The twin-rotor helicopter flew low over the bay, throwing up spray as it skimmed above the surface of the water. It was shrouded in darkness, visible only by the pinprick glow of positioning and anti-collision lights. Inside the cabin, his power-armoured bulk seated on a reinforced canvas frame, Colonel Colin Wallis looked down the length of the assembled officers and felt nothing.

Twelve of them wore black and yellow taksuits beneath armour plating or mages’ robes, rendered anonymous by their full-face helmets. They were Tactical Response officers; the outgrowth of the old Special Weapons and Tactics paradigm. Each of them was the product of urban combat courses that more closely resembled the training for military special forces than law enforcement. To Colin’s eyes, they were decidedly mediocre. Their training had forged them according to a standard pattern, which prevented each of them from truly excelling.

His own team were seated close to the cabin doors, just behind the cockpit. There were four of them, himself included, collectively drawing as much pay as the two Tactical Response squads combined. There was nothing uniform about their equipment save for the shared colour scheme of black trimmed with red, or the name written in white letters on their patches.

Firewatch. The best of the best. The bug-hunters. Blacker than black ops. Colin had been with them for over sixteen years, fighting against the worst the world has to offer. He’d stormed the Chicago Containment Zone in fifty-eight, burning out hives of Insect Spirits while the bugs choked to death on the clouds of Strain-III-Beta Ares had dropped on the city, the bacterial bioweapon seeking out any magically active entities and smothering their souls until they starved to death.

He'd fought in the corporate war with Cross Applied Technologies from later that year to the turn of the decade, leading clandestine raids against selected targets and often abandoning his uniform for deniability’s sake – pretending to be a Shadowrunner, of all things. Then he did it all again in sixty-two to sixty-three, when Proteus AG attempted a hostile takeover of Ares’ strategic partner, the Frankfurt Banking Association.

The ‘why’ of the wars had never mattered to him. He knew the causes were important to Ares Macrotechnology and its enemies, but that had only been of secondary interest. It was their importance in and of itself that made them worthwhile; what he was doing mattered because they’d sent him to do it, and he could see the worth of his tasks in the calibre of his enemies.

Then came Crash 2.0, in twenty sixty-four. It was an apocalyptic conflict; a digital Ragnarok. In a very real sense, it was the end of one world and the start of another. Its proponents certainly thought so; the Winternight cult believed that the Matrix was the prison of their god, Loki, and that they could only free him through its absolute destruction.

Colin had led his strike team in desperate raids against the doomsday cult, searching for stolen nukes and nanotech weaponry while the world fell into magically-induced winter. It was a war on existential terror, conducted with the total lack of restraint that comes when the people in charge fear the death of all they hold dear. He’d stormed remote training camps alongside UCAS military gunships, dragged persons of interest out of their hideaways, bunkers and in one case the performance of their daughter’s school play.

Colin had never felt more alive, more vital, but in the end there was nothing he could do. Winternight’s true insanity, discovered too late, made his efforts look like a futile attempt to stop the tide from coming in; their Jormungand virus tore through the old matrix from the inside, while the EMP blasts of fifteen modified nuclear warheads destroyed its physical infrastructure.

It was only later, and only thanks to his security clearance, that Colin learned that even that destruction – the total annihilation of the matrix – had been nothing more than a sideshow to the true battle between digital gods happening beyond his reach, as the self-styled DEUS AI rose and was destroyed for its hubris. All his efforts and achievements against Winternight tasted like ash in his mouth.

The New Revolution came almost as a relief after that, a reminder that there were still enemies who could be cut and killed, but in hindsight it marked the beginning of the end for his aspirations and his career.

At first, it seemed as though Ares still loved its favoured children. The Firewatch veterans – Colin included – were promoted far above their level of responsibility, as Ares tried to use an increase in status and pay to keep hold of its investment even as their duties shifted towards training the next generation of operatives. Insect hives continued to be discovered in ever-decreasing numbers, and Firewatch still led Ares’ efforts to destroy them.

