The M4A1 carbine is a lightweight, gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed, selective rate, shoulder-fired weapon with a collapsible stock. With stock extended, the carbine is roughly the length of an acoustic guitar. Collapsed, it reduces to thirty inches long, or a little shorter than a standard baseball bat. In its socks, carrying no ammunition, it weighs in at around six pounds, or two and a half kilos, the weight of a mid-range laptop.

  This was what a soldier took to work.

  The M4A1’s fully automatic fire mode could spray seven hundred rounds per minute the length of an airport runway. The rate of fire was notional, as auto-fire would empty the thirty rounds in a standard magazine in two and half seconds. At twelve taxpayer dollars a pop, the army understandably discouraged full-automatic fire. Each single shot was cheaper than a cigarette and conceivably more lethal, depending on the wielder’s aim and government tobacco taxes.

  Sly’s carbine had a stubby flashlight too, which he liked.

  Steps lit by diffuse lamplight, the group took the worn stone stairs in single file and at a trot, taking each corner in stack formation. Each member of the team knew who was responsible for each area or angle, dead space or blind spot, and the tight line minimized exposure to weapons fire. Eli Brown was on point, followed by Clarke who cleared the left, and Smith, the right, and so on until Marcus brought up the rear, carrying the snipers’ rifle across his back and a carbine with the stock collapsed in one mitt-sized hand. Ramirez and Sly took the sheltered centre, Nio and Trap ahead and behind them with slung shotguns, ready to breach a door at a hand-signal or short verbal command.

  They met no impediment of any kind. At first.

  The stairs were dry, dusty, strewn with a thin detritus of rubble and dust. A straight flight of stairs led to a broad landing, then a line of smoking sconces pointed to a circular, narrow well down to the next chamber, from which there was a short sprint to the next straight stair, and so on, down. Everywhere all torches were hot but dark, snuffed out as the enemy retreated, but light intensification exposed the stairs as if illuminated by a dusky sun.

  Sly kept a growing sense of exhilaration under firm control.

  “Wait,” Eli murmured, the word picked up by throat-mike by Gus and transmitted to the others’ shades. He halted on the edge of a short flight of stone stairs, a dark place even with night-vision. “Does anyone else feel that?”

  A breeze? Sly felt no movement in the air but, on introspection, he did feel odd. Clarke spoke before he could put the sensation into words.

  “Something’s down there,” she said, with a degree of surety Sly didn’t feel. “I can feel it, an ache in my joints.”

  Sly spoke up. “Who else feels something’s down there? Gus: poll.”

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  The question popped up in his peripheral vision, answers of yes and no.

  Everyone but him voted yes.

  “What is that?” Eli asked hesitantly. “A sub-conscious smell?”

  Gus’s auto-completion popped up an answer, and on reading it Sly found he agreed. ‘Electroreception, produced by the sensor-strands. We’re picking up something magnetic on the stair ahead.’

  Eli trod down onto the stairs, cautious where he put his foot, lightly brushing away the scattered dust with a toe. He moved as quickly as he could, but always with care, then grunted on the tenth step.

  “Here. Trap.”

  “Here,” said Singh, moving down.

  “I meant ‘trap’, a thing to remove your foot at the ankle. But you’ll do.”

  As the engineer went down, others took his stream to see the device. It was a thin steel mechanism, lying flat and level on the stone like a plate, wearing a heavier than usual scattering of dust. The trigger was a raised, saucer-like halo, at the centre of two half-moons of steel sharks’-teeth. Imagining what might happen to any foot that stepped down in haste, Sly hissed.

  “Dozens of traps on these steps,” Clarke insisted. She wasn’t near enough to see but her tone suffered no idiots, and no one wanted to disagree. “There’s no avoiding them.”

  Trap agreed and decided to trigger them all on the right side, sacrificing an extendable mirror-stick and any thought of stealth. Five minutes later the metal rod was chewed up and each device was safe, snapped shut with a loud clap.

  “Don’t rush, the cultists want you to try to make up time. Don’t run. Check your eyeline, as well as your feet.”

  Sly’s warning was taken seriously, and soon Eli wordlessly dealt with a length of razor-wire rigged at neck height. He examined a piece of it while Eli checked for more, but it wasn’t of a kind he had seen before. Corded strands of near invisible wire bound irregular razors, slivers too light to be made of metal.

  Ceramic? If the idea weren’t so awful, he’d say they were teeth.

  The way down varied but typically spiralled straight down. Sly calculated the number of steps and the probable depth of L4, and their speed of travel, and soon estimated that the team was nearly down and out.

  On the next corner he nudged Eli to use the other mirror selfie-stick.

  Doing so, Eli signalled back with four upraised fingers.

  Sly doubted only four cultist sentries were close, but Ramirez took it out of his hands, waving for Nio Gonzalez to go on down. The man was feline, on his toes as he swung around the corner, carbine raised and firing, jaw set in a rictus grin.

  Sly moved up to follow Gonzalez and his ears rang with the gunfire in the confined space. As the lightly armoured tangos went down to Nio’s gunfire two others rushed into the chamber, but by the time Sly had rounded the corner that pair was down too, sprawled out and bleeding, one with an honest-to-goodness shield on the ground next to him.

  “Blue light,” Nio said, in a tone of awe. “That shield glowed, man. They mightn’t have guns, but the rest of their equipment is spectacular.”

  Descending, Sly saw the shield hadn’t suffered even a bullet hole. That impressed him, blue glow or no, but a ricochet from it had clipped the sentry in the face. Not for the first time he wondered where this bunch of fringe environmentalist cultists came from. Wherever it was, they had weird but effective high-tech gear.

  The defenders only numbered six in total. When the team swept into the corridor beyond, the troop was alone and facing the gates to the city.