Chapter 4

Picking his way through the now eerily quiet warehouse towards the nearest armoury, pulse rifle gripped at the waist ready to fire at the first sign of movement – loyalist or rebel – Sam realised the LSF must have evacuated the base. He was somewhat dismayed at this thought, realising that, considering his shaky-at-best relationship with the rebels, there was no guarantee they would ever let him into the replacement base. They might even think he was the one who sold them out.

Reaching the armoury, Sam unclipped the current charge pack from his blastgun and let it fall from the floor, leaking a glowing green liquid from a small crack on the side, and replaced it with a new pack from the shelf. He also took a few spares for his bandolier, along with half a dozen batteries for his rifle – all the 32MW packs that were available – and a handful of grenades.

From where she was sat on the cold floor of the war room, Jeanne’s eyes shot daggers at the enemy commander, irritated that she had been caught so easily. The evacuation had been thwarted, and all the surviving rebels had been gathered in the war room with their hands bound behind their backs, presumably awaiting transportation to detention facilities.

"Major!" Johnson called, "We have a camera crew coming over from Media Department, and they want you to put together a firing squad. They want you to make the executions as bloody as possible,” he continued, showing evident disdain, “entertaining. 'We have to be seen to be tough on the terrorists', they said. 'Hearts and minds', and all that crap...With all due respect sir, you won't get me in a firing squad. You'll have to court martial me for insubordination first."

Morgan knew most of his men were as disgusted with the commercialisation, brutality and lack of honour in the modern corporate military as he was, but it was encouraging to see that Johnson was determined enough to risk facing court martial over it. “No, Johnson, don’t worry,” he replied, “I agree. Surely you can’t believe I’d be happy about that either. I’m not gonna be presiding over cold-blooded murder!” he declared indignantly. “But the question is what we can do about it…”

“Well sir, I’ve got your back whatever you decide,” Johnson told him. “So long as you don’t put me in the firing squad of course, that is sir,” he hastened to add.

Sighing wearily, thoroughly demoralised, Jeanne rested her head against the cold metallic wall behind her. As die-hard determined as she was to defy corporate rule for as long as she breathed, in her current sleep-deprived state, combined with the shell shock of seeing her lifelong friend Tom killed like a dog by corporate troops, she was about ready to give up the fight. Ready to let despair take her; ready to die. She had, of course, been ready to die for as long as she had been working with the LSF, if her death was beneficial in some way to the fight against oppression. But this was different. She simply did not seem to have the strength to carry on. She almost willed death to come to her.

That was, until she saw one of the soldiers, complete with egotistic strut, aura of chauvinism and the repulsive stench of machismo, step towards her. All of a sudden, the fire of rage, resentment and hatred lit inside her a furnace of defiant energy. Apparently, there was some fight left in her after all!

“Up ya get, sweetness,” the pig spoke, grinning at her.

“Bite me,” Jeanne retorted, plastering a condescending smile all over her face and drawing her left knee up to her chest.

As the somewhat stunted man came closer to her, she forced her other knee hard into his groin, and let out a small laugh at his grunt of pain. “Bitch,” he wheezed, doubling over and falling to his knees, his voice a few octaves higher, “that just earnt you a front row seat.”

Jeanne just looked at him, still smiling sweetly and feeling slightly amused, and catapulted her booted left foot into his face, shattering his nose.

A short, heavy man with whiskers and a spotlessly smooth tuxedo which was a little tight around the chest area swaggered in the door of the war room where the prisoners were being held from a neighbouring common room. “I’m Mr Adams, I’m the director of the broadcast. My camera crew are almost finished setting up, so whenever you’ve picked your firing squad feel free to send the first group of prisoners through.”

Morgan, seeing red, turned and took a step towards the newcomer, so that they were standing nose to nose, Adams looking suddenly uncomfortable. "You seem remarkably cavalier about cold-blooded killing, Director," Morgan remarked, lifting him slightly by the Adam’s apple and drawing his pistol, “but only over my dead body will you get me involved.” He shoved the pistol threateningly under Adams’ chin.

They stood there – well, Morgan stood and Adams hovered there – for several minutes, Adams sweating profusely.

“If you think it’s so interesting, Director, then surely you would like some… experience?”

“But-b-but” Adams sputtered. “But… I work for Dermis! I’m not a terr-“

At hearing a dispassionate, cold-blooded killer have the nerve to refer to people who risked their lives every day for what they believed in and to defend the people they cared about as ‘terrorists’, the pale red transposed over everything Morgan saw turned bright crimson and he saw nothing else.

“Lights out, scumbag,” he said, pulling the trigger. “Curtains closed.”

The shot echoed through the room.

Allowing the body to fall to the floor, breathing heavily, Morgan turned to see all eyes on him.

