Patrick Lee - The Breach

"Still a move the Whisper could expect. So far, it adds up."

"What adds up?"

"That Aaron Pilgrim meant for a Tangent team to be here tonight. Meant for them to open these doors and trigger the Ares, and end up fighting off a siege by the whole city."

"Why?"

Travis thought about it, but could only shake his head. "I don't know. Whatever it is, the dominoes are dropping exactly like he wants them to, so far. We're dead-centered in the trap."

He watched her consider it. Watched her hate it as much as she acknowledged it. It wasn't so much an assessment of their situation as a diagnosis.

"How the hell we're supposed to compete against this kind of thinking, I don't know," Travis said.

"I might," Paige said. She looked around the mostly empty room, then back at him. "We exploit the things the Whisper could've never predicted."

"Like what?"

"Like you. Four years ago, or fourteen years ago, whenever Pilgrim got this plan from the Whisper, there's no way it could've known a random hiker would show up at that crash site two days ago. That Ellen Garner would've survived and left a note for you to follow. That you'd end up holding the Whisper yourself, and that it would be compelled to tell you how to read this language."

He nodded. That much seemed safe enough to believe.

"Meaning we were never supposed to know these names," Travis said, indicating the list carved into the floor.

They were both silent a moment.

Then Crawford's voice came over the speaker. "We're on it. I'll put someone on each name, dig up everything there is, find whatever thread connects them all to Pilgrim."

His last word was cut off by a scream in Travis's ear, from one of the snipers over the comm system: "Gun!"

Half a second later, another of them cried out, and then there were two voices shouting that a man was down.

Sprinting again. Past the nuke. Down the stairs to Level Eight.

Miller, on the landing farther down, saw Paige and shouted, "Sixth floor! Hill's been hit!"

Travis followed Paige down, past the piles of ammunition Miller continued to stockpile, through the tunnel of wires to the level below. Then more tunnels, across the sixth floor, toward the windows and the sound of screaming. They found two snipers kneeling over a third, who'd lost a good portion of his face and neck but was somehow still breathing. Wouldn't be for much longer.

Paige dropped her backpack from her shoulders, wrenched open the zipper and brought out something that looked a lot like a pistol, maybe a little Walther PPK, Travis thought. Then he saw it better, and realized the resemblance was only fleeting: the thing's shape was just stark and practical, a small black tube with a grip and a trigger. It was the Medic.

Paige aimed it at the dying man's wounds, her body language full of doubt, and pulled the trigger. The effect looked something like a camera flash going off, accompanied by a surge of heat that Travis felt two feet away. The man's body spasmed in response, and Travis saw the injuries change dramatically. The blood flow seemed to staunch itself in less than a second.

But the guy was still dying. Eyes still wild as he fought for breath. Paige gripped his hand, and her eyes pleaded with him to fight. But after a moment, his own eyes tilted away from hers, and he expelled a hard breath. He didn't take his next one.

"Shooter was in a window halfway up the block," one of the others said. "They're getting smarter about it."

Travis thought of the demo video on the laptop, two of the enraged men conferring thoughtfully and then trying to pick the cage lock. Livid, but not stupid. Not even close to stupid.

He turned to the window. Outside, on the bridges and in the streets between the buildings, the barricades of the dead were now adorned with the burning shells of automobiles. The blazes slowed the forward crush only a little, but had a stark effect on the fog, baking the air and clearing deep cavities through the mist around them. Like lenses through which Travis could now see the carnage, hard and clear in the firelight. He wished he couldn't.

A small knot of people broke from the crowd and came inward at a sprint. The two snipers near Travis and Paige opened fire again.

Travis leaned close to her and shouted, "We're not gonna last much longer! Four hundred thousand people out there! They see what's not working for them, they'll find a way that does!"

"What are we supposed to do?" Paige shouted. "If they come in, they'll trip the sensors!"

"How does it normally work with the Ares?" he said. "Are the attackers after the thing itself, or just the people who are tagged by it? It's just the people, right?"

Another car detonated in the street below, like a mortar round going off.

Paige shouted over the sound. "Yeah! They're just after us!"

"So let's leave!"

She looked at him like she'd heard wrong. So did the nearest of the snipers.

"They'll follow us," Travis said. "And they'll forget about the building. We'll end up dead, but at least we can draw them away from the fucking nuke. There must be service tunnels under the streets, drainage, pipeline maintenance, that kind of thing. Is there access to them from inside this building?"

"Yeah," Paige said. "There's a panel in the basement. It's not huge, but we could fit through, single file-"

She stopped. Caught her breath. A second later Travis realized why.

Then she was on her feet and running again, through the tunnel, shouting into her comm unit as she went. "Second floor teams, get to the basement! Secure the conduit access!"

Travis was right behind her, rifle in hand, hitting the stairs now, down through the wire-choked space, past the feeders running ammo, past the rabbit tunnels branching out to the shooters on every level. Third floor now. Second. First.

And here were the snipers Paige had just ordered down. Bunched around the doorway to the basement, the door itself torn from its hinges. Four men, firing on full auto at something right there, maybe just feet beyond Travis's angle of view. Paige's insight had prevented disaster by a margin of perhaps seconds: the throng had already flooded into the basement through the access tunnels.

At that moment, one of the four snipers took a shot to the head and dropped. However many people were down there, some of them had guns.

Travis realized he could hear their voices, loud as the shooting was. Could hear the screams of anger, could hear even the distinct words, in German and maybe Italian. A noise to Travis's right made him turn. It'd sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor. It came again, and this time he saw its source. The hallway floor heaved upward an inch, hit by something from below. Some heavy object in the hands of probably a dozen people, being used as a battering ram to come through the floorboards. The third impact cracked one of them, leaving a four-inch-wide gap. Through it, Travis saw the nightmare. The space below was wall-to-wall with writhing bodies, faces twisted in rage. Eyes locked onto him through the gap, and a volley of incensed screams came up.

He turned and saw Paige looking at the same spot. Then, beyond her, one of the snipers took something from his backpack. In the crazed light, Travis couldn't see what the thing was, but had a pretty good guess.

Paige turned, saw it, and screamed, "No!"

The man pivoted toward her, and Travis saw what he'd expected: a grenade.

"There are gas lines down there!" Paige shouted.

"What the fuck are we supposed to do?" the man yelled.

Paige had no answer.

The floor heaved again. A second board fractured, right behind the first, and a hand gripped it from below and snapped it down into the darkness. The hole would be wide enough to admit bodies soon. A second later, Travis heard the battering impact again, somewhere else on the main floor.