by K A Riley
I must’ve smiled a little at this thought because Wisp gives me a playful elbow to the arm and asks me what’s so funny.
“Nothing,” I tell her. “Just fantasizing about best-case scenarios.”
“Those are the best kind of scenarios to fantasize about,” Wisp whispers back to me through the dark.
Brohn crawls toward us and turns to sit next to me with his back against the low stone wall that curves around our little hiding place. His updated m4A4 carbine rifle with the attached M420 grenade launcher module rests on his lap. “Remember what we used to say back in the Valta whenever everything was going good?”
“Sure. ‘For now, at least.’”
“After today, we’re going to have to change that to ‘for now and forever, at least.’”
“I can live with that.”
“I think we all can,” Cardyn pipes in softly from the other side of Brohn, where he’s down on one knee redoing the laces on one of his boots, his HK416 assault rifle resting next to him on a patch of soft, wet grass.
“This is going to work,” I insist.
“Not that I disagree,” Brohn says, “but what makes you so sure?”
“Because if it doesn’t, we won’t get to use your awesome new ‘now and forever’ line. And that would be a terrible, terrible shame.”
Brohn stifles a low laugh with the back of his hand before reaching out to clip the strap shut on my leg holster. “Can’t have your gun slipping out mid-fight now, can we?”
I say, “Thanks,” and I’m just getting ready to remind everyone that we only have two minutes before we initiate our attack when I hear Wisp next to me mutter, “Uh oh,” and I curse myself for having upset the gods of war with my confidence and bravado.
“What’s wrong?”
Wisp points over to where a male figure is approaching us in a stealthy crouch through dark swirls of midnight fog. Ghost-like, he glides between two rows of trees lining a narrow footpath in the small, pitch-black park.
I get ready to raise my gun, but Wisp puts her hand on my forearm and shakes her head. “It’s okay. I know him.”
The man, dressed in a San Francisco police uniform, inches over and slides to a quiet, kneeling stop in front of Wisp.
“Kress. Brohn. Cardyn. Rain. Manthy,” Wisp whispers, pointing to us one at a time. “This is Captain Huang. He came over from the city’s Special Weapons and Tactics team.”
“It’s an honor to meet you,” he says under his breath, stuttering like a hyperventilating, over-enthusiastic groupie and shaking each of our hands in turn. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
While he stares at us for what feels like an hour and a half, I finally ask him under my breath if he’s here to stop us.
He shakes his head hard, his chins jiggling, and I worry for a second his head might fall clean off his neck. “No. The Major and Granden and I have been in touch over the past couple of months. All hush-hush and very unofficial, of course. And no. We’re not going to stop you. In fact, we’re here to help you.”
Captain Huang is a pear-shaped, stocky man, bald and flush with friendliness. He’s also rosy-cheeked, probably from scurrying all the way over here in the middle of the night under the noses of the Patriot Army. Squatting there in front of us in the dark, panting and sweating, he seems practically giddy.
“Thank you,” Wisp says, her voice quiet but clear. “When we talked a couple of weeks ago, you said you didn’t know if you had the support on the force.”
“We didn’t,” Huang says tipping his head toward me and my Conspiracy. “But then they got here. Anyway, word got around, and…well, consider Mission, Richmond, Park, and the Northern District Stations at your disposal. Ingleside and South are going to sit it out, but they won’t stand in your way.”
“You’re sure?”
“Don’t worry. Granden is out making the rounds as we speak. He’s got connections even above my pay-grade. He won’t let anyone sabotage your operation.”
Leaning in and whispering, Rain asks Captain Huang, “If you don’t mind my asking…why? I mean, why are you helping us? The Patriot Army is part of the government. And so are you.”
Captain Huang holds up a hand to cut her off. “Just because they call themselves ‘Patriots’ doesn’t make them Americans.”
Wisp holds up a finger for us to wait a second, taps her comm-link, and nods. “It’s time,” she says. “I’ll coordinate from here with Captain Huang. Granden is working with the local authorities as Huang says. I’m giving the go-ahead to the other nine teams right now. The rest of you know what to do.” Wisp’s thin black wristband gives a quick blink. “Now get going—this is it!”
