The Padanian safe-house wasn't the tallest building in the surrounding block – the rebels ought to sack their estate agent – but they compensated for their lack of vantage by ensuring that the roof was constantly patrolled. Being a residential area, no weapons were on display, but the unzipped duffel-bags lying between the two guards keeping an eye on the sky from their deckchairs, and by the foot of the third guard pattering cigarette-ash down into the alleyway around the side of the building, provided easy access to arms.
Giada was squatting down in front of a laptop that her handler had set up at the far side of the roof of the Agency's observation building, observing the three Padanians and assessing their positions out of their sight through a webcam that Section One had installed during their investigation phase some days ago. She was holding up her TAC-15 crossbow vertically beside her as she studied the image – killing three enemies in close proximity without raising the alarm was a tall order, but she had the means to achieve it. With Rico and Melanie beside her, all three guards could be eliminated in one conjoined strike – but the reports from their rifles would have alerted their comrades below and begun the real battle too early. Her quieter crossbow might only give her a second's advantage before the Padanian's felt the impact – but races can be won by shavings of fractions.
Satisfied that she had every target clearly marked in her mind, she hefted up the TAC-15, nocked a cyanide-tipped bolt to the groove, and firmly walked to the roof-edge and fired immediately, plunging a bolt into the base of the throat of one of the Padanians with a fleshy thud. He didn't even so much as gag or gurgle – his head merely tipped down as though he had dozed off, lulled by the heat of the day.
Normally it would take time to crank a crossbow's cable to firing tension, but Giada's cyborg strength could yank the wire back into position with a single tug. The Padanian's companion turned his head toward his fellow sun-lounger – with the body slumped into the curve of the deckchair, it took a moment for him to recognise the protruding quarrel, and another moment to realise its import – but his cry of alarm only emerged as a thick, greasy, rancid burble of frothing vomit as another payload of cyanide was dumped directly into his stomach. The third roof guard didn't even claim the moral victory of seeing where his death was coming from – looking out over the edge and leisurely drawing on a cigarette, enjoying the skipping ruffle of wind skidding across the roof-tops and the sensation on his shoulders of the softened sun filtered through his shirt, he only realised that he was dead when he tried to raise his hand to his mouth for another breath and discovered that his arm was instead spasming in a different direction.
Giada felt the gentle, softly affectionate kiss of a sigh of wind brush against her cheeks and lips as the crossbow wire snapped forward. She watched a feathery tuft catch on the fabric of the guard's shirt around his kidney, like a dandelion seed carried there by the light of spring, and then followed the arc his centre of mass described as he slowly sagged to the floor, slowly lowering himself into a yielding easy-chair.
"Zero, Beta One. Three tangos down. Roof clear." Giada spoke into her earpiece.
"Alpha All, Zero. Start." Ferro's clipped voice was as precise as the sine-waves quivering through the air.
"Zero, Alpha One. Confirmed. Commencing action!" Petrushka's words leapt in pitch as she was already bursting into daylight and arcing across the gap separating the two buildings, Kara and Agapita forming a pennon behind her. The three clapped firmly down onto the flat roof, scuttled apart to quickly slash the throats of each of the fallen roof-guards as a precautionary measure, then snapped back into a line as they shuffled through the roof door and down the stairwell into the building. Giada's crossbow sniping had already bought the alpha team several yard of uncontested advance, and the building itself afforded them a couple more – the stairs leading up to the roof were separated from the upper floor corridor by another door, designed to prevent draughts but which also helpfully offered further concealment. Petrushka looked as though she was prepared to not so much enter stage right as to tear apart the tormentor, winding up to batter through the door, but her grand entrance was put on hold by an urgent squeeze on her arm from Kara. Suitably chagrined, Petrushka moderated her showmanship and opened the door more gently.
"Down already, Kreshnik? Told you that you needed suntan lotion on a day like tod—eh?"
Well, she'd tried. Petrushka kicked the door open fully, her Spectre submachine gun already blazing. The Padanian standing in the corridor convulsed as he was riddled with bullets, his coffee-cup exploding in his hand while his limbs jerked and twisted in a spastic chorea, capering down the length of the corridor like a demented puppet with a drunken master, before splaying out on the floor in a tangled mound as life's strings were cut. Kara moved to one side of her – while a normal human would spray wildly as his weapon bucked on full-auto, a cyborg had the strength to keep her aim locked firmly in place, so she was not risking crossing a line of fire – and sliced a shorter burst of rounds along the wall with her P90, chopping through someone who was trying to leap back into the room but hadn't quite cleared the line of the threshold of one of the four large rooms that quartered the upper floor. Kara and Petrushka moved left and right, slipping along the walls to the nearest door, while Agapita ran between them towards the other end of the building.
