the Wormwood Archive Relics of Fallen

He knows what he saw in Iraq. The Army told him he didn't.Staff Sergeant Dan Kelly has cleared enough weapons caches to know what ordnance looks like. The thing in the corner of that mud house outside Tikrit didn't look like ordnance. Minutes later it opened a hole in the air and took the two best soldiers he ever led.The official report says incoming mortar fire. Two polite men from the Defense Intelligence Agency say sign here. Dan signs. For eight years, he carries it.Then, weeks from retirement, a stranger with an operator's handshake buys him a steak, pours him a glass of very good tequila, and asks one question: do you want to know what really happened to your team?Behind a guarded gate at Canyon Lake, Texas, sits a program more than a hundred years old. Its people recover weapons nobody on Earth built. Artifacts that bend gravity. That put you in a permanent coma from nine feet away. That make a Green Beret who only ever learned Spanish wake up speaking Tamil. That sing to each other in the dark. The job is simple: find them, make them safe, figure out who made them. The program's clinic is full of people who didn't do it carefully enough.Dan's new team is a crew of ex-special operators, a Marine bomb tech with a short fuse and a .50-caliber rifle, a linguist, a coder, and a historian who clears cartel tunnels in French cuffs. His first weeks put him in a gunfight under the Mexican border and in a rain-soaked Texas ditch, watching a surveillance SUV fold up like a crushed beer can with its driver inside. Someone is hunting the hunters. Someone who has been using these weapons for years. Someone Dan has met before.Relics of the Fallen is military science fiction with boots-on-the-ground grit: hard-edged action, real team banter, cosmic-scale strangeness, and a bomb tech who would rather talk a weapon down than blow it up.Keep your hands in your pockets. And whatever you do, don't touch it.