On Wisp’s cue, my Conspiracy slips around to the side of the Armory where the two guards on duty have left their post to aid their fellow Patriots, who have just entered into in a furious gun battle with Team Bayview about fifty yards down the block.
On a rooftop on the far side of the street, Team Marina lays out a blitz of cover fire with their retrofitted McMillan Tac-50 2040 sniper rifles. A blizzard of bullets rains down, sending soldiers scattering for cover as the deadly slugs plunk huge divots into the surface of the street and along the Armory’s façade.
The deafening howl of emergency-alert klaxons from the Armory joins in with the rest of the escalating pandemonium. As we hoped, the diversions attract the Patriots’ attention everywhere except where we are. Despite the flashes from muzzle fire in the gun battle out front, the explosions from Team North Beach’s blaze-grenades, and the searing brightness of the Armory’s external security beacons, my team is amazingly and thankfully pretty much invisible.
In the confusion and under the cloud of dust and debris being kicked up, we slip easily up to the now-unguarded middle door on the east side of the building. Thanks to our feathered, flying spy, we know the combination they use on the input panel, and we know they never change it. Rain punches in the code, and, sure enough, the door unlocks and slides open.
Once inside, we skitter past an unmanned office, through a set of glass double-doors, and into a small supply room.
We all get Wisp’s voice in our heads telling us that Teams Golden Gate and Alcatraz are at the Munitions Depot and Team Ashbury is about to be in control of the Communications Center. Those are tough but manageable jobs. Both of those divisions are staffed mostly with lower-ranking, barely-trained soldiers. Still, it’s a good first victory, and Brohn and Cardyn exchange a congratulatory handshake.
Our assignment is Command Headquarters. We know from our recon missions that it’ll be where Krug is set up and it’ll be the first thing the Patriots lock down once they realize they’re under attack, which, unless they’re blind, deaf, and dumb as a box of hair, they’re aware of by now. Besides being the brains of the Patriot’s local organization, Command Headquarters is also the hub of operations and the most important room in the facility. It’s also the most protected. It’s from there that the Patriots will initiate their complete takeover of the city starting in just a few hours when Krug’s reinforcements arrive.
That gives us a practically non-existent window of time to get in, take it over, and secure the room while coordinating with the simultaneous attacks currently underway against the Munitions Depot and the Communications Center over on the west side of the huge facility.
I take the lead and guide us out of the supply room and up the service staircase tucked away in the interior of the Armory. It’s just one flight up the unguarded narrow stairway that ends on the mezzanine level at a landing lined with green lockers, storage totes, and custodial supplies. I recognize it in minute detail from Render’s stealthy exploration of the space.
Brohn starts to make his way toward the door that will lead us out to the open, second-floor walkway overlooking the vast floor of the Armory, but I grab him by his arm and hold him back.
“Not that door,” I whisper, pointing to the door of the storage closet set in between two of the banks of lockers. “That one.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The door is locked, but Brohn solves that problem by snapping off the handle and reaching in with his finger to disengage the interior locking mechanism.
We enter what appears to be a closet, but which I know is an old pass-through leading straight to an unused conference room, which leads to an access corridor, which is, conveniently, just on the other side of a synth-steel wall from Command Headquarters.
Once we’re inside and then across the empty conference room, Manthy does her trick on the electronic lock on the next door. It surrenders to her and opens with a light sigh. We step into the access corridor and scurry along its dark length to the small control room annex where we know a single soldier, Lance Corporal Ferregetti, will be tucked away at his little monitoring station.
Rain steps forward and lunges into the room, but the chair where Ferregetti is supposed to be sitting is empty.
We follow Rain into the empty room. “What the hell?” Wisp exclaims. Then, turning to me, she asks if I’m sure this is the right station, and, if so, where is the guard.
Before I can answer, a voice rings out from behind us. “Drop your weapons,” the man stammers. “And don’t…don’t move!”
