Sigma Mercenaries 0002: Training The Trainers

by CSS Stravag

Sigma Side Story, Year 1, Days 004 to 020. Sigma One isn't just the boss, he's also a guy that solves problems and teaches others how to solve problems. Unfortunately, the newly-formed Secret Service is about to find out that having an instructor for a commanding officer is two parts interesting and five parts inadvertent uphill battle... (Rated M for later chapters)

7. Nonstandard Operations

(Sigma Mercenaries, Story 0002: To Train The Trainers)
(Chapter 7: Nonstandard Operations)

(3 April, Magi Year 14408 / Year SL 8838, 0630 Hours Local Time)
(METARGraphic Field South, Base Boarhound, Terra 232)
(Day 17 of Campaign)

After the elevator closed up behind Sigma One and Toni, the intercom dinged. "Attention trainees, this is a prepared survival training scenario. Your objective is to climb your way out of the basement levels and exit through the main door of the hangar. The method or methods you use to bypass or confront the hazards in the scenario is entirely at your discretion. This is not a scored event, it is pass or fail only based on whether or not you would have survived the hazards and made a clean exit. Your challenge is set for 8 levels. All persons encountered should be presumed hostile. Good luck."

"That is reassuring," Toni said.

"Agreed," Hess said before he pulled his UMP40 forward and chambered a simulated round. Toni was quick to charge her ACR in the moments thereafter.

"What do you think they will start with?" Toni asked.

"Probably a mechanical room setup, elevator motors, heating and ventilation, similar. Keep your eyes up and check everything, the prototypical mechanical room will have a lot of hiding places, a lot of cover for tangos to engage us from."

"Got it."

-x-x-x- ENTRY FLOOR: B8 -x-x-x-

The elevator dinged twice as it came to the bottom floor, and the doors were not overlong in opening for the two to exit. Hess went first and immediately right, Toni went second and left to cover that area. He could see some minor movement in the distance but nothing close to them (within 20 meters).

"You called it, mechanical room," Toni said after she verified nothing was in their vicinity of where they had disembarked the room.

"With extra hazards thrown in for good measure. Some of these barrels and containers are flammable, don't throw any shots that aren't needed," Hess ordered curtly, given that one of the barrels ten yards in front of him was labeled 'benzene'.

"At least the machine layout is reasonable, and we can see over some of them. Where do we go next?" Toni asked.

"Exit is northeast corner, I can see it from here. You have point," Sigma One ordered.

Toni pivoted around, moved past Hess on his right, and naturally shifted herself toward the outside wall to make herself less of a target. Hess followed suit and matched pace to her from three meters back, to prevent an enemy easily walking a burst of automatic fire across both of them. With Toni on point, she covered the forward area, Hess covered the right sweep toward the open area of the room (open inasfar as machines were not obstructing the view).

After passing four possible turns towards the east, she stopped at the next intersection because of some warning lines on the ground in the direction they intended to go. "Hess, possible problem here. Do you know what these markers mean?"

Sigma One knelt down to the ground just shy of the marker. "Don't recognize the language, but it is definitely a haz marker. Good catch, because it looks like we have a recessed pressure plate in the ground ahead."

"Pressure plate? You mean, step on it, something goes boom?" Toni asked.

"I don't see a device, but I do see some kind of worrisome mechanical assembly ahead," Hess pointed his weapon flashlight at it. "Didn't we just pass a couple barrels of benzene?"

"About 20 meters back, yes," Toni looked in that direction, but kept her rifle towards the more open area of the room.

"I'm going to use one as an analog to set this off. Cover me." Hess stood up and doubled back to the barrel. Once he got to the three barrels, he checked the first two for contents and found them empty, but the third was not empty, it was partially full and of the same rough mass as a person (if not distributed the same). He took a moment to torque down the cap on it to make sure it would not leak, then slowly levered it down to resting on its round side. After that, it was fairly simple for him to roll it out to the location where Toni had stopped, and after she had shuffled around it, he rolled it forward and onto the pressure plate.

The result of the barrel tripping the pressure plate was swift and stunning. As soon as the plate tripped, it released an unseen mechanical latch that secured a heavy spring. That spring cut loose with roughly 700 pounds of force, pushing a pivoting arm out into the walkway. On the length of the pivot arm was a series of jagged and sharpened angle-iron pieces intended to mercilessly cut up and break a person's knees or lower legs. In this case, the angle-iron blades put a total of seven punctures into the benzene barrel, though none were low enough for the benzene to start leaking.

Fortunately, catching the trap early saved them both a bad case of broken and eviscerated legs. "Well, that was friendly of the girls," Toni said acidically.

Unfortunately, the way it had been set off made a hellish racket, and a second after the trap sprung, a couple strobe lights over the walkway started pulsing. "HEY! We've got intruders!" A welder shouted from several rows east of where Toni and Hess were standing.

"Intruders! Western wall!" Someone else shouted. Hess looked in his direction and saw a large, burly pipefitter pick up a half-meter pipe wrench and begin jogging toward. Sigma One gave him no warning, he centered the reflex sight on the pipefitter's chest and gave him four rounds. At the range of 25 yards, he had no trouble landing all four in the heart and left lung, which put him down hard and caused the wrench to clatter to the ground.

"Toni, engage as they bear," Hess said. "If they're retreating or standing, leave them be."

She had her first engagement after a moment, a guy wielding a flat-blade screwdriver and a box cutter tried closing up on them from the east, but he wasn't smart about how he covered his approach and exposed himself badly, even skylighted by a machine with some bright indicator lights. Toni put her ACOG scope on his upper chest and gave him three rounds, the first round landed on the top of his sternum and the third round punched through his neck and into his spine.

"Gunfire has highlighted our position, here they come!" Toni said.

"Do 'em by the numbers!" Hess centered his sight on the welder that had initially called out, and two rounds put him on the ground as a sputtering wreck. To the tango's left, he put a three-round into a maintenance worker with paired box cutters before he could start sprinting toward the two Sigma troops.

"Three to the south!" They had crossed behind the walk path that Toni and Hess had already taken, though much faster than the Sigma troops. The lead of their group was dropped with three rounds in the gut, which caused his buddies to stop dead in their tracks and simplify the aim against them. Two rounds each, both landed in heaps on the ground and only one was still effectively alive.

"Toni, move east one!" Erich checked the walkway for traps quickly, then advanced to the next intersection between machines and took cover behind the meatier part of one. From here, he had a very simple shot to a pipefitter that was caddy-corner from where he and Toni had taken up new cover. Another four rounds, another downed pipefitter. A maintenance generalist tried to take up the wrench that had been dropped by the deceased pipefitter, but a well-placed round to the side of the head put an end to that thought.

"They're still coming! What the hell?" Toni half-shouted before she put four rounds into a large guy in a mechanic's jumpsuit. He seemed to absorb the first three rounds, but number four put him on the ground.

This time, Hess checked the northern path at their intersection for traps, and with no safety warnings or obvious triggers, reoriented on it. "Toni, moving one north!"

"Go!" She took a moment to put a couple rounds into an exposed janitor, this one with a gardener's machete, to make sure he did not close on them.

At the next intersection, Hess checked his paths and found the western path marked off for a trap, and the eastern path marked off just the same. Just past the warning stripes on the far end of the eastern path, a tango in a mechanic's jumpsuit froze in place, staring at Hess who was staring at him through the reflex sight of his UMP40. Movement past the frozen tango caused Hess to recenter and put a pair of rounds into the upper chest of a charging welder. Thankfully, this guy was smart enough to not be running with a lit welding set, so when it clattered to the ground it did nothing. The other guy threw a knife at Hess, poorly, so Hess settled him with a pair of rounds as well.

"Closing up behind you!" Toni ducked down the northern path and closed up behind Hess, facing south to cover away from Hess.

"East and west are trapped, we go north," Sigma One said.

"Ready," Toni fired four rounds at a moving enemy toward the southeast corner of the mechanical room, but the amount of obstacles between them resulted in no hits. "Shit, should not have done that," Toni grumped after the fact.

"It was worth a try, engage 'em closer if necessary," Hess said. "Just be careful of the barrels. On me, stay close." Toni made sure she stayed close by way of catching her left hand in the back of his belt and continued to cover toward the south. Another ten meters north, they stopped at the next intersection and took cover again, and for good reason: one of the mechanics tried to bring a pistol to bear on the team, and even managed to get one shot of five into the machine that Toni and Hess were covering behind. Both Sigma troops engaged with a pair of rounds, and he dropped down on top of a machine.

"Where to next?" Toni asked.

"We go east, does not look like any warning stripes for a hundred meters." Toni hooked her left hand in the back of his belt and followed close as Sigma One slowly made his way east. There was movement south of them, roughly a dozen guys still milling about, but these were the smart ones of the crew and were staying mostly or completely covered behind the machines, preventing any easy shots for either operator. Eight intersections they crossed with nary a hazard, though at number nine they had to stop for a warning stripe on the ground and a rather clear reason: a painfully-obvious tripwire connected to an actuation mechanism.

"I can see that at a glance," Toni said. "What's the plan?"

"This," Hess pulled a fire extinguisher off a mount on the side of one of the machines and slid it across the ground toward the tripwire. On contact, the fire extinguisher had more than enough momentum to set it off, which caused a spring actuator to whip around a chunk of sharpened angle-iron on a course that would have easily busted through a helmet and into the trooper below. "Come on," Hess waved her forward, where he stepped over the sprung trap and shortly past it to the next intersection.

"They really don't want us to have an easy go of it," Toni said.

"I was thinking the same thing," Hess commented. "Still, no fun unless there is some challenge."

Well south of them, one of the skulking workers tripped a leg-breaker trap and had his knees taken out from behind. Toni could see the hit clearly in her ACOG scope, the force of the striker was sufficient that he was rotated around in fall and landed head-first on the concrete floor; whether he lived or died from the strike, he was clearly incapacitateed from losing his legs and the likely severe concussion.

"Good to see environmental hazards apply to them as well," Sigma One said. "Come on, we're about halfway east to the stairwell."

Their path would continue east another forty meters, south ten, east twenty, north forty, east ten, north ten, east ten, south ten, and east the last twenty to the stairwell. They dodged at least another six traps and had to put down one more worker that tried his luck with makeshift melee weapons, though none of the remaining hostiles closed the gap toward the end.

"So, we're here, just head up?" Toni asked.

"Need a restroom break?" Hess pointed to the adjacent bathrooms.

"No, I'm good," Toni said. Hess did a quick check of the door to ensure that there were no traps or triggers, then pulled it open for Toni to enter and clear. She stepped in and took guard position at the base of the stairs, then Hess entered behind and closed it. "Are we going to leave a surprise for anyone pursuing?"

"Definitely," Hess said. He pulled a frag grenade out of his grenade pouches, stripped off the safety clip, and pulled the pin. The pin he used to wedge the grenade between the door and the door handle in such a way that opening the door would dislodge the grenade, loose the safety lever, and arm it. Five seconds later, the grenade blast should take care of anyone pursuing them. "Ready to go," Hess said after he was sure the grenade would not drop of its own volition.

"Moving!" Toni started up the stairs slowly, checking each step to make sure they were not about to blunder into another trap or trigger of some kind. They climbed three sets of split stairs, where the stairs terminated at the door into the next area. "Door."

"Stacked. Before we go, swap mags and retain your partial."

Both Hess and Toni ejected their partial magazines, pulled their farthest magazines from the center of their bodies, and swapped them out. The fresh magazines went into their weapons, giving them both 31 rounds in and ready for use.

-x-x-x- B7: OVEREXPOSURE -x-x-x-

Toni yanked the door open and Hess was first to enter, going right out of the door as was customary, quickly followed by Toni on the left. The room they were now in was a single monolithic room with the occasional structural column, occupied by rows upon rows of benches stretching for at least two hundred meters.

"Damn, that's a lot of benches," Hess grumped. "Looks like each bench has about a hundred grand in testing equipment on it."

