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  “Snap out of it, Nolan,” growled Davidson, guessing her train of thought. “The money isn’t in your pocket yet.”

  From the data collected by the ARES they were able to work out a plan of attack while they continued along the forest road. McDermott would find a good covering position from the west with the MPHG while Ramsay and Anna would circle northwards; Strutton and the sergeant would come from the east.

  “Speed and surprise.” Davidson slapped a hand against the side of his rifle. “I’ll hit them with EMP first to stop any digi-traffic calling for help, breach pads on the fence and then work in pairs through the compound. When we’re secure Anna launches the ARES on full engagement mode.” “Just like New Korea,” said Ramsay. “Smooth and steady.”

  “And get that thing to stay out of the way,” Davidson told McDermott, jabbing a thumb towards the STaLKer.

  “I’ll keep Stan with me, sergeant,” McDermott replied with a wink.

  The others signalled their understanding and the team split, moving into the forest, their combat visors compensating for the lower light levels. About five hundred metres on, Anna and Ramsay turned east towards the compound. A cursory look confirmed that there were no watch towers, although Ramsay scanned the surrounding trees, looking for camouflaged watching posts amongst the foliage.

  “Relax,” Anna said quietly, laying a hand on Ramsay’s arm. “This is Indotech stuff we’re dealing with here, not that state-of-the art commubloc gear they had in New Korea. Mark One eyeballs are all we need to worry about if we stay off-net.”

  She thumbed the safety switch and her IL-28 gave off a brief hum as the range-finder and ammunition setting systems came online. She nodded to Ramsay. Her partner slung his rifle and pulled a thumb-sized object from a pouch at his belt. He gave it a twist and a tug, separating the two halves to reveal a metre-and-a-half of explosive cord. With Anna covering him, Ramsay moved towards the corrugated metal of the fence, using the trees as cover.

  Anna advanced to twenty metres from the compound. Sheselected airburst rounds on the IL-28, setting the detonation range accordingly. Ramsay attached the breaching charge and withdrew, holding his gun in one hand and a trigger-switch transmitter in the other.

  They waited in silence. Anna smoothly moved the sight of her rifle back and forth along the fence, taking long, deliberate breaths, fighting the surge of adrenaline that was trying to convince her that she needed to charge in screaming and firing. Her gloves absorbed the sweat seeping from her palms and demister valves kept her visor clear of condensation, but there was no gadget to stop her heart racing, her ears hissing with the increase in blood pressure. Some of the long-term mercs had internal regulators implanted for that sort of thing, but she wasn’t in this game for the long haul; she just wanted to earn enough to get out into the new worlds and set up a business of her own. “Activating EMP projector,” Davidson announced. There were no other visual or audio cue that the generator had been activated. There was silence for a few seconds before he spoke again. “Breach.” That single word launched the mercenaries into action. A loud bang resounded from the opposite side of the compound. Ramsay detonated the charge a moment after. The explosion tore a gash through the metal, twisting the fence into a jagged hole just wide enough to step through. Ramsay let the detonator drop, hanging from his band on a wrist, and had his rifle up in a second. Anna fired a burst of three rounds, timed to detonate just inside the hole. The snap of each airburst bullet seemed to be quiet after the sound of the breaching charge. Ramsay was the first to the hole, pushing his rifle through the breach so he could look on the camera-viewer.

  “It’s clear,” he said. “Peel left.”

  Anna was on his heels, turning to the left as she stepped through the broken fence, Ramsay covering the other direction. They had breached behind one of the compound shacks, the building only a little higher than Anna was tall, with horizontal slit windows and a flat roof.

  Using their gun cameras, they checked inside the gloomy building; an open space with a few sacks and boxes showing on the lowlight displays, but no sign of the enemy. Anna tapped Ramsay on the shoulder and when he glanced back she pointed upwards. Receiving a nod of agreement, she slung her rifle and grabbed the edge of the roof. A window made a good foothold to lever herself off the ground.

