TIME-CHASE by Bobby Asghar : Chapter 1

TIME-CHASE
TRACKER BOOK 1
BOBBY ASGHAR

Copyright © 2015 Bobby Asghar
www.bobbyasghar.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the author, except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,
events and incidents are either the products of the author’s
imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely
coincidental.
Angelic Press
ISBN: 1-52-087191-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-52-087191-2

DEDICATION
First and foremost for Angelina.

CONTENTS
1 BREACH 1
2 STRYKER 21
3 SAFE HOUSE 51
4 RIPPLES 60
5 DEFIANCE 78
6 FRACTURES 101
7 CARRIE 124
8 UNHAPPY NEW YEAR 140
9 DECEIT 159
10 DIAZ 175
11 VALEDICTION 190
12 SAVAGES 212
13 ASSASSINS 240
14 THE GATHERING 271

1
BREACH
A hand sweeping canvas—the sound of the surveillance
control room door sliding open—made the enforcer
twist in his seat to look back. Access to the SCR was
highly restricted and he hadn’t received any notification
of visitation. All the more surprised to find no one
stood in the doorway, he turned to the console,
checked the cam feeds. The hallway on the other side
of the door was clear, as were the adjacent passages.
The enforcer frowned: if it was a malfunction he’d have
to bypass the circuitry to close the door, and he’d have
to call it in—he should call it in either way.
He rose up from his chair, oblivious to the
surveillance room’s own feed showing him still seated
at the console. He turned about, was about to patch a
call through to Fuern command via his com-link when
something dense and metallic slapped the floor ahead
of him. Drawing his gun was a reflex action, and futile:
it wasn’t going to make a shred of difference against a
heat-seeker; neither would the medals he’d won nor the
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scars he’d suffered in gaining them. Face pale and
stretched with the absolute certainty of it, he pictured
his wife and son before crashing back against the
console, riddled by the heat-seeker’s muted discharge.
He was dead before his scorched and bloodied face
slapped against the white tiled floor.
A hooded figure pulled in through the open
doorway, her gun raised at the fallen enforcer. Clad in
white from head to toe, a grilled mask over her mouth
and nose, she scanned the room through the smoky
haze. Her eyes—her only visible feature—were piecing
sapphires set in snow on a misty morning. They were
frosty with it, and insensate to the sight of the still
smoking corpse.
The enforcer neutralised, she slapped her gun to her
thigh grip and marched towards the console, retrieving
the heat-seeker on the way. She slipped it into the
pouch strapped to her chest as the door slid shut
behind her. Nonchalantly kicking the dead enforcer’s
legs aside, she pulled up over the console. She set the
chameleon she’d used to loop the visual feeds down on
top of it, and the surveillance disrupter transmuted
from the white of her glove to the slate grey of the
workstation. She tapped at the console screen.
“Blue, status,” a man said through the plug at her
ear, his designation the brown of his own eyes.
“In position,” she said, her voice distorting to a
mono tone rumble as it morphed through her mask.
She accessed the local surveillance network, pressed a
data card onto the input scanner and said, “Uploading
now.”
She shook the stiffness from her legs while she
waited. The Fuern complex was a multi-story tower
both above and below the ground, and the climb down
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the ventilation shaft to the ninth underground level was
a cakewalk compared to the cramped eight hours she’d
spent holed up inside it with her two companions.
Policed by thermal sensors—which were easily
duped—the shaft was their only way in, bringing them
to within a stone’s throw of the SCR. Then they’d
waited for the active personnel count to drop to a
skeleton crew before activating the chameleon and
dropping into the hall. The chameleon’s range was
short and indiscriminate, but good enough to loop the
feeds in and outside the surveillance control room, as
was its purpose: once inside the SCR she could
manipulate the surveillance network with the finesse of
a surgeon
She pulled up the complex’s security schematics.