"Electronics equipment?" Toni asked.

"You got it, and this isn't the cheapo gear, either," Sigma One said as he approached. "I've done my time on a bench like this in the past, testing components and devices as they come in for triage and repair. That's part of how I financed my way through college."

"Damn, I wouldn't know where to begin with this," Toni said as they closed up on the first pair of benches, back-to-back benches that were assembled in long rows. "Do know where to begin with that problem, though," she pointed down the way at a pair of security guards milling about between rows of the benches.

"Leave 'em, let's try to sneak pa—" Hess was cut off by the surprisingly loud sound of the grenade trap he had left for possible pursuers in the stairwell behind them.

Unfortunately, the sound of the grenade also drew the security guards' attention in the direction of the door, and with it their attention looking almost exactly in the direction of Toni and Hess. "Intruders! HALT!" The first of the security guards shouted a second after the echo of the grenade faded, then started jogging toward with his hand on his pistol.

"They made us," Hess knelt down next to the end of the bench row, braced his UMP40 against the top surface of it, and put the reflex sight on the upper chest of the approaching tango. 100 meters was a bit of a long shot for a pistol-caliber sub-gun, but Hess had been specifically practicing for such a shot in weeks prior and hammered him down with three shots out of a five-round burst. He never cleared leather, but his buddy stopped immediately and dropped to the ground, then slid in under one of the benches to clear the line of fire. "Second tango is covered about 80 meters down the way."

Two shots came from a service pistol, though at the distance in question, neither round came very close to hitting either operator. "How do we handle this one?" Toni asked.

"Deliberate search forward, keep an eye up and out for any buddies, fire on him as we bear," Sigma One said.

"Got it," Toni put her left hand on Hess' shoulder after he stood up. She ended up hooking her hand in the top of his water bladder carrier to make sure she stayed with him as they moved forward. After they passed two of the structural columns, she caught sight of movement to the south, in the wider area of the room, and the sight of a pistol aiming in their direction. "Tangos right!" She said a moment before a shot came close — very close — to her shoulder.

"Engage right!" Hess dropped to knee again and put his sights on the area where the enemy guard was to expectation, the tango peeked his head out and tried to level his pistol toward Hess and Toni, though Sigma One beat him to the punch and drilled him with a single shot through the left eye.

"Four tangos right, two pairs, one on the west side, one on the east," Toni reported after a moment. Two more shots passed by her before she loosed her first three-round burst, though she only managed to nuke an oscilloscope on the desk in front of one of the east-side security guards.

"Keep moving west, fire as they present themselves," Hess demonstrated the technique as he began moving, he shuffled to his left and kept his front toward the enemy, continually side-stepping so that he moved west and could send single shots toward the security pukes that were trying to engage them. After he domed a second guard on this floor (at the cost of 12 rounds), the three remaining became a lot more circumspect about moving and shooting, and especially about their use of cover.

"Cover me while I check this decedent," Erich let his UMP40 hang and hauled the dead guy out from under the bench. Much as expected, he was a common security guard in terms of equipment carried, basic uniform, basic shoes, basic utility belt with an expanding baton, pepper spray can, pistol, holster, and four magazines. Disappointingly, his pistol of choice was a Glock 19, a 9mm product that did not match what they were carrying. Even still, a pistol and four magazines was a pretty decent haul in a situation where resupply was not guaranteed, so he added them to his general purpose pouch and came back up to support Toni.

"Down to two," Toni said. She had finished off the west-side team while Hess 'salvaged' the downed tango. "I've chewed through most of this magazine. Find anything useful?"

"Somewhat, Glock 19 and some mags, nothing earth-shattering." Hess took a moment to fire a pair of semi-auto rounds at the taller of the two east-side tangos. Both rounds missed by expedient of him taking cover behind a DIT-MCO wire tester machine.

"Next?" Toni popped off a pair of rounds at the same tango as Hess had missed. Her rounds missed as well, for the same obstacle shielded him from her rifle.

"We continue west, check his buddy, and hopefully continue to the western wall," Sigma One declared with a hint of worry in voice. "When you are ready," he prompted the SSO.

Toni reached her left hand to Hess' water bladder pouch and hooked four fingers in the edge of it. "Go," she said.

Hess continued shuffling leftward (westward) until he reached the first tango dropped on this floor. "Check him, I'll cover," Hess said before he took cover position behind another DIT-MCO machine stack for inspecting large wire harnesses.

"On it," Toni flipped the tango to face up and started checking his gear. "Same on this one, Glock 19 and 4 mags."

"Stow it, may need it if we run dry," Hess recommended. "Looks like our stalkers are coming back this way, and they're not being subtle about it," he commented.

Toni jumped up and put her sights on the lead. "They're trying to head us off on the western side, should we try to drop them?"

"Save ammo, this is a lousy field of fire," Hess said. He looked down under the benches and was surprised to see a complete lack of modesty panels, meaning that he could easily crawl under the row of benches and come out in the next row. "Hey, we've got a gap here. Let's move laterally across rows and come up next to their last stand."

"Interesting," Toni took cover position while Hess crawled under the bench and popped up in the next row. Hess took the cover position next, and Toni closed up into the row he was in, then shot under the next row of benches and came up past Hess. When she came up, Hess signaled 3, meaning three more rows to cover to optimal position. She gave him a quick thumbs up, then Hess ducked down and slid through to the row Toni was in, then past her to the row four away from the enemy pair. They would do the transfer twice more with the enemy none the wiser since Hess and Toni kept themselves quiet and down below the level of the benches.

"The Hell did they go?" Toni heard one of the guards ask.

"I dunno, did they sneak back downstairs?"

"Maybe, let's go check it out," the two guards were rather noisy in passing Toni and Hess, which gave them perfect timing for a literal pop-up ambush. After they were a couple paces past where they had been crossing rows, the two Sigma operators stood up and both fired into the backs of the guards in the next row down. Neither guard survived the ministrations from behind.

"Cross under, I have overwatch," Hess said. Toni slid under the row of benches and carefully checked to make sure the four deceased guards in this row were actually deceased.

After she was sure there was no movement: "Clear, four tangos down in this aisle."

"Coming your way." This time, Hess vaulted up to kneeling on the workbenches, did his own check of the four bodies, and gingerly stepped over the testing equipment to come down next to Toni in the central row. "Check the two we just dropped, then we go west."

"I have point," Toni took the lead to the two they had bushwacked, and once on site gingerly verified the two were dead: she kicked their guns loose, then flipped them to face-up to make sure they were DRT (1). "Confirmed kills."

"Gear?" Hess asked, still watching south to make sure there was no other movement.

"Same, Glock 19s and mags," Toni checked the pistol of the nearer of the tangos to where she was kneeling.

"Grab two mags from him, that gives us the pistol plus six. I hope we won't need more any time soon, but we'll cross that bridge if needed." Hess did the same from the tango he had engaged and felled, giving him six mags plus the partial in the pistol he recovered.

On the way west, they checked the two that Toni dropped and found their gear to be identical, so they left it rather than add any more weight to their present gear sets. Finally fully west in the room, Toni and Hess were able to make good time down the west wall and to the stairwell up to the next floor. No other persons were in the room that they could identify.

"Two down, six to go. Seven, if they have any surprises in the hangar itself," Toni said, staring at the door. "Mags?"

"Yeah, now's as good a time as any." Both SSO and Command Administrator swapped magazines in their primary weapons in the same fashion as they did before entering this monolithic room.

"I'll handle the door trap," Toni said as she stacked on the door. Hess took his position, Toni opened up, and he made entry. No persons or obvious immediate traps were in place, so he took station at the bottom of the stairs aiming up in case someone went down. "What's the method?"

"Pull a grenade, strip the clip, pull the pin."

"Done," Toni reported.

"Wedge the grenade spoon facing out between the door handle and the door surface itself. I had to use the pin ring as a spacer to make sure it didn't move."

"Got it," Toni held her hand under the grenade for a moment until she was sure it would not move. Tension between the spoon and the door handle made sure it did not move. "Done."

"Stack up, we've got a long ways to go."

-x-x-x- B6: CLAUSTROPHOBIA -x-x-x-

Hess was first through the door, Toni second, and immediately inside the room they realized one critical fact: "This place is dense-packed!" Toni gaped after she realized that she was now in a real-world crate and box maze. Most of the pallet stacks and crates were well above her head, three meters and up in terms of altitude, and almost all of them looked to be solidly built.

"This is gonna be a big bitch," Hess grumped. "All these crates are going to force close quarters."

"How do we do this?" Toni asked.

"There's no real good way to do this without a company of troops to deliberately search it," Hess gauged. He was partially correct, but for full saturation of such a dense maze two companies would have been better. "Best bet I can think of, we stay to the outer walls to limit angles that enemies can come at us. We will do stealth to point of compromise, then we eliminate anyone we come across."

"All right," Toni said, though her voice told that she considered this anything but. "You have point, I'll cover the corridors as we pass them."

Toni again took to following with her left hand on the back of Hess' gear, covering to the right as they moved north along the west wall, until they reached a corner and turned to head eastbound. The first twenty meters of crate maze only held two lateral rows of crates and no contacts, but the sound of persons moving around was quite evident to the two operators.

After the turn, though, they had a good 100 meters of wall to cross, and the crate density dropped off on approach to the eastern wall. A sound caused Sigma One to hold his hand up and signal stop; Toni thought she recognized it, but wasn't sure if it was a garage door or something else. "Bay door?"

"Exactly, and a forklift," Hess pointed in the direction he thought it was coming from. "We'll want to avoid that, guarantee there will be personnel in the vicinity, probably with radios."

"Got it," Toni shuddered unconsciously, given that she figured the other SSO troops were likely trying to force them into a fatal funnel with such structural planning. "Ready to go."

"Moving," Erich said quietly before he moved up to the next crate corner. He went to do a corner peek around it and came face to face with a guy in overalls and armed with a box cutter. In the battle of reaction speed, Hess won the bout handily by pushing him against the next row of crates, then used his combat knife to go between two ribs and into his left lung. The strike wasn't fatal, but it was crippling; a quick reset and the blade across the throat put an end to this worker in a reasonably quiet fashion.

The attempt at stealth, however, was blown by position. "INTRUDERS! WEST SIDE!" A lady shouted from 40 meters down the row of crates and boxes, though it was her last action before Toni put two rounds in her chest.

"Well, fuck. Try to be quiet and unobtrusive, and here we go," Hess grumped. He lifted a shop rag from the deceased worker and used it to clean his blade, then sheathed it to resume his UMP40. Toni and he both engaged a worker that came to check on the downed lady, two rounds from Hess and one from Toni put him on the ground next to her.

"We gotta move!" Toni said after she caught sight at the far end of the row from them of a security guard with a long gun of some type, likely a shotgun.

"Brace and engage him," Hess ordered as he covered toward their prior axis of advance. Toni did as ordered, and was able to put him down with three well-aimed shots from her rifle at a distance of 160 meters.

"He's down, stacked," Toni said in a hurry.

"Moving," the big guy stepped off quickly and didn't stop for corner checks, relying on speed and Toni to check the flank while he pushed forward toward the eastern wall. Ahead, a worker with a sledgehammer came around the corner twenty meters ahead of Hess and tried to sprint to close the gap, but three rounds in the body and one to the head put him on the ground well before he closed the gap. Another warehouse worker tried to stall them with a pocket pistol, he fired six shots from a small-caliber snub-nose revolver from behind the body of the fallen sledgehammer wielder, though the accuracy of his piece was abysmal at 20 yards and only one round came reasonably close to either operator. In response, a single tap to the forehead put an end to the tango.

Two more crate rows ahead, roughly a third of the way east in the room, Hess and Toni ran into their first concerted attempt at an attack. Four workers were stacked behind two more warehouse workers carrying 'POLICE' marked riot shields, the kind made from clear polycarbonate to allow an officer to clearly see what was happening in front of him or her. Such shields typically blocked an officer from face to mid-thigh, and these were no different; at the close range of ten yards, Hess could easily tell the shield was not a full tower shield and left their legs vulnerable.

