“The one with the shotgun and the ballistic vest,” says Allen, “you’re sure he’s the ring-leader?”
“Tim Todd Smith,” says the driver. “We’ve had him black-flagged for a couple of years now in connection with genome copyright violations. But in the last few days, he’s been all over the internet stirring up dissent against us.”
“Bleeding heart liberals waving livedrive rights placards,” says Allen, bitterly.
“Cranks, right? So we leave it to local PD?” The driver’s already changing comms frequency.
“PD? No. I’m sure that’s what Leander Bishop would have done but he got himself killed the moment he left the safety of the Citadel. I’m going to stay informed by facing every threat the way it should be faced. At street level.”
The driver rolls his eyes. “How should we deal with this, sir?”
“I want forty RESC in full riot gear here in thirty minutes,” says Allen. “Toronto needs to see us taking a tough stance. Grab Todd Smith then beat the rest to a pulp. I want to see teeth on the street, understand?”
The driver pauses as he listens to comms chatter in his earpiece. “Sir, Citadel says there’s a fixed wing airplane skirting our airspace. Do you want to return to track it?”
Allen stares at the demonstration through his binocs then glances down at his watch. “No,” he says. “Tell them to man the air defenses and to keep me informed. And park behind that mall there. I can watch our men break up the demo and still be back to the Citadel within the hour.”
“Look and learn,” he adds as the utivan rolls. “This is how RESC stays on top. Hands-on, by-the-book, every time.”
“Nice morning, hardly cold at all.” Judy Alexis looks into a cloudless sky as they dismount their bikes and stand on the yellow line, just as the voice on the speaker tells them. Kirsty’s thrown up three times on the ride out to Citadel’s main gate but Judy Alexis looks fine, she’s calm and relaxed in Kirsty’s spare Federal Environmental uniform. Kirsty wonders how she manages it, what with the drone of the plane overhead and the clatter of the approaching Tramtrax half a mile to the south and the grinding gears as the gates roll aside.
The Citadel’s nothing like she’s expected, more like a tree-lined university campus than a fortress. A guard standing at the door of a squat cinder block office waves them over and Kirsty’s so scared, she pushes Judy Alexis forwards to do the talking.
“Mr John Danford,” Judy Alexis says, scanning the guard’s name badge. “You ready for some boring government meddling?”
The guard’s an old guy who looks flustered. He takes Judy Alexis’ work sheet and fusses with a barcode reader. “You’ll have to bear with me,” he says. “I just transferred in from the North West Districts. This job… it’s sort of all new to me.”
“Take all the time you need, ” says Judy Alexis, smiling sweetly while the old guy fails to get any data off the paperwork that Kirsty faked last night. “After the ride out here, we could do with a breather.”
Kirsty stands back and tries to stop her hands trembling as she clips a thumb-sized minicam onto her fallball cap and plugs the lead into Slate. She really does need that breather too – in five minutes, she’ll need all the energy she can muster.
The Tramtrax rattles past the Citadel’s gun towers and the Reverend pulls the beanie down low enough to touch his antique X-Metal sunglasses. He’s enough time to remind himself that style shines from within despite the coveralls then the carriage lurches to a halt and the doors hiss open.
Most of his Gs make for the turnstiles, heads down, faking the boredom of just one more day shift. As planned, a couple of groups hang back near the gun tower stairwells while the mercwarriors lie on the Tramtrax floor, struggling to suit up in their bulky armor before anyone sees them.
The Reverend takes his rightful place at the front of the line and eyeballs the night shift queuing patiently on the other side of the turnstiles, worn-out and spotted with livedrive shit and blood and slime since the corporation doesn’t run to the cost of supplying showers. He steps up to kiosk where a bored guard sits with his chin in his hands.
“Tickets and ID,” he drones and a hundred and fifty bolts on a hundred and fifty sprayguns snap back in a ripple of metallic snicks. The Reverend pushes his barrel right up the guard’s nose.
“Only one ticket’s getting punched today, motherfucker, and that’s yours if you go for the alarm. Now pop this gate before I pop you, bitch.”
