It had taken one-hundred and eighty-four years, seven months, and eleven days to create the United States of America—and merely six months to tear it in two. A decade on, standing on one of the last battlefields of that so-called war, Emmett Bradshaw still could not pin down the reason for the ache in his chest. Whether it’d been to take up arms against his countrymen in the first place, or when he’d been ordered to lay them down.

  The patriots of the last war were the inheritors of the next. There was no marker to commemorate this wooded hill that overlooked a stretch of Route 91. No plaque to immortalize the sacrifices of the dead. The highway was still littered with the burnt out wrecks of battle tanks and combat walkers. It was here that they had thrust back Proletarion and his band of paramilitaries, drawn a line in the asphalt, and regained the initiative for a counterattack that never came.

  “Phalanx,” Collins asked. “Is everything set?”

  Bradshaw turned, frowning. “No codenames,” he said, and checked his watch—his father’s Rolex, an antique older than the Golden Age. His father had been a hunter, too. A sign then, perhaps, that everything would work as planned.

  “But yes, everything is set.”

  Pride and anxiety clashed behind his sternum, and it’d been enough time that the latter was almost unfamiliar—almost. His team was good, and his methods were sound—or, at least, as sound as they could be, given their quarry. But this was the most delicate part of the operation. The time when they would be most exposed. The time when they risked direct contact with their target.

  “Remember,” he continued, “we’re here only to observe. We’re just a team of hikers who ended up in the wrong place at the right time. We were watching our friend sketch the sunrise when everything went to hell—nothing more, nothing less.”

  But they were. He was the leader of Victory 14, and a war hero besides. With him, also incognito, were Challenger, Echelon and Invicta, the Guardian of the Eastern Seaboard herself. He’d had to swing Intercept from some classified Agency operation, and he’d only managed that because he’d saved the life of the current Director. Even he didn’t know what they were doing today.

  The United States wasn’t the titan it had once been. Over the years, within Bradshaw’s lifetime, the poles of the world order had shifted from singular to multiple. This morning marked the moment he would draw them back. When this operation was done, his homeland would be leading the world once again. Such was the concord he had signed.

  He checked his watch again. It was time.

  One of the wrecks began to move, like a scorpion coming out of torpor. The M20A6 Shepard had been, at the time of the war, the next-generation autonomous combat vehicle and a marvel of Golden Age engineering and doctrinal philosophy. A hexapedal walking tank armed with a pair of railguns, four surface-to-air launchers, and bristling with enough miniguns to ensure complete point-defense and anti-personnel coverage. Hardware like that had been the holy grail of the Golden Age military-industrial complex, but history had proven it a poisoned chalice.

  This one had only been mission killed. Only its proximity to the border prevented anyone from retrieving it. For two months, Bradshaw had his people, under cover of night, repairing it just enough that it could move once again—and updating its neural heuristics, to sever it from the NORTHCOM command network and put it on a direct path to the nearest population center: the city of Preston and its few thousand souls.

  It would, if Bradshaw had made just the right educated guess, never reach that point. Already, NORAD would be detecting the heat signature, the reactivated walker, and that it was not responding to commands. Due to the tense geopolitical situation, the IESA would be notified—and they would send their hunter.

  It was already nearby, enroute on some secret UN tasking. The joke of the Functioning World was that it only functioned while the IESA let it function. Everyone knew that the status quo only worked while no one pushed things too far. Rocking the boat was inevitable, anticipated—capsizing it was not.

  They’d been rocking the boat a lot lately, flirting with disaster, but there was too much riding on this operation to do anything else. Yet it risked the IESA coming down on them and the United States like Cronus devouring his sons—which was why only Bradshaw knew the truth of it. But Collins had a point: like any well-designed machine, there were the tolerances you could push past and ones that’d push back.

  “Conrad,” he said, “What’ve we got?”

