"Good luck," Jason said as he turned left at the bottom of the stairs.
"I'll see you outside," Mark replied, making sure it was just that little bit pointed. "No heroics."
"Oh, I have no plans to get blown up today." He was gone into the dark, and Mark turned the other way.
Not so dark down this corridor. That would be because the doors on either side were open, all of them. Which meant what?
"Keyop, you take left, I'll take right. Looks like the Spectrans have been in here."
The Swallow nodded, and disappeared through the nearest door. Mark took the one opposite it. Medium office, five desks, probably nine-to-five weekday staff. Certainly no sign of a struggle. So, if he was planting an explosive device, where would he put it? More to the point, if he was training a set of goons, where would he tell them to put it, that they couldn't get wrong?
It was under the desk, looking remarkably like Keyop's drawing. He yanked it off - some sort of glue pad, nothing sophisticated, and examined it quickly. As the kid had said, a basic digital detonator on the top, blank now. Presumably it would come up on zero, and boom.
No electricity; no failsafe. He ripped the detonator off and it came out wires and all. One down.
"Under the desk!" he called.
"Got it!"
The other desks were bare. One per room, then - or a pattern he didn't have time to figure out. He left it on the floor and moved on to the next office, hyper-aware of just how dark it was getting. The sun must be almost below the horizon now.
He almost ran into the entrance doors before he realised that they'd reached the end of the corridor. Keyop was only seconds behind him.
"Where now?"
To the left was the main canteen; to the right, the entrance to ISO Academy. Mark pointed right. "You go that way. I'll do what I can here. Five minutes, then head through the building to the back exit, make sure everyone leaves." There was no sun at all on the parking lots any more - they were completely shadowed by the trees beyond. Even so, two Spectran troop transports were clearly visible. How had they got past the early warning system? Heads would roll for this.
The doors down this corridor were shut. He had to assume that meant that the Spectrans hadn't gone in there. They'd have headed for the canteen, surely? Even on a Sunday afternoon, there would have been people in there, to be neutralised or worse.
He opened the swing doors at the end and raw instinct saved his skull. He hit the floor, rolled, and came up gasping, hands in the air in a good position for a counterattack, though hopefully they wouldn't know that.
"Jarrald, Mark, Lieutenant Commander, Team Seven - friend!"
"He doesn't look Spectran," said a dubious voice, from the man who'd been wielding the table leg. Mark could barely see him, but that looked like an ISO chef's uniform.
"He isn't," said a second voice. "Breakfast regular. Commander, what the hell is going on?"
"I'll explain later. Have the Spectrans been in here?"
"Yeah. Came in shooting. We hid in the freezer. They went in all the storerooms, sounded like they took a bunch of food, but didn't bother with the frozen stuff. Came out a few minutes ago to this."
"Any casualties?"
He gulped visibly. "A dozen or so of Team Four, I think. Anna's taking care of them." He pointed to the other end of the canteen.
"Badly hurt?"
"They're all dead. She's making them decent." His voice shook, and Mark finally put a name to the face and voice. Tom, who'd been here longer than Mark had, and who'd carried his breakfast tray to his table for weeks when he'd been a new and incompetent wheelchair user. Anna he thought was a new assistant. He didn't recognise the other man at all, but Sunday afternoon was hardly a prized shift.
Half of Team Four were dead? Two of the security teams were on duty each weekend, on rotation - not guard duty, but being here if something big went down. Team Four and Team Seven, this weekend. It sounded as if they'd been hit first. It sounded as if the Spectrans had known exactly where they'd be, down to the room. This was getting worse and worse.
"Anyone else alive?"
"Just us three. Unless they took prisoners - and where the hell are G-Force when we need them?"
"Off-planet, most likely. Seen any explosive devices? Black and white, round, a bit bigger than a coffee mug?" He crouched down again as he spoke, peering under the tables. Oh joy. Dozens of the things.
He grabbed the nearest, held it up, demonstrated removing the detonator. "We need to clear these fast. You, start that side. Tom start here. Move."
They didn't argue, diving under the tables where he'd indicated, and Mark headed for the kitchen and the storerooms beyond. They'd seeded the canteen far more heavily than anything else he'd seen, and chances were that the other nearby areas were similar.
Indeed. As far as he could see - which was minimal - there was an explosive device in every saucepan. Mark groaned and stripped detonators as fast as he could, counting seconds. He'd give himself two minutes. There was no way he'd clear this lot in that time, but he needed to clear the bulk from the storeroom too. There were ten floors above them here, and it wouldn't matter whether or not the upper floors had been seeded with explosives if there was enough damage at ground level.
Thirty-four. No more visible in the kitchen, and he was heading for the storeroom when there was a shout of "Commander!" from the direction of the canteen. He recognised that voice. What the heck was Don Wade doing down here?
"Report!"
Don staggered into the kitchen door, gasping. "Dome goes down at sunset. Need to evacuate!"
It was sunset. He'd have said it was past sunset.
"We need to go now," he shouted, heading out of the kitchen and to the swing doors. "Follow me - that's an order!"
