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above, the direction he expected the drone to come from.
    Did he trust the Air Force pilot?
    Cowboy leaned on his stick, driving the F-35B hard and sharp, exactly as Turk had suggested. The g’s hit him hard, pushing him back into the fighter’s seat.
    A black bar appeared at the right side of his windscreen. The targeting radar was going wild.
    Mother!
    â€œCan I fire?” asked the Marine, pushing to staywith the UAV. But before anyone answered, the black aircraft turned its nose abruptly in his direction and sliced downward, moving and turning at a speed Cowboy didn’t think possible. He made his own abrupt turn, losing so much altitude that the Bitchin’ Betty warning system blared that he was too low. He scanned his radar and then the sky, but the slippery little UAV and its tiny radar cross section had once more disappeared in the weeds.
    Damn.
    T URK REALIZED WHAT was happening as soon as Cowboy got the altitude warning. There was no way the Marine was going to catch the other plane now.
    Still, they needed as much data as they could get. And they were going to get it by going home.
    â€œYour bandit’s heading west,” he told the Marine.
    â€œYeah, we’re following.”
    â€œYou have it on radar?”
    â€œNegative.”
    â€œDid he turn on weapons radar?” Turk asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œWe’re going to search this area. Once he’s over the water he should be easy to find.”
    â€œEasier, maybe.”
    â€œYeah. You see where he launched from?”
    â€œI didn’t. I’ll check back with my people,” added Turk, though he could already guess that the answer would be no: they would be giving the F-35s a vector to the site if they had.
    Turk signed off with Cowboy and continued down the slope to the mining area. His boots sank into the soft ground. The place smelled like dirt, and death.
    While considered “small,” two-hundred-pound GBU-53s still made an absolute mess of anything they hit; the three guerrillas who’d been holding this part of the perimeter had been obliterated. Twenty yards away, half of one of the trucks lay on its side, blown over by an explosion.
    A severed leg lay on the ground. Turk stared at it for a moment, frowned, then kept walking.
    Three months ago, that would have turned my stomach, he thought. Now it’s just one more ugly part of the landscape.

9
    An island in the Sembuni Reefs, off Malaysia
    F INALLY, THEY’D COME .
    Lloyd Braxton stared at the console, even though the displays were blank. He had been waiting for this moment for many months. In a sense, he’d been preparing for it for years.
    It was intoxicating. Kallipolis was becoming a reality, precisely as he had envisioned. The days of nation states were passing before his eyes; the elite was ready to take over.
    He clenched his fists, controlling his excitement.
    There was a great deal to be done. This was just one small step in the evolution.
    The next step was to defeat the Dreamland people—Special Projects, Whiplash, whatever the hell bs code name they were using. Defeat them and take their technology, the last piece of the puzzle.
    Defeating Dreamland would be sweet. Rubeo and his web of sellout scientists, technodrones for the governments of the world, would finally be put in their places.
    Braxton scolded himself. If this became a quest for revenge it would fail. He had argued this many times with Michaels, Thresh, and Fortine—especially the ship captain Fortine—who while still being true believers, bore personal grudges against their governments and a host of officials who had wronged them. Braxton didn’t blame them, exactly, but he knew that Kallipolis was a movement of history, a phenomenon like the Renaissance or the Reformation, not something to be sullied by personal grudges.
    Kallipolis was both a goal and a philosophy. The philosophy was perfect, unfettered freedom: true