Now it’s our turn. The Able boat takes the other’s place, bumping hard against the construction composite of the quay. The water-jets race, holding us in place with their thrust.
It’s time. I grab my assault rifle, giving the wire a split-second to synch up with the weapon’s circuitry. Safety off, gas-vent recoil compensation at nominal one hundred percent, thirty-five rounds in the clip, one in the pipe. Ready to rock. Most of Assault Team Able are already over the side and running toward the compound by the time I’ve moved. I sense a presence next to me, don’t have to look to identify Argent.
“Cranked up?” the chromed runner asks, cradling his assault cannon in his metal hands.
I give him a feral street grin. “Out on the pointy end,” I shoot back.
He slaps me on the armored shoulder, and we vault over the gunwale together.
There’s nothing left to oppose our advance. Covering us from behind, the two Riverines are positioned to annihilate anything with their twin Vanquishers before they pull back to a safe distance. (Wouldn’t want our best way out of here to get sunk . . .) Overhead, the Yellowjackets are still mixing it up in a chaotic fur-ball, while the two surviving Wandjina drones continue their coordinated fire-missions. Time to change that.
“Do the gate,” I growl into my throat mike.
A rigger somewhere hears my order and honks one of the combat drones around in a turn that would pulp a meat pilot. It races out over the river, its engine screaming, then pulls an Immelman that looks as tight as a hairpin, boring right in toward the gate.
“Cover!” Argent bellows beside me, and both assault teams hit the deck.
Not a moment too soon. The Wandjina’s nose is pointed dead center at the gate, its machine gun pouring rounds into the reinforced composite with no obvious effect. It doesn’t matter. The drone slams into the gate, and the shaped charge installed in place of some of its more advanced sensors detonates.
I don’t see it, of course, because I’m on my face sucking mud with my arms protecting my head. Even through my armor, I feel the heat pulse. And then the pressure wave drives the air from my lungs and bounces me a hand-span off the ground. I land hard, my head bouncing inside my armored helmet, and I hear fragging bells. I try and shake it off.
Then a hand grabs my arm—hard texture, surprisingly gentle grip—and helps me to my feet. “You all right?” Argent asks.
I consider shaking off his hand, but the way my equilibrium’s still spinning I decide against it. “Chill,” I tell him, and we both know it’s one of those little white lies. While I’m still waiting for my brain and the law of gravity to agree exactly which way’s down, I look toward the gate.
Only to see there isn’t a gate there anymore. Team Baker and most of Team Able are already through, and over the ringing in my ears I hear the ripping of autofire from inside the compound. Typical, considering the situation—the assault troops are tearing things up while their supposed “commander” is still trying to get his brain in gear outside the area of battle. I pick up my assault rifle—which I’d dropped—and grip it in a kind of sloppy port-arms. “Let’s do it,” I tell Argent. And together we dog-trot forward.
There are a couple of corpses inside the gate, or what’s left of them after the RPV’s jury-rigged warhead did its thing. At least our armor’s different from the defenders’, letting me know it’s NVC troops that are down.
Inside the prison-style walls, the facility’s just like I’d have expected from the vid we shot from Raven’s bird. Four major buildings set around the perimeter of a square, with a handful of smaller structures. As we enter the compound proper, a half-dozen firefights are going down around us. The single remaining Wandjina drone has given up its random strafing because the rigger has no way to tell friendlies from targets. It’s still in the fray, however, pouring autofire into the guard towers (or whatever the frag they are) at the four corners, apparently against the possibility that the occupants have weapons that can be trained on the inside of the facility. Doesn’t strike me as likely, but I can’t think of a better way to expend that ammunition at the moment.
Assault Team Baker has fanned out, and they’re basically blowing the drek out of anything that moves. My comrades on Team Able are doing pretty much the same thing, except for the four lighter-armed troopers—combat deckers whose job is to find the lab complex’s computer, crack into it and download anything and everything they can lay their electronic mitts on. (It’s a serious drag that Lynne Telestrian’s intelligence couldn’t tell us exactly which building contained the computer core, but those are the breaks.) As assault leader, my job’s basically to oversee what’s going down and not get myself geeked in the process. Apparently Argent has taken upon himself the task of bodyguarding me around, which is fine with me. At the moment I feel totally out of my depth, wandering around like a haif-fragged fool, trying to figure which way to go next.
