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 knows 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.”