Chapter 79: Contact (II)
Gareth was at the railing when Michael came up and the city outside was in the particular state that the pulse had been showing him from the lobby but seeing it from elevation made it different in a way that the pulse didn’t communicate.
The variants were at the wall.
Not through it yet, the first one had hit the north face and the turret had engaged and the sound of the engagement was a sharp mechanical sound that Michael had read about in the turret specs and was now hearing for the first time in the courtyard below.
The turret tracking the first variant at speed was the fastest targeting cycle the advanced unit could run and it was running it and the first variant went down at the wall base and the turret cycled immediately to the second.
The second variant was at the wall corner.
Not the face. The corner. The northeast corner where the overhang bracket changed angle and the exterior geometry created a brief tracking shadow in the northeast turret’s arc.
Michael felt it before he could see it, the pulse showing the second variant’s position in the corner shadow and the turret cycling to reacquire and the half second gap between the first target drop and the reacquisition.
The second variant went up the corner in that half second.
Not over the wall. The overhang angle caught it, the bracket geometry doing exactly what the overhang was designed to do, deflecting the climbing attempt at the transition point where the angled section began. It lost its grip at the overhang junction and came back down the exterior face and the turret reacquired and engaged.
It went down.
But the third variant was at the south face.
Michael looked at the southeast approach. The Aberrant group was two blocks out now, the mass of fifty one signatures moving at the steady approach pace and the southwest and southeast turrets were tracking them and the engagement range was coming up and he looked at the south face exterior and felt the third variant on the pulse moving along the south face exterior looking for the approach angle that the first two hadn’t found.
He looked at the south face turret.
The southwest turret was at maximum engagement angle on the Aberrant approach vector and its secondary coverage arc for the south face mid had compressed exactly the way the coverage analysis had predicted under simultaneous multi direction pressure.
The south face mid was the gap.
"South face," he said to Gareth.
Gareth was already looking at it. He had the pulse relay data on the notebook and he’d been tracking the third variant’s movement along the south face exterior in real time. "It’s looking for the gap," he said.
"It found it," Michael said.
The third variant hit the south face at the mid point where the southwest turret’s compressed secondary arc left a two meter gap in the coverage and it went up the face in the gap with a speed that was different from anything Michael had seen in forty days, not the climbing speed of a Crawler, something more direct than that, the bone reinforced shoulder joints and the extended arm reach giving it a movement profile that the wall face hadn’t been designed to defeat at that speed in that specific location.
It cleared the overhang.
Michael felt it on the pulse the moment it was over the wall, the signature dropping into the courtyard interior, and he activated the interior alert on the comm pulse simultaneously.
"Interior breach," he said to Gareth. "Southwest courtyard."
Gareth was already sending the alert signal to the lobby.
Michael went down the watchtower stairs.
---
He hit the lobby at the same moment Maya’s voice came through the comm pulse from the control panel.
"Breach in the courtyard," she said. "Third variant, southwest position. Rens is repositioning to the southwest corner platform."
He looked through the lobby window into the courtyard.
The third variant was in the courtyard.
Up close it was different from the body Dr. Kang had examined in the courtyard three days ago in the specific way that a thing at rest was different from the same thing in motion. The extended arm reach and the reinforced shoulder structure and the particular way it moved across the courtyard space with the speed that the pulse had been showing him but that seeing directly made significantly more real.
It had already assessed the courtyard in the two seconds it had been in it and it was moving toward the building entrance.
Fast.
Rens hit the southwest corner platform from the interior staircase at the same moment and had the bow drawn and the variant was already halfway across the courtyard and the range was shorter than the exterior engagement had been and the variant’s movement across open flat space was not the same movement as the exterior wall approach and Rens read the difference and adjusted and the arrow went in clean at the neck junction.
The variant slowed.
Not stopped. Slowed. The neck junction shot that would have dropped a standard Stalker immediately was producing a different result on the variant anatomy and it kept moving toward the building entrance with the reduced but still significant speed of something that wasn’t finished with what it had started.
Second arrow. Same junction. Deeper angle.
The variant went down at the building entrance threshold.
Michael stood in the lobby and looked at it through the entrance and then looked at the pulse.
The Aberrant group had hit the wall.
All fifty one of them.
The engagement sound from the wall exterior changed completely at that point, from the sharp mechanical cycling of turret units tracking individual targets to something that was both of those things at the same time from two different directions and underneath it the sustained pressure impact of fifty one bodies at the wall face simultaneously.
He looked at the turret status display.
The southeast and southwest turrets were at maximum engagement. The northeast turret had dropped the first two variants and was cycling to the Aberrant approach secondary coverage. The northwest turret was holding its primary zone and covering the west face.
The turrets were doing serious work.
He pulled up the Aberrant approach numbers on the pulse.
Fifty one signatures at the wall, the turrets cycling through targets at maximum rate, the approach wave absorbing the engagement and still pressing at the wall face with the particular sustained pressure of a coordinated group that had accepted the turret fire as a cost of the approach.
They knew about the turrets.
He looked at that for a second. They had approached the wall directly into turret fire which meant they had assessed the turrets during their observation period and had decided the approach was viable anyway which meant either they had numbers sufficient to absorb the turret output and still breach or they had identified something in the defense picture that made the approach viable at a level Michael hadn’t modeled.
He looked at the seventh blast wall panel sitting half seated on the east face exterior.
The east face exterior had seven anchor bolts engaged of twelve. The panel was held but not fully locked. Sustained pressure at the panel base would eventually unseat it if the anchor bolt engagement was insufficient for the load.
He felt the Aberrant pulse signatures and the wall engagement and looked at the east face exterior in the Blueprint Interface and ran the load analysis against the half seated panel.
The numbers were not comfortable.
He looked at the lobby.
He looked at the building entrance where the third variant was down.
He looked at the comm pulse and thought about who he needed where right now and what the next thirty seconds required.
He sent three targeted pulses.
One to Cole. One to Sera. One to Gareth.
Then he went to the east face interior.
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