The world felt hyperreal to Kate, everything in sharp focus. She could hear the skitter of pebbles disturbed by the Tin Men’s passing, the whir of hydraulics inside her. Fear was taking hold, but her greatest concern wasn’t for herself. She was worried about the platoon, worried that Lieutenant Trang was losing it. His bot’s eyes were still lit up, but while the others were checking alleys and windows, Trang kept his gaze straight ahead, as if nothing was left of him but the robot he inhabited.
They ran through Al Marjeh Square toward the looming headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. Businesses and hotels lined the road, nothing at all like the souqs and markets and little shops in the older parts of the city. People were at windows and on balconies. Some had begun to explore the streets, trying to find working cars. Most appeared to be locals, but she could hear voices calling to her platoon—shouting in German and Japanese and French and English. The bot’s onboard programs translated them all, but most of the cries were the same, regardless of language. What happened? Can you help us? Is anyone coming?
Whatever memo had gone out saying Get the fuck out of Damascus or at least keep your head down, the foreigners in the city hadn’t received it.
Locals began to shout at them as they ran past the El Tahjh Hotel and then projectiles started flying. Bottles and chunks of masonry landed in the street, but the Tin Men were too fast; not a single object struck its target.
“Sons of bitches,” Hawkins said, catching up to Kate on her right. “We oughta go back and let them take another shot. See if they’re—”
Mavrides stopped, spun, and shot up the ground in front of several civilians. One of them cried out, crumpling to the ground as a bullet struck the meat of his thigh.
“What the hell?” Danny yelled.
The whole platoon came to a halt, weapons raised as the rest of the civilians began to scream at them, more rocks flying. Several ran to hide behind a taxi they had been trying to start, one of the very few vehicles that had been out on the street this morning.
“That’s right!” Mavrides barked. “Have a taste—”
“Mavrides!” Kate snapped. “Don’t pull that trigger again!”
The kid turned toward her, the ace of spades painted on his forehead shining in the sun. “Not planning to. Just quelling some agitators.”
Kate stared at him. “No more firing unless you’re fired upon. That’s a direct order.”
Mavrides laughed, the sound hollow and metallic. Laughter never sounded natural coming from a robot’s mouth, even if it was supposed to be a perfect re-creation of the pilot’s voice.
“It’s the Stone Age, bitch,” Mavrides said. “Orders don’t mean much anymore.”
Kate stepped up and shot him in the head. The bullet ricocheted off toward the front of a department store, breaking a window, and she instantly regretted it. She’d kill civilians herself if she wasn’t careful. The people who’d been screaming at them and hurling bottles thought better of it and retreated to cover, except for two young men who shouted profanities from behind the dead taxi. The cries for help from the hotel had gone silent.
“Got your attention?” she asked. “You shoot another civilian and I’ll shove a grenade up your ass and turn you into shrapnel.”
Mavrides scoffed.
The lieutenant only stood there, hanging his head. Hot wind blew along the street. Somewhere close by a baby was crying and its angry wail seemed to come from every direction.
“Lieutenant?” Birnbaum ventured.
Trang glanced around, then locked eyes on Mavrides. “Private Mavrides, we may be well and truly screwed,” Lieutenant Trang said. “We’ve only got conjecture so far—”
“What the hell is ‘conjecture’?” Mavrides snarled.
“Guessing,” Birnbaum replied. “We’re fucking guessing.”
“The point,” Lieutenant Trang said, “is that all is going to be well. You have received a direct order from a superior officer. You do not want to disobey that order. In time, this situation will be resolved. Order will be restored. I promise you that if you don’t toe the line now, you will be well and truly fucked later.”
Trang stared at Mavrides another few seconds, then turned on his heel and called them to fall in. “Kelso, take point. Corporal Wade, with Sergeant Morello out of commission, I’m naming you acting sergeant,” he said. “With me, please.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, rushing to catch up, ignoring the strange looks the rest of the platoon gave Trang just as she was ignoring the faces in the windows all around them.
