Icarus Effect

CHAPTER FIVE

Silver Springs-Maryland-United States of America

The autocab let her out at the curbside outside her apartment block, and Kelso glanced back to watch the driverless vehicle nose its way back into traffic, the sensor antennae along the hood of the car feeling the air. The fare from the airport had claimed the last of the money on the discretionary credit chip Temple gave her. The flight back had passed in a blur, Anna's gaze turned inward, passing the time with the ebb and flow of the same emotions over and over again. She felt disgusted at herself for her weakness, angry at getting caught, sad at the thought of letting Matt down, numb and furious, full of regret and fear.

But mostly she felt hollowed out inside. All the work, everything she'd done in the endless days and weeks of her clandestine investigation, now was unraveling all around her. She had destroyed her career for the sake of something that only she seemed able to see, for a truth that no one else wanted to face.

As she walked the short distance to the lobby of the building, the question echoed in her mind. Was it worth it?

Inside, she thumbed the entry pad to her apartment and ignored the glow of the messaging system, dropping the packet she had carried all the way from the 10th Precinct on the sofa. In the living room, the television activated automatically, blipping to the local Picus News affiliate preset. The screen showed a report about the upcoming National Science Board caucus on human augmentaion; the conference was getting a lot of heat from the pro-human, antienhancement lobby, and it seemed like every day a new busload of protestors arrived in the capital.

She ignored the low burble of the screen and fished out her vu-phone, leaving it on the countertop in the small, plastic-white kitchen, mechanically moving through the motions of swigging milk from a carton in the refrigerator. The apartment was dim; the sunny magnolia colors did little to lift the tone of the gloom leaking in from the dull, low cloud smothering the sky.

Anna grasped the carton in her hand, her fingers deadening with the cold. Was it worth it? The question hammered at her in the silence.

A grimace crossed her face and she went to the alcove where her laptop sat inside an old cedar bureau. The computer woke at her touch, and she pulled her federal ID from her pocket; the machine automatically pinged the arfid in her badge, but the data chip did not reply. Instead, a small panel opened on the screen. The text it contained was a paragraph of legal boilerplate reiterating what Temple had told her in the holding room, but the meaning was clear. Access denied. Clearance revoked. Even the most basic level of entry into the agency network was sealed off from her.

She sat in the dimness, lit only by the glow of the screen, and began to wonder what else had taken place while she was in New York. Temple had reamed her files, that much was certain… but had he sent agents to her home as well? Anna looked around. She saw nothing out of place.

A sudden impulse pushed her up from the chair where she sat, and she crossed to the closet. Inside, hidden behind the hanging clothes, the safe-locker she'd installed back when she moved in was visible, the door still sealed shut. She typed in the entry code and found the contents as she'd left them. A box of what little jewelry she had, some cash and papers-and in a separate section, a short-frame Zenith 10 mm automatic, two full ammo clips, and a small flash drive.

Anna took the gun and checked it before loading. The weapon was legal, licensed and clean. If anything, the flash drive was the more dangerous item; inside it was an encrypted copy of everything she had worked on, every bit of data gleaned along the road to this moment.

She turned the memory module over in her hand. All that work, all the lies and secrecy, the nights she stayed late at the agency offices digging into files she should never had accessed, the legacy of the stims she'd taken to keep awake, to keep going…

Was it worth it?

A chime sounded though the apartment, and Anna flinched in surprise. The house was announcing a call on her vu-phone. She left the gun and the drive on a shelf in the closet and went to the handset.

The caller ident read Matt Ryan. Anna had been maudlin about deleting his name and number from the phone's memory. It was a foolish, silly thing, but she'd kept putting it off; perhaps on some level she was denying the reality of what had happened six months ago on Q Street.

She gripped the handheld, her knuckles turning white around the silver casing. Slowly, Anna raised it to her ear, tapping the answer pad. "Who is this?"

The voice at the other end was electronically distorted, all trace of identity bled out. "You and I need to have a talk." Kelso's training instinctively kicked in; she tried to listen through the masking filter, looking for the cadence and pattern of the voice, profiling the speaker in her mind.