It wasn’t fulfilling work, but it still felt as though he had a purpose. After two years, however, it seemed as though Ares began to forget about Firewatch. Whole teams were reassigned to meaningless bodyguard jobs or garrison duties in the middle of nowhere, while others appeared to drop off the map entirely. Firewatch had been built to fight a single existential enemy, but it seemed that the corporation had no idea how to use its creation in that threat’s apparent absence.

Five years of relative peace had seen his own Firewatch team reduced to an overpaid High Threat Response unit, their skills deteriorating in a city that didn’t need them. There was nothing that could challenge him in Brockton Bay, nothing that could drive him on towards perfection. Just scum killing scum.

“Thirty seconds out,” the pilot reported, before the whole helicopter abruptly lurched to the left, juddering as the pilot deployed a series of infra-red flares. “Chosen presence confirmed; they just fired a MANPADS from the LZ, and I can see people down there with LAWs.”

Colin took a moment to pull up the feed from the Ares Dragon’s forward camera, his vision matching the pilot’s own for a moment as he took in the situation at a glance.

“Weapons free,” he commanded, and a moment later the airframe shook once again as the forward-mounted heavy machine guns unloaded on distant targets. At the opposite end of the cabin, the tactical officers stood, grabbing the roof straps to keep themselves stable as the loadmaster lowered the rear ramp.

Colin and his team stood as well as the cabin doors just behind the cockpit swung open. They’d left the bay behind; the helicopter was skimming across the rooftops of the North End, crossing the chasms between megatowers and tenement projects as it neared their target.

He accessed the camera suite once again, decreasing the magnification so that he could see their target in full. It was a megatower, seventy stories tall and rising out of the misleadingly named ‘New Estates;’ a sprawling district of massive urban infrastructure built half a century ago and steadily falling into disrepair ever since.

Whatever carefully-ordered plan the architects had for the place had long since given way to decaying anarchy. Their landing zone was an expansive balcony about two thirds of the way up the building, boasting a commanding view of a lot of equally miserable towers. The architect probably envisioned it as an outdoor park or plaza, but the residents of the place instead seemed to be using it as somewhere to dump their trash.

The helicopter shook again as the pilot aimed another burst of shots at a group of targets. This time Colin saw the impacts as they happened; high-power rounds tearing through concrete blocks that might have been intended to support artificial trees before eviscerating the armed group taking cover behind them. Another group of suspected hostiles were running back into the building, but they were mingled with a flow of civilians. A degree of collateral damage could be justified, but not against retreating targets.

When the helicopter hit the balcony, it blew away hurricanes of plastic, metal and food long since rotted away to mush, splattering the walls of the tower and sending a rain of filth spilling off the sides.

Colin leapt out before the wheels even hit the ground, his cybereyes – integrated with his helmet’s optics – scanning the rooftop with every sensor he had available, picking out every human figure among the storm of debris.

He picked out weapons, too, raising his arms and firing incandescent beams from his gauntlet’s inbuilt Lancer MP-III laser carbines at any armed target he could see. Beside him, his team fanned out and similarly engaged the enemy, adding to his fire with the suppressive force of two assault rifles and bolts of magical energy.

The tactical officers were only slightly slower, fanning out and firing in pairs as they bounded towards the cover of decorative concrete walls and abandoned household appliances. Before them, the Chosen were trying desperately and pointlessly to prevent Knight Errant from gaining any ground.

Two vector-thrust aircraft roared overhead, unloading salvos of rotary cannon fire and anti-personnel rockets onto the roof of the building. They were smaller than the twin-rotor transport, disgorging eight more tactical officers onto the rooftop before peeling off to provide fire support.

Sixty floors down, the perimeter would be moving into place; a hundred and fifty officers and as many drones establishing a cordon around the megatower, while the city’s few subterranean specialists descended to cut off the underground routes. Their only responsibility was to stop anyone from getting in or out until the strike team had done its job. Colin was reasonably confident even beat cops could manage that when backed by enough firepower.

