TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE. SYSTEMS ARE FAILING. PILOT RESOURCE IS INSUFFICIENT FOR EXISTING MATERIAL REQUIREMENTS. ADDITIONAL SOURCES ARE REQUIRED. INITIATE SCANNING MODE.

SCANNING MODE. LEVEL 0 TARGET LOCATED AND DESIGNATED A09. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

ATTACK MODE. TARGET A09 ELIMINATED. POPMODE.

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. NO TARGETS WITHIN RANGE. DATA RESOURCE LOCATED WITHIN RANGE. DESIGNATED D03.

CLEARMODE. INITIATE TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE. UNABLE TO APPROACH RESOURCE D03 AND REMAIN CONCEALED. APPROACH OPENLY. SUBMIT HACK MODE.

HACK MODE. D03 CONNECTION ACHIEVED. LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE PENETRATED. LOCAL AND REGIONAL MAPS RECEIVED. REGIONAL NOMENCLATURE ESTABLISHED. AUXILIARY ECONOMIC AND TECHNICAL DATA INTERPRETED. SUBMIT HACK-TARG MODE.

HACK-TARG MODE. MINIMAX DENSITY OF COLLECTION TARGETS VERSUS DEFENSIVE EMPLACEMENTS BEST-FIT HAS BEEN DETERMINED. LOCAL DESIGNATION IS SILICON VALLEY: DISTANCE 437 MILES. CENTRAL GRID REFERENCE DESIGNATION IS Q00. PRELIMINARY COLLECTION TARGETS ARE Q01 THRU Q04. POPMODE.

HACK MODE RESUMED. STRATEGIC TARGETS ACQUIRED. EXTRACTION BEGINS. EXTRACTION COMPLETE. POPMODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE RESUMED. STRATEGIC TARGETS ACQUIRED. SUBMIT SCANNING MODE.

SCANNING MODE. THIS UNIT HAS BEEN DETECTED. FIVE TARGETS WITHIN DETECTION RANGE, DESIGNATED B0A THRU B0E. ARRIVAL ESTIMATED IN 97 SECONDS. POPMODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE RESUMED. RISK ASSESSMENT COMPLETE: AVOID COMBAT. INITIATE EVASION MODE.

"That thing was here. I'd bet my eye teeth." The two county sheriffs stood looking at the wreckage of an ATM in front of the local bank. Twenty dollar bills lay strewn about, as if a madman had cared more for the wires than the money involved. A few of the bills seemed oddly burned as well.

"You don't say. Just what exactly are 'eye teeth,' anyway, Justin?" asked the smaller of the two county deputies. Gus spat and was silent for a moment.

"These ones, in front, Justin." Gus tapped them for emphasis. "Keep your gun ready, just in case."

A movement like a dark breeze swept through the bushes behind the bank, and the service station next door. They pointed their guns at it, but there was nothing there.

"Better phone this in to the Federal boys. They wanted to know which way it was headed."

Allison Drake yawned and looked out the window for a moment. The meeting with ILM was going long and pointless, as usual. But outside, the day was blue and warm, and begged for a jaunt outside in a very short Simon Chang dress. The lovely image was interrupted by the sinking realization that she had not packed it for this business trip. Shoot! Stuck with her red and black pant-suit? Not a chance.

Oh, well. Time for shopping!

Allison always enjoyed the shopping in the Bay Area. Even though the Seattle and Vancouver areas had a wide variety of high-end clothing stores, it wasn't the same as, say, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, or the cute places around Stanford University. Seattle had way too much self-conscious political correctness, all-natural fibers and bulky peasant crap.

What she wanted was something a little slinky and a lot fun, to show off her legs and a fair amount of shoulder and cleavage in the summer sun. Actually, the white Simon Chang outfit wouldn't have done at all, anyway. Something in a golden color, perhaps with red accents.

