A .50 round blew out of the engine about six inches from my head, a piece of shrapnel catching me across the cheek and throwing me to the ground, the rifle clanking as I landed on it, pinning it beneath me.
“Fire,” I gasped, the wind knocked out of me. “Get these bastards off me.”
“Can’t,” Passerini’s voice came over the open channel. “We’re tasking the F-22s to hit the Russian SAM sites at the south end of the city right now. The only other thing in range that would be of use is an AC-130, which is—”
“I know what an AC-130 is,” I said, trying to get up. I was bleeding from the face, warm liquid dripping down my cheek. My left arm was refusing steadfastly to bear much weight, and I couldn’t even get to my knees. I reached for the rifle grip and started to raise it. “I understand the risks. But I’m about to get overrun—”
A foot lashed out and stomped the barrel of my gun flat against the tarmac, bending it and shattering the furniture as a combat boot landed atop it.
A squad of infantry phalanxed out around me from either side of my ruined hatchback, guns at the rise around me. Twenty of them pointed right at my head.
“Professional courtesy—last words?” the squad leader asked, never taking his eye off my face in the sight picture. He was staring straight down the barrel at me, and the moment I got out of line, he’d paste my brains all over the tarmac. He said it clear, loud, and his finger was right on the trigger.
I swallowed.
I took a breath.
I looked down the yawning barrel of the AK-74U, and knew I had one chance—and a very thin one, at that—for survival.
“Hammer,” I said, no louder than a whisper, “Danger close.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX
Passerini
Graves was white as a sheet, apparently seeing the writing plainly on the walls.
“Did she just say …?” General Kelly asked from across the room. It was so quiet in the ops center, you could have heard a cockroach fart.
“She did,” Passerini said, setting his jaw. “She knows what she’s asking for.” He took a deep, long breath. “SPIRIT … fire for effect.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
Dave Kory
“What … what does that mean?” Holly asked, the hush fallen over the bullpen. “‘Hammer … Danger Close’?”
Mike Darnell answered, of course. “It’s military slang. ‘Hammer’ is the callsign of the current Secretary of Defense, Passerini. And ‘Danger Close’ means she’s calling in fire on her own position and she knows—damned well—it will probably kill her.”
Some good news in all this after all, Dave thought. But didn’t say it. Again. He frowned. This was getting bad, wasn’t it? He could feel the atmospheric change in the room.
But it’d be over soon, wouldn’t it?
“Livestream is up!” Caden said.
“Shoot it out to everyone on our mailing list, and post it on all our social media feeds!” Dave said, spinning around in his chair. “Get it to everyone! Let ’em know …” and here he did smile, because he couldn’t help himself, “that if people want to see Sienna Nealon die live … we’ve got it right here on flashforce.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
Lethe
“Look at this …” Hades said, staring at the live feed from outside the hangar. “All along, someone has been watching her through our cameras. Hard to believe they could get away with that from our very own systems.” He turned a pointed gaze toward the corner, where ArcheGrey was seemingly joined to a computer by one hand, her head down.
“She’s been fighting with someone all day,” Yvonne said, positioned a step behind Arche. As Lethe watched, Yvonne shot her a sideways look as she answered Hades. Interesting. “But you’ve been busy, and she’s been trying to handle it. Someone has a botnet that’s operating worldwide, sending out a massive amount of—”
“He doesn’t have a clue what you’re saying,” Lethe said.
“I understand the basics,” Hades said, looking at the screen, and the soldiers swarming around the overturned car. “This little drama, filmed live on location in our country, has been going out worldwide.” He settled his fierce gaze on Arche, who took no notice of it. “Not exactly a boon to our burgeoning tourism industry.”
“What do you think killing Sienna Nealon is going to do for your tourism industry?” Yvonne asked, staring at the screen.
Hades turned his head slightly away, as if to answer her. “Nothing good, but … I wouldn’t bank on it yet, because … as, it seems, is the standard, these idiots have decided to give her a moment to fight back.”
“What do you think she’s going to do against fifty guns?” Yvonne asked as the screen view flipped to a long shot from a camera mounted on the side of the castle. It showed Sienna with her gun trapped under a soldier’s boot, getting swarmed. “I mean, she’s good, don’t get me wrong, but … I don’t see how she dodges out of this one—”
A loud, thundering boom echoed in through the hole in the wall, rocking the castle as something impacted, heavily, explosively, just outside.
“I imagine that is how,” Hades said dryly, as the castle shook again. He looked over his shoulder and his eyes met Lethe’s. This time … she did smile.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE
Sienna
Asking for an AC-130 to rain down fire at the guys surrounding you is basically asking to get shot by rounds big enough to punch holes in tanks, so you better believe that when the first rounds started landing, I did my level best to pretend I was much smaller and much thinner than I actually was by dropping to my knees and huddling into a ball, hoping that I wouldn’t be completely blasted into chum.
The tarmac was exploding all around me, fragments of concrete and asphalt peppering my sides as I put my hands over the back of my head and dealt with world-endingly horrific noise raining down around me for the … sixth? Tenth? Eight-hundredth time today?