He sprinted forward, the servos in his legs and suit acting in perfect harmony even as the software in his helmet automatically tracked the targets around him, marking them out in different shades of red depending on whether they were already being engaged by other members of Knight Errant’s shared tactical network.

He leapt up onto a concrete wall, trusting his armour to shrug off the responding shots of small arms fire as he scanned the surface of the tower rising up above him. There were armed figures moving into firing positions in some of the windows, most of them armed with sidearms or civilian-grade rifles that could be dismissed as a non-threat, but his sensors picked out a single team moving an assault cannon into position.

With a mental flick, he tagged the gunners as a priority target and watched as one of the vector-thrust gunships swept sideways in an arc across the façade of the tower, spraying the apartment with a torrent of fire from its rotary cannon. Colin couldn’t dwell on it for long; the tactical network had already picked out a Chosen combatant aiming a LAW at him.

As the cyborg fired, Colin triggered his wired reflexes and watched time slow to a crawl. He leapt from the wall, falling at a glacial pace as he lined up a shot on the cyborg and squeezed the trigger, running the laser for a third of a second before he adjusted his aim to the next target, then the next.

By the time he landed it was clear that the battle on the balcony was nothing more than a triviality. The Chosen had enough warning to bring some of their guns to bear, but overall the attack had been successfully kept secret until their lookouts could physically see the approaching taskforce.

Colin ignored the stragglers, issuing a silent order for his team to follow as he stormed towards one of the entrances into the building. They moved in perfect unison, keeping pace in spite of their wildly different loadouts and specialities.

Colin led the charge, his experimental powered armour integrated with his cybernetics like a second skin, allowing him to move like lightning while retaining all the protection you’d expect from the heaviest armour off the market. His wargear was similarly designed around getting in close, with the twin lasers on his gauntlets acting as his primary means of engaging at range.

The others covered him; an adept, another soldier and a mage creating a balanced unit that was capable of fighting its way through any threat, each of them wearing Firewatch’s patented Bug-Stomper armour that used proprietary materials to cut down the weight of a full-body suit of milspec armour by twenty-five percent. They were Major Rhys Ellis, Captain Molly Romero and Captain Mohamed Nelson. That hadn’t always been the roster of his team; there had been transfers, injuries, promotions and losses – especially against the bugs – but this team had been with him for the last four years.

Ellis hugged Colin’s left shoulder, firing his assault rifle at anyone who looked to be rallying the enemy. He was an adept, trained in Ares-developed military martial arts designed to make him lethal in urban combat. Far from the zen spirit embodied by the stereotypical martial artist, Ellis remained an Ares marine through and through. When he fought, it was a demonstration of maximum aggression.

Romero was on his right, her own bursts of rifle fire aimed more at suppressing the enemy. Her deceptively slighter build hid a body that was more cybernetic than not – as much as she could take without her essence fraying into nothing. She was a true razorgirl, dancing across the battlefield as she eviscerated her enemies with slashes of her claws and point blank shots. She’d been a Shadowrunner before Firewatch made her an offer.

Nelson was the newest and youngest member of the team, as little as that meant. He had been raised and trained within Ares’ education pipeline for magically awakened children, and his magic was still intrinsically bound to Knight Errant’s preferred method of thaumaturgical study. In combat he was as relentless as any of them, but out of combat he put his skills to use teasing secrets out of suspects’ minds or searching for answers that could only be reached by mystical means.

After four years, that was all Colin really knew about them; how they fought and what skills and experience they contributed to the team. None of them had much of a life off the job – you couldn’t chase perfection half-heartedly – but Colin especially lived for his work. Firewatch was his whole life. He knew how to do one thing, and he excelled at it.

Inside the tower, broken speakers screeched into life with a burst of noise as every AR screen began to broadcast a Knight Errant emergency warning, displaying the authorising warrant and announcing the legality of the operation under the police corporation’s contract with the municipal government, as well as demanding the compliance of all residents.

