Babylon never truly slept. But this early in the morning, deep in Electric City, she dozed. The streets were clear. Most of the lights and signs had been turned off. Skyscrapers loomed in darkness and silence, not quite dead yet never alive.
The perfect time for violence.
Weaving between high-rises, three gravtrucks soared through the air, flying above street-level sensors and below air traffic radars. Black Watch occupied the lead vehicle, Red Raven had the chase. In between them were the Angels, flying on autopilot.
Back at the warehouse, Gregory guided their route, talking them around law enforcement checkpoints and patrols. Peter kept an eye on the street cameras and an ear to the dispatch radio, ready to react to unexpected developments.
“Spider, Victor One. We are five minutes out,” Karim reported.
Yuri lowered his head, closed his eyes and clasped his hands together.
“Almighty God, defend us in battle. Hear the cries of those who suffer from wickedness and oppression. Take pity on us, Lord, as we act as champions in your name, to bring back the light into the world. Safeguard us from the snares and the magic of our foes. Keep us safe from harm and deliver us from evil. Extend your hand to shelter us, to lead us to victory, and to smite our enemies with all your wonders.”
A mote of white light sparked in his heart. It grew larger and brighter, becoming a dancing flame. It burned hotter and cleaner, filling his mind’s eye. He breathed, releasing all thoughts and emotions, his awareness focused on the flame. All at once it became still, no longer a stream of fire, but an immovable pillar of incandescent light.
The light radiated from within him. It encompassed the cab, washing over Karim. It leeched into the rear cabin to illuminate the team. It passed through the confines of the vehicle to touch Team Red Raven, and then only with slightly greater difficulty, the never-living shells of the Angels. Everywhere the light fell, he knew. A deep knowing of all that they were, are, and would be, just waiting to be surfaced to conscious thought.
The light expanded, filling the city, the nation, the world, the entire universe. Once again, it was as though a veil had fallen off his eyes, revealing to him a deeper layer of reality. His awareness broadened and deepened with the light, embracing all things. When he directed his attention below, he sensed the streets and the alleys. When he brought his awareness to his flanks, he perceived without looking the buildings flashing past. When he looked up…
A great white throne floated upon a sea of glass, as insubstantial as cloud, as brilliant as the sun. Upon that throne sat the being whose visage he could not bear to see. He had an impression of immense feet clad in enormous but simple sandals, a clean white robe draped over legs as massive as mountains, a gigantic hand extended to grasp the world—and to cover his face.
Yuri looked away.
He continued whispering prayers under his breath. Every single prayer in his arsenal, every one that matched this situation. His heart settled into a deep, abiding calm. Every cell emanated serenity. His consciousness became a vast, tranquil lake, a reflection of the sea of glass, reflecting all around him. His ego, his persona, every barrier between him and the universe, fell away. From the depths of his being, a silver cord sprang forth, flowing into the heavens above.
God was with them. He had always been with them. So long as he hewed to this truth, none could stand against them.
“Samurai pass Michael,” Yuri murmured.
The Void Collective wouldn’t be able to drop in unannounced. Not while he maintained his state. It wouldn’t stop bullets or disable electronics, but God works in mysterious ways. They had a plan, they would work the plan, and so long as they stuck to sound tactical principles, the rest were in God’s hands.
“Swordfish online,” George reported.
The Swordfish was a cell phone surveillance device, ‘borrowed’ from the PSB, courtesy of Gregory. By mimicking a cell tower, it forced all nearby cellular devices to connect to it. Under more ordinary circumstances it was used to trace phones and record conversations. For this op, it would also jam all wireless signals in the area of operations. Other than the team’s whitelisted devices, no one could call in or out.
“Bull, Bull, Bull,” Karim called.
As one, the convoy swooped down on C8.
The aerial warning system buzzed the flight computer. The transponder retorted with the city’s emergency services code. The system acquiesced.
The three gravtrucks landed in the parking lot. Yuri popped the door and leaned out, bringing up his coilgun. Dead ahead, shadows moved behind the lit windows of the guardhouse. His sights rested on the door just as the first guard stepped out.
“HANDS UP! DO IT NOW!” Yuri boomed.
His hands shot up.
“On the ground!”
He hesitated.
In that fatal moment, the rest of the operators spilled from their vehicles. Red Raven charged for the entrance of C8. James and Zen followed. Kayla and Will closed in on the guardhouse.
Behind the window, someone moved.
“Gun!” Karim called.
As if by magic, the window shattered. The guard flinched.
“HANDS!” Yuri warned.
