Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (21 page)

She didn’t know what to do, but for a moment she took her time thinking about it. Then she hit the starter and turned her boat around to head for the closest assault boat. She didn’t know what the hell had happened to Weston, but she needed the gear he’d gotten off that cursed ship.

She was heading for it when suddenly all three of the assault boats got a mind of their own and turned in unison, heading for the shore.

Not knowing what else to do, Lyssa followed suit.

The craft she was following were amphibious assault craft. She’d seen enough of them in the last few months of the war. They were designed to be launched from carrier task groups for large-scale assaults on enemy beachheads, though it was pretty clear that these had been upgraded.

The ones she’d ridden in the war weren’t fully automated, for one thing.

As they reached the shore, she found her attention drawn away from the assault landers to a yellow shape moving jerkily under the surface of the water. She watched it warily from a distance as it rose up from the depths and then breached near the shore. She recognized it as a utility loader, but it was bigger than any she’d seen before.

Water sluiced off the construction yellow steel as the machine lumbered up onto the shore and turned around.

Lyssa let out a breath of relief when she recognized the armor sitting in the pilot’s compartment of the big machine.

“Captain,” she growled, “you are the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever worked with, and I’m a former Marine who joined the damned NYPD. Do you have any idea how many assholes you meet between those two groups?”

Eric just looked back at her with his head cocked to one side, silent for a long moment before he chose to speak.

“Lyss, until you’ve dealt with politicians and reporters, you don’t know the meaning of the word.”

She shook her head as she beached the boat and climbed up over the bow, jumping to the bank. “You get what you needed?”

“I got what I could,” he answered as he popped open the crash bars holding him into the pilot’s position of the loader. “Was interrupted before I could get it all.”

As Eric pulled himself out of the machine, dropping to the soft bank, she turned and looked back over Long Island Sound. There, out in the middle of the water, the keel of the
Odyssey
still rose out over the waves. It was now smoking like the tube of a cannon that had just been fired, but it was still surprisingly intact.

“You get them all?”

Eric considered for a moment, “I think so. They’re tough, but they can’t take an overpressure wave much better than we can. I’ll deploy drones to make sure, but yeah, I think I got them all.”

“Good.”

Down the shore from where they stood, three fully laden assault cargo landers shifted to land mode and slowly trundled ashore with their packages.

CHAPTER SIX

National Guard HQ,
Intrepid
Sea, Air, & Space Museum

MEN AND WOMEN had stopped what they were doing and were gaping at the skyline over the city, pointing at the searing flames.

“What the hell is that?” Potts demanded, glaring at the sky as if it were to blame.

“No idea, sir.”

“I’m getting real damned sick of hearing that, son.”

“Sorry sir.”

“Do we have a unit over that way?”

“Nothing large for sure,” his aide answered. “I can check for scout units.”

“Don’t bother,” Potts said. “Get on the link to the flyboys and girls up there and find out what that was. If it’s anything interesting, have one of our recon squads check it out up close.”

“Yes sir.”

The general shifted his focus back to the map that showed fighting all up and down the island of Manhattan. He had men engaged with the enemy in every borough of the city, but the biggest concentration was without a doubt right on
the island. They had checkpoints at every way on and off the island, but from what the brief said this wasn’t a job where containment did a whole lot. It was a war of extermination. Either the enemy died or humanity did.

Potts wasn’t going to lose this one.

“Tell Third Platoon to move their ass. We’ve got men pinned down and getting cut to ribbons on Eighth,” he said, looking over the tactical display. “And get some air support over them. That’s our major advantage here. Let’s use it.”

“Yes sir. We’re rushing the turnaround on reloading the aircraft, but another wing will be in place in three minutes.”

Potts growled. “That’s three minutes too long. Has the President declared a state of emergency?”

“Yes sir. . .?” The aide trailed off, confused.

“Then I want our old weaponized drones brought out of mothballs.”

“General Potts, sir, that violates . . . I don’t know
how
many international laws . . .”

Potts snorted. “This is New York, not some foreign nation. If the people of this country want my commission or my head, they can have it when this is over. The rest of the planet can sit and spin. I am
not
losing this city. Issue the order.”

“Y . . . yes sir.”

One thing most every civilized nation on the planet agreed on, one of the very few things, was that while it was impossible to completely shove the genie back in the bottle, autonomous weapons platforms were not to be tolerated. Drones were cheap, easy to deploy, and too well stealthed for the comfort of any nation, and those that still manufactured them were under deep international sanctions.

That had all stemmed from the use of Chinese and Indian drones to drop high-explosive military payloads on New York,
London, and Madrid in the mid-twenty-first century. Neither nation was directly involved, of course, but they both sold their obsolete drones on the open market and the value of the weapons had long since been hammered home to terrorist groups worldwide.

Useless in their original tasking, drones like the Carnivore and Terran Raptor were sublime at sowing terror and confusion. Cheap, easy to use and deploy, and capable of wiping out a city block before anyone even thought to look for them, they quickly became the weapon of choice for terror groups worldwide.

By the 2070s, several international treaties existed and India had been embargoed for almost a decade for selling automated weapons to nonaligned parties. It was only after India finally capitulated upon joining the Block that the international supply of the ugly weapons began to dwindle. Historically, drone warfare had become a disgusting relic of an earlier time, something taught in schools as a cautionary tale more than anything else.

It was a stance that Potts agreed with. To his mind, if you were going to kill a man you should have the guts and honor to at least accept a degree of risk yourself, no matter how small. Pushing a button and killing people by remote was no way to do things. It made soldiers lazy and careless.

The world had politicians for that already. It didn’t need to add soldiers to the list.

Now, however, he needed more guns in the sky and drones were one way to do it. It would take time to get them out of storage, tested, and armed, but all the more reason to start now. He’d take heat for it, but if it saved the city, then he’d happily turn the spit on himself.

Potts found himself distracted and scowling at the tactical display, however, and his mind was brought rudely back into the present.

“Why do we have fighting in the Bronx? I thought our units were still trying to get through traffic.”

“They are, General. Those are reports from police and civilians mostly. We’re monitoring them from overheads and intercepts,” the aide said. “Almost eighty percent of reported fighting across the city is from police and civilian units, sir. We’ve got men and machines into some areas, and that number is growing fast, but the city is effectively gridlocked and we just don’t have any of the highly mobile units available. They’re all overseas at the moment.”

Potts closed his eyes. “Damn.”

There was just no way in hell that police units would have the firepower needed to crack these bastards, and in New York neither would civilians, for the most part. Lives were being lost and he knew that there wasn’t a damned thing he could hope to do about it.

PARKCHESTER, BRONX

DETECTIVE MIRADI HAD been an NYPD officer for the better part of his life, and until today he’d thought that he had honestly seen everything. Murders, rapes, riots, robberies. The weird cases, the brutal ones. Ones with happy endings, and ones that just never found an ending at all.