CHAPTER 18

Killing did not help Constantine sleep, as his killing was in no way virtual, but it did not much hinder him, either. At least, it had not in the past. The small actions he and his teams had taken over the years had been against some truly grotesque people, generally of a terrorist persuasion. Their motivations varied, their platforms differed, and their methods ranged from beheadings to electrocution to burning people alive, but they were all undeniably and unequivocally evil. Never in dealing with them had there been the slightest need for doubt, the slightest cause for moral ambivalence. People who slaughtered children for political gain were easy to kill. People who had sacrificed their humanity through savage behavior were easy to regard as animals. Even the guards in the prison they had hit previously were self-evidently bent toward cruelty, presiding over a third-world dungeon rife with torture and inhumane conditions. It had been a cruel prison for cruel prisoners, an institution of an oppressive regime housing its terrorist enemies, a place with no good people. It had presented not so broad a gulf as killing the terrorists themselves, but killing the guards of that prison had still been fairly easy.

This was a different story. These men were soldiers much like himself, or at least like the conventional forces of his own service. With them he might have had much in common, and he bore them no particular ill will as individuals. They had conducted, on orders from their government, an unprovoked campaign of aggressive conquest into a smaller neighbor, and perhaps they could be judged for their adherence to a political creed that sanctioned such acts, but that was a far subtler distinction than between Constantine’s brethren and the inhuman monsters that were his usual targets.

These men were not guarding a brutal prison, nor were they engaged in any obviously evil activity. They were simply military men, guarding a military facility. A few of them certainly may have been involved in mistreatment of the locals during the initial invasion, but there had been no mass calamity, no widespread rape or pillage, at least not that the news had reported. Certainly nothing worse than the crimes routinely committed by the international “peace-keeping” forces of the world’s supposed good-guys. Even his own countrymen had been credibly accused of such crimes on occasion. No, the space between himself and these men was the narrowest of margins, with little moral distinction. This was genuine war, even if as yet undeclared and conducted in the shadows: He would kill them because they were the soldiers of an enemy nation, and current foreign policy required it.

If there was one saving grace to the mission, it was that it required minimal footprint, and therefore minimal body-count. A rifle coughed—and it was, truly, barely more than a cough—and a man in a watchtower fell to his knees and toppled out of site. He would not go home to his children, but he had chosen his side, and tonight that was the wrong side. With luck, he would be one of only a few.

Task Force Royal was certainly well-armed. Once again the bulk of Constantine’s detachment carried automatic rifles chambered for the enemy’s cartridge—though this time they were not of indigenous manufacture but instead high-end purpose-built carbines with suppressors, advanced optics, and infrared lasers for use with night-vision devices. They looked nothing like local armaments, but that was acceptable because their description would never find its way to local authorities. No witness would be left alive.

However, if all went well, these rifles would never be fired. Even suppressed, they would be noisy. Supersonic rifle rounds produced a sonic boom, a wake in the air that struck the ear with a high-pitched snap, by itself almost as loud as a pistol shot. The actual blast at the muzzle might be contained within a silencer, but if these rifles were fired, everyone in the vicinity would hear it thanks to their high-speed projectiles. As such, each operator’s “primary” weapons for this mission were a suppressed, small-caliber pistol shooting subsonic rounds—just sufficient to penetrate into a human skull or rib cage and rattle around a bit—and a knife.

Indeed, one might better say their primary weapon was stealth, augmented by these nearly silent tools, with the assault rifles held in reserve should all stealth fail. A minimum of bodies, a minimum of signature, quick and quiet. Constantine stood by as they cut the fence. No fancy gear, here; just old-fashioned bolt cutters, snipping away in the dark. Once the first fence was open, they made their way one at a time across the tall grass to the inner fence and began snipping that, too.

Now they had to keep their eyes open. There would be patrols and there would be dogs.

The air was clear and cold, the sky filled with stars, but there was no moon. It was what they called a “low-illum” night, carefully chosen. No one expected them; no one would be on any sort of high alert. Each team member carried some special-purpose tool. Some, bolt cutters. Some, computer equipment. Some, explosives. A few, including Constantine, additional weapons of special design. Constantine felt for the safety of his “special-purpose” rifle, a very traditional design, shooting the same cartridge but cycling by virtue of a manually-operated bolt. In some ways, it was the sort of rifle with which a local child might have hunted pigs or deer in the countryside here—in the ages before these nations joined the developed world in better restricting private gun ownership. How that child of long-lost history would have gaped in envy. Constantine’s was suppressed, equipped with a thermal scope, and loaded with custom ammunition launching bullets at just beneath the speed of sound—very similar to the rifles his team’s marksmen had used during Press Hook. Constantine was one of a couple who carried these in addition to pistols, to give them just a little more reach in silence, should it be necessary for instance to eliminate a tower sentry before crossing open ground.

He felt for the safety, as was his habit, while he searched the far reaches and corners of the compound for movement. It was a dark night without the moon, but an eminently manageable night for his night-vision goggles. These were the latest compact white-phosphor image intensifier tubes, a generation better than his standard issue and far superior to the old green-phosphor NVDs he had borrowed during the drug-house raid. In this case, four tubes made a set of goggles, with two facing forward for binocular vision and one more on each side canted outward for improved peripheral vision. TF had toys to make even Constantine jealous.

