“This building sucks ass,” 1SG Vidal said, mirroring Mark’s thoughts. By the records, Overton Shipping was a 96,000 square meter facility that was 32 docks high with 16 drive in doors. The clearance height was 50’, 1,200 auto parking spaces with trailer parking and fenced truck court.
In laymen’s terms, the place was gigantic. Mark did not have a very large police force, and only had a dozen heavy hitters composed of two squads on that team. Normally, this meant that quarantining the area effectively would be a huge challenge. However, that wouldn’t be as much of an issue because the first problem was negated by the second problem.
There were no other buildings nearby, the terrain was flat and well lit, and there was absolutely no other cover in the area. The nearest building on the east side was over 2000 meters away. That clearly wouldn’t work. The west side was equally depressing. The only thing on that side was a tiny headquarters area for Overton Shipping and getting there would require crossing from the jungle, which was frankly impossible.
Coming in from the south was also a dead end. A stockyard gave cover, but it was also 1000 meters out from the main warehouse. It was too open, plus they’d need to explain to the people in the stockyard what they were doing and not do anything that would make them panic. Not a good option.
That left the north side of the entrance as the only possibility. A tiny building, called “Organics Supply”. He searched his memory. Wasn’t the organics movement something that faded out in the early 21st century after getting astroturfed by corporations? “In context,” EVE said to him, “It refers to companies which ship raw organic particles needed for biosynthesis.” That made more sense.
The building was only 1,386 square feet, but with only 40 officers at the scene, that would be plenty of room. “So we set up in the building to the North, then what?” Mark asked Vidal. The big man pondered it for a moment.
“Way I see it sir, we have two options. Option one is to run and gun, shock and awe. We light up the area, sirens blaring, blow down the doors with explosives, and throw in tear gas. We follow in hard and take out any targets not immediately surrendering.
The downside to this plan is that we have no idea what’s inside there, and we know these guys play dirty. Some explosives in a container could set off when we breach. Or they might detonate it themselves. Or a mounted machine gunner could take out the first squad as soon as they run through. You get the drift, mass casualty scenarios.”
Mark nodded along, so Vidal continued. “The other way is to send someone crawling across the 100 meters of open terrain and plant surveillance devices all around the warehouse. Once we know what’s inside, we figure out our plans.”
The SWAT team commander was Sergeant Mirja Nicholson, looped in on the call between Vidal and Mark. She didn’t have their combat contacts, so she couldn’t see them the way they could each other, but she could overhear the conversation.
“I agree with 1SG Vidal’s assessment. We keep the team on standby to engage if the recon mission is compromised.”
Vidal relayed the orders to the team. They parked their vehicles at various locations a mile out from the warehouse and moved in from the North going from building to building out of line of sight of the warehouse until each squad could enter the Organics shop.
Mark and Vidal stood behind the building. Vidal gave the thumbs up and lay on his side, then started crawling towards the warehouse. They had special reconnaissance armor used for missions like this, which disrupted light patterns and made it harder to spot a person. Vidal opted for his heavy Reflex armor instead. His reasoning was that even if the recon mission was successful, they still might get into a firefight, and he’d rather be ready for that.
The side crawl was to obscure his ‘slug trail’, as he called it, the noticeable pattern a dragged body leaves behind. Mark watched Vidal move. Or watching him move wasn’t really accurate. He was moving at such an incredibly slow speed that Mark couldn’t notice him moving at all. He was moving a few centimeters a minute at best.
The problem with all defensive preparations is the human element. Humans get very bored, very easily. Snipers and other elite units often required the ability to tolerate superhuman levels of boredom, waiting in a single spot for days while watching out for an enemy. For most soldiers, even a very a short time on guard duty caused their minds to wander and look for any escape valve from the monotonous boredom. Mark’s mind was even worse. Having EVE hooked up to his mind, he played solitaire, pong, texas hold-em, and other games against EVE. He could have done something more elaborate, but he didn’t want to become completely distracted.
Instead, he watched with his eyes half-focused on the warehouse. The rest of his team in the warehouse must be bored, but they could talk to each other. Mark focused his eyes and tried to see Vidal. He couldn’t. He was impressed. He knew roughly where Vidal should be by checking in on his combat contacts position, but when he actually looked at the spot, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Vidal’s movements were so minute that nothing drew any attention to his location.
Another half hour passed. Mark didn’t see any signs of activity at the warehouse. The worst case scenario was that the team was ambushed and completely destroyed. The second worst case scenario though was that the warehouse had been evacuated and all of the evidence was gone. His decision to raid the warehouse immediately, instead of doing a multi-part investigation, hinged on that scenario. Mark had no idea about the loyalties of the people on the planet, and given the depth of financial fraud that Chon had found, he didn’t want to risk blowing an operation.
