The rooftops of the residence towers are official use only. There’s a landing pad for drop ships, and the access doors are controlled by the security office down in the basement of the tower. The entrance vestibule on the rooftop leads into a service area with its own express elevator. A platoon can walk out of their drop ship, onto the elevator, and out into the atrium at ground level in less than two minutes.
From the moment they leave the roof and go down into the service area underneath the roof, Jackson has a strange feeling about this call, a little nagging voice in the back of her head. The place isn’t restless enough to justify a company of TA. Something feels all wrong to her. Maybe Detroit has made her shell-shocked, paranoid even, but when she’s forced to pick between staff officer judgment and her own instincts, she knows which to pick.
“Hold on,” she tells her squad as they wait for their turn to take the elevator down to the atrium. The other three squads of the platoon are already down there, and there’s no gunfire, no distress calls, but that nagging voice in the back of Jackson’s head screams at her not to let her squad go on that elevator.
“Hunter 2, this is Hunter 22 Actual, do you copy?” she sends over the platoon channel. The Lieutenant doesn’t respond. She checks the TacLink, but there’s no status update for the first three squads of her platoon, all down in the secure area of the atrium by now. The short-range TacLink signal sometimes doesn’t have the pop to go through a hundred floors of reinforced concrete, but she should be getting at least something. Thirty troopers down there, and none of them in a spot to get a good signal?
“Something’s fishy,” she tells her squad. “We’re not taking the elevator. I’m checking in with Company.”
She walks to the door leading back to the rooftop. When she pushes the unlock button, the light flashes red. She tries again, gets the same result.
“What’s going on, Corporal?” one of her fire team leaders asks.
“It’s locked,” she says. “They locked it behind us. I can’t get on the roof to get better comms. Secure that emergency staircase over there.”
One of her troopers tries the door of the escape stairwell.
“It’s locked too.”
“Those are never locked from the inside,” she says. “Break that son of a bitch open.”
Two of her troopers take turns trying to kick down the stairwell door, but it’s a fireproof hatch with tamper-proof cladding, to prevent the residents from breaking into the maintenance spaces from the outside. They kick it a few times, but for all the good they’re doing, they might as well shoot spitballs at it.
“Kelly, Grenade launcher,” she says to one of her fire team leaders. “Load buckshot. Aim at the spot where the main lock meets the frame. Everyone else, back to the other door. Cover the elevator door.”
“What about the rooftop hatch?” Specialist Kelly asks.
“That’s ten centimeters of laminate,” Jackson replies. “Can’t blow our way through that one without blowing ourselves up with it. Now move it and get that stairwell access open.”
“What the fuck is going on?” one of the privates asks.
“Don’t know yet,” she says. “No comms, and they’ve locked us in remotely. You want to take that elevator down and find out for sure?”
“Negative,” the private says and eyes the elevator door.
Specialist Kelly chambers a buckshot round in her grenade launcher and walks over to the staircase door. The other troopers get out of her way with some haste.
“Fire in the hole,” Kelly announces.
Her rifle’s launcher barks its deep authoritative thunder. The sound reverberates in the small service area. The buckshot load from the oversized caseless 40mm shell punches into the lock and doorframe like a wrecking hammer. Kelly walks up to the door and gives it a sharp kick, and the heavy steel door pops out of its shattered lock and swings open.
“Where are we going, Corporal?” Kelly asks.
“The fuck away from here,” Jackson answers. “Get to the floors below. Reassess the situation. Try to get the rest of Company back on the radio. Now move your asses.”
They move down the stairwell to the floor below in tactical formation, rifles at the ready. Jackson can tell that some of the troopers think she’s being mental, but she’d rather err on the side of caution than find herself trapped in a steel box with her entire squad. After last week, anything seems possible.
The fire-proof door on the 100th floor only opens from the inside as well, but another buckshot round from Specialist Kelly’s grenade launcher takes care of the lock and half the frame. They file into the hallway beyond. There are apartment doors all along both walls of the hallway, but nobody sticks their heads out to see what’s going on, not even after the thunder from a low-pressure rifle grenade. The hallway terminates in a little foyer that links the four corridors on this part of the floor and provides a little common area. There are no residents around here either.
Jackson checks her datalink to tap into the local security network. All the apartments have bioscanners and explosives detectors, and any assisting TA squad usually has full access to that information when they do sweeps. You walk up to an apartment door, you can instantly see how many people are present, their security classification, and their arrest history. When Jackson tries the datalink at the next apartment door she passes, nothing comes up. It’s like the network for the entire building is out. She knows that can’t happen—it’s triple-redundant, and she should be able to get at least something from the wireless transmitters. It’s either deliberately turned off, or someone is solidly jamming all their data comms.
“Watch the corridor junctions,” Jackson cautions. “We’ll go to the central core, get line of sight to the atrium.”
None of this feels right. The building’s security office is supposed to link with them as soon as they are on the ground, keep them up to date, tell them where they’re needed. The rest of the platoon is supposed to be online, feeding their sensory data to her and the squad. This total radio silence is the strangest thing she has ever experienced on a drop, and it’s unnerving.
At the next corridor intersection, Jackson can see the open space of the building core past the hallway in front of them. Every central corridor on each floor lets out onto a gallery overlooking the big open space in the center of the tower. You can see right down to the atrium on the first floor. There’s a chest-high railing and another meter of polyplast barrier above that, to keep people from falling over the edge, or throwing each other. There’s a safety net, attached to the gallery of the tenth floor, but without the polyplast, the hood rats would make it a sport to jump into it on purpose. Some still do, barrier or not.
The squad is twenty meters from the gallery when a warning buzzer trills, and the fire door at the end of the corridor comes down and locks into place. Jackson whirls around to see the same event mirrored at the other end of the corridor, back where they had just entered the 100th floor a minute ago. The corridor is pitch dark for a moment. Then the red emergency lighting comes on.
“Visors down,” Jackson yells. “Go augmented. Spread out and stay sharp.”
She pops her own helmet visor into place and lets the computer adjust the optical input. The section of corridor sealed off by the fire doors is sixty or seventy meters long, but that’s not a lot of space for nine troopers to find cover if someone decides to hose them down with automatic fire. The infantry calls narrow indoor passages “death funnels”.