Measures of Absolution

Chapter Six Mazes

When the First Sergeant walks into the squad bay, Jackson is by herself, sorting out her kit and checking for defects.

He waves her off as she snaps to attention.

“As you were. Come over here and have a seat.”

She obeys and sits down at the table with the First Sergeant, who is the only person in the battalion that scares her as almost much as Sergeant Fallon.

“I need a squad leader,” the First Sergeant says. “After that clusterfuck last week, I’m short a few heads. You up for padding a squad with the rest of your guys?”

“What’s the drop?” she asks.

He looks at her and purses his lips.

“Charlie Company is doing a public safety sweep assist in Detroit-22. Fifth-gen PRC.”

Jackson feels a unsettling tightening in her chest.

Fifth-gen PRC. Good God.

“I’ll take a squad in Charlie,” she says. “Just keep my boys off the line for a few more days.”

The first-and second-generation PRCs were old school traditional thinking. High rises, none taller than twenty floors, laid out along wide streets, with parks and stuff in between. They meant to give it a regular neighborhood look and feel. All the oldest PRCs are first- or second-gen. They didn’t have to tear down the old cities, just clear blocks piecemeal for new high rises. They worked okay, for a while anyway.

The third-and fourth-gen PRCs were much the same, only they tacked ten more floors onto the maximum for the high rises and clustered them all together like small cities. Twenty to a cluster. Most of the worst shitholes are third- or fourth-gen, because they’re difficult to manage in a centralized manner. Too many people spread out over too many acres.

The fifth-generation PRCs—now those are something else entirely. The Commonwealth’s crowning achievement in efficient people storage. All the latest thinking in crowd control, food distribution, security, and space utilization.

Residence towers a hundred floors high. Built around a hollow core, for convection cooling and to let daylight in. Each tower with its own fusion plant, medic station, security office. A hundred floors, a hundred apartments per floor, average occupancy two. Those are the units. Four towers put together in a square, the spaces between them walled off with thirty-foot concrete dams. That makes a block. The plaza between the four towers is for public services—recreation, food distribution, shops, public safety, transit station. Each block is centrally managed, its own little city. Eighty thousand people put together in a square footprint a thousand feet on each of its sides.

Twelve of those blocks arranged in a much bigger square, four blocks on each side of the square—that’s a fifth-gen Public Residence Cluster. Forty-eight towers, split into blocks of four. Close to a million people in a fifth-gen, and that’s at designed capacity. Many hold one and a half, two times that number. In the middle of that gigantic square made up of residence blocks are the wastewater and garbage facilities, the main power plant, the food manufacturing and reprocessing stations, administration building, and the main law enforcement and detention center for the PRC. From here, the Public Housing Police can lock down blocks and quarantine them in case of public unrest, and send backup to the public safety stations in the twelve blocks. Three hundred sixty-seven acres, a little over half a square mile, and it’s a self-contained, compartmentalized, centrally managed city that houses and feeds over a million people. And the average metroplex has twenty or thirty of them.

In theory, the fifth-gen PRCs are easier to police than the older ones, and that’s mostly true. You can shut down a floor, a unit, a block, three blocks, the whole damn place, all remotely from the central law enforcement facility that sits in the middle of the PRC like a spider in the center of a web. For some reason, however, Jackson hates going into the fifth-gens. Maybe it’s because she grew up in a third-gen PRC, and she’s used to the warrens of high-rises clumped together. In a third-gen, you always have a place to run and hide. It’s sprawling and cramped, but everything is interconnected. The fifth-gens are so compartmentalized, you have choke points everywhere. Residence towers have two main entrance halls. Blocks have one entry and exit point, toward the middle of the PRC. It’s all too easy to shut down, too easy to trap people, funnel them like animals in a slaughter chute.

They drop into PRC Detroit-22 with a full company. It’s a lot of combat power, but Jackson knows that if things go to shit again, it won’t be enough, not even close. The four drop ships of Charlie Company circle the towers of the target block at a safe distance. Then the lead ship swoops in and lands on the roof of the ten-story civil administration building, down on the square between the residence towers. Jackson is with Second Platoon, and their drop ship does not follow. Instead, they circle around and settle on the roof of the outermost residence tower, a hundred floors up. Then the tail ramp drops, and Second Platoon’s thirty-six troopers rush out to deploy.

