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  However, until a proper sterilization group could be dispatched to the region, it would settle for isolation and containment.

  Several large asteroids had already been adjusted to keep them course from coming anywhere near the world over the next many cycles, just to prevent spores from being ejected in the impact. The world would have to be carefully sterilized before more… active forms of destruction might be considered to ensure that nothing again could ever take root.

  The probe consulted with the convocation, reporting the outcomes of the process thus far and received permission to continue along with congratulations on the deployment of an effective countermeasure.

  The Probe noted, with some pride, that its solution was being added to possible alternatives by probes across the galactic disk. Tens of thousands of probes were dealing with similar worlds, though on lower scales of development, and any tool in their arsenal would be one of value in the eternal war against life.

  Monitored communication from the world below drew its attention.

  Another experiment was coming to fruition.

  The probe slid closer to observe personally.

  *****

  USSOCOM Bunker, Virgina

  “We have a hit!”

  Isaacs and Pierson spun, both rushing across the room to where the technician had called out.

  “Where is it, Soldier?” Isaacs demanded.

  “Over Eastern Europe, drifting west,” The man said, “I think it’s coming down over Berlin.”

  Isaacs nodded, grabbing a phone up from the desk.

  “Isaacs,” He said gruffly into the phone. “Get the sled in the air, and enough tankers to get it to Germany.”

  Dan Markham snapped around from where he was examining the intercept data, “General! The Blackbird isn’t flight ready…”

  “I don’t care I said get in the air and do it now,” Isaacs ordered, ignoring the Skunkworks representative. “Call me when he’s moving, I’ll have more specific directions.”

  He slammed the phone down, eyes falling on Markham.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Dan,” Isaacs said firmly. “We don’t have time for testing.”

  Pierson quietly swiped her phone on and called into her own network.

  “Hale, we have a target.”

  *****

  Over New York

  Alex tiredly paused in mid-air, shifting a chunk of concrete and clearing the way for first responders to get their vehicles into the worst hit sections of the city. He settled the debris down in an empty lot, waving at the cops, paramedics, and firefighters that went racing by.

  “What is it?” He asked Pierson, a finger to his temple pushing the induction device in tighter so he could hear her better.

  He listened for a moment, nodding.

  “Germany. Roger that. No, I’m ok, I’m good, really.” Alex said, “I’m on my way. Do we have any assets in the area?”

  He was quiet a moment, disappointed by the response but unsurprised.

  “Alright. I’ll talk to you when I’m approaching the area. Let me know if anything changes.”

  With the conversation done, Alex took a last look around before he looked up and vanished into the skies with a crack of supersonic motion the only thing left in his wake.

  *****

  Chapter 4

  Lockheed Skunk Works Trials Field, Outside Burbank California

  Colonel Zack Brolin stepped out onto the baking tarmac of the test, his flight helmet thumping against his right thigh as he looked to the east where the sun was just starting to make itself known against the backdrop of the mountains.

  “It’s a nice night for a flight, Zack.”

  “Uh huh,” Brolin nodded, not looking at his RIO, his eyes instead falling on their ride for the coming mission.

  Shadow black, barely visible in the lights of the airfield, she was a sight. He’d always wanted to fly one of the SR71s, from as young as he could remember. It hadn’t seemed to be his fate, though, with the last of the birds being mothballed shortly after he’d joined the Air Force.

  Fate is a funny thing, Brolin thought as he started forward with his RIO, Lt Colonel Jeff Beakman keeping pace.

  Normally, of course, he wouldn’t have a Radar Intercept Officer. The blackbird normally held a space for a Reconnaissance Systems Officer instead, but this wasn’t a recon op and their sled wasn’t packing a camera.

  “Where do you two think you’re going!?”

  Brolin grimaced as he recognized the voice. The Skunk Works supervisor was a one star with a chip on his shoulder, and he took his procedures seriously.

  “Orders from SOCOM, Sir.” Brolin said. “We have a target to service.”

  “Not in that plane you don’t,” Brigadier General Collen growled. “That death trap hasn’t even been test flighted yet.”

  “I know, Sir. That’s my job,” Brolin reminded him, repeating himself, “Orders came down through SOCOM.”

  “I don’t care if they came from the White House, Colonel,” Collen snapped. “Procedures are locked in stone. You don’t fly that thing on an op until it’s been tested.”

  Brolin exchanged a glance with his RIO, having no problem decoding the thoughts on the other man’s mind. They both knew what the bird had been refitted to do, and just how big a deal it was. No one knew what was behind the superhuman attacks across the world, but the two air force officers knew that it was the blackbird’s job to hunt it down and blow it out of the sky.

  They saluted the General in unison, then continued toward the blackbird.

  Collen gritted his teeth, “Stand down, Colonel! Lt Colonel!”

  Neither man hesitated in their steps, as an old man with Master Sgt chevrons ran up beside to keep pace with them.

  “She’s locked and loaded,” The Master Sgt who was clearly past his retirement age said, “We’ve put eighty thousand pounds of fuel on board, but the engines are going to suck that down in no time if you don’t get her up into hypersonic and into SCRAMJET mode, you hear me? Don’t muck around below Mach Four, or you’ll sputter out of fuel before you hit the Canadian border.”

