Creeping into the city was easier than Dan expected. Given the Capital’s foreboding atmosphere, he had anticipated roving squads of CHT partisans preventing people from moving freely. Instead, the streets were almost completely deserted. The majority of the city’s residents were long gone, having escaped well before the armed paramilitary groups began clashing with government forces.
Dan frowned slightly as they jogged toward the Capital, taking in the periodic signs of conflict. Other than the occasional partially-collapsed building or series of bullet holes in a brick edifice, the city was almost pristine. If it wasn’t for the lack of power and the flickering illumination of the still-burning buildings near the National Mall, he could’ve almost written everything off as construction.
This wasn’t what warfare in an urban environment had looked like. Dan had seen enough footage of the invasion of Jarkarta to know that something was wrong. Someone had gone to great lengths to minimize collateral damage and pull the civilians out before hostilities began. If Dan hadn’t already been convinced that the entire uprising was orchestrated months to years ahead of time, the lack of damage to the city confirmed it.
There were just too many coincidences to believe anything else. Simultaneous linked rebellions in capitals across the globe with at least some support from each of the countries’ political and military establishments just didn’t spring up overnight. The CHT didn’t have anywhere near the forces needed to fight the armies of any of the countries it was operating in. Unless they were absolute idiots, they wouldn’t have launched the revolts without some idea that they would have cooperation from the inside. No, whoever planned this spent years infiltrating every level of multiple world government.
He tried to think of someone other than Henry Ibis who would fit that description, but Dan’s mind kept coming up blank. It might have been one of Henry’s unnamed associates, but Dan doubted it. Ever since he had seen the footage of the powered armor from the Thoth Foundation on the CHT troops raiding the Capital, he had feared the worst. Henry had the right combination of ambition, resources, and insanity to pull this off. Hell, even the name of the Coalition for Human Transcendence screamed Thoth Foundation to Dan.
By the time Jennifer and Dan reached downtown, the sun had long set, but by now they were close enough to the fires that visibility was no longer a question. Where before the damage had been sporadic, closer to the Capital, almost half of the buildings were nothing but rubble. Burned-out armored vehicles sat abandoned in the street, their origins indeterminate beneath the charring in the darkness. The volume and intensity of the gunfire increased to the point that Dan kept expecting the next corner they turned to be the one that would dump them into the middle of a full on firefight.
After almost an hour of jogging through the abandoned city, he finally began to run into other people. On their own or in pairs, he would periodically spot armed figures slipping toward the sounds of gunfire. None of them wore uniforms, and as far as he could tell, their weapons consisted of whatever guns were on hand. Some had hunting rifles while others carried Kalashnikovs or AR-15s. About half of them moved with the smooth gait and purposeful actions of trained soldiers, but the others carried their rifles slung over their shoulders while cracking jokes, unaware of their surroundings. The only unifying factor that Dan could identify was that all of them were moving in roughly the same direction.
The lack of organization worked in their favor, as no one questioned Dan and Jennifer until they finally reached the actual fight. About a block from the National Mall, a pair of burning Armored Personnel Carriers stood in the middle of a boulevard. Muzzle flashes on the other side of the street betrayed the loyalist forces as both sides took potshots at silhouettes barely visible in the flickering firelight of the burning vehicles.
Dan turned on his spellshield just in time for it to catch a three-round burst of rifle fire. Glancing around briefly, he realized that he was completely alone and in the open, Jennifer having already taken cover in a nearby alleyway. Cursing under his breath, Dan sprinted toward her, bullets picking at the street around him. Gasping for breath, he glared at her accusingly.
‘What the hell, Jennifer,’ he hissed at her. ‘I could’ve been shot out there.’
‘I’ve been hugging the buildings for the last couple blocks. Maybe you’ve been fighting enemies with medieval equipment for too long. I just assumed you had some reason to be walking in the middle of the street where snipers could take potshots at you. Like you were planning on cowing people into submission by just stalking forward through a hail of bullets or something.’
‘No,’ he whispered heatedly. ‘There was no such plan. I don’t know anything about fighting people with guns. The closest my training came was in dealing with an occasional crossbow. Why would I know the first thing about looking for cover?’
‘Sorry,’ she replied sheepishly. ‘Look, it might be for the best if I take the lead, then. So far, I’ve been following you because you’ve been acting fairly authoritative about marching into the city and rescuing people in a blaze of magic and glory, but if there isn’t a plan…’
‘Please,’ he responded in relief. ‘I was just trying to act like I knew what I was doing to keep up morale, but I’m so far out of my depth right now that I need an inner tube. If you have a plan, let’s just get to it.
“Seriously.” Dan chuckled uneasily. “Right now, all I can think of is either trying to sneak around the fight, which seems improbable, or just charging through both lines and hope that no one can catch up to us before we can break your Dad out. That seems like a great way to get machine gunned by both sides simultaneously.”
‘Let’s just repeat the raid on the void ship from Brazil.’ She shrugged at him in the darkness. ‘The buildings around here are all ten to twenty stories tall, and there’s uncertain light at best. With any luck, no one will see us when we cross the street. Hopefully.’