Even on a clear night, the photons falling from the stars were few, and most of them were in the “near infrared” range of the spectrum, which is to say a wavelength just a little longer than the deepest red which the eye could see: a color just below color, just out of reach of mortal perception. They were there, though, these invisible photons, the light that was not light; dim (and invisible to the eye even were it not so dim) but present. Such faint particles of energy bounced off of everything about him and trickled into the tubes of his goggles, and there, focused by an objective lens, they struck upon a chemical film especially sensitive to that color-just-beyond-color. They struck, and where each photon struck the front face of the film, a single, infinitesimal electron flew away from the rear face, on exactly the same line. (This was magic, as far as Constantine was concerned, even though he had been required to sit through classes on it. Even more magical was what happened next.) Each electron thus released flew across a tiny gap and fell into the mouth of what the electron would surely have seen as an enormous, hexagonal tunnel in a vast honeycomb of enormous, hexagonal tunnels—if electrons could perceive their adventures.

There, because the tunnels of the honeycomb all went at a faint angle, the electron inevitably struck a tunnel wall and bounced, and when it did, a bright burst of thousands of additional electrons showered after it, following its path. This was the true sorcery. Each electron which struck a tunnel wall in this strange honeycomb of passages caused another intense shower of newcomers, all racing along the same line of reflection, so that where one lonesome electric particle entered the cave at one end, millions upon millions of electrons came sizzling from the other. These millions upon millions of new companions bombarded another film, a phosphor screen, and where they struck did give it life in the form of white light. And so one lonely infrared photon which no human would ever have seen, entering at the objective end, became one lonely electron, but that electron in the mystic honeycomb caves could multiply into a great army, pouring forth upon the phosphors and making them blaze before Constantine’s eye, so that as he looked about himself, he saw a bright world of grays and whites, clearer and cleaner than a black-and-white movie picture. Even a guard’s poor flashlight, which must surely to the guard have seemed a weak weapon against the night’s forbidding shroud, to Constantine appeared as a cone of incredible white brilliance lancing through the night.

Constantine touched the shoulder of the man nearest him. That man looked, nodded, and touched the shoulder of the next, and so on until each was aware of the approaching sentry. The clippers continued clipping. When they had made enough of a seam, they pulled back into the tall grass of the outer yard, spread out, and settled down to wait. He would pass, and in time he did. Once he was moving away from them, they approached the fence again, and a pair of men pulled apart the chain-link wings and held them for the rest to crawl through. Once all were in, they set the chain-link back in place and wired it near the ground, so that it would pass casual scrutiny. Then they pushed forward toward the structures of the power plant.

This facility had been taken during the invasion and now was serving additional duties, one of which, if Sing’s powers of aggregation and collation proved out, was of particular interest to them. They even had a sense of in which building their prize would be found, if it would be found. There would be no entering by the doors, though. While it was something of a third-world facility, the compound still boasted sound security measures, including robust locks, and they had not had enough time to let the Agency do the leg work of duplicating the keycards and ferreting out the punch-code combinations in use here. Furthermore, there were the better part of two companies’ worth of men garrisoned here, enemy soldiers, and the active entrances were well-observed. The detachment had resolved, after reviewing satellite and similar photography, to climb to the roof of and cut their way into the target building. First things first, though.

They made their way along the edge of the compound as quickly as the need for silence allowed, and Constantine broke off with a companion to clean up his mess. They climbed up into the watchtower—a wooden, almost makeshift structure, no doubt erected recently—and collected the dead man and his personal effects, especially his radio. They pushed him out of the tower, descended after him, and picked up his corpse. He would have to go with them until they found a good place to stash his mortal remains.

From there they progressed into the facility. It was a campus, the size of a large university or a small town and with almost as many buildings, some little larger than trailers, others towering like airplane hangars or factories. They could see additional sentries about, marked by the flicking cones of their lights, and they could of course see the great swaths of territory illuminated clear as day by flood lights and search lights. Occasionally voices spoke through their stolen radio in a language Constantine did not understand. A couple of the TF operators was a specialist in the local tongues, and one of those carried the radio in case a reply was needed, but they had waited until the tower guard had completed a check-in before killing him, so they had time.

Constantine huffed. A hundred and eighty pounds he judged the literal dead weight over his shoulders, and nothing was more troublesome to carry than a dead body. They were heavy, they were hard to keep a grip on, and they flopped about as if they were ever trying to slither away. When the team finally found a collection of large air conditioning units behind which they could hide him, Constantine whispered a prayer of thanks, dumped him off there in the shadows, and then began massaging the cramps out of his hands and shoulders as he jogged to catch up to the team.

Eventually they reached the building which was their target, the men responsible for the grappling lines tossed them up to the roof, and they climbed. Once again, Constantine found himself doing something that in theory he and his colleagues could do, but which in reality was more the domain of cinema. Good times, he thought, as he pulled himself onto the top of the warehouse. Two men were already working on a skylight, prying it open. They anchored rappelling lines there on the roof and then, two by two, with their companions providing cover, they descended into the building.

