There wasn’t a single crack of light leaking around the door. No sign of life. Infrared didn’t reveal much, either. He scanned along the side of the building again.
“The conditioning unit is on,” Ralph observed. “I can see the motor’s heat, and the grille’s venting. Someone’s in there.”
“Do you want us to infiltrate a nanonic sensor?” Nelson Akroid asked. He was the AT Squad’s captain, a stocky man in his late thirties, barely coming up to Ralph’s shoulder. Not quite the image one expected from someone in his profession, but then Ralph was used to the more bulky G66 troops. Ralph suspected Nelson Akroid would be a healthy opponent in any hand-to-hand fighting, though; he had the right kind of subdued competence.
“It’s a big building, plenty of opportunities for ambush,” Nelson Akroid said. “We’d benefit from positioning them exactly. And my technical operators are good. The hostiles would never know they’d been infiltrated.” He sounded eager, which could be a flaw given this situation. Ralph couldn’t imagine him and his squad seeing much active duty on Ombey. Their lot was more likely endless drills and exercises, the curse of any specialist field.
“No nanonics,” Ralph said. “We could never depend on them anyway. I want the penetration team to deploy using standard search and seizure procedures. We can’t believe any information from a sensor, so I want them going in fully alert.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Diana?” he datavised. “What can the AIs tell me?”
“No change. There are no detectable glitches in the warehouse processors it can access. But there’s very little electronic activity in there anyway, the office and administration systems are all switched off, so that doesn’t mean much.”
“What’s the taxi’s maximum capacity?”
“Six. And the Industry Department says Mahalia employs fifteen staff. They service and distribute parts for agricultural machinery right across the continent.”
“Okay, we’ll assume the worst case. A minimum of twenty-one possible hostiles. Thanks, Diana.”
“Ralph, the AIs have discovered another two possible glitch traces in the city’s route and flow network. I instructed them to concentrate on vehicle traffic around the spaceport in the period after the embassy trio arrived. Another taxi suffered a lot of problems, and the other’s a freight vehicle.”
“Shit! Where are they now?”
“The AIs are running search routines; but these two are proving harder to find than the first taxi. I’ll keep you updated.”
The channel closed. Ralph reviewed the AT Squad as they closed in on the warehouse, black figures who seemed more mobile shadows than solid people. They know their job, he admitted grudgingly.
“Everyone’s in place, sir,” Nelson Akroid datavised. “And the AIs have taken command of the security cameras. The hostiles don’t know we’re here.”
“Fine.” Ralph didn’t tell him that if Tremarco or Gallagher were in there they’d know for sure that the AT Squad was outside. He wanted the squad charged up and professional, not shooting at phantoms.
“Stand by,” Ralph datavised to the Squad. “Status of the assault mechanoids, please?”
“On-line, sir,” the AT Squad’s technical officer reported.
Ralph gave the roll-up door another scan. Like Pandora’s box, once it was open there would be no going back. And only he, Roche Skark, and Admiral Farquar knew that if the virus carriers got past the AT Squad, then the industrial park would be targeted by SD platforms.
He could feel the low-orbit observation satellite sensors focusing on him.
“Okay,” he datavised to the squad. “Go.”
The assault mechanoid which Ombey’s AT Squads employed looked as if the design team had been accessing too many horror sensevises for inspiration. Three metres high at full stretch, it had seven plasmatic legs, resembling tentacles with hooves, which could move it over the most jumbled terrain at a sprint that even boosted humans couldn’t match. Its body was a segmented barrel, giving it a serpentine flexibility. There were sockets for up to eight specialist limb attachments, varying from taloned climbing claws to mid-calibre gaussrifles. Control could be either autonomous, operating under a preloaded program, or a direct waldo datavise.
Five of them charged across the parking yard outside the warehouse, covering the last thirty metres in two seconds. Long, whiplike cords lashed out from the top of their bodies, slashing against the door’s centimetre-thick composite. Where they hit, they stuck, forming a horizontal crisscross grid four metres above the ground. A millisecond later the cords detonated; the shaped electron explosive charge was powerful enough to cut clean through a metre of concrete. The ruined door didn’t even have time to fall. All five assault mechanoids slammed against it in a beautiful demonstration of synchronized mayhem. What was left of the door buckled and burst apart, sending jagged sections tumbling and bouncing down the warehouse’s central aisle.
With a clear field of fire established, the mechanoids sent a fast, brutal barrage of short-range sense-overload ordnance blazing down the length of the building. Sensors instantly pinpointed the designated-hostile humans flailing around in panic, and concentrated their fire.
Behind the assault mechanoids, the AT Squad flashed through the smoking doorway. They scuttled for cover between the stacks of crates, scanning the deeper recesses of the warehouse for hidden hostiles. Then, with the mechanoids taking point duty down the central aisle, they began to fan out in their search and securement formation.
Mixi Penrice, proprietor of Mahalia Engineering Supplies, had been struggling to remove the linear motor from the stolen taxi’s rear axle when the assault mechanoids crashed into the warehouse door. The noise of the shaped electron explosive charges going off was like standing next to a lightning strike.
Shock made him jump half a metre in the air, not an easy feat given he was about twenty kilos overweight. Terrible lines of white light flared at the far end of the warehouse, and the door bulged inwards briefly before it disintegrated. But he wasn’t so numbed that he didn’t recognize the distinctive silhouette of the assault mechanoids sprinting through the swirl of smoke and composite splinters. Mixi shrieked and dived for the floor, arms wrapping around his head. The full output of the sense-overload ordnance struck him. Strobing light which seemed to shine through his skull. Sound that was trying hard to shake every joint apart. The air turned to rocket exhaust, burning his tongue, his throat, his eyes. He vomited. He voided both his bladder and his bowels; a combination of sheer fright and nerve short-out pulses.
Three minutes later, when pain-filled consciousness returned, he found himself lying flat on his back, shaking spastically, with disgustingly thick liquids cooling and crusting across his clothes. Five large figures wearing dark armour suits were standing over him, horribly big guns trained on his abdomen.
Mixi tried to clasp his hands together in prayer. It was the day which in his heart he’d always known would come, the day when King Alastair II dispatched all the forces of law and order in his Kingdom to deal with Mixi Penrice, car thief and trader in stolen parts. “Please,” he babbled weakly. He couldn’t hear his own voice; too much blood was running out of his ears. “Please, I’ll pay it all back. I promise. I’ll tell you who my fences are. I’ll give you the name of the bloke who wrote the program which screws up the road network processors. You can have it all. Just, please, don’t kill me.” He started sobbing wretchedly.
Ralph Hiltch slowly pulled back his shell helmet’s moulded visor. “Oh, fuck !” he yelled.