Four scumbags sit in an estate car, parked up outside a secure warehouse complex in the first glimmerings of the late July dawn, waiting. I know them, or at least I know the types. Some mother’s sons, her hopes and dreams, the same sad old story of good boys become bad men thanks to the whims of an indifferent and cruel society, and the choices they made in response. I can’t sing you the songs of their lives, but I can hum the tune.

They don’t know I’m here watching them. If they could see onto the roof of that warehouse, they’d be able to see me, clad in my trademark suit of shiny black armour and matching black helmet. They’d recognise the red stripe that bisected both, running from crown to groin. And they would shout my name and run for the hills.

“Red Line!” would be the shout, and it would be a curse.

They’ve been sat here for over an hour. One window is cracked open to allow their bad breath to escape, and one of them is smoking a cigarette, the end flaring red as he pulls hard and often, flicking the ash carelessly onto the road outside. They sit, they wait, they cradle their guns, cold metal clasped in sweaty hands. Maybe the driver shifts in his seat, uneasy with the hardware around him. Maybe the man next to him is all too keen to see what this baby can do, just waiting for the opportunity to let rip. Maybe one of the lads in the back is having second thoughts about the whole damn mess, the adrenaline having long curdled into good old-fashioned fear, his thoughts dominated with images of interrogations and beatings and the brutal, tattooed lags he’ll be spending the next fifteen years with.

All four steel themselves as a van pulls up opposite, painted in the colours of the Royal Mail. Actions are checked for the last time, all as ready as the last ten times. They pull balaclavas over their faces. Inside the van are three more brutes, the supposed brains of the operation. Three lives of deep criminal experience. They aren’t alone in the van. They’ve brought along an unwilling helper, someone whose house they’ve broken into in the dead of night. Julian Horrocks. They’ve held guns to the heads of his wife and his children. They’ve sworn that they won’t hurt his family as long as he does exactly what they want. What they want is for him to let them into the cash-processing facility where he is the security manager. What they want is the five million pounds waiting there for distribution. Julian agrees, because of course he does, and now here they all are.

I know this because the Met know this, because they have a man on the inside of the gang.

Julian gets out with the leader of the gang. He’s a good boy, afraid for the life of his family, left at home under guard. Julian opens the gate, goes to chat with the men in the security office. This is not normal, they’ll be thinking. It’s barely five thirty in the morning, the boss doesn’t come here this early. Who has he got with him? The security guards aren’t armed. Julian’s new friend is, and he orders them to surrender. The guards comply. It’s not their money in the facility, their lives not worth whatever pittance they’re paid. The van drives in, and the rest of the gang dart in on foot. The guards are bound and gagged.

Julian leads the gang onwards, through a key card locked door into the facility. There are ten or so people inside, sorting the notes, running them through counters and bundlers, stacking up the bricks of cash inside a vault ready for collection. Ten of them versus seven gangsters armed with automatic weapons is not a fair fight for someone else’s money, especially when it’s insured against this exact event. The staff are gathered together, bound hand and foot, and left lying on the floor of the vault. They are no threat, they know nothing. They’ve seen nothing except the eyes of the gangsters, cold and hard.

The gang gets to work. They’re happy and laughing. There’s more cash here than they expected, lots more, a bumper haul. They drag holdalls from the back of the van, stuffing each one with bricks of cash. The van fills up fast. Too much to take. They curse at the cruelty of it, that they’ll leave so much behind, they could’ve bought Porsches with what they’ll leave behind. They push Julian into the front seat of the van, sandwiched between the driver and the leader. The other five cram into the estate car. The police band is clear, the pigs have no clue. A clean get-away. A short dash through the still slumbering streets of London, out into the countryside to the safe-house. They’ll divide the cash and be on their separate ways, laughing all the way to Cancun or Bali or wherever.

I watch it all, hovering above it as it unfolds, my Talent rendering the walls virtually transparent. A textbook raid as far as these things go.

I follow the van at a height of a kilometre as it speeds north through an industrial estate. I keep pace with them, the airspace clear, easing my way along as the van jolts and jounces over the pot holes at 60mph. The tactical radio net is buzzing, the feed from my helmet’s camera crystal clear. I wonder whether the robbers have the slightest clue that their day is about to be ruined. The driver is unaware of my presence, just as the gang were unaware of the informer in their midst, the mole who worked with the Police. The Police are following at a sensible distance, vectoring in from my data. The Met put in a request for Talented help and I am it. I am the heavy mob. I am the one they call in when there is heavy lifting to be done, when bullets whistle through the air and skulls need to be cracked. I’m the one who can fly and has super-strength.