Most of them flipped up their NODs, for all the lights were on inside. Even so, the catwalks onto which they descended were empty. This facility never fully slept, but at night it operated on a skeleton crew—now augmented by a night-watch of guards to oversee the technicians and insure against sabotage or insurrection. The detachment swept along the empty catwalks and descended toward a control room, not because they had planned it so (for they had no prior knowledge of the warehouse’s interior) but simply because the team leader had surveyed their surroundings and gestured. This warehouse served several duties, housing some machinery of the plant’s operations but also providing storage for equipment and supplies. Much of the storage space had been usurped by the invaders and was now given over to sheltering vehicles, crates, pallets, and all manner of military logistics cargo. The elevated control room to which they proceeded overlooked this storage area, which made it a good place to start. The point man opened the door, and the next man shot the military guard recumbent in a chair at the far end of the little room. Put-put-put went the operator’s pistol, and little holes appeared in the guard’s face. He was dead before he ever understood what was happening. There was just a little blood on the wall behind him, where one of the bullets had succeeded in exiting the rear of his skull.

The technician who also occupied the room looked very surprised as the shooter pulled him from his chair and threw him onto the floor upon his face. With that, the control room was secure. Constantine waited outside while several men examined the equipment inside, and one of the linguistic specialists held a quiet conversation with their captive.

Constantine took this time to look down at the storage area. There would almost certainly be guards there as well, but if there were, he could not see them from here. That was okay; Constantine waited, as several others were doing now, spacing themselves out about the catwalks and surveying the area below. Eventually, Constantine heard another snap of a suppressed rimfire pistol, and then the remainder of the team emerged from the control room. The team leader motioned a circle over his head, and they consolidated for a quiet conference. It was almost strange to hear their voices. Again, he was reminded of how much his own unit needed to work on that skill, of operating without a spoken word. Their discussion was over in a moment, and then they began to spread out. Several team members traversed the catwalks again with the very quiet bolt-action rifles. Constantine handed his off to one of these overwatch personnel, and then he followed the rest down to the ground floor. They crept amongst the stacked pallets and cargo containers, the stored trucks, forklifts, and other clutter, and Constantine focused on his footwork, ensuring that each time his boot touched the ground it did so gently, noiselessly.

A couple of clicks sounded in his earpiece, as of a radio transmit button being squeezed and released by someone on the channel. The men ahead of him paused, and he paused. They lowered their goggles again. In this well-lit interior, the image in the goggles was very bright, almost washed out even on the lowest gain setting, but it was workable, and it allowed them to see the powerful near-infrared laser being shined down from above toward a place just out of sight beyond the crates. The beam was ever so faintly visible, but far more visible was the diffuse glow of light reflecting up on the walls and objects around the concealed grotto ahead. Somewhere in there, the beam was landing as an intensely bright spot, so bright that it would be almost instantly damaging to the naked eye—which was a strange thought considering that it would also be invisible to the naked eye.

The team leader held up his hand. The beam turned off, and then turned on again three times in sequence, each time at a slightly different angle. Then it went dark. The team leader lowered his hand and raised his goggles, and the rest of the ground team did likewise. They held their position for a moment, waiting, but the overwatch personnel reported nothing further. On a silent hand signal, they resumed their forward progress toward the area which had been highlighted for them. They found it, and just before they found it they heard a flurry of dull, small impacts. They streamed out from among the crates and covered their sectors, several of them firing their quiet pistols into the seated guards who were already under assault from above. It was over in a moment, all three enemy personnel brought low by the fusillade.

This was how Special Operations won, against all apparent odds: they made sure that in truth the odds were entirely on their side. Here was a place where they were, technically, terribly outnumbered and outgunned, but here was a place where no one expected an attack, much less an attack from within. Of those terrifying numbers, almost all were asleep, and the rest were focused outward, or were in places like these, cozy interior stations where their greatest concern (or so they thought) lay in finding ways to stay awake.

A few of the team moved on past the now abandoned card game to cover the warehouse entrance, while the rest focused on removing the bodies. If people had to be eliminated, let them go missing rather than immediately be found dead. When that was done, they began searching the containers.

It did not take long to identify the crates that were most securely locked. It took longer to open them. Once the first lid finally went up, they knew they had found what they sought. After staring down at it for a moment, one of them keyed his push-to-talk.

“Possible jackpot,” he said, so softly as to be barely audible to the man next to him. Others converged on them. Constantine approached the box and looked down into it.

“Well?” asked the team leader.

“This is not what I saw,” said Constantine, “but I think it’s related.”

Several began lifting it from the box while another produced a camera and documented their work from every angle. It was undoubtedly a suit, albeit bulky and heavy. Its external surface was faceted, a complex conglomeration of irregular polygons. The substance of that outer skin was difficult to classify; it was hard, yet seemed almost textile in nature, and its coloring was a subtle camouflage pattern, an irregular fractal in shades of gray. Under this external paneling, dictating its contours from beneath, lay presumably mechanical structures which imparted a form like overwrought musculature. The shape of it bulged with suggestions of actuators along the shoulders, and across the bend of the elbow between the upper and lower arm, lateral and medial to the joint, and likewise in the legs and hips. These enshrouded mechanisms made the arms appear relatively short and burly, gorilla-like, and the hands almost comically small. The suit’s torso was likewise disproportionately barrel-chested and thick around the waist, no doubt allowing not just for supportive and mechanical structures but also for ancillary systems and controlling electronics. It had a hunch to its back, a hump of volume expanding up toward the shoulders, containing what mechanisms they could not begin to guess. Perhaps a battery or generator. The legs were thick, with similarly extreme contours covering muscle-like actuators, and the boots, unlike the gloves, were huge and in keeping with the burly proportions of the rest of the suit. The helmet seemed too large for a human head, but when they examined its interior, they found that its cranial cavity was human-sized, and the rest of its bulk apparently filled with electronics and devices. The helmet was heavy, too, but they could see where it fitted into supports upon the suit’s shoulders which would bear most of its weight.