Chapter 3

Pressed against the back wall of the warehouse, Morgan clicked his com – “All teams in position. Initiate attack. Be advised that they will be aware of our presence.”
A loud crash came when he kicked down the light metal door, followed by the deafening boom of the flashbang he threw inside and the pew-pew-pew of automatic gunfire as, with his arm over his face to shield him from the effects of the flashbang he sprayed suppressive fire through the doorway, then ducked back outside away from return fire which never came.
With the rest of Alpha Team – Lieutenant Johnson and eight other men – he entered the building, pulse rifle braced at his shoulder, and saw that the refectory where they had entered was deserted. A few of the tables were overturned, the floor was carbon-scored and the walls were dotted with the burns of pulse fire, and – mixed with the glorious smell of stale bread… in the army all they had was nutrition supplements – the smell of cordite was distinct in the air.
“Lieutenant Smith, sir,” the voice crackled over Morgan’s com, accompanied by the sound of explosions and weapons fire, “we’re pinned down on the fire escape, experiencing heavy resistance. Cannot enter building. Requesting urgent assistance.”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant,” Morgan responded. Turning to his team, he said, “You heard the man – Delta Team need our help. Move out!”
Bursting through the door – which had already been torn from its hinges, probably by those in the refectory when the alarm had sounded in their rush to reach whatever positions they had been assigned in the case of discovery – and onto the warehouse floor, Morgan and his men broke into a run.

Knelt behind the wooden and scrap metal barricade, Jeanne felt the rusty lifeline shudder under her against the fire of the attackers’ energy weapons, disgorging from the armoured personnel carrier at the end of the street. The stock of her rifle – a century-old but well-maintained and gleaming M4XX carbine – kicked against her shoulder as she returned fire. Three of the suits – Corporate soldiers, like those of any well-equipped army, wore camouflage of course, but nevertheless they were referred to as suits in the LSF and for that matter most of the anti-Corporate community – fell to her fire, but she was devastated to see Tom lying in a heap on the floor, his arm from the shoulder down having taken its leave from him currently residing on the grimy, oily road on the other side of the barricade.
She was unable to do anything for Tom, as in the next instant her anonymous comrade – whose name she had learnt was Andy – had thrown both of them to the ground behind a stack of plastic crates. “Fire in the hole!” his warning was drowned out by the blast of a grenade behind him, and out of the corner of her eye Jeanne saw Tom disappear in a cloud of fire and shrapnel.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!” was her cry of despair, and she launched herself over the barricade to spray death down the road with a vengeance.
Then there was a sickening crack to the back of her skull, and she yelled out, dropping her weapon and falling to the ground. As her vision blacked out, she saw a camouflaged figure lift his rifle back to firing position, its tip pointed menacingly at Andy.

Hearing weapons fire, Sam swung his rifle down from his back. “Fuck,” he cursed the inconvenience under his breath, “they must have been discovered.” He scanned the nearest entrance – the freight entrance – and saw extensive explosion damage inside the loading bay and the makeshift defensive barricade shattered, about half a dozen soldiers entering the building and restraining the two surviving defenders.
“Okay, baby,” he sighed to his blastgun, “I’ll run in, grab a few charge packs and we’ll be out before anything happens.”

The staccato of old-fashioned gunfire filled the air, and a sharp cry drew Morgan’s head – Private Tucker doubled over and fell to the ground, clutching his solar plexus, victim to a burst of submachine gun fire down the aisle.
As he stopped moving, the rest of the team instinctively sought cover in the neighbouring aisles. Morgan braced his rifle on one of the empty shelves and dropped Tucker’s attacker with a single shot. Private Caboose leant out into the aisle down which the rebels were approaching, and the remaining team members dashed for the staircase to the gallery, shooting wildly into the cloud as they passed.
At the top, Morgan leant over the rail to lay down suppressing fire while his men gained ground towards the offices at the end of the walkway. As he was turning to follow them, a single rebel emerged from the slowly dissipating smoke cloud, coughing and sputtering and clutching the bloody stump of his right arm and clearly no longer a threat to Morgan’s troops; Morgan declined to finish the job.
The offices, he discovered, were now a war room, filled with the best communications and tactical equipment the rebels could obtain.
More importantly, it was also filled with people, many of whom were unarmed. In fact, there were several children and even a handful of pregnant women among the crowd.
Grimacing, he raised his rifle and made burnt cheese out of a middle-aged man lining up a 19th Century revolver to meet the newcomers. Other nearby militants were also producing weapons; at the other end by the far door, the gunmen engaging Delta Team were taking notice, but mostly staying focused.
One of Morgan’s men was fumbling with a grenade.
Morgan tackled him and knocked the man’s arm against the railing behind him, forcing him to drop the grenade to the floor below.
“I will NOT have MY MEN KILLING INDISCRIMINATELY!”
With that, he struck the man in the head with the butt of his rifle, smashing the side of his skull and killing him instantly.
Around him, his troops were opening fire.