It’s Ferregetti, looking dangerously nervous behind the huge four-barreled rotary machine he’s got trained on us.
“How can we drop our weapons if we can’t move?” Cardyn asks, stepping between us and the quivering soldier. His voice is even and oddly calm, and I’m pretty sure he’s lost his mind. He must sense us about to take our chances as we reach for our weapons because he waves us back. “There’s a way out of this, you know,” he tells Ferregetti. “Krug is using you for his own good, not for yours. Break the hold he has on you. Be honest with yourself. About why you’re here and what kind of person you really want to be. Honesty is the mark of true strength. It’s what will get you out of here alive.”
The puzzled young man, short but thick and with a scraggle of a black goatee adorning his chin and upper lip, lowers his gun, raises it, and lowers it again. He gives a painful squint with each motion, alternating between wanting to drop the big weapon and needing to fire it. “I can’t,” he says, through clenched teeth. “I have a duty.” It takes visible effort, but he raises the big gun one more time. With his sleeves cuffed above his elbows, I can see his forearm muscles flex and fill with blood.
In a flash, Rain shoots him once in the leg to immobilize him and once in the hand, causing the clunky gun to clang to the ground.
Before I even know what’s happened, Brohn is on the man, his hand clamped over the wounded soldier’s mouth. In one swift motion, he whips a pair of immobilizer zip-cuffs from his belt and slaps them onto the groaning soldier while Manthy draws one of her stun-sticks from her belt and presses it to the man’s neck causing him to twitch like a freshly-caught fish until he slumps down to the floor and moans himself into unconsciousness.
“How…?” I start to ask Cardyn, my eyes wide. I’m on the verge of either cheering or else dismissing what just happened as a bizarre dream I’m sure to wake up from at any second.
Brohn claps Cardyn on the shoulder. “See?” he says to me. “I told you he was good at getting people to do his bidding.”
We all look impressed, but Cardyn looks disappointed. “But I didn’t get him to do anything. He still would’ve killed us.”
“But you got him to pause, to think. You have abilities,” Brohn says. “A gift. “Raw, maybe. But it’s something to work on.”
I’m still looking back and forth from Cardyn to the downed soldier. “How…?” I ask again, but the rest of my Conspiracy is already ahead of me and on their way to the last door between us and the Command Headquarters, our ultimate objective.
Her head cocked, Manthy drags her palm along the area around the door that we know opens into the rear of the big room. She raises her head and lowers it again, her ear to the wall, concentrating until she taps into the system she’s looking for. At first, I think it’s a trick of the light, but Rain nudges me. She sees it, too. Manthy’s eyes have gone black like mine apparently do when I connect with Render.
Neither of us has time to contemplate this, though. We have a job to do.
With the muffled sound of gunfire and explosions coming from all around the Armory and with agitated shouts coming from the other side of this door, we draw our weapons, exchange what we hope isn’t our last look goodbye, and prepare to burst into the room.
25
Our infiltration is quick, intense, and we’ve caught everyone in this room completely by surprise. Their arrogance makes them dangerous but also vulnerable. Thinking the local police were on their side—or at least under their thumb—and that the little pockets of rebels scattered throughout the city were too uncoordinated and insignificant to warrant real attention, this place isn’t half as well-defended as it should be.
The door whooshes open, and we leap into a scene of chaos and panic. Patriot soldiers are scrambling around, rushing from one monitor to the other, trying to respond to orders barked at them from Ekker on the far side of the room, and practically crashing into each other in the confusion as they try to sort out what’s happening outside.
In a fraction of an eye-blink, I absorb every detail of the expansive room:
An enormous, two-leveled room. A huge bank of holo-displays on one wall. Four command consoles in the middle. Three rows of monitoring ports. A dozen bundles of conduits and a system of silver bulkheads running the length of the ceiling. A central tactical display station. A curved wall of red projected surveillance holo-screens showing the action outside and down on the main floor below.