"Whoever you are, you're not Matt Ryan. So I'm hanging up-"

"That would be a mistake," said the voice. "I spoofed the caller ID so youd pick up. Because I'm guessing right now that you're not in the mood to talk to people. Not after what happened at the pier."

Her throat went dry. "What pier?"

"Don't talk to me like I'm stupid, Agent Kelso. I really hate it when people do that."

"Then show me the same courtesy," she snapped, her patience wearing thin. "Who the hell are you and what do you want? Answer that or get lost."

Anna heard a faint sigh. "You can call me D-Bar. And like I said, I wanna talk to you."

"We are talking."

"Well, when I say I want to, I really mean we want to. And not over an open line. In person."

She drifted back toward the closet, reaching for the pistol. "Uh-huh. And who is 'we'?"

"A group you may have heard of. We call ourselves the Juggernaut Collective. We're kind of a big deal."

Anna's hand froze on the gun. "If you know who I am and what happened out at the pier, then you know the last thing I'm going to do is talk to a terrorist." She should have disconnected, right then and there; but instead she waited.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Yeah, trite, maybe, but true." The sigh came again. "Look, let's cut to the chase, 'cos

I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this conduit secure. You went to that wannabe Widow and her crew and they gave you some scraps. But the fact is, she's a bottom-feeder and she was never going to get you what you need. We can. We're looking for the same thing."

"I don't know what you're talking about-"

"The Tyrants. Do you want to know who they are or not?" Anna said nothing, and after a moment the voice returned. "I'll take your silence for a yes. Check your messages. If we see anyone but you, that name will be all you'll ever get." The connection cut with a click; a moment later, the vu-phone beeped. In the message cue was a street address in downtown Washington, D.C., and a meeting time two hours hence.

In the bathroom she paused to splash a handful of cold water on her face. Two hours; that barely gave her enough time to throw on a fresh set of clothes and bolt out the door.

And she was tired. The events in New York, the time in the cells, the nervous tension of the flight home… The fatigue from all of it was exerting a heavy, tidal drag on her. She couldn't afford to do this half-awake. She couldn't afford to miss something.

Anna reached for the door to the medicine cabinet without looking in the mirror.

Knightsbridge-London-Great Britain

The town house had once been a hotel, an exclusive boutique lodge in a shady mews just a few blocks away from the greensward of Hyde Park.

Like so much of the city, it sat in unconcerned contrast with the sheer-sided corporate towers emerging from the streets around it, the pale stone of the five-story exterior understated, the rectangular windows lit from within by a warm glow not lost through the thickness of armored polyglass. From the outside, it seemed no different from any of its neighbors; but the structure of the town house was reinforced and hardened against anything up to a rocket attack.

Saxon glanced around the fourth-floor room and took in the clean, sparse decor; white walls and chrome-framed furniture. A print of Rubin's

The Flute Player hung on one wall, a large thinscreen monitor mirroring it on the far side of the room. The six operatives sat around a long, glass-topped conference table, each dressed in what passed for civilian attire-although to a trained eye none of the Tyrants could shake the aura of a soldier, even when armor and weapons were out of reach.

At first, Saxon thought the town house was some sort of operations center, perhaps the London base for the Tyrants; but then he had glimpsed slivers of the rooms on the lower floors through half-open doors. He saw living spaces, a study, a kitchen-and dotted around, the touches that showed a family lived in this place. On the third-floor landing, Saxon passed a framed photo and had to look twice; Jaron Namir gazed back out at him, dressed in a suit and wearing a yarmulke, smiling broadly. A woman in yellow and two children, a boy and a girl, shared his good cheer.

The image was jarring; try as he might, Saxon couldn't connect the man in the picture with the man he had seen kill silently with no pause, no flicker of remorse.

They were in Namir's home. Something about the idea of that ground against Saxon's every ingrained instinct. The idea of a man like him, a man like Namir having a life and a family outside the unit, seemed false. Somehow, unfair.

In the wake of the mission in Moscow, the team had gone through a cursory review aboard the transport plane as it flew west, back into

European airspace. As with every other operational debrief, Saxon had felt as if they were going through the motions, not just for themselves, but for some unseen observer. The people who gave the orders were watching, he was certain of it. Not for the first time, he wondered if they would ever show their faces.

