Calculus of War
War had come to a tiny slice of Saint Lucille. The three blocks around the chapter house of the Guild of the Maker were a no man’s land, a beaten zone under continuous observation. Any cop or car who strayed into the zone attracted a burst of gunfire. No one had died, not yet, but it was enough to discourage anyone who dared approach. Sirens wailed futilely at the edges of the zone, lights flashed impotently at the darkness, cops scrambled from cover to cover with pistols and shotguns woefully inadequate for such long ranges. Within the guild house, strange noises floated out of broken windows. Crashing, smashing, the occasional single gunshot.
Why hadn’t they left yet? Yuri wondered.
That was the biggest mystery of the night. A raid was short, sharp, violent. The raiders couldn’t afford to get bogged down. Once the QRF arrived, everything would get complicated.
There was too much military experience concentrated in the forces of the New Gods for them to not know this. They shouldn’t be digging in. They should be bugging out. Did they think they could take on the SRT and prevail?
Yes, Yuri admitted. It pained him to acknowledge it, but he could not discount that possibility. While capable, the SRT were cops first. They would always view the world through a law enforcement lens. Protecting life and property came first, not killing the enemy. They thought in terms of safety and protection, not necessarily in bringing massive firepower to bear. It was the first thing Yuri had to train out of every former cop who signed up for the STS. The cadre hadn’t had the opportunity to do that with the SRT.
It didn’t fit their mission set. Or, more importantly, their capabilities.
The New Gods knew that too. A high-profile attack like this could only be defeated through an even higher profile application of firepower. Something the Guild knew the SRT wouldn’t have.
The SRT had been a thorn in the New Gods’ side long enough. The Guild had tried to destroy them. Now it was the Sinners’ turn.
But what about the Guild’s QRF?
There was no guarantee that the SRT would arrive ahead of the QRF. The raiders would have to prepare to destroy both forces simultaneously. It was their only hope of getting away safely. Could they do it?
Yes, Yuri knew. It was possible, with the right disposition of forces. It would take a lot of courage and even more firepower, but they were nothing that the Sinners lacked.
Raid the chapter house, inflicting enough violence to draw in the SRT and the QRF. Dig in, strongpoint the site, lay booby traps at the known entrance and egress points, and set up multiple crossfires. Once the opposition arrived, rake them in hails of withering fire and destroy them. Should the enemy make entry, make them pay in blood for every step.
The defender always had the advantage. The traditional calculus of war held that an attacker needed a three to one advantage before commencing an assault. No one knew exactly how many attackers were in the guild house. For all he knew, the SRT might be wading into a force three times their size—or worse.
But the SRT had three advantages of their own.
The first was the SkyBear. There were few gravity vehicles in Moreno Island. The kill team would be focused on watching threats from the ground—not necessarily from the air.
The second was firepower. The cadre hadn’t shown off _everything _they had at their disposal during the assault on Watson’s.
The last were the true believers. The seculars and the religious minorities in the department who believed in Clark’s mission and vision, who would give the last full measure of devotion to the job. Including and especially those in the gravtruck with him. They weren’t tech’d up the way the Sinners and the Guild would be, but if they played their cards right, it wouldn’t matter.
Planning the insertion took only a few minutes. It said more about the lack of information on the scene than the efficiency of the team. With so little to go on, they reverted to the STS standby.
Speed, surprise, violence of action.
The cadre borrowed spare radios from the MISD’s stores. Kayla and the snipers climbed into James’ gravcar. Yuri and James took the snipers’ places inside the SkyBear. As they lifted off from the parking lot, Sheriff Clark dashed inside MISD HQ.
It hadn’t been too long since Yuri had ridden to war inside a SkyBear. It felt like a lifetime ago. As the gravtruck soared through the air, he felt a sense of dissociation, as though he were plunged into the past yet trapped in the present.