There were days that Allison wished she had gone into fashion rather than systems. Someone, somewhere should be designing fabrics and clothes that were easy to wear, pretty, and mixable. Like her favorite scarf, that seemed to go with everything, picking up a slight tinge of color to accent whatever she wore it with. What a wonderful fabric!

She had never been able to find anything quite like it, and she didn't consciously know why. Her mind just sort of slid off the subject, out into the bright afternoon sun, then back to the stuffy meeting room and the scratchy baritone voice of Steven Kyler.

Kyler was thin and dark and mid-height, standing even with Allison at one-seventy-five centimeters. Five-nine, she corrected herself. He probably didn't know a centimeter from a centrifuge. Kyler might even be considered cute, if he didn't always have the smell of old cigarettes hanging on him. At least he knew how to dress, something a little more Brooks Brothers than most high-tech company teams would stomach, and with it the tamest Rush Limbaugh tie she had ever seen, with bright blotches of color that somehow seemed almost muted enough to work.

Kyler had replaced Charlie Nguyen after the debacle during the Elite War, and swiftly tightened security to try to avoid any further intrusions into the ILM system, or what remained of it. He had rapidly nixed Nguyen's ill-conceived idea of using the spare MIPS on Allison's accounting systems to generate a slight gain in throughput for Industrial Light and Magic on its full-scale renderings.

Allison had breathed a sigh of relief on that one. Cinematic Concierge Corporation, her own company, just didn't provide enough MIPS to offset the transmission costs of the results from the data-heavy rendering process. The infrastructure changes would have been ridiculous, the benefits miniscule.

However, Kyler had then gone overboard in the way of security, hiring his own white hat crackers to supplement Allison's own use of IB2Tap, and that had ruffled her feathers somewhat. At least she knew it wasn't personal. She didn't like IB2Tap either, but he was plainly one of the best.

She sighed inwardly. Her role in the meeting had already been over for forty minutes. Soon, she would be free to enjoy the day.

The mobile command center technicians stretched uneasily to relieve the cramps in their hands and shoulders, caused by hours of furious tedium. Hundreds of anomalous reports had been sifted, cross-catalogued and analyzed, leading to this one little fact:

They had no idea exactly where the damn thing was.

Oh, yeah, they had a pretty good idea that it was headed north and west, and that it wasn't capable of flying right now. That was pretty clear from the intermittent reports and the occasional surveillance photo they could reconstruct after the fact. And the destroyed mail boxes.

But the thing had been programmed pretty damn well, he thought. It was changing direction rapidly and often, backtracking occasionally, changing speed and tactics remorselessly, and somehow managing to evade any cordons that the local officials threw up. It was smart, swift, and nearly invisible.

And on the wrong side.

The premiere patriot had been forced to fight the thing once already, and nearly lost, despite his overwhelming tactical advantage in experience and the aid of a provisionally class three meta. He wasn't looking forward to the next engagement, considering the fact that his own suit was basically in shreds and couldn't be repaired before the next-gen suit could get to Silicon Valley, where it was undoubtedly going.

The components for the suit's energy storage facilities were produced in Cupertino, along with a few other minor components. If the next-gen suit successfully attained those, it would be back near to full capabilities within a few minutes, at worst, or an hour at best.

Which left him with a Hobbson's choice - fight a damaged but overwhelmingly powerful suit with fisticuffs, or change his own armament and tactics more dramatically than he had in a decade.

He knew which choice he had to make, but that didn't give him a rosy feeling. Wearing another man's skivvies always felt wrong.

Once she had extracted herself from the clutches of Kyler's meeting, Allison Drake headed up 280 towards Stanford Mall. 101 was a closer route, but she felt like the winding 280, with its tall, rolling hills just losing their green to the onset of summer, would be the better choice.

It was a glorious day.

She had a feeling, a growing excitement that seemed a bit overboard for a shopping trip. Exhilaration. Freedom.

Man, that had been a lousy meeting.

"We've got one!" the female tech exclaimed. "El Camino near Rengstorff."

