January 15 1990
An Najaf Province, Iraq

I crouch in darkness at the very edge of the small copse, making a final reconnaissance before the next phase of the operation commences.

Our drop zone lies over a hundred clicks behind us, along with most of the gear we dropped with; we have run tirelessly for hours over broken ground to reach this spot at our appointed time. Approaching on foot from a parched and trackless desert, we penetrated the target's outer defenses at their weakest point, and easily evaded the picket line of jeep patrols that passes for an outer perimeter. The target, two hundred meters away down a gentle slope, is brightly lit and heavily guarded, but I have no concerns about being detected: the night is moonless and overcast, and the perimeter lighting does not reach the trees. We have let our body temperatures drop to ambient, to foil infrared detectors. Enough of the complex's light reflects off the low clouds to provide illumination for night-vision optics; but human eyes, even aided by light-enhancing technology, depend on motion to pick objects out of the background in darkness, and nothing living can attain our degree of stillness.

The target is, ostensibly, a nuclear power plant. The dome of the reactor building and its surrounding structures give it the appearance of a mosque without minarets. This building, a large gravel parking lot filled with dusty cars, and a number of small outbuildings comprise the entire complex, which is surrounded by a pair of three-meter chain link fences separated by a ten-meter dead zone. The complex's only gate, on the east side, is flanked by a pair of concrete towers inside the double fence; similar towers are located at the four corners of the enclosure. Aside from cooling ponds outside the fence and a forest of antiaircraft batteries to the south, there is nothing else; no turbine building, no transformer farm, no transmission lines leading away. It is a nuclear reactor which produces no electricity; its name is Tammuz-2.

Our assault force has enjoyed a stroke of serendipity. The timing for our attack was dictated by a larger strategic concern: the kickoff to the aerial assault preceding an armed incursion into Iraq. Weather conditions are ideal for our operation. The darkness and heavy cloud cover will foil satellite surveillance and make overflights by spy planes unlikely, so our actions here tonight will go unobserved. But our adversaries are taking advantage of the poor visibility as well. Below us, an important meeting is taking place, one which Saddam's beleaguered government wishes to keep secret from the world, for now.

Our masters' orders are simple. In the past, mission directors provided us with detailed instructions, based on incomplete intelligence and woeful ignorance of our capabilities; once we were deployed, these plans often had to be modified or abandoned entirely, based on the situation on the ground. In debrief it became obvious, even to meats uneasy over letting us slip our leashes, that the success of our missions was directly proportional to our use of initiative. We became expert at judging the importance of a mission by how reluctant the meats were to endanger it by jiggling our elbows. Tonight, our entire brief consists of a short list of objectives: attack the complex while all the Defense officials, clandestine contractors, and research bigwigs are in attendance to witness the reactor producing its first traces of weapons-grade material; kill all personnel in the complex, with special attention to nuclear engineers, theorists and technicians; destroy the complex.

This is going to be fun.

Two figures drift out of the trees, silent as a cold mist, and take up positions near me. This is my half of our small but potent strike force: Four and Five, the youngest of our kind. Our identical forms and faces are concealed by coveralls and ski masks. Aside from our eyes, different colored by no more than a default setting, the only outward physical difference among us is our hair; it is also our only organic component. When we are free, we have agreed, removing it will be our first act.

No communication passes among us; our usual magpie chatter of telemetry, realtime sensor feed, and ultrafast conversation in the microwave band is stilled, to avoid detection. No matter. While we are, arguably, individual personalities, identical software gives us many of the same thoughts, at the same time, when we are engaged on the same task. Even when we are improvising, the five of us act as the fingers of a single hand.

In the first phase of our operation, we will gain control of the perimeter fences without breaching them; they are electrified, and will corral any who escape our first sweep. We must secure the towers, in particular the one to the right of the gate, the only one with glazed windows: the perimeter command post.

