“Trident Actual, we have uplink. Report status.”

  The words crackled through Jonathan Ames’ helmet, and he sighed in relief. He lifted his left hand to signal his team to halt before curling the hand into a fist to activate the secondary channel in his pressure-sealed helmet.

  “Trident Actual to Neptune, ingress successful. Strike team progressing toward objective Alpha. Two Mikes to visual contact. We just reached Charlie.”

  “Acknowledged, Trident. Are you set up for feed?”

  “Array is green, Neptune. Transmission on your request.”

  “Begin transmission, Trident, and proceed to objective.”

  “Wilco, Neptune. Feed going live, Trident is Oscar Mike.”

  Jonathan lowered his hand to settle it back onto the barrel of his rifle and glanced at his team, nodding his affirmation. A moment later, the blue light on the deployed black flying saucer in the middle of the darkened hallway turned green, and he felt a subtle whir as the camera on his combat armor’s helmet activated.

  “Trident,” he said over their comms, “proceed apace.”

  His team acknowledged with a round of affirmations, and Jonathan started forward again along the dimly lit metal corridor.

  They had penetrated the sublevels of New Atlantis only thirty minutes prior, using a mix of state-of-the-art stealth submersible and cutting-edge plasma breachers to gain access to the secured bowels of E2’s artificial island. The size of the complex was, in a word, titanic; spanning almost three kilometers down into the depths. The only shields against them being pasted by deep-sea pressure were the combat armor they wore, and the companion pressurization of the island’s lower levels.

  Whoever had designed New Atlantis had done it right.

  Even three kilometers down, it felt like walking in any building on the surface.

  Johnathan led his team toward the sealed rectangular blast doors at the next checkpoint. He posted himself up against the right side of the frame, signalling his point-man, Chief Petty Officer Third Class Alexsei Ivanov, to the opposite side.

  The remaining four members of Strike Team Trident joined them, back and against the walls, and Jonathan turned to his tech, Lieutenant Gabriel Sampson.

  “Open it, Wiz.”

  “Wilco, boss,” the tech replied, raising his right wrist to access the digital keypad on his wrist-comp. His fingers danced across it, and Jonathan rechecked his rifle’s safety.

  Six hours. It had taken them six horrific hours of navigating the limits of the submersible’s pressure-maximum-rated depth to find a breaching point in New Atlantis and gain access to the hidden bowels of the island. When they’d finally managed to lock with the deep-sea infrastructure and create a pressure seal, he’d sent a prayer of thanks out of sheer relief.

  A hiss from the doors refocused his attention, and Jonathan shouldered his rifle, sighting with the holographic red dot sight and exchanging nods with Aleksei. Jonathan’s left hand rose to count down from three, one finger at a time, and then Aleksei cleared the door at the same time as he did; both stepped forward and toward their respective sides in unison while the rest of the team moved to cover positions.

  “One clear!” Aleksei reported over their secure link.

  “Two clear!” Jonathan said in tandem, followed by an “All clear!” a second later.

  The area they’d entered ended with a truncated bulwark on Jonathan’s side, and a shorter corridor toward another blast door on Aleksei’s. That had been expected, but the lack of any kind of security for the past half an hour had Jon’s bad vibes radar screaming at him. The entire sublevel was lit by red emergency lighting, but there was no sign of anyone present.

  There were no signs that people had been there since it was built, other than the sterile lack of dust and other debris.

  “No sign of contact anywhere,” Jonathan said with a grimace. “Let’s keep going.”

  “This place is giving me the fucking creeps, boss,” his second, Lieutenant Commander Yamato muttered.

  “I’m with Zack, this place is fucked,” agreed Chief Petty Officer Third Class Michael Rosen. “It feels like we’re in a goddamn horror movie.”

  “So let’s get this shit done and go home,” rumbled Lieutenant DeShaun Williams, their heavy weapons specialist.

  “We’re almost on target,” Jonathan said without countermanding the discourse. “Keep tight and move. Once we get Trident a look at whatever is down here, we can exfil and be back in time for the game.”