Petrushka reached the doorway of her designated room just as a Padanian was trying to push it shut – another kick banged in back open and sent him stumbling backward with a scalded yelp, while the last few rounds in her magazine carried him further to the far wall. The flailing body obstructed his comrades' fire just long enough for Petrushka to quickly scan the room, before she ducked back outside to reload as the retaliatory barrage chewed away at the frame and crumpled the door to matchwood. The room was apparently a weapons workshop, so she couldn't rely on enthusiastic amateurs exhausting their ammunition in a timely manner – not that it mattered. Petrushka flexed her knees and span round low across the doorframe, firing off a burst at shin height, and then sprang back the other way at full height and blurring speed, launching another burst – as soon as she landed she used her momentum to pirouette round back to the other side of the frame, a wavy stance that it was difficult to focus on, and blurted another burst to take down her fourth target. She then hopped down into a prone position and leaned her upper body around the ragged frame to cut down the last man who was trying to blindside her by moving up to the near wall.
Kara whipped quickly around her open door, but positioned her body so that it snapped forward off-centre – the shotgun blast that would have pasted her face instead blew a hot, muggy breath past her ear and crunched into the wall in the other side of the corridor. Kara fired immediately, her shots tearing up the mattress of the cot that the Padanian was leaning on for support, the floating tufts obscuring the unsightly mess the rest of the rounds made of his face. A few shots ricocheted off the metal frame of the bed, producing a pained yell deeper into the room as one rebounding round bit into the thigh of a second Padanian, bringing him down onto one knee and knocking off his aim so that his own shotgun blast gouged a long runnel out of the wall by the door instead of swatting away Kara's jaw. Kara stepped into the room and shredded the Padanian with the rest of her magazine before he could fumble a firmer grip on his weapon.
This room was a dormitory, and a door towards one end suggested a private bathroom for a time when this was a large bedchamber rather than being crammed with cots. Quickly ducking down to make sure that no-one was hiding under the beds, Kara moved across the room and but her back to the wall beside the bathroom door and then reached an arm back from outside the frame to test the handle, finding it to be locked. Someone was hiding in there, but because a spray of reactive snap-fire hadn't perforated the door while she was rattling the knob, Kara judged that the occupant was grateful to be on a toilet in this situation. Kara was a proper lady and she didn't really relish the prospect of entering the bathroom and being forced to confront a compromised enemy struggling to control his... effects. She contented herself with punching a hole through the bathroom door and posting a grenade through it – Section One volunteered for post-operation cleanup, dealing with the plumbing would justify their paycheques.
As Kara was arming her grenade, Agapita paced towards the end of the corridor and the front of the building. She smoothly swept around to cover the staircase as she passed it, rattling off a burst of shots to menace anyone coming up the stairwell – she did not hit anyone, but the stone chips flung from the rounds drilling into the wall caused someone mounting the first flight to yelp in pain and tumble down over himself with a crash of floorboards. While the enemy on the ground floor were still recoiling, she flicked a grenade over the banister to rend a ragged hole through the wooden stairs, bleeding dust and splinters, to cut off reinforcements from assisting their comrades upstairs. The blast also washed up to the large bay window overlooking the staircase and shattered its glass in a crashing cacophony of spinning shards, and Agapita used the horrendous din to disguise her reloading (she had only fired a few shots, but a full magazine was ready for any threat) and her footfalls across the bare floorboards of the corridor, bursting into the third room before anyone could detect her approach. It was some sort of living room for the Padanians to use during downtime, and two of the enemy were tipping over a couch and throwing card tables into a corner of the room to use as a final redoubt – as Agapita kicked the door-lock so hard it was ripped from the frame and shattered against the far wall, they both vaulted behind the safety of their cover like yelping, scalded dogs. The thick upholstery and wooden frames of the furniture would have been decent protection against grenade shrapnel, and maybe the bee-stings of pistol rounds; they had less to offer against an assault rifle's full thirty-round magazine at a range of barely twenty feet. Agapita could not see exactly what was happening to the bodies in the blender of bullets and churning timber crushed into the corner, but there were occasional wet tongues of red licking up the walls.
Agapita reloaded her SA80 as she stepped into the middle of the room.
While the Agency had not cleared the street before commencing the operation – a risky strategy and perhaps reckless public endangerment, but one which helped to limit signs of their presence to the Padanian lookouts – the residents of Guihono knew enough from their regular clashes with the police that while the teams were large, mass-rioting was not a spectator sport, and to keep their heads down when reports started sounding. The street was empty of bystanders, which was an encouragement for the five Padanians who fled from the descending tread of the battle on the storey above to run out of the front door – no visible cordon meant that it would be easier to move then if they were penned into a narrow alley at the back of the building, waiting for a car to pull up at one end and turn it into a fun day out at the shooting lanes. The best of a bad job is still inferior, though – and an empty street just offered a clearer field of fire for the Agency.