The SRT operators around him weren’t his team, yet in their faces he saw the same determination and readiness he had seen among the STS shooters in his time. The weapons weren’t the same, but the constant checks and double-checks, the little reassuring rituals before imminent combat, they were the same. The humming of the gravity mirror, the unfiltered chaos blasting from the radio, the sweet scent of hydraulic fluid mixing with nervous sweat and gun oil, that was most assuredly the same.
For the past few weeks, he had played at being a farmer. Though it had been an educational experience, he was now returning to his one true vocation: war.
“Central 11, Zulu 11. We are one minute out,” Lucas radioed.
“Zulu 11, roger. Break, break, break. All cars at the perimeter, mark your positions with flares. We don’t want friendly fire.”
STS SkyBears were originally specced for the military and kitted out for high-intensity combat. Sensors, artificial intelligence, outboard pylons with hardpoints capable of mounting gun pods and rockets. A beastly hybrid of gunship and cargo truck, it was exactly what the doctor ordered for an op like this.
The SRT SkyBear was demilled for police use. No guns. No rockets. A dumbed-down AI that could fly but not set up a gun run. It did, however, retain the overhead gun turret.
Yuri sat in it now, held in place by a heavy-duty harness. A ring of steel surrounded him, a thick shield rated to stop heavy machine gun fire. Transparent ballistic windows restored some visibility. An overhead canopy sheltered him from overhead fire. A thick glacis plate, also fitted with ballistic glass windows, defended his frontal arc. In some other time, the ensemble would have been completed by a machine gun, an automatic grenade launcher, an honest-to-God minigun. Here, though, there was nothing. Just the gun port, a narrow vertical opening, useless until filled.
Yuri shoved his assault railgun through the port. The slot was, barely, wide enough to accommodate the railgun’s bulk. Left fusion vision goggle lowered, right eye unaided, he watched the world below.
Two images superimposed themselves in his brain, a world in green and black, a world in darkness and light. His brain needed a moment to adjust.
The chapter house sat proudly, occupying an entire city block all by itself. The structure itself was just a humongous cube, taller and wider and much larger than the shops and small businesses around it, though it was only two stories tall.
Ragged lines of flashing lights sealed off every road leading in and out of the area. Tiny figures scrambled in the dark, no more than suggestions of motion and flashes of orange.
And there was a half-dozen of them on the roof of the Guild chapter house.
A searing white light pierced the darkness. Then another, and another, and another, joining to become a wall of flame. The fusion goggles automatically dialed down the brightness, reducing it from painful to merely distracting.
But not for the gunmen on the roof.
He had to assume the opposition was listening into the radio. If not the assault team, then a support element far away, feeding real-time intelligence to the assaulters. Likewise, he had to assume the rooftop security team had fusion vision capabilities at least equal to his own, maybe even superior.
Clark hadn’t disclosed the direction SRT was coming from. The security element would maintain all-round vigilance. Dropping flares didn’t just mark friendlies on the ground. It blinded anyone looking at them with the naked eye and forced fusion vision goggles to shut down. At the very least, it would distract them for a moment.
Long enough for Yuri to do what he did best.
Right eye closed, Yuri dialed up his left goggle’s magnification to 4X. Six shooters swam into view. A target occupied every corner of the roof. A man watched the parking lot to the rear, and the empty spaces beyond. The sixth shooter was running towards the front of the building. When the shooter stopped, Yuri closed his left eye, opened his right, raised the railgun.
And thumbed a switch.
The fire control system, a small black box mounted on the left side of the railgun, emitted a laser pulse. The pulse struck a patch of roof behind the sixth shooter and bounced back. Numbers and images appeared in the glass. He elevated his weapon, bringing the dot to the X, flicked off the safety of his electromagnetic grenade launcher with his left thumb, exhaled.
Fired.
Capacitors fired within the EGL. Coils energized. With a hollow thump, the EGL flung a 40mm caseless grenade out into the world below. The butt of the railgun punched Yuri’s shoulder. As his sight picture cleared, he swore he saw a flat black cylinder sail through the air in a lethal parabola.
A brief pop of light marked the grenade’s detonation. Thunder split the world. A cloud of razor-sharp steel scourged the roof in a rapidly expanding sphere of death.
