by Gary Ballard
She focused her eyes down the dead-end street again, noticing the placement of several snipers already in the best vantage points. Some form of gas grenade could do the trick, maybe tear gas or some Somnobombs™ to soften up them up before sending in a rush. The holographic map had told her that the warehouse had no exits out onto Mateo Street to the east. Other than an air drop onto the roof of LA Valley Shipping, a frontal assault was the only option. “Nothing good, L.T. We got any gas on hand?”
L.T. looked to his assistant, Tom Waters. “Just plain smoke. It does have the chaff in it, but it won’t knock anyone out.”
Pollock looked from Danton to Graves to Waters to L.T. for an answer. “Well? Is it doable?”
L.T. nodded grimly. “It’s doable, but there’s going to be a lot of casualties on both sides. We got enough vests?”
Waters nodded. “A vest for every officer.”
“At least the company is good for something,” L.T. grumbled. “Suit ‘em up.”
Pollock’s pocket buzzed. He retrieved one of the prettiest personal comms Gina had seen and began speaking rapidly into it. Danton began to check her own vest, securing the straps before checking on her pistol and shotgun. “You have got to be kidding me. We talked about this. Are they even ready? You told me I had five minutes. NOW? Where?” His head snapped up, his eyes squinting against the dazzling sun. “I see them.”
Pollock snapped the comm closed. “Forget about it, L.T.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your time is already up. They want this to be Special Squad’s beta test. They’re already here.” He pointed at the sky.
Danton searched the air in the direction Pollock had pointed. What had been a small speck against the blue sky became a growing black mark, then a bug-shaped blob. Finally, she heard the helicopter’s rotors, but rather than the throbbing roar she expected, she heard only a whispery pulse, almost at the edge of hearing. The chopper’s body was big enough to carry ten men and mean-looking autocannons hung from either side. Magnifying her vision, she zeroed in on the cargo space. Three unbelievably large men in black uniforms stood waiting in the doorway. Their startling size paled beside their appearance. One had no face, his head covered by a mirrored metallic mask of some form. The second seemed a man in name only; both arms were glittery metal and the shorts he wore revealed a pair of cybernetic legs as well. Mirrored goggles wrapping around his head gave the third man a disconcerting visage, as did the book-sized mini-missile launchers sprouting from his shoulders.
“What the fuck is that?” Danton hissed.
“That, Officer Danton, is Special Squad.”
Her breath caught in her throat as all three men stepped from the chopper door, free-falling forty feet towards the flat warehouse roof.
Danton breathlessly watched the cybernetic freakshows plummet to what she assumed would be a painful death. “Oh my god, they jumped,” she hissed. But instead of seeing a gruesome display of the power of gravity, her eyes grew wide when the first made violent contact with the roof. A great cloud of dust flew up around the one with the shoulder launchers, who she nicknamed Goggles, as he landed on his feet, his body shuddering with the harmless impact. The silver-armed monstrosity she called Wall for his sheer size. He landed in a dusty roll, and sprang to a kneeling position, holding a pistol-shaped gun that was so massive its ammo must be as long as her finger. The faceless one, Mask, did not come off as lucky as his partners; while he landed on he landehis feet, whatever gear he had loaded himself with was too much for the weathered roof. Like a butcher’s knife sinking into a block of warm cheese, he exploded through the roof and disappeared into the darkened warehouse interior. “Shit, one of them went through the roof. How the fuck did they survive that jump?”
“Special Squad has been seriously upgraded,” Pollock announced proudly, “but you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Those aren’t upgrades, those are full body conversions. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Technically, you shouldn’t be seeing it now, Officer Danton, but somebody up the chain wanted a field test.”
“So what, we just stand around holding our dicks?” L.T. grumbled.
Pollock chided the Lieutenant like a cross schoolteacher. “ Lieutenant, that sort of sexually insensitive talk is not appropriate workplace banter. What if a reporter heard you just now? Officer Danton could sue you for sexual harassment and the company would have no choice but to settle.”
Danton hand-waved the talk and strode closer to the warehouse, trying to get a better look at the action. Pollock continued speaking to L.T., giving orders that she knew would rankle the grizzled cop. “Your men need to get ready to do cleanup duty. This should be over in minutes.”
She ignored the PR flack’s instructions fixing her gaze on the action. Wall had moved to the edge of the warehouse roof, carefully taking aim with the cannon in his right hand. Even from so great a distance, Danton could hear the gun’s shot as soon as she saw it. Glass shattered from windows a block up from Wall. Something with that much concussive force should have knocked him twenty feet the other way, but his shiny silver arm barely shuddered from the back-blast. The gun’s effects were similarly concussive. The target was a car that three Magos crouched behind. Instead of bullets, the gun must have fired some form of grenade, like a flashbang without the flash. The car rolled over onto the Magos and past them, knocking the whole group down and taking a chunk of the pavement underneath with them, but without any sort of incendiary effect. It was almost like a sonic wave had sent the car tumbling.