Seated around the table, Namir led them through the postmortem once again. On the plane, they had given their reports one at a time; now, with all of them together, Saxon felt the pressure of the unanswered questions in his thoughts.

He leaned forward. "I could have brought Kontarsky in alive."

Hardesty gave him an arch look. "Was that ever the objective?"

Saxon ignored him, turning to Namir. "You said Kontarsky was working with Juggernaut. He was a high-value target. He must have had intel we could use."

"The minister was compromised," Namir replied. "Anything we'd have been able to compel from him through interrogation would have been marginal at best. We didn't need what he knew."

Saxon's eyes narrowed. Despite what Namir had told him earlier, he was sure of Kontarsky's reaction when he mentioned Operation Rainbird.

The name meant nothing to the man.

Namir saw his train of thought and headed him off. "You need to see past this, Ben. Don't make it personal. Kontarsky was a cancer in the

Russian federal government. We cut him out."

"Sends a message," offered Barrett in a languid tone. "Anyone deals with Juggernaut, they're not protected."

"We're not in the business of taking prisoners," Namir went on. "You know that."

Hardesty leaned back in his chair. "As we're on the subject, maybe the limey can explain why it is he didn't just double-tap the creep the moment he found him?"

"I told you. I could have brought him in."

"You don't get to make that choice," Hardesty replied. "You're not in command of this unit.

We're not your little PMC scout troop, Saxon. You lost that, remember?"

Saxon studied the other man. "Maybe if you were actually on the deck with the rest of us, instead of hiding behind a camo net four hundred meters away, I might have some respect for your opinion, Yank" He gave the last word a sneer. "Don't make the mistake of thinking you see everything down that rifle scope."

"What I did see was you talking to the mark," insisted the sniper. "And someone else, too, maybe?"

"Kontarsky was the only one in the room," Saxon replied, a little quicker than he would have liked. From the corner of his eye, he saw

Hermann, Federova, and Barrett watching the exchange, gauging his reaction.

Do you know what you are doing, mercenary? The ghost-voice's questions returned to him. Do you know what master you serve?

The misgivings muttering at the edges of his thoughts were there, clear and undeniable. Saxon broke eye contact with Hardesty as Namir stood up and crossed the room to a window.

"I understand your intentions," said the commander. "But I need all of you to follow orders when I give them. We may not have allegiance to a flag anymore, but we all must share allegiance to the Tyrants. If we don't have that, then we're no better than Juggernaut or any of the other anarchists out there." He threw a look toward Saxon and Hermann. "You two are our newest recruits. You both understand that, don't you?"

"Of course," replied Hermann, without hesitation. In turn, Saxon gave a wary nod.

Namir went on. "There are reasons for everything we do. Reasons for every order I give you. Every mission." He smiled slightly, the craggy face softening for a brief moment. "We cannot bring stability if we don't have equilibrium in our ranks." Namir's gaze crossed to Hardesty, and his tone hardened again. "Clear?"

The sniper pursed his lips. "Clear," he repeated.

He will never tell us, Saxon realized. Whoever is pulling the strings, he's never going to pull back the curtain on them. The question that came next pressed to the front of his thoughts: Can I live with that?

In the months since Namir had plucked him from the field hospital in Australia, Saxon had earned more money than he had in years of service with Belltower and to the British Crown. The Tyrants had fitted him with high-spec augmentation upgrades, given him access to weapons and hardware that had been beyond his reach in the SAS or as a military contractor. Downtime between missions was spent at secure resorts, the likes of which were open only to corporate execs and the very rich. And the missions… the missions were the most challenging he'd ever had.

Putting aside Hardesty's irritating manner, Saxon meshed well with all the Tyrant team members. He couldn't deny that he liked the work.

They were free of all the paperwork and second-guessing he'd waded through as someone else's line soldier. None of the Tyrants wasted time saluting and sweating the trivial crap; they just got on with the business of soldiering, and the appeal of that simple fact held Ben Saxon tight.

He liked being here. Despite all the doubts, it still felt right. After all the two- or three-man operations, the tag-and-bags, the terminations and infiltrations, and then the Moscow gig, Saxon felt as if he had graduated. He was in; but part of him remained troubled, and it annoyed him that he couldn't fully articulate it.