Danny led the way. Travaglini held back, covering their six. Normally Hawkins would have been guarding their flank, but he stayed with Mavrides, the two of them slightly off to the left, talking with each other as the entire platoon began once again to run. Hawkins gave Mavrides a small shove and the younger soldier fell in beside him like a dog coming to heel.
“Sir, I—” Kate began.
“I worry about my wife,” Lieutenant Trang said quietly, though loudly enough for Kelso and Janisch and McKelvie and a handful of others to hear. “I wonder what she’ll do with my body.”
Kate glanced worriedly at him. The guy was coming totally unraveled. “Comms will be up soon, Lieutenant. The second another satellite comes into range, we’ll get our orders—”
“The systems at the Hump will keep my body alive,” Trang went on, interrupting her. “I guess it could last awhile like that—empty, I mean—but I hope they declare us dead quickly. Otherwise it would be hell for her, with my body there, heart still beating, but just empty.”
“Jesus,” McKelvie said, catching Trang’s panic. “My kids…”
“If I’d known,” Janisch added, “there’s no way I would’ve—”
“Stop,” Kate snapped. As they hustled along Al Jalaa, in sight of the Egyptian embassy, the two of them glared at her. That hyperreality persisted, as if all Kate’s senses had been amplified, and she caught every detail of their expressions as she glared back. “You’ll see them again. Just focus on right now. We protect the embassy and we wait for comms to be restored.”
Kate glanced at Trang but he chose not to reply. Running, enjoying the way her robot legs moved beneath her and the agility and speed of her body, she told herself that he was wrong. It was something she needed to believe.
Someone grunted and swore as pottery shattered. Kate spun in time to see the remains of a potted plant spilling to the street, dirt raining down from Rawlins’s head.
“Son of a bitch!” Rawlins said, backing up, gun pointed upward.
They formed a rough circle, backs toward one another, and scanned the rooftops and upper windows. Anyone could have thrown the pot—a grandmother, a kid, any Syrian who thought the Americans had outstayed their welcome—and Kate figured that would be most of them. Plenty of locals had seemed relieved when the Tin Men had been deployed to put an end to the civil strife tearing the city and the country apart, but she knew the longer they had stayed, the more it must have felt like an occupation instead of a helping hand. And now…
She narrowed her eyes, heard the zippy little sound it made when the transparent sun-filters that passed for eyelids came down, and her vision telescoped, giving her a close-up of the roof of a small apartment building. Had she seen something move there, or was it just the flap of the bleached white laundry on the clothesline?
“They blame us,” Danny said, turning to face the others.
Kate stared at him, ignoring the useless Trang. He hadn’t even raised the barrel of his weapon.
“You’re saying they think we set off the EMP?” McKelvie asked.
One of the others—new tin, a private Kate had barely spoken to—gave a mirthless laugh. “If you were them, wouldn’t you think Americans did this? Or our allies?”
Hartschorn started walking again, slowly at first. “Can you be sure we didn’t?”
Something moved on the apartment-house roof. Torres spun and fired, putting two bullets through a flapping bedsheet.
They all hesitated, scanning the roofs for enemies.
“Move out,” Kate snapped, not waiting for Trang.
As they picked up speed, Kate saw the occasional frightened face at a window, saw a mangy yellow cat slip behind a dead moped, and all she wanted was to get to the embassy as swiftly as possible. If anyone wanted to take shots at them—potted plants or shoulder rockets—she didn’t give a damn.
“You’re doing fine,” Danny said, easing up beside her. “You hold it together, and we’ll hold it together.”
At his words, the hyperreality subsided a little. She knew it then: as long as she had Danny, she could get through this. She didn’t know why he suddenly seemed so important to her—their flirtations didn’t explain the bond—but she knew that she needed him.
More gunfire erupted somewhere in the city. At first, none of them paid it much attention—in a city with so many guns, with chaos unfolding, it was surely only the beginning—but then there came several more quick volleys.
“Sarge,” Hawkins said, quickly approaching her. “That’s coming from the northeast. I think it’s—”
“The embassy,” Danny finished.
Two small explosions punctured the morning sky.
“This is it,” Kate called, hating the tinny buzz of her own voice. “Go, go, go!”