“It’s definitely a powered armor of some sort,” observed one of the men. Another found the catch which unlocked a panel on the suit’s chest. The panel was hinged along its bottom edge and opened much like their own chest-mounted tablets, revealing what was surely a display screen, albeit currently dark.

“You’re sure this is not what you encountered?” asked the team leader.

“Absolutely,” said Constantine. “The proportions aren’t the same. This is much bulkier. The thing I saw… I mean, we’re operating under the assumption it was a suit, but it wasn’t heavy like this, and…” He exhaled. How to put it? “This is obviously a suit. That thing, honestly, didn’t feel like a guy in a suit. You kind of have to be there, but it felt like a fucking wraith. Not a machine, but not a living thing either. It makes your gut turn over just looking at it. This just looks like a lot of robotics you could put a man inside of.”

“So are we SOL, here?” asked another. “Is this a bust, or what?”

“No,” said the team leader. “We came looking for a powered armor suit, and we found it. This fits the intel.” The Agency had collected, and Sing had collated, multiple reports of encounters by local resistance fighters during the invasion that loosely matched what Constantine and Melody Ritter had witnessed—big, fast, adaptively camouflaged—but with consistent differences that had been a nagging source of doubt for Sing. If these reports had seemed a little more grounded—still terrifying, but less supernatural—then here was the reason: A new combat suit did exist, was appearing here and there on the battlefield, and was a model of extremely advanced robotics. It just was not of the kind Constantine had witnessed.

“Yeah, and the fact remains,” he added, “nobody should have something like this, yet. Sing was clear about that. Nobody’s got this level of tech working practically—or at least, they didn’t a few months ago. It’s not what I saw, but it’s jackpot as far as we’re concerned.”

“All right. That just leaves the question of how we can exploit it. There’s no way we can carry this thing out of here. It’s gotta weigh almost six hundred pounds.”

“We’ve got the photos.”

“And we can get pieces of it out. Take the helmet, some of the mechanics. Get some internal photos, too.”

“Can we get it turned on? Just walk it out under its own power?”

All eyes went to the man who had voiced the idea, and then all eyes went to the suit.

“Well, if it’s legitimately designed for combat, then it’d be designed to be idiot-proof.”

“The only question would be fuel. It’s gotta run on something. If it’s not fueled up, I don’t know how we’d go about getting it fueled up. Or recharged, or whatever it takes.”

The team leader nodded. “All right. See if you can figure it out. At least see if you can power it on. Keep taking photos, get whatever you can on it. We’ll set exfil posture while you work. Not a lot of time left, so work fast. Zero-three—” It seemed a little extreme to Constantine, but Task Force never used names during an op, even in seemingly private or secure settings. 03 was Constantine’s call-sign for this mission. The team leader eyed him. “—you’re here in case your previous encounters with this shit give you some insights or something. Take another look at this thing, and keep looking around while we work. Anything that catches your eye, get photographs and sketches at a minimum.” Their sketch-man was already hard at work making renderings of the suit and of the context in which it had been found.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Constantine nodded. The team leader moved on. “Exploit team, get those other crates open, the ones like this one. See if they contain more suits.”

The exploit team worked at a feverish pace. Photographs. Sketches. The opening of the remaining crates which were like in appearance and security to the one that had given up its strange artifact. Constantine helped where a way to help was obvious, but otherwise he held back, looking over everything. They did find two more suits, and then in another crate several heavy weapons which looked to be modifications of conventional systems—light machineguns, automatic grenade launchers, and one which looked to be a rifle or cannon in a caliber thicker than his thumb. It was clear by their customized controls and electronic add-ons, and by the similar packaging, that they were of a set with the suits.

“God damn,” observed one of the men quietly as they documented the arsenal.

A sudden scrambling drew their attention, and Constantine looked in time to see the first armor stand up. The two men who had been working on it had jumped back in a fright, and with cause, for the way it pushed itself to its feet was uncannily human. Several rifles came up, directed at it, but once it was upright it became still again.

The men who had activated it looked somewhat sheepish as they also recovered their feet and gave thumbs up. The team leader motioned that all was clear, and the rest of the team relaxed.

Constantine walked over to them.

“Well, we turned it on,” said one of the two.

“Nice,” said Constantine.

“Can you work it?”

“I think so,” said the other, touching options on the suit’s now active tablet screen. “Menus seem pretty simple.”

“Good. See if you can figure out its fuel state. And how far it can go on a tank. We can’t assume it’s cross-country capable. How do you get into it?”

The man at the screen grinned and touched a button, and before their eyes the upper portion of the torso split open, back from front. The operator’s grin faded a little. “Huh,” he said. “I guess you’re supposed to climb in from the top. Seems awkward.”

