The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Unexpected Resistence

"Any luck?" a grim Dee tightly asked as she appeared out of the darkness behind the stage, most of the large chamber's lighting now shot out by one side or the other. She was a wraith in black, her sunglasses marking her as a member of Alpha Team. With her face covered, only the sunglasses and the sound of her voice had allowed Olira to identify her successfully.

"Only in stopping the bleeding," the exhausted vampire healer rasped softly as Dee slipped past her, her Shiva up and slowly scanning back and forth, its autofire targeting set to fire as soon as a mole fell into its scanning cone.

The moles had scattered from their initial centralized position after taking heavy losses from a concentrated Alpha Team and security detail counterattack. The survivors were now occupying the far end of the chamber, hidden in the darkness after shooting out the lights and sporadically firing at the stage as their ammunition ran out. It was in that direction that Dee swung her Shiva in.

"But he will need a hospital and a liter of blood if he's to survive," the Qos Viran medic went on to say, slowly wiping Martin's blood from her hands onto the legs of her black combat fatigues.

"Sounds like a war's going on out there," Tony Blair, Britain's Prime Minister muttered softly from where he crouched beside fellow leaders, President Johnson of the U.S. and Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada. In front of them squatted two members of Alpha Team, their weapons also searching the darkness of the chamber's far end. And surrounding them and the leaders was a heap of bodies, fallen personal security and Secret Service agents, slain by the moles' attempt to slaughter the world leaders.

The building shuddered as if to add emphasis to Prime Minister Blair's comment, the movement quickly followed by several loud explosions, the force of which rattled the building's many windows.

"Surely, there must be something we can do!" Prime Minister Chretien said in his strong Quebecois accent as he glanced into the darkness behind the stage. "We cannot just sit here and wait for the assassins to complete their job and kill us all. Perhaps we can find some way to get out of the building!"

"A good idea, Mr. Prime Minister," Dee replied with a quick glance over her shoulder at three of the most powerful leaders in the free world. "If the exits weren't being covered by other terrorists positioned to take out any leaders that manage to escape the slaughter here, in the main hall. According to our people outside, who are taking heavy losses at the hands of the terrorists stationed outside, they are situated perfectly to pick off anybody that attempts to slip out any of the exits on the outside of the building."

"What about your police and military?" President Johnson asked hoarsely. Having just won the election for the presidency in December of 2019 in a hard fought battle with incumbent Vice President Al Dore, the economic conference in Calgary was to be his first international event. His dismay couldn't have been greater to find himself caught in the middle of a well-organized and deadly terrorist attack that was in the midst of overwhelming the Canadian security forces. A terrorist attack apparently aimed at slaughtering the leaders of the free world!

"Don't they have contingency plans in the case of a severe terrorist attack, like this one?"

"Yes sir, they do," Dee confirmed with a sharp nod of her head, once again swinging her attention back to the hall's far end. "Those plans are currently being initiated. We should be reinforced shortly by the RCMP's special terrorist taskforce and elements of the military's Joint Taskforce One, trained in anti-terrorism, along with your own special forces." At least, she hoped they were inbound. Them, or Mordecai and his Storm Wolves; somebody to haul their asses out of this particular fire!

Pushing those thoughts aside, she focused on the situation at hand. The moles hadn't fired in a while and that break in their pattern was disturbing. It could mean that they were on the move.