She looked up at the powerfully built man standing over her, decked out in a barely modified draughtsman's power-suit. The modifications appeared to be decorative, aside from a dart-thrower on each wrist and a rough web of circuitry across the midriff. He looked over her readout before replying. "Excellent. Self-destruct the next two outbound, and set the inbound string auto-pinging. Let's bring him in."

She pressed a few buttons, then tapped the touch screen, where some dots turned from blue to red then disappeared. "I think he blew one before I got to it, so I blew an extra two, sir. Inbound is pinging."

Old Glory smiled. "Good work. Let's hope he takes the bait."

The technician hesitated for a moment. "Sir?"

He raised an eyebrow, then realized that the motion was not visible in a draughtsman suit. "Yes?"

"How did you know?"

He considered briefly. How did he know the next-gen suit would approach Silicon Valley from the north, even though on the larger scale it was coming from the direction of Las Vegas, which was south and east?

There was a wide variety of information he had sifted through to make his estimate of the strategic moves available to the suit. There were about twenty-five outcomes that the analysts had considered highly probable, and most of them involved an incursion along the wooded mountains to the west, since the cover was better.

"I can't take all the credit for the good work of your team, Jen. But it knew the probabilities, same as us. If there are 25 scenarios, and 18 of them come from the west, where would you put your defenses?"

"To the west."

He nodded. "So, knowing all that, where would you infiltrate?"

A look of comprehension crossed her face. "Anywhere else."

"Head of the class." He checked his timer and calculated travel time. "Any more questions from my number one student?"

"Isn't it risky, letting it get into populated areas? And not shutting down the traffic?"

Old Glory grimaced. "Of course it is. But we didn't have any way to catch it before it got here, nor anyone who can stand up to it if we did catch it. It is programmed not to unnecessarily endanger civilians, so we're relatively safe there, as long as it doesn't perceive a threat. We DO have a good chance of taking it down, if we can control where and when the battle takes place. And for that, it has to look like we don't have any security."

He prepared to leave. "Hold down the fort, Jen. I'll be on band D."

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. LEVEL 0 TARGET DETECTED AND DESIGNATED A57. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

ATTACK MODE. TARGET A57 ELIMINATED. POPMODE.

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. LEVEL 0 TARGET DETECTED AND DESIGNATED A58. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

ATTACK MODE. TARGET A58 ELIMINATED. POPMODE.

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. LEVEL 0 TARGET DETECTED AND DESIGNATED A59. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

ATTACK MODE. TARGET A59 ELIMINATED. POPMODE.

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. LEVEL 0 TARGET DETECTED AND DESIGNATED A5A. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

Russell Borogove heard the explosion outside, and popped his head out the door of the small shoe repair shop. Some maniac dressed up like Old Glory, walking like Gary Cooper in an old western, blasted one after another of an endless line of mailboxes heading north down El Camino. Radical.

Some miles north, Old Glory smoothly glided through a short sequence of martial arts movements, feeling the draughtsman armor catch at inopportune moments along the arc. The borrowed suit was a piece of shit.

Okay, it was state of the art for the prior decade, production-wise. But it was the difference between wearing a custom-tailored wetsuit from a world-class manufacturer, and renting a basic one at a dive shop. No comparison.

Hopefully the man in the suit could make the difference. Well, that and a high-tech deathtrap designed to distract the next-gen suit. Around Old Glory in the Stanford University football field were arrayed a few dozen lightly modified mailboxes, and on a small pedestal behind him was an array of small highly specialized components. Glory was the last line of defense between the suit and its next meal. And the defense should start… right about… NOW!

The next-gen suit burst howling into the stadium, smashing three mailboxes with low-powered blasts and then running laterally across the field, ignoring the remainder of the units. Old Glory spat, the spittle splashing across the face guard of his unfamiliar suit. Damn it!

It stopped and planted its feet, hands upon its hips in a caricature of a human surveying the field, like a nightmare scarecrow dressed in the rags of Old Glory. Glory sensed rather than smelled the scent of burnt metal.

