Got them right where we want em

  Gradie stood over the boxes spilling out of the mutited pstic pallet c and checked his phone again. EP had gone ba the footage and taken images from when the pallet Cooper had slipped the in was assembled in the receiving bay at the POE and Gradie tried to match the blurry pixels to the boxes before him. The fact that he couldn’t see what boxes were in the pallets until he cut the semi-opaque pstic off would have been frustrating if not for the fact that every pallet he had cut open so far had boxes on it that looked very those-pixels-esqe anyway.

  He felt two possibilities open to him, each standing off in the dusty darkness like the monsters of sleep paralysis; either he found the before the other side, whoever they were, attacked, and the gunfight burning in the back of his mind never even happened, or he would be digging though pallets in the middle of a gunfight, and it would all e down to him finding the before a bullet found him. Even if there was an afterlife, dying in a dusty pile of rejected appliances and other er products didn’t seem like the way to go, and a rising voice, screaming at him to drop his guns and run out the side door, was being more articute by the sed.

  “Hoallets he got left?” Sam whispered, on the line.

  “Eight,” EP answered, like announg a death.

  “Oh lord!”

  Gradie didn’t tell them that it was more like nine, ht and a half. Mostly out of spite. He didn’t know why he was on the main el anyway. Just so he could hear them gossip about his speed? Why not e help him?

  He kicked the remaining stacked boxes over, hoping they would be easier to dig through in a single yer.

  “Stay quiet,” EP said.

  “How am I supposed to do this quietly?” he whispered.

  “Figure it out. This is the part where you show you have what it takes to be here. And don’t say another word unless your life is at stake.”

  He cut open the pallet and the sound slid through hundreds of thousands of square feet of dead space. EP’s drone, h above him, shone an IR illuminator on the boxes, aried to vince himself that this is what he had signed up for.

  EP ran through the defense for the huh time. The explosive pts. The barrier pallets set up in front of most of the small entrance doors to fuhe attackers towards the others. The positioning of the team, which EP had dialed in to a degree of timeters, with dire from Michael and Philip. The team’s targeting sers had painted her map in various colors, with blind spots revealed iy grey.

  Her drones filled in the gaps. They were marked on the map like a starfield, programmed with predetermined evasive paths, loaded with explosives hts, or just sensors and cameras. She did a quick sweep of the ones outside, stationary, hidden. Some parked on the beams at the underside of the nearby overpass. Some atop t highway lights.

  Her third eye moved out farther still, aed the ripples of the oning attack. Multi-vehicle crashes. Police ser chatter about sightings of “suspects in the main case”, and ns the attackers were shooing w enfort away from the area like flies, baiting them across the city. But beyond that, there was no sign of them. No unordinary traffic heading for the Do unexpinable sense of Hardworlders at work, not sihe phone call. Just rumblings, like a distant thunder.

  She returned her thoughts and sing to the warehouse, now dark and still.

  Lindsey and Philip were up owalk, silent as the dust, with duffle bags full of sand and barrier pallets pced around them. Luke and Sam down on the floor, surrounded by cover, cealment, and ammo. The escape routes and fall-back positions were all pnned out. They had drilled it verbally ten times. Everything that could be done had been done. Now was the time for trolling breathing and pnning for the uable.

  But they had been waiting in silence for at least ten minutes and the tension was gone, slowly repced by annoyand sleeping limbs.

  “ you call them and see where they’re at? I’m worried,” Luke said, his voice breaking out like a bright s in a movie theater.

  “Shut up!” Lindsey hissed, but her words were boung in ughter.

  “I’m telling you, they only called so we would get spooked and cut our set up short,” Philip said. Michael had only giveen minutes after the call to finish preparing, vetoing Philip's request to wait until EP spotted something.

  “Which didn’t work,” Lindsey hissed. “We got all the gear out.” She had spent the full ten minutes driving around the warehouse pnting charges.

  “Yeah, but we could have spent more time setting up ped barriers for kill zones,” Philip said.

  “With what?”

  “What? All these pallets! Did you not notice we’re in a—”

  “Vehicles on the access road,” EP said.

  The warehouse got dead quiet again beside the shuffling sound of Gradie digging through boxes.

  “A bck SUV,” EP tinued. “Probably armored, judging by the way it’s riding. Followed by a sedan. Got others ing from the west. Work Van, another SUV, two trucks…” EP bit off her words. It was a caravan, ten vehicles and ting, coalesg out of the mindless hum of the surrounding traffito something sinister and focused. Onvisible ohree highways that circled the district of warehouses, now in the open, brazen, like fighter pnes abandoning the cover of clouds.

