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"Control, this is Fox Hunter One. Target is down. Impact coordinates: 27°17' North, 118°58' East. Requesting ground recovery team to the crash site immediately."
"Fox Hunter One, Fox Hunter Two, good work. Valorian interceptors are inbound. Return to the Dominion now."
The two Aurelian pilots banked hard and pointed their noses toward the open ocean, engines at full burn. The mission was complete. The target was wreckage. Time to get out of Valorian airspace before the interceptors arrived and turned a covert operation into an international incident.
Behind them, on a nameless island in the eastern sea, the crater smoked.
In the testing ground, several hundred pairs of eyes stared at the Signal Bee's feed. The drone had descended to a low hover above the crash site, its stabilized camera showing the rubble in sharp detail. Shattered rock. Uprooted vegetation. A gouge in the earth where something very heavy had hit very hard.
And at the center of it, half-buried under debris, the motionless red and gold shape of Mark One.
"Hey, did anyone else see that? I swear the armor's finger just moved."
The reporter who said it was immediately drowned out.
"Are you out of your mind? This isn't a movie. Nobody survives a fall from thirty thousand meters."
"This is reality, not a novel. The human body turns to paste at that kind of impact velocity."
"How did someone with eyesight that bad even get a press credential—"
BOOM.
The pile of rocks on top of Mark One exploded outward.
A shockwave of dust and debris engulfed the Signal Bee, and for three seconds the screen went gray. The crowd in the testing ground surged to their feet, shoving, craning, trying to see through the static.
Then the dust cleared.
Mark One stood in the center of the crater.
Upright. Intact. The reactor in the chestplate was glowing. The eye slits were lit. And the armored figure was rolling its neck and tapping the side of its helmet with one gauntlet, like a man working out a crick after a bad night's sleep.
Ethan's voice came through the speakers, casual and faintly amused.
"I'll say this for that missile: it just cured the neck pain that's been bothering me for weeks."
The testing ground was silent for exactly one second.
Then the noise hit like a physical force. Screaming. Cheering. Reporters who'd been weeping five minutes ago were now on their feet, shouting into cameras, grabbing colleagues, some of them actually jumping. The sound bounced off the reinforced walls and doubled back on itself until the entire facility was vibrating.
"THIS IS A MIRACLE!"
"'Miracle' doesn't even BEGIN to cover this!"
"How is this POSSIBLE? A direct missile hit and a thirty-thousand-meter fall, and he's STANDING?"
General Hale's voice cracked through the communication link, raw with emotion he wasn't bothering to hide.
"Mercer! Are you hurt?"
"Completely fine, General. The defense systems on Mark One are a lot more robust than they look."
Inside the armor, Ethan ran a quick damage assessment through the HUD, and the results painted a picture that was a long way from pretty.
The back panel where the missile had struck was warped inward, the alloy buckled and partially fused from the heat of the detonation. Three of the rear stabilization vanes were gone entirely, sheared off during the fall or the impact. The left shoulder assembly was cracked, its range of motion reduced to about sixty percent. The right boot repulsor was flickering, its output unstable. One of the knee joints had seized during the crash and was responding with a grinding resistance that Ethan could feel through the suit's frame every time he moved.
The HUD itself was glitching. The left third of his visor display was dead, replaced by a band of static. Several sensor feeds were offline. The altitude readout was frozen at zero.
And Ethan himself wasn't untouched. The shock absorption system had done its job, had kept him alive through forces that should have turned his skeleton into powder, but "alive" and "unharmed" were different categories. His ribs ached with the deep, spreading pain that meant bruising at minimum. His left wrist throbbed where it had slammed against the interior of the gauntlet during impact. His ears were ringing. When he'd first tried to stand in the crater, his vision had gone gray at the edges for three full seconds before stabilizing.
The suit had saved his life. But it had paid for it.
Functionally, Mark One was operating at maybe sixty percent. Flight was possible but rough. Speed would be reduced. Maneuverability was compromised on the left side. And another direct missile hit would probably finish what the first one started.
"That's incredible news," Hale said, audibly exhaling. "Now listen to me carefully. The two Aurelian jets are heading back toward the coast. Our interceptors will handle them. All you need to do is fly southwest and—"
"No."
The word was flat. Final. The voice of a man who was done taking directions.
"General, those pilots fired a missile at me with the intention of killing me. If the armor had been anything less than what it is, I'd be dead right now."
"They hit me. And now they're running."
"I don't accept that."
On the other end of the communication link, Hale felt his blood pressure spike for the fourth time that day.
"Mercer, listen to me! Don't be reckless! The Republic will handle this through the proper channels!"
"You've survived. That's what matters. Flying back into a confrontation with armed fighter jets only puts you in danger again!"
Ethan understood the concern. He did. But "proper channels" meant diplomatic protests, closed-door negotiations, strongly worded letters exchanged between ambassadors while the Aurelian Republic denied everything and the pilots who'd tried to murder him received promotions.
That wasn't justice. That was paperwork.
"General Hale, when have I ever done anything without being sure of the outcome?"