Goggles stepped to the edge of the roof next, his shoulder launchers roaring to life. Six mini-missiles shot from the launcher leaving tiny trails of smoke behind. They impacted the area around the Diablos on the south side of the street, sending orange gouts of flame and smoke into the air. Body parts flew from the area, and Danton followed the dizzying arc of a severed arm with sick fascination. Within seconds, most of the opposition outside the warehouse had been neutralized by these cybernetic mysteries. Another shot from Wall’s hand cannon blasted a hole in the wall of the warehouse on the north side of the street, sending Magos soldiers scattering towards the police cordon.
A fourth party entered the fray at that moment, much to their eventual regret. The Gun Club’s members had finally had enough of the firefight on their front doorstep and retaliated, hosing the front of the warehouse, the street and the roof down with of down small arms fire. Goggles ducked behind the lip of the roof for cover, but Wall stood tall for it, protecting the fleshy bits of his face with his metallic left arm. With his right, Wall aimed the hand cannon wildly, letting loose another cacophonous blast that bored a hole through the Gun Club’s wall, taking at least three unlucky members of the congregation with it. Wall screamed soundless obscenities down at the congregation, a primal scream of triumph that proved short-lived.
Someone at the Gun Club had an ancient RPG, the kind she remembered seeing in Beirut, Lebanon on the news as a young child when her dad would rail against the “goddamned ragheads.” A huge burst of smoke puffed from the hole Wall’s cannon had created, followed by the cone-shaped rocket straining towards the heavens on a tail of exhaust. The rocket struck Wall full in the chest, enveloping him in orange fire. Somehow the man stayed on his feet, his torso straining backwards with the force of the explosion until he was almost bent over backwards. As the mist around the cybercop began to clear, the bile rose in Danton’s throat. Somehow he had survived the direct hit. The skin of his face had practically melted in most places, little bits of flesh still hanging on to the red ruin of muscles that clung to his skeleton. What should have been the bones showed through the meat, and Danton finally understood why he’d remained standing. Rather than bone, it appeared the man’s skeleton was covered in metal, either as a protective coating or a full replacement. The external parts of him that were man were blackened and burned, but the core remained stable. His metallic skeletal grin, devoid of lips or flesh, glowered back at his
assailant, who disappeared in a red mist of sonic force.
Someone came stumbling out of the loading dock at that moment, limping to the cab of the truck parked in the bay and climbing in. It took Danton a moment to recognize the bloodied face of Goyo Cardenas, one of the longest-standing Magos Shotcallers. It had been a long time since he’d been spotted in public, but his name had floated around the precincts since Danton’s days as a beat cop in LAPD. Slamming the cab door shut, Goyo started the truck and threw it into gear. As the truck lurched into motion, a crazed smile split the middle-aged gangster’s face. Within seconds, he had gotten the truck past both lines of gangsters and was steaming toward the police cordon.
A blurred figure leapt from the edge of the loading dock Goyo had vacated, flying into the air in a lazy arc that ended on the roof of the truck’s cargo area. Mask had reappeared, his expressionless silver face gleaming in the sunlight. Crescent-shaped blades protruded from both forearms, their razor-sharp points digging into the truck’s roof as he climbed towards the cab. As he reached the cab, he slammed his left blade into the cab’s roof, the blade emerging directly in front of the startled Goyo. The Shotcaller’s head snapped upwards to look at the roof just as Mask drove his other blade into the roof, striking Goyo right in the forehead. The dying man’s foot must have slammed into the gas pedal, the truck bursting forward and twisting into the red brick wall of a warehouse on the north side of the street. As the truck slammed into the wall and bounced off, rolling onto the driver’s side, Mask took an acrobatic leap, cut two flips and landed on his feet. His feet barely touched the pavement before he leapt back towards the warehouse seeking fresh targets.
It was a full minute of stunned silence before Danton could move again, and by that time, the battle was all but over. Horrified by Horrifiewhat she had seen, she couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. What would have taken the normal CLED officers half-an-hour of hard fighting to overcome, these three insane cybercops had dispensed with in minutes. Only Wall seemed to have taken any real damage, though from his movements it was hard to tell if he felt the pain at all. The gangsters outside the warehouse, the ones who’d survived, surrendered easily, most unable to put up much of a fight. The Gun Club congregation had to be convinced by bullhorn to put down their weapons. Pollock had to grab the bullhorn at one point to keep L.T. from losing it and assaulting the place. The flack had quieted the situation down with promises of the corporation footing the bill for repairs and funeral costs. Once resistance had died to a low simmer, the Special Squad chopper had returned, retrieving all three of the cybercops from the roof by zip line. As the crew flew away, Danton followed them with her eyes, her mind a tumult.