The residents themselves – the ones who were still outside at this hour – were in a state of frantic panic, rushing back to their apartments or diving into whatever cover they could find in order to avoid the pitched battle tearing through their home. Complicating matters further, the hostiles were behaving in much the same way.

Inevitably, the line between resident and gang member was deeply blurred. The Firewatch team passed dozens of people whose faces bore the tattoos of the megatower’s controlling neo-Nazi gang – the Eighty Eights – but who were otherwise unarmed. Seven of them even threw down their weapons at just the sight of Colin’s team. Only the ones who were led by Chosen were putting up any real fight, and even then it seemed to be mostly because they were as scared of their overlords as they were of Knight Errant.

None of them could hold a candle to Firewatch. Some of the Chosen were armed with decent weapons, but Colin had cut his teeth fighting through the confines of insect hives. The cramped corridors of a megabuilding were his natural hunting ground, while his squadmates kept watch to the sides and the rear as they moved down the path to their target.

The Chosen had established a base in a cluster of apartments near the centre of the tower, overlooking the light well running down its core. Knight Errant’s intelligence suggested that the Eighty Eights had originally built the place by knocking through the walls of several units, using it as a central hub where they could hold court, store currency and manufacture narcotics in relative safety. Their source within the Eighty Eights said that the gang were angry at being booted out of what was essentially their headquarters, but that the Chosen had come in enough force that they didn’t have a choice.

Colin didn’t care about inter-gang squabbles, but it affected the likely threat assessment. The local gang could be cowed through shock and awe, then rounded up by beat cops. Most of them would likely be released later; Knight Errant were running out of cell space and the municipal courts were already overloaded with the gang war.

The analysis passed through his mind while his body was engaged on more physical pursuits, running on automatic as he sprinted through a hastily-made barricade and swept his lasers down the corridors to his left and right, eviscerating a half-fleeting mob of gangsters before he drove his fist into a half-prone Chosen cyborg who’d started to rise, cracking her faceplate and crushing the skull beneath.

Ellis had holstered his assault rifle, the weapon held on his back by the quick-release system built into his armour. Instead, he wielded two heavy pistols, using them as clubs as frequently as he fired them. One of them was a Remington Roomsweeper loaded with flechette rounds, while the others was an Ares Predator V he used to put meaty shots through the heads of anyone too far away for the flechettes or his fists.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Romero had similarly stowed her rifle, but instead of drawing a sidearm she’d extended her razor-sharp claws and leapt onto the ceiling, scuttling around with her joints and waist moving in all directions as she systematically dismantled her targets with quick cuts. Sensors and cameras integrated into her armour provided her with an all-around view of her enemies, giving her movements an almost robotic quality. Colin had once heard some Knight Errant officers saying that she didn’t even seem human, but when he’d told Romero she’d just laughed it off and said that was because she’s an elf.

Nelson walked his own path. Out of all of them, he was their only true ranged specialist, hanging back from the main group and providing the vital magical support that allowed the others to function effectively. Lightning sprang from his fingers in dense bolts that struck priority targets or wide balls of energy that exploded at his command, engulfing whole groups in storms of electrical energy. All the while his eyes were only half there as he watched the astral world for threats that only he could see.

Ignoring the entrances to the Chosen base, Colin simply smashed through a non-load bearing wall, crushing through a sofa that had been pushed to the side of the room even as microgrenade launchers on his shoulders fired a scattered burst of flashbangs that sparked in the air like fireworks.

“Justin Hammond,” he shouted, his voice amplified by speakers built into his collar. “You’re coming with me!”

The disgraced policlub leader was on his feet at the other end of the room and looked like he had been hurriedly discussing an escape route with the senior Chosen figure, identified by the Knight Errant database as Stormtiger, one of Hookwolf’s senior lieutenants.

His team were already dealing with the twenty-three other Chosen operatives in the room, adjusting their methods now that they were fighting through a command and control centre rather than a layered defence. They were every bit as methodical, every bit as violent, but their attacks were now aimed to disarm and disable where possible.

