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033 “ “It’s A Long Way Down.”


Tank couldn’t remember ever having been more uncomfortable than during his trip through the restrictive maintenance hatch. It took him a good ten minutes to navigate the crawl ways and he felt immense relief when he emerged in a similar washroom he had departed from, presumably on the next floor.

He momentarily considered going back to get Kara and Jack but he dreaded having to use the shaft again. Besides, there wasn’t much time. He had to get to the roof.

He found the floor layout simple enough with large signs directing him towards the main exit. Using the elevators would have been his first choice as it would have allowed him to reach the roof quickly. But he had to believe that if these people were professional enough to jam his communications than they probably could also monitor the elevators.

The safer bet was the staircase and tackling the remaining 73 floors on foot. Compared to his agonizing experience in the maintenance shaft this would be a breeze. The only problem was time. The terrorists had it, he did not.

Fully cognizant of his main handicap he still paused when he reached the doors that led into the staircase. His sensitive hearing had registered soft noise coming from behind the door. It was quite possible the terrorists had posted sentries in the stairs but rather unlikely that they were covering all floors.

Tank couldn’t afford to find another way. He reached for his weapon and slowly opened the door. He pushed it open a few inches but could find nothing behind it. Then with one swift push he opened it all the way, instantly bringing his Super Seven to bear on whoever he would find.

Somebody had been waiting for him.

He could feel the cold metal of a gun barrel pushing into the back of his neck.

“Bastard,” Tank mumbled. Somebody had been hiding right next to the door in the staircase, patiently waiting for him to make the first move. Now he had him dead to rights and for all his large build and strength, Tank knew that he could not survive a point blank shot to his neck, no matter the weapon.

“Your impulsiveness is going to get you killed one of these days.”

Angrily Tank whipped around. Truth be told he was ecstatic to find that it was Slade and not one of the terrorists. He had not particularly enjoyed the prospect of going out by being shot in the back thanks to his own foolishness. Of course he would hide those feelings well in front of his anal retentive colleague. “You damned bastard,” he said but kept his voice down, after all the real terrorist were just a floor below. “What the hell are you trying to do?”

Slade secured his weapon. “I had no way of knowing it was you,” Slade shot back, equally upset now. His face was covered with a film of sweat and for the first time Tank noticed that he was clearly out of breath. He must have climbed the stairs from the ground floor in record time.

“Why’d you come up here anyway?” asked Tank, normalizing his voice. “You should have tried to get help.”

“Not an option. Whoever these people are, they sealed off all exits before I had a chance to get out. Comms are down as well. What do you know about the situation?”

Slade had gone back in full team leader mode but Tank didn’t care at the moment. Technically Slade still outranked him in CCiD even after his recent demotion and the former Marine was a man born to give orders.

“Nyuchiban terrorist. They’ve taken the FNTA members hostage and already made demands. I don’t know what they are but they have moved some of the hostages to the roof.”

Slade glanced upwards. There were nearly as many steps left going up then going down. He didn’t like the prospect of climbing them as well. He knew he had no choice. “If they want to kill any of the hostages the most dramatic way to do that would be from the roof.”

Tank nodded.

“Let’s go.”

But before Slade could take a single step Tank put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “No offense, but you look awful. I’ll go ahead and you catch up with me as soon as you can.”

Slade apparently didn’t like this. “You can’t take them by yourself.”

A glint in Tank’s eyes said otherwise. “We don’t have time to argue. If you can keep up fine but I’m going full speed,” he said and moved out before Jackson Slade could protest again.

Slade watched the massive man practically leaping up the first flight in one jump and immediately knew that there was no keeping up with him.

Tank for his part gave no second thought to Slade as he rushed up the staircase. He had wasted enough time and could ill afford for anything or anyone to slow him down further. If he ran into a terrorist sentry he would have to overwhelm them quickly. He was looking forward to the opportunity.

The mini-servos in his cybernetic legs moved him upwards faster and allowed him to jump higher than most other people could. He reached the end of the staircase in just under three minutes, smirking at the idea that it probably had taken Slade six times longer to get to the 75th floor.