Was it the secrets? It seemed foolish to consider it; as a spec ops soldier, he'd spent most of his career working in the dark… but with the

British Army and then with Belltower, he'd at least had some grasp on what he was risking his life for.

In the humid night air of the field hospital, Namir had offered him a second chance. He had offered the opportunity to make a difference, but more than that, Namir had offered Saxon trust.

Or perhaps, just the illusion of it. There were other operations going on, he was certain. Tyrant missions that he wasn't supposed to be aware of; he knew for a fact that Federova and Hardesty had been deployed to the United States, Japan, and India on untraceable black-bag jobs.

Once more, any question about who chose their targets or what they were was not going to be answered.

Do you know what master you serve?

He decided then that for the moment, the questions the shadowy hacker Janus had posed would go no further.

Namir turned from the window. "It's clear to me that we've reached an important juncture here." Hardesty, Federova, and Barrett abruptly stood up, with Saxon and Hermann reacting just a second later. For a moment, the ghost of a cold smile danced on Hardesty's lips.

"About time," said Barrett.

Namir nodded to the big man. "Open the study, will you?"

Barrett nodded and crossed to the wall where The Flute Player hung. He whispered something Saxon didn't catch and a seam opened on silent hydraulics. The wall retracted into itself to reveal more rooms beyond. Saxon caught sight of a dark, windowless space, weapons racks, and workstations.

"Yelena?" Namir inclined his head toward Federova.

The woman's hand blurred as she pulled a weapon from a pocket, a boxy plastic handgun lined with a yellow-and-black hazard strip. She turned it on Hermann and pulled the trigger.

A thick dart buzzed from the muzzle and hit the German in the neck; Saxon heard the hum of a tazer discharge and Hermann moaned, his body going rigid. The younger man fell, his watch cap falling from his head.

"What-?" Saxon looked up as a second dart struck him in the chest. He had an instant to register the bite of the contact needles in his skin before a second stun charge lashed into him.

The Ohama Center-Washington, D.C.-United States of America

The message brought her to the doors of the conference center, the fading light of evening lit by the glow from inside the glass-and-steel building. A gallery of holograms formed a promenade from the street to the main doors, each of them moving through cycles showing venue information and events listings.

She moved closer, her senses sharpened and acute; for the moment, the fatigue gnawing at her had been beaten back. Kelso knew she'd pay for it later-but for now she was focused and alert.

Over the entrance, a banner announced the name of the seminar that was about to begin: No Better-The Myth of Human Augmentation. She immediately recognized the title. The ebook that it was based on had been hovering around the top ten of the Picus Network best-seller list forever, along with its various audio and video versions, not to mention the frequent references to it on the chat-show news circuit. She glanced up to see the face of the author smiling down from one of the holoscreens. William Taggart's warm, fatherly eyes watched her from behind a pair of understated glasses, wearing the same expression of compassionate concern that graced the back cover of every copy of No Better, and every flyer for his lobby group, the Humanity Front.

Taggart had founded his organization with one goal in mind-to disabuse society at large of the idea that human augmentation technology was a positive development. As Taggart's people would put it, cybernetic implants served only to dilute a person's humanity, making them less than what they were instead of more.

Anna found the Humanity Front's rhetoric a little hard to take, though. The augmentations she possessed had improved her, and that was something she'd never been in doubt about-and when she thought about the facets of her life that made her feel less human, her implants weren't at the root of it. She frowned and pushed that thought away.

Smartly dressed young men and women were handing out flyers to the attendees and anyone who walked within arm's reach. Anna noted that a fair few of them were sporting simple mechanical prosthetics in place of limbs. These were people who had taken to what some called

"disaugmentation," freely giving up cybernetic implants in an attempt to move back to being fully human again; the only thing was, losing an augmentation wasn't like getting a gang tattoo removed or ditching your piercings. She didn't know quite how to take someone who'd made that choice willingly. Maybe life with a basic leg prosthesis was easier, with less maintenance to deal with and no weekly regimen of neuropozyne doses to keep the nerve contacts crisp, but Anna wasn't buying it.