"Charge him!" one of the guys in back said. Before either shield operator could move, Hess drilled the lead shield-bearer in the left knee, where there was supposed to be riot armor covering the legs to cover for the shield not being a full tower. A quick traverse and he was able to land the same shot on the other shield-bearer at the cost of two misses before the hit. With their cover down, Toni followed up on the four in the stack, a short burst from her rifle killed two and injured two. Hess did the two injured tangos with two rounds apiece, then finished up the wailing shield-bearers by yanking their shields aside and putting a pair of rounds in their chests.

"Shield?" Toni asked after she pulled one of the factory-new shields from an opened crate not far from where the stack of enemies had been downed.

"Leave it, more weight will slow us down," Hess said. They resumed march toward the eastern wall, and with the reducing density of crates quickly realized that the wall in question was not the far wall of this simulated floor, but a partition wall to separate two rooms.

"Huh, cargo elevator south of us," Toni pointed at the elevator in question. "Should we ride it up?"

"Oh, no, hell no, never ride an elevator in a tactical situation. Elevators are a quintessential fatal funnel, and any floor you stop at could have a machine gun team waiting to hose you before you step foot off the cheap carpet," Hess explained, figuring this was an excellent teachable moment. "Always do the stairs, and always keep to the outside of the stairs when possible to minimize your target profile."

"Right, got it," Toni acknowledged the point.

"Let's go." Hess continued his way east until they came to the wall and the bay door they heard earlier. "Well, that sucks ass," he said, looking back and forth along the eastern wall. "No personnel doors and only the two bay doors."

"Damn it, I knew they would try to funnel us," Toni said. "So, which one is going to suck less ass?"

"Our ingress was the northwest corner, that means the egress is going to be southeast," Hess demonstrated by pointing in each direction. "Shortest route from one of the bay doors to the stairs up is going to be the far-end bay door, so I'm expecting the largest part of the resistance will be down there waiting for us, but we'll have tangos up here just to hedge their bets."

"So we breach here?" Toni asked as she pointed to the door controls.

"You got it," Hess said. "One moment, though," He pulled his ear protection and carefully put his ear to the bay door. After a few moments, he could recognize no sound on the far side of the door. "Not hearing anything," he said quietly. "Swap mags."

"Ready," Toni said. Hess took point, cinched his UMP40 in tight, and thumbed the bay door open control. A bare moment after the door started opening, he could hear the starter on the forklift rattle the engine to life, followed shortly by the whine of the transmission as it lurched forward to impale the bottom panel of the door with both forks, which jammed the door only about a meter open. "Whoa!" Toni shouted after she realized what had happened.

Hess saw through this kind of trickery immediately: by jamming the door only partially open, they would have to crawl under the door to get to the other side, likely into the waiting sledgehammers and crowbars of the warehouse workers on the other side. The patter of feet coming toward only reinforced the point, so he went for his area weapon of choice, a frag grenade, pulled the pin quietly, stripped off the safety clip quietly, and rolled it under the forklift tines to where he thought he heard the best concentration of tangos. Before it detonated, he pulled Toni back and out of the line of the blast and fragmentation, deliberately interposing the body of the forklift and a wall between them and the blast location. Even still, the blast was enough to rattle teeth for the two operators, and the surprised shrieks of the tangos told tale that they were not expecting such a response from the interlopers.

Sigma One dolphin-dove to the ground on the near side of the forklift's tines and brought his UMP40 to bear on the area to the left of the forklift. There was one security guard standing there with his pistol loosely aimed in the direction of the door, but his face was looking southbound at the carnage and never saw the mercenary. Two rounds from Hess at the grossly short range of six meters put him in an early grave and cleared the way for him to see two more warehouse workers coming toward with crowbars and fire extinguishers. These two he also hammered with two rounds apiece, one downed and one wounded, the latter dropped his fire extinguisher and retreated.

Toni jumped over Hess and dove to the ground in the same fashion as he did, though her landing point was on the far side of the fork tines and she had clear line of sight to where the grenade detonated. "Clear!" she shouted after a few seconds made it obvious that nobody in the vicinity had survived the blast or fragmentation.

"Moving!" Hess began army-crawling forward until he was under the door and could pop up to standing. He used the engine of the forklift as cover to clear his immediate area, slicing clockwise until he was convinced there was no movement in the immediate area. "Clear!"

Toni rolled under the bay door and sprang up on the far side of the forklift from Hess. Once on this side of the door, she was able to look down the immediate row of industrial shelving and saw another forklift waiting at the other bay door, driver at the ready but staring at her. The shot was stupidly easy for her ACR, slightly less than 100 yards, and a three-round slumped him over his controls.

"Got seven workers and two more security with that blast," Hess said after he pulled the deceased forklift operator off the forklift to join the others that had been fragged by his grenade.

"No movement," Toni said after looking between pallets toward the eastern outer wall.

"Let's go, we'll make good time now that we are in a more open forklift rack area," Hess set off north again, this time he covered both forward (north) and right (east), while Toni covered east to south (behind them). At the end of the forklift rack row, he came across the worker he had severely wounded and finished the job with a round to the head. After Hess fired his shot, a barely-visible small automatic pistol clattered to the ground between his legs.

"Wow, good thing you saw that, I was going to ignore him," Toni said.

"Glint of steel says enough about his intentions," Hess declared as they passed the first north-south aisle-way. A worker toward the far end ran away from them and took refuge at the far end of the row, clearly hiding from the mercenaries, so neither operator engaged her. They saw no other movement on this side of the bay doors as they crossed another ten rows of racks, then down the eastern wall to the expected staircase.

"Live tangos behind us, so we should set a trap?" Toni asked.

"Do it," Hess said as he took cover position on the stairs. Toni took only thirty seconds to set the grenade trap on the door handle, then stacked to follow Hess up the stairs. At the top level of the staircase, both operators stopped to swap their magazines for fresh ones before they opened the door to the next floor's challenge.

-x-x-x- B5: LABCOAT SYNDROME -x-x-x-

Toni pulled the door, Hess made entry. The right side of the corridor ended after about five meters, so Hess continued the sweep left until the corner about 90 meters down the way with a hard right and who knows what beyond it. Toni was not overlong in joining him. "This is different, area not based on a wide-open space."

"Hard right in 90 meters. Eyes up and out, but keep a lookout for traps since this is confined space," Hess said.

"Ready," Toni said after she hooked her left hand in the back of his water bladder pouch.

"Let's do it," Hess advanced slowly, firearm trained forward to the corner since that is where the threat axis would be, assuming there are any threat parties on this floor. Once he arrived at the corner, he stopped and slipped his ear protection to listen, and could easily hear movement some distance around the corner. "Movement in the corridor."

"Plan?" Toni asked quietly.

"Here," Hess reached into one of his utility pouches, rummaged around for a second, and came out with a small mirror plate in a plastic housing. He knelt down at the corner and extended the mirror out into the corridor to where he could use it to examine the contents of the corridor. All he needed was ten seconds of viewing to get a very good read on what was around the bend, so he stood up and back from the corner.

"How bad?" Toni asked, still fairly quiet about it.

"Two guards, light body armor and long guns, six rooms, three east side, three west side. One guard is roaming, the other one is at a desk. If I do the foot-mobile, can you get the desk jockey?"

"Will do," Toni nodded.

Hess squared up to the wall and prepared to do a lean-out shot from partial cover. "After I drop the roamer, shoot out at an angle to the far wall and do the desk jock. Give me two when ready."

"Two what?" Toni asked.

"Two pats on the shoulder." After a moment, Toni gave him the signal and started the process.

Hess did his part of the engagement by way of doing a corner lean. He leaned out on his left leg by flexing it and simply leaning over to where he could see around the corner. The roaming guard was headed away from him at a range of about 25 meters, a pathetically easy shot for Hess to put four rounds in his upper back and head. The desk jock was much farther away, at the far end of the walkway, so Hess had delegated that shot to Toni.

Toni did as Hess instructed, she swept wide through the corner and to the far wall, took a knee next to the wall, and took aim at the second guard. He had taken the comical and very Hollywood action movie habit of turning the desk toward the sudden threat axis, and was preparing to flip it when Toni's first round struck him in the left shoulder. Two more rounds caught him in the upper chest a bare second later, and since he was wearing simple IIA body armor, the 5.56 rounds of Toni's ACR blitzed through the kevlar panels and into his upper lungs with little hesitation. They were not enough to be fatal, but the three hits were crippling and shock would finish him before Hess and Toni finished clearing the rooms.

"Move it up!" Hess said after he came around the corner and took position behind Toni.

"Windows left," Toni pointed out as they approached some long windows on the left side that terminated at a door.

"Slice the pie," Hess said. "Sweep around the corner of the window incrementally so you don't fully expose yourself without clearing the area downrange," he explained as another teachable moment for this training simulation.

Toni rotated around the corner of the window in incremental steps, her rifle aimed through the window to clear the room beyond. The space beyond the window was a clean room, and after she checked the room, saw nobody inside. "No movement."

"Move to door, enter and clear," Hess said. Toni continued down the wall to the door and immediately breached, then Hess entered first to clear the right side. Toni followed into the room and checked the left side, both of them swept through to the back of the room to make sure nobody was camping out of view. True to her initial check, there was nobody in the room. "Clear!" he announced after they had checked the last possible nooks and crannies within.

The two Sigma operators made their way out of the room and checked both ways in the corridor to make sure an ambush had not just materialized. What they found was proof positive of Virtue's earlier warning about all parties being hostile, several labcoat-types had come out into the corridor and were stripping arms off the downed guards, with one other office worker already armed with a large-frame revolver. "There!" The office worker shouted before he brought the revolver up and rattled a shot off at Hess, though it was a complete whiff (missed by over three meters) and took out the window to the clean room. Hess was on target less than a full second later, two rounds from the stupidly-easy range of ten meters put the office worker down hard.

Toni sighted up the nearer of the two labcoat types and drilled her in the side from the same range, before she could get the guard's pistol out of his holster. Both Hess and she engaged the third person at the nearer guard before she could bring his rifle to bear properly. At the guard's desk down the way, Toni had to engage two more labcoats, one trying to do CPR on the downed guard and the other trying to work his rifle (and failing miserably at it). Five shots, two more downed tangos.

"Check the downed guard, I'll cover," Toni pointed at the nearby deceased guard. Hess swept forward quickly and flipped him to face up so he could check pouches and arms.

"Wow, not expecting to see this," Hess said after he checked the rifle the guard was carrying. "Hi-Point 995 Carbine. Also another Glock 19 and appropriate magazines."

"How good is that?" Toni asked.

"It's a pistol-caliber carbine, not a particularly good one but it is a step up from just carrying a Glock," Sigma One explained. "It's a budget, entry-level pistol caliber carbine, nothing more or less."

"Anything else on him?"

"Yeah, four flashbangs," Hess pulled two of them, hooked them into part of his MOLLE loops, then pulled the other two and hooked them in Toni's MOLLE loops next to her frag grenades.

"Ready to go," Toni declared after Hess took aim down the corridor again.

"Move." Toni led off again, came to the second clean lab on the left side, and did a window check on this one again, though there was no necessity to enter because there was no part of the room that was not visible from the hallway windows and no person was visible inside. The third lab room (an electronics bench room) had two persons inside, both armed with pistols and they took shots at Hess as soon as he crossed the window, so he fired back with appreciably better results. Six rounds, two downed tangos.

Toni checked the desk guard and found he was equipped with roughly the same gear as the other guard, though he also had two frag grenades that Toni added to their gear as well as four flashbangs she split between them.

"Shouldn't we check the other doors?" Toni pointed to the three doors on the eastern side of the hallway, none of which had windows and none of which were open.

