“She’s right,” Lucius said. “We can’t do a stealth insertion. This is entry by the front door, all alarms screaming.”
“Very likely,” Yuri said grimly. “So I’ll need some body armor.”
Lucius handed a bag over without comment. It contained a bulky jacket and thick overtrousers along with a lightweight helmet. “You as well,” Lucius said, holding another bag out to Jessika.
“I’m not going in there,” she said indignantly.
“Of course not; you don’t have any combat training, for one. But if we do wind up in a firefight, I’d like you to have some protection. We don’t know what sort of weapons Baptiste’s people are carrying.”
Jessika glanced suspiciously at Yuri, who was doing his best not to smirk. The bodywork of the vehicle they were riding in was practically nothing but kinetic armor.
“Thank you, Lucius,” she said dispassionately. “That’s very considerate.”
The tactical squad deployed in the same fashion as they had at Fedress Meadows, their vehicles encircling the building and coming to a halt. This time, when the paramilitaries climbed out, they were accompanied by a group of combat support drones: thick, dark disks with squat muzzles protruding from their rim, flying nimbly above the squad.
Yuri followed Lucius outside. Warm rain hit him full on, immediately soaking around the edge of his armor jacket. A thick unbroken layer of black clouds had closed off the sky, obscuring Thestias and its halo of golden sunlight.
“I guess God isn’t going to be watching over us,” Yuri muttered. He pulled down the enhanced vision visor. The squad’s tactical grid sprayed across it, highlighting the locations of individual team members in green. The interior of the building was laid out for him, with the ground floor divided into three large spaces and the upper two floors split into a maze of rooms.
“Are you in the network?” he asked Boris as they walked behind eight paramilitaries who closed on the front door.
“The G7Turing has acquired limited access.” A smattering of purple stars appeared, most of them on the first floor. “These are the heavy processing cores.” Yellow circles materialized. “And these are the main power drains.”
“Three overlaps,” Yuri said. “Okay, Lucius, those three are our primary targets. Take them first, lock them down. You are authorized to use appropriate force.”
“You heard the man,” Lucius said. He snapped out orders to individual four-man squads and assigned each a target.
The combat drones shot forward. A camera on one showed Yuri somebody racing away from the entrance lobby, sprinting deeper into the building.
“Take the doors out,” Lucius ordered.
A drone fired its scattergun at the glass doors, sending crystalline splinters slamming into the lobby. Twelve drones swooped in, followed by the paramilitaries.
“Yuri,” Poi Li said quietly. “Stay safe.”
“Working on that.”
Yuri had decided on checking the biggest power drain point first. Whatever creepy procedure Baptiste was performing on his snatched victims, it would need power. He pulled out his semiautomatic pistol and headed up the stairs behind Lucius. His visor was showing him an array of images as the rest of the team smashed their way into the building. Drones zoomed along corridors, scanning for gang members.
He’d almost reached the second-floor landing when the shooting started. Gang members armed with machine pistols came crashing out of rooms, raking the corridors with full-magazine discharges, then snapping in reloads to carry on the carnage. Whatever weapons they’d fabricated had an astonishing fire rate, shredding walls, floors, and ceilings in chaotic shrapnel clouds. Drones returned fire, sending out a barrage of thunderburst grenades. They exploded in incandescent blooms, the blast waves shattering windows and tearing doors off their hinges. The drones advanced, electromagnetic rifles slamming super-velocity rounds toward any hostile their sensors detected. Gang members reeled back, diving for cover. Paramilitaries crept after them, directing the drones’ fire, sometimes opening fire themselves.
Yuri hit the ground as soon as the shooting started. Just in time. Half the wall behind him disintegrated into a swirling cloud of fragments and dust as a gang member strafed it. His two escort drones zipped forward, blasting away in retaliation.
“Holy shit,” he screeched. His head came up. Lucius was on the ground in front of him, also scanning around urgently.
“Looks like they saw us coming,” Lucius shouted.
“No fucking kidding!”
