To my right, Piers sprays a long burst into the shadows just under the roof at the far end of the warehouse. Bullets spatter and spark off all the metal up there, and I think for a moment he’s seeing things. But fragged if there isn’t a squawk and then a dark shape tumbling from the catwalk to crash-splat into some cargo boxes below. Lucas—a few ticks late, as usual—hoses down the spot where the figure isn’t anymore.
So they’re up top, too, whoever they are. When I heard the first shots, I figured some other gang. When Katrina went down, I upped the ante to someone serious, a first-tier gang. Possibly the Ancients or a squad of Seoul men. Now I’m not so sure. Whoever they are, their tactics are good,
and they’re showing more discipline than the typical gang. I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.
Sudden panic. I can see all the boys, all five of them. That means they’re all on the same side of the Bulldog as me. Which means . . .
Staying low, with my head down at about knee-level, I duck around the front of the truck. Someone sees the movement. Muzzle-flashes flare in the dark corner, and bullets tear into the truck’s bodywork. I respond with a controlled, three-round burst, but it’s more an attempt at suppression fire to keep their heads down than in hopes of hitting anything. Meanwhile the tech in my head is predicting impact points, recording ammunition expended, and measuring wear and tear on the silencer. Then I duck back as the Bulldog undergoes more drastic depreciation.
Frag, things are definitely not looking good. And then they suddenly look even worse as Fraser goes over sideways, his throat torn away. Lucas pops up like he’s on springs and fires back in the direction of the incoming mail. I hear a grunt of pain from the shadows. It doesn’t sound like a kill, but maybe somebody got slowed down.
I scramble to the rear of the truck for a look around that way. All I can see are shadows every fragging where among the crates and shipping cases and piles of odds and sods. There are lights, of course, hanging from the girders and catwalks near the roof, but not many, not enough. For about the hundredth time, I wish I’d gone for the full-meal deal and had my eyes enhanced while the surgeon already had me opened up installing the skillwires. Thermo, or even just low-light, would be a lifesaver at the moment. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if the thing that got me killed right now was a little queasiness over eye surgery?
Muzzle-flashes from the darkness, and then I’m sucking dust on the floor. The Bulldog gets remodeled again as I roll under it. I cap off another three-round burst, blind, into the darkness. A figure moves, and for the first time I can see who we’re up against.
Blue combat armor with yellow trim, helmet with semimirrored macroplast face-shield, matte-black shock gloves. Stun baton on the web belt, bandolier with extra
clips, and an H & K submachine gun in the mitts. A Lone
Star Fast Response Team trooper. Oh boy, just fragging marvelous.
Bullets chew up the cargo case next to the FRTer, then whoever’s shooting at him walks the burst into his chest. The trooper’s armor stops the light rounds, but by pure luck a ricochet tags the visor release on his helmet. Up snaps the macroplast shield, and for an instant I can see the slag’s face. Then there’s no face anymore, just a spray of red.
Down he goes, and I send three more rounds over the top of his body. “Got one!” I yell, just in case any of the boys are listening. Then I scrabble back out the other side of the Bulldog.
Lone Star. Fragging wonderful. Whatever happened to interdepartmental communication, tell me that? Some parts of the Star know not to dick with certain Cutters operations, and why. But why didn’t Officer Friendly—may he rest in peace—and his little friends get the word? Probably some kind of internecine rivalry between the Organized Crime (Gang) task force and some other little personal empire within the corporation. That drek happens all the time within the Cutters, so why should the Star be any different?
Now the Bulldog rocks under the impact of another kind of report—a full-throated boom this time rather than the high-pitched ripping of SMG fire. I know enough about Lone Star equipment and tactics to know what it is. If this is a typical FRT squad, there’s one guy out there with a Mossberg CMDT combat auto-shotgun; if it’s a double squad, there are two of those beauties roaming around.
Time to leave. Right now. The shotgun blast came from the right side of the truck, the passenger side. So I scramble out from under the driver’s side. Fire comes from above, hosing down the ground in front of me. Trideo shows to the contrary, it’s surprisingly difficult to fire accurately from a higher elevation. I return fire in the rough direction of the muzzle-flashes. Little chance of actually hitting anything, which is fine by me, but there’s nothing more disruptive to a gunman’s concentration than a bullet past the ear. When Katrina went down, she fell against the driver’s side door, shutting it. The cargo door’s still open, though—with a crate of ARs half-in half-out—so that’s the way I dive into the Bulldog.