Giada waited until three Padanians had dripped out of the front door, dribbling to and pressing themselves against parked cars in an attempt to find cover, before she engaged them – she didn't want to turn the taps off too early when the Padanians could drain more into the killing field. As two more Padanians hesitated on the threshold, she fired – her TAC-15's underslung grenade launcher punching a shell between the pair and burying it into the porch that they were just leaving behind as they stepped down onto the street. The blast swept them up into a grey cloud, spinning them within a tight twister of shrapnel and stone chips until they had unravelled into wavering streaks of glistering gore slopped across the middle of the road.
As hot stones stung the air around the three other Padanians, one of them was knocked off his feet by the buffeting blast – and it also knocked askew his self-preservation, as he immediately bounced up and risked a dash across the road to his car on the far side. However, Amelia had already booby-trapped the vehicle the night before - one small pre-adolescent girl being able to move around street lights and crawl under the chassis more discreetly – and putting the key in the lock only sprung it; with a smoky, dirty, sooty flash the door was blasted off its hinges, propelling the hapless Padanian back across the road to a spine- and skull-shattering impact against the kerb.
The two remaining Padanians, squatting down by the wheels of another car, exchanged a desperate, strained glance. If they had held each other's gazes, they would have been focused on their bodies and the lives contained within them, and might have surrendered – but as one shifted onto his knees, the connection was broken, and their eyes moved to the world and objects around them, which returned no thoughts and could only be reacted to.
One of the Padanians shot through the door lock of the car they were sheltering behind and leant into the footwell, wrenching at cables and trying to hotwire the vehicle, while his companion risked jumping up and scooting around to the passenger side, jerking his body around and pipping single shots from his submachine gun at random angles like a defective lawn-sprinkler. The Agency adults in the observation room instinctively flinched and ducked as one of the shots shattered the thin window and burst a puff of plaster from the ceiling, but Avise scrambled across the carpet to snatch up his AR 70/90 and launched himself at the conveniently-opened portal, using the wall itself as a brake as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and blatted retaliatory fire down at the two surviving Padanians. His haste to fire and the time needed for his eyes to process the street and the location of the target however meant that his aim was slack, and four bursts of rounds only divoted the asphalt around the shooter. The Padanian swung round in a rising shout as he now had an enemy to focus on, but by this time Avise had centred himself and his fifth burst took his target in the chest. An armoured vest stopped the bullets, but their kinetic impact was still enough to squeeze a strained squawk out of the Padanian and knock him off-balance against the body of the that car his partner was still desperately struggling with; the rocking moment of recovery was all the opening Giada needed to spear him through the side of the neck with another unerring bolt – the angle of the roof meant that it couldn't quite be considered to have come from heaven, but as a general working principle it was close enough.
"A bit enthusiastic, Mancini." Michele grimaced from the floor, taking his hands off his ears as the rifle's deafening reports faded from the walls.
"No more than what I said earlier." Avise lowered his rifle as the last Padanian lurched away in an ungainly waddle of a car in the wrong gear, turning coughing, wrenching near-stalls into frantic, panicked shaking to dislodge the driver's companion, who was pulled along for fifty yards before the bolt pinning him to the car's frame snapped. Brian and Allison ought to be given a chance to contribute.
"I don't follow." Michele looked dubious as he pushed himself up from the floor along with the other handlers and support staff.
"Really? You asked me about it yourself." Avise turned back into the room. "At different times you may have to be serene or be stern, and we're proven and experienced enough to understand what situation calls for what."
The lone Padanian didn't get any further than the end of the street. As soon as he reached the junction a Delta Integrale swung out of a side-street and brushed the other car with the faintest feather-kiss. Allison's angle was immaculate – give me a lever, and I will move the world – and as the Integrale rocked to a stop with scarcely a scuffed bumper, the Padanian's car cartwheeled madly into a wall, its driver flung out of his broken door. For a drifting, mesmeric second they floated in synchornic awe, before the Padanian was mangled against a lamp-post.
Agim was fortunate that the ferocious, pummelling racket of the reports from Agapita's rifle in confined quarters drowned out his terrified whimper. He was cringing inside a wardrobe in the living room – he had been putting a coat back on its hanger and when the first shots had been fired he'd leaped into it and plastered himself against the rear wall like a sprinter from his starting blocks. Now, through the thin, tight threads of light between the slats of the wardrobe door, a smeary black column obscured its way across his vision. It broadened in breaths, each expansion across his vision a blackened blur of fading sight – the creaks on the floorboards the turning of a vice's screw around his neck.
