A block of C-X explosives on the fire door’s backside caught Laramie’s eye. Finn’s insurance policy from earlier. She hit the arming trigger.
“Up the stairs. Move!”
The three of them stormed upward. At the first turnaround landing, Kenny fought to speak between gasps of air. “Wyatt’s going bonkers on the comm. Acid is heading our way.”
“Negative—tell them to meet us at the security center. We are on Plan B.”
Kenny relayed the instructions as they made it to the ground floor. Laramie unceremoniously yanked open the security door with the melted latch. The office corridor on the other side appeared to be deserted.
“In the hall … left, then straight, copy that,” Kenny said in response to a radio communication Laramie couldn’t hear.
Thirty seconds later and they opened the security station door.
“Friendlies coming in!”
Finn was sitting at the control console and had camera feeds of the garage displayed on a set of flat panels. Chris stood behind him and studied the display. Wyatt was the only one who turned toward them as they entered the doorway. He lowered his Vector and went back to pulling an ARC vest over his head.
“What the hell happened? We couldn’t get you on the comm.”
“Got shot in the face.”
Wyatt visibly jerked his head. “What?”
“I’m okay. Helmet got toasted.”
He seemed to accept that for the moment and finished cinching the straps on his vest.
A deep rumble sounded from below their feet. The lights in the security room dimmed while the video images rippled on the monitors.
“Charges at the stairwell just went off,” Finn said.
“What charges?” asked a voice Laramie didn’t recognize.
She moved to the left and saw a thin, older man with chestnut-brown skin. His attention shifted from Finn to her as she approached.
“Is this our guy?” she asked.
“Apparently, I am,” the guy said. “Doctor Jack Bell. You?”
“Staff Sergeant Laramie McCoy.”
The man stared at her for a moment like he was trying to memorize her face. Then he gave her a nod. “There better not be a quiz later. I’m not going to keep all of you people straight.”
“Just call me Laramie. There aren’t too many of those.”
“Then I’ll just be Jack.”
Laramie thought Jack Bell seemed awfully calm for everything going on around him. She wondered if constant police actions had desensitized him to violence. Or maybe he was just high. People found escapes in different ways.
Finn pointed at several spots across the flat-panel displays. “Three targets down. The APC’s secured the exit. Looks like they’re going to wait for reinforcements.”
“What sort of reinforcements?” Wyatt asked.
Chris’s face had turned dark. “A crisis response squad—heavy gear and weapons. Our door charge may have stopped the B-team, but we won’t last against who’s coming.”
“How long until they get here?”
“Five minutes, maybe. Rimini District station has a CRS and they’re only a couple blocks away.” Chris leaned back over Finn and swept his fingers across the control tablet. The cameras switched to the street-level entrance, where police officers with weapons out were scrambling around the perimeter. “Looks like they got the alert out to the guards. We’re not getting out the main entrance, either.”
“Forty minutes, and we’re already on Plan C,” Wyatt said.
“We have a C?”
Wyatt grabbed his Vector and went to the security door. “Maya, switch with me. Hit the building transmitter and patch me with Dragon.”
“On it, boss,” she said. Maya moved her small frame against the wall, her head drooping as she sent neural commands to her CORE helmet. The last CORE helmet, Laramie realized with a start.
“I’ve got Dragon. What do you want to tell him?”
“Open the comm so I can talk.”
“Done.”
“Dragon One,” Wyatt said, pressing his earpiece against his head. “Do you copy?”
“Wyatt? I mean—Acid? What’s going on?”
“Bad things. Contact Teo and reroute the Javelin to our position. We need a roof pickup ASAP.”
“Okay, will do. What channel are you broadcasting from? I don’t recognize the source.”
“We’re using the Health Department transmitter.”
Several seconds passed on the comm. “They’ll be able to trace that to the safe house. You just compromised our location.”
Chris moved next to Wyatt and took over the conversation. “We have other houses, Elton. Have Teo pick you up on the way. Get out of there and take the girls with you.”
“Okay,” Elton said. His voice sounded heavy, resigned. “I’ll do it.”
Laramie watched as Wyatt and Chris shared a long look. Then Wyatt moved back to the door and spoke with Maya. It took a moment for Laramie to realize Chris was staring at her.
Her gut wrenched into a knot. His tirade over Sid still stung. Chris had made it very clear he felt she was responsible for his losing a brother Marine. What was coming next? Blaming her for how she handled the garage?
Instead of a rebuke, he gestured at her forehead. “Are you all right?”
“Huh?”
“Your head.”
Her fingertips went up to her temple and brushed blistered skin. “Oh. Yeah. It’s okay.”
He watched her in silence. Surprisingly, Laramie didn’t see anger in his eyes. Then he just gave her a nod and turned back to the security monitors.
“We’ve got company,” Finn said in alarm. He made gestures over the control tablet to adjust the images on the flat panels. “CRS is rolling up. West side, multiple vehicles.”
Wyatt started barking orders. “Okay, let’s get going. Maya, you’re on point. Everybody else stack up. We’ll move to the roof and fortify a position until our pickup. Dr. Bell, you stay behind me.”
“No argument there,” Bell said.
