Hostile Takeover Read online

  Hostile Takeover

  The SynCorp Saga • Book Three

  by

  David Bruns and Chris Pourteau

  Welcome to the Boardroom…

  The Syndicate Corporation needs people like you to shape humanity’s future.

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  For our canine companions

  Katie, Lucy, Sydney, and Tricksy

  Who warm our feet and help us walk off writer’s block

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Enjoy This Book?

  About the Authors

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter 1

  Corazon Santos • Outside Fort Hood, Texas

  From a high point on the interstate overpass, Corazon Santos squinted through the ripples of heat coming off the concrete for her first glimpse of their destination. It wasn’t much to look at, just a blur of buildings in the distance.

  Fort Hood, Texas. Home for herself and the hundred thousand plus refugees who streamed out behind her in a two-kilometer-long accordion of people. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder. A sea of swaying, bobbing head coverings stretched as far as the eye could see.

  All following her. Just the thought of it made her stomach roil.

  The temperature indicator in the corner of her data glasses told her it was 110 degrees Fahrenheit—the measurement had shifted automatically to Fahrenheit when they crossed the border from Mexico—but under her own head covering she was cool and comfortable thanks to the chill collar she wore. Everyone in her migration had one, she’d made sure of that. The loose-fitting collar cooled the blood in her neck just enough to keep the rest of her body comfortable.

  “Is that it, Corazon?” asked Maria. Her acolyte’s slim body was lost in a huddle of loose-fitting robes.

  Cora studied the height of the morning sun. “We should be there by midafternoon. Let’s call a ten-minute rest period, Maria.” Only a few more hours until I meet the one on whom rests the fate of the Child.

  The girl hurried away to pass the word. It wasn’t easy to stop a group that large, but eventually the mob ground to a halt and spread out in the dust on either side of the interstate. Civilian aircars passed overhead, some of them swooping lower to catch a glimpse of Corazon Santos and the great Neo migration.

  The newsfeeds called her the leader of the migration movement, but the reality was nothing so grand as that. One day, after services at the local Temple of Cassandra in Panama, where she was living at the time, she started walking north. She was the medic at an orphanage, and she took a few of the young men and women with her, staff and children alike.

  She had no money, no transportation other than her own two feet, and no destination other than north.

  But she had conviction. In retellings, the story grew to say she’d had a vision from Cassandra that inspired her to start the migration, but that also was not true. The visions started later.

  Cora halted in place and sank to the ground. The heat from the concrete roadway radiated through her robes into her backside, soothing the aching muscles. For the last six months, she had walked at least thirty kilometers every day, hardening the flesh of her thighs, calves, and back into ridges of muscle.

  A three-year-old boy ran to her and threw himself into her lap. His smile was bright and his dark eyes danced. “I walked the whole time all by myself, Corazon,” he said.

  She tweaked his nose. “I saw you, Juanito. You are such a big boy now.”

  He responded by snuggling deeper into her layers of robes and dragging Cora’s arms around him. She was doing this to give the children a better life, she told herself. But the truth was harder than that. Corazon Santos’s life was not her own. She was in service to a higher cause.

  Visions compelled her. It was all she could do not to scoff at the absurd thought. She was a nurse, a mother, a sensible woman, not some magical mystic caught in the throes of religious fervor.

  And yet, she walked. She followed the signs north. To him who would lead her to the Child.

  “Excuse me, Corazon.” The two men who approached were twins, Chaco and Lito. Together they formed the head of her security team. She hoisted young Juan off her lap and took the proffered hand from Chaco to get to her feet. The identical twins were dark-skinned, with straight, coarse black hair and quick eyes. They were shorter than her by a head.

  “Has the spy moved?” she asked.

  Chaco was two minutes older than his brother and usually served as the designated spokesman for the pair. “Yes, Corazon.”

  The US military had placed a young man in the migration just before they crossed the border. He looked and spoke like a native, but he was clearly a military man and asked a lot of questions. Further digging had shown him to be a United States Marine and close to General Graves.

  “He disappeared about an hour ago,” Chaco continued.

  Cora blew out a breath of exasperation. She had yet to make up her mind how she should think about General Graves. He had put a spy in her ranks, but he was supposed to help her save the Child. Cassandra worked in mysterious ways, but that combination seemed a stretch even for Her.

  “So you think he left to report in to his superiors?” Cora tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. The twins were just doing their job.

  “Yes, Corazon,” Lito spoke, probably trying to emphasize to her how important the request was to them. His voice was lower than his brother’s and husky from lack of use. “We think it is wise to have security near you at all times now.”

  Cora chuckled. “There is no way you can make me safe, Lito. No matter how hard you try. If the Americans want me dead, I will be dead. I serve Cassandra. If it is Her will, then it is so. The spy will tell his superiors we are a peaceful migration of poor refugees.”