But then, with the clatter of an empty magazine being discarded, the vice's handle broke.
Agim had joined this operation out of moral desperation. His half-brother had helped to establish a new republic in Kosovo, and a second cousin was laying the foundations of Greater Albania with a band of guerrillas in the hills of Macedonia, but all he had done to serve his nation's cause was pick strawberries in the service of the old imperial occupier, who should have been hated and confounded at every turn; the pay-packet he sent home to his elderly mother in did not enrich the nation when it exacted an unequal loss of dignity and pride. Agim had entertained an indulgent delusion that he could add a sinew to Albania's strength – but with a flash of Providence, maybe it was actually true. The panickingly warm and clammy grip of the pistol slipping through his hands froze coldly and firmly solid. With a wrench of his thigh and a wordless yell he kicked the wardrobe door open.
Agim shot Agapita five times.
Agapita shot Agim once.
Petrushka waited for the sound of the last report to artfully echo away. "Hallway clear! Rear North clear!" She then barked out, throwing her stage voice with such modulated ease that she seemed to speak not from her mouth, but from every wall.
"Rear South clear! Bathroom clear! Near enough!" Kara's voice was more muffled, but it was no difficulty for a cyborg to discern.
Agapita turned around, the bare floorboards creaking underfoot, to shout back through the door into the hall. "Stairway clear! Front South cl—"
Front South slammed into Agapita's face as her left foot was swept out from underneath her and pitched her forward onto the floor. She was already rolling to the side as a second shotgun blast heaved up through the floor where her chest would have been if she had stopped to grunt or complain like a mere human. She continued rolling through a blizzard of wood as automatic fire began pecking up through the floorboards, tearing her clothes on jagged-edged bulletholes and convulsing a couple of times like a worm under e bright light as rounds found their mark, before hitting up against the wall and using it to push herself upright, as she could now see that the ball of her left foot had been blown off completely. It granted her a second's respite, as the fire coming from the floor beneath was wild and undirected – the floor was steadily disintegrating, but it was being eaten out from the inside with most shots more central and few reaching the wall that Agapita had pressed herself against. She took a moment to paw the fresh wounds in her chest and groin – unlike the superficial grazes of the earlier Padanian's pistol shots, these were reluctant to clot and seemed pretty deep – and winced as an arc of rounds from a Padanian spinning like a top curved through the floor and drilled a trail that halted little more than a foot from her head.
That clinched it. The room in front of her was dissolving into a fog from the wood burst upwards and the plaster raining downwards, but it was not opaque – in every sharp-edged particle spinning before her she saw moment, observed velocity, calculated angles...
Agapita fired off another full magazine, squirting it in three ten-round bursts. The upcoming fire stopped immediately.
"Clear" Agapita grunted, using the butt of her SA80 as a crutch as she hobbled over to the door and hoped that the floor wouldn't give way underneath her.
Fabio Amaretti sat in his chair behind the desk in the final chamber of the house, his office, the one that the cyborgs would designate as "Front North". The papers spread across his desk in broad, inviting openness were jostled from their neat, small piles as another explosion shook the building. Fabio grunted in irritation and stretched his fingers out to brush them back into place again, even as the reverberations from a sustained burst of gunfire rattled the lightbulbs in their sockets and made them flicker briefly.
The battle sweeping through the rest of the house got up a tremendous racket – Fabio was too sanguine to elevate the disturbance into a din – throbbing through the floorboards, quaking through the walls, shuddering through the doorframe – but Fabio was quite calm, collected and comfortable, bobbing on a boat of certainty above the noise. He had experienced enough to realise that 'chaos' was a trite and banal term that the unimaginative resorted to when their dull intellects were confounded, like religious mummers who still resorted to miracles over the explanation of science; there was no such thing as chaos, only an order whose sequence had yet to be perceived. Myopic people would have been terrorised by the violence blazing in the neighbouring rooms, stumbling flat-footed and unbalanced and shoved and buffeted from blast to blast, their senses whirling around in panic and confusion – but Fabio had already discerned which route he would be carried on, so why fret?
As a scream splattered against the outside wall and seeped through to his ears Fabio experimented with raising his pistol towards the door a few times, testing the most median and moderate speed of draw and how slackly he could hold it without it slipping through his fingers. He had received very specific instructions, and understood their purpose. Every detail had been organised, everything had been prepared, everyone had been briefed. Operatives these days carried helmet-cameras and he needed to make a small show of defiance so that no questions would be raised by third parties during the debriefing, but he knew that the attackers knew what to do. They would restrain and arrest him, and for his help in corralling a pack of random dregs into a herd large enough to alert state security he would be assigned a place in a comfortable open prison that he could easily slip away from when it suited. 'Budget cuts' would mean that there'd be no great effort to track him down, and there would be a decent fee waiting for him in a Cayman Islands account.