The last door he found was computer controlled and sealed without any means to open it. He slipped his fingers inside the door panels “ not an easy task as his fingers were rather thick “ and pushed the two parts open easily. They had not been designed to keep out the likes of Tank.

Behind it he found a maze of maintenance corridors and pipe work forming part of the environmental systems. The lights here were dim, allowing for too many shadows. But Tank doubted the terrorist were hiding, after all they had no reason to assume somebody else was still in the building. There had been no attack from the outside as far as he could tell and transporters clearly didn’t work, otherwise the hostages would have been beamed to safety a long time ago.

The sting of embarrassment of being caught off-guard by Slade still nagging at his pride he was determined not to make the same mistake again. So he sacrificed expediency for caution as he moved slowly through the maintenance labyrinth, trying to find the roof exit.

He swept each intersecting corridor carefully, always keeping his gun in front of him, ready to fire without a moment’s notice.

A steady draft alerted him to the right direction. Soon after he found the lift and an open access door to the roof. He listened closely and was sure he could hear gentle sobs somewhere beyond the door, nearly drowned out by the sound of clunky equipment bouncing in the wind.

He approached quietly and pushed his back against the wall next to the roof access. Tank spied around the corner and saw a heavily armed man standing with his back to him, guarding the door. Just a few meter beyond cowered four of the hostages, two men and two women. They had some cuts and bruises but nothing serious. Some may have tried to put up a fight.

He could see no other terrorists but that most certainly didn’t mean that there weren’t more of them around. He chastised himself for not having asked Jack “ or Oshii, or whatever “ how many terrorists exactly had boarded the elevator.

Tank decided to strike. The opportunity was not perfect but if he waited too long he would run the risk of one of his opponents coming up from behind him.

He secured his gun and slipped behind the man guarding the roof access and used his huge arm to put him into a choke hold. If he cut the man’s air supply off for a few seconds it would be enough to render him unconscious. A tactic Tank was very familiar with and had plenty of practice with.

It didn’t work.

The man struggled wordlessly and refused to go down. Tank was getting annoyed. He let the man go, ripped the rifle out of his hand and smashed him across the face with it. He felt backwards, against the wall and sagged down to the floor.

Satisfied Tank went into a crouch and slowly back paddled into the door frame. The knocked out terrorist lay motionless at his side. He didn’t give him another look. Instead he fumbled for the power cell of what looked like a plasma rifle, removed it and placed the weapon on the ground while slipping the energy cell into a pocket. Then he reached for his Seburo again and slowly took in his surroundings.

The hostages had spotted him now and some of them were beginning to stand, surprised by the appearance of their savior and prompted into movement by their own fear.

Tank motioned them to stop and stay where they were. They complied hesitantly.

The MSD officer pointed at the incapacitated man at his side.

One of the hostages seemed to understand. He held up two fingers.

Tank nodded and then forked his own fingers and pointed towards his eyes.

The man shook his head, he didn’t know where the other terrorist was.

Wherever he was hiding, Tank knew that it was very likely he had heard him take out his friend. His subtle approach in taking out his opponent had not worked and the second attempt had been a lot nosier. But Tank had no choice, he had to get into the open and get those hostages out of there.

He stepped out slowly, keeping his gun trained on the many empty and concealed spaces on the large roof were somebody could be hiding. There were a number of maintenance buildings, environmental and power units as well as a dozen spires, reaching further into the skies. Stairs led down onto lower levels of the roof and one staircase led up to a shuttle landing platform.

“Ok, we’re going to get you out of here,” he said quietly as he approached the hostages, his eyes constantly scanning the surroundings. “I need you to remain calm and do exactly as I ““

He saw the sudden glimmer of bright angry energy a split second too late. He tried to push himself to the ground but the plasma burst still struck his right arm.

The hostages screamed.

Tank didn’t. He fell painfully to the ground and the sensors which doubled as nerves in his cybernetic arm informed his brain of massive damage. Thankfully his enhancers shut off those sensors immediately before his brain could interpret those signals as agonizing pain.

“Get back, get back,” he yelled to the hostages even while he was still lying on his back in the open. “Get behind cover,” he said and indicated towards a large cooling unit which would shield them from the sniper.

They did as they were told.

