The carnage from the street had spilled down into the garage. More cars sat abandoned. Many of them were locked in eternal collisions that had jammed up whatever escape their owners might have wished for.
The elevators leading to the upper floors and to the basement were on the right. With the power grids out across the city, they wouldn’t be working.
Using the night-vision capability of the HUD, Simon gazed around the garage. “Bring up the garage schematic,” he said.
“Accessing,” the suit AI said. At almost the same moment, the blueprintoverlaid the garage visual. The elevators and stairwells were clearly marked.
The stairwells were on the left side of the garage. Simon led the way. Fear lurked inside him. It always did these days. It was another thing to take into account when he had to face the demons. When he’d been a child and later ateenager growing up in the Templar environment, he hadn’t really known fear.
When he’d been small, the first stories all Templar children were told of thedemons had scared him and given him nightmares. That was normal. Templar children were raised with the idea of bloodthirsty demons waiting to take over the world. That definitely wasn’t the same kind of upbringing other Englishchildren enjoyed.
In his teens, however, he’d ceased believing in demons. After all, no one hadtruly seen one. Even the stories of demons were hundreds of years old, told by men who’d traveled from England and France down to Constantinople, before it was renamedIstanbul. They’d been warriors that had prided themselves on their prowess.
And wouldn’t stories of defeating demons be a grand tale?
That was how Simon had come to think of the Templar beliefs when he was a teenager. He’d alternately frustrated his father and broken Thomas Cross’sheart. In the later years, they’d grown apart. Simon had developed a love for parkour, BASE jumping, and skateboarding as well as other extreme sports, and he’d never known real fear during that time. Even when he’d broken limbs inattempts, he’d been just as ready to try it again.
Now, though, he knew the demons were out there. And they were waiting.
At the door to the stairwell, Simon sheathed his sword down his back. He kept the Spike Bolter in his left hand. With his right, he gripped the door’s handleand pulled it gently.
It swung out almost soundlessly. That wasn’t a good sign. The door had beengetting used.
He held up and listened. Only silence echoed in the narrow walls. He scanned the floor and checked the metal staircase leading down into the basement.
“Clear,” Danielle said.
Simon knew she was accessing the video from his HUD. Groups were able to do that over close distances. The Templar had been thorough in their armor upgrades. They’d been planning from the start to fight a vastly superioropponent. Some of the upgrades they’d managed over the years had been given tomilitary forces. And Templar armorers had borrowed just as heavily.
After a last quick glance up, Simon started down. He knew Danielle would cover him as she came down. Walter, the fourth man down,would also cover the top while Kevin covered the bottom with Simon.
The stairs corkscrewed down. Graffiti covered the walls. Some of it was funny. Some of it was offensive. The sad part was that none of it mattered any more. The people who had written the missives and the reasons they’d writtenthem were all dead or didn’t matter any more.
With the audio enhancers turned up, Simon heard the soft impacts of the Templar behind him. Nothing human probably would have. They’d learned how to goquietly despite the armor.
Two landings farther down, they reached a doorway marked PRIVATE.
“What did they keep down here?” Simon asked. Danielle had been responsiblefor the research.
“Files,” she replied. “Extra office furniture. Cleaning equipment.”
Simon examined the schematics. The room was thirty feet by forty feet.
He tried the door.
It was unlocked.
“Ready?” Simon asked. He packed away the last of his fear and concentrated onthe adrenaline that was hammering his system. He needed it to keep himself stoked, but too much of it would
“Warning,” the suit AI said. “Adrenal output beyond optimum. Preparingpartial sedation. Stand by for”
“No,” Simon said. “Abort slap patch.”
The suit came with built-in medical and psychological aids. If a limb was lost, it was designed to truncate the injured area and preserve the blood flow. If a Templar started to hyperventilate or panic, slap patch prescriptions could level the Templar’s emotional state.
If that failed, some of the suitsfor those that relied more heavily onmagicspells provided the same results.
I’ve got it, Simon told himself. He needed the adrenaline flow. He alwayshad. That was why he’d taken up extreme sports. His father, God rest his soul,never understood that entirely.
The others stood waiting.
Simon swung the door wide, shoved the Spike Bolter inside, and cautiously followed it.
Boxes and office furniture filled the room and created a virtual maze. Most of it was stacked taller than Simon. Automatically, before he entered the room very far, he checked the ceiling. Far too many of the demons they fought seemed able to cling to any surface.
The ceiling was clear.
He went forward slowly. The Spike Bolter led the way.
“Send distress response,” Simon told the suit AI. “Identify me.”
“Acknowledged. Sending.”
The distress response was a low-level communications tag that infiltrated all the frequencies open to the Templar. It was designed for search and rescue missions for Templar whose suits had powered down due to battle damage or malfunction.
“There are two responses,” the suit AI said.
“Onscreen,” Simon said.
Immediately two starburst blips appeared on the HUD. They were close together, straight ahead of Simon.
“Confirm one other human body temperature,” the suit AI said.
“Onscreen.”
Another starburst, this one red in warning, formed beside the two.
“Can you identify the new signal?” Simon asked.
“Negative. Parameters are human.”
Human. Simon pondered over that but he kept moving forward. A last wallof crates and office equipment blocked the way. He shouldered his way
