Read Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution for Free Online Page B

the side of caution than find herself trapped in a steel box with her entire squad. After last week, anything seems possible.
    The fire-proof door on the 100th floor only opens from the inside as well, but another buckshot round from Specialist Kelly's grenade launcher takes care of the lock and half the frame. They file into the hallway beyond. There are apartment doors all along both walls of the hallway, but nobody sticks their heads out to see what's going on, not even after the thunder from a low-pressure rifle grenade. The hallway terminates in a little foyer that links the four corridors on this part of the floor and provides a little common area. There are no residents around here either.
    Jackson checks her datalink to tap into the local security network. All the apartments have bioscanners and explosives detectors, and any assisting TA squad usually has full access to that information when they do sweeps. You walk up to an apartment door, you can instantly see how many people are present, their security classification, and their arrest history. When Jackson tries the datalink at the next apartment door she passes, nothing comes up. It's like the network for the entire building is out. She knows that can't happen--it's triple-redundant, and she should be able to get at least something from the wireless transmitters. It's either deliberately turned off, or someone is solidly jamming all their data comms.
    "Watch the corridor junctions," Jackson cautions. "We'll go to the central core, get line of sight to the atrium."
    None of this feels right. The building’s security office is supposed to link with them as soon as they are on the ground, keep them up to date, tell them where they’re needed. The rest of the platoon is supposed to be online, feeding their sensory data to her and the squad. This total radio silence is the strangest thing she has ever experienced on a drop, and it’s unnerving.
    At the next corridor intersection, Jackson can see the open space of the building core past the hallway in front of them. Every central corridor on each floor lets out onto a gallery overlooking the big open space in the center of the tower. You can see right down to the atrium on the first floor. There’s a chest-high railing and another meter of polyplast barrier above that, to keep people from falling over the edge, or throwing each other. There’s a safety net, attached to the gallery of the tenth floor, but without the polyplast, the hood rats would make it a sport to jump into it on purpose. Some still do, barrier or not.
    The squad is twenty meters from the gallery when a warning buzzer trills, and the fire door at the end of the corridor comes down and locks into place. Jackson whirls around to see the same event mirrored at the other end of the corridor, back where they had just entered the 100 th floor a minute ago. The corridor is pitch dark for a moment. Then the red emergency lighting comes on.
    “Visors down,” Jackson yells. “Go augmented. Spread out and stay sharp.”
    She pops her own helmet visor into place and lets the computer adjust the optical input. The section of corridor sealed off by the fire doors is sixty or seventy meters long, but that’s not a lot of space for nine troopers to find cover if someone decides to hose them down with automatic fire. The infantry calls narrow indoor passages “death funnels”.
    Jackson prowls back to the corridor junction and takes a right turn to explore one of the side corridors. It ends at a bare concrete wall thirty meters beyond the intersection. The only ways in and out of this apartment cluster are shuttered with inch-thick armored fireproof doors, and they have nothing in their inventory to break down one of those.
    “Hunter 22 Actual, this is OPFOR Actual.”
    The voice comes over the emergency public address system in the corridor. Jackson stops, dumbfounded. OPFOR Actual? Someone knows military radio protocol.
    “I count nine of you in corridor