  “Clear, Master Sgt,” Brolin said.

  Master Sgt Kieran nodded, “Good. You’ll have to retank anyway, at least twice, which means dropping sub-sonic. She’s a pig at that speed, and may as well leak like a sieve too. Spend as little time at low speed as you can.”

  He hesitated, “She’s packing three AIM-26A Falcons, and trust me when I say you do not want to know what it took to get three of those rebuilt for service. The guidance on them is the best we have, however, and you can take over manually and guide them in yourself if you have to. We’ve managed to get them inside the fuselage, don’t ask me how. You’ll need clearance from the top to arm them.”

  “We understand, thank you Master Sergeant.” Brolin stopped at the ladder to the cockpit, letting Beakman move on ahead of him.

  Kieran snorted, glancing back to where the General was glowering at them in seething silence but had apparently opted not to call for guards to stop them from saddling up. He wasn’t surprised, it wouldn’t end well for him if he did, the Master Sergeant expected. Orders had come down from SOCOM, which meant that while they might only have another Brigadier’s name on them, they all but had the President’s the seal to back that up.

  Frankly, Kieran didn’t know what the man was thinking. There was a time for drawing the line when it came to following procedures, but the current situation clearly called from taking risks. The man was a good peacetime coordinator for special projects, he’d proven that over the years by keeping the loss of life during experimental testing to a minimum. It just looked like he couldn’t adapt to the new scenario.

  Some men can’t handle the chaos of war.

  “It’s been a pleasure, working on her again,” Kieran said fondly as he looked back to the shadow black of the titanium fuselage, reaching up to pat the titanium of the aircraft. “I never thought I’d get another chance. I just hope we didn’t fuck u
p.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Brolin said with a smile before he hooked his hand into an upper rung and pulled himself up the ladder.

  Kieran waited until they were in the cockpit, the canopy closed, then he pulled the ladder back and cleared the space around the aircraft as the engines whined to life. He knew as well as the two crew that if anything went wrong, he wouldn’t be finding out about it from them. At hypersonic speeds, well it would be a minor miracle if the bodies were ever discovered, let alone for either of them to survive.

  The blackbird slowly began to turn and move away from the hangar, and he backed up to give it room before finally turning and walking back toward the General.

  “Save it,” Kieran said, holding up his hand before the Brigadier could say a word. “I’m retired. If you want my pension, good luck. I only came back for the sled.”

  The Brigadier scowled, but said nothing as the seventy year old Master Sergeant walked past him and back into the hangar.

  *****

  Germany

  Berlin was ablaze.

  Alex stared, growling low in his throat as he slowed below the speed of sound, the shiver of the sonic boom catching up and passing him almost an afterthought. He reached up and tapped the induction set on his ear.

  “Pierson, Hale.”

  “Pierson here, what is it, Captain?”

  “Do we have any status updates for what’s happening in Berlin?”

  Pierson snorted over the connection, “It’s all over the news, Captain. It looks like Islamic fundamentalists in a direct clash with Neo-Nazi groups, both sides armed with military grade weapons and several changed on either side.”

  “Great. Shithead versus shithead, who cares who wins?” Alex asked rhetorically. “If they weren’t fighting in the middle of the god damned city, I’d just let them have at it… maybe find some popcorn and enjoy the show.”

  “Very droll, Captain. What are you going to do?” Pierson asked.

  “Do we have any information on the target?” Alex asked, eyes lifting to scan the skies.

  “Still on approach,” Pierson confirmed. “You made good time.”

  “Then I’m going to clean house, make things pretty for our visitor,” He said, reaching back up to the induction system. “I’ll get back to you shortly. Hale out.”

  *****

  USSOCOM Bunker, Virgina

  “Captain! Captain!” Pierson called, swearing as the link was closed. “Damn it.”

  She turned around, “Someone needs to tell the President that we’re about to have a diplomatic issue in Berlin.”

  Isaacs grimaced, “Damn it, relations with the EU in general have been a little rocky since the last Administration, but the German Chancellor really doesn’t like us much. I don’t think he’ll put up much of a stink over it, as long as Hale doesn’t get carried away and do something stupid, but we’re going to be hearing about this for a while, you can bet on that.”

  Left unspoken was the obvious fact that the German, and likely EU, diplomats would use it as leverage in whatever negotiations might come up. Even Hale’s status as a ‘former’ US Marine would only distance them so far from his actions and whatever collateral damage was caused since it was clear that he was operating with US Government cooperation at the very least.

  Isaacs sighed, “I’ll tell the President. Probably nothing better we could have ordered Hale to do anyway.”

  “You’re assuming he’d have listened to any other option,” Pierson said dryly.

  “Assuming that, yes.”

  Pierson didn’t bother trying to convince the general that Hale would have listened. She knew he would have, taken the order into consideration, and then tossed it right out unless it made sense to him. When he’d been in the Marines, Hale followed orders almost without fail… the only exceptions being when he held information he felt the orders didn’t take into account but did change the situation.

