Prologue
A LifetoPlea
He still hadthe taste of apples on histongue.
The cloned fruit was sweet when he first tried a sample from the vendor. Now, only a hint of the flavor remained, buried beneath the acid bitterness of a chemical that madehimgag.
The ringing in his ears hadn’t stopped, the earlier blast close enough to harm in numerous ways. He shifted his leg as he leaned against the shaky metal vendor table, grimacing at the pain that lanced up to his hip from the hastily wrapped wound in his calf. Being on the edge of the blast, cushioned by other market customers and a metal pylon, meant the explosion hadn’tkilledhim.
Yet.
Makeshift bandages torn from his shirt and jacket had stopped the bleeding for now, but they did nothing to stop the sickening, burning pain beginning to afflict his nerves. No help was forthcoming, a fact the people still screaming and banging at the entrances to the St. George’s Market had yet tofigureout.
The explosion that ripped apart his life an hour ago came from a Splice chemical bomb. Standard operating procedure in any country was to contain the problem as quickly as possible to keep the spread of the chemical to an absolute minimum. The Police Service of Northern Ireland was brutally enforcing such a quarantine zone around the famousmarketplace.
The doors were locked, and would remain locked, until everyonewasdead.
He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the slowly growing agony creeping through his body that showed no signs ofstopping.
AFTER
2285
___________________
1
Light ’emUp
“We’refive minutes out from the target,Apollo.”
Jamie Callahan, captain of the Metahuman Defense Force’s Alpha Team, looked up from the map he was studying on a holoscreen in the belly of an X-17 Hermes combat jet. Like his teammates, Jamie wore a combat uniform specially designed with his power in mind and top-of-the-line tactical body armor. With his blue eyes hidden behind opaque tactical goggles and the air filtration mask locked in place, the Mexican Special Forces officer couldn’t see his face. As a metahuman and the son of a prominent United States senator, Jamie’s identity was classified at the highest levels, even from foreignallies.
“Thank you,” Jamie replied with a curt nod to the Mexicanoperative.
Beside him, Sergeant Ekaterina “Katie” Ovechkina, code named Viper in the field and his second-in-command, sent a bright streak of data streaming through the air from the holoscreen to the rugged communications control fitted to her lowerleftarm.
“Syncing to everyone’s HUDs, Apollo,”Katiesaid.
“Copythat.”
This mission into the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range within the Mexican state of Sonora was a joint operation between the MDF and the Mexican government’sProtectores Metahumanos Unidos. Supporting both agencies on this particular mission were operatives pulled from the Mexican Army’sFuerzas Especiales del Alto Mando. Equivalent to the US Army’s Special Forces, Mexico’s SF Corps was a small, highly trained group of operatives who were best suited to follow Alpha Team and Jaguar One intobattle.
Earlier, under the guise of a joint training operation in eastern Texas, Mexico’s operatives were secretly relocated to the Joint Forces Training Base within the Los Angeles megacity limits. Alpha Team had been waiting for them on the tarmac, and the entire group was wheels up an hourlater.
Their trajectory had them flying southeast over the border. Their destination was a heavily guarded compound nestled in a valley controlled by theFederaciónCartel. The MDF had pieced together evidence over the past few months that pointed to the cartel housing a black-market Splice lab at the compound. Getting the Mexican government to agree to green light a joint mission had taken some delicate diplomatic work on the MDF’s end through the StateDepartment.
In the end, both governments had a vested interest in destroying criminal-run Splice labs. Loosely allied criminal organizations across the world were working to create metahumans for their own gains. The genetics arms race between criminals and governments was nowhere close to cooling off. Splice, a lethal chemical weapon, was the catalyst needed to turn a normal human into a metahuman, but at great cost. Its kill-rate was dangerously high at 95 percent, and scientists the world over had yet to figure out a cure, a vaccine, or what enabled a small percentage to survive contamination andinfection.
The one thing everyone agreed on was this: dying by Splice was excruciatinglypainful.
The majority of the people brought to criminal-run Splice labs never survived the experience. The ones who did were at issue. Metahumans were monitored, if not outright owned, by the government of their native country. Rogue metahumans beholden to terrorist groups were a national security nightmare politicians never likedfacing.
That’s where Alpha Teamcamein.
The eight, highly skilled members of the MDF’s top field team all came from military backgrounds. At thirty-one, it had been years since Jamie was last a Recon Marine, but what he’d learned in that branch of the military remained with him tothisday.
“Ready for the jump?” Staff Sergeant Kyle Brannigan asked as heapproached.
