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Authors: Daniel Suarez

Kill Decision

BOOK: Kill Decision
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ALSO BY DANIEL SUAREZ

Daemon
Freedom™

 

KILL

DECISION

Daniel Suarez

DUTTON

DUTTON

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, July 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Suarez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Suarez, Daniel, 1964–

Kill decision / Daniel Suarez.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-525-95261-9 (hardcover)

1. United States. Army. Special Forces—Fiction. 2. Women scientists—Fiction. 3. Drone aircraft—Fiction. 4. Artificial intelligence—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.U327K55 2012

813'.6—dc23

2011052061

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Contents

Also by Daniel Suarez

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

 

Boomerang

Warning Order

Raconteur

Intrusion Detection

Omen

Wake-up Call

The Activity

Lost in Action

Influence Operations

Deconfliction

Eye in the Sky

Underground Drive

Close Hold

Insomnia

Closed Loop

Damage Control

Safari-One-Six

Firestorm

Hot Wash

Oscar Mike

War Mask

Sanctuary

Collateral Damage

Myrmidons

Personae Management

The Puppet Master

Proof-of-Concept

Brood Chamber

Improvise

The Swarm

Reap the Whirlwind

Prodigal Son

 

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

 

-
The First Truth
-
Humans are more important than hardware.

CHAPTER 1

Boomerang

F
rom eight thousand feet
the rescue workers looked like agitated ants as they scurried around the wreckage of a car bomb. An MQ-1B Predator drone zoomed its cameras in for a close-up. Debris and body parts littered a marketplace. Scorched dirt slick with blood filled the frame. The dying and wounded groped silently for help.

The techs called it “Death TV”—the live video feed from America’s fleet of unmanned Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper drones. The images poured in via satellite onto ten large HD screens suspended at intervals from the rafters of the U.S. Air Force’s dimly lit cubicle farm in Hampton, Virginia. Officially known as Distributed Common Ground System-1, it was half a world away from the daytime on most of those screens. The local time was two
A.M.

Monitoring the feeds and clattering at keyboards in response to what they saw were scores of young airmen first class arrayed in groups of six before banks of flat-panel computer monitors, watched over by technical sergeants pacing behind them. And watched in turn by their officers, like pit bosses and floor managers in some macabre casino.

At his workstation in the semidarkness, twenty-six-year-old First Lieutenant Anthony Jordan glanced up occasionally to gauge the mood of the world. From the look of things it was shaping up to be a pretty typical day: scattered violence.

Between glances Jordan typed chat messages to an army civil affairs team at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, just a few miles down the road from the car bomb blast on-screen. He simultaneously monitored chat threads from two other operations in theater and satellite radio chatter in his headset, all while his desk phone lit up at intervals. He sensed a presence behind him, and a sheet of paper slid into view from his left. He spoke without looking up. “Lazzo, goddammit, IM me. You’re messing with my work flow.”

Technical Sergeant Albert Lazzo leaned in from the right, his jowls hanging to the side like a plumb line. “Urgent, sir.”

BOOK: Kill Decision
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