The nitrate refinery had been built in the middle of nowhere. It was the city that had come second. Roughly planned, with vast roads running in and out of the central facility, it looked like some kind of arcane sigil from above. The alleys and side streets written in some forgotten language, etching power into the economic heart of the city-state. Iris had some lingering impression of adobe hovels, or sand-beige paint blasted by the winds. The conversion city, Pump Nine, managed to look just like every other high-tech city on the planet.

Which was to say, a mix and match of rundown squalor, just painted in neon advertisements. It had homeless people like anywhere else, but the ones beneath their porches and overpasses wore leather and chrome instead of rags.

The Arctic Cutters sent in a fake plane first. It was big and shiny, and had a gun turret, but was designed to be shot down. The drone played hard to get, forced the local militia to react to it. Surface to air missiles launched up one after another, like they were worried about running out. They should have swarmed the thing at once.

As it was, Iris got to watch from fifty kilometers east as the drone shot down missile after missile, lighting up the defense installments with gunfire, before one finally tagged the thing. Then the computer had the city’s defenses all mapped out. Long range strikes began raining down on the city like pinpoint artillery. Rooftop gardens exploded. Billboards advertising Fizzy-Zero diet soft drink rained down across the streets. Holograms of trees, memorials, religious icons, and more sparked out in flashes of light, glittering in the aftermath smoke.

When it was deemed safe, the rest of the planes flew in for the main show. Holly dropped Iris off before the main gates of the fertilizer plant and took off. Only once the plane was out of reach did she toss a bag of weapons down, and remotely unlock the arm binders. Iris sighed and rubbed at her wrists, where the synth skin had chaffed. Then she retrieved a micro-blade, with the same kind of acoustic vibration system that Roselyn’s ax had, and cut a hole through the security gate.

“Mendel? Silvy? Tell me you can hear me.” She sent the signal over the Blumhagen open channel, the frequency and encryption that they couldn't miss. She didn’t get a response.

The Pump Nine militia had one more defense measure.

It emerged from a storage shed, each step making the ground vibrate beneath her feet. The weapon was monstrous, with six grasping legs that spun around on pivots and rings, one limb seeming to roll over the next to glide it forward all while some kind of enormous eye stared at her. When he got closer, she saw it wasn’t an eye, but the guts of some kind of weapon that looked like a jet turbine, all steel teeth spinning on one another. An energy weapon like a mouth big enough to eat her.

“Huh, that’s a new one. UA design?” she asked over Arctic Cutter’s radio channel.

Holly responded, “Must be the other bidders for all those vats, trying to protect their investment. Pulling up the designation now, system calls it a Wave Beetle.”

Beyond the insectile orb, Iris could see train cars stacked up and stored beneath a loading crane, ready to ship out. Thousands of liters, and more getting produced every minute in the factory beyond. The structure looked like a bundle of grain silos, with massive pipes stretching out across the city of Pump Nine, maybe coming from the ground, maybe from other sub-factories. It was like one giant organ, excreting the soil nutrient for export. All of that machinery, protected by one imported robot. “Kind of a lackluster name, ain’t it?”

The Wave Beetle didn’t seem to like her appraisal of it, and the energy weapon began to twist and spin, to make the metal squirm and spark with electricity. It reared up in front of her and belched out some kind of hyper-velocity plasma, like it had infused the air with something magnetic and spewed it forward. The beam struck the dirt like a drill, annihilating and spewing chunks of gravel into the air.

It didn’t touch Iris, not even close. The thing was too big, too clunky. Its weapon was a gimmick and its armor made out of steel rather than graphene nano-weave. Iris wasted less than three minutes turning the Wave Beetle into a pile of scrap.

“Haber!” Mendel shouted, his voice crackling through jamming static as she peered at a strange color in the horizon. Something about the gray clouds had shifted, taken on a more blue hue despite the waning sunlight.

“Boss?” she responded, putting a finger to her ear and pacing the courtyard.

“Haber, get out of there, now. Find a way to extract. UAAF is sending in a whole division to capture Pump Nine, and you are not a friendly for them!”

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Iris clicked her tongue and switched frequencies. Arctic Cutters almost certainly had all her lines tapped, and Mendel would have known that, so she couldn’t imagine his warning being wrong. “Holly, what the hell is happening to the North East?”

A different voice responded to her. Calm, feminine, smooth as a prostitute in a parlor convincing a John to double up. “Miss Iris Haber, you really do make phenomenal bait. I am just so glad we could work together.”

Iris froze and glared at the horizon. “Who the hell is this?”

“My name is Amaranth Sherman, you can call me Amy, if you ever catch me again. Thanks to you, the entire Western Division of UAAF has been deployed to the Fertile Crescent, hook, line, and sinker.”

