I’m obsolete in every way. Welga swallowed the bitter thought and shook Ammanuel’s hand. None of this was their fault. “I’m a civilian now. You can drop the rank.”

“Third woman to get into MARSOC. You’re a legend to some of us. You set the bar high for every Raider.”

“Thank you.”

“So why’d you quit?” Dark eyes met her own, utterly without guile.

Welga did the math on Ammanuel’s age. The operation in Marrakech happened in early 2088. They would’ve been seventeen years old and paying little attention to politics or world news. It had taken a year for the truth to emerge: that the American president wanted to demonstrate his toughness, but he couldn’t, not with the caliph preaching peace and love. He needed to provoke a war with a pacifist, so he sent the first American all-female Raider unit into a blackout area, with an unreliable double agent as their intel source. He gave himself the perfect cover story in case the operation went wrong.

It might be an ambush, Captain John Andrews Travis had said at the time. But we know how to wade through the bullshit, and our commander in chief says go, so that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to capture the target alive and unharmed, because you don’t inflict violence on a nonviolent person. Those are our orders.

“You can watch it in the archives,” she said.

On her feed, Connor raised his eyebrows at her terse reply. He’d been there, riding virtual for the operation until her squad crossed into the blackout zone, and he’d had a front-row seat for the aftermath.

Welga unclenched her fists. Jack Travis had been a mentor, almost a father, and he’d never talked down to his squad in spite of getting ripped by other men for leading a bunch of girls. “Captain and everyone else in my squad didn’t make it out of there. I was in the rear—and partly around a corner—when those assholes blew themselves up. Eight people, on their side. They took out their own kids. Took out my squad, too.”

Shock registered on Ammanuel’s face. “They all died?”

“Yeah. We were in a blackout zone, no comms. Worse, they had EMDs, which deactivated our pills, radios, and bots. Not only did they know we were coming, they knew exactly what type of soldiers we were. Then the president had the nerve to call it an error in judgment. Not his, of course, but my captain’s.”