Colin ignored the chaff who weren’t in his direct path, raising both his arms to put lasers through the hearts of the two Chosen who were in his way before focusing all his attention on the two high value targets.

Stormtiger was shirtless, his chromed arms, pectorals and shoulder muscles making it look like he was wearing a metal bolero jacket. There was a tiger tattooed across his flesh and etched onto the metal, while his fingers ended in elongated claws that didn’t look retractable.

“Come on, toy soldier!” he shouted, slapping a metal palm against his chest. “Come fight a real man!”

Colin didn’t say anything in response. He simply closed the gap, his hands curled into fists. The most efficient outcome was to simply shoot him, but Stormtiger was rated as highly as Hammond on Knight Errant’s priority target list, even if they hadn’t expected to find him here. He needed to be brought in alive, with no margin for error.

The Chosen lieutenant wasn’t a fool. He knew how outmatched he was, but he also knew that he needed to buy as much time as possible for Hammond to escape. He might not understand the why – though Colin suspected Hookwolf’s lieutenants were shouldering more than their share of the day to day responsibilities of leadership – but he knew that someone wanted Hammond safe and out of custody just as much as the DEA and the district attorney wanted him in cuffs.

It meant he tried to dance around Colin, ducking in and out of reach like he might have done if this were wrestling, rather than cage fighting. Colin, in turn, ignored the spectacle and closed in to drive his fist into Stormtiger’s torso, his overwhelming superiority in weight and torque smashing through the elbow that was raised to block it, before Colin brought up his other arm and fired a point-blank laser through Stormtiger’s shoulder.

As the disarmed cyborg staggered back, Colin drove his foot into the back of Stormtiger’s knee, shattering one artificial leg and sending him toppling to the floor before Colin arrested his descent by grabbing the chain around his neck. He took in the pointed ears looped through the links for just a moment before throwing the lieutenant to the ground and placing a warning boot against his spine.

“Don’t move,” he ordered, redundantly, before removing his boot and turning his attention to Hammond.

The preacher-come-politician looked a lot more haggard than he had in the wanted pictures. He clearly hadn’t shaved in a while and his neatly pressed shirt and priest’s collar had been switched out a for a UCAS army jacket worn open over a bulletproof vest, with the flag patch replaced by the antiquated fifty stars and thirteen stripes of the USA.

There was a rifle leaning up against the wall that might have been his, but Hammond hadn’t had the chance to grab it. Fortunately, he hadn’t had the chance to escape either; Romero had scuttled around the room to block the only remaining route out, while the other two Firewatch officers dealt with the last of the Chosen.

In desperation, he reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of tokens, holding his closed fist out in front of him like it was a weapon even as Colin strode towards him. With rapid movements of the other hand he outlined an arcane symbol in the air that took form as a glowing halo of light that surrounded and shielded him. He looked uncertain for a moment, perhaps even scared, before something like resigned determination spread across his face. It was an expression Colin was familiar with, usually because it came just before the suicide bomber hit their detonator in an empty room.

“Fine then,” Hammond said. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

As if it were an incantation, he punctuated his statement by clenching his fist and shattering the tokens within. When he opened his palm, incandescent white light shot out and circled Hammond for a moment before taking form as five glowing knights, their plate armour somehow seeming more real than real in spite of being formed from solid light.

Each of them held great two handed swords in a ready position as they formed a circle around their summoner.

Colin drew his own weapon from the quick-release holster on his back, the haft expanding as the axe-head unfolded and the safety sheath fell off the monomolecular edge. With utmost finality in his movements, he drove the butt of the halberd into the ground and stood defiant in the face of his foe.

Spirits were at their heart conceptual creatures, given form by the gestalt dreams of all life on Earth. They were creatures of myth and stories, and those stories hadn’t yet caught up to the modern world.

Ares had learned through trial and error that explosives were next to useless against spirits, while guns were less effective than they should be. Their blows were too far removed from the killing intent of the wielder to be effective against creatures of thought. The explosive was forgotten in a distant factory and often armed hours before it was used, while the bullet became conceptually separate from the shooter the moment it left the barrel.

