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Teo overtakes his team in the homestretch before the last junction, hand already steadied on the carbine’s underbarrel anti-materiel attachment.
Rounding the corner, he plants his boot on the knee actuator of the Raytheon XOT2, coming nearly face to face with man in the pilot’s seat as he launches himself over the exoskeleton and the security detail for whom it is point man.
Hot on his heels, Scheppe and Kikl have already neutralized half the men by the time still-airborne Teo puts his slugs through the dogs’ powerbanks.
As he lands he kicks one of the fallen quadruped’s still-whirring auto-cannons clean off. He recognizes it as a decade old Boston Dynamics industrial model, expensive at the time and never able to compete with the pricepoint of Sino knockoffs, but the robust design eventually found its niche with organizations of varying scruples around the world.
Now it lays on the ground with the others, splayed open, exposing charred innards.
The exoskeleton hunches awkwardly near the corner, pilot slack in the harness.
Motion in the corner and Teo’s weapon is leveled in a blur. A dock worker of some sort. Hi-vis vest stained red, not his blood. On his knees, eyes wide, hands clasped in front of his face, pleading, whimpering
por favor no por favor no
Scheppe bolts to the man and shoves him to the ground.
“No se mueva! Quédate aquí! ¿lo entiendes? No se mueva!”
The man nods frantically, tears and dirt caking his cheeks.
Teo can only imagine his terror. Looking into their eyes—no, not even their eyes, the matte finish of tac glass. No expressions either, only the fuligin scales of ballistic weave over their skin.
Scheppe releases his grip on the man and turns to the 3 just as they feel, more than hear, the chirp from their bone-conduction comms.
Radio jamming in effect. Anti-swarm EMPs in 10.
Even as the neutral voice of the system finishes, Teo can see the Cartel hunter killer drones. They’ve been spotted, and the hordes are descending.
Teo disengages his SyNAPS—relishing the brief instant of introspection and contentedness that always ensues—even as he picks off hunter-killer drones accelerating towards him. Hundreds of icons, glowing imminent-threat-yellow, dancing across his visor. And then, the EMP. And then the next. And the next. Hundreds of now muted-blue icons raining down.
And then he reaches to bring his SyNAPS online again. It probably wasn’t ever necessary to kill it, all their tech is hardened, but Command advised de-networking whenever possible before EMP as a precaution.
For just a moment he toys with the idea of staying offline. Kikl must be thinking the same thing because he casts Scheppe a knowing look.
“Whatchu think, Jakob? Oldschool?”
Scheppe chuckles, eyes never leaving the field before them.
“I wish, Elcko, but I’m trying to make Master Sergeant one day, and an Article 15 wouldn’t look very good on my record.”
“Roger that.”
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They flip their switches and once again feel the rush of becoming greater than the sum of their parts.
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In the last of the day’s quickly fading light, they converge on the nondescript building.
With most of the facility’s exos and drones KIA from the pulse—the few hardened platforms remaining easily picked off at range—they advance unimpeded, the number of hostile heat signatures on their displays dwindling rapidly.
Moving through the final labyrinth of makeshift shipping container offices, the team splits up. Overused trope in horror films of old actually an effective stratagem when you outclock your opponents by a factor of 10.
Running the corridors, it’s like a 100 year old arcade shoot-em-up played in slow motion.
Hostile in the open: vrak! vrak!
Hostile in doorway: vrak! vrak!
Hostile behind non-combatant: hold fire, pivot, flank.
Hostile exposed: vrak! vrak!
Multiple hostiles behind inadequate cover: vrakvrakvrakvrakvrak!
15 minutes into infiltration, the incidence of Human Shield has increased an alarming—albeit predictable—degree, now every third or fourth round threads the needle. Perfect killshots grazing past the flailing, the screaming, the panicked.
Watching a balaclava’d head mushroom into the wall behind him, Teo suddenly feels the urge to speed up, though he couldn’t say exactly why.
Any overt enemy entrenchment would be immediately flagged and picture-in-picture’d on tac glass, a multi-angle livestream of Dead Men Walking courtesy of their eyes in the sky.