The CMDT shotgun put a hole big enough to stick my head through in the truck’s right side, and individual pellets have punched finger-size holes in the other side. SMG rounds continue to clatter and spang off the vehicle’s exterior as I scramble over three crates of useless ordnance into the driver's compartment. Another burst stars and frosts the windshield while I’m tearing Katrina’s fiber cable out of the control panel to enable the conventional controls.
“Mount up!” I scream, hitting the starter and hoping the boys can hear me over the gunfire.
The engine lights up instantly, thank the gods; this is no time to have to call the Motor Club. I slip the automatic transmission into gear, tramping on the brake with my left foot while pushing the gas pedal to the floor. Hardware complains, and the torque of the big turbocharged engine tilts the truck a couple of degrees to the left. More rounds spatter off the armor. Ducking down low, I slap at the row of switches for the lights. Lots of lights, and big lights, all over the Bulldog. Christ knows how many millions of candlepower or lumen-feet or whatever, but enough to light up an area the size of a football field brighter than noon. Anyone looking even near the truck is going to be flash-dazzled inside this dimly lit warehouse. Don’t quote me on this, but I think the lighting rig kicks out enough photons to overload even flare compensation in cybereyes.
Weapons open up all around the warehouse, a continuous burst of reflex fire, but nothing so much as grazes the truck. Trying to fire into the lights must be a bitch, but I’d say the effort doesn’t seem to be worth squat.
I can smell something start to cook—it’s not a great idea to hold a brake-stand for very long even if your engine isn’t turbocharged—but I’ve got to give the boys at least a few more seconds. Even with my eyes streaming from the almost blinding reflection of the Bulldog’s fragging lights, I can see movement among the cargo boxes. In one of my mirrors I spot little Piers on his feet and sprinting for the truck. Then there’s a triple boom, and he doesn’t so much go down as rupture when a three-round burst from the auto-shotgun slams into him.
En and Paco are on the move too. I don’t see Lucas at all, and I sure as frag don’t have time to send out a search party. Paco’s got his head down and he’s hauling hoop for the Bulldog’s open door. Running into the truck’s lights has got to be blinding him, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Bullets chew up the concrete floor around him, but I don’t think anything scores.
En’s halfway to the truck too, but the drugs in his system don’t seem to understand about self-preservation. He puts on the brakes, turns and empties his SMG in one long burst— god knows at what. Answering fire comes back from all over. His head snaps back, something sprays out the back of his neck, and that’s the end of En.
I hear Paco slam into the back of the truck, and then I hear him scrambling in. “Go, Larson!” he croaks.
I go. I know I’m leaving friendlies behind—Katrina’s still alive, I think, and who knows what happened to Lucas?— but I don’t have much choice. I release the brakes, and we’re off, fast and wild. I’m hoping whatever it is that just fell out the back of the truck is the crate of rifles and not Paco, but I’m too busy fighting the wheel as the truck fishtails wildly and almost gets away from me. I aim the Bulldog roughly down one of the lanes between high stacks of crates, but don’t quite get it right, and I almost go out the side window as we sideswipe something. Bullets are thudding into the bodywork all around, but not much is getting through. Then the truck bucks like it got butted in the rear by a juggernaut, and the lower rear-right corner of the cargo bay is just fragging
gone.
The CMDT scores again. I don’t know if it was just a lucky shot, or if the fragger with the combat gun is going for the tires. If so, we’re in trouble. The Bulldog’s got runflat tires, but run-shredded they’re not.
Wall ahead. I hang a skidding, squealing right, and we’re running parallel to the long side of the warehouse. Not particularly where I want to be. At the next lane I hang another right.