But a blade was imbued with the primal force of history, backed by the deliberate malice of a blow meant to sever flesh and end life, driven by the force of the wielder’s body and will. When Colin strode forwards and jabbed his halberd towards the leading spirit, it parried his blow with the resounding clang of metal on metal.

The knights of antiquity and the knights of modernity fought a pitched duel in the devastated keep of a gang that ruled like feudal lords. Colin drove his halberd forwards between sword swings, hooking the collar of a knight’s armour with the base of the axe head and using it to drag the spirit in close enough to drive an elbow into its back. Once it hit the floor he reversed his halberd and drove the spearpoint into the gap between neck and helmet, striking the spirit in a spot that was only vulnerable because the spirit believed it should be.

He ran a second knight through as it fought with Romero, who had been struggling to fight an enemy with a greatsword’s reach even after extending the cyberspurs built into her forearms, then decapitated a third with an axe blow while Ellis and Nelson killed the remaining two with magically-enhanced attacks.

That only left Hammond, whose shield was shattered by a spearpoint jab. Ellis moved in to disable him, kicking the firebrand’s legs out from under him as he pressed Hammond’s arms together before slapping on a pair of cuffs, while Romero pulled a full-face hood over his head and cinched it tight around the neck. The cuffs contained a type of moss that reacted to active magic, triggering a powerful electric shock, while the electrochromatic fabric inside the mask emitted a constant barrage of light and sound that made it next to impossible for a mage to focus enough to astrally project.

By the time Hammond was secure, the Tactical Response officers had reached the headquarters. The officers moved throughout the scene applying trauma patches to the dying and cuffing the ones who were merely wounded. Many of them – most likely the newest – occasionally paused as if they were shocked at the violence the Firewatch team had unleashed, or how many Chosen they’d taken down while the ‘urban combat specialists’ were stuck fighting their way through corridors.

They didn’t linger long. The purpose of this raid was never to grab everyone. They could sweep the tower clean of Chosen and Eighty Eights, but the evidence against most of them would be insufficient to convict, while the city’s courts and the state’s prisons simply didn’t have the resources to process and detain that many people. The best they could do was cut off the head of the snake, then interrogate it until it revealed the most vital organs of its body.

Another helicopter was waiting for them on the balcony, a second twin-rotor transport that had disgorged its cargo of Knight Errant custody officers in bulky body armour, who were chaining a number of prisoners to their seats. Other captives – perhaps three dozen – sat in lines a little way back from the landing zone, waiting for either their release or a spot on another aircraft.

Colin and Romero led Hammond up the ramp, guiding his feet up the step and pushing his head down so he didn’t hit the roof, while Ellis and Nelson carried Stormtiger out on a stretcher. The cyborg was met in the aircraft by a Knight Errant paramedic, who connected a diagnostic tool to his cyberware before preparing to shunt his cybernetic limbs in case he’d sustained internal damage, while the Firewatch team loomed over Hammond as the last custody officers boarded and the helicopter took flight.

None of them spoke on the journey over. Even the prisoners were silent, in the familiar way defeated enemies often were after losing everything in the span of minutes. Twenty minutes later they touched down on the roof of Knight Errant’s headquarters in the city; a monolithic tower on the border between Downtown and the historic city centre, with a giant holographic logo flickering on the side of the building.

When they touched down, the rank and file Chosen were led out first then split according to triage between a waiting group of paramedics and the elevator that led straight down to the cells. The Firewatch team left the helicopter last, taking a different elevator down to one of the many interrogation suites in the building.

Once there, Colin was surprised to find it packed full of people who weren’t with Knight Errant. Men and women in suits were lingering in the bullpen, while others had brought blue jackets that bore the letters of UCAS federal agencies; the DEA and the FBI, mostly, though there were one or two from the NSA. Knight Errant’s own detectives looked distinctly outnumbered, as did the state prosecutors.

