“AHHHHHH!”

Dr. Brandt, Manny, and Sasha finally reacted. Roland had to remind himself that their brains wouldn’t have been able to properly process what he’d done while it was happening. The whole altercation had lasted barely a quarter-second. To Manny, Sasha, and Dr. Brandt the violence had been disorienting and almost unintelligible.

The three negotiators from Rolling Fuck were not stock sapien. They’d reacted faster and gone to ground almost as soon as he’d rushed the first man. At least, the women had. The young man was too dazed and battered to react to much at all, so his friends pulled him down and shielded him with their bodies.

Of the other three, Manny was the first to react. He grabbed Sasha by the shoulder and shoved her down below the window line. Roland was proud. He would have said something about that, but everything went disastrously wrong a fraction of a second later.

Roland had known Alexander and his men were rushing the door. He’d estimated a solid one-point-four seconds before they breached the entry way. That’s why he’d occupied himself by checking on everyone. He’d trusted his senses and trusted that the Heavenly Kingdom didn’t have any gear he hadn’t already seen. That proved to be a mistake, because unbeknown to Roland two men in powered armor hung off the outside wall of the building, directly underneath the window.

Their suits were bleeding-edge stealth technology, utterly absent from Roland’s petabytes of memory. His passive sensors had missed them entirely. Roland first realized they were there, and that he’d erred terribly, when they opened fire.

Close to a hundred .30 caliber slugs tore through the wall of the jail at roughly forty-two hundred feet per second. They were fired at such close range, and with such total surprise, that Roland was unable to dodge or prep his sub-dermal armor for impact. Nineteen rounds hit him: fifteen in his center of mass, one in his left thigh, and three in his right shoulder. Two hit Manny, ripping a hole through his left hand and another through his kidney. Dr. Brandt, who’d only half-turned to face Roland at this point, was torn apart in a fusillade of steel. Roland also registered hits on their not-yet-rescued captives: one in Tule’s left butt cheek, one that severed Rick’s index finger, and another in the young man’s shoulder.