"Mark One isn't just fast and high. You're about to see what else it can do."
He cut the communication.
At the Holloway house, Linda was gripping Frank's arm so hard her knuckles were white, tears still wet on her face but her eyes locked on the screen where, impossibly, the boy she'd been mourning thirty seconds ago was standing upright and talking trash.
Frank hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. His eyes were fixed on the television, and the expression on his face was one that Linda had never seen before. Not relief exactly. Not joy. Something deeper. The look of a man watching his son walk out of a burning building.
Natalie was crying. Silently, in the doorway, with her hand over her mouth, crying in a way she hadn't cried since she was six years old and believed the world could take things from you that you couldn't get back.
In his apartment, Hargrove was on his feet.
Standing. At ninety-one. With tears on his face and his cane forgotten on the floor.
"That boy," he whispered. "That impossible boy."
Marcus, beside him, had the expression of a man whose entire professional worldview had just been validated and demolished simultaneously. The shock absorption system worked. At a level that made his own research look like finger painting. The human kinetics problem that he'd spent his career studying had been solved by a teenager who'd learned it from downloaded memories of a fictional universe.
He should have been humiliated. Instead, for reasons he couldn't fully articulate, he felt something closer to pride.
"Dad."
"Yes?"
"He's going after them."
Hargrove looked at the screen. Mark One was rising from the crater, climbing fast, headed not southwest toward safety but northeast toward the retreating Aurelian jets.
"Of course he is," Hargrove said quietly. "He's seventeen."
Fox Hunter One and Fox Hunter Two were running.
Full afterburner. Mach 2.5. Pointed at the ocean, pointed at the carrier group, pointed at the floating piece of sovereign Aurelian territory where two pilots who'd just completed a successful mission could land, debrief, and start planning how to spend their commendation bonuses.
The mood in both cockpits was relaxed. Triumphant, even. The target was down. The mission was complete. In forty-eight hours, they'd be home, and the story of how they'd taken down the most advanced piece of military technology on the planet would follow them for the rest of their careers.
Then Fox Hunter Two's radar screamed.
An unknown contact, approaching from the west at a speed the radar system flagged as a sensor error because no manned vehicle in its database could move that fast.
The pilot of Fox Hunter One saw it a second later. A dot on his scope, closing the distance that had taken them minutes to build in what appeared to be seconds.
"Fox Hunter Two, are you seeing this?"
"Affirmative. What the hell is—"
The dot became a shape. The shape became a color. Red and gold, growing in the canopy at a rate that made the pilot's training scream evasive action NOW.
Mark One pulled up hard, braking from pursuit speed to a relative hover in a maneuver that would have killed the pilot of any conventional aircraft. For a single frozen second, the armor hung in the air directly behind Fox Hunter Two, close enough that the jet wash should have torn it apart.
Then Ethan raised his right palm.
The repulsor fired.
A beam of concentrated energy lanced from the armor's palm, white-hot at the core and bleeding into blue at the edges. It struck the fighter jet's left engine housing with pinpoint accuracy.
The engine didn't just fail. It detonated. The turbine blades, spinning at tens of thousands of RPM, shattered inside their housing and tore through the fuselage like shrapnel from the inside. The fuel line ruptured. Fire bloomed across the wing root.
The jet had two seconds of confused, crippled flight, one engine gone, the airframe yawing violently as the remaining engine's thrust pulled it into a spin it couldn't recover from.
Then the fuel tanks caught, and Fox Hunter Two became a fireball.
In the testing ground, the Signal Bee captured the moment in crystal clarity. The footage would be replayed on every news network in the world for the next seventy-two hours: a red and gold figure, one palm raised, a beam of light connecting it to a military fighter jet that erupted into flame a heartbeat later.
Fox Hunter One's pilot watched his wingman's jet disintegrate three hundred meters to his left.
Five seconds. That was the entire engagement. From the armor appearing on radar to the fireball. Five seconds.
The promotions. The commendations. The fantasies of career advancement. All of it vaporized along with Fox Hunter Two.
There was only one thought left in the pilot's mind, and it was very simple: survive.
He slammed the throttle forward. Maximum speed. Every ounce of power the engines could produce. Heading for the carrier group, heading for the combat air patrol that was supposed to be covering their return, heading for anything that wasn't the red and gold shape that had just shot down a fighter jet with a beam of light from its palm.
Behind him, Ethan watched the surviving jet flee.
For a moment, a flicker crossed his mind. The pilot of Fox Hunter Two was dead. A human being, following orders, doing a job, gone in five seconds because Ethan had aimed his palms and fired. A few months ago, he'd been a high school student getting his homework stolen.
The guilt was real. Brief, but real.
Then he remembered the missile. The heat-seeking lock. The warhead filling his visor. The intention behind it: kill the boy, take the armor, deny everything.
If Mark One's defense had been anything less than what it was, Ethan Mercer would be a corpse on a nameless island, and nobody would ever be held accountable.
He let the guilt go.
Then he looked at the fleeing Fox Hunter One, and his right palm began to glow again.
"You've seen the repulsors. Now let me show you what else this armor can do."