I didn’t have anything better to do. It’ll be fun.

The one part of the plan the informant didn’t know was where the safe-house was. We are heading west now, the city limits behind us. The roads constrict down into little more than tarmacked lanes, the van winding its way between hedges. Ten minutes later, the van passes through an open gate into a disused farm, the farmhouse dilapidated and surrounded by outbuildings in ever worsening states of decay. A livestock farm, judging by the barns, left high and dry long ago by falling economic tides. The house itself is grim, smashed windows and unlit rooms. The largest barn, though, stands with its main door open, a single weak light shining out. A man walks out into the yard raising a hand in greeting. He sees the van and the estate and his hand curls into a fist pumping in celebration. The van slows, crawls into the barn. The sentry slides the door closed behind it. The estate car slides to a halt in the yard, disgorging its passengers. They make their way around the barn to a side door and head in.

I’ve swung around to the left before flying over the barn. Frontal approaches are too risky. I’m quite easy to spot against the light blue sky. I come to a halt above it, hanging in the sky. I close my eyes and extend my Sense outwards. People, Normies, sometimes ask me what it’s like to have a sixth sense, to be able to see through walls. I always answer the same way - I don’t see through walls, no light is involved. I perceive in gravity with my Talent, almost as if it were like normal sight. In truth, it’s not too dissimilar from radar. It doesn’t matter how opaque something is, it only matters how big it is, how much it distorts the space-time continuum. It appears in my mind like it were thermal vision, a heat-map of local mass concentrations, or like a wire frame model. I perceive everything larger than a few grams, spread out in three dimensions, in a radius of about fifty metres. Beyond that, everything gets imprecise and messy.

I’m glad the gang chose the barn as the base of operations. The farmhouse is solid despite the depredations of time and neglect, all stone walls and thick ceiling joists. The barn is little more than aluminium sheeting on an iron-frame, itself on a base of brick. It’s a hive of activity. The van sits between three Range Rover Discoveries as the gang unload it. They aren’t waiting for the police to turn up and they aren’t taking the time to count it here. One of their number stands watch at a window. Four of the gang are moving the money. Two of them are standing and smoking, having a chat. The eighth man is in a back room with Julian, now sat on a chair, bound and gagged. A plan of attack coalesces in my mind. The priority must be the hostage.

The brains trust meeting breaks up.

“Jase!” shouts the leader. “Need a word.”

One of the loaders sets his holdall down in the back of the Range Rover.

“What’s up, boss?” he says.

“Step outside for a mo, would ya?”

The leader waves a hand at the door. Jase opens the door and heads out. Behind him, I Sense the leader pull a big pistol, a Desert Eagle or M1911 or some such, out of its holster. Jase, being a sensorially impoverished Normie, knows nothing of this. He walks out into the yard, turns around. The Boss is standing there, gun raised.

“What’s u-” he says as the rest of the gang fan out behind the Boss, all except for the one guarding Julian. He stretches out his arms parallel to the ground, palms facing his boss in the universally understood gesture of ‘let’s all just calm down, hey?’. I sink down onto the roof, touching down light as a feather. I stay back from the edge, close enough to Sense the action precisely but not close enough to see. I’m sure poor Jase is sweating bullets, his eyes wide and darting to and fro.

“What’s up? You know what’s up, Jase. Why don’t you tell us all what’s up,” the boss purrs.

“Don’t know whatchoo mean, boss. I ain’t done nuffin.” The fear shudders up through Jase’s body and out through his voice.

The Boss clucks his tongue, a disapproving father. I know what’s coming, Jase knows what’s coming, the whole gang can see the future writ large in Jase’s blood and brains spread over the yard. And I could stop it, I could swoop down there right now, fists flying, the rounds ricocheting off my armour, the rounds of their Uzis no match for the layers of silk and Kevlar sandwiching a reactive gel. I could clear the yard of bad guys in a few frantic seconds of brutality, at no risk to myself, but for one factor. Julian would be dead a second after the first screams of pain, executed where he sits. The Police hate it when innocents turn up dead during these ops, they hate the paperwork it generates. They really hate the internal inquiry and official inquests. They’re not quite so bothered about dead arseholes killed by their own crew.

The Boss steps forward, gun levelled at Jase’s head.

“Always a joker, our Jase. Did you know I got a man inside the Sweeney, Jase? Do you know what he told me?”

Jase is shaking his head no, to go along with all the involuntary shaking his body is doing.

“He tells me there’s a rat in our outfit. He tells me who he thinks the rat likely is. Does any of this sound…familiar to you, Jase? You want to clear your conscience with your last words?”

