Shadow Ops 3: Breach Zone Read Free Page A

emotion. The die was cast. It was no time to go soft. ‘I’m heading up.’
    Naeem shrank behind the counter, uselessly punching those same three digits over and over.
    She headed to the elevator bank. A single car occupied the end closest to the counter. It only serviced one floor: the penthouse, where Scylla had lived before magic changed everything. She pressed the single, stainless-steel button.
    The doors didn’t open.
    She turned slowly toward him. The goblins surrounded the counter. One slapped a javelin down on the reflective surface and struggled to scramble up the smooth front with little success. Scylla guessed it might have been comical under other circumstances, but Naeem only stared at the javelin, face slack with horror. The creature finally rolled up on one elbow and mantled up onto the counter. It snatched up the weapon, jabbing it at the doorman’s throat. Naeem screamed and backed into the corner, pleading in his native Urdu.
    This wasn’t the time for sentiment. She was a war leader now. But Naeem had served her faithfully all the years she’d lived here. He’d delivered her packages, taken her messages, made sure to send her holiday greetings for occasions counter to his own faith. He had, in his way, cared for her. He didn’t deserve to be harmed.
    But she hadn’t won the goblin Defender tribes to her banner by promising mercy. They wanted revenge on humanity, and they would have it. She knew no single life was worth losing the loyalty of half her army.
    She had to sacrifice a few for the good of many. She need only allow it until victory was secured, then she would turn her cheek, give the good cop control. She thought briefly of Mao’s axiom: The people are the sea, and the insurgent is the fish. So long as the sea is hospitable to the fish, you will never catch them all. First she would hurt them, then she would win them.
    The Gahe came to stand at her side, watching impassively. She suppressed a shiver. The things were damn cold. It thought-pulsed to her, pictures forming in her mind. The Gahe could speak to anyone with their thought-pictures. It was a useful trait, and had made it possible to communicate with the goblin tribes, to give them the words of inspiration needed to bring them to her banner. Revenge against the humans for FOB Frontier, that hated outpost in the Source that had brought such misery. Scylla had destroyed its perimeter, opened it wide for their plunder. Now she could complete their revenge. More importantly, she promised that with their help she could bend the humans to submission, ensure they never again set foot on goblin lands.
    Even now, the creatures poured through the breach between the planes, eager to vent their rage. Too long had they been helpless in the face of humanity’s superior technology and magical might. Now they would show the people who had built a military outpost in their backyard the other end of the spear.
    The breach was one of two in New York, rotted out of thin spots between the planes. The Gahe could sense them but only pass through singly when some lucky shift in the planar fabric permitted it.
    But they could show Scylla where the thin spots were, and her rotting magic Bound easily to anything.
    The Gahe flashed another picture in her mind. The second breach, opened out in the water off Manhattan’s tip. The other half of a pincer, closing around New York’s tender throat. She nodded, and the Gahe changed the subject to the third breach, in Mescalero, showing her an image of the dust-choked pass between red cliffs even now filling up with goblins, Gahe marching at their head. Few humans lived out in that wasteland, the least populated corner of a sparsely populated reservation. Those few ran out to the Gahe , grinning like fools, shouting greetings and wordless whoops of joy. The Apache Selfers, who worshipped the Gahe as their ‘Mountain Gods’.
    The Gahe thought-pulsed the image again. The single Mescalero breach wasn’t enough. It