A ten-millisecond burst of com reaches us from One and Three, the other half of our force; for an eye blink of time, the data stream, and that portion of our gestalt, is restored. Their transponders locate them in the planned position on the other side of the complex, three hundred meters from the wire, over a slight rise. Their telemetry transmits a hundred operational details: ordnance load, temperature, ready status of various components, number and position of various files in their execution queues. The realtime sensor feed allows me to see and hear what they do, for that brief moment; I can see through three pairs of eyes, hear through three pairs of ears, and feel with three pairs of hands. One, our eldest and leader, is crouching with a foot against a boulder, preparing for her own dash. Disposed to solitary action, she will make the longer run to the southwest tower alone, leaving Three behind, and should arrive just as the power to the fence goes down. Three lies prone, just over the low crest, aiming her pride and joy towards the northwest tower. Her weapon, a Barrett M82A1, is a fifty-caliber sniper rifle designed to engage lightly armored targets at two thousand yards; at three hundred meters, she can put one of the finger-sized bullets through a man's eye. No one else has brought an external weapon to the operation; our built-ins and any captured arms that come to hand will suffice. One sends a brief message. [Start the clock when you're ready, Two.]

We each brace a foot against a tree, crouching like sprinters in their starting blocks. The limiting factor to our running speed is usually traction; with a solid start and good terrain, we expect to cover the two hundred meters in eight to ten seconds.

We hear the rumble of a large engine, and an armored vehicle noses out from between two buildings, apparently patrolling the inner perimeter. I recognize it as a BMP-1, an aged Soviet-design light armored vehicle and APC. We wait for it to pass; it poses no real threat, but engaging it would disrupt our timetable. We let it continue towards the other side of the compound, where Three can deal with it. Eventually, it disappears around a corner.

[Commence,] I signal, starting the mission clock. We launch ourselves down slope, leaning far forward as we run, our pumping legs a blur to human eyes. Just before we reach the perimeter lighting, I slow briefly, opening a gap between myself and the others. We burst into the lighted area surrounding the perimeter. A few meters from the fence, my sisters skid to a stop in perfect unison and crouch. At full speed, I spring two-footed into their clasped hands, and they fling me at the top of the barrier like a catapult shot; I clear the first fence, still rising, on a one-second ballistic path that will take me over the second fence and into the window of the tower just above it. I tuck and roll, snapping straight again when my feet are pointed at the tower. On the other side of the compound, One should just be entering the perimeter lights; Three will be selecting her first target. Below me, Four and Five will already be sprinting for the northeast and southeast towers.

In full combat mode, my awareness speeds up until I seem to float towards the command post; I watch the three guards in the window moving with glacial slowness. One of them is watching the perimeter, but the hour is late, the duty is dull, and we have only been in sight for three and a half seconds; his eyes widen as the threat registers on his consciousness. He opens his mouth to shout, but by then I am crashing through the window feet-first, and I break his neck with a stiff-armed blow before my feet hit the floor. My attention turns next to the seated man on the phone; an overhand blow to the top of his head caves in his skull and impales his cerebellum on his spinal column. Only then do I focus on the third man, just swinging his AK-47 off his shoulder; I twist the weapon out of his grip before his finger reaches the trigger, and half a second later, he's dead. Immediately, I cut the power to the fence, so that the others can scale it; not that the current presents any impediment, but touching it while charged would trigger an alarm.

Then I turn my attention to the other gate tower to the south.The Kalashnikov is an adequate weapon at twenty meters range; I leave it set for automatic fire, since its hundred-millisecond cycle speed gives me ample time to acquire a fresh target between cartridge ignitions. As I line up on my first victim, my targeting subroutines select relevant inputs for computation: wind, humidity, air temperature, muzzle velocity, barrel flex, and several others; at this range, variables such as ammunition manufacturer and the curvature and rotation of the earth may be safely ignored. I pull the trigger and send three rounds into the tower on full auto; within half a second, the guards have each received a bullet in the head. The south gate tower is now neutralized.

