There was a doorway behind the lobby’s reception desk. The door itself had been torn off, revealing a black gulf. The point drone flew through first. Yuri followed it into a long, windowless locker room with smashed light panels on the ceiling. His visor enhancements kicked in, converting the darkness into a clinical blue-and-white monochrome image. The drone navigated its way past buckled lockers that leaned against each other like a domino knock-down row that hadn’t quite worked. It slipped through another open doorway into the first of the ground-floor warehouses. Yuri came out into a huge space, broken up by floor-to-ceiling cargo racks that were mostly vacant. Grenade blasts had pummeled hundreds of empty plastic crates out of their stacks, scattering them across the floor. Ancient heavy-lift trollez were parked around the five loading bay doors, the warehouse’s vast interior making them look like abandoned toys. Two of the tactical team’s drones had been brought down, their blackened armor fuselage casings badly crumpled. Yuri didn’t like to think what weapon had done that. There were gunshots coming from the far end of the warehouse, obscured from Yuri’s view as he crouched down and ran for cover behind a solid-looking workbench.
One of his drones slid along behind a rack, its sensors scanning around. He saw three gurnez behind a cargo rack down in the second loading bay. Two of them had toppled over, and one was upside down. All three had bodies strapped on. The drone’s camera zoomed in. The upside-down gurnez had a big pool of blood spreading out from it.
“Holy fuck,” Yuri exclaimed. One of the other slumbering bodies was Horatio.
“Jessika, Lucius, I’ve found him!”
A huge explosion detonated on the second floor. The entire warehouse ceiling undulated like an agitated storm cloud, and cracks began to appear, ripping along its length. Debris showered down. The gang members at the far end began shooting wildly.
“Shit,” Yuri shouted. “Lay down suppression fire,” he ordered the drones. They fired a fast barrage of grenades.
Explosions filled the big space with incandescent light as Yuri powered forward. Twice he fell as pressure waves slammed into him, sending him skidding along the filthy floor. Above him the drones opened up with their electromagnetic guns, firing clean through the metal racks.
“Lucius, some backup!” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet for the second time. A bullet caught his chest armor, spinning him and sending him crashing down again. The drones identified the source and sent more super-velocity rounds ripping down the warehouse.
Pain was a hot ball in Yuri’s chest. Grimacing against it, he scrambled up into a crouch position and carried on toward Horatio’s gurnez. His own semiautomatic was lost somewhere behind him. Flames were roaring up the wall at the far end, ignited by the hellish burn of the grenades. The drones hovered above him, constantly scanning for hostile activity.
“Lucius? We’ve got to get him out of here.”
“Lucius has dropped out of contact,” Boris said.
“What? Is he hit?”
“Unknown. His altme is no longer transmitting.”
Yuri flinched. Connexion tactical team members were equipped with multiple access links, both implanted and on their armor, a hard lesson the department had learned after they lost track of Savi Hepburn. Today, it was practically impossible to take one of their personnel offline. Yuri didn’t want to imagine the level of violence that weapons would have to inflict on Lucius to make that happen—nothing survivable.
He tried to focus on the tactical display. Five of their paramilitaries’ icons were amber and red now, showing they were injured and pulling back. There was no sign of Lucius’s icon. “Fuck!”
He arrived at the gurnez and practically collapsed over it. Horatio’s unconscious face was caked in dust, but it was definitely him. Yuri felt unreasonably angry at how peaceful the boy looked. He worked the buckle on the strap. Another firefight broke out somewhere in the building.
“How much fucking ammunition have these bastards got?” he bellowed furiously. “Okay, everybody get out now! We have what we came for. And I could do with some help down here.”
A low, torturous rumble came from somewhere overhead. Yuri flinched, glancing up. The ruined ceiling was bulging down, the cracks multiplying. Rubble began spilling through the gaps, hurling thick gray dust clouds ahead of it. They churned in a mad tango with the black smoke gushing out of the inferno.
“Oh, shit.” He started to wonder just how good the body armor truly was. The tiny piece of rationality left in his mind was hunting down escape routes. They were all a long way off.