Spreading her fingers at the screen, she zoomed in on
her location. Then she tapped for the vis-scan feed of
the next passage along.
“On line,” she said.
“Check,” brown eyes said, beads of sweat dripping
down past tense eyes the colour of teak, speckled and
rimmed in black.
His white tactical attire matched the woman’s own,
down to the grilled mask over his mouth and nose. Gun
in one gloved hand and a black ball in the other, he
crouched down to squat by the base of the wall at the
end of the passageway. He pressed the button on the
side of the ball and it washed from black to white.
“On your mark,” brown eyes said.
“Go,” the woman said.
Brown eyes rolled the ball slowly around the corner
into the next passageway.
Small and cloaked by colour, the ball was barely
visible on the surveillance screen, and the woman
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BOBBY ASGHAR
would have missed it if she hadn’t been expecting it.
She initiated a programmed loop from the console and
the ball vanished from sight.
“Localised disruption effective,” she said.
She tapped the side of her mask and a small visor
slid up over her left eye. Tapping the bracelet at her
wrist, she brought the surveillance feed up on the visor,
and she secured the link via the console screen. Then
she locked the input terminal with an encrypted code.
“Mobile link secured,” she said, tapping the SCR
console screen clear.
She snatched the security pass from the dead
enforcer’s chest, glanced at it on her way to the door;
she didn’t recognise the name. She ran the pass over the
lock’s sensor, the door slid open, and she passed
through to the hallway. A black eyed giant was stood
waiting for her, clad likewise, his raised gun covering
the hallway to her right. Brown eyes was stood a
distance to her left, his focus on the passage beyond the
corner.
The woman turned about as the door slid shut. She
scrambled the lock with another card, then tested it
with the enforcer’s pass. Satisfied with the result, she
took a step back towards the giant, pulling a white plate
from her pouch.
“Set,” she said quietly, gripping the plate with both
hands.
Brown eyes turned to cover them and said, “Go.”
The giant holstered his gun. Then he wrapped his
meaty hands around the woman’s waist and lifted her
off the floor.
The woman pressed the plate to the ceiling.
“Secure,” she said.
The giant set her back down. Then they drew their
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guns and joined brown eyes at the corner.
“Vis-scan,” brown eyes said to the woman.
She read the next passage’s surveillance on her visor;
the live feeds were clear of personnel and the video
loops were active. “Good to go,” she said.
Taking point, brown eyes turned the corner, and he
swept along the passage, picking up the white ball on
his way. The giant kept pace close behind him. The
woman turned to look back at the camera mounted on
the far wall, beyond the SCR. She tapped at her
bracelet; a red light lit up beneath the camera. She
tapped again and the red light started blinking. Then
she turned the corner, deactivating the previous
passageway’s surveillance loop and restoring the live
feeds via her bracelet as she raced after her
companions.
Their bleached garb merged with the ivory of the
walls and tiling, augmenting their stealth beneath the
incandescent glare of the hallway lighting. The woman
set between them, brown eyes led while the black eyed
giant brought up the rear, ever vigilant of the passage
behind. Stopping at an intersection, they crouched low.
Brown eyes turned to the woman as she tapped at her
wrist.
Reading the live feed on her visor, she raised a
clenched fist: two blue uniforms and a white coat
barred their path, halfway down the next corridor.
Squat at the corner with gun in hand, brown eyes
waited, his tension governed, his view fixed to the
glacial calm of the woman’s eyes. The giant, by contrast,
was restless, looking along the passage behind, scouring
the closed doors, his gun raised to them.
The technician stopped at a door, drew out his
security pass, the two enforcers pulling up behind him.
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He paused shy of the sensor on the wall, turned about
and said something, which made one of the blue suits
laugh out loud. The technician turned back to the door
and swept his pass over the sensor. The door slid open,
the three men stepped through, and the door slid shut
behind them.
The passage finally clear, the woman looped the
surveillance feeds. Then she raised her thumb to brown
eyes, and they swept around the corner.
