Daemon

took aim at the sealed steel doors of the building.
    The roar of speeding engines suddenly came in on the wind. One guard turned, then urgently grabbed his officer’s shoulder, pointing.
‘Pas op!’
    They both turned to see one, then six, then fifteen, then thirty cars screaming in from several vectors along the runway, racing in through the gaps between distant hangar buildings. The cars swerved with remarkable coordination, all converging on Building Twenty-Nine like a school of piranha.
    ‘Polizei?’
    The lieutenant blew a whistle, and everyone turned to face him. He pointed and shouted with an Afrikaans accent. ‘Incoming! Take cover!’
    ‘Might be car bombs.’
    ‘Belay that!’ The cars had already closed half the distance. More were issuing from between the distant hangars. The lieutenant keyed his radio. ‘Secom, we have several dozen vehicles inbound at high speed. Code 30.’
    Nothing but static came back.
    ‘Scheisse.’
He turned to his men. ‘Fire at will!’
    Automatic gunfire erupted from a score of positions. Theshots cracked flatly in the open air of the runway. Tracer rounds ripped across the tarmac, ricocheting off the concrete and whining into the sky.
    ‘Knock out the lead cars! The lead cars!’
    A light antitank rocket blasted from their lines in a pall of smoke and detonated against a mid-sized car at fifty yards, turning it into a tumbling ball of flame. A black domestic sedan swerved around the wreckage and came roaring onward. Half a dozen divots appeared in the black-tinted windshield at head level right in front of the driver’s seat, revealing a high degree of marksmanship. Then hundreds more bullets tore through its front grille. As its engine died another car surged past it, and as that one was riddled with bullets, yet another took its place. Already ten cars were smoking and rolling to a stop – but still more came on.
    The shooting died down as half the squad dropped clips and hurriedly reloaded.
    ‘Watch that left flank!’
    The lieutenant leaned around the guard shack just in time to see a car’s front grille – which was the last thing he ever saw.
    The car crashed into the fence line and concrete highway divider at 110 mph, disappearing into a cloud of concrete dust and debris as it tumbled end over end. It was immediately followed by three other sedans, crashing through the gate. Automatic weapons stitched them full of bullet holes from several directions. Shouting filled the gaps in the gunfire.
    But other cars had already blasted through the fence line elsewhere, dragging great serrated lengths of chain-link fencing behind them. These caught guards across the thighs, tearing their flesh and dragging them screaming, even as other guards blasted out windows and peppered car bodies with bullets from M249s with 200-round belts.
    Now they could plainly see the cars were unmanned.
    ‘Dit kan nie wees, nie!’
    ‘Fall back! Fall back!’
    A car crashed into the edge of the parking lot, while two others careened off each other and slammed into a scattering pack of guards with such force that the guards’ bodies hurtled twenty yards and landed in the bay, followed closely by the cars that hit them. The cars sent up geysers of water as they hit the surface.
    In the distance, more AutoM8s kept streaming through the gaps between warehouses.
    Merritt raced out into the gaming pit, Berretta drawn. Automatic gunfire crackled like popcorn somewhere outside. ‘Damnit …’
    Merritt slowed as he reached the still-smoking bodies of the strike teams sprawled between the workstations. He knelt to feel the pulse of the nearest one. Nothing.
    He scavenged an HK UMP .40-cal submachine gun with a web belt of extra clips and flash-bang grenades, then spoke into his headset microphone. ‘Merritt to Secom. What the hell’s going on out there? Over.’
    The Major talked into a radio headset. ‘Agent Merritt, we’re under attack. Stand by.’
    Inside the security control room, the sound of muffled automatic weapons fire was starting to be eclipsed by roaring engines and crashing. The Major watched the external monitors. One camera showed a head-on view of a driverless, bullet-riddled car nailing the camera pole, the screen filling with snow. ‘Why didn’t they sound the alarm?’ He was having trouble comprehending it. ‘This isn’t a guerrilla raid – this is a frontal assault.’
    Ross examined the screens. ‘Computer-controlled vehicles. Dozens of them. The Factions