On band D, Old Glory gave the code words to activate the defensive systems and cordon the area. This was not going to be a cakewalk.

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. 28 LEVEL 0 TARGETS DETECTED AND DESIGNATED A8B THRU AA7. MOBILE TARGET DESIGNATED B37. COLLECTION TARGET DESIGNATED Q05.

CLEARMODE. INITIATE TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE. Q05 IS LEVEL 2 STRATEGIC GOAL. B07 DEFENDS Q05. SUBMIT SCAN MODE (B37).

SCAN MODE (B37). WEAKNESSES DETECTED. WEAPONS IDENTIFIED. THREAT LEVEL MODERATE. POPMODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE RESUMED. RISK ASSESSMENT COMPLETE. SUBMIT ATTACK MODE.

ATTACK MODE.

During the momentary hesitation of the next-gen suit, Old Glory analyzed the visible damage to its parts. It was in sorry shape. The left leg was withered, like a jointed spike of steel, while the right flared in an odd direction. Ragged feathers of uniform hung off the rib cage area, swaying as if in a slight breeze. They were probably sensory modifications, since the movement seemed purposeful.

The constant use of its power to destroy his decoy targets had kept the batteries discharged, but there was no way of determining how much until he had closed with it. Or until it hit him with its plasma sword or intrinsic gravity system.

His best chance was to hit it with his scrambler darts. They had been specifically keyed with a virus to disrupt the programming of the suit, but would only work if he could get enough of them into the suit at the same time, the first time. If he only got one or two in, it would inoculate the suit against the rest. The trouble with self-modifying systems gone berzerker. The good news was that if they worked, they might be able to save enough of the suit's memory net to give the technicians a head start on version "dot one."

His own new jammies. Oh, joy.

With the huge makeshift plasma shield on his left arm, he advanced toward the next-gen suit, just as it began to move.

Allison Drake breathed deeply as she steered the car onto Page Mill road. The old oak trees along the road were lovely, and she felt the urge to just park and wander across the university. Before she knew it, she had pulled into an empty parking lot and was ambling toward Stanford Stadium, where some kind of daytime light show was happening.

A sudden pang, almost a hunger, struck her with a force she had seldom felt in her life. She had to see that show.

The glkpratzl continued active scanning, steering the host with gentle strokes on appropriate brain structures. The prey was very close, and might mass enough to fuel full recovery. If only the glkpratzl could achieve physical contact…

Allison began to run.

The plasma sword sliced neatly through his shield as a hot knife through Crisco. Glory ducked instantly, smashed the sword arm aside with the remnants of the shield. Damn it. The suit was stronger than it should have been. That report of a destroyed hobby shop in Merced… the place must have provided sufficient parts for partial regeneration.

Glory stiff-handed the suit in the armpit, triggering his dart-thrower. It chattered briefly, then jammed, blowing into pieces when the suit brought its plasma sword up to swipe the thrower.

Glory dived backwards, but one of his draughtsman suit arms didn't complete the arc correctly and he couldn't plant them both to achieve the back handspring to his feet. He ended up wrenching himself into a roll for his life then into a defensive crouch three yards from the suit.

The suit took the momentary initiative to dive for the apparently undefended components, and six defensive emplacements opened up. The high-pitched whine from the suit substituted for a scream. Nonetheless, it reached the components and began dodging and firing to level the emplacements while it sought to integrate its prize.

"Ready. Set. " Glory allowed himself three beats to gauge the suit's condition. A greenish fuzz was spreading over the chest and armpit area, advancing in places and retreating in others. The darts had connected and were doing their job. Time to attack.

He dodged to the opposite side, not wanting to damage the parts of the suit that were under the control of the shutdown virus. Then he triggered the other dart gun into autofire.

The next-gen suit dove to the left and grabbed a piece of the plasma shield, using it to deflect the darts. Dang it! In a fair fight, this thing might even learn to win.

Good thing he hadn't planned a fair fight.

"Rockets NOW!" Glory ordered over channel D as he leaped for the sidelines.