Suddenly, he started getting visual feedback from the area. Vidal had set up the first of the neural nets, so the tiny devices were sending Mark pictures of all the obvious egress points. Mark’s primary job when they were all set up would be to manage the network and give feedback data to each team member. Mirja and Vidal would handle the operations on the ground .
Vidal slowly crept around the rest of the exterior and kept putting up more neural nets by each of the bay doors. This sort of dull, monotonous work was the backbone of most police work, and it was exactly the type of work Mark had avoided fastidiously during his time as a cop. The perimeter of the area that Vidal was traversing was around 1,240 meters setting up at each of the 16 dock doors plus other exterior doors, totaling 20 places that needed eyes on. After setting up the neural net, Vidal tried to sneak a surveillance endoscope underneath the door, but the doors were basically vacuum sealed. Humidity could damage sensitive cargo, so warehouses took precautions to be as humidity, temperature, and light sensitive as they could. Vidal attempted to open the door, but it was securely sealed as well.
“Wait,” Mark ordered Vidal. The first sergeant would be weighing a potential solo mission by himself in the warehouse and setting up the drone spies that Mark had purchased before. But if something went wrong, Mark didn’t want his best man down for the count.
“Mirja, take the lead,” Mark said over the communications channel.
“Everyone,” she said over the comms channel, “Teams Alpha through Gamma stack up counterclockwise from the North-eastern entrance following alphabetical order on the rotation. Stay low to the ground and advance.”
Alpha team had nine of the SWAT officers. Bravo through Gamma had six police officers. Alpha would stack up on Vidal and the rest would stack up on each of the normal entrance doors. There would be no choice but to use explosives to breech and go in hard and heavy.
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When each team was in position, Mirja came over the comms. “Breach on my command. In five, four, three, two, one.” The squad leaders from each team detonated their charge, blowing the door off the hinge and shooting it off into the distance.
Vidal’s squad went into a workout area. Heavy dumbbells and barbells littered the area, along with ropes, raised platforms, and other heavy lifting equipment. He saw the first target as he lead his squad around, each one calling out “clear” as they checked an area. Vidal shouted at the man, “On the ground, hands behind the head, get down on the ground.” The man stood for a split second in surprise, then reached behind his back. Vidal blasted him with a beanbag round from his shotgun. The force of the blow cracked the man’s ribs and he went down in a sprawling heap. Vidal didn’t like beanbag rounds because they required manual reloading on an automatic shotgun, but he kept that complaint to himself.
The other SWAT members quickly cuffed the man, frisked him for any firearms, finding a small laser pistol stuffed into the back of his pants, then cuffed him and pulled him to the back near the entrance.
Vidal heard some gunshots go off, and looking through his combat lenses HUD (Heads Up Display), he could immediately see why. The other squads had entered areas that were being actively patrolled. The guards in those areas immediately fired on the police squads as soon as they entered. The other squads didn’t have the fancy combat lenses that Mark and Vidal had. They were using the older smart glasses that had been standard issue on police forces, but they had access to roughly the same information as Vidal.
Five of the men on the teams were down, their team members giving them emergency first aid that stopped the bleeding from their wounds. Unlike the more sophisticated medi-gel the military had access to, the basic first-aid equipment of police only stopped the initial bleeding, it didn’t really do anything to repair the damage. Injured team members were carried out of the building and placed outside. Emergency vehicles were on standby near the area, but they couldn’t enter until the area had been secured.
The cops responded by shooting tear gas into every area of the warehouse they could, though it was too large to effectively cover the whole area. “Swap out to lethal fire,” Mirja ordered over the headsets, “Taking prisoners is no longer a priority.” Vidal swapped out the magazine on his shotgun to APHC (Armor-Piercing Hard Core) slugs. The CAW (Close Assault Weapon) was 12 gauge automatic shotgun, and the APHC rounds could take out anything short of the heaviest of armor.
The SWAT team paired off into two squads, Vidal and four others went right, the other five went left. As Vidal swept around the stacks, two men popped up and aimed on him. He swiveled and held down the shotgun trigger, sweeping left to right. Vidal’s rounds tore through the two men, the one on the left getting hit first near his right shoulder, then right above his heart. The man on the right took the slug through the throat, ripping it open and dropping him immediately. The other SWAT members kept moving forward while Vidal took on the two attackers, making sure that no ambush from the sides could wipe out the whole team.
