Moon’s squad breached Damola Ojo via its main entrance, and per her instructions they went in hard.
Without their armour, they were more vulnerable than usual to small arms fire, so the first priority was to make sure the guards on the front gate couldn’t hit them. Moon’s strategy was simple and brutal. When the squad was still a hundred yards from target, she had the beekeeper drop a neuro-interference grenade that combined lab-built organophosphates with snake and spider venom.
The fine particulate mist that the grenade released had a narrow dispersal radius and an active life of only twenty seconds, but that was long enough to tear the guards’ nervous systems into spasming confetti. The selves up on the wall toppled as they lost control of their limbs and presumably died when they hit the ground. The ones on the pavement outside went down twitching and foaming. Their deaths were less sudden but just as inevitable: their lungs were shutting down, their hearts becoming arrhythmic, their brains shorting out.
Moon waited out the twenty seconds and then went in, stepping over the bodies. She took an ABPM from her belt, pointed it at the gate and hit the trigger. ABPMs – air-burst pressure munitions – were a refinement of the civilian self-defence device called a push-away. The air-bursts generated waves of alternating high and low pressure to produce massive torsion forces within a cone-shaped space. At one tip of the cone, the waves cancelled out, allowing the soldier who’d deployed the ABPM to stay on their feet and feel no ill effects. At the other end, the waves rode and amplified each other, becoming an invisible battering ram of tortured air.
The gates didn’t so much go down as fly away in splinters. Anyone who had been standing on the other side, within a radius of about ten metres, flew away too. Armed hostiles or innocent bystanders, they were out of the fight before they knew the fight was a thing.
The squad went in.
Inside the compound they stayed tight, firing outwards in all directions and tying down the opposition while the beekeeper flew on ahead of them to search for Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills and her anima.
The slavers had no idea what they were facing, and were misled by seductive mathematics. The strangers were making a ton of noise and spitting fire, but there seemed to be only a few of them: the odds had to be solidly in the home team’s favour. They stepped out from between the trucks and the breezeblock outhouses, some drawing guns as they came, many just hefting curved pangas or aluminium baseball bats.
They met a hail of fire both from small arms and from Sa-Su rifles. Essien and Moon walked in the vanguard of the raiding party because their Sa-Sus projected a force shield when fired, depleting the momentum of any solid ammunition that was incoming. Most of the slavers’ bullets fell to the ground or bounced harmlessly off their intended targets.
The rest of Moon’s squad were limited to regular-issue sidearms, but their Cielo augments, awake again after a long sleep, handled the mechanics of aiming and range-finding with spectacular accuracy. Their hit rate was high.
But as they advanced further into the compound, they were forced to go hand to hand, which was messier. The strike team still had the advantage because of their augments and combat experience, but in a melee, Moon knew, numbers were likely to tell.
Then, very suddenly, things got worse. Someone – she was pretty sure it was Chulluque – lobbed an incendiary, and it bounced under a truck before it detonated. The truck lifted off the ground and came down on fire. A few seconds later, the trucks on either side of it ignited too. These fucking antiques were powered by chemical combustion! The flames from the burning vehicles spread via lakes of burning petro-chemicals to the outbuildings and then to the main structures. The thick, oily smoke from these fires rolled out across the compound in sluggish waves, engulfing Moon’s squad and the defenders alike.
Cielo augments included sub-dermal glands that secreted vapour-phase flame retardants when the ambient temperature exceeded 70 degrees, so the fire wasn’t an immediate problem. The smoke was another thing entirely. It lowered visibility, making it harder to pick the slavers off cleanly at a distance. It also turned the compound into a live minefield, since every truck that wasn’t already burning was now a bomb that would go off once the temperature around its fuel tank passed its flashpoint.
Moon made a mental note to pistol-whip Chulluque as soon as they were out of this, but she was still confident that she was on top of the situation. Some of the defenders were trying to push back, but most of them changed their minds as soon as they got a good look at what they were fighting. Most of the squad had thrown off their hoods to widen their field of vision. Faced with something so inexplicably alien, with crescent-moon or keyhole eyes, furred faces and scimitar teeth, the defenders either froze or fled.
Then the beekeeper brought Moon some more bad news. The slavers had reinforcements coming. There was another building across the street that had looked more or less derelict, with gaps in its brickwork and its windows boarded. Its doors had been flung open and armed selves were pouring out of it. On top of that, a crude semi-portable machine gun with belt feed was being set up in a third floor window. The squad was about to be caught in an enfilade.
Nkanika, she voked, we’re going to need to retreat towards the south wall. Lead out to my—
That was when she realised there was an empty space at her left shoulder where Nkanika was meant to be.
The Sinkhole was MIA.