had just left it parked there, and I’d blindly run right into it, wrecking myself nicely. And the Humvee, too.

  The staccato sound of gunshots peppering the undercarriage of my car was alarming in its volume and … other volume. Because it was loud and there were a lot of them. The sound of bullets pinging into the vital parts of the car was worrisome, but less worrisome than if I’d landed with the roof facing them and been subjected to a firing gallery as I climbed out of my car. Pretty sure that would have been the end of my mission, actually. I was burning all my luck today. Maybe this was why I couldn’t catch a break in life? Because I wasted all my luck not dying in moments like this.

  I shook out the pain in my left arm, which felt numb at the fingertips. I needed to return some fire soon, because the gunshots were getting louder and closer, bullets spanging off the concrete and car, soldiers closing in on me. If I didn’t shoot back, they’d continue pressing forward, flanking around the sides of the car to pincer me, riddling me with bullets. It was an ironclad law of the battlefield—shoot back or you let them build momentum enough to steamroll you.

  Me? I wasn’t a fan of getting steamrolled, so I crept up to the front of the car, took a deep breath, and sliced the pie—braced my rifle barrel on the bumper, using the car as cover and inched out until I saw a couple soldiers and they saw me. They shot at me and hit the car.

  I shot at them, and they joined the legions of dead I’d already sent to hell today. Later, bitches.

  That slowed their roll. I could practically feel the hesitation in the temporary cessation of fire as the soldiers who’d been eagerly pressing ahead a moment earlier took stock of the fact that two of their number had just gotten wiped out.

  While they were reassessing their plan of attack, I sprinted the length of the car and squatted down at the hatchback. Another deep breath. Braced the barrel. Cut the pie and shot out of this side of the hatchback.

  Got another one. The incoming fire on that side ramped up for a second and then paused as they realized they were no longer unopposed. I waited a sec, readied myself, repeated. Got two more soldiers before they started unloading on me and I had to scramble to get the hell out of there. The back of the car was nowhere near as good a cover as the front, lacking an engine to shelter behind.

  “Congratulations,” Cassidy’s voice piped out of my belt. “You killed five. Out of hundreds.”

  “I’m not hearing any brilliant ideas out of you, genius,” I said, moving quickly back to the front bumper. The volume of fire had died down here, and they were probably expecting me to do the same damned thing again, peek around the bumper and fire. I’d have to, if I didn’t want to be overrun, but I’d need to be more careful about it. All it would take was a sniper with a .50 cal anticipating my position and they’d pump a round the size of my middle finger into me, which would really put a kink in my plans to storm the castle and save the day.

  I raised my weapon up above my head to maximum extension like I was military pressing it. It would be hella awkward to shoot like this, but I’d pretty much have to if I didn’t want to be pegged in the head. I sliced the pie again, careful not to expose my pretty face more than I had to …

  The moment I saw a soldier with my left eye, I lined it up and shot, pegging him three times in the body. I caught a little motion just past him as a few more soldier scattered hard left, and then I bolted for the trunk as a .50 cal round blasted through where my body would have
been had I been standing that last time.

  Whew. A .50 round would put a severe hurting on me.

  “They’re coming at you from the trunk,” Cassidy said, a little sing-songy, like she was having a great time watching this mess unfold. “Only like three hundred or so to go. At this rate, you’ll get them about the time that the ruins of Chicago start to reach safe radiation levels again.”

  “Not helping!” I shouted, blind-firing a quick volley that hit no one from the trunk, then rolling back as another .50 round blasted through the transaxle, making the entire car squeal in protest. It also hurt my ears, because it was loud.

  “Ms. Nealon?” came a voice over the speaker. Passerini, I thought, though it was tough to tell over the persistent ringing in my ears and that steady feeling of being underwater that was becoming the new normal for my head.

  “Yeah?” I asked, deciding how long I had before I needed to risk another defense to my left and right. This was just going to get more dangerous as I went.

  “Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands up,” came a voice from somewhere near the hangar.

  “I already tried that one once today,” I muttered as another .50 round ripped through the center of the car, about three feet shy of where I was crouching. “If you’ve got any ideas, SecDef, I would be open to hearing them.”

  “We have planes stacked up in your vicinity,” Passerini said, and I straightened a little. “They’re closing in now.”

  “Music to my ears,” I said, “because I could really use an angel on my shoulder.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s just one problem.”

  “Of course there’s a problem,” I muttered. “There’s always a problem. Because I use all my luck surviving and leave none for coasting on easy street.”

  “… What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “What’s the problem?” I went to the left and crouched, blind-firing around the bumper. Then I ejected the mag as—