There was no answer. Looking at the faces of the other Judges as they formed up beside her in a widely spaced line thirty metres outside the front entrance of the Sector House, Anderson could see that they had heard her. Underneath their helmets, their mouths were set with grim expressions of determination. She might only have a little over a dozen Judges to help her hold back an army of psychotics numbering in the thousands, but she had no doubt every one of them would do their duty. Fifteen years at the Academy, and the years they had spent since on the streets made all the difference. They were Judges, and that meant they were used to being outnumbered. Facing a dozen perps or a thousand, it was all the same. The entity could throw as many of its puppets against them as it liked these men and women would never run. They were defending their Sector House. They would hold the line until Anderson ordered them to retreat, they were dead, or hell itself came calling. Though, for all that, she found herself hoping it would not come to either of the last two options.
"Drokk, but there's a lot of them," Whitby said beside her, fixing a grenade-like Stumm round to the barrel of his Lawgiver. He smiled at her, his manner nervous but resolute. "Not wanting to seem like I'm a pessimist, Anderson, but I have to say it's been good working with you. Thought I should say that now. You know, just in case."
"Yeah," she said. "I know what you mean. It's been good working with you too, Whitby." She smiled back at him. "You know, just in case."
The crowd picked up pace as it drew nearer. She could see dozens of individual faces: young and old, men and women, all united, all with the same unsettlingly blank-eyed gaze. It's like they're in a trance, she thought. Like the only thing they're aware of is the entity's voice in their heads. Ever since the crowd had begun its advance on the Sector House, it had been silent. Now, as though in response to some unheard signal, the members of the mob let out a wordless animal shriek of rage as they broke into a sprint and charged towards the thin line of waiting Judges.
"Hold your fire," Anderson shouted into her radio. "Wait until I give the order."
The crowd charged in, two hundred metres, one hundred and ninety, one hundred and eighty...
"Get ready," she yelled. "Aim for just behind the front ranks. Ready!"
As they got closer the charge became a stampede. Faces that had been blank were now full of screaming hatred. One hundred and fifty metres, one hundred and twenty, one hundred. She gave the order.
"Fire!"
"The front doors of the Sector House," she had said earlier. "That's the weak point. That's where they'll attack and that's where we'll have to hold them off."
They had been standing inside the waiting area in front of check-in, watching through the Sector House doors at the crowd gathering in eerie silence on the other side of the plaza. Upon reaching ground level after having seen the approaching mob, Anderson had expected to have to fight them off immediately. Instead, as though the entity was being careful to bring together all its forces before the assault began in earnest, the crowd marching on the Sector House had paused in the plaza, waiting while its numbers swelled as smaller groups emerged from down the side streets to join the main force.
"What about the ground floor windows?" Whitby said. "Aren't they weak points as well?"
"No. Sector House 12 may be old, but it's designed to ward off an assault all the same. The windows are all triple-layered, reinforced plexiplast. They'd need major artillery to even dent
them. No, the front entrance is our only problem. And even then, we may be able to bring down the blast shutters."
"No go on that score," Symonds grimaced. "I tried it the second I saw the crowd approaching. The door controls for the blast shutters are all fused. The EM surge that caused the last power cut must have burned them out. That's not the only bad news. I think we might have a problem with the rest of the building's electrical systems as well. After Tierney checked Custody Command, I accessed the surveillance logs for the cameras in the holding pens area. Looks like the electronic door locks down there opened on their own, releasing all the perps. That's why there was such a bloodbath. If you ask me, I don't think any of it was accidental. I think this entity - whatever it is - can not only cut off the Sector House's power whenever it likes, but by using EM pulses it can even control some of the simpler systems."
"All right then," Anderson said. "As far as I can tell, our only option is to barricade the front doors and try to hold them off for as long as we can. Then we-"
"This is madness," Hass said. "There's no way we'll be able to hold them off until reinforcements arrive. We should just grab an H-Wagon and fly the hell out of here."
"Guess you haven't been listening, Hass," Anderson said. "The Landing Bay's been gutted and all the H-Wagons are out of commission."
