“You heard the order,” Grant responded in the same low voice. “Serve the termination warrant on sight.”
“If we do that, we’ll never learn what’s going on here.”
“We know what’s going on here,” Grant growled. “A smuggling operation.”
“How many smugglers have a setup like this?” Kane demanded. “Where’d a slagger like Reeth get his hands on all this tech, how’d he manage to build such a processing center all by himself?”
Grant’s lips twitched, but he said nothing.
“How come Reeth called Salvo a backstabber?” Kane pressed on with his questions, his voice a harsh whisper. “Who’s paying the bills on this place?”
Slowly Grant muttered, “I don’t know.”
“Exactly. Salvo knows, but we won’t get any answers from him. He told all of us just enough to put us on the knee of Father Death.” After a moment, Kane added, “This is my instinct talking.”
Though Grant didn’t reply, Kane knew the kind of thoughts spinning through his mind. Magistrates were a highly conservative, duty-bound group. The customs of enforcing the law and obeying orders were ingrained almost from birth. The Magistrates submitted themselves to a grim and unyielding discipline because they believed it was necessary to reverse the floodtide of chaos and restore order to postholocaust America.
By nature, Magistrates were proud that each of them accepted the discipline voluntarily, and doubly proud that neither temptation nor jeopardy ever shook their obedience to the oath they swore. But Kane knew, on some deep, visceral level, that an oath was only as inviolate as the men who put its tenets into practice.
On that same deep level, Kane knew Salvo was playing fast and loose with the oath, superficially abiding by the words while disregarding the spirit behind them. His commanding officer hoped the team was so conditioned that they would respond like automatons in any situation, without suspicion and certainly without question. Kane was gambling that his friendship with Grant would supersede the conditioning to obey, at least for a few minutes.
Finally Grant released his breath in a sigh of resignation. “All right,” he whispered. “I’ll listen to your instinct but only up to a certain point. What do you want me to do?”
“What you always do, what you do best,” Kane replied. “Back me up.”
“If you’re wrong about this, you’ll find my boot backing up your ass.”
After a quick, whispered conference, they settled on tactics. Grant gave Kane a skeptical look but didn’t put words to it. The two men returned to the scaffold and took careful aim at the light fixtures around the room.
Quietly Kane said, “Now.”
They squeezed the triggers of the Copperheads, shifting the barrels from left to right. Six bullets shattered six light fixtures, leaving only the farthermost pair intact. Glass sprinkled down on the people in the room, and they cried out in alarm. The area around the scaffold was instantly plunged into dark gray murk. The whine of the generator masked the small sounds of the silenced shots, and for several moments, those below were confused as to what had caused the lights to go out. Kane and Grant took swift advantage of those moments.
They leaped from the scaffold, allowing their thick boot soles and reinforced ankle braces to cushion the shock of dropping nearly twenty feet. The light-enhancer units on their helmets allowed them clear vision in the dim light. Though it would have been easier to take out the generator, to kill the floods outside and allow the team to move in, Kane wanted the power to stay on.
He ran on the balls of his feet, the Copperhead trained on Neal. The man squinted in his direction, glimpsed the dark figure looming out of the gloom, and his face contorted in shock and fear. He gasped wordlessly, right hand fumbling at his waistband.
“Freeze!” Kane roared, using his command voice.
Neal froze, but only for a fraction of an instant. His hand whipped up from his waistband, a long-barreled handblaster filling it. Kane squeezed the trigger of the Copperhead. Three 4.85 mm rounds struck Neal in the face and neck. His features dissolved in a wet blur, blood spraying out of his throat like a fountain. He jerked backward, the blaster flying from his hand, arms and legs flopping like a disjointed puppet’s.