by Marko Kloos
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”.
Jackson prowls back to the corridor junction and takes a right turn to explore one of the side corridors. It ends at a bare concrete wall thirty meters beyond the intersection. The only ways in and out of this apartment cluster are shuttered with inch-thick armored fireproof doors, and they have nothing in their inventory to break down one of those.
“Hunter 22 Actual, this is OPFOR Actual.”
The voice comes over the emergency public address system in the corridor. Jackson stops, dumbfounded. OPFOR Actual? Someone kno
ws military radio protocol.
“I count nine of you in corridor 100-16. Would the NCO in command please approach the public safety terminal at intersection A-16 and patch in?”
Jackson goes to the terminal labeled A-16 and taps into the circuit. This drop has gone so far off the rails that it feels like she’s in some sort of alternate reality.
“OPFOR Actual, this is Hunter 22 Actual, Territorial Army. Open those blast doors or I will shoot my way through them.”
“That’s a negative.” The voice on the other end of the connection is clear, businesslike. It would have an unconscious swagger if voices could have those. Jackson has been on military comms for long enough to know that she’s talking to a fellow combat trooper.
“You have a squad with rifles. I don’t see MARS launchers,” the voice continues. “Even if you have HE for your grenade tubes, you’ll barely scratch the paint on the blast doors. You can shoot holes in the walls, but I can just seal you in again wherever you pop out.”
She looks back at her troopers, who are still hunkered down in the corridor, rifles pointed toward the blast door.
“Who the hell are you?” she asks.
“I’m the commander of the force that just captured three quarters of your platoon without hurting anyone. I’d like to get you to surrender your squad to me so we can keep this blood-free streak going.”
“Not an option,” Jackson answers flatly. “You think I’ll hand over my gun without firing a shot, you’re out of your mind.”
“You have eight troops. I have a full company in this unit alone. We have the numbers and the home field advantage here. There are two ways for you and your troops to leave this tower: unarmed and in our custody, or feet first in a body bag. Everyone else in your platoon has decided to pick the first option just now. Your lieutenant is unusually wise for a junior officer.”
The man’s voice is confident, convincing. Whoever he is, he has experience in making people do what he says. Jackson scans her comms and data channels again, but there is nobody in her circuit except for the eight troopers in the hallway with her. Not even the residence towers’ electronic jamming systems could turn off her comms and data access so completely. Only her platoon or company commander could cut her out of the loop like that.
“Who the hell are you?” she asks again, this time more to herself than whoever is on the other end of the comms link. Then she cuts the connection.
Ninety-nine floors below them, and a rooftop above that’s inaccessible through the half-meter thick ceiling of the maintenance floor. Jackson’s squad is trapped at the top of a very large box like rats in a maze, and they have no way to chew themselves out of it. She has no way to tell the drop ships overhead that the platoon is in deep shit. And nine troops, fighting their way down 99 floors in a residence tower with a compromised security office and a hundred hostiles to fight?
Without the schematics of the building on her tactical screen, Jackson tries to reconstruct the floor design of the residence towers from memory. A hundred apartments, in four sections of twenty-five, with four main corridors sectioning the floor into quarters. If they can cut through the apartments to either side of the fire door ahead, they can break into the gallery that overlooks the open space of the building core. If the roof hatch above the core is open, she may be able to get line-of-sight comms to a drop ship overhead. She’ll be able to look down onto the atrium and see just what the hell is happening down there. It’s a messy way out and a long shot, but it beats the prospect of hoofing it down ninety-nine flights of stairs while dodging rifle fire from every floor along the way.
“Kelly, Pearson,” she says and points when she has the attention of her troopers. “That apartment and that one. Break down the doors. Go soft, just in case there’s civvies inside.”
Kelly and Pearson do as ordered and kick down the doors Jackson pointed out. Both require multiple kicks and no small amount of cursing. The fifth-gen stuff is built to last, designed for occupation by ten consecutive generations of welfare tenants. Nobody’s inside, though. There’s furniture and the detritus of daily life scattered about, but nobody challenges their forced entry. Not that it would have been a smart thing to do. Jackson walks into one of the open apartments and checks the layout. Two bedrooms, bathroom, combined kitchen and living room. The far wall of the living room is her demolition candidate—on the other side, there will be the open space of the floor’s gallery.
“Launchers,” Jackson says. “Buckshot the shit out of that wall right there. Aim for the same spot. We need a hole to crawl out of.”
Her troopers ready their launchers. Jackson steps back into the corridor to let them do their thing. The combined bark from three grenade launchers makes the concrete floor under her feet shake. When she sticks her head back into the apartment to observe the results, there’s an irregular hole half a meter wide in the far wall of the living room.
“Do another round,” she orders. “And hurry up, or every civvie asshole with a rifle is going to be out there waiting for us to pop out.”
Her troopers fire another brace of 40mm buckshot into the wall. Whoever lives here just got an upgrade, a nice big window overlooking the 100th floor gallery. Kelly and Pearson extend the hole with their rifle butts until it’s big enough for an armored trooper to fit through.
“Let’s go,” Jackson orders.
She goes through the breach first. There’s nobody in the space beyond, which is relieving and worrisome at the same time. Nobody’s ambushing them, but the gallery space shouldn’t be completely empty. This is the common area for the entire floor, and people are here at all times of the day to socialize, trade, or catch some fresh air and sunlight from above. But there’s nobody here, not a soul.
She looks up to where she should be seeing the dirty evening sky above Detroit. The huge retractable rooftop hatch is closed. There will be no line-of-sight comms with the drop ships. If they’re even still there, Jackson thinks. Anything seems possible in this new gone-to-shit scenario. Three full squads in the bag without a single shot fired, and the opposing team in full control of the security facilities of a fifth-gen residence tower. Jackson wonders if they control just the tower, or the whole block, or maybe even the entire damn PRC, all twelve blocks and forty-eight residence towers of it. Not that it matters. It’s not like she can even take on a company with the few troopers she has.
Jackson knows that this is not going to end well. But she can’t just walk over to the nearest security panel and surrender herself and her squad without putting up a fight. There would be no point in ever again suiting up after that.
Overhead, the the public address system comes alive again, much louder than before in the narrow corridor.
“I admire your initiative,” the voice from before says. “But you have nowhere to go up there. You can’t fight your way out of here. If you try, you’ll get yourselves killed. Whatever you think they called you in for, I guarantee you that it’s not worth that.”
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.
