Read Semper Fidelis for Free Online Page A

matter?”
    To a Marine it would. “Can you tell me who my drone will be going up against?”
    “That Marine they call Magneto. Don’t think you’ve met him.”
    Zach slouched in his chair, sliding down the back and covering his eyes. Flashes of Galen’s X-Men tattoo crowded his vision. There was no fucking way.
    “Tall, midtwenties, blond hair—”
    Galen? Linc mouthed, scooted closer and tried to grab for Zach’s phone so he could listen in. Zach yanked it back and glared at Linc.
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That guy. You met him?”
    “In the parking lot at work,” he replied. His statement was close enough to a half-truth for Zach not to consider it a lie.
    “I’ll email you the details. You’ll be running your drone from a control room on the base. Turns out that you not tying this project to Synthfad was a smart idea. Legal wouldn’t have cleared it otherwise.”
    “Now you have plausible deniability.”
    Linc crooked an eyebrow and Zach just shook his head in reply. He’d explain the other half of the conversation when he got off the phone.
    “Exactly. I’ll see you tomorrow at the control room.”
    Zach ended the call and looked up at Linc. “My drone test is going to happen tomorrow at the Marine base at Twentynine Palms.”
    “How does your hottie fit into this?” Linc questioned.
    “My drone is going against him.”
    Linc slung his arm over the back of the chair. “So your baby is being pitted against your boyfriend.”
    “This is so not happening.” It was hard enough for Zach to get laid as it was. Any chance of a repeat performance of that bakery-inspired one-night stand would probably be shot down when his invention beat out Galen. He couldn’t see any other outcome with the test or his chances with Galen.
    “Think he knows it’s you?”
    Zach’s cell pinged with an incoming message.
     
    Does Waze have a way to report IEDs?
     
    Zach chuckled and felt his anxiousness about Galen easing. “Oh yeah. He knows.” He showed the text to Linc, then replied.
     
    Only amateurs need it.
     
    He followed that with a winking smiley face to make sure Galen knew he was playing along. He wasn’t pissed at Galen—far from it. There hadn’t been any promises of more than one night. He hoped there could be maybe possibly something more because…well, he liked the guy. And while he’d been gnawing at his fingernails all night while he tried to think of something to send to Galen to break the five days of no contact, of course it had been charismatic and honest-to-a-fault Galen that had come up with the perfect opening.
     
    Ouch , came the reply, and seconds later another one.
     
    I would wish you good luck, but I’ve seen your hands work. Think I’m the one who needs the luck.
     
    He grinned. Galen was way too charming and Zach was so falling for it.
     
    Goodnight JG. See you in the morning.
     
    Night.
     
    * * * *
     
    Galen was used to patrolling cities that were populated. Buildings that were alive with residents and business people. Tracks of civilians marking the streets, digging grooves into dirt paths. The sand that surrounded him was US soil for once, and the buildings were nothing more than discarded shipping containers. The residents that wandered the streets were actors hired to portray a war-wrought public that could be hiding a terrorist in their midst at any point. This training exercise was practice, but it was also damn close to his reality while deployed.
    He was trained to spot the anomaly in the chaos of urban life, and today he would be testing his natural abilities against a mechanical device that purported to do his job better than he ever could. It was the similar routine to what he went through as part of the research study at Synthfad, but this base was as close as he came to home territory. Galen wouldn’t fail here. His CO had said this drone was developed all for the mission of saving human life and not putting him or his men at risk. But there were sensations a