Here, though, she seemed to be in the minority. A lot of the downtowner crowd were filing in to hear Taggart give his lecture, and after having heard the man on television, Anna had to admit he had charisma enough to hold your attention, and the kind of academic gravitas that many people admired. Along with plenty of his supporters, he was here to make his voice heard at the National Science Board meetings, to continue his campaign to decry augmentation; he would doubtless be a fixture at the pro-flesh demonstrations taking place over the next few days.

As she entered the conference center atrium, as if on cue, a recording of Taggart's voice issued out of a hidden speaker. "Some people believe augmentation is the wave of the future. That replacing part of yourself with machines will make you superhuman… But the truth is, for every part of yourself you sacrifice, you are less than you were before. That's why I created the Humanity Front. Tonight, Fll tell you why you should be apart of it, too."

Anna scowled slightly. The name made Taggart's anti-aug crusade sound like a paramilitary group, and Anna wondered if that might have been a deliberate choice. Some of the people who shared Taggart's views did a lot more than write books or give speeches; episodes of violence against augmented humans fanned the flames of a new breed of intolerance. Groups like the militants of Purity First were more than happy to twist Taggart's message toward aggressive ends.

There were more than enough people who couldn't afford augmentation in the States and elsewhere-and she doubted any of them could have paid the extortionate ticket fee for the seminar either-as well as those who felt threatened by the new technology, just like they were by anything unfamiliar to them. The Humanity Front was selling itself as two things: a caring group out to show augmentees the error of their ways, and a force for retaining the status quo. Anna wondered if men like Taggart would ever understand that you couldn't put the genie back in the bottle.

"Can I help you?" A tanned young guy sporting a blandly neutral prosthetic hand stepped up to greet her. He gave her a once-over, immediately spotting her cyberoptics, and his expression became almost pious. "Everyone is welcome."

Over his shoulder, a shimmer passed through one of the holograph banners, the text changing. A new string of words formed: Kelso. Upper tier.

Section G. Box 3. She gave him a tight smile. "Actually, no. I know exactly where I'm going."

Anna had her hand on the butt of the Zenith as she entered the skybox. It was well appointed, with an excellent view of the stage below. The house lights were just starting to grow dim, and as the door closed behind her, William Taggart stepped out into the pool of light cast from above, to a tide of applause. She hesitated; the skybox's illumination was low and there were deep shadows everywhere.

Down on the stage, Taggart began with some carefully rehearsed platitudes, and from the shadows, Anna heard someone make a spitting noise.

"Yeah, that's enough from you, Billy." The voice was young and male.

She went to low-light and a figure in a bulky jacket and baseball cap became clear in one of the low, dense seats. With a wave, the youth cut off the sound feed from the auditorium and turned to face her. "Let me guess. You're D-Bar?" He was a youth, no more than nineteen, slouching and cocksure.

"Wow," he replied. "You're more of a looker in the real."

"Whereas you are far more disappointing." She backed off a step. "I'm not in the mood for games, kid." Automatically, she started to profile him in her thoughts. He had an accent that didn't fit; it had a European twang, maybe French-Canadian.

D-Bar stood up. He was gangly, and the puffed-up jacket hung badly on him, making him look even thinner than he was. A collection of data goggles and audio buds lay in a complex tangle around his neck. "Kid? Oh, come on, Agent Anna Kelso. Book by a cover and all that static? And here I was thinking you were a professional…"

She looked around the room, searching for anything that screamed out ambush, and found nothing. "Fair point," she conceded. "It's just that the name 'Juggernaut'… well, it conjures up a different kind of person than you."

D-Bar nodded sagely. "Oh, I hear you. I get that a lot."

"Where's the rest of the 'we' you mentioned on the phone?"

He tapped his hat, and she saw what looked like a minicam clipped to the bill. "Watching. If you try to ice me or anything, they'll wideband the pix to every screen in a five-block radius."

"Cute trick." It was likely a threat he could make good on; Anna had read up on the Juggernaut Collective's impressive hacking expertise. It was a matter of public record that they had bankrupted two Fortune 500 companies, crashed the Syrian intelligence agency's mainframe, and brought the Seattle traffic grid to a standstill. "Maybe I should just arrest you, then. I could use a win right about now."