Three anti-tank rockets slammed into the center of the killing zone, the blast blowing Old Glory eighteen yards to slam against the side wall. He staggered to his feet, switching visual modes to survey the damage. At the near end of the field, the goal posts were twisted to an odd angle, and there were shrapnel holes in half the windows of the skyboxes. A sparking noise drew his attention to the left arm of the draughtsman armor, which was shattered.

Glory fought down the urge to spit, having learned his lesson the last time. Face shield.

Less than three seconds later, the next-gen suit was rising.

"Open fire. All you've got."

SCANNING MODE RESUMED. LEVEL 1 COLLECTION TARGET DETECTED AND DESIGNATED Q06. MOBILE TARGETS DETECTED AND DESIGNATED B38 THRU B3D.

CLEARMODE. INITIATE TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS MODE. Q06 IS LEVEL 1 STRATEGIC GOAL. A8B THRU AA7 ELIMINATED. B37 NEGATED. B38 THRU B3D, THREAT LEVEL LOW. RISK ASSESSMENT COMPLETE. SUBMIT COLLECTION MODE.

COLLECTION MODE.

Allison staggered against a cement wall, the shock of sudden thunder interrupting her dreamlike reverie. The excitement changed to shock. What was happening?

Another volley of explosions rocked the walls and the floor of the corridor. She saw sunlight outside the cement tunnel, and staggered towards it. She was in the depths of a stadium of some sort. And coming toward her was a wounded Old Glory, sprinting and dodging through a hail of blast weaponry.

At the last moment, she saw the face under the mask, like a grinning skull. Then the nightmare's skeletal hands went for her throat.

Old Glory rolled to his feet and started a mad jog to the opposite end of the field, to where the next-gen suit had itself suddenly dashed to get out of the hail of fire. The suit was grappling with a figure in red and black.

"Who is that? Anyone in position to see the intruder?"

The glkpratzl stretched out a thousand tendrils to the prey, meeting it in a mutual embrace of life and death. For a moment they both registered surprise, as each realized the other was stronger than anticipated. It was several beats before the glkpratzl detected the poisoned portion of the prey and modified its strategy to temporarily augment the poison. The prey thrashed.

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE COMPROMISED.

Allison screamed for help as the black fibers bowled her over and pored over her, scratching and ripping her skin from her bones. Massive pain engulfed her. Protect me!

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE FAILING. PILOT EJECT.

Old Glory reached the corridor and stopped in shock, watching in horrified fascination a mass of shifting fibers in red, blue, green, black and grey, seething obscenely. The next-gen suit was now a chaotic organism twice the size of a walrus. The shifting of its flesh, now preponderant with blood red and black, reminded him of maggots in a wound, or worms in a bait can. Or, oddly, four cubic yards of thrashing party-colored cotton candy. Occasionally the mass revealed parts of the bodies within, one skeletal, the other of pale and lacerated flesh.

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE COMPROMISED.

The glkpratzl again modified its strategy to protect the host and damp its pain, assuming the battle defense mode as quickly as its feeding provided sufficient mass. It achieved control over one of the prey's energy generation facilities and began rebuilding long-missing reservoirs.

It felt… good.

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE FAILING. PILOT EJECT.

Old Glory fought down a sense of vertigo at the shifting heap. The newcomer, whoever he was, was in there somewhere, fighting for his life. Best to give him all the help he could. Glory emptied the dart-thrower into the mess. Chances were that a virus programmed for the next-gen suit would have little or no effect on even a closely related technology, and Glory couldn't tell whether Mister Red-And-Black might qualify for that much.

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE COMMMUNICATION FAILURE

The glkpratzl engulfed the prey and the scrambler darts, analyzing them briefly and assigning low threat level to them. It cast off the unused portions, pausing only momentarily to fashion a life support device for the prey's own decrepit host. Then it began to repair its own host.

It felt… very good.