All six gunmen dropped. Dead, wounded or stunned, Yuri didn’t know nor care. He swiveled to the black side of the structure, lased a spot in the middle of the three gunmen, loosed another airburst grenade. Another detonation, another spray of shrapnel, and the targets went still.
“Deadeye, green light!” Yuri called.
Two railguns roared.
Twenty meters off the starboard side, James’ gravcar floated next to the SkyBear. The SRT snipers were leaning out the back seat windows, bracing their weapons against the frame of the vehicle. Fitted with clip-on thermal imagers, their sights could penetrate the kaleidoscope of light and shadows dancing across the world below.
In the driver’s seat, Kayla would call the shots, walking the snipers on target. They would shoot every threat, starting with those that could still move, then those that could not. When the New Gods were in play, overkill was the only way to be sure of a kill.
A third grenade waited in the breech of his grenade launcher. As he scanned, he opened the breech of his EGL with his left hand and reached for a fat, flat box mounted on the side of his plate carrier, next to his short sword. It was a grenade dispenser, shaped like a huge magazine, a fat 40mm grenade nestled in its feed lips. He stripped the ready grenade, slotted it into the breech, loaded a second grenade, closed the EGL.
As he worked, six railgun shots rang out, one after the other. As the last reverb faded out, Kayla’s voice filled his earpieces.
“Samurai, Deadeye. All threats neutralized.”
“Copy. Proceed to OP. Break. Zulu, go!”
The snipers peeled away, heading for their designated observation posts. Kayla would drop them off on the roofs of the buildings around the chapter house, maintaining total security as far as possible. There was no telling which direction the Guild QRF would come from.
The SkyBear swooped down on the roof. Yuri swiveled to cover the roof access door. The gravtruck’s flight abruptly terminated an inch from the parapet. Hovering in mid-air, the truck pivoted in place, and Yuri turned with it. The rear doors burst open and the operators leapt out onto the roof.
When the last man was out, Yuri hit the release on the safety harness, scrambled off the seat, then charged out to join the team.
The SRT knelt in a tight circle, railguns at the ready, every operator covering his assigned area. Behind the screen of deputies, James waited for Yuri.
“Last man!” Yuri called. “Go!”
As one, the assaulters rose to their feet. A deputy broke off, running for the roof access door. The team fell in behind him, forming a long stack. James trailed behind them, taking the rear.
Yuri hung back and scanned the fallen threats.
They were all kitted out to storm the gates of Hell. Full-face helmets with translucent visors. Heavy armor suit over black overalls. Breastplate and groin plate, pauldrons and bracers, cuisses and vambraces, greaves and sabatons, the entire ensemble held together by a powered exoskeleton.
The shooters at the corners carried M480 GPMGs mated to ammo backpacks, up to a thousand linked rounds ready to go per gun. The other two assaulters had M83 carbines fitted with grenade launchers.
For all their firepower and protection, it wasn’t enough. The shrapnel had found gaps in their carapaces. The railguns had shattered their helmets and heads. And they never had a chance to bring their guns to bear.
Just the way Yuri liked it.
More chatter filled the police net. The deputies were calling in the blasts, talking above and around each other, trying to figure out what just happened. The SkyBear backed up, positioning itself in the middle of the roof. Yuri joined the stack at the door, taking up the rear. The point man carefully opened and checked the entryway. Wordlessly the deputy stepped through, and the team followed in his footsteps.
The door led down a narrow flight of steps. At the bottom they found another door. Past that was a mechanical room. The point men illuminated the space ahead with their weapon-mounted lights, the rest of the team aiming where they aimed.
Dust tickled Yuri’s nose. Metallic whirring filled his earbuds, occupying that uncomfortable volume between too soft and too loud. Exposed pipes and machinery cluttered the space. Now and then, an operator bumped against a hard surface.
The assaulter in front of James tripped on a pipe. James caught him by the shoulder before he could hit something with his face. Cursing and grumbling, the assaulter hobbled along as best as he could, trying to keep up.
