“Chopper!” Kate shouted.
“Wade, don’t yell on comms,” Naomi Birnbaum snapped. “This your first day?”
Somewhere back in Germany, in the canister where her body was being fed through a tube, Kate figured her cheeks must be blushing. Unless they were under fire, there was no excuse for shouting through a commlink. The rest of the platoon could hear her fine. Not only that, their onboard data displays would show the same thing hers did—a helicopter en route from the Blue Zone base. But knowing it was on the way and actually hearing it approach were two different things.
“Enough of that shit,” Sergeant Morello said, moving to the center of the gathered bots. “Corcoran, Prosky, Lahiri, Eliopoulos, I want you in the chopper. Fly a search pattern, rooftops and alleys. Sing out if you see anything.”
“And till then?” Hawkins asked, glancing around at the others as if to include them in his question. “We’re just gonna sit here in the open and wait to get hit? ’Cause that’s what this is, right? The rags have figured out a way to take us out and they’re going for it. Hell, maybe they’re just gonna nuke the place.”
“No one’s nuking Damascus, Hawkins,” Lieutenant Trang said, his tone full of warning. “That kind of talk does nothing for us.”
Kate shifted slightly closer to Trang. Hawkins glared at the lieutenant with his inhuman eyes and Kate knew if their bodies came equipped with laser vision, Trang would have been melted to slag.
A wind kicked up that had nothing to do with the incoming chopper. Road dust swirled around them, little tornadoes of grit that scoured the Tin Men. Kate wondered if Hawkins would push his luck with the lieutenant, but apparently he recognized that he was outnumbered because he didn’t say another word. Mavrides had no such wisdom.
“This is bullshit, Lieutenant,” Mavrides said. “We oughta corral some of the civilians who are still here and make them talk.”
Trang stepped up to him. “And if they know nothing?”
Sergeant Morello used a metal finger to tap Mavrides’s robot skull several times, hard enough to echo through comms in all their heads.
“Don’t be a dumbass, kid,” Morello said. “You’re not really here. Nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not—” Mavrides began to protest.
“Shut up,” Hawkins snapped. He could have done it on a private channel, but he said it open comm for them all to hear.
Mavrides didn’t say another word. Hawkins and the kid were on edge, amped up. They knew they were in somebody’s kill zone and wanted to lash out, break bones, draw blood. Kate understood the urge; she felt it herself. But they were fools if they believed Trang had called them back to the AZ as some kind of retreat. The lieutenant was putting eyes in the air, not relying on satellite imagery. He’d regrouped the platoon in order to be ready to attack in force.
The noise of the chopper grew louder.
“Here we go,” Sergeant Morello said. “Corcoran—”
“We’re on it, Sarge,” Corcoran said, gesturing to the other three who would be boarding the chopper with him.
“And the rest of us, sir?” Birnbaum asked.
“The situation is being analyzed back at the Hump,” Lieutenant Trang said. “We await orders.”
A crackle of static came over Kate’s comm, a private channel being opened.
“Fantastic,” Danny Kelso’s voice muttered sarcastically in her ear.
Then the chopper came over the top of a row of buildings to the east and Kate looked up into the sun, her vision automatically adjusting to the scorching brightness. The rotors drowned out everything for a second as comms adapted to the noise differential.
“Where the hell are you?” Kate asked, glancing around to look for Danny as the chopper started to descend toward the street.
“A block away,” he replied. “We were just taking a closer look at a couple of closed-up shops.”
She found his voice in her ear comforting. Searching the square for him, head full of the whap of the chopper’s rotors, she caught a glimpse of something out of place. Just a couple of inches of white piping that could have been a lot of things but that her gut told her was not any of them.
This time, she did not shout.
“Gun,” she said.
Danny heard that single word in his head, spoken barely above a whisper—thanks to sound modulation, it slipped in amidst the roar of the chopper—and he began to run.
“What’re you doing?” Torres called after him.
“It’s happening now,” Danny said.
Torres raced along thirty feet behind him but Danny didn’t wait for her. He bounded into the square and took in the scene: Hartschorn climbing into the chopper after a couple of other bots, the bird already starting to rise. Trang and Morello in the middle of the square with maybe twenty-four other robots standing around, most of them with their weapons out. Mavrides leaned against a lamppost. Hawkins stood watching the chopper take off, maybe thinking he ought to have been on it. But Danny wasn’t scanning for Hawkins. He was looking for a bot with devil horns painted at its temples.