Jase ponders his options. None of them seem attractive to me, especially since he isn’t actually the informant, who right now will be handing Julian’s family over to the Police.

“Just fucking shoot him,” one of the gang shouts.

“Fuck all of you cu-” Jase says before the back of his head explodes in a gout of blood and bone, his body flopping backwards. The Boss takes a moment to straddle his corpse and aim a gobbet of spit into his face.

“Got a job to finish, lads,” the Boss says, turning back to the barn. The gang file back in.

I open the tacnet, my voice low, my speakers deactivated.

“Update: now seven suspects plus hostage. Request ambulance. Do not approach, repeat, do not approach. Wait for the all clear.”

“Received,” the tacnet whispers into my ear. “Waiting for all clear.”

Once they’re all inside, I lift off again and drift round to the back of the barn, above the back room. I keep my Sense active, watching through the walls. I sink down, landing next to the door. The guard in here has his back to the door and window. The door is locked, made of old, weak wood, warped with time and moisture. Perfect. The guard raises a hand, stifling a yawn.

I erupt through the door, wooden chunks and splinters an aura around me. My fist snaps forward, connecting like a thunderbolt with the chin of the guard as his head snapped round at the sound of my entry. His mandible shatters and the force of my punch catapults him head-first into the opposite wall. He might be dead, who knows. I grab Julian and dart out through the smashed door. I hoist him upwards, flying above the doorway, holding position.

Silence inside and out. The gang froze at the dual sounds of Talented-on-door and then Talented-on-Normie violence. The Boss throws an arm up, points at the back room. Go check. One of the gang raises his Uzi and edges towards the inner door. He throws it open and creeps in, checking his corners. He’s been trained somewhere, only turning towards his fallen colleague when he’s satisfied.

“Jesus fuck!” he gasps. “Mike?”

The Boss steps into the room.

“He alive, Paul?” he says, before turning around. “Keep loading! Fuck’s sake, get a move on!”

Paul bends over the man, feeling for a pulse.

“Think so.” Paul moves to the shattered door. The Boss checks on Mike.

I glance over at Julian, who is clinging to me the way a drowning man clings to a life belt. He looks back at me with wide, pinned eyes. I raise a finger in front of my mask, shush. Julian nods back eagerly and screws his eyes closed.

Paul is almost exactly under me, scanning the ground behind the barn with his gun. Nothing out there but overgrown fields and neglected hedges. He takes his time, unaware I have the literal drop on him. He doesn’t come out the whole way, and he doesn’t look up. Nobody ever looks up.

“He’s alive,” says the Boss, “what the fuck, man!”

Paul backs away into the room. “Is he gonna die? We can’t leave him here! The pigs-”

“Fuck the pigs,” the Boss spits. “Got bigger problems. Got a fucking Talented out here.”

“Which one?”

“Am I Nostradamus? No clue. Top dog, probably. The bastard in the black armour. Red Line.”

“Oh fuck. What are we gonna do, Carl?”

The Boss, Carl, snorts. “Try not to die, I reckon.”

Carl goes back into the main room of the barn. Paul follows, shaking his head.

“Drop that shit and get over here! Bring your weapons!” Carl says.

The rest of the gang drop their shit and congregate around Carl. I drop back to the ground next to the smashed door, releasing Julian. He stumbles a little and looks where I point, trotting off to hide behind the thickest part of the hedge. I stay in place as Carl gives everyone the good news.

“Listen up! Listen!” he says. “Police ain’t coming. We got a bigger problem!”

“What problem is bigger than the pigs?”

“The Sweeney?”

“Sweeney are pigs, wanker!”

“Talented, lads. We got Talented problems.”

Cue four variations on the theme of cursing, a symphony of frustrated vulgarity.

“’S gotta be Red Line,” Carl says, “in which case we got two options and both of ‘em shit. We can run with what we got or we can stand and fight it out.”

“What about surrendering?” Paul says.

“Fuck that,” someone says with a laugh. “What happens if we run?”

Simple. I chase you down, flip your car, rip the roof off and pound you unconscious. Think about all that could go wrong with this plan. It’s no fun being trapped in a Range Rover rolling at fifty miles per, it being a great place to get your neck snapped or skull crushed, not to mention the odds of a negligent discharge from your Uzi. The Uniforms won’t enjoy the mess but it’ll result in arrests and arrests result in crimes solved and convictions, and even the most bleeding heart copper knows that making omelettes means breaking a few bad eggs. If I’m honest, the whole chasing thing is a bit of a faff, so I’m not a fan of this choice.

