“Not against these guys.”
Colbert’s expression was unreadable in the dark. Bauchet looked away with a small nod of agreement.
They waited.
“Okay,” Bauchet said to his compatch. “Send in the sweepers.”
There was a flurry of activity out on the main road. Bauchet could just make out several grey shapes moving through the rain toward the corner building. There was noise from behind him, and two sweepers rushed past the car from the van in which they had been waiting. The armoured combat robots went straight to the door Bauchet had watched for so long. Without pause, they blew it to pieces with a small canon and raced into the building.
“Give me telemetry,” he said into his compatch and the lower half of the windscreen became a row of viewers, showing what each of the half-dozen armoured robots saw. The sweepers were converging on infrared images of five men in a room two storeys up. “This is Chief Inspector Bauchet,” he said through the compatch to his waiting team. “Go, go, go!”
“Wish me luck.” Colbert opened the door and got out, cold air and rain rushing in until he slammed it behind him. Bauchet heard running feet and saw several armed police officers in body armour trot past him toward the shattered doorway. He kept his eyes on what the sweepers were seeing.
The men in the upstairs room had begun to move about agitatedly. He watched their little red-and-yellow heat signatures shifting around in the room. Suddenly, there were ten figures, then fifty. Bauchet frowned at the viewers. His quarry had deployed electronic countermeasures to confuse the sweepers’ sensors. He wondered where they had got such good tech. The sweepers would be shooting at shadows now, with a one-in-ten chance of hitting anything. Colbert was right. This wasn’t the kind of job the bots could handle. He broadcast the bad news through his compatch, then got out of the car.
The cold rain slapped his face and the wind tore at his coat as he struggled to fasten it. A rattle of shots could be heard from inside the building, and flashes lit the blinds of an upstairs window. A couple of shotguns, he guessed from the noise, and a machine gun. He felt a shiver of fear when he heard a buzz-gun’s vicious squeal. Buzz-guns spat out thousands of tiny iron pellets at hypersonic speeds. They could cut through body armour as if it were wet paper. By contrast, the sweepers’ stunners were silent and non-lethal. It was impossible to tell without the telemetry whether they were returning fire or not.
He walked to the door, pulling out his own stunner. One of his men waited there, covering the exit, looking bulky and large in his armour. Bauchet leaned his back against the wall and listened to the calm commentary from the mobile control unit on the compatch.
“Sweeper three inactive.”
“Sweeper two inactive.”
The robots were going down like tenpins.
At this rate, Bauchet realised, the sweepers would all be taken out before his officers arrived.
“Sweeper four, confirmed kill.”
Of course, a “kill” by the sweepers meant they had stunned one of the targets. Kills by the enemy would be the real thing.
“Unit two in position at stage one.” Not the calm detachment of the control unit, but one of the people inside the building. The speaker’s breathing could be heard as she climbed the staircase.
“No visual. Advancing to target.”
A buzz-gun screamed again.
“Sweeper four inactive.”
The shooting was almost continuous. One by one, the control unit ticked off the disabled sweepers. “Unit one, report.”
“Unit one, in position, ready to engage.”
“Unit two?”
“Taking fire. Repeat, taking fire. Two men down. Moving to…”
The voice went silent, but the roar and screech of the gun battle continued. Bauchet clenched his teeth and glowered back at the c-and-c van, willing them to give the order.
“Unit one engage. Unit three, advance to relieve unit two. Unit one, confirm you’re engaged.”
“Shit!”
“Unit one…”
“Yes! We’re engaged dammit!”
“Sweeper five, confirmed kill.”
The armoured officer at the doorway looked agitated. He was listening too and clearly wanted to get inside to help his comrades. Perhaps Bauchet’s presence was all that held him back.
“Unit one, two confirmed kills. We have a runner, heading for the back stairs. In pursuit.”
“All ground units converge on exit B.”
Bauchet pressed himself back against the wall. The officer nearby looked at him nervously. Exit B was the doorway he was standing in. Bauchet signalled the man to step back against the wall on the other side of the door but, before he could obey, the escapee appeared in the hallway. It took the fugitive just half a second to spot the cop blocking his exit and to start firing with his buzzgun. The high-pitched scream of the weapon cut through the wind and rain as a line of destruction tore through the plaster of the hallway wall, ripped the door frame to matchwood and arced into the street where the unlucky officer was diving for cover.
Bauchet saw the pellet stream cut through the man’s calf, shattering his armour. The injured officer fell to the ground and rolled out of sight of his attacker. But not for long. The runner burst out of the door into the rain, turning his weapon toward the fallen policeman. Bauchet took aim and brought the would-be killer down with a single shot from his stunner. He ran to where the fugitive lay unmoving in the rain, keeping him covered all the time with the stunner, its red targeting laser steady on the man’s neck. Bauchet kicked away the man’s weapon. Then he kicked the man hard in the ribs, just to be sure he wasn’t faking. The unconscious man made no sound and did not so much as twitch.
