Rafe would stay outside to run their comms and hack the warehouse’s security system. Assuming it had a security system. Water stained the warehouse’s floors and walls, and dead bugs littered the floor, but at least the walls weren’t splattered with dried blood this time.
Jan soon spotted Emiko crouched against the wall inside the first corner, a needle pistol in her hands, with Kinsley behind her and Pollen behind them. Jan tapped Pollen on the shoulder.
She glanced at him. “What?” she mouthed.
Jan pointed at the giant rifle she now cradled in both hands. “You fire that, they’ll hear us two blocks over.” Like Emiko, he mouthed the words instead of speaking them.
Pollen frowned. “Also makes a decent club.” She mimed smacking someone with the stock. “See? Quiet.”
Jan decided not to argue the point. “We’re all locked up,” he informed everyone. “Go.”
Kinsley tapped Emiko on the shoulder, and Emiko silently crept out of sight. Kinsley followed. The hallway remained dark, but that was expected. Power came at a premium out here.
Pollen followed the other two women, and Jan followed after her. He hated being in the back, but Emiko and Kinsley had insisted he wasn’t stealthy enough, and also, they both had night vision. Jan didn’t have ultralight contacts or a PBA, and thus saw nothing but the vague outline of Pollen’s armored form.
“Contact,” Emiko’s robotic voice said in Jan’s ear. “Hold.”
Jan crouched beside Pollen. Moments later, a pop like an air-condenser sounded. Emiko added, “Clear,” and then they were off again. Soon Jan stepped over a slack-jawed corpse with a cluster of tiny metal stakes in his head: another Truther, taken down by the near-silent bolts from Emiko’s needle pistol.
Light crept up as Jan found Emiko pressed against another closed door with a single frosted window, Kinsley at her side. Flickering red illumination came from the other side of the door, suggesting the Truthers used old-fashioned barrel fires for light. Pollen crouched on the other side of the door.
“No alarms yet!” Rafe shouted over their ear-comms. “How’s things in there? Anyone shot yet?” Unlike the robotic voices from their gear, Rafe’s was loud and quite annoying.
“No,” Emiko mouthed. “What are we looking at?”
“No security system that I can find,” Rafe said. “They have a Spacenet terminal, but the computers they’re running are so old I could barely find any package they understand. They probably just use them for archiving and uploading.”
“Can you give us an estimate of their numbers?”
“Can’t get that either. These folks may be running fossils, but they were smart enough not to keep their cameras running. They probably only turn the cameras on when they’re filming a confession or, you know, about to shoot someone.”
“I am much smarter than Rafe,” Pollen informed everyone. She brought her big rifle up and pressed one eye to the scope. “Wi-Vi scope.” She closed her other eye and aimed her rifle at the thin interior wall. “See? So useful.”
“We have those now?” Emiko mouthed.
“The Supremacy’s had those scopes for decades,” Kinsley explained. “We didn’t have them until recently.”
Pollen swept her rifle across the wall between them and the bad guys. “I count five inside. One sitting. Four standing, milling, and armed. And ...” She paused, which was unusual for Pollen. “Seven bodies on the floor.”
Jan exchanged glances with the others in the low light. “Did they have captives other than Bharat?”
Pollen shrugged. “May I shoot them now?”
“Not quite yet,” Jan said. “We need one to interrogate.”
Dying to the last was what Truthers did in gunfights, a legacy of the Supremacy’s well-known habit of torturing captives for information. Better off dead than captured had been the Patriots of Ceto’s motto, back when they were fighting to remove the Supremacy, and the Truthers were the most zealous of all Patriots. Also, random shooting might hit Bharat if he was in the warehouse and not, sadly, two meters under it.
Emiko extended an open palm and a closed fist. “Time for plan A, then.”
Jan grinned and did the same. They always roshambo’d about who got to bullshit the bad guys.
Two fists counted down in silence. Three, two, one, tie. Three, two, one, win. Jan beamed as he accepted Kinsley’s pack, and Emiko stuck her tongue out at him. He hated walking into a room full of guns, but he hated Emiko doing it a lot more.
Jan rummaged around the pack and pulled out a thick wool shirt, a battered graphene-plate jacket, and a smart-looking beret. He dressed up like a Patriot of Ceto because that was who he needed to be now if he didn’t want to get immediately shot. Low voices murmured beyond the wall as Jan donned his disguise.
“They’re milling,” Pollen mouthed, eye glued to her scope. “One of the people just sat down.”
Jan didn’t think about what that might mean. If Bharat was dead, Jan was dead, but he’d take the assholes who’d finished them both out before the torture nanos consumed him. These Truthers deserved worse for their dickish ways.
Pollen took a knee beside the wall, away from the door, and settled her big rifle’s bipod on a large hunk of biocrete. Kinsley took a position by the doorframe, readying a small dumb pistol with a big suppressor. Jan straightened his beret and took a breath. He glanced at Emiko, and this time, she didn’t smile. She watched him with real worry in her eyes.
Emiko still cared about him. She had never stopped caring about him. Jan pushed the door open and strode into the
