For a moment, Roland focused his attention outside the little APC. His hindbrain collated the bursts and vibrations that echoed out around the battlefield. It compared them with his petabytes of stored combat data and the last map of Dallas he’d downloaded before severing his deck. In a couple seconds he had what his hindbrain assured him was an 80 percent accurate projection of the current fighting. It didn’t look good for the defenders.

“And what if it’s too much for you guys out there?” Roland asked. “You gonna expect my ass to murder a bunch of strangers to get you ’n your ‘fam’ home safe?”

Bigsby rolled his eyes. “It’s a bunch of fucking Martyrs. Maybe they caught the SDF with their pants down, but they’ll lose steam soon enough. Those savages are all baseline sapien. We got chrome on our side.”

Roland shrugged. “If you’re wrong, I’ma take one of your nipples home with me. Just a heads up.”

The other post-human’s face turned purple. It grew purpler still when Sardar laughed at the remark.

“Sorry, Bigs. It’s fucking funny, man.”

“It wasn’t a joke,” Roland assured them both.

They hit Dallas proper ten minutes later. Their arrival was heralded by the sounds of car horns, squealing brakes, and frustrated shouts. The songs of a city at war. Flashes of memory, from this same city, in a different war, shot through Roland’s mind. They kept him occupied while Bigsby and his squad prepped their combat gear. There was something almost comforting about the sound of men and women arming for battle. He remembered the way Mike ran through the lyrics of “Eye of the Tiger” before every op, and the careful way Jim had loaded his pre-battle meth pipe.

The krump of mortar fire and the boom of heavier artillery grew louder and louder. The sour scents of gamma-aminobutyric acid, cortisol, and epinephrine filled the cabin. Bigsby’s team had good game faces, but they were nervous.

“Bigs,” the driver’s voice crackled over the intercom, “I’m seein’ a shitload of hostile drone activity. Sky’s fucking angry right now. Might be best to dismount h–”

Roland smelled the fuel burning off in the wake of the Hellfire missile roughly a second before it hit. He knew the archaic munition didn’t have the ability to penetrate a Mattis APC, but he still warned his fellows.

“Missile’s a’comin.”

“What?” Sardar asked.

And then it hit. The impact rocked the vehicle on its axles and bounced its hapless passengers into the hard metal edges of the cabin. Roland bounced with them, although, for him, the pain of impact was more curiosity than actual discomfort. The driver braked hard. Roland heard and felt as the APC collided with what sounded like the outer wall of a large concrete building.