The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

On the Defensive

Lash frowned as the floor beneath him abruptly shuddered as if a large explosion had gone off somewhere close, causing the building itself to move. Then his attention was captured by something more immediate as he and the knot of vampires behind him were forced to duck as a series of shockwaves and plasma bolts discharged against the wall immediately in front of them.

Ducking with a tight vampiric curse, Lash sealed himself against the wall and watched a hail of debris and shrapnel go flying by.

"Tahsis!" he snarled through the dust cloud that billowed over the wall in the wake of the shockwaves. "What the hell is going on in there?"

From the other side of the dust cloud came Lash's second-in-command's voice, a low hiss to penetrate the sounds of explosions that were raining down all around them.

"Commander. We've managed to secure the bulk of the office block. But the surviving psionics have barricaded themselves into an office near the south exit and have erected rotating, regenerating shields that are proving effective against our weapon fire. They've got us pinned ..."

The rest of Tahsis' words were lost in another shockwave assault. Hunkering down as the silvery walls ripped through the offices and corridors around them, Lash had no choice but to wait with grit teeth for the counter attack to slow and stop.

It was as the shockwaves were at the height of their attack, churning through the dust-laden air to shred expensive wood and chiseled marble that the com unit in Lash's ear abruptly crackled to life.

"Hate to be a killjoy, my friends," Duffy's voice said, sounding anxious, "but we've got company!"

"What are we going to do?" a slender female vampire hissed, her eyes wide as they watched a number of blue and white police cars come charging up Bay Street to screech to a halt in front of the massive BCE Building, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Right behind the police cars were a handful of dark blue police vans, marked clearly as Rapid Response Team units.

Duffy could feel his back teeth grinding in frustration as he watched the Toronto Police Service fill the street with cruisers, RRTs and uniformed officers in flak jackets. It wouldn't take them long to cordon off the area, secure the perimeter and begin to move in on the BCE Building, having seen the same scenario play out a dozen times. Which would effectively cut off their avenues of escape.

"Fall back to the secondary escape route," he directed after an anxious moment of thought, "and ready your weapons!"

"You want us to fire on your fellow humans?" another one of the Qos Viran asked, a lean, hawkish-looking male, his eyes bright above the line of his mask as he looked hard at Duffy.

"Not if we can help it, Danik," Duffy replied as he scuttled out from behind his cover to begin carefully drawing back into the building, his Qos Viran team moving smoothly behind him, all of them keeping close to the shadows. "But it's our responsibility to keep our escape route secure. If we have to fire on the law enforcement officers that are about to enter the building to do that, then that's what we're going to do!"

As his team began to settle into their secondary positions, with clear lines of fire on both the primary entrance into the building and the doors leading to the staircase that was the primary escape route, Duffy thumbed the talk button on his radio.

"Lash, we're going to have about a hundred police officers in here in about five minutes," he reported into his mike. "We've fallen back to secondary positions and are ready to receive intruders. I'd suggest that whatever the hell you're doing up there, that you hurry it up a bit, hey? It's going to get real messy, real fast down here!"