Tank’s left arm was useless as half of the upper part had been ripped open, revealing the intricate and now catastrophically damaged circuitry. But his left arm, the one which he used to fire his gun was undamaged. He lifted it and fired a few rounds into the general direction of the sniper.

He had taken position on top of the landing platform but Tank’s heads-up display was unable to locate him. Still the shots were enough to keep him from firing a second time while Tank threw himself behind a thick utility pipe for cover.

The second blast came quicker than he had anticipated and ripped a large hole into the pipe, releasing a stream of superheated gas. Tank fired again, the thick white gas helping to mask him, but again his target kept out of sight.

The gas was beginning to heat the air around him and Tank had to move. He did so quickly, running alongside the pipe until he was out of the sniper’s viewing angle. He leaped onto a ledge halfway up the back of a maintenance shed and then pushed himself off to jump even higher.

The platform came back into view and he noticed the thick pipe running alongside it. He fired where he believed the sniper was hiding even while he glided through the air. The gas and the duranium bullets didn’t mix well and the resulting explosion forced the sniper away from her hiding spot and into the open.

Tank landed on his feet, his heads-up display now locked in on his exposed target. He fired two rounds which were dead on target. The woman sniper refused to go down, instead she was pushed backwards by the force of the impact.

He had no time to wonder why the bullets hadn’t downed the woman. She was bringing her plasma rifle up to fire at the equally exposed Tank. He doubted that he could survive taking a hit square into his chest.

So he fired again, three, four, five times, pushing her backwards still. The sixth bullet put her over the edge of the platform and she fell. Tank noticed she didn’t scream, not even when she hit a ledge head first. She bounced slightly and then fell further and onto a lower roof level some twenty meters below.

Tank had to assume she was dead.

He had no time to confirm the kill. A high-pitched scream made him turn his head. A third terrorist had appeared where the hostages had been hiding.

Tank cursed himself. He had misinterpreted the signal earlier. The man had meant to say that there were two more terrorists not two in total as he had assumed.

The man who looked surprisingly similar to the first terrorist he had taken down had reached for the hostage who had signaled him earlier and was pushing him towards the edge of the roof. The other hostages had wisely moved away, nobody quite bold enough to attempt and save their colleague.

Tank dropped from the shed he stood on and landed in a crouch on the floor, his gun always leveled at the terrorist. He did not have a clear shot however. The hostage was being used as an effective shield.

“Let him go. The game’s over, your two pals are out cold,” said Tank but held little hope that his words would yield results. These terrorists were surprisingly disciplined.

“Please, help me,” the man whimpered.

Tank slowly approached the duo even while they continued backwards and towards the edge of the roof. “Let him go,” Tank repeated.

But the terrorist didn’t talk. He didn’t say anything, wasn’t even bargaining as Tank had expected. He hadn’t asked for him to stop or even to lower his weapon.

Tank realized that this guy had no interest in self-preservation. He was going to carry out the one and only objective he had.

Tank moved in. “Get down,” he shouted at the scared man.

But before the hostage could even think of complying he was flung aside.

Tank fired two bullets into the terrorist’s head the moment he had revealed himself. The man went down into a heap but not before the hostage had been tossed into the air and towards the ledge.

Tank jumped, willing his legs to push him further and higher than they had ever been designed to. Both of them went over the edge and landed on a flat, steeply slanted glass surface and slid downwards. Tank let go of his gun and reached out with his good arm. His heavier body sliding along faster than that of the man he was trying to save. Another second or two and he would be able to hold on to him.

There were mere inches between them now.

And then another thought pushed into his mind. He had only one working arm and he needed it to hold on to the hostage. How would he stop from sliding over the edge? There was no purchase to be had anywhere.

He decided to worry about that after he had his man.

He reached out once more, straining his arm as far as it would go and grabbed hold of his jacket. He tried to bring him closer by pulling his arm back when the fabric of the jacket tore and he was left with nothing but a few shreds of clothing.

The glass roof gave away abruptly and the man went over.

With uninhibited anger at his own failure Tank smashed his fist into the glass, inadvertently also saving his own life as his hand found a frame and held on, stopping his forward momentum inches from the ledge.

The agonizing scream of the man falling to his death was a sound Tank would not soon forget.


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