‘Hopefully,’ Dan agreed.
Walking further into the alley so as to not be visible from the street, the two of them quickly began climbing the building. Silently, Dan was jealous of Jennifer’s magnetic runes as he hopped from Force Bubble to Force Bubble while she simply climbed the wall. At least he was getting even more experience with finely controlling his mana. Still, he would have preferred a much more direct method of scaling the wall.
Sweating profusely despite the moderate temperatures, both of them took a second to catch their breath on the roof of the building. After the breather, Dan glanced over the lip of the building and swore as the night erupted into gunfire.
A full column of soldiers marched up the street toward the embattled boulevard. They wore Thoth Foundation powered armor, complete with the Foundation’s sigil–a bird holding a scroll in front of a crescent moon–emblazoned on the shoulder. Behind them was a quartet of armored personnel carriers and what appeared to be a light tank of unknown make raking heavy machine gun fire over the heads of the armored troops into the loyalist emplacements.
Sparks bounced off of the armor as the defenders tried in vain to bring them down with rifles. Machine gun nests hammered a trio of the suits to their knees, crimson tracers ricocheting off of them before the light tank silenced them with its main gun. One of the suits stood back up, wobbling slightly before it returned to the formation. At the grass divider in the boulevard, the armored suits fanned out and raised their arms. A second later, flamethrowers lit up the night as the left wrist of each suit sprouted a gout of flames that quickly engulfed the defenders’ cover.
The government forces broke into a run, only for three of the suits to launch flares up into the air, lighting the formerly-dark street. Robbed of their cover and the veil of darkness, the fleeing soldiers were quickly cut down by automatic fire from machine guns embedded in the right arms of the battle suits.
Dan glanced at Jennifer, a question in his eyes.
‘We don’t really have a choice,’ she replied grimly. ‘It’s bright enough that they might spot us, but I can’t see the stalemate lasting much longer. I’m counting twenty-eight of those suits still standing, and that’s more than enough to deal with pretty much anything other than tanks. Time and caution are both luxuries that we’ve run out of.’
‘I can’t say I disagree.’ Dan glanced down into the street where CHT irregulars were streaming forward in the wake of the power suits. ‘It looks like we have a bit of a race on our hands.’
Without replying, Jennifer ran to the edge of the building and jumped. Dan barely caught her with a Force Bubble before he replicated the feat. She took a deep breath and nodded at Dan before jumping once again. He couldn’t help but think about the road, swarming with hostile soldiers almost a hundred feet below them as he caught her once again.
Somehow, they made it across the street without being noticed and quickly cleared the remaining block to the National Mall. Trenches crisscrossed the lawn underneath the still-burning husks of the Smithsonian buildings as the constant rumble of gunfire filled the night. The two of them sprinted forward, Dan leading the way with his spellshield fully activated, as they wove in between the two struggling sides. Multiple columns of power suits assaulted the Mall from three different directions. Every once in a while, a lucky shot or high-caliber fire would bring down a suit, but by and large they stalked forward with impunity, burning major holes in the defenders’ positions.
Dan simply ignored them. As far as he could tell, the outcome of the battle was already decided. Although sporadic resistance persisted, the majority of the defenders were throwing down their weapons and putting their hands over their heads. It was only a matter of time before the remaining loyalists realized that their cause was lost.
Occasionally, a bullet sparked off of his spellshield, but both sides ignored them. The federal forces were focused on bringing down the very visible suits of powered armor as well as their tank backup, and the rebel forces were primarily targeting the handful of heavy weapon emplacements that the defenders had been able to scrounge up. More than anything, what saved them was the CHT’s fairly methodical nature. They slowed their assault to process all of their prisoners and ensure that there weren’t any surprises like remote explosives or landmines, confident that the government officials holed up in the Capitol would be unable to escape.
He was only noticed in his final approach to the Capitol itself, drawing a spray of distressingly-accurate rifle fire. Luckily, his spellshield held long enough for him to dive through a first-story window, the rain of glass falling around him and buying Dan the time he needed to roll to his feet. Standing in front of him was an older man in a military uniform, heavily-built despite his age, pointing a handgun directly at Dan.
‘Thrush,’ the older man bit out, gun unwavering as he kept it trained on Dan’s face. ‘Why am I not surprised to find Ibis’ number one lackey smack dab in the middle of all of this bullshit?’
Dan cocked his head as he tried to place the officer’s face. His spellshields were recovering rapidly, negating most of the threat posed by the handgun even at point blank range, but for the life of him, Dan simply had no idea who the man was.
Before he could reply, there was another burst of gunfire outside, and Jennifer threw herself awkwardly into the room through the window that Dan had broken. The older man’s gun swung to track her before lowering marginally.
‘Dumpling?’ He questioned, eyes locked on Jennifer as she bounced to her feet and began brushing shards of broken glass out of the fiber of her armored mesh. ‘What in the blazes are you doing here?’