  She rolled flat, pulling her IL-28 free before snaking across to the front of the building. From this vantage point she could see the length of the compound, about seventy metres from the gate by the roadside to the north fence where they had come in, and thirty metres from east to west. A loud buzzing announced McDermott opening fire with the heavy gausser; in reality a succession of tiny sonic booms created by an electromagnetically impelled round every tenth of a millisecond. A storm of solid projectiles ripped into the compound, tearing through the fence and hut walls with equal ease, shredding anything in their path until they exited to the north-east, slashing into the trees for another three hundred metres. The fusillade continued for a second and a half at most, but left a swathe of destruction in its wake.

  A more conventional crackle of gunfire could be heard where Davidson and Strutton had entered to the south-east, as well as slower barks of gunfire, presumably from the Indonesian occupants. On the first sweep Anna could not see an enemy combatant. The hut immediately to her left had already been torn up by hundreds of rounds from McDermott’s support fire, but there was a small outhouse, perhaps a washing block or lavatories, ten metres ahead and to her right. She fired another tripleburst of explosive rounds through the thin roof, the tinny ring of their detonations inside heralding a shower of shrapnel that would cut apart anybody within.

  “On the corner, got you covered,” Ramsay told her.

  “One target, hard on your right,” Anna snapped back a couple of seconds later as she saw a thin man in combat trousers and a white t-shirt emerge from the main pre-fab centre, an old T-46 infantry rifle in his hands. Ramsay reacted instantly, cutting down the Indonesian with an antipersonnel round through the target’s chest.

  “Target down,” Ramsay said, the habit of combat overriding the redundancy of the statement. “Flank is clear.”

  Anna checked left again and saw nothing. Turning her attention to the main building she could see a shuttered door at the bottom of a ramp, which looked very much like an underground garage. “We might have vehicles,” she told the others. “That’d make getting out of the scanzone a lot easier.”

  She had just finished speaking when she saw Sergeant Davidson stepping out into the main area between the huts and central building. Strutton emerged from the other side of the building several seconds later.

  The two drones that had been shadowing the squad for the whole mission circled above the compound, one heading towards the sergeant, another hovering about thirty metres above Anna. She knew she should have been used to them by now, but she still found their presence irritating. Her attention was drawn to them for just a second but out of the corner of her eye she saw movement above her, amongst the aerials and dishes crowding the jamming post roof.

  “Enemy high!” she yelped, rising to a crouch so that she could elevate her rifle.

  The warning came too late. A rattle of fire punctured the quiet and Strutton went reeling back, clasping a hand to her shoulder, tatters of active camouflage material fraying from the side of her helmet. Davidson disappeared back behind the building. More bullet impacts kicked up grit around Strutton as she fell. Her leg jerked awkwardly and collapsed under her. Her cry of pain intensified to a drawn-out scream, the sound hurting Anna as if she had been shot herself.

  “Goddamn, goddamn,” Anna snarled over and over, trying to get a clear shot at the marksman on the control tower roof as more rounds cracked down towards Strutton. All Anna could see in the scope was metal girders and ceramic digi-detector cones. She calibrated the airburst shells to fortysix metres and fired half a dozen rounds, hoping to drive the gunner away from the roof edge. Small flashes erupted over the control tower, raining piece
s of razor-sharp metal down onto the roof. “Get her back!” Anna yelled, the words directed at Davidson. “She’s right in the line of fire.” “Doesn’t matter, Nolan,” came the sergeant’s calm reply. Anna realised the screaming had stopped. She glanced groundwards and saw Strutton sprawled halfway on her side as she had tried to turn to crawl away, blood pooled beneath her. There was no movement. “McDermott,” Davidson said with slow, deliberate intonation, “I want everything on that roof taken out.”

  “Affirmative, calculating firing angle. Nobody move.”

  Although Anna couldn’t see McDermott she had seen him operating the man-portable heavy gausser before and could picture him unlocking the long gun, swivelling it on the tripod and then locking it into the new firing position, leaving just a three-degree spread of fire. Another ripple of supersonic rounds engulfed the roof of the command building, accompanied by the sound of an angry hornet swarm. Comms dishes shattered and supports crumpled, pitching detector arrays to the roof and over the edge to crash to the ground.

  If anyone had been up there, there was no chance they had survived.

