Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Now she was riding back from the top of the loop. Bearing straight for the giant, who incredibly seemed oblivious to her. Or maybe not so incredibly. He was fixated on Carmody. In a blood rage. His huge strides swallowing up the distance between them, he swung the weapon down from over his shoulder, down at his head in a vicious arc.

Carmody had a split second to act. He could turn his Kalashnikov on the giant, take him out before Kali even reached him. Could blow him off his feet while he was rushing him. But that would give the guy on the balcony the moment he needed to draw a bead. He had a direct, unimpeded shot on a downward plane, which made him the most critical threat.

It boiled down to reaction time, what physiologists call the twitch response.

Carmody’s was exceptional. When he was recruited for the 22nd STS’s superelite Group 6, he’d been tested for carnosine, a natural indicator of fast-twitch fiber percentages. Intramuscular carnosine levels thirty percent higher than normal are often found in star athletes. Levels of plus-fifty are so rare they occur in only one of every hundred million people. Carmody’s plus-seventy was the only instance the Air Force project doctors had ever come across.

He stepped in toward the giant, his head low, his left hand snapping up to catch the weapon’s shaft inches below its circular, descending head. At the same time he turned the Kalashnikov up toward the balcony stairs in his right hand and triggered an extended burst, firing from the hip, taking rough aim at the shooter with his peripheral vision.

His move caught both men by surprise, which was exactly what he wanted. His gun still rattling up at the balcony, Carmody planted his feet wide, grabbed the mace’s handle, and wrenched it toward him with all his strength, the same stunt he’d used to disarm Bela. It had already worked once, and he was hoping twice would be the charm. Tearing it from the giant’s fingers, he whirled around on his heels and brought it back behind his head and hurled it forward and up at the guy on the stairs.

The morningstar smashed into Lazlo’s right leg above the knee, its spikes biting into him like crocodile teeth as he spasmodically pulled his trigger and streamed out a wildly off-target volley. The bullets going inches wide of Carmody, he stumbled back against the rail and dropped the gun. It spun down from the balcony to the floor like a detached airplane propellor.

Carmody swiveled back toward the giant, but he was no longer coming at him. He’d heard the speeding motorcycle and turned toward it in the span of a heartbeat.

Matei identified the rider at once. He did not need to see the face behind her helmet visor. He hadn’t seen it the first time, four months ago. He could tell by her body type and some raw and primitive sense that went beyond mere visual recognition.

It was the demoness. The one who had nearly crippled him, laid him out on that side street in the rain.

“You!” he screamed. An exclamation of naked, semiarticulate rage, it tore up through his damaged vocal cords like a chain shaking in a lunatic fist. “You!”

Kali straightened behind the Ninja’s handlebars.

It was at that precise moment that the first wave of drones struck the castle walls.

Seconds earlier, a group of ten Camp Turzii flying-wing drones had reached the end point of their flight. Separating from the larger swarm, they formed up into a close helical formation and made a whining, corkscrewing nosedive into Castle Graguscu’s eastern battlement.

Thump-thump-thump, thump-thump . They walloped the ramparts in rapid succession. Their EPX-2R charges detonated violently on impact, chunks of rough, blasted stone spraying out into the Transylvanian night like bits and pieces of scaled, shattered teeth. They flew scattered and smoking through the high, alpine darkness and rained down to the ground in loose, fiery showers.

A second onslaught followed, a third, a fourth. Thump-thump-thump, thump-thump. Walls chipped, cracked, and crumbled. A drone cluster smashed into the main tower and blew a gaping hole in it. Debris spattered from its curved outer face, smoke curling from the windows as its wooden furnishings, interior panels, carpets, curtains, and paintings burst into orange flames.

The drones kept coming in tight, directed groups. The walls trembled. Long fissures spider-veined through them as they began falling apart. Debris hailed onto the scalloped front steps, clattered and bounced off the overturned Rezvani, and went skittering across the cobbled apron below.

In the Great Hall, Kali was two seconds from closing the distance between herself and Matei when a cluster of simultaneous explosions shook everything around her. The air roared. The floor bounced under her wheels. The ribbed, vaulted brickwork overhead groaned and buckled. A mass of brick and mortar collapsed directly in front of her, the crumbled masonry spilling down and piling up in a huge, dusty heap.

Suddenly Matei was gone.

She sliced her handlebars to the left, leaning hard into the turn, her foot skidding over the marble floor to keep the bike from pancaking onto its side. A millisecond slower, and she would have been crushed underneath the pile of rubble.

She swung a wide loop around it, cut sharply to her right, and scrubbed speed, halting several feet from the foot of the balcony stairs. Where was Carmody?

She looked to her left, looked to her right. Then she looked straight ahead and up. And she saw him.

The Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, he was climbing the balcony stairs, taking them two at a time. On the balcony itself, the freelancer was weakly leaning back against the rail, looking down at him, his right knee gushing blood, the handle of the mace sticking straight out of it. His carbine was gone.

There were more thumping blasts. The whole hall shook. Kali felt the floor wobble and throb. It was as if the castle’s very foundation was shifting under her wheels.

She kept her gaze on Carmody. Above her, he went bounding up the final few stairs to the balcony.

The hall shook.

Carmody took the last two or three stairs to the top with a single leap. Then he was on the balcony, facing the operator who’d killed the girl.

The guy leaned weakly against the rail, facing him. His right leg was hemorrhaging, the mace head buried in his lower thigh. Carmody saw blood pooled under his feet. The weapon had torn up the whole vine-like network of arteries above his kneecap.

“What is your name?” the operator said.

Carmody looked at him. Another chain of explosions struck the castle. The balcony rocked. Chunks of the ceiling plummeted down nearby.

“Your name,” the operator said. “Tell me. I want to know who it is that ends my life.”

Carmody looked at him.

“You first,” he said.

Something else came crashing down. The operator nodded. His lips curled into a grimace.

“Lazlo,” he said. It came out sounding like a curse. Full of hatred and aggression. “Now yours. Tell me. ”

Carmody nodded.

“I won’t kill you in cold blood. Like you did the girl,” he said. “I’m giving you a chance, Lazlo. Because we’re both soldiers.”

A glimmer of desperate hope showed on the operator’s face. He couldn’t hide it.

Carmody wanted that. Wanted to see it there. Clinia from Cluj must have clung to the same kind of hope through the beatings. Right until Lazlo put a bullet in her head and sent her flying down to the castle floor.

Carmody stepped closer. Waded right through the puddled blood, stopped, and looked at him. Lazlo was barely upright. His right leg and foot juddered uncontrollably, some sort of muscle spasm. The morningstar’s shaft was sticking straight out of it.