The guard’s right hand dipped to his waist—
Four coilguns opened up on him. He stumbled back, reeling about, but didn’t go down. Yuri lifted his sights and shot him in the face. His head snapped back. But there was no blood, only a puff of dust.
A coilgun screamed.
The threat’s head exploded in a metallic spray.
“TBCs!” Kayla warned.
So much for the stealth approach.
As Yuri and Karim covered, Kayla and Will stacked on the entrance of the guardhouse. Yuri dialed up the coilgun to full power. Off to his left, Red Raven covered the entrance of the cube. The team breacher prepared his breaching bag, just in case.
Kayla burst into the building and discharged a full-power shot.
“Guardhouse clear. I’ve recovered a keycard.”
Will knelt by the other guard and pulled something off his breast pocket.
“I’ve got another card,” Will reported.
The operators rushed for the door, Red Raven on the left, Black Watch on the right. Will handed off his keycard to a Red Raven operator before joining the stack. The Angels took off in their gravtruck, heading to the roof. There they would take up overwatch positions and provide topside security.
The keycard reader was on the Black Watch’s side of the door. Kayla touched the keycard to the reader.
Nothing happened. The reader didn’t even register the card.
Her counterpart in Red Raven tried his card. Nothing happened too.
They pushed and pulled on the doors. They were locked in place.
“It could be the Stingray,” Zen opined. “It might be jamming the reader.”
Something always went wrong.
“Breacher up!” George called.
The breacher rushed to the double glass doors, breaching charge in hand. Nobody on the team knew what the doors were made of. Some other company had installed the doors. They weren’t going to take any chances. The breacher emplaced the charge and pulled the safety pins. Everyone backed up around the corners of the building.
“Fire in the hole!” George warned.
The blast shook the gigantic cube. Windows shook and shattered. Car alarms screamed. Broken glass tinkled on the asphalt. Inside the building, more alarms wailed.
The double doors had ceased to exist.
The operators piled through the opening. The blast had disturbed the furniture in the lobby and knocked out a few lights. Past the reception desk was a frosted glass partition wall running the length of the lobby. Somehow it had survived the blast intact, though here and there cracks ran through the panels. A door fitted with a keycard reader controlled access to the business space. As the assaulters approached, harsh metallic clanking reverberated in the room.
Heavy-gauge security shutters rolled down from the ceiling, defending the glass walls. Heavy bolts locked the shutters in place.
“Couldn’t do this the easy way,” Zen muttered under his breath.
“Which means we get to do this the fun way,” Will said.
Zen pulled out a breaching charge from Will’s pack. As the operators retreated outside, Will planted the charge on the shutters, right over the door. The charge had been measured to defeat steel doors and bulletproof glass. It was probably enough.
The operators retreated outside. Yuri positioned himself at the front of his stack. In the number three spot, Will held up the detonator.
“Fire in the hole!”
The second blast shook the building once more. Smoke and debris blew out the shattered doorway. The shock wave roared past Yuri’s face. Coilgun raised, he stepped into the lobby beyond.
The charge had blasted a man-sized hole through the heavy shutters. Strangely, incredibly, the glass door behind it had survived. Barely. It was spiderwebbed with fine cracks, ready to fall apart under a hard look.
The breachers moved up, breaching tools in hand. They smashed through the glass with the pick end of their tools, then used the adze heads to clear away the remaining fragments. The second they stepped away, Yuri plunged into the room beyond.
And the lights went out.
Clicking on his weapon-mounted light, Yuri turned right. He found himself in a hallway, with doors on either end. Keycard readers glowed an angry red. Camera domes looked down from the ceiling. At a far corner, a motion detector flashed away.
“Tiger, Tiger, Tiger,” Yuri called.
It was the codeword to activate the alternative plan. George pivoted left. Their respective teams followed them. Pools of light bounced around the walls and floor, chasing the darkness. Yuri murmured the Holy Names under his breath, keeping the Void at bay.
Beams of light played over the floor, walls and ceiling, chasing the darkness away. Yuri aimed his light with care, keeping it from betraying his position to unseen threats behind corners and concealment, and led the way deeper into the Cube.
A textbook raid would require methodically breaching and clearing every room, leaving no uncleared space behind. Not this time. Any surviving security staff would strongpoint themselves, and the logical place to do it was at the security office. Yuri knew, deep in his gut, that at this very moment the survivors were watching the assaulters, summoning reinforcements and preparing for a counterattack. Thus he’d called for the alternate plan.
But they had to find the security office.