“Who invited the feds?” Romero asked, as a pair of Knight Errant custody officers took Hammond and led him – still hooded and cuffed – straight into one of the euphemistically named ‘interview rooms.’

“They invited themselves,” was the answer from a stocky dwarf who made her way over to the Firewatch team. Commissioner Piggot was dressed in a close-fitting tacsuit, rather than officewear, and had a holstered pistol on her belt. Colin wondered if she’d taken a closer look at their raid. The commissioner had a habit of personally supervising her force’s most significant operations, and often took time to attend ride-alongs in the most dangerous areas of the city at the riskiest times of night.

No officer in her position could ever be called popular, but Colin presumed it was meant as a reminder to the rank and file that she’d come to leadership from Knight Errant’s High Threat Response, rather than from the often political staff officers who thronged the headquarters. Staff officers like Lieutenant Christner, a nepotism appointee who’d achieved his position through his relation to Brockton Bay’s mayor. The fact that he seemed to be decent at his job was just a matter of random chance.

“Colonel Wallis, we need to talk,” the Commissioner said, looking up at Colin without a hint of irritation at the vast gulf in height between them. “Lieutenant Christner will debrief your team.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Colin said, turning to the side and giving his team a nod before following the Commissioner through the middle of the gathering of UCAS agents, the suits scattering like a flock of birds as he strode through them in full power armour, only bothering to remove his helmet and tuck it under his arm.

Once they were in a secure interview room a few doors down from the one holding Hammond, the dwarf closed the door and set the glass to opaque on both sides. Away from the outside personnel, Colin could see the strain on the Commissioner’s face. Something was bothering her. He could pick it up through context as well; Piggot had a habit of discussions like these. Colin’s rank demanded respect, but his position didn’t. He suspected that the Commissioner spoke to him because he had stayed in special forces, whereas she had taken a promotion she may have come to see as a poison pill.

“Romero was out of line,” he began, “but she had a point. That’s an interesting gathering.”

“You know how it works,” Piggot said, shrugging her shoulders. “When a company takes on a police contract it becomes responsible for enforcing all local laws, including laws that require them to cooperate with other agencies.”

“You know what I mean,” Colin answered, not liking the deflection. “This is bigger than a normal federal investigation.”

“It is,” Piggot nodded. “In many ways, it’s the continuation of an old investigation. The FBI have recently re-opened a number of cold cases and that’s dragged in several other agencies. Only the DEA are here for Hammond himself, and even they have become more interested in what and who he knows.”

“There’s a Medhall connection?” Colin asked. Medhall’s excuse that America As One had lied to them about where their drugs were going had always rung hollow. There were only so many suspiciously well-stocked Chosen black clinics that you could raid before you started to recognise a pattern.

“That they were using both the Chosen and the Policlub as assets? Of course; it’s a common enough strategy. The question is what they’ve done with them.”

Colin didn’t respond to that, instead waiting for her to continue.

“We haven’t spoken about our respective pasts,” Piggot said. “It’s fair enough; I’m sure there are a lot of blacked-out paragraphs in both our histories, but I do have a question. Where were you on November third, back in sixty-four?”

“Andrews Air Force Base, in DeeCee,” he answered. “I was part of a joint Wintermute taskforce; Firewatch and UCAS Special Operations Command. Comms were still largely down with the matrix, but I’d managed to get in touch with Ares’ delegation in Washington through conventional radio transmissions.”

“So, you were right in the thick of it?” Piggot asked, rhetorically.

“The base had been heavily infiltrated,” Colin continued. “When the New Revolution kicked off, some of the planes were bombed, others took off in support of the insurrection. A rogue Army unit arrived at the gate and tried to lock down the base, but they fired on the Air Force guards who wouldn’t let them in. Then it seemed like everyone started killing each other. I kept my people out of the fighting until I managed to get in touch with Ares and received orders to support the loyalists.”

“You could just as easily have ended up fighting for the other side,” Piggot remarked. “We had plenty of traitors among our own ranks, especially within the Americanists.”