The first clash ended as gang members either died or retreated deeper into the building. Yuri scrambled up and hurried along the smoldering wreckage of the main corridor. “How many gang members are there?”
“Four fatalities,” Boris said. “Estimated seven hostiles remain active on this level.”
Yuri reached the room that was drawing all the power. Its door was gone, wrenched off to leave a slim, jagged rim still attached to the hinges. Four drones sailed through the hole ahead of him. Someone opened fire on them. The response was swift. He heard the definitive sound of super-velocity rounds punching through furniture. A man started screaming—a long, terrified wail of pain.
“Hold fire and isolate the hostile,” he ordered the drones. The visor graphics showed them surging deeper into the room. One of the paramilitaries went in just ahead of him. “Careful, sir, there’s a floor breach.”
“Got it,” Yuri said. It took him a moment to make sense of the chaos laid out before him. So much of the room had been damaged by grenades and bullets. There were five hospital-style gurnez lined up along one side, most of them lying on their side. Medical equipment towers were shredded, pulsing out fluids from their torn casings. Two of the gurnez had unconscious bodies lying on them, which made Yuri’s heart lurch in panic until he realized they were both female. One had taken a bullet to the thigh and was bleeding profusely.
“Shit!” He stared around, searching for a first aid kit. He couldn’t see one.
Another firefight erupted somewhere down the other end of the building. He flinched, ducking down as bullets came slamming through the thin composite walls. “Jessika?”
“Hell, boss, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I need a combat medic case. Fast!”
“Are you hit?”
“Not me. Found our first victims.”
“On my way.”
“No. Stay in the vehicle. I’m sending someone to collect.” He turned to the paramilitary who’d accompanied him. “Go!”
As the paramilitary left, Yuri snatched up a sheet from one of the fallen gurnez and jammed it against the woman’s bullet wound, tying it on hard with a length of tube from the wrecked medical tower. Then he went over to where a pair of drones was hovering over the wounded gang member. Two laser target dots illuminated his forehead. The man had taken three hits, two in the arm, one in the chest. He was already ashen, gulping down breath. Blood was pooling on the floor. “Help,” he beseeched.
“Sure thing,” Yuri knelt down and pushed his visor up. “One of my people is bringing a medic kit. You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. I’ve seen worse.”
“Man, it hurts!”
“I need to know, where are the other people that were brought here?”
“Please. I’m sorry. I just drive the vans, you know?”
“Sure.” Yuri held up the card with Horatio’s picture. “Did you see this kid? Is he still here?”
The man had trouble focusing. “Jeez, it hurts bad. Deep, you know, deep inside. Is that the bullet?”
“Keep it together. The paramedics are almost here. Before they give you a shot for the pain, tell me: the kid?”
Yuri heard more gunfire hammering in the big warehouse directly underneath. Then a series of grenades went off. The whole room shuddered for several seconds.
br />
“Did you see him?” Yuri persisted.
“Yes. He was here. Overnight.”
“Where is he now?”
“They took him downstairs.”
“Downstairs where?”
“Ready—”
“Ready for what?”
The man’s limbs started to shake.
“Ready for what?” Yuri shouted.
“Go.” He held an arm up, fingers grasping for Yuri, as if that contact would somehow help. “Ready to go.”
Yuri stood up, ignoring the clawing hand. “Our prime target may still be in the building. Ground floor. Proceed with extreme caution.” He snapped the visor down again and studied the tactical display before striding out of the room and hurrying down the stairs. One of his drones flew point, the other took up position behind.