That got her a flash of real worry; but then the youth shuttered it away. "You don't want to do that, Anna. We're the good guys, yeah? Like you.

Serving the cause of justice and all that stuff."

This time she snorted. "Now who's being patronizing? You expect me to buy into the whole 'white hat' hacker thing? Juggernaut are information terrorists. You're not Robin Hood, you're a cybercriminal."

D-Bar gave a mock shudder. "Ooh, yeah. Don't you think things always sound cooler when you put the word 'cyber' in front of them?" He gave a short, nasal laugh. "Okay, so we rob from the rich and we keep it. Can't deny. But what we also do is oppose inequality."

"By breaking the law?" she snapped.

"We're the thorn in the side of heartless megacorps who wanna turn the world into their personal chum-bucket!" he insisted.

"What, is that your recruitment speech?"

D-Bar chuckled. "I don't have to recruit you. You're already on our side."

"Don't count on it." Kelso licked her lips, an earthy taste in the back of her throat. Her hands tightened as her annoyance built. "You've got ten seconds to tell me why the hell I am here, or I'm dragging you out in cuffs."

"I thought the choice of locale was, y'know, ironic." When he saw the hard edge in her gaze, he paled a little. "Okay, okay. Look, for a while now, we've been bumping up against the edges of something…" D-Bar paused, feeling for the right word. "Shadowy. There's a group out there. An organization with a long reach and a lotta patience. They've been systematically using info-war and assassination to target midlevel corporates

– "

"Isn't that what you people do?" she broke in.

The youth's eyes flashed. "Juggernaut doesn't kill people, lady. And if you let me finish, I was gonna say it's not just corporations getting the knife. Other free groups like us are going dark. These bad guys are taking people down with blackmail, extortion, entrapment, absorption…"

Anna's patience was wearing thinner by the moment. She folded her arms across her chest. "And this concerns me how?"

"The Tyrants," D-Bar sounded out the name, and she couldn't stop herself from reacting to it. "Yeah, that get your attention? The Tyrants are their attack dogs, Agent Kelso. This… group, whoever they are? Those black-ops bastards are doing their dirty work for them." He leaned closer. "We're both looking for the same thing. We're both asking the same question." She was silent for a long moment, her irritation warring with her curiosity. Finally, she gave it voice. "What do they want?"

Knightsbridge-London-Great Britain

Saxon felt cool, clammy concrete against his back and he rolled slightly, his head swimming, clearing from the effect of the stun-dart.

He heard a woman's voice, distant but light and playful. Gradually, he leaned up from where he lay and caught sight of a short, unfinished corridor stretching away from him. He was inside the hidden spaces behind the picture on the wall, under the stark light of a fluorescent bulb.

At the edges of the shadows around him, he glimpsed Barrett, Hardesty, and the Russian woman. Hermann was nearby, slowly pulling himself into a pained crouching position. The chamber they were in was no bigger than the conference room, but it was sparse and had the feel of a place one might use for a purpose that needed a little space, like a sparring court. Or an interrogation room.

Hermann tried to get up, but that drew a guttural, negative noise from Barrett. "You stay right there, son," he told him. The German frowned and ran a hand through his short, dirty-blond hair.

The woman at the far end of the corridor was talking to Namir, and in that moment he knew who she was: the wife. He didn't understand

Hebrew, but he recognized the rhythm of it. Their voices had the casual, easy pace of two people who knew each other intimately. Saxon closed his eyes for a moment and tried to marry the voice he heard with the Jaron Namir he knew from firsthand experience. Just as with the picture on the landing, the two things refused to mesh. He was listening to a warm and personable man, a father joking with the mother of his children, not the stone killer he knew from sorties into the deep black. Saxon had seen Namir kill men in the time it took him to blink, and do it calmly and cleanly. He wondered how he could be both of those people at once.

A child called out and the wife stepped away. After a moment, Namir came back down the corridor and Saxon saw Hardesty grin in the darkness, in anticipation of something.

Namir saw it, too, and drew a handgun, throwing the American a flat look. "Scott. Go see to Laya and the children, would you?"

The sniper's face fell. "I thought-"

"Do it now," said Namir. "I'll handle this."