Travaglini moved aside, revealing Kate behind him. In Danny’s head he could hear Morello and Trang asking for clarification even as Travaglini drew his gun, shouting the same word that Kate had whispered. Side by side now, Kate and Travaglini raised their weapons with inhuman speed and took aim at a rooftop to the west.
The first of the sniper’s bullets struck Kate along her side and staggered her to the left. The second bullet hit the same spot and then Danny understood what they were dealing with—what kind of skill. This fucker knew the sweet spot. The seam had been reinforced half a dozen times but the weakness there was a design flaw; it wasn’t going to be cured by a patch.
The shooter couldn’t kill her, of course. She was a robot. She’d wake up in Germany with a headache. But still he shouted her name and broke into a sprint, shoving a couple new guys out of the way. Inhuman speed, yeah, but not fast enough to beat a bullet.
Travaglini did it for him, grabbed Kate and shielded her, turning his back to the shooter. Then a dozen weapons were trained on the sniper, returning fire, turning the edge of the roof into a shower of rubble but with no sign of the shooter. He was rabbiting.
Danny heard Lieutenant Trang in his head. “Corcoran, do you see him?” Calling out to the bots on the chopper.
“Not yet,” Corcoran replied.
They all heard it. The whole platoon listening but not waiting, scanning every damn rooftop, rushing over to investigate every strange outcropping, because where there was one there might well be another.
“Wait,” Corcoran said. “I think—”
None of them would ever hear what Private Corcoran said next.
The burst of static made Danny scream, but he had no ears to protect—the sound came from inside his head. He spun around as if to find its source and saw the air ripple like the surface of the lake in front of his grandfather’s cabin when the wind would kick up.
All the Tin Men were bent or crouched, trying to escape the screeching that could not be escaped.
Until it simply stopped, leaving only the thump of the chopper’s rotors.
Slowing.
Stopping.
Fucking falling.
Danny stood with the other bots and watched the chopper cleave the top story off a decrepit hotel before it struck the ground. He flinched, waiting for the gas tank to go, but the chopper just crumpled. Screams rose into the air, the pilot or one of the other flesh-and-blood members of the flight crew. With a shriek of tearing metal, the door that ought to have been on the starboard side of the helicopter but was now on top shot upward and landed a dozen feet away. Robot hands grasped its frame and Prosky and the others started to climb out like spiders who’d been tipped on their backs for a moment.
Damaged, for sure, but they could be fixed.
The rocket whistled as it passed overhead. It hit the chopper, which exploded with enough force to knock the nearest bots off their feet, blacken their frames. Danny staggered back and caught Torres with his free hand, stayed upright, and found that his weapon was in his hand. He spun, saw Kate was okay, then scouted for the son of a bitch who’d fired the rocket.
He spotted the guy standing on a market roof, out in the open with his launcher as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Turned out he only had one—firing off another rocket.
“Open channel,” Danny snapped. “Lieutenant, check your six.”
Trang stood beside Morello, the two of them talking fast. Hawkins and Mavrides were off in the southeast corner of the square, taking potshots at shadows. Two charred robots were picking themselves up off the ground near the burning wreckage of the helicopter, damaged but in motion. Travaglini and Kate were racing up to the building her shooter had used for a perch, giving chase.
Nobody seemed to have heard him.
“Bot Killers, goddamn it!” Danny screamed. “Open channel! Open fucking channel!”
The rocket hissed as it launched.
Danny saw Birnbaum pounding her skull with the palm of her hand like his grandfather had done to the old TV when Danny was very small.
Sergeant Morello must have heard the rocket screaming through the air. He turned and shoved Trang out of the way. Later, Danny would wonder if Morello regretted it at the last second, if he knew what he was sacrificing.
The rocket hit Morello dead-on. It should have damaged the robot shell, cracked it, blown off limbs at best. Instead, the explosion turned him to shrapnel. Goodbye, Sarge.
This wasn’t any ordinary rocket launcher. This was something new.
“No,” Danny said. Nobody heard him; nobody was close enough. “No, no, no, no!”
As he ran across the square toward the door Kate and Travaglini had just entered, he could hear the rest of the platoon shouting questions. Lieutenant Trang barked orders as he sprinted past, but Danny couldn’t hear them through the commlink.
Alexa Day had been fresh out of the shower, ruminating about the friends she wouldn’t see for months, when she’d heard the helicopter taking off. Wrapped in a purple towel, she had rushed to the window of the little bedroom her father had provided and craned her neck to look skyward. The window overlooked a courtyard in the center of the ambassador’s residence, complete with gravel pathways and benches half-shaded by sprawling date trees but zero view of the city.