There was a doorway behind the lobby’s reception desk. The door itself had been torn off, revealing a black gulf. The point drone flew through first. Yuri followed it into a long, windowless locker room with smashed light panels on the ceiling. His visor enhancements kicked in, converting the darkness into a clinical blue-and-white monochrome image. The drone navigated its way past buckled lockers that leaned against each other like a domino knock-down row that hadn’t quite worked. It slipped through another open doorway into the first of the ground-floor warehouses. Yuri came out into a huge space, broken up by floor-to-ceiling cargo racks that were mostly vacant. Grenade blasts had pummeled hundreds of empty plastic crates out of their stacks, scattering them across the floor. Ancient heavy-lift trollez were parked around the five loading bay doors, the warehouse’s vast interior making them look like abandoned toys. Two of the tactical team’s drones had been brought down, their blackened armor fuselage casings badly crumpled. Yuri didn’t like to think what weapon had done that. There were gunshots coming from the far end of the warehouse, obscured from Yuri’s view as he crouched down and ran for cover behind a solid-looking workbench.
One of his drones slid along behind a rack, its sensors scanning around. He saw three gurnez behind a cargo rack down in the second loading bay. Two of them had toppled over, and one was upside down. All three had bodies strapped on. The drone’s camera zoomed in. The upside-down gurnez had a big pool of blood spreading out from it.
“Holy fuck,” Yuri exclaimed. One of the other slumbering bodies was Horatio.
“Jessika, Lucius, I’ve found him!”
A huge explosion detonated on the second floor. The entire warehouse ceiling undulated like an agitated storm cloud, and cracks began to appear, ripping along its length. Debris showered down. The gang members at the far end began shooting wildly.
“Shit,” Yuri shouted. “Lay down suppression fire,” he ordered the drones. They fired a fast barrage of grenades.
Explosions filled the big space with incandescent light as Yuri powered forward. Twice he fell as pressure waves slammed into him, sending him skidding along the filthy floor. Above him the drones opened up with their electromagnetic guns, firing clean through the metal racks.
“Lucius, some backup!” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet for the second time. A bullet caught his chest armor, spinning him and sending him crashing down again. The drones identified the source and sent more super-velocity rounds ripping down the warehouse.
Pain was a hot ball in Yuri’s chest. Grimacing against it, he scrambled up into a crouch position and carried on toward Horatio’s gurnez. His own semiautomatic was lost somewhere behind him. Flames were roaring up the wall at the far end, ignited by the hellish burn of the grenades. The drones hovered above him, constantly scanning for hostile activity.
“Lucius? We’ve got to get him out of here.”
“Lucius has dropped out of contact,” Boris said.
“What? Is he hit?”
“Unknown. His altme is no longer transmitting.”
Yuri flinched. Connexion tactical team members were equipped with multiple access links, both implanted and on their armor, a hard lesson the department had learned after they lost track of Savi Hepburn. Today, it was practically impossible to take one of their personnel offline. Yuri didn’t want to imagine the level of violence that weapons would have to inflict on Lucius to make that happen—nothing survivable.
He tried to focus on the tactical display. Five of their paramilitaries’ icons were amber and red now, showing they were injured and pulling back. There was no sign of Lucius’s icon. “Fuck!”
He arrived at the gurnez and practically collapsed over it. Horatio’s unconscious face was caked in dust, but it was definitely him. Yuri felt unreasonably angry at how peaceful the boy looked. He worked the buckle on the strap. Another firefight broke out somewhere in the building.
“How much fucking ammunition have these bastards got?” he bellowed furiously. “Okay, everybody get out now! We have what we came for. And I could do with some help down here.”
A low, torturous rumble came from somewhere overhead. Yuri flinched, glancing up. The ruined ceiling was bulging down, the cracks multiplying. Rubble began spilling through the gaps, hurling thick gray dust clouds ahead of it. They churned in a mad tango with the black smoke gushing out of the inferno.
“Oh, shit.” He started to wonder just how good the body armor truly was. The tiny piece of rationality left in his mind was hunting down escape routes. They were all a long way off.
The loading bay door burst apart, and one of the tactical team’s four-by-fours came screeching through the rent. Wheels locked on full turn, and its back end swung around, tires howling as they left a U of scorched skid marks on the concrete floor. The front door opened. Jessika was gripping the manual steering wheel with manic strength. “You called for backup?”
