reluctantly, as if it somehow represented safety, and gazed upward at the crumbling remains of what had once been a city at the center of the world: New York. Millions of people had lived and worked there, businesses and homes had been crammed into every square centimeter of it. They had all thought, she realized, that it would go on forever. And then things had changed.
The bombs hadn’t touched the old United States directly… most had been targeted at China and the Russian Protectorate. But they had come so close, so horrifyingly close to destroying civilization and driving the whole of humanity back to the Paleolithic. There had been riots, cities had burned and people had starved. Troops had patrolled the streets.
Looking out at the shadowed, empty streets, now overgrown by grass and trees, she could feel the ghosts of those people haunting the ruins. She tried to imagine what it had been like, but it was just too alien. She was glad she hadn’t seen it, and she didn’t want to see it happen to her world… to her daughter’s world. That was worth dying to prevent.
She pulled her jacket tighter around her against the chill; the sky was grey and there was the feel of imminent snow in the air. The Old City seemed so much more real down here. She had passed over it and by it so many times in flyers, never imagining what it would be like to walk among the buildings. It wasn’t closed to the public, but very few people came here. Very few people ventured outside the megalopolises at all, she reflected sadly. If things collapsed again, those people would all die.
She started slightly when she heard the other groundcar approaching down the narrow, barely-maintained service road, but made herself relax. She was expecting it; it was why she was there. The woman who stepped out of the vehicle was familiar to her from various political and celebrity events: exquisitely dressed even for this clandestine meeting, she was blond, tall and statuesque, and she mingled freely with the glitterati of Capital City. Val knew she was a veteran who’d been in the business for decades, despite her seeming youth.
“Good afternoon, Senator,” Amanda Sanchez said, offering a hand.
“Call me Valerie,” she insisted, shaking the hand, “since we’re conspirators.”
“Then I’m Amanda,” the other woman nodded. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your husband, Valerie.”
“Thank you, Amanda, but the way I feel I can best honor his memory is to carry on the work that got him killed.”
“You really believe that someone assassinated Glen to suppress this information?” Amanda frowned. “It’s just so hard to believe.”
“I know, Amanda,” Val said, biting back the urge to snap at the woman’s inanity. “But if I’m wrong, I’m just a grieving widow with a paranoid imagination, no real harm done. If I’m right, though…”
“Yes, I can see what you mean. Well, I have the information you asked for… I was able to access Ozzie Fuentes’ last log-in to his network’s system and I just ordered the results re-computed using his credentials.”
“Have you read the results?”
“Yes I have,” Amanda told her, pulling a small tablet from her bag. She looked at it, shaking her head. “But it’s pretty thin, Valerie… basically, the program they have analyzes behavioral patterns over time to try to discern hidden variables. For some reason, Ozzie had been looking at Vice President Dominguez.”
“As I said, it’s pretty slim… all it found was that Dominguez was something of a dilettante until five years ago, when he became more set in his ways.”
“What do you mean ‘set in his ways?’”
“Well,” she glanced at the tablet, trying to remember, “he had never stayed with one woman for more than a few months, but he’s been with his current girlfriend for five years. He used to skip around from one passionate hobby to the next-competitive chess, martial arts, you know-but he’s been an avid rock climber for the last five years. Used to jump from one group of friends to another, but has been close with the same group of people for the last five years… you get the idea.”
Valerie’s brow furled. That was intriguing, but there had to be more. “Did anything happen five years ago? Before the lack of changes?”
“Um…” Amanda scrolled through the document on the tablet. “Yes, actually.” She sounded surprised. “He travelled to Aphrodite just after the war, for a conference. It was when he returned that the program noticed the discrepancies.”
Valerie felt the hackles rising on the back of her neck, but she wasn’t sure why. There was something surreal about this… something she couldn’t quite pin down. But that wasn’t why she was here anyway.
“Thank you for your help, Amanda,” she told the woman, holding her hand out for the tablet. The journalist handed it over, with a trace of reluctance. “Trust me,” Valerie said, noting the hesitation, “if and when I can piece something together, I
“Valerie!” A voice buzzed urgently in her ear. “Get down!”
Without thinking, Valerie grabbed Amanda and dragged her to the ground behind her vehicle, just as something passed through the air where her head had been moments before…
Shannon Stark sighed with relief as she saw Valerie’s vehicle pull up at the end of the service road. She had been lying motionless in a hide on the fourth floor of this ruined apartment building for nearly seven hours, since before dawn, and the Senator’s car had been the first movement she’d seen. Which was disappointing… she had hoped to spot whoever came to make the hit long before Valerie arrived. She’d never forgive herself if she let anything happen to Valerie… not after Glen had died trying to help her. Not to mention how Jason would feel about it… he and Valerie had a short-lived relationship six years before, when they’d been stranded alone together in the high deserts of Aphrodite during a Protectorate incursion there. It was long over, but she knew he still cared about her.
When Shannon saw the second vehicle approaching, she reflexively reached for the rifle lying beside her in the hide, even though she’d been expecting it. She recognized Sanchez, the journalist, from the file she’d pulled when Valerie had contacted her about Fuentes. The two of them had worked for the same newsnet, though Sanchez was much farther up the food chain. Shannon looked her car over thoroughly with the thermal scanners in her binoculars, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn’t expected to: Sanchez was a solid citizen with an extensive background.
Of course, so was Vice President Dominguez…
“Major Stark,” she heard a call over her ‘link’s ear bud. “Check out the building at your eleven o’clock, fifth floor, on thermal.”
“Roger,” she muttered. She shifted around to her left, playing her binoculars over the partially-burned down hotel across the street.
There. Through one of the windows she could see a shape barely moving on thermal, more visible than it would normally have been in the early afternoon because of the winter cold that had set in to the concrete and steel. It hadn’t been there only minutes before when she had done a thermal sweep of the area, which meant that whoever it was had been concealed in a thermal-masking cover of some kind, and had only taken it off because he was ready to shoot…
“Get up there now, Tom!” She said urgently, grabbing her rifle and shifting it over to target the hotel window. “Valerie! Get down!”
She raised the scope to her eye, cursing when she saw the puff of hot gas coming from the window that indicated the assassin had fired. Shannon flicked her selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger, gritting her teeth against the sharp recoil. There was little sound, since her rifle was suppressed, so she could actually hear the impact as a dozen 8mm slugs punched through the decaying concrete of the hotel, sending a spray of dust and concrete chunks into the shooter. Through her thermal scope she could see him jerk back from his hide position in pain and surprise, giving her a better view, and a better target. Letting out a breath, she put the targeting reticle on the shooter’s right leg and stroked the trigger. A single round coughed out through her suppressor, the tungsten penetrator propelled by a mass of caseless hyperexplosive powder the size of her middle finger, and knifed through the concrete wall to spear into the assassin’s right knee.
The shooter thrashed and writhed in pain, a red and yellow light show in her thermal scope as he rolled back
