Prologue, the Second.

One Year Ago . . .

Elise pulled up to the three building private clubhouse compound in an eighteen wheeler.

She immediately caught sight of the troubling scene, jumped out of the truck, and headed towards the carnage. Three dead bodies lay on the walkway that lead to the posh marble steps of the front entrance façade. One woman and two males, they appeared to have been members of the staff.

She slid her floppy straw hat down against her shoulder blades, not in the mood to wear it. Now, it kept her hair out of her way and pinned down.

Elise winced at the sight at her feet. Several large exit wounds splayed out from each torso's front bodice. They were running away when they caught the rounds.

With a fiery glare in her green-eyes, Elise glanced at the squad leader of her creep team.

He stood at point position near by her.

"Caza, did you do this? I said no dead civilians unless absolutely necessary. This -," Elise's hands waved from left to right, pointing at the fifteen meter spread of bodies, "- appears entirely superfluous."

Elise reflected on her own odd choice of words that reflected an attempt to maintain her professional demeanor and keep her anger to a minimum.

Caza, a tall bearded man, shadowed over her. She understood that respect for her tactical intelligence kept the team in line but the dead bodies that lay at her feet caused a momentary panic in her that that operational sentiment may be subject to change.

She looked at the weapon he carried, noting the trigger finger white knuckled tight against the trigger guard.

He held a Gideon 338 Exp Carbine. It fired a 338Exp Magnum Lapua.

A specially fitted round for short barrel guns where long barrels were impractical for anti-material usage.

Caza grimaced at the accusation. He held up the weapon and pointed it to the furthest building.

A heavily damaged turret leaned off of a strongly reinforced awning.

"I know it looks gruesome, and I'm holding a Dyer Maker (anti-material carbine) which pretty much matches the wounds so I ain't even mad at the accusation, but it wasn't me. It was that big iron up there."

Elise squinted as she eyed it. Her left eye was enhanced with an artificial cornea. Squinting boosted the ultraviolet range in the array of her perception. The damaged turret formed a unique cold-signature.

Elise glanced from one fence side to the opposite end and back to see if she could spot a twin to the turret that may have been hiding by cameotic means but nothing unusual called attention to itself.

Unfortunately, the visibility for the overall club grounds was highly limited from her current low ground standpoint.

"There have been no more of the turrets popping up, right?"

Caza shook his head.

"I've had the drones on patrol all morning cycling through SOP, with one flying out at a time. Got Birddog on watch in the shed back there. She never slips up."

Elise suppressed a smile. Birddog was his sister, a family nick name for Fiona. Caza was defending her, and Elise liked that show of loyalty, especially in a man who could one day be her brother-in-law.

"Now, I've got them all going non-stop though I hate to waste top grade biodiesel. Can't make any promises. That thing popped up out of nowhere."

With a skeptical grimace pinching on her face, Elise motioned to the turret.

"It's tethered to an awning with metal plates bolted down!"

Caza shrugged. His lips bunched up, contorted and at odds with one another.

"Check the video. You'll see. It came out of nowhere."

Elise palmed at the air between them.

"Okay, I believe you. But their own staff, they killed in cold blood?"

Caza breathed hard and angry. His eyes twisted up to the side under squared up brows.

"Yeah. Fucking sucks. When we surrounded the place those unfortunate bastards got pinned down. I promised them safe passage, and of course I meant it, too. But when they made a run for it, that turret popped into existence and lit them up.

"The squad gave it all we've got, as you can see up there by the mess we made of it. But the damage was already done."

Elise could still smell the burning oil on the breeze coming from the spent gears of the machine gun.

Her voice titillated towards exasperation.

"Who the hell uses a large caliber for a turret? 5mm or even .223 I use myself, but a 338 or .50? It makes no sense, Chief.

"I mean, the idea behind your standard turret configuration is to keep it low maintenance because it operates independent of a support staff in combat conditions. Low maintenance is not possible if the gun is prone to overheating, excessive smoke output, and gear wear."

Caza nodded along.

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"You are preaching to the choir, Senora Luna Claro." He looked down, biting at his lip as he hesitated. "I think the turret was on a suicide mission."

Elise ignored the anthropomorphic conceptual absurdity of his words claiming agency for the turret and assumed that Caza meant it was sent out by someone who programed the task it carried out.

She eyed it once more to see if there was anything she over looked.

No means of software control was visible on its remaining surface but that didn't mean much. With modern design and engineering, control panels tended to be tucked out of sight and out of the way.

It still made little sense to her as Elise gamed the incident in her head. Perhaps the turret didn't belong to the Dimittis cult fanatics she was tasked with hauling in.

"Why would those assholes use it for a suicide mission to eliminate their staff and not our crew?"

Elise noticed something about the corpse of the woman. A cochlear implant tightly wound the outer parameter of her ear.

It was first generation tech used as a dampener on the El Otros, the Manifested who were called 'Those Amongst Us' by a public who were taught the existence of them, Manifested made indistinguishable from non-corrupted humans, was nothing more than a reactionary myth.

Elise snarled in disgust. She knew better.

"Caza, help me turn this guy over. He is kind of big."

The corpse had a cap on its fully intact head. A tam o' shanter with the club logo on it. Elise pulled it off after Caza turned the body over from whence it folded.

"They all have them," he confirmed, gesturing that it wasn't necessary to disturb the third body.

Elise stood up.

"All right. Here is the game plan. Keep your gunners in position for now but we are executing a fallback until we figure out what is going on with the turret.

"Send Rigo over to help me carry these bodies over by the surveil shack. According to 2053 Convention Rules of Engagement for mercenary and bounty hunter teams, we are responsible for casualty recovery and for reporting the circumstances and conditions in which they were found. It is part and partial to what makes us the good guys . . ."