  “You sure it’s not the ing crew?” Luke whispered.

  “Yeah, and you’re the stain,” Lindsey whispered. Luke ughed in his throat.

  “They’re going dark,” EP said. On her drone feed, the headlights died as the cars approached the DC, as if an invisible force radiated from it and demanded darkness. A momehe lights in the parking lot went off in dark disks of shadow. A drone on the roof caught the slight sps of suppressed ons on its audio feed as they skipped across the lot. EP switched to infrared and watched the vehicles approa light blue, the es of their IR illuminator headlights preg them like sails. Other cars moved into the back lot and darkness quered it methodically.

  “Vehicles in both lots. No clear attack poi,” EP advised them.

  “Don’t fire until you get a whole squad, but don’t let two squads link up,” Philip said. EP saw Lindsey shake her head in a se of her s.

  There were more cracks i. EP saw two of her outside drone feeds go dark. “Shit.” She set the high flying one on evasive maneuvers and the feed started to roll around. These first minor moves always quied her heart rate the worst. A pawn for a pawn. Once you were in it, you hardly noticed.

  She caught movement on the feed of the front lot.

  “Joey, they’re stag up on the wall south of the main dot another squad going in the north office. Just broke the gss.”

  “Back lot?” Lindsey whispered.

  EP g the west feed. “Just sitting in their cars right now.” In her peripherals, Luke made a hand signal in one frame, and the gunmen in the front lot shattered the doors in another.

  “Joe’s got tact.”

  Luke was set up on the ground floor, among a serpent coil of veyor belts, his position reinforced with pallets of sandbags, the MG3 resting on its bipod, pointing towards the front door like a missile already in flight. He had aimed the on at the tral metal detector with a ser sight when he first set up.

  The men came in the front door over broken gss. Their active IR glowed like Christmas as they sed ers and cleared the security office from the lobby. He could tell they were fodder. They had all the right moves, but something was g. They crossed the lobby in swift practiced steps that cut the distao bits the way their rifles pie-sliced the room. Point man stepped square in front of the tral metal detector, like a target moving into the crosshairs in an old arcade game, and Luke opened fire with a smile.

  The scream of the MG3 bounced off every surfa the warehouse. It made the sheet metal roof sing its song, a solid roar, indivisible, each retort blended into the . Shell gs and links poured onto the ground as the gun pushed into his shoulder, devoured the ammo belt, and threw fire at the lobby. Even with the fsh suppressor, the muzzle fsh blinded him during the bursts.

  The rounds rang off the metal skeletons of the turnstiles ite sparks and cracked off the floor. Two of the IR sers jerked down to the ground as the men holding them died. His ammo belts had their tracers repced with standard rounds, so the bullets struck out unseen. At just under fifty yards, it didn’t matter.

  Rounds zipped in from the parking lot and struck pallets and boxes around him. More like a whimper than a ter-attack. Luke had poured almost a hundred rounds through the lobby in about five seds, and all he could see were bodies. Vehicles squealed through the lot to get out of his line of sight. He fired shorter bursts after them and rounds sparked off the lot. Someo of sight was screaming into a radio.

  “ you tag that guy?” he said softly, between bursts. One of EP’s drones lit up a se of wall to the left of the turnstiles with an IR beam a a half-sed burst into it. The voice stopped.

  “They’re moving iruck door office,” EP said. “Charge going off.” An explosion rocked the building, like some giant pying drums on the roof. The roar came through their earbuds as a moment of silehe office windows shattered out onto the main floor. Sam swore and Luke chuckled as he felt the vibration at his bad in his boots.

  “Got em. Whole squad,” EP said.

  On her left monitor, an outside drone feed sholume of debris where the trucker entrance had been. The cars in the back lot stopped moving. Men got out o a few of them and aimed at the building from cover. ons came out of trunks and doors.

  Movement in another window dreortion of her focus, which was fragmented aultiple ss, despite the tunnel-vision-tug of adrenaline.

  A five-man squad had broken into the north-east offid now moved towards the door to the warehouse floor. One of them was listening to intel from a voice el she hadn’t been able to get into.

  “On your door Max,” EP told him.

  How would you defend a massive warehouse with four people? ime, some things are meant to be destroyed. episode, .