Ehukai Beach, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
The SEALs and Conan eased deeper into the thick trees. The robot lobster sat idle at the feet of one of the frogmen until he picked it up and put it on his back; its claws wrapped around him like straps.
“Butter’s pretty creepy, right?” said Duncan.
“At this point, nothing’s creepy to me,” said Conan. “Any more gizmos we’ve added since I’ve been living under a rock?”
“Just this,” said Duncan, tossing a small nylon bag the size of his fist to Conan.
“What is it?” said Conan, unwrapping it to reveal a poncho.
“You remember Harry Potter? It’s his invisibility cloak,” said Duncan. “Well, it doesn’t really make us invisible, but it does fuzz the Directorate sensors. Metamaterials in it fuck with the EM spectrum, kinda like how a magician uses mirrors in a trick.”
“We’ve done all right with these,” said Conan, drawing her wool blanket around her shoulders. It was so stiff with sweat and dirt in places that she seemed to be donning a mantle of armor.
“But this doesn’t smell like a dead goat,” said Duncan. “We have others for the rest of your unit.”
“No need; I’m it now,” said Conan.
Duncan knew not to ask anything further. It was not the time for that kind of conversation. From the way Conan’s voice dropped with her response, he knew she would be trying to figure out her own war for the rest of her life.
A rustle in the scrub at the seam of the beach made Conan fling off her blanket, drop down, and put her weapon to her shoulder. Duncan dove down behind her. She saw a figure advancing slowly, staying in the shadows. The silhouette of an assault rifle showed it to be armed. Conan looked over to Duncan and motioned with her finger for him to follow her lead. He shook his head.
Screw it, this was her turf and her war. She leaped up and smashed the figure full in the face with the butt of her rifle.
“Co kurwa, do kurwy nedzy!” the man hissed from the ground, blood coming from his apparently broken nose.
A Russian. She knew they’d been aiding the Directorate with advisers. Conan leveled the rifle at him, pressed it to his forehead.
“I don’t know if you understand me,” she whispered, “but you need to shut the fuck up or this will be the last thing you see.”
Conan felt something cold and sharp at her neck. “Major, you need to stand down.” The man who’d called himself Duncan was holding a knife to her throat.
USS Zumwalt, North Pacific Ocean
Mike wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It was hot in the rail-gun turret. The cabling that snaked through it seemed to be choking the air out of the space. But that was not what was making him sweat.
“Please take it,” said Mike. He was embarrassed, never having heard himself plead like this before. “It’s a float vest.” This flotation vest was not like the others aboard. It was a dark green inflatable model, the kind issued to Navy aviators, not the bulky vest in bright orange that just made it easier for the sharks to find you. The aviator’s vest had more than a dozen pockets stuffed full of essentials, as much to put a pilot’s mind at ease as to enable him or her to make it in the wild or survive ditching in the ocean. The detachable pockets were hooked with Velcro straps onto horizontal lanyards stitched into the vest and they opened in various directions, each holding a mystery, like an aviator’s Advent calendar.
“Pilots wear them,” Mike said. “So do some of the SEALs. You’ve got these here pockets that —”
She did not let him finish. “Where did you get this? Nobody else is wearing this, are they?” said Vern. “It’s just me in this… straitjacket?”
“It comes from the captain, who knows you’re the most important person on the ship.”
At least part of that was true. He’d actually gotten it from a supply contractor at Mare Island whom he’d served with in the Venezuela campaign, no questions asked about why he wanted the best life vest in the warehouse, size small.
“It inflates automatically if you don’t pull this tab first. Now, here’s the smoke hood, this is the locator beacon, here’s the strobe…”
He had kept the float vest out of sight, waiting until he knew she really needed it and, more important, until she finally realized she might need it. That moment was now.
Vern put the vest on, moving carefully, as if it weighed ten times more than it did.
“Well, thank him for it,” she said. “And thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said with a wink. “It’s government issue, meaning it’s made by the lowest bidder in order to get some overpaid jet jockey to think the Navy actually gives a shit about what happens to him.”
She smiled. “I mean it. Thank you, Mike.”
She wrapped her slender arms around him with surprising force.
A call to general quarters battle stations prevented either of them from saying anything more. They stepped back and looked at each other at arm’s length, then took off in opposite directions, unsure if they would ever see each other again.
Tiangong-3 Space Station
Chang screamed into the monitor as he watched the battle play out, but none of them were able to hear him.
At first, seeing Huan floating above the limp commando with the crazy mask, Chang thought that Huan’s madness just might have worked.
But behind Huan, the monitor showed the three other taikonauts had not fared as well. One floated unconscious, knocked out by the commandos’ Tasers. The other two had their faces against one of the station walls, each with a commando floating astride him, their suits streaming red blood globules into the air.
Huan pushed the unconscious commando back toward the airlock, which opened as if to swallow him up. But instead, another commando slipped into the station. This one, much slighter than the others and wearing no mask, appeared shocked for a brief second, his eyes wide. Then he batted the floating commando’s limp body away and fumbled with something at his side. He pushed toward Huan with a diver’s kick of his legs against the airlock door, his entire body formed into a spear, the short sword at its tip.
Huan pushed forward off his side of the wall with his arms in an attempt to kick the commando with his feet first. The bulk of the exo-boots smashed into the blade, and the force sent the two men careening off in opposite directions. Huan bashed into the hard plastic of a food station, his exo-glove ripping open the rehydration unit, while the slight commando banged headfirst into the wall.
Before Huan could pull his arm out of the mess of the food unit, the commando with the blank white mask was on him. He jabbed the foot-long sword into Huan’s leg, straight through his suit and into the bulkhead’s insulation. Huan, his body now diagonally pinned to the wall, tried wrenching free, to no avail. Chang watched as the white-masked commando drew a six-inch-long metal stake from a bandolier on his assault vest and drove it into Huan’s chest, puncturing his lung.
Chang could see Huan looking up at him in the monitor, his face imploring, as if Chang could do anything to save him now. Then Huan’s head lolled to the side, lifeless.
The man in the white mask removed the sword and stake from Huan’s body and slapped tape over the holes in the suit to keep them from leaking more globules of blood into the station’s atmosphere. The rest of them began to tape up the other bodies. Sheng Hu, the taikonaut who had been shocked unconscious, jerked slightly when the white-masked commando thrust another metal stake into her.