At the end of the room, the team found a door. The point man stacked on the knob side. Lucas took the hinge side. Everyone arranged themselves behind the men up front as best as they could. The point man tried the knob. It didn’t budge. Lucas made a fist and pumped it above his head.
The breacher stepped out the stack, a pistol grip shotgun in hand. There was no space here for anything other a shotgun breach. The breacher racked the gun and jammed the muzzle into the space between the knob and the edge, aiming down at a forty-five-degree angle, and looked at Lucas. Lucas nodded.
The breacher fired.
The blast reverberated in the tiny space, assaulting the assaulters from every angle. Yuri’s earbuds cut in, killing the sound. A cloud of sawdust erupted from the battered door. The breacher booted it the rest of the way open. Light streamed into the room. The broken knob fell to the floor. The point man kicked the door aside and flowed into the space beyond. The team followed, guns at high ready, switching their weapon lights off, flowing through the narrow entryway.
Over their shoulders and helmets, Yuri caught impressions of soft amber light, a narrow hallway, paintings hanging on walls, men peeling left and right. Men yelled, stun grenades exploded, railguns screamed.
And suddenly it was just Yuri and James, side-by-side in an empty hallway.
Dried blood streaked across the floor in rusty streaks. Spent brass rolled down the hallway, leaving a forest of tiny tracks. But there were no sign of bodies. Not yet.
To Yuri’s sides was a set of opposed doors. Beyond that was a second set of doors. The end of the hallway fed into a wider space and a left-hand bend.
Yuri and James pushed up. Past the first set of doors, past a vending machine, past a small nook with a water fountain. As one, they stopped and raised their weapons to cover the openings beyond, automatically canting their railguns, readying their offset red dot sights.
The door to Yuri’s left opened.
Out peeked a helmeted head, a masked face, an extended arm, a muzzle of a carbine.
Yuri fired.
The shooter’s hand exploded in a burst of white—white?—and his chest jerked back, yanking him out of cover. Yuri tracked upwards and fired again. The flechette slammed into his neck and blew outwards in a dense particulate cloud. The shooter slumped stupidly against the doorframe, almost as though he were trying to sit down, and James nailed him in the head.
Behind them, the SRT operators flowed out of the open doorway. A heavy hand gripped Yuri’s shoulder. He moved up, stacking on the door to his right.
A heavy presence intruded into his consciousnesses. There was someone in the room beyond. White-green corner. He stopped just shy of the door, switched shoulders and leaned out.
He looked into a corner-fed room. A conference room. The threat was in a hard corner to his right, impossible to reach without exposing his back to the opening ahead. They’d have to dig him out the hard way.
Back behind cover, Yuri rapped his left fist against his helmeted temple, held it out, and opened and closed it twice. The number two man shuffled slightly. A hand snaked around Yuri’s bicep, holding up a stun grenade. Yuri nodded. The number two man pulled the pin and lobbed the stun grenade through the door.
Flash and bang and Yuri rushed in and turned right.
And found himself staring down a gun.
The threat stood in a corner, his head tilted ever so slightly to the side. The stun grenade had distracted him, stealing his attention for a moment, and as the threat looked back at Yuri, Yuri shuffled to his left and fired.
The flechette struck the threat high in the chest, just above the breastplate. The threat fired, but Yuri didn’t feel it, didn’t register anything but a flash of light and a puff of smoke. Yuri fired again taking him between the eyes. The flechette shattered against the shooter’s face.
The railgun hadn’t recharged quickly enough for a high-velocity shot.
The shooter flinched. Recovered. Raised his weapon—
A second railgun discharged. And this time the back of the threat’s head burst in a spray of hot metal.
The threat dropped in the limp, boneless way of the dead. The flechette had punched through the helmet and the wall beyond, the hole surrounded by a thin halo of gray pulp and clear fluid.
There was no blood.
Bits of shattered materiel lay at his feet. Gray matter dripped down in long streaks. That was all.