The door in front of him jolted, from a direct strike this time instead of a collateral rattle. Fabio's attention pricked up, and he straightened himself in his chair.
Okay, showtime.
The door shook again, a few slivers of wood splintering around its lock fitting – and then a third time, although it was less a rending convulsion and more a light tremor. A blink of disquiet flickered across Fabio's face as an unguarded voice was audible from the other side of the door.
"Kara, my arm's a bit iffy, can you break this open for me, please?"
After a muffled affirmative the door practically jack-knifed into folded halves. The sudden snap of violence flicked Fabio back into readiness, and delivered a figure into the room.
The rehearsals had been valuable. With practised ease, Fabio raised his pistol – just not quite quickly enough to cover the soldier entering the room before he would level his rifle at Fabio – and his grasp was loose enough for his pistol to slip down to the floor in submission, with a smooth, easy, settled immediacy that would not give time for anyone's trigger finger to get twitchy.
Unfortunately for Fabio, his life philosophy was not quite as insightfully unique as his condescending ego pretended. Agapita herself saw a path to navigate through chaos with the paved certainty of the orders that she had received. She had been instructed to eliminate threats. She saw a threat. She eliminated it.
The fist of bullets that slammed into Fabio's chest spun him around in and flung him out of his chair. The last thing he saw before he died was the wall that once was behind him now rushing up to his face.
"Hallo Zero, this is Alpha One!" Petrushka's voice crackled over the radio. "Building clear!"
Ferro gave an acknowledgement and then lowered the walkie-talkie to address the handlers. "Okay, boys, we're up."
The group thudded heavily down the stairs of the building and jogged out onto the street, their sidearms readied in their hands. Alessandro, in the centre of the line, suddenly tipped to the ground with a yelp, making everyone hurl themselves down for bruising and grazing impacts against the tarmac, expecting incoming fire from a surviving enemy – but Alessandro's immediate stifled, spitting, scathing curses informed the others that he had just slipped on some of the remains of the two Padanians smeared by Giada's grenade strike. A few guffaws slipped out despite the bottling strain of an operation, although everyone picked their way over the ragged crater gouged out of the entryway and filed into the devastated safe-house at a steadier pace.
A thin mist wavered through the air of the house, as smoke seeped down from the upper storey and plaster fell from cracks crazing the walls after the old building had been shaken by multiple grenade blasts. Petrushka was already waiting in the hallway, the barrel of her Spectre smoking after hosing down two enemies who had tried to barrel out of a rear storeroom, but the adults still split up to sweep quickly through the ground floor for any last Padanians hiding in cupboards or pantries, finding none. Ferro and Avise turned together through a wide open arch into the main front parlour – a room covered in a layer of wood and stone, still bleeding dust and splinters from a sagging ceiling torn ragged from the dozens of shots that had ripped through it; under the covering, the three bodies Agapita had rained lead down on looked little different to the cushions thrown off the couches, the pools of blood expanding from them congealed into a brown paste by all of the foreign objects mixing into them. Something shifted in the floor above them, and several brass casings clattered down through a shotgun-hole in the ceiling. Ferro narrowed her eyes into a squint as she tried to peer through the jumbled detritus, and they opened again to take in some documents lying on a side-table against the wall, only discernible as the straight line of a paper edge connecting multiple crazed cracks from the flakes and stones burying it. She crunched over the floor towards the prize, and so didn't notice small patches of colour appear on the body of one of the felled Padanians, dust shaken from his clothes as he scraped an arm towards a discarded pistol.
Two reports rang out, close together, like the left-right jabs of a boxer. Ferro spun round and snapped her handgun's barrel between Avise's eyes.
"Steady on, Milani!" Avise's expression widened in alarm, and he created a curl of smoke as he motioned to the ground with the hot barrel of his revolver. Not removing her weapon, Ferro glanced down and noticed the fresher, brighter, cleaner blood spread on the back of the now-stilled Padanian. She examined the body for a moment, flicked her eyes back up to Avise (looking at the muzzle of her pistol, somewhat baffled), and then down to the body again, before finally putting up her weapon.
"You should have aimed at his arm, or maybe even shot away the weapon that he was reaching for. It would have been useful to have a prisoner to interrogate." She snipped.