Even with premeditated stealth and contrived cover
there was only so far they would get undetected: stories
deep in a veritable ant’s nest, their eventual discovery
was inevitable. The deeper into the complex they
ventured, the higher the odds stacked against their
lasting concealment. Then their dice finally crapped out:
a door opened up and a blue uniform booming laughter
stepped out into the passageway ahead of them. With
only the colour of their garb to hide them, they froze
rigid.
The enforcer’s mirth tapered abruptly, the hairs of
his neck rising to the white shadows in the corner of his
eye. He reached for his gun but was fated never to
reach it: his transitory hesitation was all the edge the
intruders needed. The passageway pulsed with rapid
muzzle flare as muted gunfire burst out at the enforcer,
turning the walls from sanitary to opposing canvases of
abstract red splatter. He fell back between them,
crashed to the floor sputtering blood, his gun still
holstered at his side.
The three intruders scattered to the side walls,
crouched low as the alarm sounded and the passageway
dimmed. Eyes tense beneath a blinking wash of red,
their ears rang to the periodic wail; their window of
opportunity had been cut short.
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Blue eyes tapped a button on the side of her mask
and her ensemble morphed to black. Her companions
followed suit, their colouration transmuting to match
her own as she covered the open doorway with her gun.
Whoever was in the room had triggered the alarm. She
pointed at brown eyes, swept her hand towards her
face, and then tapped at her head. Brown eyes nodded,
and he crossed in front to cover her. She traced the
room’s vis-scan feed, pulled it onto her visor, saw two
uniforms—a man and a woman—crouching down on
the other side of the doorway. She pointed her thumb
down, then raised two fingers and motioned her hand
around the doorframe. Keeping the feed online she
raised her gun, one frigid eye on the two uniforms as
they shuffled closer to the doorway, the other glaring
through flashing red at the edge of the frame. She
waited for the female enforcer’s gun arm to pull out
past the frame. Then she opened fire, and her
companions’ firepower added to her own.
The enforcer cried out as she twisted, her fingers
stretched by high current, her gun spinning free. She
slammed into her partner’s chest, a raw gorge running
along her upper arm.
“Lopez!” he said.
“I’m good, Cage,” she stuttered, pressing her hand
to the wound, blood oozing out between her trembling
fingers.
Cage fired into the hall, more to keep the wolves
from the door, and concrete chips and splintered wood
showered him for his efforts. Though outgunned and
pinned down, he only needed to hold them off until
backup arrived.
“Take cover,” Cage said, flinching to gunfire and
shrapnel.
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The notion of shelter was a non-starter to Lopez:
there was nowhere to hide. The only way in or out was
through the door, and Cage wasn’t going to hold them
off for long. Her right arm was useless. She was good
enough with her left, but her gun was out in the hall.
“Need a gun,” she said, thinking out loud.
Cage looked into sea blue eyes which burned with
both suffering and enmity, and were streaked with
reflected lightning as gunfire tore in through the
doorway. He shook his head: he didn’t have a spare.
Lopez twisted away, scanned the room for an
answer. She glanced down at her own red trail. Then
her eyes stretched wide as a heat-seeker slid in through
the blood.
“Cage!” she cried out, twisting back, and she threw
herself at her partner as the heat-seeker detonated.
A dire sense of urgency dragged Cage back to harsh
reality, and his pain shook him. He couldn’t see from
his burning left eye, but he could feel it run wet across
his skin. His right was hazy, swirling smoke, his partner
on top of him, her head on his chest.
“Lopez,” he said, sputtering blood.
She didn’t reply.
“Lopez!” He strained to reach for her with his one
good arm.
Her eyes were open, her head and back matted with
blood. Though she’d sacrificed her own life to shield
him from the discharge, she’d died in vain: the heatseeker
had done more than enough to incapacitate him.