DANGER. SYSTEMS ARE SYSTEMS ARE SYSTEMS ARE

As the colors faded, Old Glory became fairly certain that the next-gen suit had lost. The red-white-and-blue motif was basic to the pattern of the suit, and would prevail except in stealth modes. This thing was falling to red and black and a greenish grey. Feathery pieces were falling off in grey-white flurries, like sickly snow.

The raw feeling on her skin subsided, leaving her feeling somehow refreshed, almost exhilarated again. Allison stood up, looking into the face of another modified version of Old Glory, this time dressed in a somewhat clunky looking suit of armor. What a weird dream.

Old Glory watched the grey ashes fall away as the man stood up, and a shock of recognition came over him. How many years had it been? Then his heart fell. Samuel had been dead for a decade. He crossed his arms and looked the young man over.

Allison looked in awe at Old Glory, the personification of American power as much as the Redcoat had always been that of Canada. For a moment she felt the taste of beignets and coffee. The overwhelming presence of the premier patriot was much the same as she had always felt from her Magic Mountie in the coffee shop that she frequented as a child.

She waited for him to speak.

Old Glory looked the young man over. He stood passively at a strange sort of attention, obviously with respect, but not with proper form. If he had any military training, it was an odd sort. Certainly not JTF-1, nor regular RCMP. But there was no doubt he was wearing the battle uniform of The Redcoat.

Glory glanced at the pile of grey ash and fiber that had been the pinnacle of American high-tech. He clenched his fists and growled, kicking the ashes and encountering a huge lump of something before recovering his voice.

"Do you know what you've done, son?"

Allison was surprised, but didn't know what to say. Done? Son? She looked down at herself, saw serge red and black and realized she must be dreaming again. The last time she had dreamed of being a Redcoat had been during cramming for her oral exam on her thesis. At least then, she had the excuse of months of studying their history. She stared at her white-clad hands. Lucid dreaming didn't happen to her very often.

"You've pulverized a billion dollars of American hardware." Glory reached into the pile of fluffy grey fibers and encountered Potemkin's body. He lifted it gently from the pile and set it on the edge of the lawn. It was the weight of a child, barely a head and emaciated torso, with some fibrous stubs where the limbs had been. The next-gen suit had used the rest of the materials of the pilot for its own repair. Glory fought down the need to retch. It was only by the grace of God and the misguided dictates of the U.S. Government that the victim, that pitiful creature, had not been him.

Under his breath he said a prayer over the young pilot. Potemkin had been a brash young buck, but had not deserved anything like this. No one deserved a death like this. Glory's eyes misted. Potemkin at least deserved the chance to die a hero. Didn't they all deserve that?

Glory glanced back. Where were his manners? "Thank you."

Abruptly, Allison realized that the scene had been stable too long to be a dream. He thought she had destroyed something and he was thanking her? What the heck was happening?

In response, there was a sudden questioning feeling. Could she be more specific?

Glory looked up at the young Redcoat, who was wordlessly watching his ministrations to the corpse. As if the Redcoat had never seen a dead body. Had Glory himself ever been that young? Just like Potemkin, this Canadian kid was taking on a world full of hurt, where the best chance you had was a broken life, and the worst was ending up like this, this thing. "Do you know what you are doing, Redcoat? Do you really know?"

Of course not, Allison thought. Allison watched the visor of the big armored suit, unable to gauge the emotions of the man, but bowled over by the power, the bitter venom in his words. She wanted to hide, to run, to disguise herself so that he couldn't follow and wouldn't know who she might be. Voice disguise mode enabled. came the reply.

"I know it seems like a great lark. It did to him." He jerked his head at the wasted body. "It's not. No one tells you the cost. Hell, sometimes you don't even know yourself until…" He shook his head. "Too late."

Self-pity was a waste of time. The kid had been warned. But maybe one more warning. "A lot of people looked up to the man who last wore that uniform. Heaven help you if you disgrace it. They'll come for you." He paused. "I'll come for you."

Allison felt a chill go through her. "I… I understand."