The gate swings wide and the night shift keep well back and the Reverend starts walking, stoked that he came up with a good line in front of all his Gs.
Marcus Allen peers down on the protesters from the second floor of the glass-fronted shopping mall and checks his watch again. “It’s been fifteen minutes,” he tells his flanking bodyguards. “Where’s my riot squad?”
“Sir, you said you wanted them in place in thirty minutes and they will be. They’re currently in utivans five blocks away.”
“This is bullshit,” he tells them. “Not good enough at all. Tell the transport to pick me up round the back. I’m taking a piss then we’ve got to get back to Citadel.”
He leaves the guards to moan about their hard-ass new boss and follows the restroom signs. He’s standing by the urinal when Pope walks in. Allen glances round as Pope starts to wash his hands, then doesn’t think about him again. He’s oblivious to him drawing two suppressed pistols. The first he knows about it is pressure at the base of his spine and just below his shoulder blades. He feels the shock as subsonic hollow points balloon through tissue, then he’s just cold and numb as his dead legs fold under him and Pope catches his fall.
Allen strugglers for his next breath as Pope lays him down in a puddle of his own urine. Pope raises a gloved finger to his lips as Allen tries to speak.
“I’m calling MedAssist from the paybooth outside,” Pope says quietly. “But if you start shouting, I’m coming back and putting two more shots through your skull, okay?” Allen nods weakly and Pope rests his head down gently. He stands, pockets the pistols and walks out to make some calls.
The guard is still frowning and re-scanning the forged docket when Judy Alexis looks at Kirsty who looks at her watch and nods. “Maybe I should just take the details straight off your Slate,” he says, turning to see Judy Alexis holding a spraygun on him.
“Maybe you should sit down and shut up,” she tells him, so he does.
Kirsty sits too, pulling Slate and uplinking to FedNet. The moment she tries to sign on, she gets a human face instead of her usual job sheet. She was counting on this.
“Federal Environmental Officer Kirsty Powell?” says the face.
“Speaking” she says.
“I’m Special Agent White of the FBI. You’re in deep trouble, Powell.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, “I’ve been busy on a case.”
“You’ve missed shifts, made an unauthorized request for backup and we suspect you’ve been off-District too,” says Agent White gravely. “We need to talk to you.”
She nods and thumbs Slate, sending the case file she’s generated on Arclights. She’s modified the file so the first page flashing up in Quantico will be her valid request for armed response. “Guilty as charged, Special Agent White,” she says. “But take a minute read my case notes, watch this minicam feed and when you come get me, bring every gun you can muster…”
The calls come a few minutes apart. First is Pope, his cable access call patched into Hemblen’s comms. “It’s done,” says Pope. “RESC is running leaderless.” He hangs up.
“Through the turnstile and ready to stir shit up,” says The Reverend.
“FBI’s reading the file and watching the visual feed,” says Kirsty.
Hemblen nods to Perry who licks his lips then transmits the TAC data. There’s a twenty second delay that seems forever then Perry breaks into a smile and starts fumbling to clip his face shield into his helmet. “Cleared for mercwar, Jude,” he says. “No Union opposition listed. Go when you’re
ready.”
Hemblen snaps his own face shield into place. “Then it’s time to go, go, go,” says Hemblen into CrashNet. “Fire in the hole in five…”
He shuts his eyes and opens his mouth to equalize the pressure as the charges blow the doors of their shipping container clean off, killing the Meat4 Power loading bay crew who were yawning and milling about outside and just about to open it up anyway.
Sunday 23 March
09:05 am
MAZ O’TOOLE TUGS the nylon tether one last time before shuffling to the lip of the Skyvan’s rear drop door. He looks down, the wind tugging at his clothing, the vast expanse of the Citadel laid out thirteen thousand feet below, the first streams of heavy-calibre tracer fire drifting lazily up to meet his plane. He grabs the first dummy that’s dangling from an overhead wire and hurls it into the plane’s slipstream to tumble towards the Citadel’s lakeside docks.
There are twenty more to sling out. Maz and the BASEracers have been up all night making them, stitching bags of wet sand and lentils into coveralls then rigging the chutes to deploy at eight thousand feet so they’ll hang as tempting targets. Maz watches the ground fire zero in on them and sees Meat4 Power vehicles speeding to intercept them. Perfect.
