The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above.
    Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.
    She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn’t slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood—but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.
    The orange-white light still filled the room. The gunfire downstairs went on unhindered.
    Paige had never destroyed an entity before. Some of the strictest protocols forbade it. For obvious reasons. Who the hell knew what would result?
    She’d know in a second.
    She unslung her rifle, shouldered it, centered the sights and fired on auto.
    The Ares made a sound like a human scream when it shattered. The room plunged into near darkness as the thing’s light vanished, and the plasma channel to the amplifier switched off. Where the Ares had been, wild orange arcs of electricity skittered like fingers over the surrounding floor space, grabbing for purchase. Then they weakened, flickered, and died away.
    The change came over the crowd in an instant. Travis let go of the trigger, spun hard and shoved aside the barrel of the only gun near him still firing.
    The people on the steps below fell back. Where there’d been rage, there was now only shock. And fear. More fear than he’d ever seen. They drew away from the shooters, eyes wide and heads shaking, pleading in at least three languages. No ignoring their faces now. Travis saw them—felt pretty damn sure he would always see them, the way they looked in this moment. Would never lose a detail of this image if he lived to a hundred and five.
    Within a matter of seconds the stairs below him were clear, at least of the living. The crowd had turned, shrunk away around the banister and out of view down the next flight. A sound came to Travis now. Like rushing air channeled through some narrow space, keening and high and fierce. It came from every direction. He understood. It was the crowd outside. It was thousands of people suddenly finding themselves waist-deep in the bodies of their friends.
    Paige’s voice came over the comm unit in his ear. “Weapons tight, but hold positions. Choppers are coming for evac, five minutes. Sit tight until then, in case this isn’t over.”
    Five minutes later. Out through the front doors. Over the cobblestone approach. Past the wrought-iron fence. Dawn saturating everything pink, and the fog churning in compound dynamics: surging in toward the still-burning cars, curling violently in the rush of air from the Black Hawks. Four of them. Coming in low from the east, right along Theaterstrasse. Setting down in the street, their rotor wash at ground level pushing the fog back enough to reveal the mounds of bodies at the perimeter. Travis saw the nearest pilot and copilot survey the carnage, their mouths forming words he could lip-read pretty easily.
    A moment later he was aboard the third chopper, with Paige beside him, along with a dozen of the others. Strapping in. Paige had the black cube from the ninth floor in her lap. The amplifier.
    She cupped her mouth to his ear and shouted, “Take a look!”
    She turned the cube over in all directions, showing him every side of it. All were smooth, featureless. No place for any wires or cables to connect. The damn thing had just been lying there, plugged into nothing. It alone was the amplifier; the nine stories of circuitry were all for show.
    One more addition to the list of shit he couldn’t square with.
    The rest of the team from the building had already piled into the remaining Black Hawks, and