The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

look at 7 Theaterstrasse and know that the targets of their rage were somewhere inside. Then each light turned away quickly, as the people behind them ran for the stairs. Ran for the street. The whole city would be out there in a matter of minutes.
    Down in the fog, the mob made forward progress in spite of the gunfire. Travis saw Paige’s eyes, filled with hard tears, spilling now. She was tough as hell, he knew, but tough didn’t cover this kind of thing. Nothing did, short of psychosis.
    “It’s not enough,” she said, her voice cracking twice in those three words. “Single shots aren’t going to keep them back.”
    She turned from the window and moved quickly into the tunnel of wires, toward the stairwell. Travis followed. Paige reached behind herself as she went, unzipped her backpack and plunged her hand into it. She came out with something that looked like a flashlight with lenses at both ends. The Doubler. It was more or less what Travis had pictured when he’d read the report, though its details drew his attention: the way its surface caught the light, the way its separate materials—whatever they were—met without seams. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen. A tool built by alien hands.
    Paige reached the top of the stairs, and shouted, “Seventh floor, ranking operator to the stairwell!” She had to yell it again, waiting for a gap in the shooting, before one of the snipers, a woman in her thirties, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Travis had seen her introduced earlier as Miller. She looked as shaken by the events of the preceding minutes, as Travis supposed all the snipers were, but she was steady on her feet.
    Paige tossed her the Doubler and yelled, “They need to switch to autofire! Grab five magazines, double them compound until they’re eighty, then use that group for a basis and start massing piles right where you’re standing. I want one person acting as feeder for each floor, running clips to the snipers. Double some fresh rifles, too. They won’t last long under the strain.”
    Miller nodded and disappeared with a purpose.
    Travis and Paige returned to the window. Outside, the crowd had filled both bridges to the south, and all the streets between the buildings in every other direction. Gathered flashlights flickered around in the fog, like lighters above the crowd at some end-of-the-world rock show. At the mouths of each of these bottlenecks—bridges and streets alike—the amassed dead had finally begun to constitute a real obstacle for the incoming throng, and where the surge backed up, Travis suspected that even some of the living had stumbled and been trampled, and become a part of the barricade themselves.
    The snipers were still firing single shots, picking their targets. As Travis watched, the nearest outriders of the mob were always the ones taking the hits. A flashlight bobbed over the pileup on the near end of the left-side bridge, and came hurtling toward the building at impossible speed. No fucking way could a human move like that—
    A rifle cracked from the fifth floor, straight below Travis, and the fast-moving light in the fog clattered on the cobblestones as a man screamed. Under the scream, Travis heard the telltale racket of a bicycle wiping out.
    The piles of bodies were only doing so much. The fifty-foot buffer zone around the building wouldn’t last much longer if the autofire didn’t start soon.
    Travis heard someone crying in pain, somewhere in the dark below. The man who’d come in on the bike. Still alive. He sounded young, maybe just into his twenties. His cries were so full of suffering it turned Travis’s stomach. Paige’s eyes were still rimmed, catching the moonlight and the red tracer fire from below. She held on to just enough composure to keep her breathing steady. The dying man’s cries escalated to screams. He was saying something in German. A single word over and over. “Bitte! Bitte!” Travis thought it meant “please.” The tone sure as hell implied that it did. Paige reached into her vest, came out with a pair of FLIR goggles and strapped them over her eyes. She leaned through the window, shouldered her rifle and aimed it down. She fired a single shot, and the man’s screams switched off instantly.
    A few seconds later the autofire began, one sniper at a time, and after a moment the night was a roar Travis could barely think above. The impact against the advancing crowd was more dramatic than he’d imagined. The front