Just north of Sanguine Springs
Lukas stumbled through the forest, Dieter's limp form still draped across his shoulders. Hard going, uphill through the trees. Far enough from town that the roaring conflagration no longer lit his pathway. Maybe far enough to evaluate the situation. He dropped to his knees and rolled the younger man onto his back.
Dieter's head lolled to the side, his face pale in the tree-filtered moonlight. Pale, with hollow cheeks and blue-tinged lips.
"Dieter. Dieter!" Lukas grabbed his teammate's shoulder, shaking him. Nothing. The kid's head flopped to the other side, eyes half-open and unseeing.
"Nein!" Lukas ripped open Dieter's plate carrier, popping the quick release with savage yanks. The ceramic plate clattered to the ground. He pressed two fingers to Dieter's carotid, ignoring the omen of a neck slicked with blood.
Lukas waited. Nothing. He repositioned, pressed harder. Still nothing.
Find the bleed and plug the hole, dummkopf.
With one hand supporting Dieter's head, Lukas rolled the wounded man from his back to his side. It was enough to see the truth.
Pine needles already darkened and slick, soaked by the blood seeping off Dieter's back. Blood flowing, slowly now, from a shrapnel perforation in the back of the man's neck; an inch of jagged glass still sticking from the wound.
Glass, cutting through muscle and artery and nerves.
A fatal blow. He must have bled out in seconds.
He rolled Dieter onto his back and stared into the dead man's face. Eyes open, staring ahead, as if they could pierce the veil and see into the next world.
Lukas sat back on his heels, numb. Dieter's lifeless form. Suppressed gunfire echoed off in the town. It didn't register. His hands were shaking.
Back in town, the gunfire died away. Even at this distance he could hear the flaming house as it groaned and collapsed further in on itself. He wondered if Matthias made it out in time.
"I'm sorry," Lukas whispered. He reached out, closing Dieter's eyes with two fingers. "I'm sorry, kid."
He stayed there for another moment, kneeling in the ash and pine needles beside the body of his teammate. His brother was somewhere in that wreckage. Maybe dead. Maybe alive. As if either made a difference.
Where was everybody? He keyed his mic. "Rigel, this is Claw One Mobile, what is our status?" His only reply was the ringing, high-pitched silence of tinnitus.
"Rigel, come in," he tried again. "We've had some casualties. What is the overall status?"
No answer.
Lukas swore. He flipped through channels, trying and failing to make contact on every frequency.
Rigel. Johansen. His own men, stationed outside while he had searched the target's house. Nobody answered the call.
His men had died. All of them, maybe.
As dead as Dieter.
Lukas buried his face in his hands. He knelt alone, lit by the distant glow of the burning town painting the trees orange. His mind echoed, replaying something he'd told Johansen that night—"This will be like shooting fish in a barrel."
But fish don't shoot back. It stank from the beginning. But now? It felt like a setup. One that cost his men their lives.
Lukas's stomach turned to ice. He closed his eyes and fought for control, finding only a blank numbness.
The numbness lasted thirty seconds. Maybe less.
Then the fury came.
Lukas surged to his feet, chest heaving. His boot found a rotten log at the clearing's edge—he kicked it once, twice, three times until it exploded into splinters and punk wood. The sound cracked through the trees like breaking bones.
"Verdammte Schei?e!" The words tore from his throat, raw and guttural. He kicked again, obliterating what remained. "Verdammt!"
He spun back toward Dieter's body, hands fisted so tight his knuckles went white.
The grenade. That damned grenade rolling across the floor. A simple enough object.
But it wasn't. It was a forked intersection in the road of fate. Black and white, versus a sea of infinite grays.
Down one? Dieter, his teammate—his soldier. Unable to move. Unable to understand the sudden complexity of decisions. Able only to throw the grenade.
Down the other?
His brother. A former leader, former idol of the company. The golden boy who did no wrong, until the night he lost his knee and his nerve. Lukas had seen to it that Matthias had the freedom to seek whatever other life he sought. He had prayed for his brother to find that elusive peace, the one he doubted existed. And instead?
Instead he turned coat, joining up to protect the exact sort of evil that Horus Overwatch lived to destroy. It made him sick.
One choice. One second.
