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.”