“Was that one of ours?”

“Negative sir,” Lieutenant Keiths could confidently answer. “Nothing of ours was cleared to drop that kind of payload, sir.”

“Do we have anyone in the area?” Potts asked, sick to his stomach. Or maybe I should ask if we did have anyone in the area . . .

“No one close enough, sir. No one too close, either.”

“Thank God for the second.”

“Yes sir. General, sir, I’m not reading any significant EM spike, no beta spike, no gamma spike. I don’t think that was a nuke, sir.”

“Well, that’s just peachy,” Potts growled. “It was still one big ever living fuck of an explosion.”

“Yes sir.”

Potts sighed, shaking his head. His boys just weren’t equipped for this kind of dirty fighting. They were old-school open battlefield trained, and this was urban street-to-street combat well beyond anything anyone had ever seen. The tanks and armor they had packed more than enough power for the job, but a hundred-ton tank wasn’t intended for driving through a damned city.

“Get me eyes on the area,” he ordered. “I don’t care if it’s from the ground, the sky, or orbit. Just get me something.”

“Yes sir.”

Eric would have been spitting dirt out of his mouth if he weren’t wearing powered armor with a full environmental seal. Assuming, that is, that he’d survived the concussion of the kinetic strike. As it was, he wiped said dirt off the face plate and double checked the setting on his GWIZ.

Only three-quarters to the top. Holy hell, are the Prims really that fucking crazy?

Central Park was flattened.

Or at least it was in the immediate area. Eric could see some trees still standing a few blocks down from his position, and behind him they were still intact to be sure. But where he’d taken his show was now an oblong crater beyond which a ring of trees were laid down like toppled dominoes. He examined the scene for a long moment, stunned by every detail he spotted, particularly when he happened to focus in on a building several blocks beyond the blast zone and spotted an immobile Drasin soldier drone embedded in the eighth floor.

Jesus. Crazy bastards.

Eric slowly and deliberately turned the dial back down to the halfway mark before he turned and leapt off to the east where Lyssa had run ahead of him.

Lyssa was spitting out dirt as she picked herself up off the ground, looking over her shoulder with wide eyes and a horror-filled expression. She didn’t know what had just happened, but a mushroom cloud was pretty much a universal sign of an atrocity. She felt a wave of relief when she spotted Weston’s black-green armor bounding over in her direction, and got to her feet to greet him as he landed.