The power suddenly went out and the room plunged into blackness.
Laramie switched on the tactical flashlight mounted to her Vector. Nervous faces glanced around, some looking for the exit, others instinctively scanning for threats.
Wyatt’s voice boomed in the silence left behind by the lack of ventilation. “Let’s move, people!”
28
Laramie took fourth position in the stack behind Maya, Finn, and Chris. She drummed her fingers against her Vector’s trigger group and wished she still had her CORE helmet. The police had cut the power and blinded them for a reason. This wasn’t good.
The team flowed out of the security room single file. The interior corridors were dim, with no exterior windows and only yellow emergency lighting to replace nonfunctional light fixtures. Each trooper put their hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them to stay together. Laramie heard Wyatt instruct Dr. Bell to do the same.
“Back stairwell,” Finn said. “Not the one to the garage.”
Maya led them through a maze of hallways until they reached a heavy fire door. She grabbed the latch and carefully swung it open. Once sure no one was on the other side, Maya started up the stairs with the rest of the stack trailing.
Emergency lighting cast an otherworldly glow from battery-powered boxes on the walls. At the first landing, Finn pivoted to cover the back angle while the rest of them continued up. More stairs and a second landing. As they approached the third floor, Laramie heard a door latch release. A cacophony of voices filled the landing as office workers moved into the stairwell to evacuate the building. At almost the same instant, a dull rumble thundered distantly below them.
“Security room charge went off,” Finn yelled.
Just like with the garage door, Finn had booby-trapped the security room with an explosive device. Laramie realized a detonation meant that police officers were in the building—and whoever hadn’t been killed by that blast would now be
incredibly pissed.
An older woman wearing a teal jacket noticed them from the landing above. She gasped and clutched her chest at the sight of an armed team. A throng of additional office workers surged from behind her, completely blocking the way up.
“Step aside!” Chris yelled. “Coming through! Step to the side!”
The woman stepped backward into a middle-aged man with a shaved head and goatee. He caught her to keep her from falling. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I said, step aside! Police business!” Chris motioned with his Vector.
The man glanced at Chris’s battered CORE helmet, eyeing the faded POLICE letters on the side. He appeared dubious but pressed himself against the wall anyway, hauling the older woman with her. Their effort was quickly nullified by a dozen more office workers who pushed from behind them in what must have been a standard safety drill for building emergencies.
Maya and Finn stormed upward and began to aggressively motion for people to move against the wall. Some of the Health Department employees got the message right away. Others saw the weapons and either froze or wailed in alarm.
Their progress slowed as Laramie and the stack waded upstream. For every worker that tried to clear a path, another one seemed to spill in from the fire doors from above. Confusion and fear added to the impediment.
“Director Bell! What’s going on?” one of the workers asked, spotting the director behind Wyatt.
“Security issue,” Jack said.
“Why are you going up? Aren’t we supposed to follow evacuation procedures?”
“Don’t worry about me. Worry about you. Head toward the lobby and move slowly. Do whatever the police tell you.”
That was smart, Laramie thought. The officers below them would have a hair-trigger temper after the explosive charges. Dr. Bell didn’t want any of them to get waxed just for showing up.
Crowds of gaggling people filled the stairwell now. Even with Maya and Finn’s forceful crowd control, the stack’s upward progress had virtually frozen. People Laramie couldn’t see began to question loudly why the throng was no longer moving.
A voice behind her yelled to get her attention. “Laramie! Get us to the central stairwell,” Jack said. “It’s bigger and has roof access.”
Chris heard. “Finn, Maya, exit third floor. Push ‘em out of the way if you have to.”
More shoving. A woman screamed from above, pointing at Maya and the frightening exoticness of her CORE helmet. Curses of surprise followed as more eyes trained on their stack.
Despite being small, Maya apparently knew how to use her bodyweight. She shoved her Vector into the obstructing bodies and forced them out of the doorway. Finn barked at them to remain back while the rest of the stack pushed through the gauntlet. Laramie passed through the threshold and saw a corridor flanked by laboratory spaces, each encased in glass walls and filled with robots and testing vessels. The number of people thinned rapidly in what was a wider space to move.
“Let’s go!” Chris growled. “Central stairs, now!”
They flowed around a corner and left the remaining workers to stew in their confusion and fear. Laramie spotted a lab with several gurneys lined up against the wall. Each had a body draped in a white sheet on top.
Chris glared at them as they passed. “Were those people culled, Bell?”
“Probably,” came the matter-of-fact reply.
The corridor opened into an open workspace filled with cubicles. Tinted windows revealed a threatening-looking storm cell that blocked out the afternoon sun and threw raindrops against the glass in a staccato patter. The office area seemed abandoned, its normal occupants having already evacuated to the stairwell behind the troopers, but Maya and Finn swept for threats just the same.
The walls lining the interior of the office area were made of glass. On the other side Laramie saw an expansive atrium that stretched up and down across multiple stories, with a series of balcony walkways lining the perimeter of each floor to allow movement between offices. In the center of the atrium, a large, open stairwell curved around a central elevator shaft and allowed access to each level via a narrow foot bridge.