And despite it all, he'd chosen Matthias. Kicked the grenade away, giving their enemy time to escape. A chickenshit, half-measure sort of decision, the sort that takes lives. The sort that sends your own man into the blast radius to save blood.
"I picked him." Lukas's voice was hoarse, directed at nothing. At the corpse. At himself. "I picked my brother over you."
His legs gave out. He dropped to one knee, head bowed.
Team leader makes the hard calls. Picks the mission over sentiment. That's the job.
Except he hadn't picked the mission. He'd picked Matthias. Family over the contract. Family over the men who'd trusted him, who'd followed his orders into this godforsaken town without question.
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How many times had he drilled it into them? Remember, you don't rise to your level of excellence, you fall to your level of training. In together, out together. No man left behind.
And now?
He was the only man left.
The last one standing.
Team leader.
What a joke.
His hand moved on instinct, reaching for the small notebook in the inside of his plate carrier. A Fieldnotes pocket notebook in a black Cordex waterproof keeper. His on-the-go mission logbook. Time to act like a leader and record those he had lost in the mission details.
He pulled a steel-bodied pen from the same inner pocket and clicked the button at its dry end. The pen clicked smoothly, its miniature report echoing off the trees. His fingers wrapped around the knurled surface. Deceptively simple, the Montblanc sold for more than some men took home in a week. It had belonged to Matthias before—he shook the thought from his head.
Forget him. I hope the traitor died.
Lukas opened the notebook to the latest page. He rested it upon his knee to list the names of his KIA, the pen's tip resting against the paper when he stopped. The last thing he wrote still hovering two lines above on the crisp vanilla-colored paper.
An initial, a surname, and a single, oversized question mark.
H. Caine?
He stared at the partial name.
They'd been given a target package—low-risk, they'd said. Minimal security. Quick in-and-out for a clean kill. Simple contract work.
Someone fed us to the wolves.
The anger shifted. Crystallized. Not the fury at his fallen idol of a brother, nor the cold rage of self-loathing anymore—it was something sharper.
Cleaner.
This wasn't a botched op. This was a setup.
They'd been burned. Sold out. Served up to whatever the hell was waiting in that house, and now his men were dead because someone signed off on it. Someone named H. Caine thought Horus Overwatch disposable enough to throw into the grinder.
Lukas closed his eyes. He took a breath, then wrote the names of each man he failed that night. Then, with careful, deliberate action, he crossed out the earlier question mark. He replaced it with two exclamation points, then drew a black border around the partial name of the man who had set them up.
Lukas closed the notebook, retracted his pen, and stuck both inside his body armor. He'd made up his mind. The target package was a trap. It could remain unfinished.
"Good riddance to the contract," he muttered. His jaw set. "Now it's personal."
But first, he had a promise to keep, or at least partially fulfill.
Dieter couldn't stay here. Animals would find him by morning. Maybe worse—whoever ran the ambush might send cleanup crews through the woods.
No time for a proper burial. No time for sentiment.
Lukas scanned the clearing, eyes adjusting to the darkness. Twenty feet to the left, a shallow depression in the ground where an old tree had torn free, roots and all. Close enough.
He dragged Dieter's body to the depression, moving with mechanical efficiency. Laid him flat. Removed the dog tags with a sharp yank—one for the chain around his own neck, one for his pocket. Stripped the sidearm from Dieter's thigh holster, checked the magazine. Fourteen rounds. He took the spare mags too.
The plate carrier he left. Too bulky, too identifiable.
Fallen logs, birch, pine, and oak. Mossy and moth-eaten, but all he could lay hands on in this place and time. Lukas gathered the materials from a twenty-yard radius of Dieter's body, building a punky wood cairn over Dieter's torso and face. Not much. Enough to keep the scavengers off for a day or two. Enough to give the kid some dignity.
When the last log was in place, Lukas stood over the grave. No words came. What was there to say?
He touched two fingers to his forehead, then pressed them to the top of the cairn.
Ruhe in Frieden, Dieter.
Then he picked up his MCX, turned and walked away, his shadow flickering on the ground through the trees like an old black and white movie of a vengeful hunter.
It was time to find out more about H. Caine.
