Saturday November 3rd

Breece sat in a booth in the small restaurant on K Street. He was in casual business attire, his hair and eye color changed, an extra forty pounds of false weight on his frame, temporary prosthetics changing the shape of his face. He watched on his slate as people filed in to Westwood Baptist. Security funneled the arrivals through checkpoints, scanned them for weapons, bombs, Nexus.

Inside the church, Miranda Shepherd was already beside her husband, just yards from the podium where he would stand and give his rousing speech exhorting Texans to elect Daniel Chandler, a true servant of the Lord, to the governorship.

The speech would be broadcast live to millions. And it would have a more… explosive conclusion than the audience might expect.

Breece smiled to himself.

9.32am.

Almost showtime.

Kade stared out at the sea and the darkening sky. The sun had set already, drowned in that endless ocean.

Was Shiva infiltrating minds already? Subverting them?

You paved the way, Ilya whispered in his thoughts.

“Yes,” Kade whispered aloud. “Yes, I did.”

He checked the time. In little more than an hour the PLF would use Nexus to kill again. Hundreds would die. Fault lines would be cracked even wider. Retributions and reprisals. More terror.

Su-Yong Shu had seen it. A war between human and transhuman. It was beginning. And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Nakamura, Sam, and Feng reviewed the plan one more time. Here – Lane’s rooms. Here – the doors the children came in and out of, the wing they were housed in. There – the vehicles by the house. There – the airfield, the hangar, the plane that Sam could fly, that could get her and the children to the Indian-occupied Andaman Islands.

Here, here, here, and here – the targets. Communications systems. Surveillance cameras. Radar. Missile launchers. Guard posts. Mobile guards on rotation.

They went through it again and again. Then it was time to go.

They launched the small inflatable boat. Thirty yards out Nakamura subvocalized a command, and the sub sank silently behind them, swallowed back up into the sea. Status updates scrolled across his retinal display as the sub set off on the next stages of its mission.

Ahead of him Sam and Feng sat on either side of the small boat. They were all in top-of-the-line chameleonware, their battle systems linked by short-range IR laser. Nakamura’s goggles painted them as translucent green outlines. He stared at Sam’s ghostly shape, and something tugged at his chest.

I hope you can forgive me, Sam, Nakamura thought. Someday.

Sam scanned the horizon as they moved in.

Her goggles picked out cameras on the house at the top of the cliff, drew red circles around them, around the guard post at the top of the cliff, around a soldier moving on patrol.