  The brothers exchanged glances. There was something they weren’t telling her.

  “Has the spy seen any weapons?” she asked. It was easy to hide a few dozen small arms amidst a hundred thousand people. Another look flashed between the brothers and Cora drew in a sharp breath. “The jamming device.”

  “It is a hunch only, Corazon,” Chaco said. “The spy was seen near the bus where we have the device. It may be a coincidence, but we are being cautious.”

  Cora cursed to herself. Weapons they could steal, but the jammer was irreplaceable. Without it, any attack would be a bloodbath—on her side. They’d searched the spy’s belongings on multiple occasions. If he had a scanner with him, it was tiny, and he would have to be close to the power block of the jammer to detect it. Still, if the jamming device ha
d been discovered…

  “Maria,” she called out. The acolyte appeared at her side. “We’ll stop here for lunch. Bring up the buses.”

  A caravan of ancient, mismatched, gas-powered buses followed the migration. They carried the infirm, the very young, and the supplies needed to feed a hundred thousand mouths twice a day.

  “Yes, Corazon.” Maria raced off, already issuing orders.

  “We planned for this,” Cora snapped at the twins. “Disassemble the device and spread the pieces among the designated carriers. Bring the power block to me.”

  “As you wish, Corazon.” Lito held out his hand. On his opened palm sat a black cube about three centimeters to a side. When Cora picked it up, it was much heavier than it looked and slightly warm to the touch. The bottom side held an array of bright gold contacts.

  “How close does someone need to be to detect it?” she asked.

  “In this deactivated state, less than a meter,” Chaco said.

  Cora nodded. “I will keep it safe.”

  Chaco looked at his brother. “One of us will stay with—”

  “I will keep it safe,” Cora repeated, more gently this time. “They will not search me.”

  Reluctantly, the twins walked away. She could hear the buses moving closer now, the roar of their diesel engines breaking through the white noise of a thousand conversations.

  The cube weighed heavily in her hand. She had refused air transport from the US–Mexico border all to conceal this tiny power source, the key to her entire plan to take over the army base. She looked at the smudge of a town on the wavering horizon, feeling the tension growing in her shoulders. There was a reckoning coming. She could feel it.

  If I am worthy, take me, Cassandra, she prayed. She had lost so much already. Her husband, her child, her free will. Some days she just wanted to lie down on the hot pavement and never get up.

  Even the visions, once so sharp and clear, had faded as she grew closer to her destination.

  Faith. The word rang clear in her head. She was the anchor for these people and the millions—billions—of Cassandra’s followers the world over. She had been chosen to show them a new path to the future. If she lost her faith, what about them?

  “Juan!” she called out.

  The little boy with the bright eyes was at her side in a flash. She knelt down to his level, taking one hand in hers while the other worked open the zipper of his yellow and red backpack and slipped the cube inside.

  “Yes, Corazon?” he said, his mouth parted like a puppy. He danced with energy, making her laugh.

  “How would you like to walk with me this afternoon?”

  “Yes, Corazon!” His sandaled feet did a patter of excitement on the pavement.

  Cora stood, still holding his hand. “You have to promise to stay right next to me for the rest of the day, especially when we get to the army base. Do you promise?”

  Chapter 2

  William Graves • Fort Hood, Texas

  The drone feed gave General William Graves a bird’s-eye view of the incoming refugees. The uneven column stretched on for miles under the hot Texas sun. The people looked like ants from this distance, but the field of view showed the scope of the problem.

  Situation, Graves reminded himself. This was a situation, not necessarily a problem. Yet even in his own head he emphasized the qualifier necessarily.

  The dark shape surged and ebbed along I-35, moving north at a snail’s pace. They spanned both lanes of traffic, guardrail to guardrail, and spilled into the dusty median. An endless caravan of yellow school buses, pickup trucks, tractors pulling wagons, semitrailers, and all manner of private vehicles followed them at a snail’s pace, like camp followers in some ancient crusading army. Every day the refugees grew in number.

  “Crowd size estimate?” he said to the room of uniformed army personnel wearing regulation data glasses and manipulator gloves.

  “One hundred and six thousand, sir,” replied Captain Cho, a slight Korean woman whose frame was all but lost in her pressed fatigues. “Looks like they picked up a few more last night.”

  Picked up a few more was the story of this migration. The nucleus of the movement formed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the New Earth Order space station, nearly six months ago. Graves should know; he’d personally set the charges that destroyed the station’s fusion reactor. He turned to Sergeant Estes, another veteran of the Neo station destruction.

  “Any word from Ortega?” Graves asked.