"With a closed door, you can bypass it or check it in a dynamic situation. If we were clearing the building top-to-bottom, you bet we would be checking those doors, because we'd have to clear every inch of floorspace and every conceivable hiding spot. Since our objective is just get the hell out of here alive and intact, we're going to skip them and place our typical door trap in case there's anyone in there that comes looking."

The guard desk abutted the corridor that went west from the main central corridor, so Hess sliced around the corner to clear it and waved Toni forward. They made it to the door up to the next floor without incident, emplaced their door trap, and took the stairs up to the next level. Magazines were swapped and they took a brief moment to breathe before they jumped off.

-x-x-x- B4: REASONS -x-x-x-

Hess opened the door, Toni took to the corridor and immediately went left. "This look familiar?" she asked as Hess stacked up behind her.

"Vaguely, yes," Hess said with a notable level of sarcasm to voice. "Clear to point, then do a corner check."

"Moving!" Toni led the way forward with Hess holding onto her water bladder pouch. At the corner, she stopped shy and took a knee. Hess handed off his mirror plate to her to look around the corner. She took fifteen seconds to give a very thorough look up and down the hallway, then handed it back. "Two doors left, two right, doors left are open bay doors. No movement."

"Move at your option," Sigma One said. Toni went around the corner and stayed to the near-side wall, Hess shot across the hallway to the far wall and stayed close to it. At the first bay door on the left, Hess stacked up and signaled Toni to close on him, which she did, though with the caveat that she rather badly exposed herself to the bay door. Hess figured he'd have to give her a lecture after the exercise about open doors and exposure, but for this one it wasn't a huge deal at the moment.

"Ready," Toni whispered.

"Give me two," Hess said. Toni gave him two pats on the shoulder, and immediately Hess entered and went right as was normal for the first entry. Toni went left and started searching the room deliberately, but came to one conclusion after she checked completely down the rows of bunk beds.

"Clear!" Toni shouted after she made it to the corner and could see nobody in the room at all.

"Clear!" Hess acknowledged. The two backtracked to the bay door out and back into the hallway, then down the hall to the second bay door.

"Give me two," Toni said. Hess gave her two pats on the back, then followed her into the second barracks bay and went left as was proper of the second entrant. Again, the two operators swept down the rows of bunk beds and came to the conclusion that there were no persons in the room.

"The Hell? Nobody here to party?" Toni asked as they met up again at the bay door leading into the barracks room.

"Looks like it. Let's clear the rooms on the other side of the hall, and if we are clear, we'll take a break."

-x-

"Gave him a breather?" Clint asked Moira.

"Figured they'd want a halfway respite, and give them a chance to talk a bit. Remember, this is being recorded and shown around the base, so anything they have to say will be known far and wide," the green dragon in human form answered.

"Good call," Victoria said with some gusto.

The group of Secret Service and the Administrators watched on the monitor as Toni and Hess made entry into the first of the storage rooms, cleared it, and came out again in proper form to head for the second room. "At least this is a long demonstration of how to properly conduct some close-quarters battle," Clarence said. "Seeing them in action, I'd have to say they could give even you a run for your money, Clint."

"I think I could take him in close," Clint said. "Maybe. It would be a damn close match at this point. At range? Forlorn outcome."

"Yeah, handicapping him by forcing him to use close-quarters weapons only definitely changed the dynamic," Sionet pointed out. "This would have been a breeze if he had his Mark 14."

"Exactly why I stipulated no long range rifles," Moira said. "And what is the deal with you specifying the OpFor carries only Glock 17 or 19 and those Hi-Point Carbines?"

Clint chuckled. "Hess can use either of those weapons, but has no love for either so he won't actively carry one as a drop-gun."

"He did pick up a G19 and some mags as a backup piece," Clarence reminded him.

"That's rare conduct for him," Clint admitted. "He prefers Springfield or Taurus for pistols, though he did have a couple Sig-Sauer products in his inventory at home. Ruger or Smith and Wesson for revolvers, I've seen him stack rounds with a Ruger product in the past."

Conversation died out after the two came out of the second storage room and headed back into the barracks. After having cleared the barracks rooms, their check of the rooms was more haphazard because of the complete lack of threat parties on this floor.

-x-

"I'm not worried about the contents of the lockerboxes, I think they won't have given us any notable freebies for this run," Hess pointed out. "I'm more interested in taking a rest break."

"Agreed," Toni said before she sat down on one of the bunks. Hess took a seat across the aisle from her, which she considered a bit disappointing but did expect. "So, liking the challenge so far?"

"Not bad, got to give it to the crew, they designed a pretty good mouse maze so far. Haven't had much opportunity to flex some alternate methods of clearing or bypassing, but we still have three floors above us and the hangar itself. All in all, 8/10 would bang and make entry again," Hess said. "What are your thoughts?"

"Pretty much the same. This definitely isn't a challenge for untrained or under-trained persons, knowing how to move, shoot, and clear rooms is a requirement for this." Toni sighed. "Damn good to have you covering my six, big guy."

"And thank you for putting up with my eccentricities throughout this shoot house." Can't get too mushy even if I'm starting to lean in that direction. This is almost assuredly being recorded and re-transmitted, Hess thought in such a fashion that Toni would clearly hear the thought. He covered any appearance of willful thinking with action, he removed the medical kit from his right drop-leg platform and began opening it up at the same time.

"Three more floors and probably a few more good lessons," Toni acknowledged the point. I heard, save your final judgment until after you've seen my other form. Not everyone likes an avian, she told him telepathically while he was busy rummaging in his medkit for Excedrin. Inwardly, she found herself rather giddy at the thought that he was opening up to the possibility of letting his heart free once more.

"How are your feet and legs doing?" Hess asked after he found the right material.

"Could use a dose of Excedrin," she said. Hess tossed her an individual packet, which she caught readily.

"Without this, my knee would be stiff and unusable by the time we get out of the hangar." Hess had drained a good drink from his water bladder to down the Excedrin, then let the hose hang from one of the MOLLE loops again.

"Gotta lose weight, big guy," Toni pointed out fairly.

"That's a battle I've been fighting my entire life," Sigma One said. "Still, I've always been a fan of good food and good cooking. Everybody has a weakness."

"I'm trying to keep my mind focused on the task here, not on my weakness," Toni grumped.

"Hrm?" Hess semi-prompted her.

"A good hot shower," Toni answered.

"After this trudge? Totally worth it," Sigma One acknowledged the point. "Of course, we have to survive the trudge first."

"I'll bet a few bills they'll try to roll us on the way out of the hangar," Toni guessed.

"No take on that bet, that's just the kind of asshole game-breaker that Clint would pull on a challenge like this. I'd be surprised and rather disappointed if they did not try," Hess said with a derisive snort. "Unfortunately, that is also a very valid real-life ambush ploy as well, so it is legitimate and expected."

"Then we run the gauntlet and enjoy every second of it." Toni leaned back against the end of the bedframe and put her legs up to stretch out. "Few more minutes?"

"I'm not in a rush," Hess said.

-x-x-x- B3: THE CUBE FARM -x-x-x-

Hess and Toni exited the stairwell in the southeast corner of the room, Toni lead the way out with her ACR on the right, Hess went left with his UMP40.

"Office space," Toni said. "How do we handle this?"

"Exit in the northwest corner again, we're going to have to cross through the cubicles to get there." Whoever had set up this cubicle farm had not been very sensible about how office workers mill about on a daily basis, which meant this was another engineered chokepoint that the two contestants would have to navigate the hard way.

The lay of the land was two rather dysfunctional groups of waist-height cubicles facing a central north-south walkway. Both groups of cubicles had their own north-south passageway along the back end of the group, specifically abutting the east and west walls, but the interior design of the 90-meter swath of cubicles was almost entirely random itself. There was no clear way to traverse east and west, which would have indicated someone with a shred of common sense had set this edifice up, but the present state of affairs made for one hell of a roadblock. And, Hess suspected, it was a roadblock maze chock full of trap points and ambush areas.

"I see three entries on this side, where do we kick off?" Toni asked.

"Start with the middle one. Chances are real good they won't give us an easy cross on the near entry."

"Middle it is, I have the left guard." Hess moved up the outside (eastern) wall for roughly 100 meters as Toni kept behind him and to his left, her ACR pointing toward the most open areas as the big guy moved forward. Truth to tell, Toni had already decided he would be best for walking point in this maze; she trusted his observation and reaction skills to find the traps much better than she trusted her own.

Hess stopped at the mouth to the middle entryway and took a knee. "Huh, they must really not like us."

"What gives?" Toni asked.

"Wires," and Hess put a tactical light on the wires in question. "Trigger plate under this boot mat, here," Hess used his combat knife to lift the edge of it from a small standoff distance, and thus reveal the presence of the trigger plate. "This one should be easy to defeat." He put the tip of his combat knife against one of the wire conductors and pressed down hard on it, not moving the plate but severed the wire. "One wire cut, no trigger." Hess demonstrated by tapping on the pressure plate several times with the butt of his knife, and nothing happened.

"Should we just jump over the cubicles end to end?" Toni asked.

"Don't want to do that, you skylight yourself for a shooter with a sense of humor," Hess shot that thought down quickly. "Cubicle walls don't provide cover, these are not heavy enough to stop even a .22 reliably, but they do provide concealment. I suggest we make use of it." Hess peeked up above the level of the cubicles for a moment to make sure there was no movement, then stood up and stepped over the trap trigger.

"Well, that's nasty," Toni said after she had a good look at the trap to which the trigger was tied. An electromechanical latch was holding down a swinging lever that was connected to some truck springs, and the end of the lever had two attached cinder blocks for the impact weight. The pivot radius would have put the spring-deployed striker at shoulder level for a reasonable man, not necessarily enough to kill but certainly enough to put someone out of the fight.

"Told ye, they really want to test us," Hess said. "And I can already see a tripwire about ten meters ahead."

"Damn, this is going to be a big pain in the ass," Toni grumped. "Lead on, I trust your spotting ability more than mine," she said.

"Keep your eyes up and out for personnel threats while I navigate the maze." Hess moved forward to where he saw the tripwire, grabbed an office chair from one of the cubicles, and simply rolled it into the wire. The tripwire was attached to the same kind of swinging lever trap they had just passed by, and once triggered the spring-actuated lever slammed down on and destroyed the office chair.

The racket caused by such a strike also caused a secondary reaction. "The hell?" Someone asked after a moment. "Oh shit!" A lady half-shouted before a gunshot rang out. Toni had her rifle on target just as a second shot rang out and struck Hess' shoulder in the body armor, though Toni's four rounds achieved much more of a result.

"Tango down, no other threats visible," Toni said. "You all right?"

"I'll live, took one in the shoulder. Where was she?" Hess asked after he stood up from kneeling after he took the hit.

"Five, six rows over," Toni pointed toward the north.

"Just one guard?" Hess wondered aloud. One guard covering a maze of this proportion would be obscenely improper conduct, but all else being equal not surprising to Hess.

"Not seeing anyone else," Toni said.

"Ready to move?" Hess asked.

"Let's do it," Toni hooked her left hand in Hess' water bladder pouch and followed close, making sure to keep her eyes up while the boss scanned for traps.

They advanced another 20 meters into the cubicle farm, took a right (now headed north), and had to stop after five meters for another tripwire. Hess highlighted the tripwire for Toni with his weapon light, so she stepped over it and took position to wait for him to take the lead again. Ten meters farther down the aisle of cubicles, it was another pressure plate trigger on a leg breaker trap, easily stepped over by the pair.

Another nine traps awaited them on the circuitous route through the eastern group of cubicles, a mix of the swing-over cinder block traps and some of the leg-breaker traps from the mechanical room five floors below them. When they exited the eastern block of cubicles, both made it one pace and stopped dead in their tracks, looking up and down the north-south alleyway between the two blocks of cubicles.

"What manner of bullshit is this?" Toni asked in an arch tone of voice.

