Blood pooling on the hardwood flooring, he watches its progress. Four guards, decorated, head to toe in rigs, ceramic body armour, kevlar helmets, submachine guns, magazines, tasers, flashbangs, tear gas, lying dead in the lobby of the office, bits of them splattered across the wall, gone in a few seconds. Dead at the end of a suppressed shotgun, held by someone dressed like them. Now the assailant sits at the desk of the security deck and levels the shotgun at he, the technician.
‘Sit,’ says the false guard.
He sits.
‘Plug that in. Then wait for the console to come up. Good. Type what I tell you.’
He types, following the false guard’s dictation: The greatest mistake the dragon ever made was taking the last bit of gold. So it was not knights they sent but an altogether more lethal creature; people with nothing to lose.
‘Send it.’
He sends it. To where, he doesn’t know, just as he doesn’t know what the dongle he was handed has just uploaded.
Then he hears the distant clomp of footsteps. Outside, in the stairwell, dozens of heavy boots pounding their way up to the security office.
He flinches back as the false guard stands. Then, the false guard places the shotgun in his, he, the technician’s, lap. He’s so startled by the weapons presence, he doesn’t think to try and pick it up. What if this is a trick. The false guard goes over to one of the bodies, turns it aside with the side of his boot, then lies himself down in the pool of blood, where he remains motionless.
He is still staring at the false guard and his false death when the door explodes and blurred shadows come screaming into the room to see a technician with a shotgun and five dead guards at his feet.
Paddy Dobson
29th January 2021