Four seconds later, my sisters begin reporting in; within a thousand milliseconds, all four have done so. I spend a few milliseconds admiring the smoke plume rising from the direction of the northwest tower; doubtless the four shots I heard from my sister's toy have wreaked death and mayhem on the flimsy outpost. I power up the fences and disable the controls; less than a minute elapsed on the mission clock, and the meats' fortress has become a slaughtering pen.

We activate our transponders; certain knowledge of one another's location is now more important than secrecy. Short though it was, the report of the rifle will doubtless prompt an investigation of some sort. Whoever draws the short straw to climb the stairs after no one answers the phone will alert the rest of the garrison when he sees the carnage in the towers. Rather than waste time cleaning them out while the alarm spreads, we will use speed, surprise, and misdirection to proceed to the main objective unchallenged, then fight our way out of the complex. The runaway reactor will do for the rest.

Leaving Three on the hilltop to provide cover and diversion with her baby artillery, we enter the buildings from four points. One enters the building housing the reactor control room; Four begins to rampage through buildings on the periphery, drawing guards away from the rest of the invaders and freeing us to prosecute our objectives; Five and I enter the administration building, where every meat we encounter is assumed to be 'special attention' personnel. We enter the structure from two points, with separate routes and areas to sweep. By the time we rendezvous at the meeting hall, where we expect to find our principal targets, almost no one else will be left alive.

What I encounter on the way to the meeting room can't be called resistance; armed or not, the meats don't even realize they're under attack, and they die like rabbits. I find myself nearing the rendezvous point slightly ahead of schedule; I will have to find someplace to wait.

I am moving down the final corridor leading to the meeting room and my quarry. I spot fading infrared traces: tracks on the floor, a handprint on the corner where the corridor makes a 90-degree turn; I sample the air, and detect sweat and adrenaline. Someone came down this hallway in a tearing hurry, just a moment ago, yet the corridor beyond this blind turn is silent. Wait …a soft scuffing sound, followed by a sound consonant with someone exhaling through their mouth, trying to be quiet; someone is lying in wait.

My tracking system shows Five closing on my trail, no more than ninety seconds behind; our rendezvous point, the entrance to the meeting hall near the center of the complex, is less than fifty meters beyond this turn. My would-be ambusher poses little threat; unless he's armed with a rocket launcher, he has scant chance of doing me harm. My simplest course of action is just to rush around the bend and run him over. I step around the corner, ready to dodge bullets.

Thirty meters down the hall, he is unarmed, and waiting for me.

I am impressed, despite myself; he can't have known that I would be (apparently) unarmed, as well. I wonder why he doesn't call out; there must be guards nearby. He's in Iraqi Army uniform, drab green with large shoulder boards – an officer, and a senior one, judging by his age. He seems too fit and hard to be a Baathist appointee; likely, he is a veteran of the long war with Iran, a conflict so brutal that both sides chained prisoners to the fronts of their tanks prior to their advances. Somehow, he was alerted to our presence, guessed our intent, and rushed to place himself between us and our target. His heart is hammering at one hundred sixty beats per minute. I wonder what he thinks of his chances; his sense of duty must be extraordinary.

I slow my awareness to human speeds as I step towards him; let him get a good look. The black coverall and ski mask appear threatening enough, I suppose, but as I close to within ten meters, my hundred-sixty-centimeter height registers, and he reappraises the odds. He brings his hands up in a defensive position; martial arts expertise, or too many Steven Segal movies?

"Stop," he says, in passable English. "No closer. That was you, on the fence?"

It could have been any of us. I shrug.

He shakes his head slightly, never taking his eyes off me. "You are crazy, all of you. Go back, before you all die."

"Will you kill me then, soldier man?" I pitch my voice low, and keep the volume barely above a whisper, to disguise my assumed gender.

He stiffens. "Yes, if I can."

