There’s a pause, and when the voice comes on again, the man sounds almost gentle.
“NCO in charge, contact me on the nearest security panel when you are ready to discuss your surrender. There’s no shame in wanting to stay alive, you know.”
Jackson looks back at her squad, hunkered down behind concrete benches and planters with rifles at the ready. Most of them look like they’re in a death row cell and they can hear the footsteps of the execution delegation. They’re all privates, most of them green second- and third-class, and a pair of more seasoned first-classers that have been in the TA and doing combat drops for a little over a year. Jackson wishes she had her regular squad with her. If she is going to bite it on this drop, she’d rather be with Hansen, Baker, Priest, and the others. Her own squad would cause that smooth-talking OPFOR commander a much bigger headache than this squad of green kids. And with Sergeant Fallon here, the other team would be in deep shit.
But she doesn’t have her own squad, just these eight scared privates.
“What are we going to do?” Private Kelly asks her. Kelly is a young woman who looks like she just barely made the height and weight minimum for infantry. She’s the only other female in the squad.
Jackson ponders her reply for a moment. Of course, there’s no real choice, not for her. If Sergeant Fallon were here, she would have potted the comms console with her rifle the second the other guy mentioned surrender.
“We’re Territorial Army,” Jackson says. “We do our jobs, Private Kelly.”
She looks over to the closest elevator bank.
“Kelly, Pearson, cover that. Anyone steps out with a gun, you punch their ticket. No warnings.”
Kelly and Pearson look at each other, then obey. They move up to a cluster of planters ahead and train their rifles on the elevator doors.
“Everyone turn off your TacLink,” Jackson orders. With their data links compromised, they’ll have to go the old-fashioned way, voice and hand signals. Not having that almost omniscient TacLink awareness is a huge disadvantage, but letting the enemy—whoever they are—see through the squad’s eyes would be an even bigger one.
Jackson looks around for a way off this floor that doesn’t involve a ride in a computer-controlled elevator. There are staircases, but they’re at the corners of the floor, reachable only through corridors that can be sealed off piecemeal remotely by the security office. And they can’t all rappel down to the atrium ninety-nine floors below. They would have been better off in the staircase back under the roof.
Jackson curses herself for that tactical blunder. She led them in here, and now there’s no way out.
Then there’s movement to her side. Across the chasm of the central core, on the other side of the gallery, armed civilians are coming out of hallways and quickly taking cover in the gallery. There are two layers of polyplast security barrier between Jackson’s squad and these armed civvies, so she can’t engage. She signals her squad to take up covering positions and watches the force across the chasm as they take their own cover behind planters and low walls, every bit as efficiently as her own squad. There are a lot of them—three, four squads, and more coming out of the shadows of the hallways beyond, all converging on the gallery. Jackson knows her squad can’t take on that many, not in the confines of this rat maze.
“Last chance,” the enemy commander’s voice comes over the public address system. “Surrender your weapons, or we’ll come and take them.”
Across the core, a lot of rifles are aimed in Jackson’s direction now, and a lot of them look like military hardware.
But they don’t have battle armor, Jackson thinks.
None of the civvies have the sealed armor to go with those stolen military rifles, and she wants to bet they’re a little short on augmentation too, because nobody over there seems to be wearing a helmet.
“Launchers,” she tells her squad in a low voice. “All gas grenades. Lob ‘em over the barrier and onto the other side. Give me a volley on my mark.”
Her squad obeys. They take buckshot shells out of launchers and replace them with riot gas canisters. Kelly almost fumbles her reload, then readies her grenade launcher and looks at Jackson with wide, fearful eyes.
“Left side shoots left, right shoots right,” Jackson orders. “Kelly, shoot straight across with me. On three. Two. One. Fire in the hole!”
Nine launchers thump in a short, stuttering drumroll. Two of the gas grenades clatter against the polyplast barrier on the other side of the chasm and careen off, then fall down into the core spewing smoke. The other seven grenades drop into the gallery space beyond and burst apart. Within a few seconds, the other side of the gallery is blanketed with riot gas.
To a trooper in sealed armor, a gas grenade is just a minor inconvenience. The helmet keeps out the chemicals, and the augmented vision from the sensors cuts through the smoke. To an unprotected civvie, however, it’s like getting your face doused with alcohol and set on fire.
Instantly, there are screams of anger and pain coming from the far side. Jackson can see people hunching over or dropping to their knees in the noxious white cloud her squad just conjured with their launchers.
“Flank and flush,” Jackson orders. “Southeast corner, doubletime.”
She rushes her squad to the corner of the gallery, then turns left to cover the stretch of garbage-strewn concrete that is the south side of the gallery. Then she’s at the southeast corner. She looks around the edge of the concrete retaining wall to see the armed civvies retching in the chem cloud. The stuff is pretty persistent, but it won’t keep them suppressed for more than a few minutes. Until then, they’re blind and in no shape for fighting.
Jackson draws first blood. In the mouth of a hallway ten yards in front of her, two of the armed civvies are still alert and on their feet, at the far edge of the chem cloud. They see her and raise their rifles. She shoots first, letting her computer select the burst length as she sweeps thecivvies with her muzzle and holds her trigger down. The M-66 pumps out two three-round bursts, and both civvies fall over. Their rifles clatter to the floor as they die silently.
When Jackson looks to her left again, the remaining civvies have retreated into the vestibules and hallways of the floor beyond the gallery again. She wishes she had some HE or frag grenades to bank off these walls and bounce after them, but the ammo loads for the mission were limited to nonlethal and buckshot for the launchers. Nobody anticipated having to use high explosives for a simple public safety sweep assist. The world seems to have gone nuts since last week.
She has never missed that heavy, unwieldy piece-of-shit MARS launcher more in her life. With armor-piercing rockets or thermobarics, she could crack these walls like eggshells, blast a hole into the exterior wall, radio the drop ship, get out of this mess.
“Back to the hallway,” she tells her troops and points at the wide main hallway on the south side. The fire-proof door isn’t down yet, and the main hallways lead straight to the main staircases. They rush over to the south side, trying to cover in all directions.
Just as they reach the mouth of the hallway, the elevator bank nearby chimes, and the doors open. Jackson and her squad are maybe fifteen meters away as the elevator disgorges a squad or more of civvies with weapons. They see her group and raise their guns just as Jackson’s squad bring up theirs.
She wants to stop time at that moment. She knows what is going to happen, but she’s powerless to avoid it. It’s that freeze frame of mental acuity when that trigger has been pulled and the striker is racing toward the primer of the cartridge. The civvie in the lead starts to shout something, but Jackson can’t understand it, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway.