“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.

The loading bay door burst apart, and one of the tactical team’s four-by-fours came screeching through the rent. Wheels locked on full turn, and its back end swung around, tires howling as they left a U of scorched skid marks on the concrete floor. The front door opened. Jessika was gripping the manual steering wheel with manic strength. “You called for backup?”

A line of bullets stitched deep craters in the windscreen. The drones hurled grenades and super-velocity bullets in reprisal. Above everyone, the ceiling cracks multiplied like black lightning bolts.

Yuri snatched up Horatio’s limp form and lunged into the four-by-four. Jessika was already accelerating away before the door closed.

“Out out out!” he screamed. The tactical display showed him the paramilitaries moving fast.

Then they were outside, bucking across the wide parking lot, rain pounding the bodywork. A slender contrail streaked through the monsoon, moving so fast Yuri was still staring at it in bewilderment as it passed barely five meters above the four-by-four.

The hellbuster missile slammed into the collapsing building and detonated, obliterating it in a sun-bright plasma cloud. The blast wave punched the four-by-four with extreme force, sending it tumbling across the asphalt, every impact a hammer blow—