Page 19 of Breaking Danger (Ghost Ops #3)

However, good things don’t last. No one knew that better than him. Jon planted his palms on the mattress next to her head and tensed his muscles. Pulling out and rolling over wasn’t going to be easy. Not because he didn’t have the strength but because he didn’t have the desire.

He moved his hips and instantly Sophie’s arms and legs tightened around him.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

Oh, man, no. But out of a sense of duty, he replied, “I’m heavy.”

There was no refuting that and she didn’t try. “I like it.”

Christ. She didn’t want him to pull out and roll over and he didn’t want to either.

Something had messed with his soldier’s brain because he knew falling asleep in this position wasn’t smart, wasn’t in the battle manual.

They had been taught how to sleep in battle conditions, been trained to it, sometimes with blood. They’d trained to operate at peak capacity on two hours’ sleep a week. They’d been trained to come out of REM sleep fighting. In the field, Jon had never been a second away from a weapon.

Now, right now, goddammit, his weaponry was in the living room.

Every single freaking piece of equipment was precious seconds away.

The thought was unbearable for a professional soldier.

But the thought of detaching himself from Sophie was…

was even more unbearable. That warm softness all along his front, the silky hair tickling his face, that warm grip on his dick—he couldn’t do without it. Simply couldn’t.

He was being rewired.

That was his last thought before a warm perfumed blackness overcame his senses.

The noise woke him. He was instantly awake, instantly realized what it was.

Light colored the edges of Sophie’s lined curtains, enough to see the time on his wrist. He’d slept until mid-morning, something he couldn’t ever remember doing.

Sometime during the night he’d slipped out of and off Sophie, his subconscious being more of a gentleman that his consciousness. She was lying half on him, head in the crook of his shoulder.

He’d slept deeply, something he rarely did. That descent into deep sleep discomfited him. He sometimes had nightmares, which he hated. So he’d trained himself to go into a shallow sleep, completely unlike the semi-coma he felt he’d been in.

He’d woken up because of the noise. The noise was unlike anything he had ever heard in his life. Jagged, dissonant, feral. Growing louder.

Sophie raised her head, smiled at him, a frown between her dark eyebrows. In the faint light all he saw was pale skin and dark blue eyes.

He smoothed his hand over her hair, wishing that things were different. Wishing he were here in this absurdly frilly and comfortable bed with this amazingly beautiful and smart woman under normal circumstances.

Jon didn’t do romance and he sure didn’t do love. He was a love ’em and leave ’em guy, all the way. But Sophie?

Wow, with Sophie he just might have made an exception. She was absolutely fascinating, probably smarter than he was, certainly better educated. Soft, gentle, very easy to be with. And he liked the glimpses of frills, of hyper femininity, that he’d seen.

Another first. Jon’s life had always been reduced to essentials.

For most of his life he could have packed all his worldly goods into one duffel bag, ready to take off in ten minutes.

He owned no property outside his guns. The military had given him all the essentials and he had wanted nothing else.

No ties, no belongings and above all, no frills.

Ghost Ops had been made for him.

No emotional ties either, until Haven. He’d respected Lucius and Mac, ready to follow their orders even if it led to his death.

But now he could see beneath Lucius and Mac’s rough exterior, particularly with their women.

It was as if they came alive in their presence.

Mac was crazy about his wife, Catherine and that child she was carrying.

And Lucius—Lucius had been so beaten, so broken when he and Pelton, Romero and Lundquist had arrived that Jon thought he could see death following Lucius around, one step behind him.

Stella had yanked him right back into life.

And Nick. Man. Iceman Nick who didn’t care about anything or anyone. When he’d received some secret signal from Elle that she was in danger Jon thought Nick would go crazy. Implode from stress.

Jon didn’t believe in love, of any kind. Not in love at first sight or second or even third sight. His parents had been sick fucks, incapable of loving anything except their drugs and until Haven, until this past year, he’d never seen love at work, had never even believed it possible.

But now…well, suppose it was possible? Suppose you could find someone you loved and admired and who loved you right back? Something he didn’t even imagine existed in the world until he saw it, first hand, at Haven. So if you found it, what then?