"I'm starting to wonder if one of your subordinates is a bit of a masochist," Erich said with some reverence to voice. "This is the kind of density of traps and triggers that either screams 'go the fuck away' or identifies the architect as not entirely stable."

"No joke," Toni groused. "Could be Clint, though."

"Could be, I wouldn't put these shenanigans past him," Hess acknowledged the point. "So, it's obvious we don't have any axial traversal here," and he waved his arm left to right, signaling going north or south. "I'm good at seeing and strategizing spatial traps like this, but I'm nowhere near flexible enough to worm my way through some of those tripwire nets."

"Huh. What about setting them off preemptively?" Toni asked.

"It's a gamble. In addition to the shin-breakers and the skull-crackers, we also have four spring-actuated heavy pipes that look like they'd release in two counter-rotating pairs, crushing a man — or woman — in the middle in a very messy fashion." Hess pointed his tactical light at one of the newer wide-area traps for reference.

"Woman…" Toni thought aloud. "Got it! We'll use Busty Betty back there to set off the traps between here and the next entrance!" The nearest of the entrances on the western side was only about 15 meters north up the way from their exit point, but had at least three traps between where they exited the eastern cubicles and would enter the western ones.

"Yeah, that would do the job nicely, and she's already too dead to complain," Hess said with a smile. Gives the viewers some gratuitous violence to go with their other amusements, as well, he thought but did not say aloud.

You got it, give the viewers a look at the price of failure on dodging traps, Toni told him telepathically. "You get the dead wench, I'll get her a suitable chariot."

"Back in a moment." Hess had no trouble dodging the few traps between their position and the security guard's cubicle, mainly because he had taken time to mark them as hazards as he went through. Every one of the cubicles around them had neon yellow highlighters, and all Hess had to do to mark a trap line was put a highlighter under the line right in the middle of the walkway. The pressure plates were even simpler, flip the doormat off them and step over.

Fifteen meters into the cubicle farm, Hess came to the cubicle of the slain guard and stepped in. They had previously checked her for any unusual or interesting gear and found none, so they made their comments on her uniform malfunction and went about their business. Now that he was about to pick her up and carry her, he realized that her security guard button-down shirt being unbuttoned from navel to collar was not a 'uniform malfunction', it was deliberate on her part. Why, exactly, she would be guarding a trapped cubicle maze with her shirt wide open and bra exposed came only to two conclusions to Hess: one, she was supposed to be something so distracting that one or both of them would have been shot by her while gawking, or two, she was supposed to be playing with herself as fanservice or temptation on the run through here. Hess figured either was possible, given the progenitors of this maze.

Still, he had work to do, so Hess grabbed her right wrist, hauled her up onto his shoulders, hooked his right arm around the simulated guards' right knee, and stood up to do a fireman's carry to take her through the maze. True to her word, Toni had a high-back Captain's Office Chair waiting for him when he arrived at the central corridor. She braced the chair when Hess flopped the dead body down in the chair, then took a moment to better arrange her posture and pose for the coming spectacle.

"What do you think? Boot it and clear back?" Toni asked.

"Actually, I'm going to leg-press the chair out into the kill zone. Give me a couple meters' clearance, then drop back a bit." Toni positioned the chair three meters inside the cubicle walkway, dead guard facing knockers-first toward the traps, and took cover in a cubicle next to the chair. Hess laid down on the ground behind the chair, sidled up to it so his legs had maximum tension on them, put his boots on the lower back of the chair, and simply pushed outward in the fashion of a leg press. After he made full extension with his legs and their crash test corpse was on the way, Hess quickly swung his legs around and took cover in the cubicle to his left, opposite Toni.

'Busty' rolled straight and true out into the hazard area and did exactly as was intended for her. She tripped the first tripwire she came to, a swinging leg-breaker trap that rotated out from the other side of the walkway and struck the chair just under the base of the seat. It struck metal and not body, so it propelled her farther north towards their goal. The second and third traps activated were counter-rotating skull crushers, the first of which slammed onto the back of her chair, glanced off, and caused her body to weakly catapult forward a meter onto the pole of the other skull-crusher, and from there she skidded forward and down, into the tripwire net for the body breakers. The four metal pipes swung out in counter-rotating directions, meant to trap an unawares target between two very nasty sets of rotating pipes and crush them from four impact points. Unfortunately for the trap design, if someone was down low (not standing) when the trap was set off, they could theoretically not be struck by it, or possibly be struck only by the lowest pipe. So it went with Busty, she took only the lowest pipe square on her arse given her butt was pointed skyward, which flung her body forward and past the western entrance that Hess and Toni were eyeing. In her brief posthumous flying lesson she also managed to trigger another pair of skull crushers and was finally pinned against a wall by another leg-breaker.

"That sounded energetic," Hess said as he stood up and stretched out. "You all right?"

"No injuries, nothing violated my cubicle," Toni said.

"Good, let's roll," Hess waved her toward the disaster zone.

"Well, she did her duty ex post facto," Toni said with a shred of humor after they entered the central walkway.

"True," Hess was thankful that her chest was pressed up against the cubicle wall that she was now pinned against, sparing him that sight on what was probably now a heavily-mangled body. "She did trip everything to the western entrance, so let's go."

"Definitely. How are we going to do this side?"

Hess made it ten meters into the second section of cubicles and stopped. It dead-ended to his right (the northern direction) and had no other paths.

"We are going to do this the direct way, if a frag-bait comes up clean. Toss a flashbang over that way, the sound should wake and shake anyone around," Hess pointed to their south, toward the thickest part of the cubicles on the western side. Toni was quick to pick it off her vest, arm it (same process as a regular grenade), and toss it toward where Sigma One indicated. It landed on top of a desk segment and blew, though both Sigma troops knew to look away from the flash for a moment and look back quickly to catch anyone stunned or aroused by it. No tangos appeared after a minute, so Hess concluded that this was now an empty floor.

"Nothing," Toni nodded twice. "I guess we're going direct to the western wall?"

"Aye, I'm not going to try to brave that shitfest," Hess jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the central corridor. "One climbs, one covers. You can lead off."

Hess and Toni crossed laterally through the cubicles and dodged the dense trap schema readily. Both were very sore from cubicle walls and office furniture mishaps, but they made decent time by simply bypassing the threats. At the stairwell up, Toni led the way to the next floor, and having expended only four rounds, decided not to swap magazines. Both stretched, braced, and made ready for the next challenge on the far side of the door.

-x-x-x- B2: THE WINDING ROAD -x-x-x-

"Long corridor, door at the end," Toni said. At least in this entry hallway, there was no personnel to contest them right off the bat.

"No traps visible, but a lot of obstacles. Watch your step." Hess took the lead southbound on the consideration that, despite being a long corridor that appeared to run the full length of the west wall, the narrow confines would make it possible for him to take any kind of opposition under fire fairly easily and reliably.

"This is weird, just a straight shot down the western wall?" Toni grumped about halfway down the corridor.

"I have this sinking feeling in my gut as to what kind of configuration this is," Hess said as he dodged around a pallet of industrial equipment. A few meters further, he had to skirt around a palletized aircraft landing gear assembly, then around a stack of computer towers against the wall.

"Do tell," Toni said.

"Snake path, where we go to the end, go through the door, and we have to walk all the way back north to the next door, and wind our way south again. It's one plan to maximize the amount of real-estate we have to trudge, force us to become worn down, hasty, lose judgment and become easier to roll," Hess guessed offhand. He would find out he was partially correct on the intent, but not on the form of the level design.

"So, if I'm doing the math right, we've got roughly 4 kilometers of trudge to go by," Toni said as she ducked around a large barrel of industrial lubricant.

"Floor figure, I'd say. These corridors are about 8 meters wide, if we assume 2 meter walls then our straight-line haul is 4 kilometers. Assuming less wall, say 1 meter walls, you're looking at 4.4 kilos. Half meter walls would give you 4.8 kilometers. You could go thinner, but I don't think they would, too easy to breach the walls in a straight line."

"Makes me think of how easy it would be to just punch through drywall," Toni giggled.

"Damn straight," Hess said as he came to the door and stacked on it. "Drywall and business-spaced sheet metal studs? You bet your ass I'd just Kool-Aid Man my way through the maze the short way."

Toni stacked up behind him and gave him two pats on the shoulder. Hess pushed through the door and immediately checked the corner behind the door (nothing) as Toni checked down the hallway. At the far end, four persons were painting the walls and all four looked at Toni as soon as the door swung shut behind Hess.

"Oh shit! I ain't paid to deal with that!" One of the guys in the crew said. He set his paint roller down and was out the far door in a hurry, with the other three painters not far behind him.

"Well, that works to our advantage," Toni said. "Don't have to shoot some poor unarmed or less-than-proper-armed hostile."

"Agreed," Hess said as he commenced the walk toward the door.

"Just realized we're headed east now," Toni pointed out. "Think this might be a spiral corridor orientation?"

"We'll see if the next corridor segment does the same thing, that would confirm your theory," Sigma One said while moving through some palletized barrels. A few of them had hazmat markings, though Hess did not look too closely for identifiers as to what was in which barrel.

"Wet paint, watch your step," Toni cautioned.

"Knocked a can over, I can smell it from here," Hess said as he approached the area where the painters had been. True to his guess, one of the painters had knocked over a 5-gallon bucket of white paint, though the splat from it did not completely extend through the corridor and both were able to get around the spill cleanly.

The door had automatically closed after the painters exited, so Hess stacked up once again to make entry. Toni gave the signal to make entry, so Hess pushed through the door and immediately made to check the right-hand corners while Toni took the long view down the length of the hall. Nothing was waiting behind the swing arc of the door, so the two started their way down the hallway.

"Another left hand turn and another long-ass corridor," Toni pointed out.

"This is going to be one big bitch of a march, they're trying to wear us down," Hess grumped.

"I refuse to give up!" Toni said with clear determination.

"Oh, we're not going to surrender because they made us do some hiking," Sigma One said. "Just keep your pace even and take your time, conserve energy whenever possible."

Both followed the advice, they kept their pace even and smart, with one eye on the door and the end of the corridor and one eye on their road to avoid obstacles or the possibility of traps. The presence of painting crews meant that traps were unlikely, though not impossible, and the amount of material in the hallway made for plenty of ways to conceal traps, mines, or other hazards.

Two-thirds down the corridor, the door in front of them opened and a flashbang was tossed around the doorjamb. "Take cover!" Toni half-shouted before she dropped behind a large diesel engine on a pallet. Hess dropped to one knee and looked aside, away from the flashbang, just before it detonated so as to save his vision, but still had five meters to go forward before he could post up behind anything substantial enough to stop gunfire.

After the flash subsided, Hess made for the cover of a pallet of ceramic tile and was able to get down behind it before the first enemy through the door fired off his shots. Four rounds struck the tile boxes fairly decently from 60 yards, leaving little in the room for attempting to negotiate.

Toni took a few moments to look around the back side of the engine at the OpFor. "Hess! Heavy hitters!" she said quickly.

"Got 'em both!" One of the enemies declared before he put several rounds into the side of the engine block that Toni was covered behind.

Hess heard the distinct sound of a shotgun bolt being pulled back and released. "Suppress 'em and move up!"

Toni made the first move for the Sigma troops, she made use of the rear of the engine block as a defensive shield to brace her ACR against and took aim at the enemy lead. Four rounds went downrange from her gun quickly, all centered on his chest, though surprisingly to her the tango wasn't slain by the hits. All four had been stopped by his heavy body armor, though the impact from them put him on his ass. The next logical target for her was his head — now less mobile because he was sitting — and two rounds there finished the job.

Sigma One ducked around the corner of the tile stack with a corner lean, put his reflex sight on the nearest of the enemies, and cut loose with eight rounds centered on her head. At 40 yards he clipped her twice in the left shoulder, three times in the upper chest, and once in the throat just below the chin.