Curious, she had dressed hurriedly in denim shorts, a burgundy Harvard University T-shirt, and black high-tops; run a brush through her hair; and then padded down the hall. She found a corner window that gave her a view of the grounds but also allowed her to see down into the street on the other side of the wall. Once, her father had explained, the ambassador’s residence had been the entirety of the embassy, but now it was only one corner of the city block, with a wall around it and a metal fence around that, topped with barbed wire. It had become more military base than embassy. In the courtyard, Marines hurried about on various errands. Several were surrounding a second helicopter and she wondered if it, too, would take flight.
No, she thought. Stay here, just in case we need you.
She furrowed her brow, studying the two guards on the wall just below the window. They were in motion, pacing quickly, scanning the horizon and peering down into the road. One of the Marines used the scope on his rifle to examine the windows of a structure across the street, with a sharpness to his movements that created a flutter in her chest.
Breathe, she told herself. They’re probably on high alert twenty-four hours a day.
She heard a creak behind her and turned to see Baz Nissim coming up the steps. Alexa thought she might have detected a hint of disapproval in his eyes when he caught sight of her bare legs, and a flash of anger went through her. She was prepared to dress modestly when out in public in Damascus, but this was her father’s house. Surely she ought to be able to do as she pleased inside these walls.
“Miss Day,” Baz said. “If you’ll join me in the dining room, a small meal has been prepared.”
Alexa thanked him and let him lead her down the stairs and through to the dining room. There were pears and figs and berries, dried meats, bread and cheese, and a bowl of red grapes that had her mouth watering. She made a beeline toward a pitcher of water on the left side of the table, beads of moisture sweating on the glass, but she paused when she saw the single place setting.
“Mr. Nissim?” she said, turning toward him. “My father said he would join me.”
He nodded only once, and his expression did not change. “He’ll be along.”
“Has something come up?” she asked, thinking of all of the times in her life when her father had been absent because something had come up. Then she pushed away her childhood resentment—here, of all places, she could forgive him his distractions if they meant keeping the people at the embassy safe.
“The telephone,” Baz replied. “Just a quick briefing from the base commander.”
Alexa nodded and began to pour herself a glass of water, eyeing the fat, ripe grapes. Her father was the ambassador to Syria; he must have to receive briefings all the time. She had waited this long to spend time with him—what was another few minutes?
Breaking off a small bunch of grapes, she slid into a chair and popped one into her mouth. She’d expected it to be sweet, but the grape had the sour flavor of rot and she turned from Baz to spit it into her hand. Great, she thought. He already disapproves of how I dress—now he’s going to think I’m a total pig.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she felt herself blush as she turned toward him. “Just my luck to pick the one bad grape in the—”
Shouts came from elsewhere in the house and she heard heavy footfalls pounding down the hall toward the dining room. The polite smile Baz had been wearing slipped and he glanced nervously around as a tall, dark-eyed Marine swept into the room with Arthur Day following right behind him.
“Dad, what’s going on?” Alexa asked.
Her father held out a hand to her. “Let’s go, honey. Right now.”
“Ambassador?” Baz said.
“Something’s happening,” he said. “The power just—”
A boom sounded, muffled by the building around them but still audible. Alexa froze, and in the silence that enveloped them all they could hear was the rattle of distant gunfire followed by another muffled boom. She turned to stare at her father, feeling suddenly very small and very young. Part of her wanted to shout at him—he had promised she would be safe—but another part wanted him to scoop her up in his arms the way he had when she was a little girl.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Alexa rushed to her father, took his outstretched hand, and began to run. A strange numbness enveloped her, like nothing she had ever felt before. It was as if she existed in a bubble and the rest of the world passed around her, unable to touch her. Like a fishbowl, she thought. She knew that fear had taken over, that a little bit of lunacy had crept into her brain, but she did not try to fight it. Lunacy felt safer than reality.
“Where are we going?” she heard herself asking.
Two Marines waited ahead, guarding an open door beyond which a darkened stairwell led downward. Several people—embassy workers, she thought—were moving through the door and down the steps. A Marine passed a flashlight to a heavyset woman in a pantsuit and she moved faster than Alexa would have expected. The bald man who had been Alexa’s bodyguard on the drive from the airport ran toward them from the area at the front of the house.
“Ambassador, it’s not just the power,” he said. “The phones are out. My radio’s not working. Robeson says the cars just died in the street, like the engines are fragged.”
