The sky over San Francisco was gray, not with fog, but with canvas.
Jason stood in the shattered lobby of the Transamerica Pyramid, glass crunching under his boots. He looked up through the ruined atrium.
Above the city, six massive airships blocked out the sun. They weren't the sleek, silver zeppelins of fiction. They were ugly, iron-clad beasts, belching black coal smoke.
On the flank of the lead ship, a red star was painted in rough, dripping strokes.
"Soviets," O'Malley spat, checking the magazine of his Thompson. "They didn't waste any time."
"They were waiting," Jason said grimly. "They knew Gates's shield would fall eventually. They let us do the heavy lifting."
Paratroopers were descending in droves. Their white chutes filled the air like jellyfish.
They hit the ground running. These weren't the high-tech cyborgs Gates had used. These were men. Hard, hungry men in heavy wool coats and fur caps. They carried prototype submachine guns—the early PPD-34s.
They didn't ask for surrender. They kicked in doors. They dragged confused, "Silent" citizens out of buildings and threw them into trucks.
"They're not liberating the city," Sarah whispered, watching a soldier smash a shop window and grab a handful of jewelry. "They're looting it."
"This is a resource grab," Jason realized. "California is a gold mine of tech and infrastructure. And with the US government collapsed, it's free real estate."
A rumble shook the ground.
Jason looked toward the bay.
A heavy cable lowered from the lead airship. Hanging from it was a tank. A T-18 light tank, swinging in the wind like a toy. It hit the pavement with a bone-jarring thud. Its turret swiveled toward the Pyramid.
"We can't fight a tank with a shotgun," Hemingway said, lowering his weapon. "My prose is punchy, but not armor-piercing."
"We need to get back to Alcatraz," Jason said. "The Icarus is our only ticket out."
"The bay is swarming with gunboats," O'Malley pointed out. "We'll be cut to ribbons before we get halfway."
"We move through the shadows," Jason ordered. "Go."
They sprinted out the back exit, diving into an alleyway.
The city was a war zone. The pristine, sterile streets of Gates's utopia were now littered with debris and bodies. The silence was broken by the staccato rhythm of machine gun fire and the roar of tank engines.
They reached the cable car turnaround at Powell Street.
"Halt!"
A patrol of five Soviet soldiers stepped out from behind a trolley. They raised their rifles.
"Hands up!" the leader shouted in broken English.
Jason froze. He raised his hands. O'Malley tensed, his finger on the trigger.
"Don't," Jason whispered. "Five against four. We lose."
The soldier stepped forward, grinning. He reached for Sarah.
BOOM.
A shell whistled overhead. It slammed into the trolley car behind the soldiers.
The explosion threw Jason to the ground. Wood and metal shrapnel rained down.
When the dust cleared, the five soldiers were gone. Replaced by a smoking crater.
"Who fired that?" Hemingway yelled, wiping dust from his mustache.
A heavy armored car roared around the corner. It had an American flag painted on the door. Not the blue flag of Standard Oil. The Stars and Stripes.
The door kicked open.
A man in a leather bomber jacket and a peaked cap leaned out. He had a corn cob pipe clenched in his teeth and a pair of aviator sunglasses hiding his eyes.
General Douglas MacArthur.
"Get in!" MacArthur shouted over the roar of the engine. "Unless you want to learn Russian!"
Jason scrambled into the back seat, pulling Sarah and Hemingway with him. O'Malley dove into the front.
The car peeled out, tires smoking.
"General MacArthur," Jason said, catching his breath. "I thought the Army was gone."
"The Army is never gone, Prentice," MacArthur growled, steering the car through a burning intersection. "We just dig in."
He looked at Jason in the rearview mirror. His expression was pure contempt.
"You broke the government, son. You decapitated Washington. Now the Reds are here to pick the bones."
"I stopped the mind control," Jason argued. "I freed the people."
"You created a vacuum!" MacArthur snapped. "And nature hates a vacuum. Now I'm holding the Presidio with three regiments and a prayer against the entire Red Army."
They sped toward the Golden Gate Bridge. The Presidio military base lay at its foot, fortified with sandbags and barbed wire.
"Why save us?" Jason asked. "If you hate me, why not let them shoot me?"
MacArthur took the pipe out of his mouth.
"Because you have the Icarus," he said. "And the Icarus has a nuclear reactor."
They drove through the gates of the Presidio. It was a hive of activity. Soldiers were digging trenches, setting up machine gun nests. It felt real. Grounded. No holograms, no lasers. Just men preparing to die for dirt.
They entered the command bunker. It smelled of stale coffee and fear.
MacArthur slammed a map onto the table.
"Soviet Intelligence knows what you have," MacArthur said. "They aren't here for the land. They have plenty of land. They're here for The Pile."
He pointed to a photo of a Soviet scientist. A young man with intense eyes.
"Igor Kurchatov," MacArthur said. "Their head physicist. He's years behind on atomic theory. If they capture your ship, they capture the Bomb."
Jason felt a chill.
"If they get the reactor," Jason whispered, "they jump ahead twenty years. They win the century."
"Exactly," MacArthur said. "So you aren't leaving. You're going to help me defend this rock. Or I'll blow your ship up myself to keep it out of their hands."
"General!"
A medic burst into the room. He looked terrified. His mask was bloody.
"Sir, the infirmary is overflowing," the medic gasped. "It's spreading."
"What is?" MacArthur demanded. "Mustard gas?"
"No sir. The flu."
Sarah stepped forward. "The Spanish Flu? That ended in 1919."
"It came back," the medic said. "The soldiers... they're drowning in their own lungs. It's faster. Meaner."
Sarah grabbed a mask from the table. "Take me to them."
Jason followed her to the infirmary tent.
It was a scene from hell.
Rows of cots filled with young men. They weren't just coughing. They were convulsing. Their faces were blue—cyanosis from lack of oxygen. Bloody foam bubbled from their lips.
Sarah checked a soldier's pulse. She looked at Jason, her eyes wide with fear.
"It mutated," she whispered. "The chemical weapons. The bio-diesel smoke. The stress. It created a pressure cooker for the virus."
"H1N1 Prime," Jason realized. "It's not just killing the weak. It's killing the strong. Cytokine storm."
He looked at the map on the wall. The Soviet invasion force. Thousands of men, packed into airships, breathing the same recycled air.
"The Soviets brought it," Jason said. "Or they're catching it. This isn't just an invasion. It's a plague vector."
He looked at MacArthur.
"We can't just fight them, General. If that army spreads out across the country, they'll carry this virus to every city in America. We're looking at an extinction event."
MacArthur looked at the dying men. He clamped his pipe back in his teeth.
"Then we hold the line here," MacArthur said. "Nobody leaves San Francisco. Not the Reds. Not us."
"We have to get to the Icarus," Jason said. "If I can reconfigure the Tesla Coil... maybe we can end this fight without firing a shot."
"How?"
"An EMP," Jason said. "We fry their ships. We strand them here. And then we quarantine the city."
"You want to trap us in a cage with a bear and a plague?" MacArthur asked.
"I want to save the rest of the world," Jason said. "Give me a boat. I'm going back to Alcatraz."