  Collins closed his eyes, piercing the electromagnetic skein like he was listening to music only he could hear. “It’s quiet out here. Some chatter on the military bands. And,” he tilted his head, as if picking up another tune, “a lot of encrypted chatter back and forth from something approaching from the east—and fast.”

  “Just as anticipated.”

  “We’re going to a lot of effort just to lure out a cyborg,” Invicta said.

  Unless it’s not a cyborg, Bradshaw mused, and that was why they needed Collins—Intercept. Why everything had to be handled so precisely.

  When it came to hunting, humanity had always known the rules, the importance of blood and oxygen. Even the mightiest mammoth could be brought down through attrition—wound it enough times and blood loss and exposure would do the rest. Even a horse could be run down by a single person if they simply had the endurance to run it ragged. Knowing the rules, you could employ the optimal strategies.

  But what if your prey didn’t obey those rules, or perhaps any of the rules that constrained life? What if it was stronger than you, smarter than you, and possessed senses that could sniff out the slightest hint of a threat? What if you weren’t hunting a cyborg, but a true remnant of the Golden Age—an artificial intelligence, a thinking machine?

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  It still seemed absurd to Bradshaw. Ever since SHIVA had put so much of Europe to the torch, the IESA had ensured that no artificial intelligence could ever prosper again. The fact that one could be operating in Geneva, right under their noses, beggared belief. Yet that was what everything pointed to, and what his allies had told him to prepare for.

  It was why they weren’t using their code names, why they weren’t in uniform. Why they hadn’t brought anything electronic with them—not their phones, not even digital watches. No telephone calls, no emails. Everything had been done in-person, in analogue. Until they knew precisely what they were dealing with, it was better to be overly cautious.

  The Shepard began to move. If it identified them as a threat, then he and Invicta were more than capable enough of destroying it. He looked toward the east, and the rising sun, and their target dropped through the clouds, trailed by an afterburner plume.

  “Incoming,” Bradshaw said. “Target in sight. Conrad, I need everything you can hear.”

  “You said they’re some modded-up cyborg? You didn’t say they were flight-capable.” Intercept said, frowning. “If I can’t keep them in my line of sight, this won’t work.”

  File photos from his sources in the IESA’s MARBLE group told him what he was looking at more than his eyes did—a figure in matte black armor with boots that looked more suited for a combat mech than a superhero suit. All of that told him very little. But that was why he had Intercept.

  And Echelon.

  “Danny,” Bradshaw said. “It’s time. Paul, Sofia—you let me know the moment you think we’ve been rumbled. Conrad, keep listening.”

  Echelon nodded, exhaling slowly, and raised his pen to his sketchbook. He began to sketch with small, slight movements. Simple lines and shapes then longer lines, curves and angles. Bradshaw kept one eye on him, and another on their target as it streaked toward the Shepard as it turned toward the oncoming attacker—and opened fire.

  The railguns opened up, metal slugs hurled with enough force that the air rippled from their passage. Their target was halfway through an evasive barrel roll, and returned the favor with two quick bursts of missiles.

  “What’s that,” Invicta murmured. “An integrated armory? Micro-missiles? Jesus, no wonder she’s tied to Dynazon.”

  Bradshaw frowned.

  “It,” he said.

  The robot’s first salvo struck the forward left leg of the Shepard, and blew it off at the joint between hull and limb. It steadied itself, bringing its railguns to bear, capacitors charging, and then the next set of missiles struck both cannons there—defanging the walking tank, and popping one of the capacitors with a terrific arcing flash.

  Their target burned past the Shepard, coming around for another run, and the batteries of the walking tank tracked unerringly, and opened up, rippling off missile after missile after missile.

  The target climbed, burning hard, dropping flares. More from thoroughness than need—it could clearly outpace the SAMs, and Bradshaw nodded to himself as it turned, practically flipping one-eighty. “What the fuck is that?” Challenger asked. “That turn would’ve torn any of our airframes in half.”

  Bradshaw wondered if the Shepard was as confused as they were. The point-defense cannons opened up as their target closed in, one arm extended, hovering around the walker like some technological hummingbird, weathering the hail of 20 mm fire as it picked off each turret with one shot each. He thought he saw sparks. Maybe he just wanted to.