“I don’t engage in factional politics,” Colin said, though he did hold a particular disdain for those eccentrics who believed that Ares Macrotechnology itself was the truly legitimate successor of the old USA.

“Some would say that makes you a Militarist.”

“You would say that, but you’re a Militarist yourself. A Corporatist would say it makes me a model employee.”

“Fair enough,” Piggot conceded. “And after you received your marching orders?”

“I linked up with the largest collection of loyalists I could find and supported General Colloton in retaking the sprawl. I was fighting in Union Station when they found the President’s body in the White House.”

“I was in Detroit,” the Commissioner said, almost conversationally. “Things there were much calmer, of course. We had our own unrest, but we rolled out the garrison in support of the UCAS. The sight of Ares tanks on the streets was enough to settle the issue. But here in Brockton Bay, things got interesting.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“The New Revolution were close to taking the city, the National Guard had largely rebelled and the gangs were running rampant, but at the last minute Max Anders committed his entire security force to restoring order, saving the governor’s life and city in exchange for a firm commitment to push through a vote on state-wide extraterritoriality.”

“They think he lost his nerve,” Colin mused, eyeing the opaque glass and the agents beyond it. “That he was part of it, but backed out at the last minute? Or that he knew about it but wasn’t involved, so he intervened to exploit the situation?”

“The numbers don’t match,” the Commissioner said. “He had too many rent-a-cops, they were too well armed and the opposition folded too quickly. But this isn’t my suspicion, and it’s not really theirs either. Knight Errant and the FBI have both been handed tantalising packages of data that infer a great deal, but prove nothing. All of it from an anonymous source.”

“Is it us?” Colin asked. “Ares, I mean?”

“I asked Stansfield. He said no, and I believe him. The higher-ups don’t care enough about Medhall to keep this secret from the city’s senior executive. It’s a more personal feud between local families. If the regional executive officer isn’t aware of any moves from us, Ares isn’t involved.”

Piggot paused, folding her arms and looking down for a moment, as if uncertain.

“What I find more concerning than who they may be is that they haven’t given us the smoking gun. I’m certain they have enough evidence to prove something the feds would have to act on.”

“You think they want the FBI to work for it,” Colin observed. “Drawing us deeper into this local feud once they start snatching up Medhall execs and asking them if they’re terrorists. It would weaken Knight Errant’s position in the city.”

“I think that’s one possibility. The other is that they want to spark a war, so they’re dropping just enough to get us on high alert and the city gradually filling with federal agents, while Medhall’s deniable assets expend themselves on this gang war.”

Colin frowned, pulling up a case file from the database.

“The strike that began this gang war was explosive, but surgical. They knew exactly when and where to hit the Chosen to cause maximum damage with a single blow.”

“The city’s a tinderbox, Wallis, and if they’re going to light it, it’ll be soon. Medhall’s petition for double-A status is going before the Corporate Court next week. If it’s accepted – and our analytics suggest it will be – they become truly extraterritorial, which means all those agents out there can’t touch them without jumping through some very difficult hoops.”

The strain on her face made sense now. Commissioner Piggot was a general who knew that a battle was coming, but had no control over how it would begin. Perhaps Hammond would give them enough information to launch a pre-emptive strike, but Colin doubted it. He was a true fanatic who believed himself a soldier fighting for a righteous cause – almost certainly the same cause so many others had fought and killed for six years prior. He wouldn’t break.

“Thank you for warning me,” he said. “I’ll keep my team ready.”

In truth, though, Colin found it hard to sympathise with the Commissioner’s concerns. The city was blindly staring down the barrel of a catastrophe that threatened to rip open old wounds and fill the streets with violence not seen in decades. The eyes of the nation would be drawn to this nondescript place, and Ares would take notice of the part its soldiers had played in events.

The greatest triumphs of Colin’s life had come during the greatest disasters of cities, governments and nations. He was a soldier to the core and, at long last, he might have found another battle worth his skill.