Shadow Watch

its stony rim.

The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.

“Nest’s ready to be cleaned out,” the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.

“Roger, we’re on it,” its leader replied.

He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.

The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.

But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons’ targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.

One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.

A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim… but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.

The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad’s leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.

He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the hell.

Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.

* * *

Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor — the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.

In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader’s bullet, and the damage it did to him.

For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. There was the surprising realization that he’d been spotted as the invader’s weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough… should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.

And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.

Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn’t been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the space between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some goddamned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor’s treaded runner, filling the spaces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams — when had he ever stepped on Satan’s tail to earn this one?

He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.

The man who’d shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.

Furiously wishing to God that he knew where he’d dropped his rifle, Thibodeau turned his head downward and saw to his amazement that was it still in his right hand, his fingers clutched around the grip, its barrel jacket pressed almost vertically against his side.

He dropped his cheek to the floor again, dropped it into a pool of his own blood, no longer able to keep it up. He was funneling all his willpower into getting the hand to move. He told it to move, begged it to move, and when it failed to respond silently began cursing it, demanding that it quit giving him bullshit, insisting angrily that it could fuck with him later on, could fall right off his shoulder if that was how it had to be, but that right now it was going to obey him and raise the goddamned rifle.

Thibodeau heard himself take a racking breath. He could see the invaders in their black helmets and uniforms, getting closer, pounding up the stairs.

Come on, you bastard, he thought. Come on.

And then suddenly his arm was coming up, dragging the gun with it, dragging it through his spilled blood, getting its barrel under the railing and pointed down at the stairs.

He triggered the rifle and felt it rattle against his body, spraying the stairs with rounds. The invaders almost collided with each other as they halted in their tracks and shot back with their own weapons. Bullets whizzed over Thibodeau’s head, tocking like hailstones against the projecting edge of the catwalk and the wall behind him. Recovered from their surprise at being fired upon, seeing that Thibodeau was badly wounded, the two invaders were coming at him once again, crouching, their guns stuttering as they began climbing the stairs. A third man, meanwhile, had opened fire from the aisle below.

Thibodeau pumped out another burst, but knew he was weakening, knew his clip would be empty soon, knew he was nearly finished.

Laissez les bons temps rouler—wasn’t that what he’d told Cody earlier? Let the good times roll, roll on to the very last, take me rolling down nice and easy, amen, God, amen, he thought half deliriously.

And fired again at the invaders with the remainder of his strength and ammunition, braced for what he was certain would be the final moments of his life.

* * *

“Thibodeau’s down,” Delure said. “Christ, we’ve got to do something.”

“Give me the ’hog’s position,” Cody replied. He was staring at pictures being sent by ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras in the payload storage bay. Now under the remote control of the monitoring room, their feeds normally appeared on a television screen every ten minutes in a rotational sequence that included feeds from other medium- and high-security buildings, and that should have been automatically overridden in the event of a trespass, with the system tripping an alarm and locking its visuals upon the area that had been breached. But the cameras’ regular transmissions had been neglected as the attack at the compound’s periphery gathered momentum, and the invaders had apparently gained entry to the warehouse through authorized means, defeating the override.

It was a lapse whose consequences had become terribly clear to Cody’s team in the past several minutes.

Jezoirski was looking closely at the hedgehog’s video transmissions. “Felix is at the warehouse… about thirty feet down the corridor it’ll bear left, take another elevator down to the storage bay….”

“You said that means, what, another minute until it’s actually on that catwalk?”

Jezoirski nodded. “That’s my estimate, yeah.”

“Thibodeau might not last that long,” Delure said. “I’m telling you, Cody, he needs our help right now.”

“Our orders are to sit tight.”

“But we can’t just sit here and watch them kill him.”

“Listen to me, goddamn it!” Cody snapped. He was sweating profusely now, the moisture dripping down over his lips. “We’d never make it to the warehouse before the ’hog and the backup team. You want to help Thibodeau, keep your eyes on those screens, and be ready to tell that robot what to do when it reaches him!”