Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with the communications blackout had spooked them.
Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish blink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics-he was changing vision modes.
The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover. In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad, sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.
Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.
He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.
The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.
He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three- round burst into the door. Then, spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.
The third guard was still struggling with his rifle, shouldering aside the remains of a collapsed lighting rig. He launched himself at Saxon and slammed the frame of the weapon into his face, cracking his eye-shields. The soldier hit back with a punch from his augmented arm, and connected with the guard's ribs. Bones fractured with a sickening crunch and the assailant staggered backward, wheezing.
Then all three of them attacked him at once, using their guns like clubs to beat him about the head and shoulders. Saxon felt an impact at the base of his spine and he stumbled, losing his balance as the elevator continued to drop toward the ground floor. He had no doubts that the guards had reinforcements waiting there; he had to finish this quickly.
Locking his legs, Saxon pivoted and let his reflex booster implant ramp up to full. His nerves jangled with the sudden new input, the influence of the neuromuscular accelerator coursing through him. The guards were crowding in and he struck out once more. The man with the cracked ribs went back into the doors, slammed into place by the torso of the first guard. Saxon fired a low, fast kick at the leg of the other man and was rewarded with a pain-filled yelp. Natural bone broke easily under the turned steel of a heavy augmentation.
The giddy rush of speed made Saxon's skin prickle; he felt heat wash over him, and in a moment of sudden, shocking scent-memory, he smelled aviation fuel and smoke. The crackle of the fires around the crashed veetol were abruptly there in the front of his thoughts, the horrible tearing noise as Sam died in front of him Fury spread through Saxon like a wave, and he went in for the kill. The throat of the fallen guard he crushed with a brutal, stabbing blow from his cyberarm; then he pulled a broken piece of roof support up from where it had landed and used it to beat the next of the guards bloody. The last man, who fought back as he coughed and spat, struck out with a cyberhand that sprouted a fan of blades. Saxon took a cut across his cheek, but the pain seemed distant, edited from the moment. He took the guard's arm-a spindly model sheathed in pink, flesh-toned plastic, doubtless Federal Army surplus-and bent it back against the joint, fracturing the casing. The guard tried to struggle free, but Saxon took a clump of his hair and beat his head into the walls until he fell.
The elevator chimed and Saxon let the guard's body go, allowing it to fall out and onto the dusty marble floor of the lobby.
Three more men were waiting for him, standing in a semicircle around the elevator bank, each with a heavy-caliber automatic raised and aimed. The data feed from the wet-drive helpfully told him that these men were also members of the Bratva, each with a lengthy police record; but the tips of the prison tattoos that emerged from the open collars of their shirts made that clear enough.
Saxon slowly raised his hands, panting, the moment of animal fury he had felt in the elevator fading as fast as it had come. For a few seconds there, he had become lost, absorbed in rage-fueled guilt over Sam, Kano, and all the others. The edges of the dark anger he had first felt in the field hospital boiled inside him.
He knew enough Russian to understand that the men with guns wanted him to kneel down. Carefully, he did what they asked, biding his time.
One of them would have to come close enough to take the Hurricane from him, and then, if there was a chance
Something shimmered like oil on water in the corner of Saxon's vision and he turned toward it in time to see a shape emerge out of the air, a glassy, swift figure blurred by motion, abruptly becoming solid, real.
The military called it 'mimeoptical active camouflage'; Saxon wasn't up on the full technical specs for the augmentation, but from what he knew, the system used a matrix of molecule-thin induction wires implanted beneath the epidermis and across cyberlimb plating that when activated, generated a local electromagnetic field that could render a human being into a walking stealth weapon. It was prohibitively expensive and delicate under battlefield conditions, and difficulties with the human augmentation interface meant that it was rarely deployed in combat.
Full synchrony between the user and the system was hard to achieve; to use it well, you had to be someone with a near-pathological focus of will.
The ghost figure became Federova, and she killed the first man with a slashing knife cut to the throat, dispatching the other two with quick, silenced bursts from her machine pistol. She trembled slightly as the camouflage effect bled away, the focused EM field dissipating.
Federova looked across at him as he stood up, her scalp beaded with sweat; and then she smiled.
'Go tactical' ordered Namir.
The elevator doors came off their mountings in a screech of torn steel, and Barrett swung out behind them, snorting with effort. He dealt with the guard closest to him with a savage backhand punch that drove bone shards up into the man's forebrain. The guard dropped to the unfinished concrete floor, twitching as he died. Namir and Hermann came in a heartbeat later, their machine pistols snarling. Armor-piercing rounds sprayed in fans, taking more kills.
One of the guards was still alive, and he stumbled toward a side corridor, bleeding heavily. The German was on him in a moment, and with a haymaker punch from his armored fist, he crushed the man's skull with single blow.
'Move,' snarled the commander. The mission was entering its full active phase; now speed, not stealth, was of the essence. Namir glanced around, his eyes narrowing. The thirteenth floor did not match the spy photos captured by the intelligence sources of his patrons. Instead of fitted deep pile carpets and bright walls patterned with subtle murals, the surroundings were bare and undecorated. The floor had the dusty scent of old concrete and ozone. Where mahogany doors should have led the way to opulent suites and apartments, there were yawning open frames walled off by ragged sheets of industrial polythene.
Hermann gave him a quizzical look. 'This is not right.'
'No,' admitted Namir. 'Proceed. And stay alert.'
'Company,' snapped Barrett, raising his arm. A group of four more thugs sprinted into view from along one of the radial corridors, each of them armed with a heavy rifle.
'Take them,' said Namir.
Barrett's right arm came apart on expanding frames, the plating folding back, the hand turning aside to allow the mechanism within to emerge; he tugged an ammunition belt from a hopper in his backpack, swiftly slotting it into the feed maw on the base of the reconfigured limb. From the wrist emerged the triple-head barrel of a minigun. The muzzles spun into a blur, and with a sound like the buzz of a heavy electric generator, the cyberweapon ejected a gout of yellow fire and a storm of bullets. Grinning, Barrett panned the cannon across the corridor, ripping through the flimsy flakboard the guards used for cover, tearing into them, blowing craters in the surface of the unfinished concrete.
