By the sound of it, the fighting had only grown more intense throughout the morning. The crack of small-arms fire had been almost drowned out by the all-consuming roar of close-support drones in the sky above them. The only noises to rise above that din were the stippling bangs of mortar fire and the pop-pop-popping of cluster bombs.

Firebase Jiminez was about two miles back from the new front. It was mainly a staging area for the SDF’s Autonomous Artillery Division. The AAD was made up of men and—mostly—drones from all the secular militia groups active in the Dallas area. The firebase itself wasn’t well-fortified. The only physical defense was a fence topped with razorwire to keep civilians out. That wouldn’t be much of a barrier for a determined assault. Until a couple of hours ago, Jiminez had been far enough from the front that an assault wasn’t considered possible.

After an hour of mixed jogging and running, Manny and ­Reggie took a left onto Park Lane and the firebase came into view. It had been built in the bones of an old apartment complex. Several buildings had been converted into offices and the rest left as barracks space. The apartments were situated across the road from a tall, very thin, parentheses-shaped building that looked out over a large field dotted with landing pads. The name “Top Golf Driving Range” was still visible on one side of the building.

Several hundred militiamen were hard at work throwing up defenses. Stihlglass sheets had been set up to screen a dozen machine-gun nests. Further back, soldiers piled sandbags in front of two howitzers. Manny and Reggie weren’t the only civilians trying to gain entrance. Fifty or so people clustered by a checkpoint in the middle of the road, a hundred yards ahead of the construction efforts.

The checkpoint was new, just a sandbag machine-gun emplacement manned by six fighters in powered body armor. They were overwatched by a pair of ancient Abrams tanks, positioned on either side of the road. The soldiers in the middle checked documents and let the occasional civilian through. They turned most people back. There were a lot of shouts and violent gestures on the part of the civilians. While Manny watched, one of the guards raised their rifle up and fired it just to the left of a screaming man’s face. He recoiled in fear and pain, clutched his ears, and staggered away from the checkpoint.