“Shit,” one of the Marines said. “EMP. It’s got to be. Whatever’s happening, it’s big.”
Alexa did not like the way their faces all paled at this pronouncement.
“Dad?” she said, her voice far away.
“Just keep moving, honey. We’ll be all right.”
He went first through the door and started down the stairs, still clutching her hand as he guided her after him.
“Where are we going?” she asked, grabbing a handrail to keep from falling. Something thundered in her ears and she thought it must be more gunfire, more explosions, but then she recognized the rhythm of her own heartbeat.
Don’t die, she told herself. I don’t want to die.
“In a crisis, protocol requires the residence be sealed off from the rest of the embassy. There are only two passages from this building into the rest of the Marine installation, a side exit on the first floor and a basement tunnel. The first floor will have been sealed already—steel doors—but that’s okay. Don’t be afraid. The tunnel is part of the evacuation we’ve always planned in case of emergency.”
Suddenly she felt angry, and ashamed of her fear. “It’s got to be ISIL, right? Who else would go this far?”
Her heart kept pounding as they reached the bottom of the stairs, but she felt more able to breathe. A massive metal door hung open at the far end of the basement and a single Marine stood beside it, ushering and prodding them all into the tunnel beyond.
“It’s never as simple as one label,” her father said. “It could even just be some local jihadist group. The list of people who’d like the United States out of Syria is a mile long.”
Alexa glanced at him, frowning as they entered the tunnel. Voices echoed around them, coming from the employees hurrying ahead and the handful of people bringing up the rear. Somehow she regained her clarity.
“That’s not what this is, Dad.”
Her father gripped her hand more tightly. “Don’t worry, Alexa. I promise, this will all be over—”
“Dad, stop,” she said. Blinking, she reached up to swipe at an irritation in her eyes and realized she had been crying. The knowledge made her angrier, which helped. Anger didn’t eliminate her fear, but it helped compartmentalize her terror. “You can’t hide what this means from me, or protect me from it. I’m not twelve years old. My father is a foreign diplomat. I know enough to know that local jihadists don’t set off an electromagnetic pulse. They’ve burned out every circuit and engine in the city.”
In the shuffling darkness, she saw the ambassador blink. “Alexa—”
“Nothing will work until it’s replaced,” she went on. “Millions of dollars in damages, maybe billions. People don’t do that to their own city. It’s not jihad. It’s anarchy.”
Her father looked at her as if he were seeing her—the seventeen-year-old her—for the first time. “You always were wise beyond your years. But no matter how smart you are, I’m your father. I’m still going to try to protect you.”
“Fine,” she said, “but don’t keep me in the dark.”
The ambassador nodded.
They hurried along the corridor, following the footfalls ahead and the bobbing flashlight beams. People jostled one another. There were probably emergency lights run by a backup generator, but none of that would work now.
They reached a bottleneck, where people had clustered around to pass through the metal doorway at the end of the hall. Two Marines barked at them. One had an assault rifle pointing at the floor and the other waved a flashlight back and forth as if he was signaling a plane to land. They were grim young men with determined faces and eyes alight with purpose, and immediately she felt a little bit safer.
“You amaze me, you know,” her father said when they were on the other side of that door, the residence sealed off from the Marine-base portion of the embassy. They were all shuffling into a large dining hall that would apparently be their holding area for the moment.
Her father edged closer to her. His skin had flushed pink and his eyes darted around as if in search of someone who could give him answers. Alexa could see his anxiousness and confusion. He was the highest-ranking American government official on hand and had grown used to being the decision-maker, but all politics and diplomacy had evaporated with the EMP. Whatever happened now, the decisions would be military.
“I’m serious,” he said quietly, bending to speak into her ear so that no one else could hear him. “Why didn’t you panic? Everyone around you is panicking—me included—but you’re—”
“I’m scared out of my frickin’ mind,” she said, and the admission made her voice quaver, tears welling in her eyes.
“Scared, yes,” he said, nodding. “But you’ve got it under control.”
Industrial flashlights had been set at intervals throughout the windowless room and they cast eerie shadows. How they were still working mystified her, but it wasn’t like she was an expert on EMPs. Alexa glanced around at the embassy workers and the Marines who were gathered in the cafeteria, wondering what was going on upstairs. They were all terrified, but none of them knew just what it was they were supposed to fear.
“Kids I know,” she said, turning toward her father and keeping her voice low, “we grew up thinking the world could blow up anytime.”
Alexa wiped her eyes and then took her father’s hand again, holding on tightly. “I just never expected it to be so soon.”