A machine gun popped out from behind one of the stacks, the triggerman hidden. He sprayed bullets wildly at the SWAT team. The SWAT teams hid behind their riot shields, letting the bullets bounce off. When the gun clicked dry, they advanced on the gunman as he reloaded and hit him with a quick burst of submachine gun rounds.
“Vidal, move your left and up two hundred meters. There’s a group of enemies pinning down some of our people.” Vidal checked his HUD and could see what Mark was talking about. More of the targets were barricading themselves in, giving themselves cover and slowing down the clearing of the building. Vidal gave the hand signals for his group to advance, then knelt down and walked up behind the stacks of boxes.
Charlie team was pinned down. Vidal’s combat lense gave a yellow notification over Charlie team, meaning one of their members just got hit. His team kept moving quietly behind the barricaded attackers. When he peered out at them, Vidal could see there were four men armed with machine guns, peppering the area where the cops were hiding behind crates. They didn’t have the riot shields to keep them safe from bullets, so they were pinned down with no way to advance.
As they crept up behind the ambushers, three men appeared from the opposite direction to reinforce them. They saw Vidal’s team and opened fire with submachine guns, as Vidal and the SWAT team returned fire. Vidal felt a few bullets hit his suit, but they didn’t have the punching power necessary to penetrate. His own firearm had no such problem, two slugs from his shotgun took two of the men down, while his teams bullets quickly finished them off.
The ambushers turned as they heard the gunfire from behind them. Vidal pivoted and took out the attacker closest to him. He continued to auto fire and strafe across the attackers, but a round to his floating rib took him down. The suit immediately cold pressed the injury site to keep the swelling down. Status report showed that the rib was bruised, but not broken. He pulled out a fresh magazine and swapped it into his automatic shotgun.
Vidal sat up, expecting to unload his shotgun, but his team had taken out the other attackers. He pulled himself to his feet and kept moving forward. Progress after that was slow going and followed a pattern. They’d advance to an enemy position, get pinned down, and another team would flank the barricade. One of the officers unfortunately popped his head up too soon, and got it blown completely off. Unfortunately, that made his squad mates lose their composure and attempt a mad rush at the barricade, resulting in them getting mowed down. Red Xs filled Vidal’s HUD. They were down a dozen people from when they’d entered, only 28 of them left to clear the area.
As Vidal and his team advanced, he saw something that made him freeze in his tracks. A warbot, or more accurately, a walking tank version of a warbot with a half ton of depleted uranium composite laminate over high hardness steel alloy. It had an insectoid build, with eight legs emerging from its torso and a square metal head on top that swiveled 360 degrees.
“Everyone, get out now,” Vidal ordered over his headset. Mirja reinforced this command when the team stood still. Everyone started egressing from the area, but the warbot had already spotted them. It began firing its machine gun bursts at the scattered officers, who fortunately ducked down. They crawled and ducked to escape the barrage of fire, which was fortunately lessened by the warbot trying to target multiple opponents in different locations.
“Captain,” Vidal said over the comms, “We got a huge problem.”
“On it,” Mark responded. He called over to the helicopter unit for them to land on the roof of the organics building. He’d set this up just in case they encountered what in a traditional game he would have called “high level enemies.” The helicopter had a dinosaur laser sniper rifle on board, so called because if you were ever sent to the past, this rifle could take down any dinosaurs you encountered.
The helicopter landed on top of the organics supply store, just as the first wave of police officers started exiting the building. Mark pulled the rifle from the helicopter, then waved it away to get out of the area. He set up the rifle on top of the building and waited for the warbot to exit the building.
Instead of appearing out of the normal exits, one of the bay loading doors opened up. The warbot appeared walked through the loading bay and started firing at officers attempting to flee the area. Not good. Mark lined up his first shot to hit one of the connecting joints. He controlled his breathing, took a steady trigger pull, and hit the monster between two of its joints.
The warbot buckled, but its numerous reinforced legs meant it just shifted its weight away from the injured leg and onto legs that were still functional. The missile turret on the warbot swiveled to line up a direct shot on Mark. Mark slowed down time and lined up a shot between the joints of the lead leg. He squeezed the trigger and took out the lead leg.
This caused the warbot to fall down, and the missile it launched to be off target. The warbot adjusted, and this time it shot its rocket directly underneath Mark rather than trying to hit Mark directly. Even if Mark destroyed its balance again, this round would hit.
Instead, Mark aimed directly at the head, looking to put the round through the eye socket of the beast. He squeezed the trigger and took its head off, just as the round impacted with the organics building. Mark flew through the air, the rifle out of his grasp. A notification appeared in his vision.
“You have died.”