  A chorus of acknowledgements came through the link, and Jonathan motioned them toward the new door. It was standard practice not to speak unless necessary for most of their missions, but there was a degree of latitude he allowed regardless—mostly because of the triple-secured links of their array. The communications to the outside were solely broadcast through the saucer accompanying them, while their inter-squad radio had some sort of technical specifications that made their discourse immune to eavesdropping.

  He didn’t need to understand it, so long as he was assured it worked by Gabriel.

  “Trident moving to target bravo,” he reported, left hand squeezed into a fist, advancing quickly down the corridor with his team. “No joy yet, Neptune. This place looks completely abandoned.”

  “What intel we could gather tells us that whatever E2 is hiding, you’ll find it behind the door after this one, Commander.”

  Jonathan bit back a snort of irritation and posted himself against the right side of the new doorframe again, motioning first to Aleksei and then giving a thumbs-up to Gabriel to do his work.

  “I understand that, sir,” he then responded to Trident. “This place is just creepy as hell.”

  “And your courage is appreciated, Commander. Nobody likes going dark like this, but O.N.I. can’t afford to rely on exterior agencies. Too much of the government is in Maxwell’s pocket.”

  “Should you really be saying that out loud, Neptune?”

  “Son, if me saying that is found out, we have far bigger problems than telling the truth.”

  “Roger that,” Jonathan said with another grimace.

  The hard fact was that Trident was correct. The United States was firmly under the control of E2’s enigmatic CEO, and had been since the previous election. The executive, legislative, and judiciary branches were all happily in the trillionaire’s pocket—and there were rumors that even the world’s oldest and wealthiest families were in lockstep with Adrian Maxwell IV. It was some next-level dystopian 1982 reality, and all the rest of them could do was hope it didn’t end up with World War IV.

  Three of them had been bad enough. He’d lost his father and uncles to the third.

  The Middle East was still a depopulated hellscape from that last conflict.

  A hiss from the doors heralded their opening, and Jonathan signalled Aleksei forward while stepping through and right simultaneously.

  This time they emerged into a corridor extending along Jonathan’s side, another solid bulwark on Aleksei’s. It had been the same story for the last thirty-plus minutes. Each corridor, one after the other, was built as a funnel toward the next, with blast doors all the way through. It felt more like a herding warren than a proper facility, and for the life of him, Jonathan couldn’t figure out what in the hell was going on.

  “One clear!” Aleksei reported dutifully.

  “Two clear!” Jonathan followed a second later, with an “All clear!” that followed.

  “What the fuck is this place?” Michael hissed over their comms. “Seriously, boss. This place feels like something out of a forties horror-holo.”

  “That’s what we’re here to figure out, Chief,” Jon replied more calmly than he felt.

  He more than shared Michael’s weirded-out, creeped-out sense of wrongness.

  “That’s door Alpha, brothers,” Jon continued, nodding to the door ahead. “Let’s breach and get what we came for. If we receive contact, it’s gonna be there.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I’ll crack the door,” Gabriel said while the rest of the team fell in and moved toward the final barrier.

  “Post up and lock in,” Zack called over the comms while Jon set himself up at the door.

  “For what we are about to receive,” DeShaun rumbled quietly, “may the lord make us truly thankful.”

  Jon curled his fist again and spoke quietly.

  “Trident is breaching, Neptune. Standby.”

  “Godspeed, Trident.”

  Jonathan fixed his hand back onto his rifle, rechecked his safety, and then exhaled to steady himself. His head turned to his team, and a nod conferred final approval.

  The moment it was given, Gabriel tapped a button on his wrist, and the doors hissed open rapidly to welcome them within. As one, he and Aleksei penetrated and swept the interior, darting into the massive chamber beyond and checking their immediate vectors, only to slowly halt upon seeing what greeted them.

  A massive room built with countless repeating hexagonal tiles in a gigantic, geometric sphere revealed itself as their destination. The limited access they’d had to planning and information about the facility had shown some manner of large chamber, but nothing like what they were seeing. Immense silvery-metal four-sided obelisks dominated the space, jutting out equidistantly around the spherical mass with strange sigils blazing upon their surfaces.

