Tasìa stepped back under the awning to prevent the warbirds from establishing a visual. The IR scrambler would help greatly in obscuring a readout, but she really needed to be in the high grass near the family of peccaries to exploit the device to her best advantage.

After re-entering the building, she wiped her nostrils clear with a tissue she had found in a box on the center desk. An adrenaline like chemical compound seeped through her sinuses. It itched something fierce and it made her feel a little buzzed like the first time she smoked a cigarette.

It had also caused the momentary perception of slow time that allowed her to make eight accurate shots in approximately ten seconds.

Most surprising to Tasìa, once again in an emergency, she had an intuitive understanding of how to trigger the reaction. The treatment she had received in the IMCQ, disguised as chemotherapy, opened up suppressed Harvest neuro-tech embedded throughout her body. Of that, Tasìa was now certain that that was the purpose of the fake treatment.

She only hoped that the chemical burn-off didn't sting so badly as before the next time she went to take a piss.

As she walked back to the door, a skydiver's body twirled slowly down just a dozen feet in front of her. The jet-stop pack, de rigueur for modern jump troopers, was intended to minimize impact from a free fall.

Typically, they prevented the kind of shooting gallery that Tasìa dealt the skydivers from occurring.

With no manual override for last-second calculation in effect, the jet-stop pack's rocket thrusters pointed straight down. A sudden burst sputtered alive. The corpse thrust several hundred feet up in the air.

Its legs caught fire as it swooshed upward. The corpse came back down to earth engulfed in flames.

The corpse was the remains of one of the last three skydivers she had shot. She gave each one of them a headshot to administer an instant kill after realizing the other five skydivers did not die outright when the jet-stop packs exploded. Instead, they suffered great pain on their descent down.

Tasìa went back into the office and she grabbed the remaining three .50 magazines. The neoPalm let out its little Paraguayan folk tune.

"Tasìa del Alma-Gris, here."

León coughed, but he cackled in laughter as well.

"What's so funny," she asked, not in a particularly humorous mood. She remembered though she had presented herself to him as a sweet little goofball.

Play along, sister.

"Oh, you had to have seen it, Tasìa. That corpse shooting straight up into the air. Look! There goes another one. Just how many of them did you kill?"

Tasìa returned to stand under the awning, once more. She leaned against the doorpost as she stared down at the crashed Sikorsky S-92, sitting approximately two hundred yards away from her.

It appeared to be in rough shape. From the shattered tail, the fuselage sprawled out like strands of twisted entrails. The back part of the passenger cabin jutted out with the doors collapsed in.

The helicopter rotor blade was nowhere to be seen.

She gave him her best attempt at a chuckle. She recalled a German philosopher once said humor could only be facilitated with a good appetite. Tasìa's stomach was feeling wrenched with the adrenaline flow.

"I took out eight. That was the entire squad that they brought down. How are you holding up, my friend?"

"Personally, I am a little banged up. But, I have been much worse in even shittier situations. What truly sucks, Javier lost his head. Shot off in mid-flight."

"Damn," was all Tasìa could say.

"He was much less a sinner than I, so I doubt that he risked the eternal flames."

Tasìa thought it curious that León took her one word response so literally. The death of Javier must have put him in the mood for pontification. He continued to speak.

"It makes you wonder. God plucks him away to the hereinafter, and leaves me right here still. Javier takes a full-on ammo burst to the neck that rips off his head. I am left ungrazed and I was right there at his side."

She could hear the tremor in his voice.

"How long did you know him," she asked. Her eyes scanned the ground, making no assumptions that the airborne attack was the only one coming.

Tasìa wished she could contact Felicité to get a satellite fix, but her hacker friend would be asleep at this hour.

León had not answered after several seconds.

"Is there something wrong," she asked.

León grunted and cleared his throat. His thoughts must have taken a dark turn, she realized. There would be no more gallows humor.

"We had been in the same deployment for a good decade."

Tasìa glanced up. The warbirds were on the move. One was missing. There was no time for pontification.

"León, we are not out of this just yet. Stay down and stay put, okay?"

"Roger that."

She thought he should have a good cry of it.

It's always less messy that way.

More likely, he was taking a cigarette lighter flame to his palm to help him deal with his emotions. Men were weird like that.

As she placed the neoPalm in a secure pocket protector, Tasìa caught sight of the long strands of grass, nearby and to her right, mashed down and spread out. The blades started to swirl clockwise.

Now the building was in shadow and the peccaries, their strange faces shaking and baying, were on the run.

Fucking stealth warbird. Did not even hear its descent.

Dozens of bullets punched into the wall on the far end from her. She ducked as the awning above received a sheet of hot shrapnel from an angular rain of the shredded materials. Some bore hot and stinging into the cotton of her shirt.

She had left the feathered jacket at home. Was that a good idea?

The bullets ate into the wooden frame of the siding as the spread of rounds inched closer.

Tasìa squatted steady with one knee pulled down as she took out one of the two handguns she had strapped to her body. It was a Desert Eagle .50 AE she had holstered along the length of her haunches.

Tasìa breathed in with the tight clinch in her gut once again to instant effect.

Before, she could not even hear the warbird, now the propeller sounded off with a definite slow whoosh whoosh.

Amazing how effective that works, she thought.

The warbird, small, with a sleek fractal carapace, came down, hovering above the car lot. The gunner manned a GAU-17 Gatling gun. He was stray shooting the large front office window for suppressive fire purposes.

If she had the time to do so Tasìa would have smiled. They made the mistake of assuming she would do the sane thing and seek cover.

Not having a clear shot on the gunner, Tasìa fired two rounds into the center mass of the GUA-17 rotator assembly. The chrome metal gears of the machine gun pitched out, white-hot.

Pink spray burst out into the air surrounding the gun port. The gunner lunged forward, his hands gripped a support rail to keep from falling out.

The skin from his jaw was missing from his cheekbone to his chin.

Ouch. Could not have been any uglier if I shot him in the face.

She could see the pilot turn his head backward to check on the gunner.

When he turns back around, he's going to activate those two 30 mm turrets lodged in the front and set me ablaze.

Tasìa aimed squarely at the pilot, trying to stack her shots for maximum impact. The first round barely dented into the reinforced glass. The second produced a noticeable thumb-sized curve. By the third round, which she had centered in the exact same spot as the first two, the pilot's head had jerked back around.

The third round splayed the entire sheet of glass in front of him. The two remaining rounds would have definitely penetrated, but the pilot sensibly took the copter back up.

The next shot did not impact the same location. It dug in, nearly at a vertical angle into the glass.

She watched the warbird disappear over the southern ridgeline, likely to take his casualty back to base.

A large caliber round smacked the cement walkway a foot to her left boot. It had ripped through the awning's sheet metal.

A second warbird must have been hovering out of her audial range.

As she held her breath, Tasìa popped a smoke grenade on the ground nearby. It bellowed the same sticky ochrous fumes she had encountered in the vents of Ward Ocho.

Tasìa ran up the length of the paved surface before diving into the tall grass. There was a chance their gunner caught sight of her, but to her relief, the awning received another two rounds that would have certainly killed her if she had stayed put.