Avise furrowed his eyebrows and was about to ask if a little gratitude at having her life saved would be so agonising a concession, but the back-bite died in his throat. As instinctive as his typical tetchy defensiveness was, his conscience stilled it when he understood through her hesitant eyes resting uneasily above the critical bark from her mouth just how crucial authority was to her – not out of proud swagger, but because assertion and influence was crucial to her distinctiveness and thus her fundamental sense of worth. A mask that required constant care through reconfirmation was frail, and a time when the smoke had not even cleared was not the best place to decide to crack it and make her lose face in more ways than one.
Avise settled for a shrug and a "Beg your pardon, Milani." and turned back into the hallway.
The hallway was steadily filling as the sweep was completed and the adults regrouped around the focus of Petrushka.
"I'm glad to see you're alright, Petra." Alessandro clucked as he brushed wood splinters off of his cyborg's shoulders and thighs without inhibition, meaning it as more than a platitude – perhaps he was projecting his lack of combat experience onto Petrushka, but he had been uncomfortable with Ferro assigning her as the lead and most exposed cyborg in the alpha team.
"Thank you, 'Sandro." Petrushka smiled coyly in appreciation.
"Don't leap headlong into danger, though," Alessandro's voice became chiding, "maybe cyborgs are tougher, but even the crew of a tank don't go out of their way to get rockets slung at them. You were lucky the blast only showered you with this." The handler winced as he picked a splinter out of his thumb.
"Oh, don't worry, this didn't come from a grenade, Sandro!" Petrushka was quick to reassure her handler. "I just jumped down the stairs, that's all."
A tremendous crash suddenly whipped everyone's heads round in that direction. The wooden staircase had been completely gutted, disembowelled by Agapita's earlier grenade, leaving a gaping, ragged cavity – into which Agapita herself had just plunged.
Agapita's bare leg waved uncertainly over the lip of the hole where the first four steps now ended. Avise's eyes widened when he saw the red stain at the top of the white flesh, and he quickly ran around the side of the staircase, scraping to a stumbling stop on the irregular spars and fragments of wood as he beheld his cyborg. Bullet-stings had smudged scabrous brown and red across her bare shoulders and collar, while deeper, broadly-spread patches turned her yellow tube-top black, and it was itself torn ragged to near destruction, nicked by a hundred small slits from rolling across a bullet riddled floor. Her belt, held on only by a few sinewy leather threads after a bullet had torn through it, had snapped in the fall and splayed out underneath her, while a shotgun blast had shaved away most of the front of her skirt and the skin from her thighs in two smartingly red weals. She had a nervous grin.
"Sorry, sir," she began sheepishly, "I think I tore something in the fall. There's a leak in my abdomen."
Avise shook his head and gave a wry chuckle, before squatting down and ruffling Agapita's hair fondly. "Never mind, my dear, it's just your surfeit of glory pouring—ouch." He grunted as he found a wood splinter himself.
Ferro wasn't sure whether to be impressed by Avise's strong rapport with Agapita or appalled at his nonchalant lack of concern for a significantly damaged unit. She settled for gripping Alessandro's arm and hissing at him to fetch the medic.
"Um, excuse me?"
Everyone looked up to see Kara poking her head around the landing.
"Um... I hope everyone won't think too badly of me if I, er... ask for a ladder?"
"Something's," Alessandro flicked a tongue over his lips as though he tasted the word springing forth, "awry."
Reschligan's face twitched in a brief frown, but he quickly grasped the edges of his mouth and pinned it back to neutrality. He held something of a private antipathy towards Ricci – with his lank body, thin smile, and history of rooting around in Italy's underbelly, Alessandro always conjured up an image of a weasel in Reschligan's mind, and here he was again, ferreting about and scrambling over another of his investigations and batting in his face; however, as prejudicial as Reschligan's sentiments were, he was enough of a professional to not let them rule him: if Alessandro could scurry beneath the detritus of the battle and tease out a new insight, Reschligan was not going to dismiss the prize out of sheer petty pride. After all, to do that would make him even more like Ricci.
"How so?" Reschligan asked, unnecessarily archly.
Alessandro noticed his colleague's self-conceited manner through the inflection of his voice, but decided that he would not let himself be pricked by the barb and instead began stroking his fingers lightly over the papers spread on the table. "Look at these names, for a start. 'Loran Muzaffer'? 'Agim Xhemail'? 'Driton Besmir'?" He then hocked a thumb towards the doorway, through which a Section One photographer recording several of the bodies still flashed – in the instant's glare, a snapping flick of the imagination twisted the pits of bullet-holes traced down the length of the wall and the streaks of arterial spray lashed across it into rust-sharp snakes dripping black venom from their fangs. "Even if they're just aliases, none of the stiffs in there look much like the unblemished shining nurtured strength of realised Alpine manhood, sculpted of arm and proud of brow, do they?"