Yuri stood by the downed threat and swept the room. Long table. Many chairs. Three assaulters.
Every man raised their weapons, pointing the muzzles at the ceiling. Yuri turned to the body. There was still no sign of movement. He reached down and pulled off his helmet.
A third eye stared at him.
“Zulu, this is Samurai. OPFOR are Sinner TBCs.”
A total body conversion cyborg was natively resistant to gunfire. The only organic part of him left was the brain. Cover his body in armor like this and he was damn near unstoppable. Thank God the cadre had splurged on railguns for the SRT. Without them, there’d be no way in hell they’d penetrate all that protection.
But an assault railgun needed a second to completely recharge its capacitors. A lifetime in a firefight. It could fire with partially-depleted capacitors, but it wouldn’t be enough.
“Move in pairs at a minimum. Get the headshot with the first shot,” Yuri continued.
Back outside, the stack formed up. Now it was Yuri and James in the lead, shoulder to shoulder, the SRT crowding behind them. As one, they reached the corner at the far end. In a single fluid movement, hearts and minds and bodies in total sync, they rounded the corner, James kneeling to go low, Yuri stepping out to aim over his helmet.
Here was a wide atrium, spanning the breadth of the building. Paintings hung on the walls. Mechanical curiosities rested within glass displays. A pair of carpeted stairs swept outwards and downwards in grand arcs like twinned crescent moons to reach the first floor. At the end of the atrium, another left-hand turn awaited.
And in the middle of the atrium, there was a pile of bodies stacked high.
They were all human, dressed in a hodgepodge of civilian clothing and tactical overalls. Dried blood cascaded in frozen rivers to form a dark lake. They’d all been drilled through the head, chest and groin with mechanical precision, every group so tightly clustered Yuri could cover them with his hand. Ten paces away, carbines and pistols lay in a messy heap.
They had to be the security force, or what was left of them. The Sinners had blown right through the defenders like a steel tsunami, then dug in to hold the building against a second assault.
Like the one Yuri was leading now.
Yuri approached the corner. A sense of foreboding gripped his heart. Something was wrong here. He could taste it.
He stopped just shy of the wall. Paused. Then signaled for a stun grenade.
James held one out before him. Yuri nodded. James primed the flash-bang and threw. Not at the floor, but at the far wall, bouncing the grenade off the gleaming wood and up towards the ceiling—
Flash. Bang.
Yuri rounded the corner.
Three threats. Two left, one right, all of them leaning out of open doorways, weapons trained downrange, ready to fill the hallway with steel. The closer target on the left retreated out of sight. The one on the right had a machine gun, the further on the left a carbine.
All this Yuri processed in the space of milliseconds, in the time it took for him to plant his foot and twist his torso and raise his weapon, his mind completely still, completely free.
He fired.
The machine gunner fell.
The other threats fired.
Rounds slammed into the wall, blowing out chunks of wood inches from his eyes. Yuri fell back. A round whooshed past his head.
And suddenly the shooting stopped.
Damn. That had been way too close for comfort. Yuri had heard rumors that Sinner TBCs could opt for integrated eye and ear protection, shielding them from the effects of flash-bangs. Maybe those rumors checked out after all. All the stun grenade had done was made the shooters look away for a moment. Just a moment of distraction, no more.
“You alright?” James asked.
“I’m good. Two threats with long guns. They’re barricaded in the rooms and they have the hallway locked down. Flash-bang didn’t seem to work on them.”
They were stalemated. Both the SRT and the Sinners dominated their respective chokepoints. Anyone who tried to rush in would be riddled with steel. How do you work the problem?
Grenade.
Stun grenades were only useful as a momentary visual distraction. The other less-than-lethal grenades in the SRT’s arsenal would have even less effect.
Lethal grenade.
There was no reason for cops to carry lethal grenades. The ones he had had an arming range of fifteen meters. Far too long for this kind of close work.
Shield.
Except that the shields were stored uselessly in MISD HQ.
Yuri cursed. The team had thought of everything except what they needed for a situation like this. They’d been out of the game for way too long. He had only one option left.