“Jon?” Sophie repeated sleepily, lifting up on one elbow. He reached out and tucked a dark shiny lock of hair behind her ear. “What’s that noise?”

If you found it, you protected it.

“The swarm,” he said grimly. “It’s here.”

They came and they came and they came. She and Jon stood by the window with the curtains open. The sky was cloudy with smoke and fire debris, casting a gray pall over the morning.

At first they watched on Jon’s scanner fed by a couple of Haven drones.

At some central control station back in Haven they pieced together a large scale picture from several drones.

She could tell by the slight fracture marks in the hologram, which disappeared when Jon zoomed in with one drone’s video feed.

It took a moment to realize what she was seeing, though she could hear it well enough.

A loud, dissonant cacophony, growing louder by the minute.

A noise unlike any she’d ever heard before, the very voice of utter chaos.

Screams, bellows, fists against metal, glass shattering, all combined into one long rolling wall of sound that was the most frightening thing she’d ever heard.

Jon zoomed in more closely and there it was—the swarm.

The main force rolling up Jones, people shoulder to shoulder, shoving each other, striking randomly, a mass so dense that for a second it looked like one single organism with an infinite number of moving parts.

The front part of the wave was 20 blocks long.

Jon tapped and the focus zoomed in even more, so she could see individual faces.

Every hair on her body stood up in an archaic, primitive rush of utter terror.

She couldn’t imagine that so many expressions of violence and madness had ever been gathered together in the history of humanity.

Even in the mass battles of the past, there must have been some human expressions amongst the rank and file, a few hanging back, not wanting to maim and pillage.

Some who tended to the wounded. Some who simply didn’t want to fight.

Here there was nothing she recognized as even vaguely human, just a boiling mass of bodies trying to kill each other.

Half the faces were covered in blood which was almost a blessing because she couldn’t see the inhumanity there.

All she saw was blood on skin, sometimes dripping off the faces if the killing had been fresh.

Nobody looked up, of course, because the drones were silent.

Mute witnesses to mankind’s degradation, flying high overhead, robotic souls unflinching, cameras emotionlessly shooting video footage that sickened her heart.

“They—” Her voice came out so faint she had to stop.

She was leaning against Jon like you’d lean against a wall, to hold you up.

He was absolutely solid, face without expression as he held out the monitor so she could watch.

At her almost soundless voice his intent gaze switched from the monitor to her face.

She was a scientist. Maybe one of the few left alive.

So as long as she had a beating heart and a functional brain she was going to do what was a scientist’s first duty—observe reality.

There could be no hypotheses without observation.

She remembered one of her first biology professors laying down the law and how she had thrilled at the thought.

It had been like looking into the very heart of life.

Well now she was looking into the very heart of death, but her duty was still clear.

She coughed, gathered her strength around her like a cloak.

“They are behaving very much like a swarm,” she said, proud of the fact that her voice was clear and steady, even while her heart hurt so much in her chest. She watched them boil and scramble up to the top of Jones.

“There’s a concept in biology known as emergence.

That there can be a hierarchical form of organization not apparent at the lowest levels.

” She tapped the air of the hologram. “Each individual is behaving randomly and yet in their numbers, there is a primitive form of organization there. They are following the ‘nearest neighbor’ rule—blindly following where the person next to them leads. If they are swarming up Jones I can only imagine that they have an instinctive tropism for water—for the Bay. So though each individual doesn’t know where he or she is going, the herd is heading for water. ”

Jon’s jaw muscles clenched. “Can they swim?”

Could they swim? “I don’t want to give a glib answer but my instinct is to say no.

Swimming requires motor control and coordination adjustments.

I don’t see any sign of that here. Many exhibit what could only be called spastic muscle movements, uncontrollable.

That would be deadly in water. And I don’t think they could coordinate their breathing enough to stay afloat.

” She looked up at him. “That’s my considered opinion but I don’t know if I’d stake my life on it. ”

“If they are attracted to loud noises, maybe we could set up boom machines offshore. Watch them fall into water like lemmings.”