“Bauchet, here,” he said into the compatch. “Confirmed kill. Get a medic over here. I have a wounded officer.”
“All clear,” c-and-c announced. “Roll call. Medics to the indicated locations.”
The compatch chatter went on. Bauchet knelt down beside the man he’d shot and pressed a neural activity blocker to his temple. The little disc would keep the man’s brain scrambled for at least an hour. Long enough for the rope-and-tie team to get him properly processed and on his way to the station.
“How are you doing?” he asked the wounded officer.
The man pulled off his helmet, revealing himself to be a young man no more than twenty years old. “I’m okay, thank you, sir,” the young man lied. Rain poured down on his head and into the neck of his armour. His face was white.
“You’re lucky it’s not worse,” Bauchet told him. His words might have been a reprimand but his tone was more sad than angry.
The young man looked stricken, no doubt thinking he should have had the first shot, should have done what he’d been trained to do.
“You saved my life,” he said.
Bauchet turned at the sound of footsteps approaching and waved the medic on to the young officer. Colbert was right behind him, along with several other officers to pick up Bauchet’s catch.
“Tell me we didn’t lose all of unit two,” Bauchet said, standing up.
“We lost three officers in total, sir. Another five injured, including this one.”
Bauchet looked away sharply, needing to control a sudden anger. “The sweepers?”
“Scrap metal, the lot of them.”
Bauchet turned and set off toward the car. “Come on. I need a hot shower and something to eat. Then we start questioning these bastards.”
* * * *
The ferry terminal at Dover sprawled in the darkness, a dismal, decaying relic of a time long gone. In the late 2020s, toward the end of the Great Adjustment, it was already struggling to survive. CT2, the second Channel tunnel, when it opened in 2034, put the final nail in its coffin. Since then the old ferry terminal had been allowed to fall victim to slowly rising sea levels and increasingly violent Channel storms.
Now Jay Kennedy sat in one of the decrepit customs sheds and peered through a night-sight at the crumbling pier
s and the gently lapping water. It was cold as hell but Jay thanked the gods it had stopped raining.
“Trafalgar, report.”
Every half hour since he started his watch at eight PM, the little voice in his ear had said the same thing. Every half hour since he started his watch, Jay had given the same reply. “Trafalgar. Nothing to report.” It was now four in the morning.
“Heads up, lads and lasses.” It was a new voice, the broad Yorkshire drawl of Holbrook himself. Jay actually did sit up, his attention pricking. Holbrook was God on stilts. The highest ranking operational officer Jay knew about. The bigwig who had given the speech at Jay’s graduation ceremony. The man who had recruited him all that time ago.
“New intel from our friends elsewhere,” Holbrook said. He meant Europol, Jay knew. They always called them that. “The rumours are true, it seems. The shipment will be arriving this very night. Be vigilant, everybody.”
Jay felt his heartbeat quicken. This was it then. Tonight he would discover whether he really had what it took. Tonight he would face real villains. People who would kill him if they could. He started to go over his training in his mind, then stopped just as suddenly. He wasn’t cramming for an exam here. He was on an op and he needed to focus on what he was doing. He’d been on operations before, but never like this. All through his training they’d used him to pick up intel on the streets. He still used his old tag, Luke, and hung out with what was left of the splashparty crowd, picking up snippets of information about the bricks and what they were doing, working with the analysts to piece together the movements of their most-wanted splashteams. They had never given him a gun before. They had never sent him into danger like this. He scanned the old jetties once again. Had anything changed? Was that the same pattern of shadows he’d seen last time? He shook himself and stood up, walked a few paces and came back to the window. Fear was sliding into him like a vapour. It tightened his lungs and scattered his thoughts. He needed to get a grip on himself or he’d miss something, get himself killed. Or worse, get someone else killed, let everyone down.
What were they thinking of, letting a boy of nineteen, barely out of basic training, take on a job like this?
Was that a movement? Up there on the road? He fidgeted with the focus on his night-sight but could see nothing unusual. Should he call it in? What if it was nothing? Stupid rookie, panicking over a tree swaying in the breeze. But there was no breeze tonight. Just the cold and the lapping waves.
“Agincourt to Waterloo.” The whisper of the comm almost made him fall off his chair. Shit!
So there was something up there.
“There’s movement on the road,” the voice continued. It was Helen. Sharp, mean-looking woman. Stationed just a hundred metres away, but higher up with a better view of the road. “Two trucks. Repeat, two trucks.”
“Acknowledged, Agincourt,” said the voice of Waterloo—Barry Overman, officer in charge of the op. “This is it, ladies and gentlemen. Hold your positions.”