  Estes, despite his Hispanic surname, had grown up in Iowa and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. His shorter partner, Ortega, had a mahogany complexion, a noble nose that dominated his profile, and spoke fluent Spanish, so he’d been assigned to infiltrate the Neo migration. The only special request Graves had made following the heroic raid on the Neo Temple of Cassandra space station was for the two US Marines to be transferred to his staff. The Joint Chiefs, anxious to keep the attack on the Neos quiet, had agreed. The pair of marines had made their separate peace with working in an all-Army environment.

  Estes shrugged. “He says they’re quiet, sir. No signs of hostile intent … just a shit-ton of them. He hears talk of weapons but hasn’t found any as of yet. Still, that many Neo fugees in one place, sir? Kinda gives me the willies, you know?”

  Graves’s face darkened. “That’ll be enough of that kind of talk, Sergeant. These people are not fugees, they’re not illegals, they’re not aliens—they’re guests of the United States government. Is that clear?” He raised his voice so the rest of the room could hear.

  Graves had his own reservations about President Teller’s new open-borders plan, but his job was to follow orders to the best of his ability—and stay out of Teller’s way. Since the Haven ships had departed Earth—without Graves telling the president the true nature of the Havens in advance—he and Teller had been incommunicado. Graves received his orders via the Joint Chiefs and he executed them, which was fine with him. He’d had enough of politics and side deals and secret plans to last a lifetime. If the Havens had been the last gasp of humanity, then so be it. He’d spend his last days helping people and meet his maker with a clear conscience.

  Graves turned his attention back to the main screen. “Where is she?” he asked. He didn’t need to say her name, they all knew who he was talking about.

  Captain Cho answered again. “They’re on the move again, sir. She’s right up front.” She stabbed at the air with her manipulator glove. “Putting her on-screen now.”

  Graves nodded as the image changed. Corazon Santos was a tall woman, draped in colorful robes, with a plain cloth drawn across her face to block the dust and dark sunglasses to protect her eyes. A little boy with a red and yellow backpack walked at her side, holding her hand.

  For all the vaunted intelligence capability of the United States, Graves knew surprisingly little about this woman. Somewhere between mid-thirties and mid-fifties, she was of possible Brazilian descent and a devoted follower of Cassandra and the New Earth Order. She had zero social media presence, and until Panama, had been completely unknown to the YourVoice community.

  And if his intel reports were to be believed, she had single-handedly brought together a Neo diaspora to march north from South America. His instincts rebelled at the idea of a new Neo leader. He had destroyed Cassandra’s seat of power, he and Estes and Ortega—and Remy Cade, he reminded himself. The station had gone up like a Roman candle … and now, back here on terra firma, was he witnessing the threat reborn?

  There was only one way to find out.

  “Tell me when they reach the camp. I’ll greet Ms. Santos in person,” he said.

  • • •

  Graves decided to forgo the air transport down to the camp, settling instead for a solar-powered jeep driven by Sergeant Estes. The Texas afternoon sun beat down on his beret like a molten hammer. It had to be well over a hundred in the shade.

  By the time they reached the refugee tent city, the streets were clogged with people. Este
s laid on the horn and inched the vehicle forward. Graves put a hand on his arm.

  “I’ll go the last bit on foot, Sergeant,” he said. Estes’s face was pinched with worry. Graves knew the young man considered Graves’s security his responsibility. “It’ll be fine,” he assured Estes.

  Graves queried Captain Cho back at HQ for the exact location of Corazon Santos.

  “She’s at the center of the camp, sir,” Cho replied. She dropped a pin at the coordinates. “Looks like they’re setting up a building of some kind … a church, I think.”

  Great, Graves thought. We’re starting right off with the religious mumbo-jumbo. He stepped out of the jeep, dust puffing out from under his boots. A walk would do him good. He needed to get the lay of the land before confronting the Neo leader.

  “Excuse us,” Estes barked at a wall of backs in front of them. The people parted, dark eyes peeking out from under head coverings, brown hands pulling children out of the way. There were a lot of children, Graves noted. At least a third of the refugees he passed looked under the age of twelve.

  He trudged behind Estes, nodding and smiling, meeting glares with what he hoped was a friendly demeanor. The sheer number of people was overwhelming, and he worried about their ability to keep them supplied with basic necessities indefinitely. To him, Teller’s solution of opening the borders felt like a temporary political move, although to what end, he had no idea.

  Graves tamped down his frustration. He was done with all that. His job was to keep these people alive and healthy. That was it.

  The temporary structure described by Cho turned out to be an elaborate tent, like something out of an old movie about desert-dwelling Bedouins. Emblazoned on the side of the dwelling was the sign of Cassandra. The enigmatic woman, her face half hidden by the Earth, seemed to glare at him.

  You, she seemed to say. You destroyed my temple. How dare you approach me?

  “That’s inviting, General,” Estes muttered.