Reschligan shrugged. "We're pretty sure that they're all Albanians. That's nothing special, though – Padania aren't the only criminals to use illegal immigrants as muscle."
"Muscle, though, that's the thing." Alessandro raised a finger to fix the point, which flicked up another irritated scowl from Reschligan. "Most Padanian factions are fascists and they rely heavily on stirring up xenophobia to rally their base. They'll rent a mob from the, aha, 'informal economy' when they need to bulk up with some heavies for a brawl, or a disposable hitman for a scraggy alleyway murder who won't flag up any record on the police database if he gets photographed. That's all they are, though – cannon fodder. 'Why kill the wogs when they're happy killing each other', et-cette-er-ah." Alessandro aspirated each syllable in a knowingly exaggerated display, adopting the caricature of an academic reciting the taxonomy of a curious specimen under glass, as if Padania's attitudes were similarly dead and dusty.
Reschligan looked across the left-hand side of the table, where Alessandro's hand rested on top of Agim Xhemail's identity card, to the stacks of planning documentation that they had retrieved from Fabio's office. "I think that I see where you're heading with this. The Five Republics wouldn't bring in a group of foreigners into the central preparation of an offensive operation, would they?"
"Well, we have been damming up Padanian revenue streams recently," Alessandro gave a sardonic smile, "so maybe this is just a particularly entrepreneurial terrorist cell that thought a progressive recruitment policy would win it a subsidy from the Racial Equality Commission."
Reschligan did not laugh. Given the state of vacuous, numb, myopic stupefaction with which the drones maundered through the back-offices of Italian bureaucracy, he could imagine such a thing actually happening. "It's an irregularity, certainly," he kept his manner businesslike, "but not every Padanian group is going to be a model of cool computational analytical objectivity, are they?"
"I wonder about that." Alessandro mused. "After all, the Five Republics weren't forged in the fires of ethnic strife; they're a tax avoidance scheme that's got too convoluted for its own good. I don't know why they just can't register their companies to a mailbox in Lichtenstein like everyone else."
"Their backers, maybe, but not the actual frontline activists, they're as distinguishing as Klansmen - you said that yourself." Reschligan rejoindered. "What I'm driving at is, what's the reason for this deviation? I can't perceive—" he checked himself, realising that that wording could be interpreted as his inadequacy rather than the reality of the situation – "There isn't any. If these Albanians were just dupes brought here to bait a trap, why wasn't this building wired to go up like Vesuvius the moment the cyborgs stepped in here? Or why aren't there any cameras live-streaming the Social Welfare Agency's dirty deeds to a Facebook page somewhere? Furthermore, there was a genuine Italian caught in the noose, too. If there was an ulterior motive behind this cell's exposure, why did he let himself be caught in his own trap?" Reschligan tramped his feet up and down; the floor was still covered in a layer of wood splinters and plaster flakes from where Agapita had fired down through the ceiling from the floor above, and it crinkled in emphasis.
"Why are you trying so hard to put down the idea of an 'ulterior motive', Reschligan?" Alessandro frowned. "Teasing out the threads of knotted intrigue is our business, after all. Don't start swinging the lead!"
"There's a difference between insight and paranoia, Ricci," Reschligan brushed off the criticism lightly and adopted a condescendingly patient tone, helping Alessandro with his revision for a refresher test, "you shouldn't miss the wood for the trees."
Alessandro pulled a pleasingly childish face at Reschligan's needling and looked as if he was ready to mutter some juvenile retort, but it turned into a strangled yelp as he spasmed suddenly. Reschligan nearly jumped himself – had Alessandro gone and stuck himself through his soft shoes on a sharp piece of debris? – but as Alessandro cursed under his breath and began shoving hands into his pockets it turned out to only be the unexpectedly powerful throb of his phone vibrating with an incoming message. Reschligan scoffed inwardly at his colleague's discomfiture, and while Alessandro turned away to speak to his caller Reschligan began scrutinising the papers spread out over the table in greater depth.
Even at only a brief, scanning perusal, Reschligan's eyes gleamed with the glint of digging gold. After batting about for so long in foggy clouds of amorphous suppositions and vague conjectures, it was now finally condensing down into something solid, tangible and weighty. Guihono was known in security circles for its surly and obdurate populace, not especially dangerous as such but nonetheless a delinquent nuisance, guilty of frequent low-level public disturbances, which required constant corralling. These papers, though, were a goad to escalate that sullen bolshiness into anarchic rebellion – a detailed plan to perpetrate a massacre during the town's next riot: but not on the public, rather on the police. It was almost chilling in its clinical treatment of atrocity, describing with annotated maps how shooters would infiltrate crowds to enfilade police formations, roadside amenities would be mined prior to a disturbance to disrupt their manoeuvres and break them up down alleyways and side-streets and agitators would rile up the crowd through ringleading antics and faked injuries from 'police brutality' to a foaming fury, surging forward to crush isolated patrols.