His left arm and side were riddled, as were both of his
both legs, he was blind in one eye, and was pinned
beneath her limp weight.
His gun was a blur to his right, on the floor, too far
to reach. Clawing at the slick red tiles, he tried to
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TIME-CHASE
wriggle free, to squirm closer to his gun. Groaning,
twisting beneath his dead partner, he pushed sideways
at her shoulder, shifting her weight. Finally sliding her
off, he stretched right, reached for his gun, as a dark
giant stepped in through the open doorway. Cage’s
blood wet fingers brushed the base of his gun grip, the
intruder’s shadow sweeping over him. Then a heavy
boot pressed down against his hand, pinning it to the
floor.
“Still alive,” the giant said, his mockery evident even
through the distortion. The enforcer shuddered,
sprayed spittle as the big man’s boot ground harder, but
he wouldn’t cry out. The enforcer’s resilience gave the
giant pause for thought. He glanced at the dead woman,
then back at the man underfoot. Keeping his weight on
the enforcer’s fingers, he crouched down to squat and
snatched the security pass from his chest. The black of
his eyes swelled at the sight of the Search and Destroy
insignia on the enforcer’s pass.
“Trackers,” he said, his rancour fuelled. He crushed
the security pass in his hand, and then dropped it into
the spreading red pool on the floor.
Drawing at his own animus, Cage clenched his left
fist.
“Time,” brown eyes said over the com.
The enforcer lashed out, but the giant saw it
coming—the swing was weak and flailing—he caught
the enforcer’s wrist, held it firm. The enforcer wouldn’t
have been a match at his best, much less debilitated.
Still, it might have been fun.
“Look at you, all broken and busted,” the giant said,
grinding his boot harder. “You ain’t all that . . . less
without a gun hand.”
Finally yielding to his pain, the enforcer cried out.
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The giant pulled closer to him and said, “See—
trackers ain’t so tough.”
Cage spat at him.
“Now!” brown eyes said.
The giant wiped the spittle from his face. Glowering,
he pressed his gun barrel to the enforcer’s one good
eye, smothering him in darkness, and said, “Time’s up,
tracker.”
“Go to hell!”
“You first.”
The enforcer roared.
The giant silenced him with a muted clap of thunder,
spraying blood and bone across the floor.
“Chase me now, bitch,” the giant said, rising up.
Then he turned and ran out after the others.
Though they’d reached farther unseen than brown
eyes had expected, they were far from done. The brunt
of the security forces—nine floors up at ground level—
would no doubt have realised that the surveillance
network was compromised. Before long they would
have company. He took brief consolation in the
knowledge that there would be no more surprises
hidden behind passage doors: with the alert raised,
every room on the level was on lock down.
“Readings,” he said.
“Tracing emissions,” the woman said, tapping at her
bracelet, navigating through the maze in her visor. Even
through the distortion her voice was markedly frigid
and smacked of composure. “Close,” she said, and she
nodded her head right at the intersection ahead.
“Kill the vis scan,” the giant said, all too aware that
the active visual surveillance was restricting their pace.
He felt like a rat in a maze, and the screaming alert only
further elevated his already heightened tension.
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Watching over his shoulder was beneath him: he was
straight fight, not cloak-and-dagger; he hedged bets
with brawn and backed them with ruthlessness.
“Not yet,” brown eyes said: he needed surveillance
feeds active. “Take point,” he said to the woman.
The woman nodded. She looped the next passage’s
feed. Then she turned into it, and the two men
followed behind her.
Blast-proof security doors barred their passage into
the next hallway.
“Last set,” the woman said, swiping a card over its
sensor. The panel’s lamp glowed red and the doors held
fast. She swiped again, got more of the same.
“The enforcer’s card,” the giant said, breathless.
She knew it wouldn’t work, but she tried it anyway.
“Codes have changed,” she said.
It hadn’t come as a complete surprise to brown eyes;
he’d allocated a window for it, and tech was the reason
the woman was with them.