And there’s an FRT trooper standing directly in my path. For an instant he’s frozen there in the lights looking like he’s facing down an Angel of the Lord, then he’s flinging himself aside. I think I tag his boot-heel as we go by. I flip him the finger, even knowing he won’t see it. (Probably won’t see anything but afterimage for the next couple of minutes.) A hard left, and we’re heading down the centerline of the building. The big up-and-over door’s right ahead—closed, of course—so I push the pedal to the metal again and brace for impact. I hear Paco yelp as he sees what’s coming, and I second the emotion. The door looms up, reflecting entirely too much of our own light back into my face.
We hit the door at sixty klicks or so, and through we go. The only thing that keeps me in my seat is my death-grip on the wheel. Something goes squish-pop in my left wrist and it feels like someone’s set fire to my thumb, but I’ve got other things to worry about. My cargo, for one. Paco and a couple of crates of rifles come forward at high speed, and suddenly I have to deal with company in the driver’s compartment. Some of the metal from the door’s still plastered across the front of the Bulldog so I can’t see squat, and we’re still taking fire from somewhere. We bounce off something—the way this night’s going, it’s probably a fragging Citymaster, or maybe a panzer—but at least the impact removes the metal blocking my view. (The windshield, too, but you can’t have everything.)
Now I can see where I am, and I don’t like it. The warehouse parking lot’s full of Lone Star patrol cars, all with their pretty lights flashing and sparking. From the number of vehicles, I’d guess we’re dealing with at least two FRT squads. (Two-plus combat guns. Glad I didn’t know that earlier.) Figures scurry around as we tear out onto 144th Avenue, and a couple of cars are firing up for the pursuit.
Time to make a call. I reach for the radio, but Paco distracts me with a “Whafuck?” or some other pithy comment. He’s already dazed by his abrupt visit to the front of the truck, and not tracking well, so I cold-cock him. Then I place my call. I suppose my radio manner is a little lacking in professionalism, but—to quote the sleeping Paco— Whafuck?
It takes a while, but eventually the message filters through channels to the right ears. The lights and sirens on our ass turn off, and we’re alone on the streets of Kent.
About fragging time, too.
Ranger, the Cutters’ war boss, isn’t happy, but then he rarely is. He claims to be third-generation Cutters, which makes him a real rarity, a gang member whose father and grandfather both managed to live long enough to have kids. Or maybe he’s just lying through his teeth, with the smart money on the bulldrek side of the equation. He’s sitting in his “office,” actually a sparsely furnished room upstairs in the Cutters’ Ravenna safehouse, on Thirty-sixth Avenue Northeast, a block from the Calvary Cemetery. He’s got his Doc Marten drek-stompers up on a table, and he’s giving me and Paco the evil eye out from under his heavy black mono-brow.
“Three crates,” he bitches. “Three fragging crates out of a dozen, that’s all you bring back. Plus you lose us eight soldiers, and the warehouse is blown. Good night’s work, Larson.”
“They can’t trace any of the drek in the warehouse back to us,” I point out reasonably. The Cutters, like all first-tier gangs, learned long ago the wonders of shells, fronts, and holding companies.
“Frag the trace,” he barks. He pounds a fist down on the table and his half-kilo of bracelets, and bangles clatter like scrap metal. “The Star’s going to suspect, and they’re going to be watching the place, right?” I nod. He’s right, that’s just what the Star’s going to do. “So you blew us the warehouse, drekhead,” he finishes.
Sometimes the tech in my head seems to know I'm mad before I do. This is one of those times. I feel the touch of the wire, feel the i-face reaching out for the circuitry of my H & K (which, of course, is somewhere else). And I realize the wire would like to kill Ranger, and so would I.
But I bite back on the sudden anger. Out the corner of my eye I see Paco shifting from foot to foot. He’s not mad, he’s embarrassed or scared, and that just seems to fan my anger.
Somehow I keep it under control, though. “What were we supposed to do?” I ask, as coolly as I know how. “There was no tail on us. We set out the watchers, and I had Katrina jacked into the surveillance system. There was no sign of trouble.” I shrug. “Then suddenly we’re dealing with
two
Lone Star FRT squads. Eight of us against ... what? ... twenty of them?” Twenty-four, actually, according to Lone Star SOP, but not a smart thing to mention. “They’ve got armor and heavy weapons, we’ve got fragging popguns.” The anger’s building, so I bite back on it again. “The way I see it, we’re lucky we made it out with even three crates and the Bulldog.”