“Figure it out. There’s no good way to get a truck out of here.”

“Roger.”

The team leader stepped aside, looking over the other team members who were at work at various tasks, including the laying of explosives. Constantine knew him little, as he, like the others, had not made a friend of Constantine, but Constantine could guess what the man was thinking now. They had an incredible prize, intact, begging for recovery, but the mission profile offered them no feasible way to recover it. If the armor could not walk out under its own power, they would have to leave it. Even if it could walk to the border, there were other considerations. Outside the door were hundreds of well-armed soldiers who would hunt them mercilessly if it became evident that they had stolen this. Was there any path from here with that thing in tow which did not get them all killed, or worse?

“Oh, shit!” said one of the men, a quiet exclamation. They never spoke loudly, even when they spoke. Constantine turned his eyes to the suit, standing there stock still and headless, and he saw what had drawn the reaction: it had changed colors. Its skin was now a boxy pattern of grays, browns, and greens that roughly echoed the clutter of stored cargo around it.

“I’ll be damned,” said the team leader. “That’s pretty good.” He looked over at Constantine, who just shook his head.

“You should see the real thing, sometime.”

They worked on, and Constantine continued in his assigned role as the floater, surveying everything they found in hopes of some insight only his past experience could provide. He had none, though, other than that he had already given: that this thing, for all its technical marvel, was a poor substitute for “the real thing.”

What did that mean for the real thing? Was it just a suit, like they had originally wanted to believe? Or was it something more? This was a suit years—maybe decades—beyond what they would have declared the state of the art, yet it could not be said even to be in the same league as the thing which had killed SA Raines.

Constantine was standing by, feeling somewhat at loose ends, when one of the men working on the suit walked over to the team leader and conferred quietly. The team leader nodded and said something in return, and then approached Constantine. “Looks like the suit’s got some kind of transponder they can’t turn off. We’ll have to figure out how to disable it if we want to take it with us.

Any ideas?”

“Not really,” said Constantine.

The team leader nodded. Again, Constantine could guess his thoughts: “Why did we even bring this guy?” Mentally, Constantine shrugged. “Can’t help ya, man,” he replied in the imaginary conversation. They only locked eyes for a moment, but most of the content was delivered. Then the team leader turned and walked back to the suit. One of his men was even then climbing out the top. The suit was not only clever enough to stand on its own, but clever enough to shift its weight and keep its balance with a man climbing on it. Uncanny was the word.

“Yeah, someone else wants to take a look, feel free,” said the man who had been poking through the suit’s operating system. “I can’t find any way to turn off location reporting system from the suit’s controls. It shows that it’s operating, and lets you change codes, but it doesn’t turn off.”

“I can see that,” said the team leader. “If this is their new ace in the hole, they’re going to want to keep tabs on it.”

“Ties our hands a bit.”

“’Fraid it does. You think it’s already sent an alert to someone?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. I think it’s something they use for battle tracking. Once they know it’s missing, though…”

“Either way, let’s shut it down. Get it back over near the crate, and set charges on all of those crates. Send up the data you’ve got and see if you can bring a couple of pieces, like the helmet, for the analysts.”

“Already workin’ it.”

The team leader nodded and keyed his microphone. “Net call. Prepare for exfil. We’re going out the way we came in.” He paused, glancing at the suit again as it went dark, and then added, “Possibly compromised.”

The exploitation team cleaned up and packed up quickly, and began consolidating toward the staircase that would take them back to the catwalks above. The team leader personally directed a few final details. Just as the last of them reached the stairs, an alarm siren began howling outside.

The team leader gestured for them to press ahead, and he unslung his automatic rifle. The rest did likewise as they approached the ropes still hanging from the skylight. Down there in the storage area, hidden from their current vantage, there came a sharp, reverberating bang. The first of their claymore mines had gone off by the main entrance. Setting that boobytrap was a gamble, drawing attention to the building but delaying investigation. The men climbed their ropes as fast as they had ever climbed ropes.

Constantine emerged from the skylight in his turn, and he could hear below him the voices of enemy personnel tentatively working their way into the warehouse. Another sharp concussion told of the second claymore firing. The sky was still a field of black and stars, but now the air was filled with noise. Alarm claxons continued to blare from several directions, and over that they could hear the shouts of men and the whine of vehicle engines.

Someone anchored a rope and tossed its length off the back of the warehouse roof, and one after another they began a hasty rappel to the ground—perhaps too hasty, for one man twisted his ankle and another fell onto two of his companions. Constantine counted himself lucky not to have broken a leg. They went as directly as they could away from the bulk of the noise through the maze of buildings, goggles down, rifles in hand, the IR lasers on those rifles dancing and flicking as they ran.

It was too much to ask that his team might escape without taking contact. The enemy were simply too many. They could stage a full assault on the supposedly occupied warehouse and still send a hundred men filtering through the compound with lights and guns, hunting for any sign of an intruder. As the detachment sprinted toward the perimeter, they could see those searching lights over their shoulders, a squad here, a platoon there, coming on like a tidal wave. Rounding a corner, they came face to face with one such squad at a distance of perhaps fifty yards, down the length of an artificial canyon between two structures. The enemy’s rifles roared and flashed, and the detachment responded in kind, their suppressed weapons snapping. It was a brief firefight, men falling out of the enemy force quickly. They had not anticipated the ferocity of their prey. Presently, the surviving guards fell back, and Constantine’s companions used that excuse to break contact, picking a different path rather than pressing into resistance.

