Just posture and purpose.
But the cargo’s movement shattered whatever choreography the yard was normally supposed to follow.
Orange vests streamed like ants from a kicked nest—some shouting, some reaching for radios, some lunging toward the dolly’s driver, and the smart ones?
The smart ones got the hell out of the way.
“Lung?” Royce shouted again—but it was a minotaur who answered.
“Incoming!” Ellum warned, giving the dockworkers time to flee.
He came in sideways, not head-on—shoulder to the cargo box’s side, horns low, hips driving. The truck didn’t stop, but the box skewed—off-center now, like a propeller with one bent blade.
On Ellum’s mic, I heard her—Sirena’s startled shriek, sharp and muffled.
The first sound I’d had from her in ninety-one seconds.
I measured my failure in decibels.
“Someone on the ground is calling this,” I told the agents. “Find him.”
“There’s a suit in an orange vest,” Aceon said, still running in, leaping from cargo box to cargo box. His sheer landing weight made the boxes clank despite the silencers he’d put on his hooves. “By the yacht—shouting into his watch.”
“Dick at high noon. Got it,” Lung shouted.
And I had him too. I zoomed the frame—filtered for heat, surface metals, signal signature. His watch chirped in the RF—wrong brand for dock issue, wrong firmware, custom strap.
I isolated it from a sea of noise.
Intercepted and injected.
I killed its audio mid-bark, flipped the screen to dead gray, and stole the tiny ‘hi, let me in’it used to open doors—a badge by another name.
Then I lit up the dock PA. “Aisle C, evacuate.” Crowds were organisms—easily panicked. Pinch the right nerve and they jumped. “Hydrogen sulfide alert. Repeat: hydrogen sulfide alert.”
Civilians raced away, leaving just the pit crew behind. They were all over Ellum, who swatted them away like flies. I spottedmen with broken bones. Ellum was holding nothing back—but neither were they, as even the injured ones remained inexorable.
Trapped at MSA HQ like I was, Royce was a ledger in a suit—hands flat on the table, knuckles gone white. His eyes skimmed the feeds, landed on the one that mattered, and something in him closed.
“Wetwork authorized—liability assumed,” he said, low and absolute, and I boosted the channel to make sure everyone heard it.
A second later, the dick in the suit dropped—sniped by Lung, after authorization.
But the pit crew continued to fight—and now Kelly joined the fray.
He peeled fighters off of Ellum with his free hand—one of them fastened into Ellum’s thick hide with his teeth—and Kelly’s body had to twist his head off like a tick to get it off.
“It goes without saying these fuckers are fucked,” Ellum announced, stomping the nearest men on the ground. Under any sane circumstance, they’d be screaming, crawling, running—away.
But instead they kept coming.
Orange vests, broken arms,no hesitation—zombies with batons, sweeping at his ankles even as his hooves crushed their forearms like chalk.
Lung aimed for the truck’s driver next—brains splattered out of the cockpit—but the truck didn’t slow down.
And more of theHelepolis’s crew started running out of the yacht, adding to the pit crew’s numbers.
Kelly ran forward and planted his head under the dolly like a bowling ball, wedging it in front of a set of casters like a chock, and the dolly hiccupped, ramming against his magically sturdy skull.