  Echelon gagged, and Bradshaw turned his attention to him. The slight pang of concern passed with the gentle breeze that stirred the leaves below. The muscles in Echelon’s neck clenched and spasmed, head curling back as his jaw twitched and jerked, his lips moving wordlessly. His eyes had rolled back into his head and he was sweating. His arm and hand moved like he was possessed, sketching at a rate Bradshaw’s eyes could not follow—and maybe he was.

  The empowered were one of the wonders of the world, and the source of a multitude more. Since Preceptor had stepped onto the world stage four decades before, the question of peak human capability became a lot more broad, both physical and mental. There were concrete powers, conceptual powers, transcendental powers. All of them spat in the face of conventional physics. Something in Bradshaw’s brain itched as he watched Echelon. It was like some part of his brain, honed through millennia of evolution and tradition, recognized something deeply wrong.

  It wasn’t that he was some baseline afraid of something he didn’t understand and couldn’t experience. Phalanx’s optical lances could scythe through anything he could see. He could weather tank shells like they were snowballs, and throw the vehicles themselves aside like they were toys. He’d outpaced supersonic jets and gone toe-to-toe with The Champion. Whatever had happened to him to turn him from man to god on that fateful day in Seattle, he wasn’t the sort to chalk it up to divinity or magic.

  They’d still lost the war.

  But Echelon was different. He’d come into his powers young. He’d spoken of it like an earworm, like a need to expel the ideas that emerged from the back of his mind, from the depths of his dreams. To jot them down, even if he had nothing but four walls and his own blood.

  Luckily, it’d never gotten that bad. He’d been tutored and instructed in his mad acts of inspiration, and he’d been an artificer and a warrior before he’d stepped into the role of hunter. But he said it was always there, a song that only made sense when he wasn’t listening to it. There was a gap between him and Echelon. There were empowered abilities that affected the body and those that affected the mind. Invention and inspiration may have gone all the way back to the mythical Daedalus, if not further.

  But this?

  He hadn’t wanted to involve Echelon, but the young man insisted there was no other way. They needed him and his ability to discern electrical systems with nothing but his thoughts. Without knowing the capabilities of their target, Echelon had said, they had no way of knowing whether she—not she, he reminded himself, it—could detect anything more conventional, even the photonic graze of a targeting laser.

  But all Echelon was doing was watching.

  “Target’s bugging out,” Invicta said.

  “What?” Bradshaw asked. It took him a moment. Like he’d become lost in the motions of Echelon’s arm, sucked into the same trance. He looked back toward the highway, where the Shepard lay in pieces, smoking and burning, and their target was punching out toward the clouds.

  Echelon’s head tracked their target until they couldn’t see it anymore, and then he lurched forward, eyes rolling back into place. He dropped his pen, fell to his knees, vomited, and waved off Bradshaw’s attempt to help him up.

  Only now, with the task complete, could he allow himself to think of him as his son.

  “I just,” Echelon said, spitting, “need a minute...”

  “He okay?” Challenger asked. “Did we get what we were here for?”

  Bradshaw picked up the sketchbook and flipped through the pages. Lines and fragments resolved into shapes then diagrams of mechanics and hardware—pieces of an endoskeletal schematic. He had no idea what he was looking at, but it was surely enough.

  “I believe so, yes,” he said. “Intercept?”

  Collins exhaled. “I’ve never encountered anything like that before.”

  “Just tell me what you got.”

  “I don’t know. It was so much. I need a minute.”

  “You have thirty seconds.”

  Intercept shook his head. “I wasn’t able to determine any points of vulnerability, much less exploit them.”

  “That’s fine. What did you get?”

  Intercept said, “One thing. A transmission that was slightly less secure than the rest, but even then I only caught the tail end of it. A phone call to Switzerland. Geneva, I think. To someone called Kasembe.”

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