My head rang with vicious and unstoppable thunder as the AC-130 gunship rained down all hell upon the men ringing me. Someone screamed and it might have been me; warm and wet liquid splattered across my back, something hard thumped on my shoulder blade and rolled off as though a baseball covered in saline had bounced off me.
About a thousand angry stings peppered my forearms, my biceps, my shoulders, back and thighs, as though a really pissed-off swarm of mutant bees was determined to find all the available skin they could and stab the hell out of me.
On the pain scale, it was somewhere below getting a building dropped around you and just above being shot.
In moments that felt like hours, the shower of pain eventually came to a stop, and I was left with the dull sting of all those countless injuries.
I lifted my head up. Dust and smoke floated in the air around me, and when I cracked an eyelid … the scene wasn’t pretty.
Men were moaning around me, some dead, some very much not, but with some significant pieces missing from them. The AC-130 had fired all around us, with big guns and little guns, and the five feet directly encircling my position looked a little messed up, concrete shrapnel covering it thoroughly, but …
The area past that?
There wasn’t a five-foot square of space anywhere within a hundred yards that didn’t look like it had had a jackhammer applied to the surface of the tarmac.
I turned, and the hatchback was a good fifty yards closer to the hangar door than I’d left it. And also in three pieces.
“Hang on,” a distant, tinny voice said, and a missile shot down from above. It felt like it missed my head by a few feet, but it was probably closer to a hundred. It came to an end just inside the hangar, and I ducked as an explosion lit the place up, one of the big, movie explosions with orange and yellow fire shooting out of it.
The volume of fire that had been coming my way out of the hangar started to pick up a little as I snatched up the nearest rifle—not mine, but that of the lead guy who’d asked me for my last words. He wouldn’t
be needing it, judging by the hole in his head that was currently filled by a piece of concrete debris. I sprinted for the cover of the burning, shattered hatchback, firing as I went, putting shots into the darkness of the hangar and not worrying much about hitting anything.
I slid in behind a section of the hatchback’s transaxle and took a breath. Still couldn’t hear very much. If I hadn’t had super healing, I would have started to fear for it ever coming back. As it was, it’d probably be a day or two before the ringing would stop. It was so damned intense, I had to close my eyes for a second to let the adrenaline kick back in to blot it out.
“Ten minutes,” Cassidy’s voice made it through the fog and ringing in my ears, cutting the bullshit and restoring a certain amount of clarity. “If you’re going to do something, you might want to get a move on.”
“How many guys in the hangar?” I asked. “Do you have control of the cameras in there?”
“No, Arche is fighting me on that one,” Cassidy said, “but judging from the external views I’ve got, it’s still at least a hundred, and they’re dug in, under cover.”
I took a breath, then another. “I’m going to have to run for it,” I decided. “That’s the only way.”
“Hold on just a second,” Passerini’s voice came through.
“Hammer, I appreciate your efforts to clear the way, but if you lob any more bombs in there, you might bring the place down,” I said, sneaking another look at the hangar. They definitely had fire superiority in there.
“Understood,” Passerini said. “Stand by.” And then, in the background, a sign of my returning hearing, maybe, I heard him say, “Deliver the asset.”
“Deliver my ass from evil, I think you mean.” This was under my breath. I thought.
“Yeah, well, he’ll do that, too,” Passerini said as explosions in the distance heralded the probable end of Hades’s SAM sites. Something else sounded, loud, clear—
The chop of rotors as a Black Hawk appeared from behind the top battlements of the castle, doors wide. A silhouette was hanging in the open bay door, and dropped, falling the three hundred or so feet, a distortion of light and energy forming around it—
The figure hit the tarmac and spun at the last, directing an energy burst like a wave into the hangar that expanded out like a blue forcefield, destroying a dozen crates and flipping more than a few of Hades’s surviving car collection.
He stood there for only a second after that before I kicked my piece of the hatchback forward and it slid up next to him. He dove for the cover it provided, and I charged and baseball-skidded in next to him. His skin was an ebony tone, and this time, when he saw me—unlike the last exchanges we had—he grinned like we were old pals. “Ms. Nealon.”
“Well if it isn’t my old bud, the Terminator,” I said, firing blind over the top of my cover. “Welcome to Revelen. I could use an unstoppable force on my side right about now.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TEN
Passerini
“Who is that?” President Gondry asked over the open line. “That soldier you just sent in?”
Passerini leaned in, letting a small smile escape. “That’s Warren Quincy, the military’s only metahuman asset at present. You might recall that Ms. Chalke borrowed him from us with your permission back in January to deal with Ms. Nealon, and he proceeded to chase her halfway around the country while she was tangling with that clown that ripped up the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Minneapolis.”
“Hm,” Gondry said. “Good to have our people on the scene.”
Now, Passerini smiled a little wider. “And he’s just the first.” To General Marks, he turned, and got a nod. “Here they come,” he told the president, and sure enough, on the screen—
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
Sienna
Navy SEALs were parachuting in at the edges of the hangar, into defilade, or cover, and snugging their chutes back behind them as they got into position to return fire on Hades’s remaining troops.