Let it remain so easy, prayed Constantine, but it would not. The detachment passed under an enclosed footbridge and several elevated pipes and sprinted across a lawn into another urban canyon. There they hugged the wall on one side, moving through the shadows behind a collection of small domed tank structures. They could hear more vehicles, maneuvering now around the perimeter of the compound. The enemy was not sure exactly where they were nor what their vector, and so was acting to seal the entire campus as best they could with their numbers.

“Blow the charges,” transmitted the team leader. A moment later they heard a crackling of immense magnitude, and a split second after that they felt the breeze produced by the combined effect of their explosives. A few glanced back, including Constantine, and saw the dust cloud—drawn in their goggles in shades of gray, lit brightest on its underside by the searchlights on the ground around it—as it ballooned over the skyline behind them.

“Has the data gone through?” the team leader asked over the net. They could hear in his speech that he was as winded as the rest of them, struggling to speak as he ran.

“Working it,” replied another voice, similarly challenged. The exploit team had consolidated all of their photos—including photos of the hand-drawn sketches—onto a tablet which, connected through their satellite radio, could transmit the bundle to headquarters, but the comms operator had been forced to wait until they were outside for clear line of sight to the satellite, and the urban canyon effect was further hindering his ability to maintain a lock. “Need open ground.”

“Copy.”

They found it, and with it several trucks bearing down across it from the right. Spread out before them was the worst sort of open ground, a small airfield—meaning where it was not flatly paved it was well mowed. The pickup trucks they heard before they saw, for all three were driving without headlights or floodlights, barreling in column down a taxiway parallel to one of the runways. The only illumination aboard any of them consisted of clusters of ever so faint laser beams pointed this way and that from their beds.

The detachment broke left, sprinting hard toward the hangars in hopes of keeping separation between themselves and the trucks and thereby delaying detection, but even as they did so they knew it was probably futile. Sure enough, the three trucks turned off of the taxiway and toward them, and they saw the beams of the IR lasers swinging in their direction. The enemy had NVDs.

“Go dark,” commanded the team leader. “Smoke.”

They killed all of their own near-infrared illumination, including the aiming lasers on their weapons, and as the trucks turned to parallel them, and they heard the first rounds snapping through the air around them, they threw smoke grenades toward their attackers. It took several long seconds for the smoke screen to build, and they endured that span by taking pot-shots at the trucks while they continued their desperate run for the cover of the hangars, listening to the sharp, ear-ringing cracks of supersonic rifle bullets passing close by through the air. Eventually the smoke built to such a volume that they could see the enemy’s lasers as bright lines cutting through it, and the sound of passing bullets became less deafening as the accuracy of the enemy’s fire decreased. The trucks were mobile, however, and simply revved their engines and accelerated clear of the smoke screen.

“Smoke,” said the team leader again, and again a small volley of smoke grenades went tumbling through the air. Constantine guessed they had about one more such volley in their collective inventory. He had kept hold of his two. Accurate fire was once again snapping in the air around him, and he once again felt it imperative to respond, sending a burst of rounds through the billowing cloud toward the source of the white beams in the trucks. Ahead of him, a man went down, rolled, stumbled, and was dragged up by the next man behind him. They ran on, but slower, and Constantine caught up to them, reaching around the injured man’s back from the left and grabbing hold of his belt on his right side. The casualty, supported thus by two comrades, stumbled on with them while firing back over their shoulders at the attacking trucks.

The pickup trucks once again blasted through the smoke and bore ahead of the Task Force det, trying to cut them off, but the enemy had to balance that against the withering hail of return fire which Task Force was able to deliver even on the run, once their targets were ahead of them rather than behind.

The trucks were easy to see and easy to hit for the men on foot, whereas the dark shapes running along the dark ground, now backlit by the clustered cultural lighting of the power plant, were difficult to shoot accurately from the beds of the bouncing, racing vehicles.

“Throw flares,” someone said over the radio, and Constantine realized it was a brilliant idea. The enemy—especially if their night vision devices were of an older generation, which was likely—would be “bloomed out” by intense light sources. The sparks of the flares would appear as bright suns surrounded by halos of light that washed out anything nearby.

“Do it. Away from us.”

Several men threw flares back, into the open grass behind them, and Constantine threw one of his toward the trucks. A bright light in the foreground could be just as troublesome as one in the background.

Either way, as long as they were within the enemy’s field of view but remote from Constantine and the men of Task Force Royal, they would have a screening effect.

The trucks completed their end run within a few seconds and reached the hangars ahead of the detachment just as the det reached the nearest corner of the nearest building. Constantine could see clearly, by the bouncing lasers and by the light of the flares which had landed near, the enemy soldiers dismounting.

“Bravo, peel right. Alpha, attack.”

The team leader was making his gamble, for all of their lives, on an assault into the ambush. Half of the Task Force team ceased fire and broke right, into the open dark, while the remainder, including Constantine, began advancing from their hangar corner. They used cover where they could but just as often simply knelt or dropped prone for a moment to provide covering fire while others pushed past them, closing in on the parked trucks under a continuous fusillade of bullets.