“Hack it,” he said. Then he turned to the giant and
said, “Cover the passage.”
The woman levered the face-plate off the sensor
panel with her knife. Then she clipped a wired feed
from her bracelet to the sensor’s exposed circuitry.
Reading the feed on her visor, she worked on bypassing
the lock’s security protocols. An icon flashed in the top
corner of the screen. She dragged the symbol down,
splitting the display in two, giving her a view of the
hallway outside the surveillance control room; a security
team was closing in on the door.
“They’re at the SCR,” she said.
The giant jerked his head to look back down the
hall.
“You know what to do,” brown eyes said to the
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woman.
She nodded at him.
“Do it! Kill vis-scan. Keep this door open.” He
turned to the giant and said, “With me.” The two men
ran back along the passageway.
The woman watched the enforcers gather outside
the surveillance control room. Though she’d scrambled
the door’s lock, their getting through it was only a
matter of time, which was why she’d placed the
explosive plate on the ceiling. Tapping at her bracelet
she remotely detonated the charge, and the screen flash
white, then to grey speckled snow, the walls about her
shuddering to the force of the blast. She swiped and
tapped to unpack the virus she’d implanted within the
surveillance network. A moment later the vis-scan feed
on her visor flashed to white noise. Then she swiped
back to continue working on the door.
“Report,” brown eyes said, buzzing in her ear.
“Security neutralised, surveillance down,” she said.
“The doors?”
“Close.”
She typed in a final coded sequence; the circuitry
clicked, the panel flashed green, the bolts drew back,
and the blast-doors parted. She tugged the wired feed
free of her bracelet, and she squeezed between the
doors as they opened up.
“I’m through,” she said, drawing her gun.
Slowing to a halt before the next intersection, she
pressed her gun to her thigh grip. She crouched low
and pushed a probe left beyond the wall’s edge, rolled it
between her fingers for a better view through the
flashing red. She saw the door at the far end of the
passage, and the recessed array of sensory filamentcannons
along the top of both walls. A single hit from
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TIME-CHASE
one would hurt like hell; a hallway full of them was a
kill zone.
The tiny black barrels targeted movement
autonomously, collectively forming a virtually
impregnable battery: a lone intruder targeting one
would fall to the rest, and an assault force would hit a
few but wouldn’t make it halfway down the hall.
Recessed as the cannons were, even an explosive blast
would fall far short of taking them all out. Their
offensive security was superlative, but the device she’d
had specifically designed to deal with the threat wasn’t
run of the mill either. Fighting fire with fire, it was
covered with micro-filament cannons of its own, far
smaller than those which lined the passage, but
sufficient for the task. She called it the RATT: remotely
activated, its design was to trace oncoming fire and
track it to its source. Once targeting lock was acquired,
it would drop its shielding and fire a pulse at each of
the cannons. She set the RATT down on the floor and
controlled it via her bracelet and visor.
A translucent dome spread over the RATT as it
drove forward. Turning into the passageway, it was set
upon by a hail of fire. Its lustrous shielding sparked its
resistance to the intense bombardment as the RATT
trundled deep into the kill-zone. Stopping halfway
down the hall, it signalled target lock, and then the
RATT erupted.
The woman cautiously stepped along the passageway
towards the blistered remains of the RATT, searching
through the flashing haze for sight of an intact probe. A
flash burst out, and she twisted to the impact at her left
shoulder, her own fire blowing the last of the cannons
out of the wall before it could get off a second shot.
Though she seethed as she rolled her shoulder at the
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sting beneath her protective vest, the RATT had done
better than she’d expected.
“Countermeasures neutralised,” she said, into her
com link.
She marched towards the reinforced security door at
the end of the passageway. The knowledge that they’d
be waiting for her on the other side didn’t faze her. She
was ready for them, her path preordained from the
outset, her faith in both herself divine providence
unequivocal. The door was more steppingstone than
barrier, as was that which lay beyond it: once through
and in sight of her preliminary objective, she’d be that
much closer to true gratification.