He backs carefully from the door then turns to see a tangle of equipment and bodies as the half dozen BASEracers gear up to make the drop they’d swore to Hemblen they wouldn’t make. They’re clipping on goggles, checking each other’s rigs and strapping sawn-off twelve gauges or Uzis when they should be getting the hell out of hostile airspace.
Maz steps to Bleeker and whacks his arm, the old man shouting “What?” over the buffeting wind noise.
“You promised,” bellows Maz. “You said we’d drop the decoys then scoot.”
Bleeker’s smile is a snarl. “We’d have said anything to get up this high, bro. You’re the ex fallballer. Thirteen thousand feet, seventy seconds freefall. You really thought we’d pass up on it?”
Maz eyeballs Bleeker from inches away but his defiant stare’s unshakable. So he turns and unzips his own kit bag for Bleeker to see. Inside is Maz’s chute, combat-rigged with low-slung padded bags for grenades, single-shot baton rounds and a folding stock assault rifle.
Bleeker barks a laugh as Maz starts clipping his chute on. “I’ve combat dropped before, you haven’t,” Maz shouts. “Remember to fall far and open low to avoid ground fire.”
“What about the promise you made?” says Bleeker.
“Fuck it. Freefall is freefall. I knew you guys wouldn’t pass on jumping in to save your man Kenny.”
Elisabeth Giroux steps down from the smoking shipping container and turns her back on Hemblen’s squad as they lumber towards the stairwell into streams of chattering small arms fire. She flat-foots up the concrete ramp and drops behind bushes bordering a wide, well-trimmed lawn. She sweeps her field of fire through the M-81’s optics – rooftops, road intersections, windows on the other side of the green. Nothing. “Giroux for Hemblen,” she says, “perimeter’s clear.”
“Check that,” says Hemblen, the sound of gunfire simultaneously sharp through his comms and muffled as it escapes the building behind her. “Collapse the perimeter when it gets too hot.”
She hears distant gunfire to the north and looks up at a line of distant parachutes, a stream of tracer fire igniting one canopy so the plummeting body leaves smoky tail as it drops into the Citadel’s dockside. Off to the west, a barrage of spraygun fire crackles and echoes away from the Tramtrax terminal. Compared to that, the muffled and desperate firefight for each floor of Chang’s research building seems slight and incidental. She prays it stays that way.
“Movement on the perimeter…” CrashNet crackles into life and Elisabeth shoulders her rifle and searches for a target. Seconds later another call. “Hold your fire. They’re friendlies!” and Kirsty and Judy Alexis peddle furiously across the lawn, skidding to a halt on the wet grass and dropping their bikes as they slide down next to her, panting and fumbling for their water bottles.
“What’s happening out there?” Elizabeth asks as Kirsty gulps water.
“No mercwar but M4 guards are on the move everywhere,” she gasps. “Armored vehicles and utivans heading all over but no one coming this way. Have you guys secured the lab?”
Elisabeth listens to comms chatter and Kirsty ducks as a burst of fire within the building blows shattered glass over them. “Hemblen is up to the third floor and stalled,” says Elisabeth. “It’s all M4 personnel in there so everything’s live fire.”
“That sucks,” says Kirsty. “Hey FBI... you hear that?” She taps the minicam on her fallball cap. “I’ve got to get in there to give you the admissible evidence of Kenny Sossamon and they’re still shooting in there. You better be getting me backup, Special Agent White…” She raps her knuckles on Elisabeth’s helmet then she and Judy Alexis run at a crouch straight through the front door.
The Reverend’s got it all worked out. As his Gs man the gun towers and the mercwarriors take up point positions, he uses the last peaceful moments to strip off the coverall and reveal his fighting clothes – a microbranded armored jacket over classic gray baggies. Nice.
Then a utivan screeches round the corner into a wall of fire that blows wetware meat all over the road. As M4 guards tumble out the back and the Crash The Pad guys start booming away with their big badass rifles and the livedrives shriek their last, the Grifters just duck and cover and run and fire and tear shit up as loud and fast as they can.