He could hear multiple sets of footsteps behind him, and heavy breathing, but he didn't stop. "Keyop, move!" he yelled at the intersection with the Academy corridor. No response, but he hadn't wanted one. If he'd obeyed orders, Keyop should be long gone.
Back down the main corridor, past the central stairs and the doors to the north wing, through the dark maze in the centre of the building. "Keep going!" he shouted when the breathing behind him turned to desperate gasps. Past Team Seven, past the quartermaster's section of the building, and out through the emergency exit. He hesitated just a moment to let the four behind him catch up. Anna had abandoned her shoes at some point and was running in stocking feet, her uniform skirt hitched up around her waist. The chef, heavy-set and middle-aged, was struggling. Tom was wheezing heavily and not managing much more than a walk. Don... well, to be fair, Don was fitter than he'd given him credit for. Not only that, he'd made it outside voluntarily, undrugged, and without throwing up.
"Over the ridge. Go!" He could see people ahead of him, a couple of silhouettes on the high point - idiots making themselves a target for any Spectran sniper. "Get down!" he shouted at them, and they vanished so fast that he surely wasn't the only one shouting. Don accelerated past him, and Anna found new energy and followed him.
The forcefield flickered, and he knew that they weren't going to make it.
"Down!" he shouted, grabbed the slower two, and threw all three of them into a marginal depression on the slope up to the ridge.
There was an instant of utter disorientation as his implant was there again, and then an almighty series of explosions from the building behind him. Fifteen, maybe twenty in close succession? He held his breath as he was showered in fragments of debris.
The explosions stopped. No chain reaction, at least. But the noise continued, a deep creaking and groaning which told of structural damage, the sound of tiles and masonry crashing from a height onto the ground below. For a moment he thought the whole building was going to come down, but the noise died away and the skyline remained intact.
He sat up. The dome was gone as if it had never been there, replaced with the last glow of a glorious sunset. Two Spectran transports lumbered into the air and headed off as fast as they could, swinging round over the airfield and heading out across the ocean. From the ISO building came the sound of surely every alarm it contained.
Mark was just wondering how on earth to extract himself, Jason and Keyop and get down to the Phoenix when two ISO Z-17s roared overhead, fired two missiles into each of the transports, and soared away into the distance. Two flaming hulks dropped from the sky. There was a distant splash, and a rising, dispersing cloud of steam, and just barely audible above the alarms, the sound of cheering.
And, from five yards ahead of him, someone hyperventilating, desperate and unhappy.
He hates my guts and he came to warn me anyway. Mark stood up, more wobbly than he'd have admitted, and went over to the shaking Hawk.
"Thank you," he said, and when that didn't seem to help at all, sat down beside him and put a tight arm round his shoulders. "Hang in there," he said. "They're gone, Don. You're safe here. Breathe slower. I'll get you indoors, one of the accommodation blocks, but you have to calm down enough to walk."
Don tried to slow his breathing - really, genuinely tried - and then twisted away from him and threw up, body shuddering in dry heaves. And then pushed himself determinedly to standing.
"Come on," Mark said. "Tom, tell someone I've taken Don Wade inside. They'll know why." He didn't give him the chance to suggest that maybe it would make more sense for the person with a command rank to go organise the evacuees, heading off down the hill with one hand between Don's shoulderblades.
Half way back to the door, and Don stopped abruptly. "I feel better."
"Good - you'll be fine once you're inside."
"No, better." His voice wavered in disbelief. "Real, not having a panic attack better. I don't need to go inside." He stood up straighter and looked at the sky - dark blue now, a crescent moon rising above the trees, the brighter stars just starting to show. "I don't want to go inside."
Mark knew only too well that sense of disbelief that a massive problem had gone, mixed with raw terror that it might simply come back if you changed anything at all. "Then we'll stay outside," he said, low-voiced. "But I need to get out of sight from the ridge."
Don glanced at him, dropped his eyes back to the floor, and carried on walking, veering left towards Heron block. "Don Wade will go inside, of course," he said, using that same murmuring tone that nobody without implant-assisted hearing could possibly pick up from even five yards away. "Can the Eagle use the Hawk out here?"
"Probably." He had more pressing concerns. As soon as they rounded the corner, he transmuted and went to the bracelet. "G-Force, report."
"G-2, dealing with medical emergency. Out."
There was an even briefer buzz of acknowledgement from Keyop, which was all he'd expected. The Swallow should be on the far side of the ridge right now, if he'd followed orders, in a large group of people, and not able to talk on his bracelet. So, for that matter, should the Condor. Mark mentally rolled his eyes, unsurprised that Jason had found some reason to be in the thick of things.
His bracelet buzzed again with an incoming call. "Anderson. Commander, I need you in Control as quickly as possible."
"Understood." He lowered the bracelet slowly, considering his best route back to black section - up through the second floor windows, he thought. Was it structurally safe? It would have to be. He wasn't taking Don, though.
"Hawk, can you go help Anderson?"
Don stared at him in apparent disbelief, then transmuted and jogged off back towards the ridge.
It wasn't until Mark was half way across the lawns, heading for the black section windows, that he realised he'd used Don's callsign and treated him as a colleague. He wasn't at all sure this was a good thing, but he'd worry about that later.