Targeting: Pack

Their target: a man known as the Archivist. He wasn't a general or a politician. He was a whisper in the data-stacks, a ghost who carried the last uncorrupted copy of the continental water-grid schematics on a mem-stick the size of a child’s fingernail. He had gone to ground in the Sundered Quarter, a district of collapsed arcologies and acidic fogs where the old world had been scoured down to its rusting bones.

“Wasp, you have the point,” Kael murmured, the words forming as data packets. “Breathe on them.” targeting pack

“Targeting pack, new directive. Do not eliminate. Capture. The Archivist has a dead man’s switch. The schematics are rigged to self-destruct if his heart stops. We need him alive. Repeat, alive . Disable and extract.” Their target: a man known as the Archivist

“Scarab. Suppression. Non-lethal area.” Scarab-2’s 20mm cannon didn’t fire a shell. It fired a sonic projectile—a focused, concussive blast of air designed to incapacitate. The round hit the floor two meters from the Archivist. The shockwave lifted him off his feet and slammed him against the far wall. He slid down, unconscious but breathing. He had gone to ground in the Sundered

The mission was simple. The pack would penetrate the exclusion zone, locate the Archivist’s bio-signature, and eliminate him before he could sell the schematics to the Carthaginian Collective. A single 9mm round from Peaseblossom’s integral railgun would do it. Clean. Quiet. Deniable.

He wasn’t fast enough.

“Firefly, repurpose. Do not deploy flash-bang. Detach one of your demo-limbs. Set it to minimum yield. We’re talking a firecracker, not a bomb. Cicada, you have the tethers. Hornet, prepare to scream on all EM frequencies the second I give the word.”