Reschligan had done a little of what was so euphemistically termed 'public order maintenance' back when he was a conscript – that had been terrifying, unmanning, and the howling, flailing wall that he'd flinched from was formed of friends that he'd been drinking with at the camp's service bar the night before. The suggestion of what vile coil lay curled in people's breasts, to snap out in a whiplash should its restraints ever be even slackened, throttled his heart as it curled tighter within him and crushed his chest – and that had only been a training exercise. To see that box opened, the dread force, the monstrosity of the mob not merely threatened in the black ink of psychology and sociology reports but actually unleashed and unslaked, made his stomach turn. Reschligan was a detective, and it was his profession to be calm and analytical, evaluating movements and motives with a scientist's intellect and perception... but that was a life of the specific and the intensive and the particular. No-one could grasp the whirling madness of a crowd. The demotic demon defied definition.
My name is Legion; for we are many.
Reschligan's fingers trembled as he clumsily sorted out the documents back into a pile again. It was as much relief as lingering fear – that the demon would not be rising up, and that these papers were the heavy hammer that would smash it back down under the faceless lake.
"Never mind missing the wood for the trees, I'm walking the path through the forest!"
Reschligan started violently as he was knocked out of his reverie. He whipped around to be confronted by Alessandro's gurning grin. "Did it take you that long to come up with a lame comeback like that?" Reschligan snarled with open hostility.
"Hey, tough crowd." Alessandro lightly brushed off Reschligan's angriness and smiled again as he raised the screen of his iPhone, displaying a mugshot of Fabio. "Let me try a different routine – I have a positive ID on our Italian. Fabio Amaretti, age fifty-seven, formerly 'Generalissimo' of the 'Independent Resistance Organisation for a Free Piedmont'."
"How did you find that out?" Reschligan narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "We only arrived here half an hour ago!"
"Section Two's bigger share of the operational budget tells once more, I'm afraid." Alessandro shrugged apologetically. "I took the liberty of borrowing one of your staff's cameras and forwarding the body shots back to HQ. Apparently Claes had a 'software update' during her last conditioning session and the Active Security Concern watching database was uploaded into her – the boffins are testing their memetic recall routines." Alessandro shook his head in wonderment. "Just imagine, thirty years from now you could learn the dictionary just by staring at a screen of squiggly lines for a few minutes. Wonders of modern technology, eh?"
"Is the fact that you're evidently drawing a second paycheque as the Technology Department's head of marketing the only reason for disturbing me?" Reschligan dipped his head to peer at Alessandro from over the rims of his spectacles. Ricci was known for his command of body language, and that message should be clear enough to read.
Alessandro had picked up on his own thread, though, and he was absorbed with following it, ignoring Reschligan's attitude. "But do you know who Fabio Amaretti is?"
"Commander of this Padanian cell, you said it yourself." Reschligan waved a hand in irritable dismissal, as though he was batting away a persistent fly.
"Not this cell." Alessandro pressed on. "The Independent Resistance-whoevers have been defunct for years, and even this was well beyond them. You see," Alessandro was warming to his theme, enjoying the opportunity to expound his insights, "the thing is that with political certainty, a conviction of both your rightness and righteousness, naturally comes arrogance above the benighted and a sense of superiority; that can reflect off of the ego in a vicious spiral. Fabio Amaretti was no different, an indifferent also-ran with a high opinion of himself. I mean, Generalissimo, seriously? His outfit was real 'Judean People's Front' stuff. He fancied carving out his own petty empire in a Turin suburb but they did little more than blow up a few mailboxes; they killed more people in internal feuding than they ever did in actual attacks. And when he had the bright idea to live it large and set up his own protection racket... well, the Mafia tore his merry men to shreds."
"And while he evidently survived that, he'd be a spent force, and his name would be mud. He'd never be able to assemble any serious following again" Reschligan concluded Alessandro's account. Despite his earlier irritation he was naturally interested in investigation and explanation.
Alessandro thrust out his arms to encompass the room, and turned around on the spot to sweep all its evidence and wreckage together. "Hence the question."
Reschligan couldn't help but concede a smile, both in honest admittance of Alessandro breaking a new angle on the case, and in seeing his movement. All that time he spent with his cyborg was evidently rubbing off on him. "Well, Ricci, fair points and well-presented. There is something awry here, indeed. Maybe you ought to use that gadget you're so proud of to ring up Section One's communications unit and have them pull up the late Amaretti's phone records."
(Continued)