There was a moment when it looked like Hardesty might argue; but then he grimaced and walked away. Saxon heard the sniper call out and a child laugh in reply; then the hidden door closed and the sound died.

Namir worked the slide of the automatic pistol and ejected all but one round into the palm of his hand, then pocketed the bullets.

At last, Saxon spoke. "What's going on?"

"One of you is disloyal," Namir said, without looking at them. "I know which. And the other needs to prove himself." He gestured with the gun.

"So, two birds and one stone."

"One bullet, more like," Barrett noted dryly.

Hermann gave Saxon a fierce look. "I am no traitor!"

Saxon got to his feet. "Are you serious? Disloyal how, exactly?"

Namir tossed the loaded pistol onto the floor between them. "I'll explain it to you if you live past the next five minutes."

"You actually expect me to-" Hermann never let him finish. The German was swift and he came up hard, striking with that armored fist of his in a short, hammer-blow punch. Saxon barely had time to deflect it.

He was aware of the others drawing back and away as Hermann moved in and came at him again. This time, Saxon was a half second too slow and the metal-clad fist clipped him across the shoulder. Even a glancing impact was enough to rob him of a little balance and Saxon shifted his weight. Even if he wasn't sold on this sudden, enforced bout of trial-by-combat, the younger man certainly was. Hermann glared at him, sizing him up; the way he did it made it clear to Saxon that the German had given plenty of thought to how he would fight him if the opportunity arose. He had a sudden mental image of Gunther taking him down, stripping his corpse for parts to bolt on to himself like a hunter taking the skull and pelt of a kill.

Saxon dodged the next punch, and the next, but then his luck ran out. Hermann connected with a heavy strike to the sternum that rattled

Saxon's rib cage and ghosted the taste of blood up his throat. The other man glimpsed the flash of pain in his eyes and for the first time since he'd met him, Saxon saw something approximating a smile flicker briefly over the German's face. He came back in like thunder, a flurry of fast kicks and faster punches that Saxon had to work to deflect, never once getting the chance to attack in turn. The young man's nerve-jacked speed was far in advance of Saxon's own reflex booster, maybe a custom model or something the Tyrants had granted; it didn't matter. Trying to match Hermann blow for blow wouldn't work.

Instead, Saxon let the other man's overconfidence take the lead. He let his guard go loose, and the hammer-blows started to land. Finally,

Hermann connected with a punch that sent Saxon reeling, down to the concrete floor.

He blinked away pinwheels of pain from behind his eyes. Hermann went down in a looping sweep, grabbing for the pistol; he took his gaze off

Saxon in that moment, chancing that his opponent was winded. His mistake, then.

As the German snatched up the weapon, Saxon rocked off his augmented legs and collided with Hermann, sending him reeling toward the edge of the light cast from the overhead bulb. The hand gripping the gun came up and it turned into a wrestling match.

For long moments they both strained for the superior position, but Saxon had the power, and the will to take the long road. Finally, with a savage twist of his wrist, he pulled the pistol away and elbowed Hermann hard in the throat, putting him on the ground.

Saxon weighed the gun in his hand.

"You gonna do it?" asked Barrett.

At the periphery of his vision, Saxon saw Namir shift slightly, his hand moving out of sight. Hermann looked up at him, silently furious.

"No," Saxon said at length. "I'm not going to do it. Because there isn't any bloody traitor, and I don't play games like this. I'm a professional." He flipped the gun over and held it out, butt first, to Namir.

The Tyrant commander took it with a nod. "The right call, Ben. If you had pulled the trigger, I would have shot you myself."

Hermann got up slowly. "Then both of us would be dead."

"Rounds in the gun were blanks," said Barrett. "We've done this before. We ain't stupid." A smile crossed his scarred face. "You did good there. You got steel. I'm impressed."

Saxon frowned. "A test?"

"In a way," said Namir. He nodded to them all, and when he spoke again his tone was all command. "We've got another assignment, in America.

We fly out tomorrow, so make the most of your downtime tonight and be sure to prep your gear."

"That's it?" Saxon took a step after him as he walked away. "You got nothing else to say?"

Namir glanced over his shoulder. "What do you want, Ben? A membership card? You both proved yourselves. You're part of the Tyrants. Until death."