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9: Cooperation
"Everybody on the floor, this is a robbery!"
Operative Delgan had been miserable for days. His brain chemistry had been surgically altered at the beginning of his career. He believed it had been voluntary.
"Nobody be a hero! Stay out of our way and we won't have to get nasty!"
Only while he was working did he experience joy. His superiors coded him with pheromones. This made him happy. He understood that normal people could control their own emotions. It seemed wasteful to him, in those long dreary days of philosophising and laying low before the job. Delgan was a thoughtful man, a quality which made him a favourite of the superiors.
He chose a bank teller at random and shot him in the chest. The man crashed against the wall behind him and hung thrashing for a moment, fire spurting from his tunic and nose, before the thruster rounds gave out or bored through his spine into the marble.
"I don't want to make any more examples!"
Delgan felt that he had a bright future in the organisation.
"Delgan to Bega. Foyer secure."
"Roger that," said his comm unit happily.
The bank facade was a tall window that looked out across a garden terrace and the upward curve of the spire highway. Beyond was the great gulf that separated the district from other parts of the city. Aircars drifted past in orderly lanes.
That order was short-lived. Heavy lifters broke from flight control and curved in towards the financial district one by one, as the assault teams signalled readiness up and down the spire. Bega's vessel loomed larger and larger, until it shot over the gardens and smashed through the armoured glass of the facade. Shards cascaded across the floor. Patrons cowering in the corners screamed.
Delgan was wearing heavy boots and goggles with a pale grey business robe. The robe had been woven with supersmart matter and served as armour, of course; a complex series of shields and antikinetic fields would protect him from light arms fire, and he could tell from the black clouds in the West that the distraction had gone perfectly. In and out before the military could respond, that was the way.
The heavy lifter disgorged teams of extraction specialists. Delgan directed four of his men to go with them to the vault. He kept the main security cordon in the front to keep an eye on the sky. There would be no military response, but the civilian lawbringers might show before departure. He smiled. His gun was the length of his leg and almost as heavy, loaded with a range of fast-firing needle missiles. It would reduce a tactical team to lace before they even touched down. That would be fun.
"Antichronaton burst in three, two... done. Stasis shields down, isolators disengaged. We're in." Bega stayed behind the controls of the lifter lodged in the entrance while the extractor teams swapped their safecracker gear for hover pallets. They'd rehearsed this op for weeks. Cleave Reno had constructed a copy of an entire bank in an ice ravine somewhere on a southern continent, and the organisation had spent more than enough time optimising their routine. The teams knew the layout intimately. The robbery would be over in minutes.
"Look at this stuff," said an extractor with the giddy joy of a true operative. "Never seen so much gold in one place."
"You'll see more when we get it onto the ship," said Delgan. "The amount of space they gave us, we could go swimming in the stuff. It's a big... ship..."
Something black and jagged dropped out of the sky.
A deceleration thunderclap rocked the building. Glass jumped from the floor as the spire flexed in the sudden pressure wave. Delgan dropped to one knee reflexively.
"Yes, by all means. Bow."
The intruder stepped over the rubble of the bank entrance, one hand on the side of Bega's truck, the other holding a twisted black cane. He wore blood-red robes and the eight-pointed star gleamed on his bald head. Behind him the Nightmare Lacuna rumbled angry red thoughts over the banking district.
"On the floor!" yelled Delgan. "Get out of my way or I end you right now!" He brought his gun to bear.
"Oh, I don't think that will be necessary," said Expositor Niva. "There appears to have been a mistake, one I intend to correct."
This wasn't going according to plan. "I said on the floor! I will shoot you, man!"
"See, this is what I'm talking about," sighed Niva, stepping lightly off the rubble to a patch of intact carpet. "You seem bound to persist in your parade of errors. For example, I think you've mistaken me for one of you precious and fragile civilian sorts. Oh, I see you've been making examples," he added, pausing to examine the smouldering remains of the teller.
"What a nice idea."
There was a tinkling of glass overhead. One of Delgan's men looked up and screamed a moment before a blur of blades and crimson crashed down atop him. The man was already a shattered ruin before legs like razors came up and descended in a hideous spray of blood and viscera.
Another crash, and another. One of the victims managed to unleash a burst of explosive rounds as the Silhouette trooper descended like a hungry spider. Ripples of screaming plasma blasted from the crimson cloth billowing about its body. They did nothing but set the carpet alight as the man's arm span away from his body, finger still clenching to the trigger. Patrons scattered wailing.
Delgan screamed something without words, and unleashed his own weapon at the Expositor. Fire and sizzling exhaust streams spat fruitlessly at air about him, like a cloak of flames.
"Stop."
The weapon choked and shook. After a moment Delgan cursed and threw it to the ground. Blood welled from wounds on his hands. On the floor, his gun flexed and spread new-grown spines. It looked suddenly hungry.
"No wonder they wanted to get the military out of the way. You hopeless lot wouldn't last a minute against any competent force."
"Four and the Eye," shrieked Delgan, staggering backwards. The sound of spinning blades echoed out of the vault, screams cut off short. "What are you doing?"
"I'm making an example for your eager little masters." The Expositor raised his cane. "I want you to carry it."
"I'm not taking crap from you," panted the operative, his altered brain frantically straining for options.
"No, of course not. What sort of message would it be if you were alive to deliver it?"
"Wait-"
His voice cut off. He struggled to look down, only to see his own bleeding hands clamped around his throat.
"Nngh," he said, as his thumbs pressed tighter into his trachea against a slick of his own blood.
Niva's eyes never left Delgan's, even when they rolled back behind the operative's safety goggles and he slumped swollen-tongued in his own dead embrace.
A pair of troopers scuttled past on bloody blades. They paused to pour a volley of stun rounds into the lifter's interior. Outside, awful red beams pulsed and shattered a heavy lifter attempting to make a getaway.
"Tell this to your masters who would play such dangerous games," hissed the Expositor.
"The Imperium is not a toy."
