Ramez Naam - Nexus

Tattoo-boy was enraged. He was coming up to his feet, pulling the knife out of his arm with his remaining good hand. The rifle was at Sam's feet. She grabbed it. The wounded thug charged, bellowing, bloody knife in his left hand, completely out of control.

Sam swung for his knees with the rifle, connected. Her blow struck one knee in mid-stride and hammered it against the brick wall. He went halfway down, scrabbled to get up on his other leg. Sam was faster. She rose up, spun to her right through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, brought the butt of the rifle around in a whistling, blurringly fast arc that ended in a sickening wet crack against his temple, driving his head into the brick. The carbon fiber butt of the rifle splintered and cracked from the blow. The thug's eyes rolled into the back of his head and he toppled over.

There was motion behind her. Sam turned. Kade was on the ground. The first thug, Tough-bitch, was charging her, knife swinging, face enraged.

Sam dropped low, stepped forward inside his swing, and drove the barrel of the rifle like a spear, deep into his abdomen. He collapsed forward onto it, his momentum impaling him. The end ground into bone inside him. The man groaned in pain and anger, his eyes still fierce, and tried to push himself back and off of the impaling rifle.

Sam pulled the trigger, fired the taser round into his savaged guts. He spasmed, roared. She fired again. The man groaned louder. His eyes were still open. He was still struggling to get free of her. She pulled the trigger again and again until it clicked empty. The thug screamed and finally collapsed against her.

She was sweating. Her heart was pounding in her chest. The one she'd impaled was still breathing. They both were. Good. She had a lot of questions for these two. It wouldn't do for them to die too soon. It wouldn't do at all.

There was still one more out there. Sam looked down the alleyway. The tall hooded figure was retreating into the shadows. The rifle she'd impaled the thug with was spent. Another rifle had fallen to the ground across the alley. She dropped the man slumped against her, dove for the other side of the alley, came up on one knee with the fallen taser rifle, aimed, fired.

The move saved her. Twin explosions came from where she'd been, knocking her over. Dust and smoke filled the alley. The wall where she'd left the fallen thug had been blasted open, revealing a jagged hole into the building beyond. The third-floor balcony above her and down the alley had collapsed in a third blast, taking much of the building wall with it.

The hooded man was gone.

Fuck. Kade.

She found him in the smoke, bleeding from multiple locations, unconscious, still breathing. There were plasticuffs on his wrists and ankles.

She scrambled for one of the knives, found it slick with blood and gore, used it to cut Kade free. The explosions had burst the thugs open at midsection. The explosives had been inside them. Their bodies were burning. Someone didn't want them talking. It was time to get the fuck out of here.

Sam hoisted Kade over her shoulder, sprinted toward the main street, pulled her phone as she went, pounded the emergency buttons, shouted into it as she ran. "Extract, extract! Man down! Extract, extract!"

Wats was back on the ground in the alley network and halfway to the main street when he heard it. Had that been a yell? A human scream? Or had he imagined it? He paused for a moment, listened. There. Another yell of some sort. Then gunfire. He turned back towards where he'd last seen Kade and Cataranes and broke into a run. Another scream. A man this time, not Kade. Another. And then the thuds of explosions. Fuck!

He yanked his pistol free, sprinted two blocks, turned a corner where he guessed the sounds had come from, saw smoke and dust and flames ahead, passed someone running the other way. It was a tall hooded figure. Wats got a fleeting impression of a hooked nose inside the hood, a bald head. Wait! The monk who'd followed Kade the previous night. Wats spun. The figure was retreating in the other direction, almost around the corner. He leveled his pistol.

"Stop!" he yelled.

The hooded monk kept running.

Fuck. He aimed low to take the man in the legs, fired twice. Too late, the man was around the corner, shielded by the brick.

Fuck. Forget him. Find Kade.

He turned, sprinted the rest of the way to the source of the smoke. There were bodies, burning, burst from the inside. Gore covered much of the alley. Brick walls had collapsed. Suicide troopers, whether they'd known it or not. Their facial structures looked Thai. Their muscles were grotesquely large. A shattered rifle lay near one of the bodies, its business end covered in blood, the stock of it destroyed as if by impact. Another rifle lay against the opposite wall. He checked it. Taser rounds. Someone had wanted to take Kade or Cataranes alive.

There were no other bodies in the alley. Either Kade and Cataranes had gotten away, or someone else had taken them. He looked again at the dead men. Their presence suggested that Kade and Cataranes had escaped.

He stepped into the intersection between alleys, turned around. Four choices. Where would they have gone? Would they have hidden in this maze? Or would they have headed back towards the relative safety of public places?

He heard shouts from down the alley, in the direction of the main street. There. He sheathed the knife and loped off in that direction, gun at the ready. Shapes ahead. Do or die time.

Eighty miles to the south, the USS Boca Raton held station in heavy seas in the Gulf of Thailand. Monsoon waves splashed over the rounded, matte black upper surface. The submersible covert operations craft rode with its conning tower just two meters over the sea to avoid detection. Despite the Boca Raton 's huge size, Thai defense radars slid off its smooth surface, disappeared into its radar-absorbent materials.

A Thai Royal Navy ship patrolled these waters. An Indian-built Kolkata class destroyer. The captain of the Boca Raton would rather be thirty meters under, but his orders were to stay in continuous uplink, except in the case of imminent detection or harassment by the Thai Royal Navy.

The Kolkata could only find them by dumb luck, the captain knew. Despite its hundred and thirty-meter length, the Boca Raton presented a radar cross section the size of a rowboat, and a sonar signature even smaller when still. The high seas and surface sounds of crashing waves made the ship effectively invisible. Still, dumb luck had killed plenty of men. His crew was on constant alert.

Atop the conning tower, a directional maser powered through the monsoon rain and clouds, bouncing a narrow beam of data off a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites, hopping from one to the next as they hurtled through the sky at eight kilometers a second. Unless something should fly directly into that narrow beam, the uplink was undetectable.

Two decks below the bridge, in a cramped control center covered in displays, Garrett Nichols analyzed data Cataranes had produced from the walk down Sukchai Market. Next to him, Jane Kim sifted through databases and the web, looking for additional information on two of the students at the party, the anarchist Baroma Nantakarn and the loose-lipped Chuan Suttikul. Another console showed a deep net trawl for data on the monk who'd followed Lane and Cataranes. Bruce Williams was off duty, back at his bunk.

"Combat! Combat!" Jane called out.

Nichols jerked his head up in time to see most of the data feeds from Cataranes cut out. He moved his eyes to the feeds from Lane. Most were down. GPS from both phones remained up. They were in an alley between the Buddha's Kiss and the main street.

"What the hell?" he said.