The team swept past a variety of rooms. Conference rooms. Cozy nooks. An office. A pantry. They spent just enough time to cover the most obvious danger areas—corners, concealment, glass windows—before moving on.
Anxiety trickled into Yuri’s heart. He was breaking all the rules of close quarters battle. There were so many places a bad guy could hide. Once the team had moved past his position, the threat could jump out and ambush them from behind.
Yuri exhaled. Inhaled. Focused.
“Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison.”
If he lost that connection, the Void Collective would jump all over them in a heartbeat. It would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter what happened, he could not, would not, allow himself to be distracted.
A map on the wall caught his eye. He paused, long enough to glance at it, to figure out the team’s position and to find the security office. Down the current hallway, to the left, then second door on the right.
As he headed down the corridor, fresh emotions gripped his heart. Not fear, not this time. This was something cold and predatory, the anticipation of a hunter lying in ambush, a pair of lasers drilling into his chest. With every step, the feeling grew, until it threatened to overwhelm his heart.
Rounding the corner, he found the source of the sensation. The first door on the right. Keeping clear of the fatal funnel, he positioned himself by the knob side of the door. The team took their cue from him, preparing for the reaching.
The door burst open.
A white-uniformed security guard rushed out, gripping a pistol in a retention position by his ribcage, swiveling out to Yuri, angling his weapon up—
Yuri fired.
A hypervelocity round ripped into the threat’s belly. The shock of the blow doubled him over. Yuri stepped in and slashed his coilgun from hip to shoulder. The muzzle struck him in the chin and sent him spiraling off to the left.
The operators behind Yuri opened fire. When Yuri keyed on the threat again, there was nothing left of his head but blasted metal and shredded tissue.
Somewhere on the other side of the cube, coilguns screamed. Yuri sliced the pie around the doorway, looking for threats. He found only a cramped janitor’s closet. He completed the circle, then stacked on the door to the security office.
He felt the room beyond. His hyperawareness registered four presences, crouched behind furniture, weapons gripped in hands. They were… they were nothing. Four black holes in space, sealed in wrappers of flesh and blood and bone.
A profound sadness washed over him. The guards’ deeds were not their own. But they had signed themselves over to the Void, and so they would have to pay the price.
Yuri pointed at the keycard reader and mimed turning a key. Then he raised his fist above his head and rapidly closed and opened his fingers.
James reached over Yuri’s shoulder, flash-bang in hand. Yuri nodded. James withdrew his hand. A soft metallic clink issued behind Yuri.
Kayla shuffled up, holding her pilfered keycard, and brought it to the keycard reader.
It buzzed angrily.
She tried again.
It refused to open.
Shaking her head, she returned to the stack.
This couldn’t be a coincidence. Whoever was in the security office must have wiped the credentials of the dead guards. They had reacted much faster than most humans would have. They hadn’t even tried to seek confirmation of death in person. Just one of the many advantages of two hive minds united as one.
Yuri rapped his knuckles against his helmet. Fabric rustled behind him. Will stepped up with his trusty Witness shotgun. He racked the pump with a heavy double clack. Jammed the muzzle forty-five degrees downwards into the door, right over the locking mechanism. Fired.
Sawdust blasted from the point of impact. The door refused to yield. Will racked the gun again, aimed again, fired again. Now satisfied that there was nothing left of the lock, he kicked the door in.
Behind Yuri, James stepped out and tossed the stun grenade through the open doorway.
And the door swung back.
The stun grenade bounced off the door and back at the team.
“BAD BANG!” Yuri warned, shutting eyes and turning away—
The detonation struck him like a sledgehammer. Barely filtered by his eyeshields, the flash of light was a tangible force slamming into his eyeballs. Though his ear protection kicked in, he felt the concussive slap in his head, in his belly, in his viscera.
The blast rooted his feet to the floor. But deep in his mind, he heard a voice screaming at him.
MOVE!
He barged into the door, forcing it aside. Running totally on autopilot, his vision blurry, his brain wobbling on an unseen axis, he rushed one two three steps into the room, following the wall, then pivoted to his left.
Banks of monitors illuminated the room in a soft glow. In the middle of the office, there were two rows of tables, arranged parallel to each other. Men crouched behind the tables, aiming their guns at the door, exposing only heads and arms.
Muzzles flashed. Pistols barked. Bullets whizzed like angry hornets past Yuri’s ear. Bodies tracked towards him like turrets, bringing their handguns to bear on him. He took it all in, without thought, without judgment, plunging headlong into a tumultuous ocean of raw sensory data. His mind blanked, his heart emptied, his will dissolved, his body moved.