  After two seconds the firing stopped, the heat limits of the batteries and barrel restricting each burst of fire to that amount of time. McDermott would be pumping vacuum-cooled gas through the weapon but it would still be thirty seconds before the MPHG could fire again.

  If anyone had been up there, there was no chance they had survived.

  Never one to take anything for granted, Anna fired another salvo of airburst for good measure. “Go,” she told Ramsay and Davidson, moving her aim to the door of the command building. “We need to get in there now!”

  Trusting Anna to have them covered, both the sergeant and Ramsay broke into the open and covered the ground at a sprint, arriving at the door from opposite directions almost simultaneously. Anna flicked her eyes from the door to the ends of the building and up to the roof, first clockwise then anti-clockwise, eyes constantly moving.

  “About to breach,” Davidson told her. “Get the ARES up and then get over here.” Anna laid the IL-28 on the roof and pulled free her pack. As before, she uncased the semiautonomous drone and threw it into the air. This time she sent it a signal to carry out a preprogrammed patrol in a series of triangular routes that would cover most of the compound. If it detected any movement unaccompanied by the team’s unique beacon transmitters, it would dispense a cloud of micro-munitions capable of killing anyone within five metres of the impact point. With the aerial sentry deployed, Anna grabbed her weapon and jumped down from the roof, gelfilled inlay strips within her trousers dispersing some of the impact energy. Her boots had just hit gravel when the thump of another breaching charge reverberated across the compound. Ramsay led the way into the command building, his shorter M-54 a much more agile weapon for interior fighting.Davidson followed. Shrapnel being no discriminator between friend and foe in close confines, Anna switched the ammunition feed of her gun to standard 6.5mm general purpose rounds, bringing up the rifle a stride before she reached the main building.

  A large chunk of the pre-fab concrete had been torn away by the breaching explosive, including the crude bar lock on the door. She could hear the buzz of a generator inside, keeping alight the dangling bulbs overhead. The walls were bare, the floor made out of mesh-encased concrete foam. It was Anna’s job to keep watch and she stopped just inside the door, her back to the stairwell where Davison and Ramsay had disappeared. She could hear bursts of fire from both echoing back, the sharper pitch of Ramsay’s M-54 more frequent by far. There was a lot of shouting, most of it in a strange mix of Malayic and Chinese, with occasional English swearing thrown in, not all of it from Ramsay.

  It took about two and half minutes until Davidson announced that the building was clear. Anna used her camera-sight to look around outside, but other than Strutton’s body there was nothing to be seen. If there was anybody else hiding in the compound, she figured they would be smart enough to keep their heads down for the next few minutes. “Nothing happening here, sarge.” “Nolan, check the garage. Ramsay and me will gather intel and lay charges. McDermott, pack up the MPHG and bring Stan into the compound. Keep sharp. No dawdling; that orbital is going to be overhead in about seven minutes.”

  Anna quickly found an internal door to the garage. Leading with her rifle, she opened it and stepped inside to find an early-millennium gasoline-powered utility vehicle. The ignition barrel had been forced at some point in the past and replaced with a screwdriver, which still jutted beneath the steering wheel. A quick twist of the screwdriver turned over the engine with a healthy rumble of burning fossil fuel.

  “Say what you like about these farmer-soldiers, they keep their pick-ups in good order,” she told the others. “I’ll meet you out front.”

  Soon enough Anna was sat in the cab of the pick-up with Davidson, Ramsay at the steering wheel. McDermott rode in the open back with Strutton’s body covered with a blanket, the dormant STaLKer lying next to the body like a hound pining for its dead mistress. Ramsay ground the gearstick into first and they skidded across the compound and out of the open gates. They had covered about a hundred metres when Davidson sent the detonate transmission to the charges they had laid in the command building. The sound of the explosives was a dull thump over the growl of the pick-up engine and Anna looked back through the trees to see a pall of black rising into the sky. The road took a curve to the right and the smoke was lost from view.

  *** They headed east towards the coast, the shortest route out of the scanzone. Every thirty seconds Davidson checked their position on the digi-map, counting down the kilometres to go and the time remaining.

