She looked around the room at the exhausted faces, scrambling to organize a battle that seemed to have already been lost. Grainy images of the Variants played across many of the screens, along with a few videos of collaborators. The maps of enemy units showed several collaborator units and plenty of Variants.
But no Chimeras.
That sent another wave of chills through her.
“How many Chimeras have been reported?” Ringgold asked.
“I’m not sure,” Souza said. “But not many. Maybe a few dozen. Initial reports of Chimeras turned out to be mostly collaborators.”
Ringgold looked at the ceiling, considering the implications, mind racing. “If this really were brains of the New God’s operations, we would have seen more of them, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I thought so too, but it’s possible they are all protecting the Prophet,” Souza said.
“Or they are preparing to launch an assault while we’ve got all our focus on Vegas,” Festa suggested.
“Send warnings to every remaining outpost immediately,” Ringgold said. “Every able-bodied man and woman should already be on the wall, but they need to know how serious this is. They must be prepared for anything. An attack tonight could be worse than anything we faced before.”
“Yes, Madam President,” Festa said.
He began making calls to the twelve outposts scattered between Houston and Key Largo, the last of the Florida outposts. A few of Cornelius’ comms officers came over to him, pointing at a map they laid on the table.
“We now have alternate evacuation routes set up for the two task forces,” Cornelius said. “They’ll be headed north out of the city, where parts of Las Vegas Boulevard are still intact.”
He used the map on the monitor to discuss the routes with Ringgold for a few minutes before Festa returned to the table. His face was awash in pallor.
“What’s wrong?” Ringgold asked. “Are there problems with the outposts?”
“Worse, Madam President,” he replied. “We just got a transmission from the First Fleet in Puerto Rico. Scouts have reported seeing vessels of all kinds and sizes headed toward them, like some kind of scrapped together navy.”
Ringgold didn’t need to ask who those vessels belonged to. “Put me in touch with Vice President Lemke now.”
Festa tried the encrypted line to Lemke, but no one answered.
Come on, Dan. Tell me what’s going on.
The line continued to ring.
“I’m getting a new signal from the USS George Johnson,” Festa said. He patched the line in.
“Command, this is Captain Harmon of the George Johnson,” the voice said. “The Variants—they just—they swam under us before we could spot them. Then they started climbing up the sides of our ships. They’re overrunning the George Johnson. We can’t hold them back for much longer.”
Festa spoke to the captain while Ringgold went to Souza, who was still trying to contact the vice president at Central Command.
“How could they have known about Puerto Rico?” Ringgold asked. She lowered her head in despair, trying to make sense of what was happening.
A few minutes later, the line with Captain Harmon had severed. They couldn’t reconnect.
The room fell into silence for several grueling moments.
“All this time we thought the science team was listening in on them,” Souza said. “Maybe they were the ones listening in on us.”
Ringgold looked at the two generals, feeling sick. “The Prophet got us to focus all our attention on Vegas, one big honey trap, while they swept through from the east.”
Cornelius shook his head. “I… I never saw this coming either, Madam President.”
“Is there anything we can do to help Central Command?” she replied.
“Nothing we send will arrive in time,” Cornelius said. “We don’t have the supply chains. Most of our surviving air units are focused on evacuating Las Vegas, and the few naval units stationed in Galveston couldn’t make it until at least a day after the enemy arrived.”
“We need to put everything we have into protecting what little assets we have left,” Souza said. He paused, appearing as if he didn’t like what he was about to say next. “Let’s hope the vice president can hold Central Command, because I’m afraid Puerto Rico is on their own, Madam President.”
***
Azrael crouched in the open door of the MH-65 Dolphin. The chopper had been recently acquired after one of their successful conquests on the east coast of Florida, yet another benefit of their dominance over the Allied States.
After dealing with the general, he had left Los Alamos almost immediately to personally join another mission crucial to crippling the Allied States.
He had not originally planned to go, but he could no longer rely on Scions or Alphas like the general to get things done for him. And this mission was too important to fail.
Fortunately, by the time his flight from the Citadel had gotten him to the transfer point for this chopper, the battle over San Juan, Puerto Rico was almost won. He had arrived just in time to join in the final destruction.
The former Coast Guard chopper took him and six of his best hunters over the remains of the ancient walls of San Juan, built during the Spanish-American War. Fires bloomed through the darkness and tracer rounds pierced the night across the city.
His forces had prioritized destroying their comms so the Allied States had almost no warning of the destruction taking place down here.
The Allied States military still stubbornly held a few strongholds, but their navy was crushed and soon he would unleash the beasts standing with him in the belly of the helo. These six represented one of his new death squads, hunters whose minds and bodies had been tuned for one thing: eliminating the most tenacious heretics.
In the port, smoke fingered away from a burning helicopter on the deck of the USS George Johnson. Azrael had never met the former Vice President that the Zumwalt Class destroyer had been christened after, but he was going to meet Vice President Dan Lemke very soon.
A pair of cruisers