At the moment I decide to go left, toward what looks like the biggest building and also the one with the most firing going on around and inside it. I head that way, Argent dogging my steps.
Movement, in my peripheral vision. For a horrible moment, I’m back in the Tsarina, cruising through Montlake. Movement above me and to the left, on top of one of the smaller buildings. Then I snap back into the present. Without thinking, I drop to one knee and bring up my rifle. The link between the tech in my head, the smartgun in my hand, and the armor’s circuitry brings up a display from the rifle’s scope onto my helmet’s HUD. A single figure, wearing light armor different from the gear my troops are wearing. Swinging around like he’s just spotted me too, bringing some kind of weapon to bear. The Czech assault rifle and the new chip in my head—the one supplied by Lynne Telestrian—synch up, and I squeeze the trigger.
The tech tracks the fire, and where the bullets actually go is a good meter from the projected point of impact. Frag! That’s the difference between data you get on a chip and the muscle-knowledge that comes from practicing enough with the tech to integrate it and make it yours. I’ve done that with the escrima and the H & K chips, but not with this new one. Even with gas-vent compensation, a long burst on full-auto equates to fierce muzzle-rise. I struggle to bring the rifle back on line, but I’m too late. I try to fling myself aside .. .
Fire bursts from my target’s muzzle, and half a dozen impacts on my armor drive the air from my body. The sheer force of those impacts is frightening, sending bolts of pain through my chest. Fractured ribs? Quite possibly, but now isn’t the time to worry about it. I fight the rifle back onto line, and squeeze the trigger again.
An instant too late. There’s a dull whomp from beside me, and my target is blown apart by an assault cannon round. I release my own trigger, but not before I’ve hosed a couple of rounds through the carnage on the rooftop.
Argent’s looking down at me. “You okay?”
I glance down and see the bullet-impacts stitched across my chest armor. The reinforced composite of the armor is cracked and deformed by the impact, doing its job of absorbing the kinetic energy of incoming rounds by crushing and compacting. I take a deep breath, and it feels like somebody’s worked me over with a baseball bat. But that’s much better than I’d be feeling without the armor ...
With a groan, I push myself to my feet. “I’m okay,” I tell him, and that’s another little white lie.
He scowls. “Your armor’s compromised.”
I nod, looking down at the buckled macroplast again. No drek, Sherlock. Which means if I wade into the middle of incoming fire again, the armor’s not going to protect me adequately. Definitely something to keep in mind.
But on the other hand, I can’t just hunker down and wait for it all to be over. (Why not? part of my mind wants to know. Simple drek-headed macho pride?) Forcing those doubts away, I grip my rifle tighter and try to look frosty. I think I see Argent shrug as I move forward again, but it’s hard to tell under all that armor. There’s a door in front of me, and I kick it open, ducking into the shelter of the door frame after I do it.
No burst of fire from inside, so I spin around the frame in a crouch, scanning with eyes and with the barrel of my weapon. It’s pitch-black inside, and the light from outside is enough to illuminate only the first half-dozen meters of the hallway that stretches away from me. What the frag happened to the lights? Did some of our troops blow the power, or have the defenders decided that darkness is more a disadvantage to us than for them? Cautiously I move forward again.
And for the second time in as many minutes, I find I’m flashing back to the past. It lasts only a split second, but this time it’s to the darkened concrete corridors of the Fi ness Que t in Renton, where Lynne Telestrian’s troops waltzed me around like a fragging puppet. This time is different, very different. First, because my helmet’s circuitry has automatically kicked in light-amplification and thermographic sensors, projecting the composite image onto the HUD of my face-shield. And second, because I can sense the comforting presence of Argent and his assault cannon behind me and to my right.