But in lieu of such a feed, with no targets explicitly flagged, all he has to go on is a hunch, an intuition. And his intuition is telling him to hurry round the corner.
He wonders how much of the imperative comes from him, and how much from the Network, the ‘hive’.
Did the final straw that pushed this urge up from the preconscious queue come from him, or is it an insight born of the tumult of subliminal observations and judgments that his 11 fellows can’t help but make?
A high priority executive summary delivered by that dispersed exocortex now spread about the compound?
He never knows whose insights are bubbling to the surface. SyNAPS—feeding impulses only to and fro the peripheries of conscious awareness—is still a black box.
Maybe Litsch saw the glint of an ACOG before breaching the building caddycorner.
Maybe one of their stealthed ZH-72 Mosquitos overhead identified an anomalous heat signature.
Maybe Weiss, without a clean shot, nevertheless has a figure in his sights from across the compound right now.
Maybe Saara saw the obvious kill alley and thought
that’s where I would post up
Likely it’s all of those things and more contributing to Teo’s intuition—the Network’s intuition.
In any case, he couldn’t put into words why exactly he feels the need to speed up or raise his carbine 16° to the left as he rounds the corner, only that he needs to.
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He finds out why seconds later of course.
3 figures in a tight grouping. Before he’s even had time to consciously tick the demographic boxes, he’s put 2 rounds into the forehead of the man huddled behind the little girl, 2 more into the man holding a gun to her head in one hand, grenade in the other.
Teo is halfway to the girl when the spoon ricochets off the wall.
4 seconds, plenty of time to turn the tumbling frag into the last fastball some unfortunate soul will ever see.
Pinning the men at the end of the corridor with pinpoint accurate suppressive fire, he hurdles an inert exo.
His right hand has opened at his side, not his favored, but—ambidextrous as any—a simple catch and lob is elementary.
3 seconds.
Feet from the child, a Boston Dynamics Pitbull struts around the corner ahead. Clad in ceramic-reactive plating and sporting heavy ordnance—no mere repurposed industrial modal—it changes the equation. Teo runs the calculus in his head in an instant: return to sender just got a little more complicated.
From full sprint he drops into a deep lunge, right hand clasping around the grenade.
Left hand leaves his carbine balled in a fist, which he plants into the little girl’s solar plexus, uppercut lifting her to his chest.
2 seconds.
The Pitbull’s grenade launcher swivels their direction as he dives left through one of the hall’s makeshift doors. Child held fast to him, grenade cast in a lazy arc with a flick of his wrist.
1 second.
He hears the thock from the Pitbull’s barrel just as he wraps his hands over the girl’s ears, covering her tiny figure with his in midair. Instantly, the room is a vortex of fire and shrapnel.
He can just make out the wrrr of the Pitbull’s launcher retargeting when his return serve goes off—not sufficient to destroy the quadruped outright, rather providing just enough overload on its viewfinders that Teo is free to pop out from cover and cut it down with half a dozen perfectly placed incendiary slugs.
Running back in the room, he sees the girl, eyes wide with terror, writhing on the floor gasping for air.
Good, the concussive blast in that confined space was the biggest risk. With the wind knocked out of her small body, lungs hadn’t ruptured. Her ears aren’t bleeding either, also good. Arm’s broken but at least it’s not a compound fracture.
Without time to check her over further, Teo contents himself with the knowledge that the girl will live—traumatized for life, sure—but she’ll live, probably.
He squats to the girl, well aware that in full kit he looks like some grotesque insectoid creature.
“No se mueva! Quédate aquí! Stay here! Do not move!”
She doesn’t look like she’s in any condition to move, anyway. She’s in shock. Disoriented and afraid. But at least she’ll live. Probably.
If she’s lucky she’ll regain complete hearing and, perhaps in time, full motion in that arm.
Any luckier and she’d’ve never been born.
He doesn’t bother taking inventory of his own wounds, the ballistic threads surely stopped the shrapnel’s majority, any that it didn’t will soon be rendered ineffectual by the targeted coagulants coursing through his veins.
He casts one more look to the girl before ducking through the jagged ridge that used to be a wall and resuming his advance.
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