Iris paced. The city was still filled with the pop-pop of gunfire, the exchanges of missiles and anti-personnel armaments. The Washington Blues, parked in the Red Sea, hadn’t changed their bombardment. She couldn’t spot Holly’s hoverjet in the sky anymore though. “I figured they were working for you, but what the fuck? Don’t you want the factory?”

“Of course I want it,” Amy responded. “I want plenty of things, but sometimes sacrifices need to be made. Lose a little now, gain a lot later. That’s how you win in life. Don’t you know? You’re just like me. Lost a little of your body, gained all the power you could wish for.”

Millions would starve if not for this fertilizer. Even UAAF couldn’t just bomb it. But if Sherman was willing to sacrifice it… Iris could think of two reasons. Either a nuclear strike to wipe out the division, which seemed unlikely to penetrate their defenses, or Project Dragon Seed was coming to fruition. Possibly both.

“Boss,” Iris said, jumping back to the Blumhagen line. “They just sold out Arctic Cutters.”

“I’m getting reports of missile launches from all over the world right now, even deep sea. They’re coming from the Leviathans. Iris, you need to get out of there!” Mendel shouted.

She took off sprinting for the trains. They were the closest thing she could spot that could move. That hope broke as soon as she saw the strength of the engine. It could get up to speed, eventually, but it was a cargo train, not a maglev. Acceleration was not its strong suit. Part of her mind worried that Daedalus Labs had put something in her body. A kill switch or something. That at a moment’s notice, she might collapse and fall paralyzed, be forced to watch a nuclear missile crash down onto her. But no signal came, even when she jumped into the employee parking lot and found something much nicer than a car.

It wasn’t quite as retro as the motorcycle she had stolen outside Neo Taipei, but not exactly recent either. It had a sand scarred patina to it, but all the important bits still held together with an unbridled determinism characteristic to the region. What she stole, with a bit of control module hacking courtesy of her HAB unit processor, was the motorcycle equivalent of a hoverjet; a mantabike.

Some plant manager making millions a year must have gotten it for fun, and abandoned it when the violence began. She didn’t care about the history, just that it turned on. When she jammed the throttle, the embedded rotors in the wings started up. They sucked in air, pumped it through, and flung it against the ground to force her up. Then she was flying.

Overhead, hypersonic missiles cut the clouds like a knife through wrapping paper. The approaching army sent up salvo after salvo of interceptor missiles and targeted energy weapons, shooting the barrage down. The missiles erupted, showering fire and debris across the land as Iris jetted over rooftops. She bounced from one building to the next, forcing all of her speed forward as she hugged the mantabike.

“Iris! Where the hell are you going?” Holly demanded, her voice impotent over the radio.

She didn’t respond. She kept her attention on dodging people, on avoiding buildings and bumps, and jetting over the edge of the city. She had to land on a road to have any hope of making it out. The trees were all new growth, thick as a jungle, no way to fly a mantabike through them. So she took the road out that headed vaguely northwest, hoping it would go to Jerusalem, or some accessible port.

Holly started to say something else, then her voice was lost in static. Light exploded behind Iris, filling the dusk like daytime, and for a moment she thought it was over. That the radiation wave of a nuclear bomb would catch her, would pierce right through her clothes and skin and melt her insides. Heat hit her, but nothing more. The concussive shockwave made the mantabike lurch and she nearly put the nose into a ditch before she got the wings under control, but no more.

It had been a conventional bomb, somewhere in the downtown of Pump Nine. Smoke billowed into the sky, sending up gray ash to cover up the exposed cuts of cloud. Then debris began to rain. Bits and chunks fell all over. The larger pieces fell close to Pump Nine, breaking windows and spreading fire. Smaller bits made it all the way to her, pelting the mantabike like hail.

Some of the debris stuck to the wings and the dash, and to her. It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t stone or dirt or anything like that. It wasn’t gore either. It was a soft, brown-ish material, oozing a glossy fluid that made it stick to anything it touched. Iris squinted her eyes and looked at it, the more that fell across the land. Memory stirred. Then she recognized it.

It was the same fungal biomass that the blighted monstrosity in Siberia had been composed of. The kind that Holly had incinerated in the missile silo, burned away with napalm till nothing remained but the sample for study. The Shermans had just scattered bits and pieces of it all over the city, the new growth forest around it. Probably everywhere in the world they had just struck.

Somewhere, some place, Fauxnir had just regenerated, and even if it was killed there, it would regenerate from the next largest piece of flesh somewhere else in the world. A non-stop bio-threat across all of United Asia’s territory.