"God damn! They got Joey and Tanya!" One of the remaining security troops shouted.

"Keep firing!" The same trooper that ordered suppressing fire earlier shouted.

Hess ducked around the corner again and made to lay down a burst on one of the enemies providing that suppressing fire, but never had the chance to fire. Two rounds clipped him in the right arm, both stopped by the Dragon Scale Six armor but both rather painful nonetheless. Toni put paid to the shooter, a round to the face was an easy thing to dispense when the trooper failed to take cover after winging Sigma One. Hess hesitated a few seconds, then ducked out again to deliver some suppressing fire of his own on the two remaining OpFor. Neither of his four-round bursts amounted to anything, but the prospect of lead flying in their general direction had more effect on the tangos than it did on Sigma.

"Big guy!" Toni said from behind cover. Hess looked back in time to see a Flashbang skid across the ground to where he was kneeling behind the tile stack. "You bait 'em, I'll frag 'em."

Hess nodded twice as he picked up the flashbang. Arming it was the same procedure as a normal grenade, so he had it readied for deployment in a matter of seconds. To send it downrange, he ducked up above his cover for a moment, still on his knees so the exposure was minimal, and hocked it downrange for what he thought was a good 30 meters or so. He would find out later that the NFD landed behind the position of the two troopers and bounced off the side of a pallet, where it rolled to a stop in almost the best position entirely by accident.

Once the detonation happened, Toni was on her feet and did the first threat smartly with several rounds to the chest and ribs. The shot angle was side-on against his left arm, and here the choice of body armor worked against him: the plate carrier he used did not have side protection or side trauma plates, so she had a clear shot into his body cavity with four rounds. Traverse right, the second tango was braced against the corridor wall so Toni put two rounds in the side of her head.

"Tangos down!" Toni said. Hess stood up to full standing and checked the area, and found no movement to speak of.

"Leapfrog forward, clear as you go," Hess said quickly. "Go!"

Toni bounded ten meters forward and took position at a pallet of drywall putty in 5-gallon buckets, then waved Hess forward. He moved up past her another five meters and covered behind a stack of oil drums filled with motor oil, then waved her forward. Toni made the last bound before the enemy's last stand location and took cover behind some kind of aircraft part on a pallet. Sigma One made the move into the casualty zone cautiously, deliberately keeping to the left-side wall until he came to the first body and checked it.

"Confirmed kill," Hess said. Toni moved past him a bit to the first tango she shot down in this gunfight and checked him.

"He's down, hole in the head," Toni reported.

Hess moved to the next enemy counting geographically, the one he dropped. She had bled out from her numerous wounds well before Hess checked her. "Another KIA."

Toni moved past this spot to the area where she dropped the last two and checked them both since their bodies were almost parallel to each other. "Two down here."

"Damn good shooting," Hess said as he checked past her to the door. There were no major obstacles past the last two, as a painting crew was working in the area prior to the gunfight. "By my math, you got four of the five."

"Better weapon for the job," Toni pointed out the disparity between their weapon choices.

"Speaking of better weapons, only two Hi-Point carbines in this lot, this lady has a carbine-length lever gun," Hess indicated the last lady that Toni shot down, "and two of the tangos that tried to close on us had shotguns, M1014 if I recognize correctly."

"What do you think?" Toni asked.

"If we have a heavy-hitter team heere, we're probably headed for worse up the way. As much as it is going to suck carrying around extra arms, we'll want to."

"I'm not all that great with shotguns, you want them?" Toni asked.

"Yeah, I'll carry a shotgun," Hess nodded twice. He took up one of the shotguns from the deceased and collected some shells from both of them, giving him a couple dozen extra shells to work with. When he came back to where Toni was, she had the lever rifle in her possession and the shell belt the user had been wearing was now draped over her chest as a bandolier. Both had found more flashbangs and an extra frag grenade apiece on their respective deceased, so they topped off. "Ready to go?"

"Gods help us if this is going to get as bad as you think."

"I agree wholeheartedly," Hess said.

On their winding road to the next stairwell, they would encounter a couple more crews of painters but none so foolhardy as to try challenging the two infiltrators.

-x-x-x- B1: LAST PIT STOP BEFORE CRAZY TOWN -x-x-x-

Sigma One stepped through the central-stairwell doorway and immediately went right, scanning through the myriad of racks and shelves for any kind of threat he could identify and drop before they got a clean shot at him or Toni. The exact nature of those racks and shelves, though…

"Oh wow, it's the mother lode!" Toni said after a moment to look around the room.

"Well, this will make it a hell of a lot easier to get out of here," Hess commented after he determined that there were no other persons in the room.

"All AK guns, though," Toni said with some disappointment.

"Well, coming from Clint's brainpan, this surprises me zero point zero percent," Hess said. "Of course an Iron Curtain armory would be his wet dream, and he thinks it would be disgusting to me, but this joke's on him. I'm into reliable long-range firepower from the Beasts in the East as much as I live and die by Western Wonders. If he wanted to cause me consternation, racks of Thirty Years War-era arquebus would have done much better."

"Oh, never thought about that," Toni said as she checked the heft of a polymer-furniture AK-74M.

"Let's see if he included any good unicorns in the racks, or just the standard battle rifle fare," Hess started checking rows for certain rifles, though Toni continued picking through the various infantry rifle options while the big guy sought out some long-range firepower. Two treks through the racks gave him one conclusion: "Guess not. Ah, well, one could hope against hope."

"No marksman's rifles?"

"None, so I'll go with the best option from the modern era, the AK-12," Hess acknowledged. Finding one was no challenge, Clint had made sure to include a couple racks of them on the southern side of the armory.

"These are it?" Toni hefted one and immediately found she liked the feel of it. "Not bad hardware."

"True, I can accuse the Soviets and the Russkies after them of some screwy shit, but they did come up with a damn decent rifle concept in the AK platform." Hess fitted a sling to his rifle, then a Russian-copy ACOG scope to the picatinny rail. "Drop guns on the racks, these are our new carry weapons. Safe and sling your primary, we'll go it with these."

"Sure," Toni took a moment to collect some magazines and a case of ammo. "How do we load these?"

"They have loading tables at the end of the row." Hess grabbed a bandolier of magazines for himself and took it to the table. On the table was a mounted mag-loader in the shape of a crescent moon, sometimes called a 'U' Loader — the magazine went in one end of the loader, the rounds in the other, and you used a rammer to drive the rounds into the magazine. "Load an extra magazine, we'll use it in the shooting range to get a quick feel for the new rifles."

"Can do," Toni went to the next loading table over and began the process of loading up her own magazines. Lay out the magazine, lay out 30 rounds, zip them into the magazine with the rammer (1). In this fashion, both had a stack of six magazines loaded up and ready in a couple minutes.

On the eastern wall of the armory, an enclosed small shooting range for 100 meters maximum distance was set up for the troops to test and sight in weapons. Targets were easy to find, the bins below the stall tables had multiple styles of targets. Hess selected a standard marksman's bullseye and ran it out to the full 100 meter length of the range stall. Toni was not overlong in joining him to sight her choice of red dot sight in, though she opted for a 50-meter zero.

After double-checking all the screws were tightened down as much as possible without stripping, he fired one round from the new platform, which landed low and slightly left of the bullseye. A screwdriver was handy in the range stall, so he used it to adjust the permanent zero for the ACOG to the right by three mil and up five mil. Another brace and another shot, this time centered horizontally but now only slightly low. Another set of adjustments to the vertical, another shot to test placement landed in the 9 ring directly below the bullseye. Last adjustment, last test shot was almost perfectly centered in the red. Three follow-up shots proved the zero was on target and holding.

"Got mine on," Toni reported a moment later. "How are you doing?"

"Just finished my hundred-yard zero." Hess pulled down his target and set it aside, then took a moment to load up a second target, this one a silhouette. Before he took to finishing his setup magazine, he took a moment to check the area and make sure nobody was trying to creep on them. Satisfied the area was still clear, Sigma One rejoined Toni at the line to practice perforating a person at the maximum distance of the range. By the time he was finished, both Toni and he were satisfied with their rifles and sights.

"Load up one for the road?" Toni asked.

"Yeah, better safe than screwed." With having loaded seven mags already, they both had the knack of loading using the Podavach U-Loader and both loaded up their test magazine for final deployment in seconds.

"How do we go out?" Toni asked.

"Our door up to here was supposed to be southeast, so our way out should be northwest." Hess checked a compass to make sure he had not lost bearing and true to expectation he knew which door was which. "Ready arms, this is the final push."

Toni drew the bolt back on her AK-12 and stacked in behind Hess at the northern door out of the armory space. "Let's do this."

Hess pushed through the door and immediately went right to clear his side. Toni was out a second after and cleared left. "Clear right," he commented quietly.

"Clear left, hard wall at the end of the reinforced armory wall," Toni said. The wall bridged the gap between the reinforced armory room and the outside wall, making it impossible to take the short path to the door up.

"Then we wind our way around. Of course Clint is going to make this not easy on us," Sigma One said. He waved Toni in the direction that it would wind around, clockwise from the northern door, and the two Sigma troops threaded their way cautiously through the assorted boxes and shipping containers in the corridor, always wary of the possibility of traps or IEDs. At the western segment of the corridor surrounding the central room, Hess did a corner lean to check for threats, and finding none, waved Toni forward.

"Oh man, I am going to be sore from all this dashing and leaning," Toni grumped as Hess moved up past her.

"Got to get used to it, this is our future," Hess made it ten yards forward before he ordered a stop. "Hold, tripwire."

"What is it connected to?" Toni asked.

"Noisemaker, a perimeter alarm unit," Hess pointed to the wall-mounted tripwire siren unit. "Step lightly and keep your eyes mobile."

"Definitely," Toni made sure to step over the tripwire with several inches of clearance just to be safe.

No further hazards awaited them on the western side, though another of the tripwire alarms waited for them less than a meter past the southwest corner. Two other attempts at tripping them up were dodged in transit, but the big one was at the halfway point of the southern outer walkway, where the southern door of the central armory room would be.

"This is different," Toni said as she approached the container stack. "Two baby containers flanking the door, and a larger container used to create an enclosed space?"

"Designed to prevent us going out the south door from the armory," Hess noted. "The loading benches we used would be just a couple meters inside this door."

"Give me a boost up? I want to see if they had any kind of nasty surprise for us." Toni squared up to the corner, so Hess squatted down, took hold on her heel, and hauled her up above the level of the containers. She leaned over the corners of the containers, looked down, and immediately Hess could sense her tense up. "Okay, seen enough," Toni said in a near-whisper. Hess lowered her down carefully and backed off.

"How bad?"

"What kind of spider is about that wide with legs and all?" Toni spread her hands out to encompass something roughly the size of a basketball. "Tan color, very fat ass."

Hess sighed. "That would be a Brazilian Giant Tarantula, there's a more proper name for it but that's what I always know them as (2)." Hess sighed again, though this one was a sigh of relief, not of weariness. "Clint, has to be Clint. He knows I am no fan of spiders, and assailing me with a trap of that nature is a good way to wear someone down psychologically."

"Damn, never thought about that angle," Toni said.

"Well, he failed by chance; I never really thought about doubling back through the armory, and ex post facto I am glad for that oversight. Come on, let's keep moving."

"You have the lead," Toni said.

Sigma One took the lead toward the next corner, though he had to stop and point out three more of the tripwire alarm units for Toni to pass over safely. Other than that, the area had nothing major to speak of, just a wide and fairly dense assortment of industrial pallets and crates, in several different languages no less.

The third corner, what would be the northbound route on the western wall toward the door, Hess made sure to check with his mirror plate to ensure there wasn't anyone waiting in ambush. His fears were realized, though, when he was able to spot three tangos camped on the door in a fairly decent ambush position. Slowly and calmly he stood back up from the crouch and put the mirror plate away, then stepped Toni back a couple meters.

"That bad?" Toni asked in almost a whisper.