“There, in the middle. See the stairs?” Chris called up to the front of the stack.
“See it,” Maya acknowledged.
They moved through an exit door and found themselves on the walkway. Laramie heard the gurgle of a fountain from somewhere on the ground floor. She broke from their column and peeked over the edge of the railing.
“Wyatt, we’ve got at least fifty people on the bottom floor, all flat on the ground.”
“What?” Wyatt edged over to her position. “Are they shot?”
“I don’t think so.” She looked more closely. “Their hands are folded behind their heads. Prisoners?”
No sooner had she said the words than her brain caught up to the implication.
The police must have ordered the fleeing workers to lie down.
Which meant the police had already been through the lobby, and could be coming up the central stairs …
Movement caught her eye on the central stairs just one level below.
“Get down!”
Laramie hauled Wyatt away from the railing just in time. She felt rather than saw the blast. Invisible light ionized the air in front of her in a flash of heat.
“Contact below!” she said. “Police in the atrium!”
“Any hostiles above us?” Wyatt asked.
“Nothing yet,” someone said.
Chris hustled over. “They’re going to push up both sides—the central stairs, and the ones we came up,” he explained. “We’ve got to get to a defensible position. We’ll get flanked here.”
“Maya, any ETA on our Javelin?” Wyatt barked.
“Dragon says they haven’t been picked up yet.”
Wyatt looked hard at the central staircase, studying it. “Okay. We’ll move up. I don’t think they have an angle on us from the ground if we climb.”
Chris seemed to agree. “Let’s hope they don’t. It’ll be hard for us to return fire if we don’t want to hit those civvies all over the floor.”
Laramie felt herself frown. Had the police thought of that? Using office workers as human shields … this wasn’t the Juliet where she had grown up.
“Okay, let’s move,” Wyatt said. “Change the order. Move Bell to the middle of the stack. Laramie, cover our six with Kenny. Might get hairy.”
“On it.” Laramie moved to the rear of the order and checked her chem mag. Half charged. She had six more around her vest, but if they got into a sustained firefight, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.
The stack moved along the atrium walkway, hugging the railing until they reached the footbridge to the central stairwell. Maya stayed at the front. Laramie shuffled around until she was next to Kenny.
“Get ready to duck-walk backward, Kenneth,” she said.
“I was born to duck-walk, Staff Sergeant.”
The squad stretched out as they began up the stairs. A few tense seconds went by while she waited with Kenny for everyone to pass.
In the office space behind the glass wall, a faint jangle caught her ear. She thought it sounded like someone with poorly secured tactical gear hurrying to cover. She hit Kenny on the shoulder and pointed. Possible movement.
A bulky shadow edged up to a corner, crouched and alert behind the arms of a floor-mounted lab robot. Laramie spotted the long barrel of a weapon.
Her own Vector was up and unleashing a barrage of shots before she realized it. “Contact rear! Move, move!”
The figure ducked back. Laramie scrambled up the open central stairs until she reached the turnaround landing between floors. She reset her position and watched as the bulky figure edged again around the corner. Her heart sank as she spied the hardened ceramic plating of powered assault gear.
Oh no.
There was no way their Vectors would penetrate that armor.
“Heavy!” she yelled. “Heavy, behind us!”
She made it to the fourth-floor landing. Kenny was crouching down by the turnaround and joined her to provide covering fire. Two more police figures in black tactical gear emerged from the fire stairs corridor and were trying to conceal themselves behind the lab equipment. She had lost sight of the officer in assault armor.
Kenny was hurling a barrage of laser fire at the other figures, punching blobs of slag out of the glass panels. Laramie joined in. One of her shots hit an officer’s rifle and sent a sizzling chunk of metal flying over his shoulder.
The electric hum of power-assisted limbs filled the landing below them.
“Displace!”
Laramie and Kenny moved up the stairs just as the terrifying shape of the assault armor rounded into view. She didn’t even try to shoot. Her Vector wouldn’t penetrate the torso or even the black, opaque dome that substituted for a helmet. The only chance they had was to stay ahead of it and the long-barreled cannon it carried.
“Contact on the stairs!” Kenny shouted up. “Heavy, heavy!”
“Get to the top, now!” Chris said across the comm.
Laramie saw more police scrambling two floors down. They would all be on the stairs in a moment, putting more guns in the fight than her team could possibly hope to match. She raced up to the next turnaround and narrowly avoided plowing into Finn, crouched against the solid banister.
“Heavy is right below us. Let’s go!”
Finn had set a small gear pack against the inside railing and was pulling a fine filament across the stairs. “Almost.”
Explosives. How much of this stuff did Chris and his team have?
Hummmmmmm.
The assault armor rounded the turnaround below. Laramie pulled her trigger and landed six shots on the shoulders and dome helmet. Tiny ceramic shards popped into the air with puffs of superheated ash, but the police officer didn’t miss a step and raised his weapon toward them.
“Get down!”
The loud boom of a ballistic weapon rang out. Laramie and Finn fell onto each other and hugged the ground, flattened beneath the Heavy’s field of fire. The staircase structure exploded all around them. Another boom, then another.
Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1) Page 20