arms pinwheeling as he fell into the dirty water. D-Bar swore and backed away from the canal's edge.
The upper torso of a stocky, muscular figure emerged from the hatch, aiming the rifle back at the dock. Anna caught a glimpse of a grimy, weary face glaring down the weapon's iron sights.
Powell and the others all immediately took aim. Lebedev shook his head. 'No, no!' he cried. 'Put your guns down! Put them down!'
Anna could see that Powell wasn't convinced, but he lowered his assault rifle and his men did the same; still, they kept their fingers close to the triggers, ready to snap back to a firing stance in a heartbeat.
'Where is this?' called the man on the trawler. His accent was rough, British.
'Port of Baltimore,' Lebedev replied. 'We were told to expect you. We have a mutual friend.'
'Let me guess, a ghost named Janus, yeah?' He let the rifle's muzzle fall a little. 'Hell of a thing.'
That was when Anna got her first good look at the man, and she gasped. 'I know him! He's one of them, a Tyrant! I saw him at Temple's house
– '
Suddenly the guns were coming back up. 'What is this?' Powell demanded.
'Stop!' Lebedev took a step forward. 'We were told-'
'You might sign a lot of checks for us, but I have the military authority,' Powell snapped, cutting him off. 'Pardon me if I don't take the promises of a phantom hacker as gospel. This smells like a setup.'
'I'm not one of them anymore,' said the man on the boat. 'We had a
… parting of the ways.' Anna heard the pain and the cold in his voice. She watched him carefully, remembering the moment when he could have ended her life. He had let her live. She wondered if she should return the favor.
Finally, he shrugged and tossed the rifle away, onto the deck of the trawler. He raised his hands. 'If you're gonna shoot me, then shoot me.
Because I have had a day like you would not believe.'
Powell's aim didn't waver. 'What reason is there to keep you alive?'
The man pulled a vu-phone from his pocket. 'Our mutual friend Janus sent me a message. Tells me this thing has data on it you need. For the
Killing Floor.' The name brought a moment of silence with it. 'That got your attention? I have the access code. So at the very least, you want to keep me breathing until I give that up.'
'He works for them,' Powell said, glaring at Lebedev. 'First off you bring her in'-he jerked a thumb at Anna-'and now this?'
'Waifs and strays…' muttered D-Bar.
Lebedev ignored the other man and stepped up to the bobbing trawler. 'Who are you?'
'Ben Saxon. I'm just… a soldier.' He let out a ragged breath. 'I know who you people are. I'm in the same fight as you now.'
Lebedev held out his hand and said nothing. After a long moment, Saxon sighed and tossed the phone to him. 'Now give me the code.'
'I do that, laughing boy there will slot me.' He inclined his head toward Powell.
'You want us to trust you?' Anna asked. 'Do as he says.'
Saxon met her gaze and gave her a long, measuring look; then finally he nodded. 'All right. But someone get me off this tub first? I busted both my legs and it stinks in here.'
A year ago, it was the kind of gamble he would never have considered making; but a lot had changed since then, and nothing had made it more clear to him than the events of the last few days that his life was turning into one long roll of the dice.
He gave up the sister's name and waited for the one called Powell to put a round in his head. The guy wanted to do it, that was plain as day all over his face; but instead the other guy, the one called Lebedev, had a couple of blokes help him inside a nearby warehouse. Behind the derelict look of the place it was a regular staging post. They dumped him in a hospital tent and left him to the ministrations of a severe-looking medic.
Fatigue held him in tight coils, tighter than the metal nets that the robo-trawler had used to snag him from the ocean. In the grip of the steel wire, dragged under the frigid waves, Saxon had been certain that death was upon him.
It was only when he awoke inside the wet, reeking, meat-locker chill of the trawler's intake bay that he started to piece together what had happened. His attempt to contact Janus from the Tyrant jet had been at least partially successful, enough for the hacker to pinpoint where he was and track the vu-phone. After his explosive midair exit, Janus had retasked the nearby trawler as an ersatz lifeboat.
In the cold and the dark, Saxon fought all the way to stay free of hypothermia and unconsciousness. His augmentations had kept him alive, although the high-fall unit was burned out and would never function again; and as for the Tai Yong-manufactured cyberlegs, his impact with the sea had severely damaged them both.
The medic dosed him with a pan-spectrum restorative, hooked up a nutrient drip, and disconnected his legs beneath the knees with a sparking beam tool; then he left Saxon alone.
As he lay there, hobbled, Saxon felt more isolated than he ever had before. After the crash in Queensland, during recovery at the field hospital, he'd always had something to hold on to, to drive him… the need to find justice for Sam and the others. But now, even that was lost to him.
Saxon felt dead inside, as if the energy to live on, to fight back, had been sapped from him by the icy waters of the Atlantic.
As far as Namir and the Tyrants were concerned, he was a dead man. He was compelled to agree with them.
There was movement at the tent flap and the woman from the docks entered, carrying a plastic hard case. She gave him a level stare. 'You remember me.' It wasn't a question.
He nodded. 'You're Anna Kelso. U.S. Secret Service.'
'Not anymore,' she said bitterly. 'No thanks to your friends.'
'I had nothing to do with that,' he insisted, shifting on his gurney. 'I wasn't part of it…' Saxon's words died in his throat. That wasn't true, was it? A nagging voice in the back of his head demanded an answer. You were in all the way. You were just too bloody thick to see what was going on. Or maybe you did see, but you were too gutless to face up to it.
'Why did you let me live?' she asked. 'At the house. You had the shot. You could have killed me.'
He glared at her, and an ember of the old rage flickered deep inside him. 'I'm a soldier! I don't kill unarmed civilians!'
Kelso seized on his words. 'But the Tyrants do. They don't have principles or compunction. They're assassins. And you're one of them.'
'Not anymore,' he repeated back to her. 'I don't think I ever really was. I couldn't… couldn't stop being the man that I was. Before.'
She saw something honest in his expression and her manner softened a little. 'Why were you working with them?'
'I could ask you the same,' he noted. 'I know who these jokers are.' He gestured around. 'I recognize the hardware, the weapons, the setup.
Juggernaut. New Sons of Freedom. They're all on the most-wanted list. That's a long way from the Secret Service.'
She offered him the hard case. 'I'll tell you what. A trade. You tell me how you ended up on Janus's radar and I'll give you these.' Kelso cracked open the case to reveal a pair of replacement legs. 'Caidin make. They're compatible with the TYM chassis you got.'
He nodded and took them. 'Fair deal.' Saxon had extensive field training in augmentation repair, and he set quickly to work on his limbs. As he spoke, he let it spill out of him; from the incident in the Grey Range to Namir's recruitment pitch, the events in Moscow and Janus's first challenge, to the moment in the grounds outside Temple's house. 'I suppose that's when I knew it,' he concluded. 'When I couldn't stay silent anymore. I thought I was going to make a difference in the world. But all we did was exercise someone else's power.'
He sealed up the last of the connections and pushed off the gurney. Saxon stumbled a little as the gyros in the replacement modules ran through start routines and synchronized.
Kelso nodded at the legs. 'You can consider that repayment for not shooting me.'