"Then let's break into the vehicle garage," Hass said anxiously. "We get ourselves a Pat-Wagon and just plough through them. We can't just stay here. It's suicide!" Seeing the others staring at him, he got self-conscious. "Don't try and tell me the rest of you haven't been thinking exactly the same thing," he said. "I can't be the only person who realises defending this Sector House is a lost cause."
"The vehicle garage is a no go, either," Symonds said quietly while the others Judges shifted uneasily, refusing to look Hass in the eye. "I had Tek-Judge Woods check it out. The controls for the blast shutters are fused there same as they are here - but there, the shutters are already down. It means the vehicle garage is locked up tighter than a drum." He looked at Anderson. "It's like the entity's done it all on purpose to cut off all our means of escape, before summoning an army of psychos. It's like it knew exactly what it was doing."
"Probably did," Anderson agreed. "Whatever the hell this thing is, nobody ever said it was stupid." She shrugged and looked at each Judge in turn. "It doesn't matter. I don't care how smart the entity thinks it is. We'll find a way to beat it. If this job's taught me nothing else, it's that no matter how bad things seem, there's always a solution to a problem. There's always a way out. We just have to find it."
For a moment there was silence, then Symonds had said, "Yeah, about that. I think maybe I've got an idea..."
"The Stumm's not holding them!" Whitby yelled. Through the haze of gas, she could see the rearward ranks of the crowd pushing through the gas cloud, trampling underfoot those who were incapacitated by the Stumm.
"Switch to riot guns." She had to shout even louder now on her radio to be heard over the noise of the crowd. Looking around, Anderson saw the Judges holster their Lawgivers and grab the pump-action riot guns each of them were carrying over their shoulders. "Plastic rounds only. Fire!"
They opened up with their riot guns, firing soft-nosed plastic shells designed to subdue rioters without killing them. As the first salvo of shots reached their targets, Anderson saw a dozen members of the charging crowd fall, then another dozen as the Judges fired again, and another dozen. And another. Despite a fusillade of non-lethal rounds, the crowd kept coming. Eighty metres had become sixty. Sixty became fifty. Fifty became forty. Thirty-five. Thirty. Twenty-five.
"Riot foam," she yelled. "The rest of you cover the hoses and pick off anyone who gets missed by the foam."
At the order, four Judges broke away from the line - two teams of two - who grabbed the heavy hoses lying ready beside them. Aiming the hoses at the crowd, they opened the nozzles, each team unleashing a stream of foam at the nearest members of the crowd. It solidified to the consistency of plascrete on impact. With practiced efficiency, the two teams began to move their hoses in a wide arc, dousing the entire front rank of the crowd in the rapidly hardening foam and stopping them in their tracks. Soon, hundreds of would-be killers were caught in the riot foam, screaming impotently in rage while, beside them, those who had managed to evade the foam's grip were shot down by more plastic bullets fired by Anderson and the others. The crowd's charge faltered, and for a moment it seemed to Anderson that they were winning. Then, far sooner than she would have liked, the stream of foam from the hoses diminished and then died.
"That's the last of the riot foam," one of the Judges on hose duty shouted out. "The canisters are empty."
The main body of the crowd was already moving, climbing over those caught in the riot foam and trampling them underfoot as they had those who had fallen victim to the Stumm gas earlier. As the crowd surged forward, those at the front unleashed a sudden rain of missiles in the form of lumps of plascrete, metal debris and improvised firebombs. Most of them fell short, but Anderson saw a Judge fall to his knees as a piece of plascrete rebounded off his helmet. Even as the Judges fired their riot guns in response, Anderson could see the crowd was nearly on top of them. She saw faces contorted in hate, the dull-eyed expressions among the crowd having given way to primal bloodlust as they drew closer to their prey and the entity guiding them grew closer to achieving its aims. A few more seconds and the closest elements of the mob would have reached melee range. A few more seconds and the Judges would be slaughtered.
"Pull back," Anderson yelled as a rock whistled past her head. "Pull back inside the Sector House." Firing a Stun-Shot from her Lawgiver to down the rock thrower as he charged towards her, Anderson pressed the transmit button on her radio and shouted out a terse message. "Symonds, if that idea of yours is going to work, it'd better work now!"