“At gateway and holding,” she said, stopping at the
door.
Crouching low by the wall, his gun raised through
flashing red, brown eyes waited for the giant to return:
he ran off to plant a sensor-grenade around the corner
at the far end of the passageway. He caught sight of the
big man on his way back as the woman’s voice buzzed
in his ear, saying she was in position at the gateway;
they needed to get back to her. He set another sensorgrenade
down on the floor at the base of the wall, and
he waited for the giant to come up alongside him
before activating it. A red light on the side of the
explosive shell started flashing its countdown. Then the
two men ran back to join the woman. The small bomb
sat inconspicuous in the dim, intermittent wash of the
alert, as the red light on its side blinked out for the final
time.
When the two men joined up with her, the woman
was still working on the door’s lock.
A distant blast shook the hallway.
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“That’s one,” the giant said, breathless.
“The code’s—” started brown eyes.
“Changed,” the woman said, finishing for him.
“Blow it,” the giant said, anxious. He twisted to look
back through the haze.
“No,” brown eyes said. The door wasn’t nearly as
hefty as the blast-proof doors of the previous
passageway but it was tough enough: the charge needed
to take it out would likely take out what was behind it,
sealing their fate.
“Almost there,” the woman said.
“Blow it,” the giant said again.
“No!” brown eyes said, scolding the big man.
The giant turned on him, his black eyes brimming
with contempt.
A second explosion rang out, shattering the tension
between them.
“Out of time,” brown eyes said, tense. “Keep them
back,” he told the giant, pointing him to the far end of
the passageway.
The giant glared at brown eyes, airing his resentment
before running off.
“We need in now,” brown eyes told the woman.
“Almost there,” the woman said again, “but once
open I won’t have time to close it.”
Brown eyes had already guessed as much. “Keep it
tight and we won’t need to,” he told her.
Still frowning beneath his hood, the giant peered
through the blinking wash of the red alert, dust and
smoke rising up to further dim the distance ahead of
him. He crouched low, gun aimed at the heart of the
thickening cloud.
“Come get some,” he whispered, the uneasy silence
stretching on.
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A distant groan breached and faded. Then he heard
movement, and he edged back to the corner, pulling a
sensor grenade from his belt. “We got company,” he
whispered into his com-link. He activated the grenade
and bowled it underarm along the passageway before
running back to re-join his companions.
The grenade skipped across the floor and rolled
deep into the dusty gloom. It trundled to a stop, and
then the red light on its side blinked out.
“I’m in,” the woman said.
“They’re on us,” the giant said breathlessly, coming
to a halt beside the woman.
“How long?” brown eyes asked the giant.
“You’ll hear,” the giant said, turning to cover their
rear.
An explosion rang out, its close proximity shaking
debris down about them.
“Blinders,” brown eyes said, pulling two stungrenades
from his belt as he moved left of the door. He
tossed one to the woman. “Set for a three count,” he
said, letting the others know the burst duration. “On
my mark.”
The women drew right and pressed her back to the
wall. The giant pulled in beside her. Brown eyes slid low
and the woman mirrored him.
“Go,” brown eyes said.
The woman tapped at her bracelet, the door slid
open, and they tossed the blinders in low, as a furious
barrage of gunfire ripped out above them. They twisted
away shielding their eyes, and the blinders erupted with
such ferocity that they flashed the length of the
passageway white. The light blinked out and the
intruders stormed the room firing at the four stumbling
shadows within. Hapless, hands pressed to scorched
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eyes, they were ruthlessly mowed down, their execution
merciless but for extinguishing their suffering.
Batting her eyes at the dim light, the woman scanned
the laboratory for further sign of movement. Finding
none, she unclipped her pouch, and she tossed it to the
giant as she ran to the island console. A self-destruct
warning flashed across its screen, but it hadn’t been
finalised: whoever initiated it hadn’t input the final
digits of the activation sequence.