A line of bullets stitched deep craters in the windscreen. The drones hurled grenades and super-velocity bullets in reprisal. Above everyone, the ceiling cracks multiplied like black lightning bolts.
Yuri snatched up Horatio’s limp form and lunged into the four-by-four. Jessika was already accelerating away before the door closed.
“Out out out!” he screamed. The tactical display showed him the paramilitaries moving fast.
Then they were outside, bucking across the wide parking lot, rain pounding the bodywork. A slender contrail streaked through the monsoon, moving so fast Yuri was still staring at it in bewilderment as it passed barely five meters above the four-by-four.
The hellbuster missile slammed into the collapsing building and detonated, obliterating it in a sun-bright plasma cloud. The blast wave punched the four-by-four with extreme force, sending it tumbling across the asphalt, every impact a hammer blow—
Yuri recovered consciousness amid a cluster of slowly deflating airbags that had completely filled the four-by-four’s interior. A lot of the flaccid white fabric in front of him was smeared with blood. The roof was below him, and the windows were all a mosaic of cracks, though amazingly they’d retained their integrity.
Horatio Seymore was sprawled on the roof beside him. Yuri watched for a few moments, checking that the boy was still breathing. Then he heard Jessika groaning. When he looked around, he saw she was hanging upside down in the front seat safety harness, blood dribbling out of her nose to run down her forehead.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Just peachy, thanks.” She dabbed at her nose and winced. “What the fuck just happened?”
“I have no idea.”
JULOSS
YEAR 587 AA
Muncs didn’t normally have names. It wasn’t an infraction, but the clan’s grown-ups had always discouraged it; the cohort should be uniform, they explained, no favorites. Language was also considered a communication impediment. Muncs should know their master’s wishes without having to be designated and instructed; instinctive identification of any requirement or deployment was so much quicker. That also meant the boys had to learn how
to communicate those commands at a subliminal level. The process was symbiotic.
Yirella had been five or six when she started mentally assigning her two muncs as Uno and Dos. They’d been studying old Earth languages at the time, and she’d liked the softness of classical Spanish. By the time she was seven, Uno had become Uma, because even Yirella rather enjoyed the idea of having a goddess as a companion, while Dos had become Doony—for no reason whatsoever except it sounded kind of fun. When she reached eight the names had become an ingrained facet of their association, and even Alexandre had given up asking her not to use them.
Now as Yirella leaned on the wall, staring through the big window into the treatment room, Uma and Doony had their arms wrapped around her legs in a loving hug. Her hands stroked their skulls, providing reassurance that she was all right and still cared for them despite leaving them behind for eleven days. When the rescue flyer had landed back at the Immerle estate, everyone’s cohorts had come charging out of the dormitory to greet them. They ran into a wave of emotion—the relief and stress her yearmates were radiating in the wake of their ordeal. The poor muncs, expecting a happy reunion, had reacted badly, demanding affection, embracing their masters and mistresses in unbreakable hugs. It had taken a long time to calm things down. Uranti, the munc-tech, was called to deal with Dellian’s semi-hysterical cohort, to allow the doctors to treat their injured master without having to constantly bat them away.
Yirella had watched the spray shot that was quickly administered to each of the creatures with interest. She was sure it wasn’t a sedative, as they didn’t become drowsy. Instead the drug seemed to banish their emotions. Then she realized Alexandre was studying her. For once in her life she didn’t bow her head or look away; she returned hir gaze levelly.
“Did we pass?” she asked belligerently.
Surprisingly, Alexandre looked immensely sad and turned away. Yirella had followed the medical party as Dellian was carried into the treatment center. Now that the casualty team had finished with him, he was lying on a wide clinic bed, his wounds covered with long strips of surgical-grade a-skin, with various tubes emerging from blue blisters stuck to his arms. His munc cohort was snuggled up around him, drawing warmth and comfort from the touch—a scene reminiscent of puppies nestling around their mother. After spending her time on the resort island successfully playing the unattainable ice queen, she rather envied them and let out a sigh of regret.