"We could use an electro-cordon," Symonds had said as they stood in the waiting area, watching the crowd grow outside. "At most we'd only need maybe three or four emitter units to cover the front entrance - and we can get them from the Armoury. Then, as long as the cordon stays on, there's no way the mob will be able to get through it into the Sector House."
"I thought you said we couldn't trust the Sector House's electrical systems?" Anderson asked. "That the entity can cut the power supply whenever it wants?"
"Yeah." Symonds nodded. "There is that, but I've got a way around it." For a moment he had paused, and fell deep in thought. Then, realising the others were looking at him intently, he began again. "You remember I was assigned to track down the source of the power cuts? I never managed to pinpoint the actual source, but I think I found a way to beat it. The Sector House has
six
generators - four main ones and two backups - plus, we can tap into the city's main power grid. Three distinct power supplies, essentially.
"If we were to shut down all other systems, a single generator supplies more than enough power to run an electro-cordon indefinitely - meaning we'd have seven different power sources we could use. If we set the cordon to switch between each power source at micro-second intervals, I don't think the entity will be able to keep up. By the time it sends an EMP to knock out generator A, the cordon will already have switched to generator B. Then when it tries to knock out B, the cordon will have switched to C, and so on. At the same time, because the cordon's switching every micro-second, there'll be no noticeable reduction in the cordon's power - or at least not to anyone who's trying to breach it. Of course, we don't know what kind of creature this entity is, and we don't know what it's capable of." He shrugged. "All the same, I think it would work. Probably."
"Probably?" Anderson turned her attention to the crowd gathering outside and sensed a growing feeling of expectation among them. There was something in the air; soon they would attack. She turned back to Symonds. "All right, I'm guessing 'probably' is as good as we're going to get. How long will it take you to set all this up?"
"If I have another Tek-Judge to help me, maybe fifteen to twenty minutes."
"Uh-huh. No pressure, Symonds, but you've got ten. From the looks of things outside, I'd say that's just about all the time we've got left."
"Symonds," Anderson yelled. They had pulled back to just outside the Sector House entrance, their backs against the doors as they fired plastic rounds to try to keep the crowd from getting closer. Five metres ahead, between the Judges and the onrushing mob, were the electro-cordon emitters - six metre-tall vertical metal poles studded with drum-like capacitor coils all the way along their length and spread out at ten-metre intervals. The forward elements of the crowd were already beginning to step between the emitters. In another half-a-second, activating the electro-cordon would be pointless.
"Symonds, It's now or never. I hope to Grud you're ready!"
"Just making the last connections. Make sure you're standing well back. I'm activating the electro-cordon now."
With a hum of power and the smell of ozone the emitters burst abruptly into life, creating a crackling cordon of electricity that sent the members of the crowd standing between them spasming backwards in pain. Anderson held her breath, expecting the emitters to spark and die at any second, but the voltage kept coming. No matter how many times the enraged crazies on the other side of the emitters threw themselves at the cordon, they were catapulted backwards, unconscious but unharmed. The plan had worked. Trapped on the other side of the high-voltage cordon, the mob could only scream in impotent fury and throw missiles at them.
"All right," she said. She looked at her colleagues. A few had cuts and bruises where they had been hit by rocks, but for the most part they had survived intact. The hail of missiles coming from the crowd hemmed in on the other side of the electro-cordon was growing by the minute. "Let's get back inside the Sector House. Could be they'll quieten down once they can't see us anymore."
"How long do you think the cordon will hold them?" Whitby said as they went back into the Sector House. He stepped closer to her and whispered, "You have to figure it's only a matter of time before the entity decides to stop throwing them directly at the cordon and get them to target the emitters instead."
"Yeah," she said. "I guess we're going to find out just how smart this thing really is." She looked back at the crowd, at dozens of shrieking and rage-filled faces. She shrugged. "Either way, at least we've bought ourselves some breathing space. If the cavalry can get here in time, we might just survive this."