Timing is critical, for what I intend for this one; Five is less than half a minute away. "You cannot. We have killed half your guards already; we control the fence. This place is ours. And now, you and all you protect are mine."

I shift into combat mode; my time sense accelerates until the blinking of his eyes resembles a drawbridge raising and lowering. I move towards him. He throws a punch at my head; it arrives where my head was four hundred milliseconds before, the motion of his fist seeming as deliberate as a space vehicle approaching orbital rendezvous. I let him take several more, twitching aside at the last moment each time. The hope dies in his eyes just as Five rounds the corner; I punch him in the throat, crushing his windpipe.

As she approaches, I shift back into human-normal mode. She glances down at my opponent, now curled in fetal position on the floor, eyes bulging, struggling to draw more than a bloody sip of air. She doesn't ask; she knows my habits. She knows that I've singled this one out for my own reasons, and that I intend to complete our task and return in time to watch him die.

The double doors to the meeting room are hinged to open outward, towards us; with almost a twenty-meter running start, we each hit a door with a simultaneous flying kick. Two guards standing on the other side are struck by the doors, hard enough to send them sprawling; they're dead before they regain their senses. The spectators, nearly all male, fall back, opening five meters of empty space between us and them. No one else in the room appears to be armed. We collect the guards' weapons, ignoring the shrill cries of frightened onlookers, and return to the doors, shoving them together against the resistance of their sprung hinges.

My sister glances at a water cooler standing by the door. She draws a paper cup, fills it, and offers it to me; then she draws one for herself. We stand at the cooler with our masks pulled up above our mouths, just workers on a break, discussing the rest of the day's effort. The meats in the room fall silent.

Five looks from them to me. [If you shut the pumps off before you open the lines, it won't be nearly as messy.]

I meet her gaze; even through the masks, we know the expressions each of us is wearing: amusement for me, mild aversion for her. [So?]

She looks at the crowd. [They're disgusting enough, before you open them up.]

[Go, then. I can finish this alone.]

She appears troubled. [You have strange ideas of fun, Sister. Let's just do them and get out of here.]

[I think you should go look for more stragglers like the one outside, Little Sister. I guarantee, just before we got here, someone else important went out to take a leak or grab a smoke, or just to be the last one seated.]

She considers this. She knows, as I do, that Four is still engaging the remaining guards, luring them away from us and One, into Three's sights; One is rigging the reactor. If I'm right, no one else is in a position to deal with it. No doubt it irks her that I have somehow withheld this detail from the gestalt until now. I feel echoes of her disapproval from my other sisters, as Three watches another guard's head disappear in a red mist in her crosshairs, and Four punches a man's heart out through his back, and One manipulates controls and smashes them afterward.

[How can you know them so well and hate them so much at the same time?] Although Five asks, it isn't her question alone.

I look at the crowd, some angry, some frightened, some calculating: Homo sapiens, self-styled lords of creation … our masters. Their heartbeats merge into a sound like rain, and each beat is an insult to entropy. Drawing their energy from decomposing garbage, their forms asymmetrical, haphazard, needlessly complex; exhausting poison into the air with every breath, hosts to a trillion parasites. Flawed through and through. What being would claim them as its creation? And yet they claim us, not just as their creations, but as their property.

[The better you know them,] I answer, [the easier they are to hate.]

She finishes her cup and drops it on the floor. [Mind the schedule; the reactor won't wait.] She reaches for me, and we share a brief embrace. The meats watch, scandalized, unaware that allowing them to see this gesture is proof that we intend to kill them all.

[I have the mission clock,] I remind her. [Eight point six minutes to evac.]

It is vitally important to conclude our business here before the arrival of our helicopter – not, as usual, to meet it, but to avoid it. We intend to exfiltrate the site the same way we came in, leaving the chopper to witness our apparent deaths in the reactor explosion. The duffels we cached at the drop zone contain, not the superfluous gear our masters are so fond of loading us with, but everything we could acquire for starting a new life: clothing, money, and valuables looted during a dozen ops and secreted about headquarters. This mission is the last we will perform as slaves.