"Three heavy hitters, armor, helmets, AK products and a light machine gun position in good cover. When we do this, it won't be pleasant."

"Understood. How do we want to do this?" Toni had something in mind, but figured it was probably a bad idea.

"I'll do a corner lean and plug the light machine gun, after I fire you need to get to cover and start suppressing them."

"Ready when you are," Toni braced to position as Hess crouched down again and leaned into the corner. This time, the light machine gunner was looking in his direction with a classic thousand-yard stare, evidence enough that he knew something was coming but not when to expect it. It was not until Hess had the ACOG scope out in the field that the gunner showed any sign of life, though it was too little too late: by the time he realized what he was looking at, Hess had finished depressing the trigger. One round, one deceased LMG gunner.

Toni took her instructions to heart, she immediately made for the center of the walkway and fired off a good eight rounds in so doing. She didn't contact, but she had the immediate effect of forcing both of the surviving troops to take cover. Hess was able to stand and move forward of Toni's position unharassed because Toni continued to put pairs of rounds downrange into the cases and nearby where the remaining tangos were.

The coordination on these two was markedly better than the security guards on floors below, both broke cover at the same time and did so in a fashion more befitting soldiers than untrained troops: they came around the sides of their boxes, not over the top, and exposed as little of themselves as possible, though their trigger discipline was lacking in that they simply ripped a long burst until their bolts locked open on empty magazines. While there was a pause in the fire, Hess took the time unharassed to move forward and find a better position from which to engage them. After he was down and in place, Toni zoomed forward past him and stopped at a crate ten meters farther forward from his position, now 30 meters into the walkway.

This time, only one of them opened fire on the two Sigma operators, though again she cut loose with the full magazine and dropped back behind cover to reload. The reason why the second didn't fire was obvious, he went for the light machine gun and was able to pull it down behind cover. Since the ploy at hand was fairly obvious, Hess laid down on his back with the AK-12 aimed between two crates towards the light machine gun post and made sure that the crate to his right shielded him from view of the lady shooter. The sound of a large machine gun bolt was ample to prove to Hess that his suspicions were right and that he was positioned properly for the next engagement.

Toni threw a couple pairs of rounds down the way, then made sure she was amply covered for the coming exchange. The lady opened up first, then as she began firing Hess caught sight of the LMG muzzle coming up above the barrier, pointed toward the roof but descending. That told Hess that these were better-than-average guards, but still not properly trained on how to avoid advertising their intentions. As his head crested the top of the light machine gun post, Hess sent one round downrange and caught him in the neck just below the chin, which caused him to drop forward and bowl over the light machine gun barriers that would have shielded a third attempt at the heavy weapon.

Toni laid down a couple more pairs as Hess came up to standing, then Hess started firing individual aimed shots at her position while he walked forward toward her. Toni took the suppression as a good opportunity to move forward again, though the closer they got to the door the thinner the box cover became. On single rounds, Hess simply chewed through his magazine until he counted one round in the chamber and an empty magazine, then waved at Toni to keep it up while he reloaded. By the time Toni finished the seven remaining in hers and had one in the chamber, Sigma One was back in battery and resumed fire.

The methodical and very accurate fire must have broken her (simulated) morale; the enemy trooper darted to another piece of cover, this one less suited to withstand rifle fire. Hess continued firing into the side of the crate, one shot every few steps, then Toni took over as he stopped to reload again. Toni did not make it through her second full magazine before the enemy tried to regain momentum, though a shot to the body armor forced the trooper back behind the crate. Hess joined Toni in shooting at a small patch of the wooden crate until it was breached; a round went through the wood and into the back of her helmet, albeit at too low a velocity to penetrate, though it did ring her bell loudly. This time she did not flinch back after taking a hit to the body and tried to bring her rifle to bear, though she never got on the trigger before Toni put a round through her right eye.

"Tangos down! Advance with caution!" Hess ordered after he switched out magazines again.

No other surprises awaited them on the march to the enemy ambush position. "Damn! That was hairy!"

"That almost ended us, if the light machine gunner had been a little more aware of his downrange that could have resulted in us being pinned down or cut to ribbons," Hess pointed out how badly that could have gone for them. "Grab some mags from the tangos, I need three. Any frag grenades?" Erich had taken a couple moments to flip over the two deceased that had tried doing the light machine gun, and found that one of them used an old AKM in the 7.62x39 style, and the other was using a 9x39 AK of a type he did not recognize.

"Here," Toni handed him three of the polymer 74-era magazines, which he added to his AK-12 bandolier. "She's got two frags, what about yours?"

"Four total," Hess picked three off the deceased and added them to his collection. He tossed the fourth to Toni, who added it to the pair she found on the one deceased lady on her gearset. "Ready to go?"

"Now we do the hangar," Sigma One said. "I'm hoping this stairwell goes up in the utility offices behind the hangar, so we're not immediately exposed to every swinging dick up there."

"True, that would suck," Toni said as they made for the door to the stairwell. Once inside, Toni took a moment to put a grenade-drop trap on the handle of the door before they made their way upstairs and stacked for the finale.

-x-x-x- GROUND FLOOR: THAT LAST OUNCE OF RESOLVE -x-x-x-

Toni made first entry out of the stairwell and into a basic office-setting hallway. "You called it," she said after the boss stacked up behind her.

"At this point, I don't have an idea which way the Hangar is out from us, so we start checking rooms for a path out."

"Can do. Right or left?" Toni asked.

"Start with right," Hess guessed. Toni moved up to the first of the doors on the right side of the hallway, opened it, and swept inside to the strong side (right). Sigma One followed immediately and went weak side (left), though they both came to a conclusion quickly: "Clear," Hess said after he realized that a room with a bunch of shelving and boxes of paperwork was not going to have a way out into the main hangar area. On the way out, Sigma One dropped a glowstick at the doorway to signal that it had been checked and cleared already.

The next two doors were a network and phone room with no persons inside and an office with an empty desk, both of which Toni dropped glowsticks for after they cleared them. The last doorway on the right side of the corridor led to a breakroom that the pair of Sigma troops could briefly see into before a mechanic came out of the room. Toni and this mechanic traded glances for a moment before he dropped his drink and went for a pistol. Toni, by benefit of having sights on already, had no trouble whatsoever punching his ticket with two rounds in the chest before he could get his pistol out of his waistband. "Shit," Toni grumped after she realized that their stealth was now blown.

"Move it up!" Hess put a hand on the back of her water bladder pouch so he could make sure he stayed with her. Toni moved forward to the break area and entered quickly to sweep the room, immediately she went strong side and found one mechanic at a break table with a sub-gun to his side (two rounds in the chest), then Hess entered and went weak side where two other personnel were in the room — both armed with long guns, so he drilled them both quickly before they could get sights on him. "Clear!"

"Where to?" Toni asked.

"Cross the hall and breach fast!" Hess put actions to words, he moved across the hall to the first door on what would have been the left side, then booted it open. He ducked out of the line of the door immediately to clear the fatal funnel, to which Toni immediately entered and swept the strong side of the room. It was a small room with two computer desks and a lot of cork board on the walls with various amounts of paperwork pertaining to aircraft. "Jackpot!" Hess said after he checked out the window of the door on the far wall and could see part of the tail of an aircraft.

"And trouble! I'm counting a lot of guys out there with guns," Toni said after she started seeing them rousing from what must have been a midday nap and some of them started picking up guns — mainly the Hi-Point Carbines of prior floors, but a small smattering of AKs and a lot of pistols.

"Well, only way out is through them," Hess said. "Cover over by those rolling toolboxes, they should absorb at least some fire."

"Got it. When you're ready, pull the door," Toni requested. Hess ducked under the door's window to get on the hinge side of it, reached across carefully, and pulled it open for the secret service operator. Toni wasted no time, she immediately went out and right for the tool cabinets, and in the process she drilled the three nearest armed personnel with chest shots to put them on the ground. A couple unarmed persons immediately made for the safety of the parts counter on the side of the hangar and jumped through the parts window.

Hess cleared out of the office area and made for the tool cabinet next to where Toni had taken position, his aim though was to the left and down the breadth of the hangar toward where they had come up the stairs. In his case the area was a target-rich environment as some personnel came out of the office area, others filtered from the mechanics' offices on the far side of the hangar, and all with guns in hand. They quickly learned some circumspection, though, as Sigma One put six of them on the ground fairly rapidly with aimed single shots, and they started ducking for cover just the same as Toni and Hess were.

"Path forward?" Hess asked in a rush between shots.

"Got six semi-smart ones on the right," Toni said. "Center of hangar is clear."

"No way in Hell are we going down the center, even at a sprint they'd mulch us before we made it halfway," Sigma One pointed out.

"How's your side?" Toni asked before she ducked around the side of her cabinet and fired off a couple rounds. "Five on this side."

"Ten to fifteen, disorganized," Hess pulled a tool cabinet around the main one he was using for cover and oriented it toward the walkway across the breath of the hangar so that the cabinet was facing the walkway side-on, giving him the deepest part of the cabinet to cover behind. "Any heavy hitters?"

"No, just run-of-the-mill pukes, not even body armor." Toni ducked out and ripped off a couple short bursts of fire. "Down to four, here, how about you?"

"Twelve, looks like," Hess said. He aimed at an off-angle toward the center of the hangar and fired a couple shots. "Eleven." A quick pause, then a couple more shots; "Ten, I think."

"Any sign of coordination?" Toni asked before she cut loose another short burst. "I think my tangos are starting to wise up."

"Finding better cover?" Hess asked before he ventilated the exposed head of a guy with a hard-hat on. The 5.45x39 round had no trouble punching through his work helmet and into the head within.

"Somewhat," Toni said. She took aim at a punk with a TEC-9 sub-gun who was hiding behind a steel barrel, then drilled the barrel about a foot below the top rim. The 5.45 round from her AK-12 had no trouble punching through both walls of the barrel (it was being used as a trash can, so no major contents inside) and hammered the tango to the ground. "Two on my side."

"Toni, grab another tool cart to cover left, I think we're about to get rushed on this side," Hess said as he noticed several tangos starting to congregate in one area. Toni saw a rather large lady join the group that Hess was referring to, so she reached across a small gap, grabbed a large tool case, and wheeled it into position to block fire from that direction.

"Ready!" Toni said.

"Frag out!" Hess shouted as he chucked a grenade in their direction. He ducked back down behind cover just in time for multiple 9mm rounds to strike the top of his sideways tool cabinet but none of them made it to him. Two seconds later, the grenade detonated and he ducked around the side of the cabinet to take advantage of the blast and disorientation, which resulted in two more deceased by his rifle plus however many he fragged with the grenade, if any.

"They're running!" Toni ripped a burst down the way. "That blast broke 'em!"

"Yeah, I've got four runners headed toward the doors!" Hess held his fire, he would not fire on retreating troops that were unarmed. "Toni, let's go up the right side past those aircraft," he indicated the twin-engine small cargo aircraft parked on the eastern side of the hangar floorspace.

"Moving!" Toni stood up and continued to cover down the right side of the hangar, and Hess had to hustle to catch up to her so he could hold position with her as she moved.

The length of the hangar was significant — well over 600 meters long — and included parking for a lot of small aircraft. The raison d'etre of all the armed security and hostility by the personnel was left standing visible next to the cargo door of the third aircraft in line: "What — are those drugs?" Toni asked, pointing at bales of what looked like white powder.

"Damn straight they are, this is a smuggling fleet," Hess waved his finger at the other aircraft down the line.

"It's not part of our mission, but we've got to do something about this," the SSO pointed out.

"Oh Hell yes we will." Hess looked around briefly and saw a good solution to the situation: barrels of aviation gasoline. He used a barrel dolly to move them over nearby the smuggler's aircraft, then backed off and fired ten rounds into the barrels to start leaks (3). "Go!"

"What now?" Toni asked as they moved farther away.