And there are nineteen Patriot soldiers, Ekker, the mystery woman in red—her face concealed by the hood of her jacket—and, there in the flesh in front of us for the first time and dressed in his signature shiny silver suit and crimson tie, President Krug.
In all the times I’ve seen him, whether it was on the viz-screens in the Valta or on the holo-projection of this morning’s presidential parade, I always imagined him as a giant, something mythological, a mountain of a man who could and did crush underfoot anyone or anything that dared to get in his way. Standing way over on the far side of the room, cowering behind Ekker and the Patriot guard, he’s small, vulnerable, and nothing like the monster of my imagination. In this instant, I’m taken back to something my dad once said to me: “It takes a small man to be a monster.”
In the second it takes for us to break into the room and survey the scene, the soldiers spring into action with the ones from Krug’s private detail leaping into a protective circle around him on the far side of the room. Dressed in the blue combat pants and the red and white camo jackets like the other Patriots but sporting full tactical body armor and black armbands with one white star on each designating them as elite presidential guards, the six men of Ekker’s personal entourage fire at us before he has even finished shouting out the order.
Manthy and I dive behind a control console and fire our weapons at the soldiers from around each corner.
Cardyn and Rain dive for cover, too, only they dive behind Brohn. The hurricane of gunfire thunders in the room, and our advantage of surprise is long-gone. Despite what I already know, I’m shocked to see bullets bouncing off Brohn’s body. He turns a shoulder in the direction of the blasts and crouches over Cardyn and Rain as they return fire, hitting several of the soldiers who reel backward and crash into the cluster of monitoring ports in the middle of the room. Absorbing a horizontal storm of gunfire, Brohn struggles to stay on his feet, his face contorted in agony. Clearly, bullet-proof isn’t the same as pain-proof.
From our places of cover, we pick off the startled and scrambling Patriot guards with lethal precision.
With expert marksmanship, Rain takes down three of the men, one after the other. The men pitch violently forward, crashing against another one of the Patriot soldiers who loses his balance and sends a spray of bullets pinging into the ceili
ng.
I call out for Manthy to cover me as I sprint out from behind the control console. She drops her Sig Sauer, pulls her two FNX five-seven pistols from her shoulder holsters, and lays down a spray of cover fire that sends most of the enemy soldiers diving for cover. The ones who try to stand their ground and return fire are met with well-placed shots that drop them one by one.
Before we can get to Ekker and Krug on the far side of the room, Ekker, his arms over his face, leaps from behind his cover and presses a black button on the console on the far side of the room, and a floor-to-ceiling energy barrier shimmers to life between us and them.
We direct our fire at Ekker and Krug, but the energy field absorbs the brunt of our blasts, and our bullets plunk harmlessly to the floor.
Ekker grabs Krug by the arm and disappears through the far door with the woman in red and the six of Krug’s guards and Patriot soldiers still left alive.
Brohn taps his comm-link and connects with Wisp. “We have the Command Headquarters. But Ekker and Krug got away. We’re going after them!”
Rain calls out, “Manthy!”
Eyes clamped shut, Manthy slaps both hands down on the central console on our side of the energy barrier.
Her eyes go black—this time I see it clear as day—and the screen fizzles away. The five of us rush out of the Command Headquarters through the door Krug and the others just escaped through. Breathing hard, we sprint down a narrow corridor, around a sharp corner, and up to a door that’s still closing slowly on old-style hinges. We burst through the door and out onto the mezzanine walkway that runs in a circle around the lengthy perimeter of the Armory’s wide-open interior.
With Krug and his crew galloping down the long walkway, we prepare to go after them, but we have to stop and duck as bullets blast into the wall behind us.
Down below, the Insubordinates and the San Francisco police are engaged in a major firefight with the Patriot soldiers who have regrouped and are firing at the Insubordinate infiltration teams from behind parked vehicles and from up on the mezzanine across from us. We’re in somebody’s sights, but in the chaos of the battle, I can’t tell right away where the shots are coming from. Fortunately, neither can Krug and his men, which means they have to come to a sliding stop in their tracks and duck down just like us or else risk getting mowed down.