The Reverend makes for the first set of factory units. He’s kneeling behind a sign and slamming fresh clips into both sprayguns when Pooky comes huffing up behind bellowing out a warning. The Reverend stands up for a look and there, not twenty feet away, are guards streaming out of a doorway.
Their rifles come up as he levels both sprayguns and beats them to the burst, squeezing both triggers until the sprayguns click empty and the guards are all down while he’s left between twin streams of twinkling brass that ping down all around him. He’s last man standing.
“D’yall see that?” he says, staring at the pile of still and groaning bodies in front of him. He turns and says it a bit louder. “D’yall see that?” And the coolest thing is – they did. One hundred Gs just got a ringside seat of their man dropping the bad guys. He rules.
He’s laughing all the time his Gs strip the dead and wounded of their weaponry and ammunition. He’s still laughing even when two armored vehicles mounted with twin anti-aircraft cannons turn up and start blasting away with shots that blow holes in concrete walls and scream through the air towards them and turn brick walls to dust. Even as he calls the retreat and the mercwarriors lay down suppressing fire and the Grifters start running back to the Tramtrax get the fuck out of there, he’s loving every minute of it. Kirsty had asked him to create a diversion. He likes to think he’s managed something a little more legend-inducing than that.
Visibility’s down to nothing since the defenders dropped a white phos grenade into a hard-copy filing cabinet to burn up years of research. Some M4 diehard with a Barrett fifty calibre rifle is down the corridor, blasting holes clean through the walls and threatening to blow away any of Crash The Pad dumb enough to break cover. They’re going nowhere.
“Coop… any ideas?” Hemblen’s lying on the stairwell, adding the protection of reinforced concrete to his box-section laminate armor.
“The only way is up, Hem,” says Cooper. “Either we stay here until Citadel security converges on us or we run down that corridor like real men.”
“That Barrett’s going to kill us.”
“Staying here’s going to kill us too, Hem.”
“Time to die,” Hemblen mutters, then taps his faceshield to open comms. “Listen up,” he says. “We’re going for a frontal assault. Start running on the FlashBangs and nail that Barrett gunner quick. Ready? One, two…”
The FlashBangs blaze and Hemblen plunges into magnesium-strobing smoke firing blind, emerging to see Meat4 Power uniforms flopping
and dropping as bullets strike them from behind. Hemblen swings round the corner without firing a shot and comes face-to-face, barrel-to barrel with Maz O’Toole. He’s still in his chute harness, backed up by BASEracers clutching smoking twelve gauges.
“Hem, my man,” says O’Toole. “We landed on the right building then?”
“That’s the wrong way, Maz,” says Hemblen. “We’re heading up.”
Maz drops an empty mag and slams in a full one. “It’s easy street from now on,” he tells them, “Cos between our chutes on the roof and here, ain’t nothing left but corpses.” He pushes a body with his foot and Hemblen takes point and they head up the stairs to the hermetically-sealed room marked on Jeff Chang’s sketch map...
Kirsty’s got CrashNet full volume in her bomb-busted left ear with Hemblen announcing they’ve taken the building and Elisabeth Giroux cursing that tanks just arrived outside. She’s got FedNet in her right ear with Special Agent White telling her the rapid response force is airborne. She’s got Judy Alexis in front of her, stooping to pull a belt-fed SAW off a dead guard and swearing as armored vehicles with anti-aircraft cannon methodically strafe the whole first floor prior to storming the building. As she catches up with Crash The Pad shooting the door off the secure lab, Kirsty thinks she’s getting all the sensory input she can manage. But then she sees Kenny and realizes there’s room in her head for plenty more strange stuff yet.
She stares at Kenny long and hard. Or rather, she stares at the space that Kenny occupies and senses his presence within a cage that rocks and clatters to a blurring violence that the paint-chipped bent bars can barely contain. The whole room’s a mess of food and bodily waste, walls splashed, fruit peelings and burger wrappers and milk cartons stirred up by the restless, rushing force. She remembers thinks of his friend Simon’s description and realizes it was spot-on. Kenny really is moving Road Runner fast.
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