Chapter One
The pain eased as Ultima Hart layfighting for breath, staring up at the beautiful blue sky of abalmy spring day.
It was a good day to die.
Someone had said that once as they laydying, drinking in the beauty of the world they were leaving—maybein a movie.
It was just that asinine.
Therewasno good day to die.
Especially not when you were onlytwenty seven and had never had any kind of life, damnit!
Or maybe it was twentyeight?
She hadn’t realized until that momentthat she had no idea.
She thought it was spring, but shedidn’t know for sure.
Or what day of the week or month itwas.
Or what year.
Theyhad come and there was no longer an orderly progression ofminutes, hours, and days. There was just death and destruction andthe fight to live, nights and days that could only be separated onefrom another by whether or not you’d gotten to sleep, or eat—werewarm, or cold.
No one knew why they’d come—not atfirst, anyway.
No one knew where they’d come from, orhow they’d gotten to Earth.
They not been there and then they hadon the streets of Earth’s cities and slaughtered humans where theystood in shocked disbelief.
It would all have been over in thatone day if not for human nature and the will to survive. Shock hadfrozen everyone close enough to see the metal monsters, but deathand destruction had unfrozen them, sent them screaming in anotherdirection.
Everyone still livingremembered exactly where they’d been that day and what they’d beendoing. Nobody really knew how long ago that had been—yearscertainly—but they clearly rememberedthearrival.
The mechanical monsters of the alienshad simply appeared in the streets—without warning—and throwneveryone into a state of shock and disbelief that made them easytargets. The first to see them were the first to die. But humansurvival instincts had been dulled by hundreds of years of societalgrooming toward ‘civilized’ behavior and hundreds or likelythousands and possibly millions had died before those close enoughto see but far enough to away to avoid being immediate targetsmanaged to overcome their shocked surprise and react to savethemselves.
For all that, only a handful wereactually successful.
Humans were diminished so swiftly,only a smattering managed to escape the first wave that swept thecities, and with the majority of those it was pure, dumb luck thatran out fairly quickly.
The human race damned near wentextinct in the first week of the invasion, but those who managed tomake it through that week were savvy and determined. First, theyran, focused only on surviving, but in time they found enoughsecurity that rage began to bubble to the surface and they began tofight back with grim determination.
The enemy was still witling them downa lot faster than vice versa.
But, in time, they’d seen a change intactics that suggested the enemy was hurting, as well.
The mechanical monsters were replacedby cyborgs that looked more and more human—until they were human toall intents and purposes—completely, biologically and anatomicallycorrect—except smarter and faster—and they mimicked themsurprisingly well.
Not well enough to infiltrate, but thedefenders began to realize that was the plan. The straight onwarfare had seriously depleted humans, but there were still plentyto fight back. The alien invaders were trying to finish them off bydisguising themselves to find the hidden ‘nests’.
And they weren’t far from succeeding.Two of the smaller enclaves had already been wiped out by aninfiltrator.
Of course it was beginning to looklike she wasn’t going to live to see the day of the last of thehumans of Earth—her group had lost their battle and, as usual, thebastards were combing the field for survivors to end them—but itinfuriated her to think it might come to that.
* * * *
“Cut the hive link beforeyou try to take control of the quad!” Assassin Kau ordered hiscompanion and subordinate, Scout Quan, via mind link as soon asthey made contact.