“Where?” the giant said, anxiously scouring the vast
room, unsure as to what to look for.
“In there,” brown eyes said, pointing at the steelwalled
cabinet on the left wall beyond the console.
The giant ran over to. He wrenched its doors open,
and his tense eyes softened at the sight of the metallic
bracelets lining the top shelf. They weren’t his prize:
just the means to his end, but they brought him that
much closer to it. He plucked one off its mount.
“We’re good,” he said, clipping the bracelet to his
wrist.
He tossed one to the woman, then another to brown
eyes.
Brown eyes snatched the bracelet in flight. He
clipped it around his wrist as he pulled away from the
console. “Time to go,” he said, nodding his head at the
white-walled cubicle in the middle of the lab.
The giant skipped over to the chamber and tapped
the panel by the side of the door. It didn’t open. “No
good,” he said, antsy, looking at the woman.
“I’m on it,” she said. The console’s architecture was
heavily encrypted; breaching it was taking longer than
she’d anticipated.
Brown eyes turned to the door, raised his gun: he
thought he heard movement in the passage. “Cutting it
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fine,” he said, glancing at the woman.
He’d known from the start that once in, there would
be only one way out, and that it would be tight. For a
man of his profession risk was par for the course, and a
modicum of leeway allowed for room to manoeuvre,
but on this undertaking he’d been allowed none at all.
Though a paragon of self-reliance and accustomed to
working alone, he’d infiltrated the facility as one of a
trinity. First because he’d been instructed to, secondly
because it was the only way he would see the mission
through. Now finally in the lab, he was so close to
fulfilling his primary parameters that he could taste it,
but it was down to the woman now: his life, and the
mission’s success, dangled from the tips her fingers.
“This better fuckin’ work,” the giant said.
“She’s good,” brown eyes said, snapping back at
him.
“They’re coming,” the giant said, glaring into the
dim haze beyond the doorway.
“Now,” the woman said.
The giant tapped the sensor and the door slid open.
The giant stepped in.
Brown eyes ran to the cubicle and stopped at the
door to look back at the woman. “Hurry,” he said,
tense, glancing at the doorway: there would be no way
to suppress the force which was closing in on them.
“Programming to erase after activation,” the woman
said, ears pricked to the dull clatter in the passageway.
“Energising in three.” She pulled to the side of the
console, stretched her hand to the screen, as the two
men gripped the edge of the cubicle door to bar it from
closing.
“Now!” brown eyes said.
She tapped at the screen and sprinted to the cubicle,
18

TIME-CHASE
gunfire erupting from deep within the passageway. It
tore past her front and back, close enough for her to
hear it scorch the air. She launched off her feet, collided
with brown eyes, and they fell together, the door
clipping her heel as it rammed shut.
Giving neither pause nor quarter, the strike force
stormed the laboratory, guns blazing. The barrage
hammered at the heavy plating of the cubicle walls,
broke through, and tore on to burst out of the cubicles
far side.
The commander called for a ceasefire, his tension
swelling to his scepticism. The intruders had a nine
level head start, and he’d been blind without adequate
surveillance. He signalled troopers to advance on the
cubicle, and the battered cubicle door groaned its
resistance to being levered open. The commander
edged forward, his gun piercing the dense smoke within
as he hoped against hope—the potential consequences
of a successful portal breach didn’t bear thinking
about—but to no avail: the intruders were gone.
The commander turned about to look at the island
console. It held the data Temporal would need to track
the perpetrators down. He paused, frowning curiously
at the red glimmer in the haze above the console. He
stepped closer, and the smoke parted to show the red
lights of the three sensor-grenades blink out for the last
time.
19

BOBBY ASGHAR
SECT: TRACKER BOOK 2
THE ETERNAL
AYE
VERSE
Angelic Press
20