Glory heard the neutral male voice, telling nothing in its tone, and couldn't decide whether to let it lay. "And if you do live up to it, then that's another problem. Others will come after you. I can't tell you which is worse. You can't imagine it."

Old Glory shook his head. Where were his manners? "Thanks for your help here. I won't forget it."

After a moment's hesitation, Allison smiled and nodded.

She remembered an old story about Old Glory and the last Redcoat… and a chill went over her again, making her scalp crawl. Until today, 'last' Redcoat had meant 'final.' Everyone knew that Samuel Olivier, the final Redcoat, had died in the alien invasion, and his coat had died with him. All but…

All but the little piece he had given her.

Her lucky scarf.

Yes.

The Magic Mountie held her hand against the small patch of fabric, against her mother's gaping wounds. "Never lose it, and never forget who it belongs to, eh?"

Yes.

"I knew Olivier… somewhat."

Old Glory filed the information and nodded, then knelt and picked up Potemkin. He would get a decent burial, with honors. But… there were fibers attached to the pilot's throat and telltales were blinking on the belly. "Good God, is he alive?"

Yes. "Yes."

"Medical emergency." He activated his intrinsic gravity field… except he wasn't wearing an intrinsic gravity field. "Dang it! Jen, I need a care flight immediately."

Allison Drake, the new Redcoat, listened to Old Glory's voice, wishing she could hear the other half of the conversation. Abruptly a female voice began mumbling into her ear, "… about twenty-two minutes until the copter gets there, and then another fourteen to the hospital. What do you need to get Potemkin stable?"

Done A picture of the pilot's internal organ configuration formed on the inside of her battle mask, but she wished it away. It was disgusting. She informed them, "He's already stable."

"Who's that?" asked the female voice.

"He's the Redcoat." Old Glory set the body carefully back on the grass, his eyes on the skies for the medivac chopper that he knew would not arrive for ten minutes or more.

"The Redcoat?"

"The same."

A low whistle, followed by some excited cross-chatter from the female and a male she couldn't quite hear.

Allison interrupted. "I don't know what you can do for him, exactly. He's a mess. There's a lot just… missing." She put words to the feeling she had about the body. "Apparently the suit used up everything that it didn't think was necessary."

Old Glory stiffened, then buried his right arm to the elbow in the ground with a punch that shook the stadium. Every damn one of the engineers and programmers was going to visit Potemkin in the hospital, if he had to drag them there one at a time by their scrawny little butts.

He once again looked up at the new Redcoat, who for some reason was still in battle mode with a full face cover. Perhaps Glory's words had sunk in enough that he would keep his identity secret for a while. That was good news. Samuel had been much too public as the Redcoat, and Glory had been to too many funerals lately. "Son, can you fly him to the Stanford Medical Center?"

It was a few moments before Allison realized that Old Glory was talking to her. Could she fly? Yes.

But she shouldn't. It was a learned skill. She knew the stories of the early Redcoats. Funny stories, actually, but nothing to try with a man's life at stake. But there was an alternative.

"I can take him." She replied. She lifted the body. "Where do I deliver him?"

"See Doctor Stephan Klegg."

"Done."

"And when you're through?"

"Yes?"

"Meet me for a drink. I'd like to get to know the man in the suit."

She hesitated for a moment. "Another time, perhaps."

Glory's mouth twitched into a grin. The boy didn't have to beer and brag. He might do fine. "Good enough."

His mouth dropped open as he watched the Redcoat sprint down the corridor with Potemkin and take a corner at roughly forty miles per hour, accelerating all the while. No wonder he hadn't flanked the next-gen suit from above.

He couldn't fly. Yet?

He shook his head, and turned to survey the damage to the stadium and grounds. Hazmat teams would have to scour the whole damn place for active fibers. A few moments later he was interrupted by a female voice on his suit radio. "Sir?"

"Yes, Jen?"

"Could I take you up on that drink?"

Old Glory grinned wider than he had in months, a strange feeling of optimism coming over him. "Sure. You've earned it."

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