“Zulu 11, Samurai,” Yuri whispered. “I’ll buy us some time. See if you can find another stairwell to flank them.”
“Roger. I passed a floor map just now. I’ll go take a look,” Lucas said.
Yuri sucked in a breath.
Yelled.
“HEY! We know you’re in there! Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up!”
Silence.
“We’ve got you pinned! There’s no way out! Give up now and nobody else has to get hurt!”
Silence.
“The building is surrounded! Your friends are dead! You are cut off! We can do this the easy way!”
Silence.
“We’ve got all the time in the world—”
James gripped his shoulder.
“Quiet. Did you hear that?” James whispered.
Yuri listened.
A faint sound pricked the edges of his hearing. A mechanical sound.
Yuri pointed at James, then cupped his left hand and touched his fingertips to his temple. James nodded. Yuri pointed at the number three man, Cortez, then at the corner, and lifted his fist above his head, the first knuckle of his thumb pointed straight behind him.
Cortez shuffled up to cover the corner. Yuri and James crept to the guardrail. As one, they peeked out.
A large, boxy robot shuffled up the right-hand staircase on spider-like legs. Its turret aimed a carbine at the top of the stairs. Beside it, an armored assaulter slowly crab-walked up the steps, left foot then right foot, step by step, never crossing his feet, covering the guardrails.
The assaulter twitched.
James fired.
The assaulter spiraled around, flopping against the killer drone.
The drone’s turret swung around.
Yuri fired.
Bereft of programming, the 40mm grenade defaulted to impact detonation. It sailed through the air, its internal gyroscope dutifully tracking the distance it covered, its control chip patiently waiting for the signal to arm and—
The explosion consumed the stairs in smoke and fire. Secondary detonations kicked off like firecrackers, ammunition and fuel cells exploding in the tremendous heat. Yuri ducked as steel sang through the air.
Just in time to see a green fist-sized cylinder roll out of the hallway.
He froze.
His muscles turned to stone. His nerves became lead. Synapses fired furiously in his brain, trying to recognize what he was looking at, even as the cylinder rolled and rolled, and at last a coherent word formed in his head.
GRENADE!
And even as his brain finally caught up, Cortez rose to his feet.
“GET DOWN!” Cortez boomed.
Uncoiling himself counterclockwise, Cortez kicked the grenade back around the corner and—
The grenade detonated.
The fury of the blast tore his right leg from his body. The severed limb, blackened, ragged, bleeding, somersaulted through the air and flopped wetly next to Yuri.
Cortez twisted away from the blast, trying and failing to balance himself, suddenly discovering there was a void where his leg was supposed to be. He fell on his ass, drunken and disoriented. He looked down at what was left of his right leg, at the spar of broken bone crowning a shredded stump, his jaw dropping open, not quite comprehending what he was seeing.
The SRT stared too, the horror of the moment locking onto their brains in a death grip, paralyzing them in place.
Then Cortez screamed.
“MOVE!” Yuri roared.
Rising, he turned to the corner, scrabbling for the nearest display case. A second grenade tumbled out. In its malign form he saw promises of imminent death and destruction. He curled up away from it, hiding behind the case, opening his mouth and—
The blast shook his world. The ground quaked. Paintings crashed. Glass disintegrated into showers of flying shards. The shock wave flowed around the corner of the case to buffet his body. He felt it, a blast of invisible force coursing through him to shake his organs. Through it all, louder than the blast, harder than the concussive blows, a voice screamed in his head—
_GET UP GET UP GET UP _
He got up, cradling his railgun to his chest—
GET UP AND FIGHT!
He peeked around the case. Glass shards slewed off him like a waterfall. The SRT were all prone, dead or disabled or just down, he didn’t know yet. All he knew, all he sensed, was a soft pounding, something he felt more than heard, the sensation of boots pounding down the hall.
Two armored assaulters leaned out around the corner, one kneeling, one standing, both ready to unleash hell on the now-flanked team.