Brad staggered down the gravel circle, side-stepping fallen branches and broken glass. Matthias's dead weight draped like an inner tube full of silly putty across his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Each step sent white-hot daggers through his ribs—he would have quite the bruise in the morning. Minimum. His breath came in full, wheezing pulls, but he kept moving. Behind him, Jake's house burned orange against the black velvet sky.
Behind him, Jael marched, stolen MCX held ready at her hip. She jabbed at their prisoner, forcing him to keep moving forward. The man stumbled, hands bound behind his back by his own zip-cuffs. He kept his head down, shoulders slumped in defeat.
The town sat in silence. No gunfire now. No shouts. Just the distant groan of burning timber and the crunch of their footsteps through pine needles, gravel, and ash.
The quiet was wrong. Eerie. Like the forest itself was holding its breath.
Brad shifted Matthias's weight, biting back a grunt as his ribs screamed in protest. The younger man's head lolled against his shoulder, unconscious but breathing. He muttered low, in his native tongue. Mein Bruder. Dreaming of home, perhaps. It wasn't much. But it was something. That was enough to keep Brad moving.
Brad rounded the fallen lodgepole's footprint, steering the party towards his own house. This far from town, he had an impressive first aid stash for Matthias—as well as useful tools if they needed to interview their prisoner.
As the house loomed closer, Jael swore behind him. Brad turned, feeling Matthias's limbs flop weighty with momentum. By the time he turned, Jael had the rifle's barrel in the invader's face. "Move your feet, Zevel," she shouted.
But the man refused to move. He stood, feet planted. "I'm not going in there." He almost kept his voice from breaking. "I'm not going in there—the fat man and that robot girl will shoot me again."
Brad's breath caught in his throat. "Robot girl?" The words came out before he could stop them. Pain forgotten, he tromped back towards the prisoner. The man quailed at his approach, but a well-placed rifle jab from Jael kept him in place.
Wrapping his fingers around his body armor, Brad lifted the zip-tied man from the ground. He held him two inches off the ground, staring into his ever-widening eyes.
"Talk," he said. Flat. No room for negotiation.
The prisoner's words tumbled out in a rush. "The girl with the robot arm. Allison Myles. She's why we came here. She's an e-terrorist, in league with Jade Tide hackers. She hired you all, didn't she?" He twisted his head, trying to look at Jael again. Somehow, even after taking him down and frogmarching him at gunpoint, she seemed the lesser of two evils. "I don't even know why she needed security, with her shooting. Took out two of my team without blinking. And the old guy with the Tommy gun—he's crazy. Absolutely fandeme crazy—"
Brad's world tilted.
Allison is alive.
Relief hit him first—a flood of it, warm and overwhelming, threatening to buckle his knees. She was alive. She'd survived.
She'd fought.
Then came the dread, cold and sharp on the heels of relief. His ears filled with a roaring noise, as blood rushed to his head. Or was that something else?
She was the target? Still in danger. Still in that house with who knows how many killers out to get her.
"How many of you are left?" Brad barked.
"I don't know!" the prisoner said, shrinking back in his armor like a turtle into its shell. "My radio's dead; she nearly blew my head off with that damned revolver."
Way to go, Allie. But not good intel. The roaring in his ears grew louder, now like a river.
"Move." Brad's voice came out hoarse. He dropped the prisoner to his feet, shifted Matthias's weight and turned, his pace quickening despite the agony in his ribs. "Both of you, move. Now." He had to get inside. To patch up Matthias, and save his niece.
Jael shoved Johansen forward. The mercenary stumbled, caught himself, and started walking again, muttering something under his breath that might have been a prayer.
Brad's mind raced. Allison. Two kills. Tony, with a Tommy gun.
Whatever had happened in that house while he was gone, it hadn't been clean. It hadn't been simple.
And it wasn't over.
He pushed through the pain, through the exhaustion, till his feet touched the steps of his porch.
Brad stopped. The porch was shaking, shaking at the same frequency as the ever-loudening roar—a noise he realized was not confined to his head. For the hundredth time that night, his stomach lurched.
"Come on," he shouted, pounding across the deck towards the front door.
"What's wrong?" Jael asked, still covering the mercenary ten yards back.
"Allison! Tony! We've got to get them out before the whole damned house is underwater!"