"This," Hess pulled a grenade, armed it, and threw it down to where it landed next to one of the barrels — and in the puddle of fuel. "Fire in the hole!" he shouted as the two made a run for the hangar bay doors. The blast of the grenade ignited the puddled fuel, which quickly set alight both barrels and shortly thereafter the aircraft nearby. The fire also quickly spread to several other nearby fuel barrels and other flammables, which created a chain reaction that took out another four aircraft.

Toni assisted Hess in setting up the same improvised demolition method for several more drug-smuggling aircraft, and used her own grenade to set them off. By the time the two made it to the bay doors, they had destroyed nine such aircraft and a goodly portion of product that was in the process of being offloaded or on-boarded to the craft before their gunfight.

After Toni and Hess crossed the roller-track for the bay doors, their radios beeped. "Simulation completed with both subjects survived," Virtue reported. Both had been looking around the nearby simulated rooftops for possible sharpshooters, but stood down after the announcement.

"Copy all," Hess answered as he turned toward the control trailer where the Secret Service troops were monitoring the challenge.

"Going to have a chat with the Secret Service team?" Toni asked.

"Oh, I think it is warranted," Hess started off at a fairly calm walk toward the trailer. They knew he was coming, and had mustered out front of the trailer by the time he approached within fifty meters of the trailer.

"Well done big guy!" Clint said as Sigma One approached the monitoring trailer. "I wasn't sure if you'd make it there at the end, looks like I'll have to up the ante for your next run."

Hess chuckled; he knew Clint was covering their real motive, which he had somewhat succeeded in: he forced Hess and Toni to rely on each other for an extended and stressful period of time, and the result was the two were now closer than before even if neither would publicly say so.

"Damn good tour de force," Clarence said. "Already heard word that some of the footage is circulating as examples of how to move and shoot."

Sigma One decided to play for the cover, though, to not make their intentions blatant. "Got spiky in a couple places, though I have to revise my prior appraisal of the course to a 9 out of 10. Definitely would breach and make entry on this one again."

"Glad to be of service," Clint said with a mock bow.

Hess was not through, though: "Of course, doing the same course of rooms and fire would be no dice for sharpening skill, so, Virtue, please unlock all room designs including discarded rooms and concepts, and add all combinations as random sets for challenge generation."

The speaker on the side of the control trailer popped. "All facilities, contents, traps, and personnel options have been unlocked and arrayed."

"You're playing a dangerous game, there, we discarded some of those options for a reason," Moira said.

"Oh, I expect that," Hess said with a perfectly straight face. "Clint, Clarence, Victoria, do you have anything major or time-sensitive on your schedules for today?"

"I do, 1600 meeting with Nereus about housing and refugee resettlement," Victoria answered.

"Nope," Clarence said, not sure where this was going.

"Just this," Clint waved a finger at the hangar behind Hess. "Otherwise free, why?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure you've heard the phrase 'never ask of someone that which you are unwilling to do yourself', no?" Hess asked Clint.

Sigma Two didn't answer for five seconds, until: "Fuck," he grumped.

"Hope you have decent insoles in your boots, sir," Toni said with a smile.

"Fuck," Clint groused again.

"Neinke, as you had no involvement with this and are not a member of the Secret Service, you are exempted from this challenge in lieu of your preparations for entering Basic Training."

"Sir," Neinke acknowledged the point.

"Victoria, your run through the randomized course is postponed until tomorrow morning at 0730. I won't disrupt operations, but this wealth of training will be shared equally, clear?" Hess asked.

"Yes sir," Victoria answered stiffly. She knew she was caught with no ready way to worm out of it, since she had no major ops planned for tomorrow morning.

"Lydia, Asuka, Crystal, Erin, you four will go in tomorrow morning with Victoria, how copy?" Hess said.

"Clear, sir," Asuka answered.

"Moira, Rasine, Sapphire, you three go in with Clint. Virtue, generate a random new cut of facilities for Clint's team to traverse, same end goal as the just-completed run."

"Generating now, will be ready in 90 seconds," Virtue answered again by way of the speaker on the outside of the command trailer.

"Sidonia, Anastasia, Leonora, you three will run the mouse maze with Clarence. Virtue, set up a second challenge set for Clarence's team on the far side of the first training zone."

"Generating now, second scenario will be ready in five minutes." Virtue said.

"We all need to sharpen up our skills, and we all need to learn to work more fluidly with each other, not just Toni and myself. As we continue to train up, harden up, we will revisit this challenge periodically to gauge how far we've come as individual troops and as a team. So, now, all of you need to drop your live munitions in the command trailer and prepare to receive simulated munitions for the challenge to come. And, unlike Clint's twisted sense of humor, this run will not be restricted to Hi-Points and Kalash products."

There was some grumbling from the team as they unloaded and prepared to receive simulated munitions, though it was short-lived: they knew they had been hoisted by their own petard and there was no way out of it. Hess and Toni broke out MREs from their sustainment pouches on the back of their armor and took seats in the control room to enjoy at least the first parts of their run through the maze while they had an overdue lunch.

"Do you think you met the objective, Highness?" Neinke asked after everyone was out of the room except herself, Toni and Hess. She was not solely referring to what Clint was trying, but what they had discussed in days prior.

"Yet to be seen, but I think we put a dent in it," Hess said while working his way through some beef stew.

"I think the outcome was very good," Toni agreed. "Not complete, no one stroke will ever settle it all, but a good distance toward. Can you dump this in my water bladder?" Toni waved the fruit punch mix from her MRE toward Hess.

"Can do," Sigma One scooted his chair to behind her, opened up her water bladder pouch and the bladder inside, and poured the mix in. A couple good shakes of the bladder was all that was needed to mix it up into a partially-flavored fruit punch energy drink. "Done."

"And what of the Secret Service team?" Neinke asked.

"Here shortly they will learn that a challenge like this is no leisurely walk down the road, and that will make the bonds between them all the much stronger," Sigma One estimated.

The three, Neinke, Toni and Hess, would not remain to see the challenges through; Virtue would keep an eye on that for them while Sigma One and crew resumed normal working tempo. In six hours, though, the estimate from their commanding officer would be proved correct.

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Author's Chapter Afterword:

This is an exercise in the dice doing dirty deeds to everyone involved. And an exercise in how to tackle an unknown environment where potentially everything around you is hostile.

In terms of fun writing this out, this was top-shelf for me. A completely randomized 'dungeon' from bottom to top basement, with a bit extra thrown in in the hangar scene, made this an adventure that I quite literally did not know what would happen from floor to floor. As I stated in the lead-up to this, it is engineered on the part of the Secret Service operations crew, but because Sigma One had no intel on it at all, I generated this by way of random-generation tables that build the rooms, the contents, traps, and people inside.

Now, that said, most of this was fairly standard fare, room entry and clearing, open area clearing and combat engagements, and the long-ass trek on the coiled floor. There were some uses of lateral thinking and operating to get around certain hazards, but as these things happen, the Secret Service troops didn't put in as much in the way of creative obstacles in their path as they thought they did. Still, the big one here is the process and the teamwork — they wanted Hess and Toni on an island, they wanted the two of them to rely on each other to a very steep degree, they got it. And, even if Sigma One and SSO Lead would not publicly admit it, the Secret Service team achieved their goal at least in part.

And now, the Secret Service team and the other command-level operators get to run the gauntlet of their own creation. I won't be going through their mazes in story, but the reason why you did not see them in action much in Sigma 0001 chapter 17 is because they spent the latter half of their day going through the maze with no set rules. They will learn the same lessons they inflicted on Sgima One and SSO Lead, though the outcomes may be a bit different for each. I guess we'll just see what we'll see after I game out their runs on my side.

On the writing front, I have two big points to make today. One, I have found a bigass bug in my inventory program (custom-written for Sigma) that prevents me doing any more Train Scrapping (not the clearing phase, the disassembly) for the time being. Which means, sadly, that I can't advance the calendar past Day 17 for the time being. For the technical-minded readers out there, what is happening is that I had automated the scrapping of train cars that would automatically inject the material into my storage array, at least by the program — in story, the teams still scrap the cars down and stow the material in ScrapNet, but at the program level I press a button on the Train Clearing / Scrapping interface and the car I am looking at is scrapped down and added to inventory. The bug comes in when you check the scrap material after the fact, it is improperly adding incorrect material to the database for some reason, and since the program itself was written in VB6 (almost two decades ago), I can no longer debug it because I no longer have access to a program that can write VB6. So, for the time being, I am going to have to put Sigma on hold while I write a completely new inventory program, get it completely sorted and working, write a new Train Generator / Clearing / Scrapping program, integrate the two programs together (!), and then transfer my inventory out of the legacy program and into the new one. This is going to take some serious work, my prior inventory program was pushing the size limitations of VB6 programs as-is, and I am not all that well versed in Visual Basic after the end of VB6 and into the dot-net era.

The other big writing note is that construction season has started in earnest at my household, and with gardening season coming up, I'm going to have some busy weekends and after-work time frames. Construction season this year will be fairly short-lived, though, as the nasty inflation in the 2022 economy makes it extremely prohibitive to buy construction materials and supplies even for simple repairs. I'll say this much: I would not want to be a general contractor in the here and now, the shit economy would make prices prohibitive.

That's it for this story. I'll respond directly to reviews by the FFN PM system, and I thank you for keeping reading.

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Review Replies:

No reviews for Chapter 6, which is not entirely unsurprising to me. Not much happened in that chapter.

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The Gripe Sheet:

No reviews, no complaints for chapter 6. Much thanks to Takeshi Yamato for keeping my writing as close to straight as possible.

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Footnotes:

(1): The proper name for this is a PODAVACH U Loader, and it works for both AK-pattern and AR-pattern magazines. Podavach also makes a separate loader for AR-10 magazines as well.

(2): The proper name for this is Theraphosa blondii, or the Goliath Bird-Eater Spider.

(3): Contrary to Hollywood ethos, simply shooting a barrel of flammable material does not start a fire or cause an explosion, especially if you are using standard ammunition. Hence, ten rounds into the barrel would cause 20 leak points (front and back of the barrel), nothing more or less.

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Included Works:

No included works outside of prior material.

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Random Generation Results:

This listing shows all the random generation results for levels from a table I slapped together in ~3 hours using the program TableSmith to generate the results. I am including this with the story to show you that these results are not engineered on my part, I am reacting in realtime to what comes up, though in-story this is the plan of the other Secret Service Operators in action. (Further runs through this simulation will be randomized both on my side and in story canon, as Hess ordered Virtue to archive all the plans as randomized possible encounter matrices.)

ENTRY LEVEL: A Mechanical Floor, Grid layout, light machinery, hazards Flammable Barrels With extra Traps of Spring-loaded blades type ,with personnel Specialist Workers of 4 and Area Workers of 15 total. (2 remaining workers)

B7: A Wide Open Floor, No partitions, Electronics Benches ,with personnel Light Security Personnel of 6 total.

B6: A Two-Room Floor, East Exit, Single Room Type Storage Rooms ,with personnel Area Workers of 26 and Light Security of 4 total. (4 remaining workers)

B5: A Central Corridor Floor, North-South Hall, 3x3 rooms, Mixed Room Type Lab Settings and Archive Rooms ,with personnel Area Workers of 7 and Medium Security of 2 total.

B4: A Central Corridor Floor, North-South Hall, 2x2 rooms, Mixed Room Type Storage Rooms and Barracks Rooms

B3: A Office Floor, Cubicles only, Low Cubicles, two separated groups With extra Traps of Impact Devices type ,with personnel Light Security Personnel of 1 total.

B2: A Snake Path Floor, doors parallel to walls, Wide Corridors (8m), Spiral CCW Orientation ,with personnel Area Workers of 21 and Light Security of 5 total (AUTHOR'S UPGRADE: Medium security personnel)

B1: A Single Central Room Floor, Heavy side barriers, Single Room Type Armory Room (AUTHOR'S UPGRADE: 3 Heavy Security personnel)