Read The End of All Things: The Third Instalment for Free Online Page B

of government.”
    “No, because the prime minister had his cabinet approve a declaration of emergency powers and dissolved the current government,” Lambert said. “All legal as can be.”
    “For what little good it’s going to do him,” Powell said. She was down a bit from Lambert and Salcido, on the other side of the shuttle, as was I.
    “Oh, now, Ilse, he’ll be fin e , ” Salcido said. “He’s in an undisclosed location. ”
    “Which we’re on our way to right now. Another high-altitude drop and destroy.”
    “We need to get Prime Minister Okada alive,” I reminded Powell.
    “High-altitude drop, snatch, and then destroy,” Powell corrected.
    “Which begs the question of how we know where this undisclosed location is,” Lambert said, to me.
    “Okada’s had nano-transmitters in his blood since he became prime minister,” I said.
    “I assume he doesn’t know that.”
    “Probably not.”
    “How did they get there, if you don’t mind me asking?”
    “No idea,” I said. “If I had to guess, I imagine at some point or another he had a meal at the Colonial Union compound, and they were slipped to him then.”
    “And we wonder why the Colonial Union isn’t looked on with great enthusiasm,” Lambert said.
    Powell rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”
    “You can snark at me all you want, Ilse,” Lambert said, and then disappeared as a hole in the shuttle appeared behind him and he was sucked out into Khartoum’s upper atmosphere, along with Salcido and the soldiers on either side of them. My combat suit, sensing pressure drop and shuttle damage, immediately snuck its mask over my head and started drawing oxygen out of what remained of the air in the shuttle cabin. Simultaneously as platoon leader I was patched into the shuttle’s systems, which told me what I already knew: The shuttle had been hit and was no longer in full control of its descent.
    I fought down the urge to panic and focused on damage assessment. The pilot was trying to keep the shuttle from tumbling, fighting with the now damaged controls. Four soldiers out the growing hole in the side of the shuttle. Five others dead or mortally injured, another five seriously injured but alive. Fifteen uninjured and me.
    The shuttle was declaring it was being tracked; whoever hit us wasn’t done.
    I connected to the shuttle and authorized the shuttle doors to open. Everybody out now, I said, through the platoon BrainPal feed. My simulated voice made me sound more calm than I was.
    We were all already suited up to jump out of the shuttle. We were just doing it earlier now.
    By fireteams. Let’s go.
    The remainder of the platoon started out the doors. Powell stayed back with me, yelling at stragglers. The pilot kept the shuttle steady as possible. Powell and I got out of the door just before some sort of kinetic round tore the shuttle apart. I did a quick ping on the pilot’s uniform’s system feed. There was nothing there.
    Lieutenant, Powell sent. She was falling about one hundred meters away from me and sent to me via tightbeam. Look down.
    I looked down and saw flickering beams shooting up into the evening sky. They weren’t going all the way up into the atmosphere; they were terminating on points below me.
    They were hitting my soldiers. Killing them.
    Full camo chaos dive, I sent over the platoon channel, to everyone still alive. Then I ordered my suit to seal me in, went dark on communication, and made myself as close to a hole in the atmosphere as I could. The suit’s camo function would hide me visually and would do what it could to scatter any electromagnetic waves that would be sweeping over me, trying to bounce back to a receiver set on targeting me. My suit was also making subtle movements and sending out extensions to move me around randomly, changing my speed and direction of descent, almost making it harder to target me. Every platoon member who heard my order was now doing the same.
    Chaos diving could kill an unmodified human