Oh, shit.
Then everyone opens fire seemingly at once.
Jackson dives out of the way to the left, into the hallway and away from the elevators. She fires her rifle from the hip, into the tightly packed group of civvies coming off the elevators. As fast as she gets out of the way, a burst of flechettes still rakes her arm and right side. Behind her, the squad is out in the open, without the time to get to cover.
At a short range like this, a firefight between two squads with automatic rifles is like a knife fight in a boot camp locker. People scream and fall. Flechettes are piercing armor and flesh, ricocheting off hard surfaces and spraying apart in tiny splinters. Eighteen, twenty rifles firing in rapid cadence. Jackson has never been in the middle of such a hail, not even back in Detroit.
Her rifle’s target reticle disappears from her helmet display. She pays it no mind, just keeps firing her rifle from the hip. Hard to miss at this range. People are on the ground, others are madly scrambling for distance and cover. This isn’t holding the line. This isn’t a heroic last stand against the odds. It’s naked, bloody slaughter.
Jackson’s rifle stops firing. She automatically ejects her magazine and reaches for a new one on her harness, reloads, keeps firing.
She catches the movement above out of the corner of her eye. Reflexively, she throws herself backward. Overhead, the heavy steel-and-ceramic fire door of the main hallway entrance comes down quickly and silently. It slams into the concrete floor in front of her with a resounding crash that makes the floor shake. One meter to the right, and she would have been bisected by the hatch that locks into place not five inches from her right boot.
She is alone in the dark. Everyone else, her squad and all their enemies, are on the other side of the fire door.
Jackson screams in rage and frustration. She slams the unyielding laminate of the fire door with her fist. On the other side, the gunfire sounds muffled now, but rifles are still firing on full auto, and people are still shouting and screaming. Her people, her squad. Her responsibility.
“I’m locked in,” she shouts into the squad channel. “Covering fire, and retreat to the breech we made.”
Nobody replies. She pounds the fire hatch again, and this time there’s a sharp pain in her hand that shoots all the way up to her elbow. She examines her hand in the green-tinted augmentation of her helmet’s sensors. One of the flechettes from the enemy fire hit her armored glove and shattered. A shard of it must have pierced the armor and gone up her forearm. She can feel the blood running down the inside of the suit even as the armor’s computer works on stemming the blood flow with its integrated trauma kit.
There are more holes in her armor, on her right side. Jackson isn’t in pain, but her side feels numb, which is bad news. It means she’s wounded badly enough for her suit to numb her up. Still, she has her legs, arms, and hands, and everything still works.
There’s no way through that hatch except for blowing it up with a MARS rocket, which she doesn’t have. Jackson checks her rifle—180 rounds remaining—and her spare magazines. Three left, plus the one in the gun. Maybe enough to fight her way out of here.
The corridor behind her is deserted as well. A whole floor of a welfare high-rise, and it’s empty. Jackson wonders how far down they’ve evacuated. The floor below, five floors, ten? Where did all those people go? And how did these welfare rats become so organized?
On the other side of the fire door, the muffled sounds of automatic rifle fire cease. She tries the squad channel again. No reply.
Jackson replaces the partial magazine in her rifle with a full one and tucks away the partial in one of her magazine pouches. Then she moves down the hallway, away from the heavy fire door that traps her in this section.
The dark hallways of the apartment floor are eerily quiet and empty. Jackson clears the corridor, doorway by doorway, eighty meters of grungy rat warren without any rats inside.
At the end of the next hallway, there’s an escape door to a stairwell. The green fire escape sign glows in the dark like a dim beacon. Jackson walks up to the door and pushes the panic bar down to open it. It doesn’t budge.
There are two buckshot grenades left on her harness. She stuffs one into her launcher’s chamber, steps back, and blows the lock assembly to scrap with a thousand grains of polymer-coated tungsten shot. Then she kicks the door open.
The staircase is dark and empty. It’s 99 floors down to the atrium level, and she doesn’t really want to go down to where her whole platoon just got bagged by the locals without firing a shot, but there’s no other way out of this trap. She could hole up in one of the empty apartments and wait for them to come and find her, but she will not be pried out of a hiding hole like vermin.
The pain in her side is burning through the local anesthetic. The suit’s autodoc is keeping her from bleeding out, but she knows that she needs to get to a medical center soon.
She makes it almost ten floors down before she hears fire doors slamming open above and below her. It’s a trap, and she has walked into it willingly.
Jackson retreats to a corner of the stairwell and brings up her rifle. The optic on top of her M-66 is shattered, probably taken out by the same burst of flechette fire that tore up her side. The IR aiming laser still works, though. She puts the green dot of the laser on the first silhouette to appear on the staircase above, and pulls the trigger for a burst, then another. The silhouette disappears. The civvies carry high-powered weapon lights on their rifles, and the beams tear through the dark, casting harsh shadows on walls and ceilings.
Then she takes fire from the staircase below. She replies in kind, sending a few bursts downstairs. The ammo counter readout on her helmet screen goes from 250 to 210 in a blink. The civvies above her pop off a few bursts of un-aimed fire, holding their rifles over the railings without sticking their heads out.
Two grenades come flying down the stairs. They clatter on the concrete, bounce off the floor and walls, go in two different directions. Jackson rushes for one, kicks it down the stairs, knows that she doesn’t have the time to reach the second one. But she tries anyway.
She kicks the second grenade, and it flies off and hits one of the steel posts for the handrail of the staircase. It deflects at an angle and lands in the space to her right, where she can’t reach it without running right in front of the guns of the civvies down the stairs. It never comes to rest before it explodes.
Jackson is thrown backwards against the unyielding concrete of the staircase wall. Then she’s on her side down on the dirty concrete of the sub-landing. She gropes for her rifle, but it’s gone, blown from her hands. She feels the air leaking out of her, takes another breath, can’t get her lungs to respond the way they should. There are footsteps above and below her in the dark. She gives up her search for the M-66 and fumbles for the knife strapped to her harness even as she feels her consciousness slipping away. Then there’s just silence and darkness.
Chapter Seven
Lazarus
Jackson wakes up and immediately wishes she hadn’t.
There’s a bright light above her head that’s hurting her eyes, and she is thirsty, thirstier than she has ever been in her life. She turns her head sideways to avoid the painful glare of the light above. She’s in a room with unwashed floors and unpainted walls, dirty concrete. The merciless glare from the light fixture on the ceiling makes the place look inhospitable, pointing out every pockmark in the walls and mold spot on the ceiling as it does.
Her right arm is bandaged from fingertips to elbow. There’s a dull ache throbbing underneath the antiseptic gauze, but when she tries to flex her fingers, they obey. She uses her left hand to check the right side of her body. More bandages, taped to her skin, worse aching underneath. She feels like absolute shit, like she just woke up with the world’s worst hangover.