Yuri lifted and twisted his railgun and suddenly the red dot loomed large and luminous in his field of view. Head shot, he thought, and magically the red dot teleported over the kneeling one’s head. He pressed the trigger and knew without seeing the result that he’d scored a hit. He rode the recoil, snapping the railgun up to the next target. He fired, someone else fired, and the assaulter’s head erupted in a flash of white.
Yuri lowered his gun and scanned. Both threats were down, and they weren’t getting back up.
Cortez moaned. Someone else shrieked in pain.
“Who’s hit?” James shouted.
“Me,” Cortez ,pamed.
“Lead is down!” another deputy cried.
“Fuck,” Yuri whispered, and rushed to the downed men.
Gritting his teeth, Cortez fished his first aid kit from his pocket with shaky fingers. Lucas lay on the ground, totally insensate.
James grabbed Cortez’s FAK.
“I’ve got you, brother,” James said.
With swift, dexterous movements, James tore the package open and shook out its contents. Out came gauze packages, a packet of nitrile gloves, a marker, chest seals, face shield, tourniquet, timecard.
James slipped on the gloves and grabbed the tourniquet. Working swiftly, he unrolled the device and wrapped it above Cortez’s stump. Cortez winced in pain.
“You’re a hard guy. The hardest. You’ll get through this,” James said.
James wound the tourniquet as tightly as it would go. Then he turned the windlass rod and cinched it down even tighter. When the rod would budge no more, James threaded the rod through a triangular-shaped buckle. A catch at the end of the rod held the windlass in place. James checked the time on his eyeshields, then grabbed the marker and wrote down the date and time on the timecard.
As James worked, Yuri checked on Lucas. The deputies had laid him out on the ground, careful to support his head. Lucas’ lips flapped weakly, releasing incoherent sounds. Yuri removed his eyeshields and shone a flashlight into his eyes. His pupils were wide and dilated.
“Lucas! Can you hear me?” Yuri demanded.
Lucas moaned wordlessly.
“He’s concussed. We need to finish this. I need a man to stay here and guard the casualties. Rest of you, on me,” Yuri said.
“I’ll stay,” James said.
Everybody else formed up on Yuri. Yuri steeled himself with a breath, then rounded the corner.
The grenade had left a blackened crater against the wall. Smoke hung in the air. There was no sign of other threats. Yuri pushed through, and the team followed.
They flowed through the remaining rooms. Restroom, offices, a storeroom, a flight of steps. All clear. Back at the atrium, Yuri heard James on the radio.
“Central, this is… this is Zulu 22. Zulu 11 and Zulu 12 are down. We need EMTs on standby.”
“Copy that,” Clark replied. “Is the area clear?”
James looked at Yuri. Yuri shook his head.
“Negative. We’re still working on it,” James replied.
“Roger that. Give us a heads-up when you’re done.”
“Farmer and I are in command now,” Yuri said. “Rear guard, stay here and watch the casualties. Let us know if the situation changes. Everyone else, follow me.”
The blasts had reduced the lower third of the right-hand stairs to kindling. Scrap metal lay scattered across the landing. The team descended the intact flight of stairs and into the lobby. Yuri found more scattered body parts on the ground. But there was barely any blood, only torn cables and burnt polymer. Once again, more proof that the assaulters were cyborgs.
Past the lobby, more rooms awaited. A cafe. A dining hall. A library. A game room. A ballroom. The team systematically flowed through them one by one. Visions of gilded luxury swam past Yuri’s eyes. Massive paintings of august personalities, sculptures illuminated in golden splendor, murals describing the history the Guild wanted to be remembered, handcrafted furniture, crystal chandeliers. This was not the time or place to drink it all in. His brain logged only space and range, angles and motion, walls and corners and openings.
Around the back, behind an unmarked door, they found another flight of steps, heading into an unmarked basement. Down they went, the point men flooding the cramped stairwell with their weapon-mounted lights.
The stairs fed into an open doorway. The door itself lay several feet beyond, warped and blackened, victim of an explosive breaching charge. Yuri braced himself for action and stepped into the hallway beyond.