  At the center of the sphere lay a blazing object that seemed to defy Newtonian law.

  It warped and danced, shifting between states of solid and liquid and back again at dizzying speeds. Kaleidoscopic light arced and danced around it, creating a dazzling array of brilliance that almost pulled Jon’s hard-trained focus. In thirty years of military service, he’d never seen anything remotely akin to what he was witnessing.

  “Neptune, are you getting this?” he asked while curling his left hand.

  Static greeted him, and he swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth.

  “Neptune, this is Trident Actual, respond.”

  Static was his only answer again, and Jonathan turned to his team.

  “Comms check.”

  “Hearing you, Lima Charlie, boss,” Aleksei replied.

  “I can’t contact Neptune,” Jonathan said without obfuscation and retreated toward the saucer, still green-lit, still hovering with them. “Something’s wrong with the uplink. Gabriel?”

  “Uh, not sure, boss. I’ve got solid readings from the device. Neptune should be receiving you, and the visual feed.”

  “I can confirm. The backup monitor shows full signal,” Zack affirmed next, waving his wrist-comp band.

  “Then where the hell is Nep—?”

  Jonathan was cut off by the sound of impact, and the twin shouts of “Contact close!” from Aleksei and DeShaun. He spun with Gabriel and Zack and sighted his rifle on the apparent threat, only to hesitate momentarily with the rest of them in sheer confusion.

  “Wait. Isn’t that—?”

  “Adrian Maxwell IV,” Michael confirmed over the team link. “In a fucking business suit, no less, coin on his knuckles and everything. What the hell is he doing down here?”

  “Do we engage? He seems to be alone.”

  “He’s a civilian, DeShaun,” Zack said in denial.

  “He’s fucking Lex Luthor!” Michael shot back.

  “We’re not the judiciary,” Zack snapped in response.

  “We’re also not supposed to be here,” Aleksei argued in his quiet voice. “Nobody would even know, and we’d rid the world of the closest thing it has to a goddamn corpo tyrant.”

  “You’ve been watching too many Cyberpunk films again,” Gabriel jested in a tense voice.

  “Hold fire,” Jon said tightly while he and the team lowered their rifles. “I’ll talk to—”

  Jonathan was cut off when Adrian spoke in the same instant, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand gloved and rolling a platinum coin over his knuckles, his blond hair framing his cold, gray eyes.

  “I’m afraid ‘Neptune’ has had to be retired early, gentlemen. My Operations Director is touchy about unauthorized site access. I take it you six are the unfortunate team sent to do Admiral Halsey’s dirty work?”

  Six guns once again snapped toward Adrian on trained instinct, and the man smiled.

  “That answers that,” the world’s richest and most powerful man said languidly. “Splendid.”

  Jon reached up to his helmet and tapped the button for the speakers.

  “Apologies, Mister Maxwell, but we will have to decline to answer your questions. We have some questions for you, in fact, and I’m afraid we aren’t in the mood to be gentle about getting answers.”

  “Ah, yes, the guns,” Adrian said with a look of what seemed like distaste on his handsome features. “I suppose they would give you the upper hand.”

  “I like our odds, sir,” Jonathan replied curtly. Something about how Adrian had spoken tickled at him, and alarm bells were ringing in his ears. How had he known the Admiral’s name? He spoke as if the O.N.I. had been compromised, but that was impossible. They were secured in the Pearl Harbor facility’s bunker.

  “Sterling always insisted it was important to keep up appearances, but I never could stomach the things,” Adrian said conversationally. “They are rather impersonal, and far too artless.”

  “What the fuck is this guy yapping about?” Michael hissed. “Let’s take him, boss.”

  “I agree, Jon,” Zack said quietly. “We’re blown. Let’s get what we came for and exfil. He can’t do anything to us alone any—”

  Six guns snapped up again when Adrian started walking toward them at a leisurely pace, and Jonathan’s jaw tightened. “Halt. I will not ask again, sir. We will fire.”

  “Boss, he’s a civilian,” Zack stressed again.

  “Protocol’s clear. No exceptions,” Jon said back tightly.