Chapter 2

The Covert Enforcement Bureau technician was bored. Very bored, and half-alert. He had been sat there for several hours since the start of his shift, and had several more to go before he would be relieved. Nothing significant or remotely exciting had happened at his station on his shift for days. And it was hot, too, in the communications room, and airless, with the cooling fans preventing the billions of credits worth of equipment from overheating but doing little to cool the room itself, in fact seeming to merely suck the air out of it. It would be out of character, of course, for the Bureau to invest in air conditioning or any form of ventilation here; to actually spend money catering to employee satisfaction would be pointlessly unprofitable, he thought bitterly as a drop of sweat fell from his chin to the terminal over which he was hunched, making little actual noise but penetrating his silence with the force of a hammer on a very large Asian gong.
He almost fell out of his seat, therefore, when his board actually lit up.
“Sir! We got a signal from Agent Sky – its coming from an old abandoned warehouse in Rusholme!”

“Sir?” Morgan inquired when his com beeped.
“New orders. The CEB have located an LSF base not far from the front line. Since your platoon is likely to be overrun soon anyway, we want you to pull back from the battle and round them up. We’ll be closing the roads off behind you with artillery. I’m sending you the coordinates of the rebel stronghold now.” The map on the heads-up display of Morgan’s reinforced composite fibreglass visor moved south and zoomed in on a warehouse in central Rusholme.
"You'll 'close the roads', sir?" Morgan objected. "You do realise as soon as the Martians figure out how to work the teleportation network, the roads won't hardly even matter to them? That is why they chose Manchester as their god-forsaken landing zone, after all - or did you think it was to get Management and their cosy little tower!? Closing the roads will be a waste of good artillery shells and for that matter this new mission is a misuse of good soldiers who should be used to retake Piccadilly before that happens!"
"Follow your orders, Major," the Colonel responded. "I should have you court-martialled for insubordination - you be glad I'm getting soft, soldier."
Reluctantly laying the anti-personnel gun down and cocking his pulse rifle, he grudgingly opened a platoon-wide channel. “Ok men, we have new orders…”

In the ‘derelict’ Rusholme warehouse which had for the more than a decade served as a safehouse and minor base of operations for the Liberation and Solidarity Front, where Jack Morgan’s new orders had been intercepted by an LSF cryptographer, an early warning siren ripped through Jeanne’s still half-conscious mind.
Startled, Jeanne hit her head on the bottom of the empty bunk above her. She grabbed the rifle and combat belt from the desk next to her as she stood up, rubbing her offended brow – her combat knife, which she never removed other than to shower, was already in her ankle sheath as she darted for the large freight entrance to which she had been assigned when she had, upon coming to live in the safehouse after the death of her parents, volunteered to join the rear guard in the event of an evacuation.
“They found us,” explained a fellow rear-guardsman she hadn’t met before, bringing her up to speed on the situation, “the daskin’ CEB.”
“Merde!” Jeanne’s response was simple.
“Do we know how yet?” Tom, another guardsman and a close friend of Jeanne, inquired as he arrived at the hastily erected barricade.
“No,” the first man replied, “but there’s an infantry platoon on the way. They’ve been reassigned from the Martian frontline only about ten klicks away, so I’m guessing we’ve got about three minutes at most to prepare.”
Jeanne’s chest tightened slightly as she unfolded the stock on her rifle, checked the straightness of the scope camera, and fingered her belt to make sure she knew exactly where her grenades, spare clips and pistols were.

With a satisfyingly strong punch-back against Sam’s shoulder, a deafening thundercrack and a burst of brilliant green light, the plasma blastgun transformed the last piece of the Dermis artillery battery into a smouldering, burnt-out metal shell. Sam smiled as the musky smell of prematurely detonated munitions reached his nostrils.
Now, Sam knew, there would be no way of stopping the Martians from breaking out of the Dermis containment line, and from there they might very well occupy the whole of Manchester. He had just delivered the capital itself on a shiny silver platter to a merciless alien invasion force, and it felt good! Score fifty to Sam Marks! They would regret what they had done to him, and regret it dearly.
Sam noticed the blinking red light on the side of the gun, and frowned at the figure on the ammo counter: 02. “Two shots…”, he muttered to himself, and slid the weapon onto his back.
Ducking behind a slightly damaged wall, he produced a piece of flexi containing an interactive map from one of the pouches in his muddied khaki fatigues. “Hmmm,” he thought aloud, “LSF base not far from here.” He patted the blastgun affectionately, “I’ll get ya recharged there, baby.”