Stark white lights shone overhead. Air conditioning hummed. Glass crunched under Yuri’s boots. Dried blood covered the walls. A dozen bodies were strewn across the floor. Half were dressed in tac gear, riddled with bullets. The other half were civilians, all of them shot once through the back of the head. More weapons were stacked by a corner. The stench of powder and death, blood and soap, hung thick.
At the end of the murder hall, Yuri saw a twisted metal frame, stretching from wall to wall. He needed a moment to figure out that it was the ruins of a mantrap, blown apart. Past that was yet another door. The access control console next to it was blown apart, its doorknob was gone, the door itself hung loosely from warped hinges, yet it struggled valiantly to stay in place.
The men stacked on the far door. Yuri at the knob side, James at the hinges, everyone else behind Yuri. Yuri gripped his carbine high and close to his chest, locking it in the retention position, and opened the door.
And entered.
Cold air blasted into his face. Machines hummed. Racks of servers blinked red and green and yellow. The team spread out, breaking into buddy pairs, swiftly clearing the aisles and corners, racing for the other side of the room.
There, Yuri saw a man.
A cyborg.
He sat cross-legged by a terminal, hands on his lap, a cybernetic god in repose. Thick cables snaked from the back of his head to the terminal’s data ports. His regular eyes stared into nothingness. His third eye swiveled back and forth.
“Hands up! Show me your hands!” Yuri yelled, approaching the cyborg.
The subject remained still.
“Hands in the air! Do it now!”
The subject remained still.
“HANDS UP!” the cops boomed.
This close to him, Yuri now saw the gun in his hand.
“Gun! Gun! Gun!”
The team halted. The operators quickly spread out, forming a line, taking cover behind whatever they could find.
“Can you hear me?” Yuri demanded.
The third eye turned to Yuri.
“Toss your weapon aside!” Yuri ordered.
“No,” the cyborg said calmly.
Quick as a snake, he jammed the gun under his chin and fired.
Gray matter decorated the ceiling. Metal chips rained from above. The cyborg slumped forward.
“Son of a bitch,” James murmured.
The Singularity Network prided itself on rationality—the cold-blooded rationality of a machine. The assaulters were all dead. The hacker could not kill everyone on the team. There was no guarantee he could get off a shot before he died. Once in custody, it was only a matter of time before the hacker gave up his secrets.
Thus, the Will of the Net decreed that he must die.
The hacker willingly obeyed.
Yuri shook his head. The Singularity Network embraced ascension through the holy machine—and in so doing, transformed men into something much less.
“Maybe this is why the Sinners stuck around,” James said. “They wanted to download the Guild’s secrets.”
“It’s ours now,” Yuri said.
He ordered a man to control the scene. Then he led everyone back up. As he emerged from the back room, Kayla’s voice cut into his radio.
“—rai, come in! Do you read me?”
“Deadeye, Samurai. Read you five by five.”
“I couldn’t reach you. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was in an area with no radio reception. What’s going on?”
“Is the site clear?”
“It is, but we haven’t made the call yet. What’s wrong?”
“Deputies are closing in on the site from all directions. I didn’t order them to move, and neither did Central. I don’t like it.”
Clark’s voice cut in.
“Zulu callsigns, this is Central 11. Switch to Channel 8.”
Yuri adjusted his radio. Out the corner of his eye, he saw James do the same.
“Central, Zulu here. We’re ready.”
A slight pause. Then:
“Zulu, Central 11. I’ve erased the radio encryption keys and downloaded a fresh set. Listen carefully. I tracked the MISD Guildsmen. They’re at the chapter house. They’re not supposed to be here. I ordered their supervisors to tell them to stay away.”
“Central, Deadeye. Sure doesn’t look that way over here,” Kayla replied. “We’ve got about a dozen deputies holding positions, and two dozen more approaching the site with long guns.”
James and Yuri exchanged a look.
“The deputies,” Yuri said. “They’re the Guild QRF.”
Such nicestory