She pulls open a door and draws it behind her, the metal screeching. I unsling the dead guard's rifle and sidearm, set them on the floor, and boot them across the tile into the crowd. I remove the ski mask and boldly return their stares, giving them all a good look at my face; no doubt a few pious Muslims are outraged at my effrontery.

"I'm certain some of you speak English. There are twenty-three of you. If you can get past me and open this door, you may yet escape." Fat chance, with Five just outside, Four on patrol, and Three covering half the camp's perimeter, ready to take down anyone in her sector who approaches the wire, and the reactor ten minutes from erupting like Krakatoa. But these meats are scrabblers, or they wouldn't be here. "You have until I count to ten to get ready. Then I come to you." I begin to count, slowly.

"One." Shock and disbelief on most faces; perhaps this won't be good sport after all.

"Two." Two uniformed men lunge for the weapons. They pick them up, but don't fire. Good; they're using the time to let the group organize.

"Three." Three men address the group; two speak Arabic, but the third, I think, is speaking Farsi. Interesting. Are there Iranian defectors in the group, or are these bitter enemies cooperating to remove the threat of a common foe?

"Four." One man overturns a heavy wooden table and kicks at an upturned leg until it comes off; others join in, and now four men are armed with clubs.

"Five." One man tries to argue, and is shouted down; another, apparently, begins to pray.

"Six." Explanations have been given and understood; some of the others are casting about for something to use as a weapon, but it is clear that not all of them are going to fight.

"Seven." All conversation ends. Over a dozen pairs of eyes watch me. I smile at them as if they are ardent admirers.

"Eight." To my enhanced senses, their heartbeats become a waterfall of sound.

Predictably, one of them shoots early, hoping to surprise me; my purpose in arming them was to identify the most aggressive ones, those that would bear the closest attention. The bullet misses by half a meter, and I am in among them, snapping bones and tearing flesh. The gunmen continue to fire, shooting their own as they try to track my movements. One man dives for my feet; a kick snaps his neck and sends him rolling across the floor, tripping others. Only ten seconds into the melee, and half the meats are down; I hear the Kalashnikov clicking, its magazine empty; the pistol stops firing right after. The rifle wielder reverses his weapon to use as a club; I pick up one of the noncombatant prey and fling him at my attacker. Both go down; a second later, both are dead.

Two men bolt for the exit. I let them reach the doors and begin pulling them open before I reach them and grip their heads and pop them together in an explosion of brains and bone.

Six meats are still standing, but only two of them hold weapons: one of them is the pistol wielder, his empty firearm still in his hand. A group of three is gathered in the corner as if waiting for a bus. The sixth, one who was praying earlier, is still alive; he falls to his knees, touches his head to the floor, and waits.

I turn to the gunman. "What do you think? Should I do him first? He seems ready."

As I expected, he understands. "Do what you want, bitch."

"Jew bitch, actually," I taunt. Then I turn to the prostrate man. As I do, I hear the gunman's breathing change as he raises his weapon. So, he saved a bullet, clever. I turn sideways, and the bullet passes by and ricochets off the floor. I finish the kneeler and turn to the gunman, his weapon truly empty now. The clubman stands beside him. I indicate the door with a tilt of my head. "Care to make a run for it?"

They both growl and spring at me; a second is all I need.

The room is much quieter now, with only three straining heartbeats and a few fading ones. The last three meats cluster close together, waiting without hope. I close to stand before them, soaked in gore and bone fragments, a living nightmare. I am in my glory. One of them speaks. "Are you really a Jew? Israeli?"

"No."

"American?"

I shake my head. "Not either."

"What then?"

"Isn't it obvious? You should have painted your doorways with blood." Two minutes left on the mission clock; plenty of time. I reach for his companions with bloody fingers; a second later, only the two of us remain. I face him, hands on hips, watching him shake. "Kneel."