“They’re signalling,” said Helen, but Jay had seen it himself this time. Three short flashes in the infrared from up where the trucks must be parked. He turned quickly to scan the water, black as soot in his night-sight. And there it was! Three answering flashes, also infrared.
“There’s a boat out in the Channel,” he blurted, forgetting his comms protocol. He cursed himself silently and tried to get a grip. “Range two-hundred-and-seventy metres. Bearing one seventy degrees.”
“Oh, really? And who might you be?” Overman’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. Jay screwed up his eyes in an agony of embarrassment. Of course Overman knew damned well who he was. The man just wanted to make him squirm.
“It’s Trafalgar, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Did he hear sniggering from other officers, or was that just imagination adding to his torture?
“Everybody hold your positions,” Overman said again. Behind the scenes, he would be moving people into position around the trucks and up and down the waterline. There were motor launches on hand too, hiding among the piers. “We’ll let them come in and tie up before we make our move. If that’s all right with you, Trafalgar.”
Jay sighed. So this was how it was going to be. “That’s fine, sir. Excellent plan.”
“Kind of you to say so.”
For a moment, Jay felt miserable. His first time out, and he was being picked on by the boss on an open comm line. How was he going to live this down? It seemed like the end of the world—until it occurred to him that what he thought was snide sniggering might just be good-natured laughter. A curtain parted in his mind to reveal what was really going on. It really was just a bit of fun at his expense. Everyone was tense tonight. Everyone was scared. Not just him. Overman was poking fun at him as a way of relaxing everybody, to build up a bit of team spirit. It got them laughing even though some of them may be about to risk their lives. It even served to remind them that they had a rookie with them, someone who might need their help and experience. Was Overman really that subtle? Had he really just done all that? Jay decided he wanted to believe it was true.
“Hastings to Waterloo. The boat’s tying up at Pier Three.”
“Agincourt to Waterloo. The trucks are moving. They’re heading for the pier.”
“This is Waterloo. Hold your positions. And keep your eyes peeled.”
Overman would be handing over control to the assault unit commander now, Jay thought. The fighting would start any second.
And it did. Several loud percussions with bright flashes came from the direction of Pier Three. Jay saw two trucks, clearly visible for a moment, with people around them in a frozen tableau. He heard shouting and running and three shots fired in rapid succession. The assault team was using live rounds, Jay remembered. Someone had just died. Out in the Channel, powerful engines whined into life as the boat made a run for it, pursued by friendlies. A shout. Another three shots.
After that, silence rolled back like a black tide out of the night. Seconds ticked past. Jay watched the pier through his night-sight. He saw soldiers moving around the trucks but there seemed to be no other activity.
“All right, everybody. Mission accomplished. Let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”
Jay let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The assault was over, done so expertly it was almost bloodless. His relief was immense. If there had been serious trouble, he and his team would have been the reserves. He grabbed a torch and ran for the pier, feeling profoundly grateful for the skill of the unit that had spared him the terrifying prospect of a gun battle. Several vehicles had pulled onto the pier by the time he got there, and two boats with searchlights illuminated the scene. People lay on the ground, cuffed at wrists and ankles. Soldiers stood among them, looking confident and relaxed.
Jay went straight to the nearest truck and opened the back. Inside were four crates, each a cube over a metre high. Printed on the side of each was a manufacturer’s name, a model name and number, and the words “Made in India.” Jay pulled a tag-reader from his pocket and scanned one of the crates.
“Well?” It was Overman, standing outside the truck, looking in. Jay checked the display. “They’re F-Twos all right, sir. State-of-the-art stuff.”
“Enough for what we think they need?”
“No, sir. But two shipments like this would be about right.”
“Ah, well. Our friends elsewhere ought to be grateful we stopped this lot, anyway, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” Jay wasn’t too confident that the raid had done much to prevent the catastrophe they were all so worried about.
The rumour was that a new kind of timesplash technology had emerged. Groups around the world were now racing one another to use it to make a splash so huge that whole cities would be caught in the backwash. Police and intelligence agencies everywhere were trying to stop them, but it looked hopeless. The best chance seemed to be in tracking F2s and other necessary technologies. F2s were focus fusion generators. A timesplash of the kind rumoured w
ould need unbelievable amounts of energy. The kind of energy a large town would consume. The kind for which you would need twenty F2s wired together.
But collecting so many F2s was not all that hard. When oil production began its rapid decline, back in 2015, it plunged the world into a global depression that lasted until the end of the 2020s. It was the development of focus fusion that dragged the world out of the Great Adjustment, a cycle of inflation, resource wars and infrastructure collapse that was threatening to destroy everything. Those early reactors were about the size of a garden shed but could produce enough electricity to power a large neighbourhood, using plentiful, cheap boron and hydrogen as fuel. By the end of the 2030s, focus fusion reactors were being mass-produced and installed by the millions. Clean, efficient and almost-free electricity transformed the world’s economies, and the 2040s were a global boom time.
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