Nobody looked to Trang for orders. The lieutenant had folded his tent and they all knew it. Hawkins, of all people, had called her Sarge, since Trang had made her acting sergeant. But Trang ran by her side, weapon ready, and they all moved ahead.
Danny took point, the city a blur as he raced to the end of the street and peered around the corner. He’d expected some kind of organized assault, but the men gathered outside the embassy were not Syrian army, nor were they any sort of revolutionary force. He gauged the crowd of insurgents at more than two hundred, bearded men ranging from seventeen to seventy. Some wore keffiyeh scarves but most did not. They shook guns in the air, shouting for the murder of the ambassador, and then breaking into a chant: “USA out! USA out!”
He had seen this kind of gathering before and knew there would be jihadists in the crowd, calling for holy war against the Americans. But the past decade had exposed a shift in terrorist violence. Jihadists were dangerous, but anarchists were worse. The modern anarchist movement had begun with Internet hackers wreaking havoc and exposing government secrets, but the movement had spread and deepened and grown more violent—especially in response to the Tin Men. Still, most of the protestors were likely to be ordinary locals, pissed off and afraid. They were panicked, and Danny couldn’t really blame them.
Windows in the ambassador’s residence had been shattered and part of one wall had been blown out and blackened—the explosions they’d heard, probably grenades. The ambassador and his staff would have evacuated into the main part of the base compound at the first sign of trouble, but he saw figures moving about inside the ambassador’s residence. It had been breached.
Men clung to the white wrought-iron fence around the embassy wall. Sentries fired warning shots from guard towers, but some of the people began to climb toward the barbed wire at the top. A beast of a man on the ground passed a pair of bolt cutters up to a smaller man already on the fence, who handed them off to a skinny young guy who had made it nearly to the top. He lifted the bolt cutters and a sentry opened fire. The skinny guy jerked as the bullets struck him and then he tumbled backward into the crowd, bolt cutters falling among them.
Danny glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the platoon. They had spread out into two squads, one on either side of the street. They could have split up, come into the intersection from two different angles, caught the crowd in a crossfire, but when the Tin Men went into a demonstration like this, the object was to draw fire and then disperse the anarchists. To make themselves targets.
He nodded at Kate and Trang. The lieutenant raised a hand and gestured for them to move out. As one, the Tin Men rushed into the intersection. Kate slid over to lead the second squad, leaving the first to Trang, but Danny knew to stay with the lieutenant.
“Do not fire unless there is an imminent threat!” Trang ordered.
Standard protocol, but the violence had already begun on the fence around the embassy. It was too late for protocol.
Only a second or two passed before the crowd saw the Tin Men coming. Shouts broke up the chanting and people turned. Those with guns took aim at the robots. One of the Marines on the wall cheered and threw his fist in the air and was shot in the throat by a protestor. The bullet spun him into a pirouette and he spilled off the wall, tumbling across the fence and into the crowd.
Hawkins and Mavrides were the first of the Tin Men to open fire. Onboard targeting systems let them pick their shots with perfect accuracy and one by one the men carrying rifles began to go down.
A bullet dinged off Danny’s left temple, knocking his head to the side. He took aim, his sighting computer automatically sensing his intent, and his targeting system found the shooter, a burly man with a thick beard and a keffiyeh on his head. Running into the intersection with the rest of his squad, Danny sighted and fired without breaking step and the bullet hit the bearish man dead center.
The Tin Men formed a semicircle and marched across the intersection, closing the distance between themselves and the crowd, creating a dragnet. Mavrides shot two more, and the crowd began to break. Groups of three and four peeled off and fled. Only the ones who had no interest in surviving would stand and face a platoon of Tin Men. The sentries on the embassy wall shot two more climbers, who toppled from the fence into the dwindling crowd.
Kate dropped back a few feet and crossed toward Danny and Lieutenant Trang.
“Don’t surround them,” she called, now at the center of the semicircle. “Just drive them away.”
