“We’ll zap them,” said Danny. “I have the ones on the left. Wait as long as we can; get them all in view.”

He edged toward the side of the hall as the first of the Taiwanese guards came around the corner.

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As soon as one of the lights played across the floor near Egg, Danny opened up, firing two bursts in rapid succession. Three guards shot back against the wall of the hallway, literally blasted off their feet.

But another man had been behind them; unharmed, he began to retreat. Danny and Egg gave chase, running for all they were worth down the hall. The bulk of their suits and gear slowed them down, however; by the time they reached the corner, the hall was empty.

“Fuck,” said Egg.

“Yeah,” said Danny. “Let’s see if we can find this joker.”

He tapped his Smart Helmet, activating the unit’s penetrating radar mode. The mode emitted low-power radio waves that could penetrate walls roughly out to thirty feet. Their subject was nowhere in sight.

Danny flipped back into Dreamland connect mode, taking the display off the Flighthawk. But the U/MF

was too far to the west to be of any use.

“Hawks, I need some coverage down here,” he said. “On my building.”

“Copy,” said Kick, gunning the aircraft back.

Aboard Penn

0012

KICK HAD JUSTstarted the Flighthawk back when the Osprey veered across his path. He threw the small robot plane down hard toward the earth, realizing even as he did that he had overreacted. Cursing, but only to himself, he came back with the joystick control, trying to swoop level and get back more or less on course. The robot fluttered slightly, her airspeed plummeting.

“ Hawk Two, looking for that view,” said Captain Freah in his ear.

“Yeah, roger that,” said Kick. “We’re working on it. A lot of things going on up here.”

Starship, whose aircraft was to the west covering the harbor approach to the complex, started to interrupt. “You want me to—”

“I’m on it,” insisted Kick, sliding his speed up. The target building was now dead-on in his screen. Kick let his speed continue to bleed off, determined to provide a detailed view to the ground team. The Osprey, meanwhile, began rotating its wings upward, driving down toward a field near the road to drop its men.

Someone shouted over the circuit—there were people on the ground, near where the Osprey was headed.

Several things happened at once—the chain gun in the Osprey’s nose rotated, Kick threw his Flighthawk down toward the spot, Danny Freah yelled a warning and told the Osprey not to fire.

Kick struggled to keep his head clear, fighting the black fuzz of confusion creeping up from behind his neck.

“The boats,” someone said, and whether it was intended for him or not, Kick started to line up the Page 186

Flighthawk for a view of the harbor. But he was already crossing over the dock toward the water; he accelerated and began banking to the south to try for another run.

On the Ground in Kaohisiung

0014

AS SOON ASDanny saw the Taiwanese guards emerging from the buildings beyond the battery recycling shed in his sitrep window, he shouted at the Osprey pilots to back out. He saw the Osprey whip away just as one of the men began firing an automatic weapon. An instant later, Sergeant Geraldo Hernandez launched a stun grenade and then fired his taser, scattering the guards.

“Two of the fuckers down,” said Hernandez.

It took Hernandez another sixty seconds to work around a pile of discarded metal before he could get close enough to take out the others. He popped a mesh grenade over the pile, then ran around the side and zapped them as they struggled.

“Osprey in,” said Danny.

“Can I get my view of the building now?” he asked Kick after the Marines flooded out of Osprey.

“Roger that,” said the Flighthawk pilot. “Two seconds away.”

Danny toggled between an IR and a penetrating radar view, preferring to see the details himself rather than using the synthesized and annotated image the computer provided.

“Freeze,” he said, getting a good visual of the facility. It looked like there was only one man here besides themselves; he was two corridors down to the right.

“With you,” said Egg, following as Danny set out cautiously.

Aboard Penn

0015

STARSHIP SAW THEboat darting into the harbor. He knew it wasn’t theirs—the computer had the Marines dotted out with daggers—but he hesitated, as if his brain were trying to process the information and couldn’t find the next branch in the logic tree.

Gun in the boat.

Big gun.

Something else.

“Company,” he said finally. “I’m taking them out.”

He leaned on the stick, starting the Flighthawk downward. But then something tingled in his brain—the other half of the thought that had started a millisecond before. He pulled back, nailing the throttle slide to full just as the missile flared from the boat.

Missile.

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They were gunning for the Osprey, coming in over his right shoulder.

“Flares!” he yelled, hitting his diversionary devices.

Ordinarily, he would have jinked away, ducking the surface-to-air missile that had just been launched, getting himself to safety. But something had pushed off the instinct for survival; something deeper took over—he kept the Flighthawk on her course, directly into the path of the oncoming missile.

The shoulder-launched SA-14 hurtled upward at something approaching Mach 1. Though primitive by Dreamland standards, the Russian-designed heat-seeking missile was nonetheless an effective weapon when properly handled. The sensor in its nose ignored the flares, sucking the heat signature of the large aircraft it had been aimed at. But then something juicier stuck itself in its face—the tailpipe of the Flighthawk, flashing within a few meters of the weapon. The missile jerked itself to the right, following the hot scent of its new target, but it couldn’t quite keep up. Afraid that it would lose everything, it ignited its charge, sending a spray of shrapnel through the air.

Starship felt the small robot spinning to its left before he actually lost the U/MF; whatever sixth sense it was that helped him fly the plane knew he was down.

The last feed from the cam in the Flighthawk’s nose showed the Osprey just a few yards off. The frame froze, as if the tiny aircraft wanted to show that its death had not been in vain.

“Nail the motherfuckers in the boat,” Starship told Kick. “I’m outta the game.”

On the Ground in Kaohisiung

0021

BOSTON’S VISOR PORTRAYEDthe interior of the building in a ghostly gray. A door sat at the far end of the room, leading to a hallway. There was an office at the end outside the range of the helmets’

low-power radar; two guards were holed up there, marked in the small sitrep view in the lower left-hand corner of the screen supplied by the Flighthawk sensors. The guard icons blinked steadily, indicating the view had not been updated in more than thirty seconds.

Sergeant Liu moved ahead stealthily. Boston saw a shadow in the hall and steadied his taser at the doorway.

“One coming,” he told Liu.

“Wait,” said the team leader, his voice so low Boston could hardly hear it. “We want both.”

The Taiwanese guard appeared in the doorway, holding an M-16. Boston steadied his weapon, watching the man peer through the dark room. He seemed to know they were there somehow. Boston decided he could take no chances, and fired his weapon. The doorway burned blue and the guard fell to the ground. Liu dove through the doorway from the side, spinning left in the direction of the offices where the guards had been earlier. As he did, the sitrep updated itself as the Flighthawk flew overhead once more.