With his whole body jerking into motion, Caza's eyes darted up and over her head. He lunged at her and tucked her between his arms. As she fell to the ground, the sound of twin XM7s set to tri-bursts rattled the surrounding air.

Elise caught sight of her squad members, the two American US Army veterans whose bullets now slammed into something only a dozen meters away from her. She could not see over Caza to sight the target as he covered her body.

From above her, another hurling mass of auto-fire rushed through the air. Elise watched in horror as the 18-wheeler was ripped apart by the high caliber rounds.

"Everybody fall back, and take cover away from the flat bed truck," she yelled.

Caza lifted her back up, grabbed his root mic, and relayed to the full team her exact words.

Elise twisted around and grabbed her 10 mm Magellani Terra Bruciata Revolver. It strapped itself on her wrist with gas pistons firmly formed fitted on to her limb in under a second. In spite of the large caliber, shooting the gun was a breeze with the auto-straps in place.

The Americans had damaged the turret severely already but they both were engaged in a shifting backwards hike to clear out as they switched out magazines.

With a red dot on target, Elise lay fire into the connector pin for the turret's belt feed. The parts popped out in a fierce ricochet that almost clipped her ear with a deafening whoop spinning passed.

Soon after the belt feed dropped, the turret's double set of fire chambers spun empty.

There was no time to size up the victory. Flames roared from the truck. Lit-up chemicals spat about as they sizzled and cackled.

Her gut thrashed at the thought - she was about to lose it all. Almost every dime invested in the mission was on the back of that truck.

No time to sulk, she had to let them know.

"Caza you gotta tell them that there are explosives on that flatbed."

As he relayed the message, Caza threw her up on his shoulders and scuttled a solid one hundred meters before the 18-wheeler blew up with a mushroom cloud reaching hundreds of meters up in the air.

Caza and Elise scrambled beneath a picnic table before debris came spinning down all around them.

The rain of metal hailed down for several seconds, even punching through the thick wood above their heads. She began to squirm.

"Keep tight," Caza demanded.

Elise was desperate to tend to any injuries sustained by her team members but she couldn't see any of them over the smoke and mayhem nor could she hear them.

Clinching the thin grass reeds at her knees, Elise expired all of her breath before inhaling again.

Is that a heart murmur? This profession is driving me to an early grave.

Caza put a sympathetic hand against her shoulder and her body regained composure. She finally smiled. He did everything in his power in the last several minutes to protect her. That resolve and loyalty made her tear up.

She looked away.

Many of her detractors in the merc and bounty hunter field assumed she was a man-hater. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The truth was she was a mother hen to them because it took a great deal of extra effort on her part to keep her men alive.

"What was in the truck," Caza asked.

Elise shook her head as she wiped the tears from her cheeks.

"Two remote controlled killdozers, a Boring dig-tractor, two hundred pounds of explosions, in all 425 K worth of equipment, USD. Pretty much everything this op depended on."

She grew silent. A second hail of small metal bits occurred. Caza spoke up again.

"Something's eating at you. What's on your mind?"

Elise screwed up her face in an ugly pinch.

"Yeah. I've figured out why this is going down so cat and mouse like. Figured out why they are targeting everything but us. It is a taunt, by an old enemy of mine inside Ùltimos Diàs. It means they have a mole on the inside."

Caza chuckled. "Mole? That always happens with splinter groups. I thought you intentionally stayed clear of the drama. When are you not in-country to ever have a chance to make enemies inside Ùltimos Diàs?"

"Caza. This goes back more than a few years before I learned that lesson to keep to my operations and let management do what management does best - which is to kill each other. Come on, lets get moving and find out what's going on."

She returned to the RV hours later, tossed off all her clothes, exhausted.

Birddog lay on the bed in her silk pajama bottoms, on her belly, typing away on a laptop.

Elise grabbed the IT Specialist' left side rump, and messaged it like a stress ball. Indeed, it was her habitual way of relieving anxiety.

"How's the team," asked the object of her affection.

Elise leaned her back against the bed boards.

"Better than what we should expect under the circumstances. No one dead, nothing that will keep anyone out of commission for more than seventy-two hours.

"Rigo has second and third degree burns on his back. I had to dig a bolt out of one of the US Army veteran's ribcage. But all together, we are in pretty good shape personnel wise."

Birddog twisted her torso over to face Elise.

"Andu told me about our financial arrears with the 18-wheeler blowing up. I think I can help."

Elise's face squinched up.

"Where are you going with this, hon?"

Birddog's head leaned pointedly at her screen.

"We are merely sixty kilometers away from Vida Escondida."

Elise shook her head. Every few months the assignment got tossed her way and everytime she turned it down.

"Just a thief. She is not a war criminal, not El Otros, or Dimittis cult, nor a threat to Ùltimos Dìas. Just a cat burglar."

Birddog punched a few keys on her device. A striking thirty-something Metiza appeared on the screen. The name Tasìa del Alma-Gris beneath the image.

Birddog rose up and faced Elise with sulky eyes focused on the bounty hunter.

"She is worth one point two million USD, and . . . she is the best infiltrator in the business."

Elise smiled, tentatively.

"I see where you are going with this my pretty little genius. Kill two birds with one stone. Has she ever done bunker busting before?"

Birddog raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, yeah."

Birddog leaned back over towards her laptop and punched up a report.

"Read this."

Elise didn't have to lean. Her artificial eye relayed the report directly into her brain as she scanned through it.

Her smile grew broad as a germ of an idea began to take shape.