Aggression was worth a great deal in combat. The trucks had parked near the hangars with an open line of fire to their prey, but they were highlighted targets, and the moment they stopped hot lead tore into them mercilessly. The enemy dismounted away from the direction of contact and began seeking cover of their own. They tried to return fire, but their opponents were still dark, and largely invisible now in a world of blooming green stars and suns and drifting smoke. They had lost the initiative, and with it they had lost their advantage.

“Frag,” transmitted someone who had gotten close enough to lob an effective grenade. Constantine flattened out. There was only open ground between the detachment and the enemy, now, aside from the hangar doors on their left, and he did not want to eat fragmentation from a friendly explosive. A few seconds later the grenade detonated near one of the trucks with a sharp thump, and Constantine pushed himself to his feet and grabbed the injured man he had been helping.

Constantine’s shooting was suppressive at best. Without the use of his weapon-mounted lasers for aiming, the only way he could take sighted fire was to align his rifle’s holographic sight in front of one of the tubes of his goggles, which was the better part of impossible while shooting one-handed with his left hand and supporting a casualty with his right, all on the move. Those with two hands free, though, were doing good work. Anyone who showed his face or limbs or gut went down. The detachment did not bother with center-mass this night; an enemy wearing NODs and carrying laser-equipped rifles was also surely armored with plates fore and aft. Task Force shot for the pelvis, the better to ground a man, to immobilize him, before finishing him with rounds to the face and neck.

“Bravo set.”

“Bravo, covering fire.”

A new hailstorm of snapping and cracking suppressed rifle fire opened from somewhere in the dark ahead and to the right, and the team leader raised his hand, signaling for Alpha to rush ahead.

Constantine flexed his right hand, locking down on his wounded comrade’s belt with a grip that would not fail short of death, and dredged up from inside himself another reserve of strength for his legs, forcing himself forward. His body was shaking. “You can always do one more,” was the mantra in his mind. On a typical gym day, he would have been done two sets ago, two sprints ago, but there were typical gym days and then there were endurance days, days when you got angry, when you competed with the other guys and at the same time held together with them, collectively refusing to quit until you’d done just one more set, one more sprint, one more round. Those days in the gym were training for days like these, training for the mind as much as the body, to convince yourself that you could always do one more.

They reached the nearest truck, the one that had borne the brunt of the grenade. Constantine could see even on his goggles, thanks to the light of the flares around him, the many tiny holes that had been torn through it by the grenade’s lethal fragmentation.

“Bravo, cease fire, continue the pivot west.” The team leader was using his radio, but he was being judicious. They all knew that there was a chance the enemy could “DF” their radio emissions—“direction-find,” meaning locate them if they transmitted excessively (not that it mattered at this moment, but they still hoped to break contact and escape from this fight)—and just as dangerous was the chance that the enemy might have communications-jamming equipment as well, which they might use if they isolated the team’s frequency.

The casualty Constantine had been supporting grabbed hold of the truck to bear his weight, freeing Constantine to continue to advance with several others. Constantine ducked down, rolling on his side to look underneath the vehicles. He saw some legs, those of enemies who were retreating into the space between two hangars southward, and once he found the reticle of his sight in his goggles’ view, he opened fire. He was still shooting left-handed, but he had two hands on his rifle now and a steady position, and he was able to drop one enemy to the ground and pump several more rounds into the man’s exposed anatomy. It was an ugly way to die, being shot essentially from below, as the man had fallen away from Constantine and Constantine was shooting into him through his legs and into his groin. Constantine kept shooting him until he stopped moving and then shifted fire to chase another set of legs out of view. His rifle locked open just as his latest target escaped. He rolled onto his back, exchanged magazines, and then jumped up and continued on with the rest.

“Working truck,” said someone on the radio.

“Take it,” said the team leader immediately. “Break contact west.”

Two trucks still worked, as it turned out, and both the detachment commandeered. As they backed away from the buildings and turned westward, Constantine threw himself into the bed of the nearer.

“Net call. Mount and count off. One.”

There was a moment’s delay, and then another voice said, “Two.”

“Three,” transmitted Constantine immediately.

“Four.”

“Five.”

Constantine laid his rifle over the bed rail as men clambered in around him and reported themselves. The shooting had stopped. There was no feeling quite like realizing the shooting had stopped. He could see additional enemy vehicles in the distance, closing on the airfield.

“Ten.”

“Eleven is down. Seven has him.”

“Twelve.”

“Go. West, to the woods.”

The truck under Constantine lurched and took off with a growl. He could see the other truck just ahead. They raced across the airfield, all lights out, accelerating and accelerating until both vehicles were topped out, bouncing and occasionally taking air as they traversed the not-quite-graded terrain. Constantine searched the darkness ahead for the perimeter fences. He could see a watch tower off to the right at some distance, and another to the left even more remote, but the fences themselves would be almost impossible to spot on a moonless night like this without supplemental illumination, and Constantine did not particularly care to be caught by surprise—

“BRACE!”