  Crossing the safe threshold with four minutes to spare, Ramsay eased up for the next kilometre and then slowed to a stop at a signal from Davidson. The sergeant switched his comms to speaker and Ramsay killed the engine so that they could all hear Colonel Parsons.

  “We’ve been monitoring your situation via high orbital, Davidson. Good job on the mission, the Malaysian Federation is going to be very pleased.”

  There was something in the officer’s tone that wasn’t right.

  “You don’t sound so happy yourself, sir,” said Davidson.

  “I’ll let Mr Schlatter explain. Congratulations, for what it’s worth.”

  The link went dead for several seconds before George Schlatter came on.

  “Brilliant, guys! Just brilliant! You’ll make the Saturday montage for sure. Shame about Strutton, but we’ll put her on the Sunday memorial. Prime time, of course, for you guys.” “Saturday montage?” said Ramsay. “You promised us full episode coverage. I was banking on a couple of interviews, maybe even some talking heads shit to raise my profile with the big boys.” “It was looking great, guys, really was. The argument with Bateman and splitting up, priceless, and the action at the e-interdict station was top class. What we could see of it, anyway. Bad news is we lost the feed from camera two about a minute in. We’ve only got a long distance shot of Strutton going down, there’s only the visor feeds from the fighting inside the command post. Feedback has shown us that the audience just don’t like too much shaky camera. Edited together, we’ve only got about ten minutes, all told. Better to montage that, or you’re talking a network mini-episode, which is for losers if you ask me.”

  “What about the ambush?” said McDermott, appearing at the driver’s side door. “That’s going to be useful, right?”

  “Milcorp's lawyers would be all over us in a heartbeat if we tried to use that footage first,” said Schlatter. “You’ll pick up the residuals, of course.”

  “Wilkington, Holt and Strutton,” said Anna. “Three dead and we lose the episode because you dropped a camera feed? Goddamn Britannic. Why they signed with a cheap outfit like WNN in the first place, I’ll never know.”

  “Because Britannic are a tiny British independent with about three contracts, and the interstellars won’t touch you, no matter how small a percentage you’ll accept,” replied Schlatter, making no attempt t
o hide his scorn. A sigh drifted from the speaker. “Look, I’m not a total asshole. I’ll get accounts to sign off on the full episode bonus. It was our technical difficulty, nothing to do with you.”

  Anna hated herself, but this announcement damped down most of her indignant anger. Schlatter’s voice was only just audible over the idling of the truck’s ancient engine as Ramsay started up the truck.

  “On behalf of World News Network I’d like to thank you all. Don’t forget there’s downtime filming back at Labuan tonight, so watch your language when you get back, please.”

  The feed hissed as Schlatter hung up, leaving the four mercenaries to contemplate this turn of events in silence for a couple of minutes. Anna spoke first.

  “I got three more days on my contract, then I’m skipping out to Kapteyn on the next q-jump.” “Kapteyn? Too damned cold for my liking,” replied Ramsay. “Damn it, I needed that exposure. Screw Britannic, I’d rather be fighting with Milcorp and the Chinese, or maybe even Comusat. At least they get coverage. My agent is getting a call as soon as we’re back on Labuan.” Davidson said nothing. He just sat staring ahead, hands on top of his rifle lying on the dashboard. The first drops of fresh rain spattered against the windscreen. Ramsay crunched the gears again and they moved off, heading east to connect with the coast road that would take them north and back into Malaysian federal land, outside the contested territory.

  “I’m getting too old for this,” said Davidson all of a sudden. “I think it’s time to hang up the rifle and put on a bad suit.”

  “No!” Anna was horrified by the idea. “You’re a boots-on-the-ground kind of guy, sarge. Always will be. What about live commentary? That’s a good way to ease back.”

  “Nolan’s right, you might die for real out here, but behind a desk you’ll die inside far quicker,” added McDermott.

  “Strutton was right there, two metres in front of me.” Davidson’s expression was grim but determined. “If that marksman had looked left instead of right, I’d be dead. It’s not worth it any more. I’ll just sit it out until my pension comes in. My mind’s made up.”