Danny signaled in the affirmative but glanced at Trang to see if he’d countermand the order. The lieutenant barely seemed to have heard it. Abruptly, the gunfire and shouting in front of the embassy was drowned out by the scream of a rocket. Danny turned in time to see the rocket streak toward Janisch. A tiny sliver of a second passed between impact and blast—chain reaction, he thought, before the explosion threw him across the pavement with a clatter. His audio sensors muffled the blast, but he felt an impact against his back—a piece of Janisch’s carapace that had struck him. Had Danny been flesh and blood, it would have killed him.
Bot Killers, he thought. Sons of bitches.
He leaped to his feet as more specialized rockets streaked down from the roofs of nearby buildings. Hartschorn dodged and one hit the pavement, the blast hurling him through the air. Kasturi took a rocket to the face that blew her head off and cracked her chest plate open—no core explosion, but destroyed just the same. Jones opened fire, strafing the roof of a furniture store, and a rocket struck him in the back and sent shrapnel slicing through half a dozen civilians who had resisted being herded. Now, at last, they ran.
In seconds, all hell had broken loose. The anarchists were fleeing, but they had gotten what they wanted.
“Bastards,” Kate snarled. “They knew we’d head to base. Fuckin’ planned this. Two ambushes, you’ve gotta be—”
Bullets pinged off Danny’s shoulder and skull. He tracked the angle and spun, targeting system sighting on the shooter, who knelt on the corner of an office building’s roof. Another crouched beside him, raising a rocket launcher. For half a second, he thought himself the target, but then he heard Kate behind him, shouting at the rest of the platoon to get inside the buildings, to take the fight to the Bot Killers, and he knew the bastard was aiming for her.
Danny took him out with one shot, and Hawkins killed the sniper who’d been taking potshots.
A bullet knocked Danny backward, the gunshot lost amidst the cacophony of explosions and other gunfire. He frowned, weapon extended, targeting system scanning the rooftop in search of the shooter. A second bullet hit him and he heard a tiny sound that made him think of glass cracking.
A bot tackled him to the ground. He thought it was Kate until he saw the smiley face and crossbones and realized Hawkins had just saved his life. The shooter had hit the sweet spot along the seam on Danny’s carapace, twice. Has to be the same one who shot at Kate, he thought. Couldn’t be two of them that good.
“Where’s the shooter?” Danny barked. “I scanned the roof.”
Hawkins rose to a crouch, shoulder turned toward the unseen sniper. Mavrides and Rawlins had retreated behind a white box truck twenty yards back the way they’d come, but Kate stood exposed in the street.
“There!” she called, pointing at the office building. “Third-floor window.”
Danny turned to scan it and another bullet struck him, only inches away from the sweet spot. That cracking-glass sound came again, but the shot had been off. Danny saw him now, nothing more than the top of his dark-haired head and the barrel of his rifle jutting from the open window, but he’d marked him. The sniper had not finished the job, and Danny had no intention of giving him another chance.
“I’ve got him,” he called.
The gunfire continued in the intersection. Another rocket exploded—maybe killing another member of the platoon, maybe not—and he knew the Bot Killers were on the run again, scurrying like rats, possibly retreating to launch a third ambush on the platoon later.
Not this guy, Danny thought.
He left the others behind, running full-out toward the façade of the office building. The Bot Killers knew what they were up against—they knew they were risking their lives and by his count at least ten of them had paid that price—but this guy had an agenda. He could have used a rocket launcher, but instead he’d chosen a rifle, as if his skill was more important to him than certainty. Or just to show he was that certain of his talents. And he could have gone after any of them, but he had targeted Danny and Kate.
Yeah, no question. Asshole had an agenda. Danny didn’t care what it was—he just wanted to kill the guy with his own rifle—but the world was falling apart and these bastards had been waiting for their cue, which meant they had known it was coming. Whatever information they had, Danny intended to get it.
Full tilt, once they got going, Remote Infantry units could do seventy-five miles per hour on foot. Danny didn’t have the room to get up to that speed, but he hit the front of the office building at what he figured was thirty miles per hour or better. With a leap, he crashed through a massive section of plate glass and broken shards of it showered around him as he landed on the carpet inside.
He hadn’t had time for the door.