Every man in the truck bed curled into a fetal ball, including Constantine, just as the lead truck struck chain link. The second truck plowed in beside the first a fraction of a second later, and Constantine felt himself thrown forward into the other bodies. It was a soft crash, but it was a crash nonetheless, with all the screeching of metal and smashing of glass that a crash entailed, and then Constantine felt himself thrown back toward the tailgate, and everything went still.

“Over the top,” said someone’s voice close at hand—live, rather than over the radio. “Watch the razor wire.”

Constantine pushed himself up. By some miracle his goggles were still working; apparently they really did build them for combat. He looked around and saw what had happened: both trucks had literally plowed into the first perimeter chain-link fence, uprooting a great section of it and stretching it out across the grass like an elastic net before it managed to stop them. The chain-link web had wrapped around both vehicles, smashing some of their windows and binding up in their mirrors, fenders, and wheels. The razor-wire coils along the top of the fence had stretched as well, but they had a lot more slack to offer and now lay over the tops of the trucks, still presenting a formidable obstacle.

Constantine was the first on his feet, and as he looked at the razor-wire coils, suddenly he had an idea—albeit perhaps the craziest of his life. Raising his arms out of the way, he threw his body down on wire strands, crushing them against the roof of the pickup truck with his armor vest.

“Go!” he shouted. “Climb over me!”

The rest of the men in the truck did not hesitate. Constantine was not sure how he felt about that.

“Old school,” observed someone.

Constantine also was not sure how he would go about getting himself off and through the wire now without tangling himself in it and being cut to ribbons. “One problem at a time,” he thought as he felt one man after another scramble over his back and down the hood of the truck. Suddenly, he saw light flooding the area around him. A rifle snapped once, twice, thrice, and the light went away.

A person climbing over him said, “Last man,” and then scrambled away.

“Roll over,” said another voice near his face. “On your back.”

He did as instructed and felt some of the razors bind to his vest, but several hands reached in and freed him. He was now lying with his back across the worst of the coils. Constantine felt those same helping hands clamp down on his shoulders, and the man standing over him said, “Legs. Come on, legs up.”

As he threw his knees up to his chin, he felt the other men grab ahold of his legs, and he understood their plan. They took him by the arms and legs and lifted him like a sack, throwing him down the hood of the truck and clear of the razor-wire. He struck the hood, tumbled, hit the ground, and decided it could have been worse. One strand of wire had latched onto his gear, but several more of the team caught him and pried it loose, and then they lifted him up and set him on his feet.

“Go!”

He joined them on the run. They had two casualties with them, but one was on his feet and the other was conscious, carried between two of his comrades. They reached the outer fence ahead of Bravo squad.

“Anyone got bolt cutters?” asked one.

“Fuck, no,” said another. Of course not. That would be too easy.

“Y’do what you gotta do,” said a third, stepping up to the fence with his rifle. He placed the muzzle of his suppressor against a wire and fired. Out here, in the open, the sonic crack of the bullet mostly passed away from them or was absorbed into the soft, grassy earth, so the shot was not terribly loud. The wire severed cleanly.

He moved to the next wire, and the next, using his weapon like a chemically powered shear, while others held the fence links still. Bravo squad joined them, bringing an actual set of bolt cutters and starting work adjacent to the man and his rifle, snipping wires laterally along the bottom, until between them they had made a triangular flap big enough for a fighter to worm through with his kit. The first to go through held it open for the rest, and they followed, tossing and dragging their wounded.

They ran on, toward the trees now not too far away, and soon were amongst them. The team leader stood aside, counting them as they ran past him and whispering to each, “Circle up. Circle up.” Some thirty yards into the woods, they consolidated, kneeling or leaning against trees to catch their breath.

“Eleven’s gone,” said the man who had been carrying him.

“All right,” said the team leader. “Strip him and let’s go. Anyone else not ambulatory?”

“Me,” said the operator whom Constantine had earlier been carrying.

“You’re with me. I need one other.”

Another team member raised his hand, and the team leader nodded. “We bring up the rear. Zero five, you’ll go for HLZ Nightingale with the goods. Everyone else evade as fragged. You still have about two hours until daylight to reach a town and source vehicles. Questions?”

There were none. 05 was carrying the stolen helmet and tablet and a few other pieces from the suit they had found, so he and his partner would be extracted by helicopter if they could make their way near enough to the border. The dead man, 11, by now had been relieved of his weapon, his night vision goggles, his electronics—anything that might provide too firm a clue to his nationality. A few months from now, a funeral would be held over an empty coffin, and an anonymous star would be carved into a marble wall, but for the time being there was still a long road ahead of the team. It very much remained to be seen whether only one coffin would be buried, only one star carved.

When the team reached woods’ end, they broke up into pairs and separated. Each pair henceforth were on their own, to find, steal, or buy vehicles, disguises, and any other supplies they needed as they evaded cross-country toward one or another exfil option. There were border checkpoints along a couple of highways where, if they could connive their way past the enemy’s security forces, the right code word to the right Customs agent would see them safely admitted into the neighboring country. There were pre-briefed points along the border in the countryside as well, where border patrols on the enemy side were less frequent and support had been arranged and was waiting on the other. And, of course, there were various allied consulates and embassies operating in the major cities despite the occupation.

Constantine was paired with 07, and together they resolved to head north and evade for another day before engaging with the local populace. They set out as the glow of dawn was turning blue in the east.