Pollock handled the press with the slick ease of a car salesman, deflecting questions and turning the narrative to his favor at every opportunity. Danton was flabbergasted as she overheard multiple reporters ask why their video feeds had stopped working the moment the chopper had flown in. Again, Pollock deflected with aplomb. She would find out later that not one piece of video existed of the event, despite the army of reporters camped around the police cordon. Danton could only assume the chopper had deployed some sophisticated form of anti-electronics jamming, something that clearly wasn’t standard department issue. Everything about Special Squad, even the name, was expunged from the news reports that night. Heroic efforts by the CLED became the overarching narrative of the news feeds, and Gina had to laugh inside. CLED had been reduced to spectators in the event.
A brutal aftermath awaited her in the warehouse. As bad as the body count outside had been, with severed body parts littering the street and at least one body trapped between a car frame and the wall, the interior of the warehouse was worse. Those blades that Mask had used cut with deadly efficiency. Blood splatter, two missing arms and a disembowelment proved Mask’s skill and ruthlessness. Getting an accurate listing of the bodies and reconstructing the events that led to their deaths proved problematic. In all, Danton counted fourteen bodies inside. She noted the deaths of Gabby and his brother Castro plus two other from Diablos, none of whom were as big a fish as Goyo outside. She recognized a few of Goyo’s men among the ten dead Magos inside. Three Magos survived the pitched battle outside, including one of the up and coming Shotcallers, Carlos Baggy Pants. A trail of blood leading to a broken window in the back of the warehouse indicated at least one had escaped the scene, but a search of the surrounding blocks turned up no injured perps.
The sun barely peeked above the mountains in the distance when Danton’s shift ended. Drowning in thought, she rode back to the station in silence, thoughts about Special Squad and her place in CLED. The new corporate attitude had opened her career path more than the three years she’d spent busting her hump in LAPD, but she still felt stifled. Assholes like the L.T. still held much sway among the ranks, and until the new culture weeded out guys like that, she’d never get ahead. Her dad had made Lieutenant by the time he was thirty-two. At 29, her prospects of getting any higher than Officer doing the kind of beat she was doing were dwindling. Getting cybered up might have helped her a little bit with corporate guys like Pollock, but binocular eyes weren’t going to get her much more than a pat on the back and a sidewayand a sis glance from her immediate superiors, most of whom viewed cyber enhancements as thug trophies. But those Special Squad guys; they had been walking tanks, and they had been sent in to the worst type of firefight while CLED got to sit around pulling their puds. That kind of collar got the promotions, not busting corner Trip dealers and evicting tenants on the so-called “Gang Streets.”
After a quick shower and change of clothes at the station, Danton hopped on the bus. She ignored the claustrophobic press of stinky bodies on the crowded vehicle, her mind still racing. Special Squad. That was where she wanted to be, given the toughest cases, taking down the over-armed bastards without quarter. So the crew she saw today might have gone a little overboard with the ultraviolence, but surely that couldn’t be department policy. That kind of gear intrigued her. The takedowns she could make with cybernetics like that would be legendary. She decided to ask Pollock about joining Special as soon as she could.
The walk to her rental house was three blocks through a deteriorating neighborhood. Gina never felt unsafe along this walk despite the crime. After all, she was a cop. This area had been hit hard by the riots, and the city seemed unwilling to put the money into rebuilding it. Every third house was a bombed out ruin, some burned down to the foundations, leaving only charred skeletal remains poking up from the charred slab. Six of the houses on her street were undamaged but had been confiscated by CLED due to their proximity to gang activity. The latest victims had been her next door neighbors. Their eviction had been an ugly one and now the house sat in ghostly darkness as mute reminder of the screams of its former tenants. Had Danton not been a cop, she would probably have lost her home too, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about that. The neighborhood really was a mess. She knew at least three homes in the three block radius that had been rightly busted for gang activity from drug houses to whorehouses.
Lost in her thoughts, she did not notice the man following her until she’d reached her house. He was big and dark, practically mountain-sized, but the reassuring weight of her service revolver against her left breast kept her calm. His stride grew quicker as she neared her house. The pool of light and the waist high walls of her porch would provide good cover if the man wanted to attack her. She bounded up the steps and whirled, gun coming up as she fell to one knee, sheltering behind cover.
The man raised his hands. “Whoa, Officer Danton, it’s me. Aristotle.”
Gina could see his face clearly in the light coming from her back. “Marcus? What the hell are you doing at my house?’
“Can I put my hands down?”
She waved the gun in a downward motion before holstering it. “Yeah, go ahead. You shouldn’t follow a cop like that, you’re liable to get shot in this neighborhood.”
“My sincere apologies, Officer. I coul
d not exactly speak to you at your workplace, but I require your assistance.”
Gina scowled. “You and your damn boss already got more than enough assistance from me. What does Bridge want now?”