Somewhere deeper into the building, I hear the characteristic ripping of an Uzi on full autofire, getting louder. I don’t think any of our troops are carrying Uzis, so I tense and ready my weapon.
Ahead of me, at the end of the corridor, a door bursts open and a figure backs through. In thermo, the muzzle plume of his Uzi as he fires back through the doorway is a meter-long lance of brilliance. The composite image is grainy, and its false color doesn’t match the actual color of the armor either side’s wearing. So it takes me a second to confirm that this is a bad guy.
In that instant, he spots me in his peripheral vision. Inhumanly fast, he spins and fires. Thank Ghu his marksmanship’s nowhere near as jazzed as his reactions. His burst goes high, smashing concrete chips from the ceiling, and sending ricochets whining off behind us. I fire my own burst a second later—starting low, like the chip in my head tells me, and walking the burst up into his body.
Or trying to, at least. His juiced reflexes kick in again, and he’s back through the door so fast that, by comparison, my attempt to walk the burst looks like a causal stroll. Beside and behind me, Argent sends a Panther round through the open door. The flash of the explosion is dazzling even with the HUD’s flare compensation, and the overpressure wave in the enclosed space pummels my ears. Above the sound of the detonation I hear a shriek of agony. Argent got somebody. The Uzi gunner? No way to know, just like there’s no way to be sure he’s out of the fight. No way except to go and look. I move forward again.
In the lower-right corner of my visual field, the HUD flashes a message. Signaling for Argent to wait, I key on the radio circuit that links me with one of our “spotters,” a rigger watching the fun from the vantage point of the Condor stealth drones overhead.
“Strike Leader,” I announce myself.
“Eye One. We’ve got a break-out, Strike Leader.” The woman’s voice sounds either bored or drunk, but I know she’s neither. The sluggishness of her speech has to be from trying to split her attention between so many tasks at one time that getting her mouth to work right is way down on her current priorities. “Four bad guys on foot. I don’t know where they came from, they just suddenly appeared. Magic maybe?”
“Where?”
“Down by the docks,” she answers.
The boats. Yeah, it makes sense. With a ground force to landward and pure, pluperfect hell in the skies above, the river’s the only escape route.
“Armed?”
“No heavy weapons visible,” the rigger says. “Only one’s wearing armor; the other three are in soft clothes. Corp suits, maybe.”
“Got it,” I confirm, and kill the frequency. Corp suits, huh? I want them. I turn to tell Argent, but he’s already heading back toward the outside. He must have been listening in on the conversation too. All the better.
For a big man, Argent moves like a fragging sprinter when he wants to, and I have a frag of a time keeping up with him. As we race through the compound, it looks like the fighting’s starting to die down. Then I’m proved wrong as a magical fireball bursts among a knot of my troops on the other side of the compound. They go down like tenpins—stunned and wounded, but not toasted like the enemy mage obviously wanted. The few combat mages we’ve got among our force apparently are earning their keep by effectively providing the rest of us with spell defense. I can’t stick around to see how the exchange turns out; Argent is darting back out through the blasted gate, vaulting over the twisted bodies lying in the opening.
One of the boats is missing from the dock—the Samuvani-Criscraft Otter. I look around quickly, and see it almost a hundred meters offshore, already up on the step, its stern buried and kicking up a healthy wake. I see Argent bringing his assault cannon on line, but I snap out a “No!” before he can fire. He shoots me a doubtful look, and I tell him, “I want them alive. See if you can whistle us up some air support.”
He thinks about it for a moment, then nods brusquely and begins to get busy on the radio. While Argent is doing that, I run out to cast off the lines securing the Aztech Nightrunner to the dock.
But I stop in my tracks at the sight of it. The interior of the Nightrunner is a mess of shattered plastic and composite, some of it still smoking and smoldering. Somebody— obviously the slags in the Otter—tossed a grenade into the craft before taking off. The concussion, confined by the partially enclosed cabin, was enough to crack the hull, and already the sleek boat is starting to settle in the water.