  Most times, he’d been right. There were good reasons why American forces were not trained to follow orders blindly, after all.

  Since retiring, however, Hale had very much decided that he didn’t take orders from very many sources any longer. That trait had become exaggerated even more since he’d changed, something that she and Hale’s compatriots attributed to the effects of the genetic tinkering he’d been subjected to.

  He would listen, consider what he was told, and then go ahead and make his own decision.

  Frustrating for someone in her position, for at the moment there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  “Can we get into the local surveillance system?” She asked, leaning over the man who was working at the hardwired connection to the NRO.

  “Not in real time,” He shook his head, “We do have the raw satellite feed from the networks on scene, however.”

  “That’ll do,” She said, “Put them up on all the screens.”

  “All of them?”

  “Every one you can intercept. Record everything, and get people analyzing it right away. We might be able to help if we pick up on something fast enough.”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  *****

  Berlin

  A lit Molotov cocktail flipped through the air, thrown from one group or another, crossing the line that lay between the crowd and the police who were trying desperately to keep the situation from devolving any further than it had already. The German police hunkered down behind their riot shields, hoping to keep from being splashed by the burning fuel when the bottle smashed.

  A blur flashed between the police and the line of rioters, and both sides seemed to pause and blink as a man appeared between them, snapping the burning bottle in mid air and glaring out over the crowd.

  The man carefully placed it on the ground, flipped a soft salute to the police, and then was instantly gone so quickly that many of the people on either side stayed in place, blinking, as they tried to determine if they had actually just seen what they thought they had seen.

  Hale, however, was already moving on.

  The number of changed in the immediate area was, quite frankly, appalling.

  He was counting dozens, at least, showing signs of enhanced abilities, and they were all in a state of war with one another in the middle of a metropolitan city.

  This is just nuts. Hong Kong was bad enough, and there was only a handful of us fighting it out there.

  So far, thanks be to whatever gods one might want to pray to, there didn’t seem to be anything like China’s Dragon or, for that matter, himself. He was seeing a lot of thuggish types with enhanced strength, some speed, maybe a few blaster types as well. Nothing he couldn’t deal with, if it weren’t for the numbers.

  Hale talk a moment to examine the situation more closely, drifting slowly a few feet above the crowd as he twisted around. Hale’s perception of the world slowed markedly as he examined the riot with critical eyes. There were more of the changed than he’d ever seen in one place, and there is something strange about them.

  What is going on? Hale wandered as he picked out one of the things I was bothering him. These look like regular people, no gang affiliations, no racial consistencies…

  It didn’t make sense, every previous encounter he’d seen so far had been focused on groups of people who identified with one another. There was none of that here, despite what Pierson and told him. Oh, certainly, he could pick out a few of the Nazi flags, swastikas, Islamic symbols, and so forth… But they were scattered, almost like islands in the roiling mass of rioters.

  This doesn’t make any sense.

  Hale didn’t have time to think about it unfortunately, if something wasn’t done in a hurry Berlin was going to burn. He left his few seconds of slow consideration behind and flung himself into the fight at the high speed he dared with this many people so close. A blast of wind, almost 600 miles an hour actually knock some rioters right off their feet and he swept by them, even though the force dissipated almost instantly as he passed.

  He found a brutish thug
pounding on a woman who is on the ground, and didn’t even pause, delivering a single punch as he went past. The brute was flung up and back by the impact crashing into the closest building and slumping to the ground. Hale didn’t bother checking to see if his target was down, unconscious, or dead.

  He had things to do.

  ****

  SOCOM Bunker, Virgina

  News video from Berlin was going out nearly live on all the major networks as Pierson and the rest of the SOCOM thinktank watched every scrap of feed they could get their hands on. The news channels had been carried it nonstop for hours already, even before it broke out into full-fledged violence, but as the riot reached its peak every channel pre-empted its regular programming and unfiltered websites running the broadcasts struggled to keep from being overloaded by the demand.

  Announcers on every channel excitedly related the events as they happened on the screen to an audience of hundreds of millions of people.

  Up to the point of Hale’s entry into the melee, it was a familiar reporting of the events. Everyone had seen riots on the TV in the past, and while this was more violent than most… and certainly more dramatic due to the presence of so many of the newly changed individuals fighting one another and assaulting civilians, somehow it still felt familiar.

  Then the cameras caught the most well known figure in the world entering the fight, appearing from nowhere to catch a Molotov cocktail from mid-air before flashing off to pursue the fight that was spreading through the city. Cameras tried valiantly to follow the action, failing almost entirely, but managed to catch just enough tantalizing clips of the man in action for the talking heads to drone on about without repeating themselves too much.

  The man in the now infamous military fatigues, clothing that had already been made famous by the US military but had now begun to explode in sales as everyone hopped on the trend.

  In fact, ads for digicam bikinis were running in between the announcers narration of the events in Berlin.

  Pierson wondered if Hale had noticed this particular turn of events yet, or if he’d been too busy to spot the adverts for digicam underwear for children among a billion other things. She was pretty sure most of them had already existed before, but the primetime ads were new at least.