“That’s a pretty heavily guarded door,” the Terminator said in that husky voice of his. “You sure you want to go in that way?”
I blinked. “No. You got any better ideas?”
Warren Quincy, USMC (Ret), gave me that wide smile again. “Maybe one.” And he looked across the surface of the castle toward the hole I’d opened up in the wall with the tank shell. It felt like hours, but it had really been less than thirty minutes ago.
Oh. Yeah.
“Hey, Hammer?” I asked. “You got anything on hand that can put a new door in my great-grandpa’s castle?”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE
Dave Kory
“This is like watching the most intense finale of The Bachelor ever,” Constance Shriver said, “except like, a whole city is going to not get a rose.” She paused. “By which I mean they’re going to die.”
“More than one city,” Mike said, resting his chin on his fingers and stroking a day’s stubble idly. The view switched from the cameras pointed on the runway to a shot of the missile trajectory, now over Canada, streaking its way down over the Hudson Bay. “That’s the whole Midwest that’s going to get it if she doesn’t stop this.”
The screen stayed split; the long-shot camera on the left with Sienna Nealon and her new military friend, as Dave thought of him scornfully, and on the right was the satellite view.
Losing Chicago would be a shame. Losing those other cities? Meh. Dave never visited there, didn’t care to. Oh, he’d act like it was a tragedy. There were probably some decent people there.
But mostly, this was going to be a chance to write a shit-ton of clickbait about HOW SHE FAILED and WHY DID WE TRUST HER? The headlines practically wrote themselves, and he tapped a few of the best into an open Word file as he thought of them. A countdown timer was ticking in the bottom right-hand corner of the map screen as the missile came closer and closer to its target …
Something blew up in the camera frame on the live-action side, a blast detonating against the castle wall just across the tarmac where Sienna Nealon was huddling behind a segment of burnt-out car for cover.
“Whoa,” Holly said. “You see that? It’s gotta be a ten, twenty-foot jump—”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
Sienna
“Dammit, Passerini,” I said, once the smoke had sort of cleared and I could see the hole he’d made in the side of Hades’s castle. It was way, way off to the side, over the edge of the rock and a good thirty feet from the last ledge of tarmac. Crawling out there on that was not going to be an option. “You couldn’t have put it any closer?” I traced my eyes to the edge of the hangar where the SEALs were setting up with heavy weapons, probably fifty feet from the impact site. “I suppose you couldn’t.”
“I thought you metas could jump,” Passerini said. Was he taunting me?
“I’ll show you how it’s done,” Quincy said, and he started to move, smoky effect drifting off his body as he broke into a run, blurring as he sped across the tarmac toward the cliff’s edge.
I followed after, breaking cover into a sprint. “You had a secondary power you never used on me last time,” I called after him, huffing as I ran, my rifle banging uselessly against my ass with every step.
“I was trying to bring you in alive,” he said and flashed a look at that crater of destruction he’d made when he landed, and the churned-up trail of concrete he’d shot out into the hangar. “That wouldn’t have done it. I did come close, though, the last time. In the data center.”
“Huh,” I said, smiling. Harry had known, of course. He’d told me that Quincy was holding another power in reserve, and here it was.
The thunder of gunfire increased, waves of vibrato from all the shooting seeming to quake my very bones. A spray of bullets, lit by tracers, walked across the tarmac in front of us and hit Quincy in the foot. He stumbled, staggered, less than ten feet from the edge of the jump.
“Holy hell,” I said as he hit and rolled, skidding to the edge and catching himself by his fi
ngertips.
“Go!” he shouted, catching the edge as the SEALs opened fire from their positions, suppressing the machine gun and cutting its steady blast off as it moved toward me. It disappeared about two feet before I crossed its stream, reaching the edge, bending as I stooped to jump—
I leapt like I’d never leapt before, flying through the air with my legs pistoning over empty space. The hole Passerini had made was small, less than five feet, but hey, so was I, if I could just stick my landing—
I slammed into the hole in the wall, the bottom catching me across the shins and causing me to shout in pain. I started to tumble, scratching with my hands to find a hold—
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN
Passerini
Everyone in the room gasped. No one dared breathe, watching her make the leap—easily fifty feet—Sienna Nealon hit the bottom of the door they’d knocked for her—
And started to fall.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake—” Gondry said over the line, presumably watching the same thing they were here.
She caught herself. On the edge.
A collective breath was drawn. Not deeply, not until she pulled herself into the hole, a little turtle-like, clenching her knees to her chest.
“That looked like it hurt,” Passerini said.
“Yeah,” Graves said. The young man was watching intently, but he was still watching. That meant everything was going to turn out all right, didn’t it? It was hard to tell, just looking at his face.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN
Sienna
“You just broke the five-minute barrier,” Cassidy said as I dragged myself up to my feet. I was in some store room or something, and bumped into the door, a little wobbly. “You might want to get a move on.”
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