Drick stopped the roll and finished with a left foot and right knee touching the ground. Drick had drawn two weapons as they came upright. The first was a short needle gun with high impact darts filled with a neurotoxin that caused almost instant paralysis. The weapon had hundreds of darts and could fire a single shot or a steady spray using pressure propulsion. The second was a shortened gel shotgun, a crowd control and anti vehicle weapon favoured by the Judicial forces of a half millennia before. The gel, that was fired via an accelerated pressure wave, could be configured by a thumb switch. It changed from a soft putty that would punch a person to the ground, all the way to a solid ball of plasticrete like canon shot that would punch a hole through armour plating and an engine casing.
The gel shotgun was out of favour in a civilisation dominated by laser weaponry and plasma blasters but Drick was extremely fond of it for the sheer versatility and extreme message giving capabilities. Drick had kept this weapon in personal possission for a very long time and had even taken the time to learn how to construct, repair and replace every component of the gun. Drick even took the time to brew their own flavour of gel in a couple of distinct varieties.
Drick stood quickly and sprayed the six bodyguards who had moved in from each side of the door with the needler. Drick took a step up onto a chair and power-flipped using the suits altered gravity field to perform an impossible manoeuvre that shot them ten metres further into the club to land amongst a set of tables whose patrons hadn’t even had the chance to react to the slamming doors.
The club was a dome of around two hundred metres in length. The roof started at a mere three metres but reached a height of sixty metres at the apex before falling back to a parallel height of three metres on the other side. The centre of the dome was an inverted dance floor. Clever gravity generators and reversing field tubes allowed you to ascend and flip upside down half way through that ascent to literally dance on the ceiling.
Drick was already sprinting and silently hoping that the angels had been watching. A second of concern was all that was needed before a prayer was answered. Drick internal screens showed a moment of brief static and many screens in the bar flicked off. Some of the lighting systems and the more esoteric liquid crystal display clothing of the revellers flicked with static or went off. It was a medium powered electro magnetic pulse from an emp grenade.
Drick would have smiled if they were not busy moving to keep their opposition busy. There were already eight security moving on Drick’s position, they were fast, no doubt using threat recognition and tracking software. Hopefully it would be currently resetting along with the rest of the security in the building. That had been why Drick had asked for the EMP grenade to be triggered.
Modern security systems, and certainly the ones carried by the team in here would be shielded from any pulse from a handheld device like a grenade. In truth half of the patrons in the club likely had comms units that were shielded. Internal computers would have reset clocks. An electromagnetic pulse was an inconvenience and not a strong deterrent. But that wasn’t why Drick had requested for it to be discharged.
Drick had an angel with a shielded monitor array waiting. The minute the pulse was sent they should have been able to plug into the fibre backbone of the security relays. Everyone with high security used a secondary hard connection, it stopped being taken out by over-the-air interference. The pulse would have stunned all the systems for a moment, but that was enough time to inject a probe into the fibre line and jack a monitoring system into it. On the other end of the system was a very secure link to Drick’s internal comms unit and the slicer Drick had connected on a secure frequency. Rodero would be able to piggyback into the network as they had into the security guards mind, except this time Drick was not required as anything other than a conduit and could focus all attention on their own issues.
“Tell me something good.†Drick flashed the message to the secure channel the team was using.
“I’m in.†was Rodero’s response.
“System secure and disguised,†flashed the text from the angel, “heading to my cover position.â€
Drick rolled under a table as four of the security merged on their position. A quick flisk with a wrist mounted engineers cutting torch was all it took to slice through the table’s single, middle, support. Drick then launched upwards with the table casting drinks everywhere and pitching it directly into the faces of two of the guards. Drick fired the gel gun into the table with a soft round at maximum velocity. It had the effect of propelling the one metre circular block of resin and steel into the two guards at one hundred kilometres an hour. There would be broken bones and a number of bruises at the very least, if not more permanent damage, to the guards and anyone within the ten metres the table went before stopping.
Drick didn’t even look at the devastation. They were too distracted at firing two single shots into the faces of the two other guards. Both had glasses on. But neither wore masks and were yelling. Drick flicked a wrist and shot them both into the mouth, they were choking and stiffening before they hit the ground.
Drick started to run again taking mighty leaps and fast rolls in seemingly random directions. But the path was purposeful and those above on the ceiling could see that each random turn still took Drick towards the centre of the dome. As Drick reached the point below the dome’s apex they launched upwards flipping in mid air. The leap was almost thirty-five metres in height. As Drick spun in the air to look down they fired the gel gun into the head of a guard knocking them face first into a table and sent a spray of shots that took out two others and maybe a dozen bystanders with paralysing needles. They would be alive but stiff for a few hours.
The leap was enough to catch Drick in the reversed gravity and although Drick looked like they were held in mid air from directly below they were in fact falling at high speed towards the dance floor above.