CRACK—CRACK—CRACK—CRACK
In the space of heartbeats, he fired four rounds, fast as the trigger could reset. His conscious brain barely registered the shots, never mind the act of aiming and firing, but he _knew _deep down that he had hit every target. All the same, he shuffled along the wall, flowing deeper into the room, allowing the rest of the team to make entry.
The threats were all down. Dead. Blood spewed from shattered skulls to form crimson lakes.
Yuri exhaled.
“Clear!” Kayla called.
“Clear!” Yuri agreed.
Karim hit the light switch. Light and color returned to the room. Standing by the doorway, James looked up and growled.
“Damned swinging arm.”
Zen glanced at the monitors, then parked himself at the largest table with the most expensive-looking computer. He pulled out a laptop from his backpack and checked the towers.
“They’ve locked the data ports. See if there’s a key,” Zen said.
As the team frisked the bodies, Yuri checked the screens. Each showed a real-time black-and-white feed from the cameras inside the building. One camera tracked Red Raven as they stormed a deserted conference room. Other cameras displayed empty corridors, abandoned data halls, vacant offices.
The last camera showed three men huddled together in a pantry. They mashed at tablets, jabbed their phones, fiddled with their smartglasses. The oldest among them shook his head, and spoke to them urgently.
“Mason, Samurai. We’ve taken the security office. First floor appears to be clear. I have three civilians on camera. They are on level four, inside the pantry. Might be the night shift.”
“Copy that, Samurai,” George said. “We’re going to pick them up.”
Red Raven pulled out the conference room and made a beeline for the nearest stairwell. Karim stood over the body he had been searching, triumphantly holding up a thin shaft.
“ZT, catch!”
Karim tossed it overhand at Zen. Zen expertly caught it in mid-air. Zen carefully fit the key into the lock and thumbed the release button.
“It worked!” Zen announced.
He connected his laptop to the computer, then set it on the table. As he went to work, Yuri gathered the rest of the team around him.
“Back clear the rooms that aren’t on camera. Then go upstairs and spike the mainframes. I’ll set up shop here and coordinate with Red Raven. Farmer, you have control,” Yuri said.
James nodded. “Good luck.”
“Godspeed.”
The operators shuffled out. Zen hands flew over the keyboard. Yuri checked the remaining computers. To his lack of surprise, they were all password and keycard protected. He took up position next to Zen and watched the screens.
“I’m inside the systems,” Zen said.
“What can you do from here?” Yuri asked.
Zen rubbed his hands gleefully.
“I have access to the cameras, motion detectors, lights, fire sprinkler and alarm systems… I own this whole building.”
“Yeah, but can you access Project Concord?”
Zen clicked through a few screens.
“Nope,” Zen said.
“Then we’re still on the clock.”
Next the monitor, a landline rang. Yuri frowned. The Swordfish couldn’t intercept landline calls. Gregory had offered to cut the power to the neighborhood, but the presence of the UPS would defeat that move.
Which meant the security team had gotten a message out.
The landline continued to ring. Zen frowned too, then glanced at Yuri. The younger man raised an eyebrow. The older man shrugged.
And picked up the phone.
Silence.
Yuri waited.
The caller waited.
Yuri waited some more.
The caller waited even longer.
Yuri hung up.
And the phone rang again.
And Yuri picked up again.
And said nothing.
At last, a cold, robotic voice spoke.
“Status report.”
Yuri cleared his throat and lowered his pitch, making himself sound like he had a bad cold.
“All quiet,” Yuri said.
“We received an alarm signal.”
“False alarm.”
A short pause.
“You are not our man,” the caller said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We do. We feel you over the line. We feel him. We _know _you. You are not one of us. You will never be one of us. We will destroy you, consume you, obliterate you—”
“You’re making a mistake.”
Ten thousand voices screamed as one, male and female, young and old, human and other, a chorus of the deranged and the damned.
The voice of the Void.
“WE ARE COMING FOR YOU, YURI YAMAMOTOOOOOOOOO!”
“Yahweh,” Yuri said.
He vibrated the Name from his belly, willing it to cross the telephone line, to fill the listener with purity and holiness.
The Void howled into his ear, furious and frightened, horrifying and horrified, a bloodcurdling roar bubbling from primordial chaos. In that Name was everything that it was not, and it was afraid.
Yuri hung up.
“What was that?” Zen asked.
“Lock down the building,” Yuri said grimly. “We’re about to have company.”
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