  Adrian, thankfully, did stop when asked—though now, perplexedly, he looked bored when he replied. “This has wasted enough of my time, gentlemen. Lay down your arms and surrender. I have no desire to spill blood in this sacred place.”

  “That’s a threat,” Michael said fiercely, “and this guy’s a fucking loon to boot. Just wing him, boss. We can treat him, get the intel, and exfil.”

  “We cannot engage a civil—”

  Adrian chose that moment to begin walking again, and Jon made his choice.

  His aim sighted on the man’s right shoulder, and he fired a penetrator round.

  Adrian’s expression shifted to one of disappointment, and the bullet hit something just ahead of the man—a ripple of darkness that ended in the projectile turning to dust as quickly as it was fired.

  “That was impolite,” Adrian said into the stunned silence that followed, and flipped the coin in his right hand—which melted mid-twirl into liquid and resolidified itself in an elegant platinum longsword, serrated near the base and edged in purple with a black leather grip and skull-adorned hilt.

  “What the fuck is that?!”

  “Break and engage!” Jon said without further hesitation.

  Five staccato barks of gunfire and the boom of DeShaun’s Mauler .30 Cal followed along with six pairs of trained footsteps scattering in a star formation, only for the same barrier of darkness to appear once more and turn the bullets to dust each time. Adrian’s features shifted from disappointment to what Jon might have called pity, and the man vanished.

  Or rather, he moved so fast that Jon momentarily lost sight of him.

  When next Adrian appeared, it was accompanied by a wordless cry from Gabriel as the longsword in his grip quite literally cut his legs out from under him in a spray of blood and a whine of scything metal. Gabriel was lifted by the force of the strike, and Adrian was already moving before their brother hit the sterile floor.

  DeShaun brought his Mauler to bear toward the ‘businessman’ at the same time as the rest of them fired in tandem. Adrian shifted again with terrifying speed in response, slamming his gloved left palm into the heavy weapons specialist’s reinforced chestplate hard enough a second later to lift him into the air like a child, and then smash him into the floor so powerfully that his armor cracked.

  “What the fuck? What the fuck?!”

  “Jon, what the hell is this?!”

  “Gabe! Talk to us, brother!”

  The simultaneous shouts echoed across their link, and Jon opened his mouth to reply when Adrian shifted again and reappeared in front of Zack. An elegant set of paired slices to his second’s body separated his forearms at the elbows, and then the tycoon was moving again before any of them could do more than shout in alarm.

  “Keep firing! Find cover and don’t let him get close to—!”

  Jon’s words died in his throat when Adrian appeared behind Aleksei in a blur, legs bent low, and bespoke formal shoes sliding quietly along the floor while he shifted his body and spun into an arcing kick. It landed with enough force to bend the tall Russian-American around the impact of the blow and sent him bouncing away along the floor like a rag doll.

  A bark of gunfire came from nearby, and Jon turned to see Gabe on the floor, defiantly unloading his weapon toward Adrian while shouting invectives.

  A moment later, Adrian appeared behind him, lifted his boot, and slammed Gabriel’s armored head into the ground so hard that Jon saw his body spasm and go limp.

  “What the fuck…” he whispered to himself in disbelief.

  Michael and I are the only ones left, I have to get at least Michael out of—

  His thought process was cut off when Adrian lifted his left hand, pointed at Michael, and the younger man’s forearms and shins exploded in an eruption of blood, steel, and Kevlar that dropped his torso and truncated limbs crashing into the floor.

  Jonathan stared in muted horror at what had been his elite operations team, his brothers, and looked back at Adrian.

  “Now then,” the dark-haired businessman said in a mild tone. “You and I are going to have a discussion. I happen to have an excellent use for the six of you. You see, it will be Christmas soon—and what father doesn’t wish to dote on their children?”

  Jon lifted his rifle, wordlessly switched to full-auto, and pulled the trigger.

  This can’t be real. This can’t be real. This can’t be real.

  He laughed mirthlessly into the silence of his helmet as he fired.

  Adrian appeared before him a second later.

  Jon saw the fist crashing toward his helmet.

  White light flashed, and then the world turned black.

  Concept Art of Adrian Maxwell IV