From up here, a thousand feet above the PRC, the view is actually almost beautiful, Jackson thinks. The streetlights and shop signs below illuminate the dirty night air in many colors. From up here, she can see clear across this PRC and into the next one, and the one beyond. A hundred thousand apartments, millions of people. Thousands of thefts, hundreds of assaults, dozens of murders committed right this second in her field of view. No guns allowed in public housing, but Jackson knows there are almost as many of them out there as there are people. You’d be foolish not to go armed in a place like this. Without teeth and claws, you’re food to everyone out on those streets.

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 100^th 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 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.”

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.

“Last chance,” the enemy commander’s voice comes over the public address system. “Surrender your weapons, or we’ll come and take them.”

Across the core, a lot of rifles are aimed in Jackson’s direction now, and a lot of them look like military hardware.

But they don’t have battle armor, Jackson thinks.

None of the civvies have the sealed armor to go with those stolen military rifles, and she wants to bet they’re a little short on augmentation too, because nobody over there seems to be wearing a helmet.

“Launchers,” she tells her squad in a low voice. “All gas grenades. Lob ‘em over the barrier and onto the other side. Give me a volley on my mark.”

Her squad obeys. They take buckshot shells out of launchers and replace them with riot gas canisters. Kelly almost fumbles her reload, then readies her grenade launcher and looks at Jackson with wide, fearful eyes.

“Left side shoots left, right shoots right,” Jackson orders. “Kelly, shoot straight across with me. On three. Two. One. Fire in the hole!”

Nine launchers thump in a short, stuttering drumroll. Two of the gas grenades clatter against the polyplast barrier on the other side of the chasm and careen off, then fall down into the core spewing smoke. The other seven grenades drop into the gallery space beyond and burst apart. Within a few seconds, the other side of the gallery is blanketed with riot gas.

To a trooper in sealed armor, a gas grenade is just a minor inconvenience. The helmet keeps out the chemicals, and the augmented vision from the sensors cuts through the smoke. To an unprotected civvie, however, it’s like getting your face doused with alcohol and set on fire.

Instantly, there are screams of anger and pain coming from the far side. Jackson can see people hunching over or dropping to their knees in the noxious white cloud her squad just conjured with their launchers.

“Flank and flush,” Jackson orders. “Southeast corner, doubletime.”

She rushes her squad to the corner of the gallery, then turns left to cover the stretch of garbage-strewn concrete that is the south side of the gallery. Then she’s at the southeast corner. She looks around the edge of the concrete retaining wall to see the armed civvies retching in the chem cloud. The stuff is pretty persistent, but it won’t keep them suppressed for more than a few minutes. Until then, they’re blind and in no shape for fighting.

Jackson draws first blood. In the mouth of a hallway ten yards in front of her, two of the armed civvies are still alert and on their feet, at the far edge of the chem cloud. They see her and raise their rifles. She shoots first, letting her computer select the burst length as she sweeps thecivvies with her muzzle and holds her trigger down. The M-66 pumps out two three-round bursts, and both civvies fall over. Their rifles clatter to the floor as they die silently.

When Jackson looks to her left again, the remaining civvies have retreated into the vestibules and hallways of the floor beyond the gallery again. She wishes she had some HE or frag grenades to bank off these walls and bounce after them, but the ammo loads for the mission were limited to nonlethal and buckshot for the launchers. Nobody anticipated having to use high explosives for a simple public safety sweep assist. The world seems to have gone nuts since last week.

She has never missed that heavy, unwieldy piece-of-shit MARS launcher more in her life. With armor-piercing rockets or thermobarics, she could crack these walls like eggshells, blast a hole into the exterior wall, radio the drop ship, get out of this mess.

“Back to the hallway,” she tells her troops and points at the wide main hallway on the south side. The fire-proof door isn’t down yet, and the main hallways lead straight to the main staircases. They rush over to the south side, trying to cover in all directions.

Just as they reach the mouth of the hallway, the elevator bank nearby chimes, and the doors open. Jackson and her squad are maybe fifteen meters away as the elevator disgorges a squad or more of civvies with weapons. They see her group and raise their guns just as Jackson’s squad bring up theirs.

She wants to stop time at that moment. She knows what is going to happen, but she’s powerless to avoid it. It’s that freeze frame of mental acuity when that trigger has been pulled and the striker is racing toward the primer of the cartridge. The civvie in the lead starts to shout something, but Jackson can’t understand it, and it doesn’t matter in the end anyway.

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.