“We’re fucked if we run,” Carl says. I’m starting to warm to him, for all that he’s a murderous brigand.

“So we stay and shoot it out, yeah?”

Let’s be honest, that won’t work either. I mean, OK, if these losers were packing 20 milli cannon or some kind of anti-materiel rifle, they’d be in with a fighting chance against my armour, but then I’d feel fully entitled to hose them down with my Calicos and the Uniforms would have to pick through the blood for forensics and they hate a charnel house more than anything. It’s hard to square it away with the Chief Constable after the fact. As it stands, with these six merely armed with burp guns, I won’t even need the Calicos. I’ll just stroll into the barn, get in good and close for fisticuffs and show these lads the error of their ways. Quick and easy, home in time for breakfast.

Carl demonstrates his wisdom once again. “Still fucked, I reckon, but there’s a chance.”

There’s a moment of silence. Each of the gang is probably weighing the choices in their minds. Death or permanent disability is a real possibility here, depending on how angry or excited I get. It’s funny how within the criminal community there’s a certain cachet derived from being enough of a bad-ass that it took a Talented to bring you in. Such a strange badge of honour.

“Don’t much fancy dying today, Carl, mate,” says Paul.

“Me neither.”

“There’s a chance we shoot him down?” says a third. “What? Never ran from a fight in my life.”

“Shit, I dunno,” says the fourth. The last one shrugs.

Carl sighs.

“Right then,” he says, “better take cover.”

They shuffle into position, checking their weapons and their fields of fire, trying to cover as many angles as possible. I fly around the side of the barn. I pull my Calicos one at a time from their holsters, making sure they are loaded, the huge helical magazines snugly in place, the fire selector set to automatic, before holstering them. I reach the sliding barn door, still open just a crack. Jase lies in a puddle of his own blood not ten metres away. Unexpected anger bubbles away inside me, sharpening my senses.

My Sense tells me the gang are ready, cowering behind the thin metal of the Post Office van or the bulk of a Disco’s engine block.

“Whoever’s out there,” Carl shouts, “let’s get this done. Come and get us!”

My lips twist into a broad grin. I admire his gumption.

In answer, I grab the sliding door by its handle and heave it away, the door coming off its runners with a metallic shriek of protest. I hurl the door into the adjacent field. I strike a pose in the doorway with light streaming into the barn as six streams of bullets come racing the other way. Some of them find their target, my armour pummeled with multiple impacts, a few rounds whanging away off my mask and helmet, leaving smears of lead. I let them soak in the sight of me silhouetted against the morning sun, whole and uninjured. I let them drink in the knowledge that they can’t possibly hurt me. The incoming fire slackens and ceases and the blood pounding through my veins is calling me on to battle.

I suppose it’s sporting to give them the fuck-that option again, one last chance to surrender. I set my loudspeakers to their maximum setting.

“Throw down your weapons!” I say, the magnified voice booming off the farmhouse opposite. “Throw them down and come out one at a time, hands on head. You won’t be harmed.”

“Go fuck yourself, freak!” someone yells.

They had to make it personal, didn’t they?

“Last chance!” I say. They’ve made their decision. Some of them are reloading their guns and I’d swear one of them is praying. I give them five more seconds. “You are all under arrest!”

With my eyes closed, my gravity Sense scans the barn one last time. Two behind the Disco to the left, two behind the one on the far right, two behind the Post Office van.

I drift into the barn, into a hail of gunfire. More rounds impact my armour but for nothing, the 9mm slugs as much of a threat as a well-hit tennis ball. I approach the Post Office van first, bending down and grabbing it one-handed by the left rear wheel. I throw the van back-handed out of the barn, the bonnet of the van tearing a fresh hole in the wall of the barn, before it spins and cartwheels away, shedding bundles of cash and assorted debris.

I dart towards the Disco on the left, the one with a tow bar, ignoring the yells of confusion and sheer terror from the gangsters. I place a foot squarely on the tow bar and launch the car forward hard. The Disco picks up the two thugs cringing at its front end, ending their brief yells of shock as it carries them into and through the concrete wall behind them. Perhaps it would’ve been better to run.

I turn my attention to the two men left exposed when the van flew away. I arrow through the air over to them. One of them swings his Uzi towards me, looking for a point blank shot, but I smack it away with my left hand, my right coming through in a blow to his cheekbone. He tumbles away stunned as his partner brings his gun down with an overhead sweep aimed at my helmet. I duck under it, grabbing him by his coverall and smash him into his comrade who is trying to shake his head clear. They roll away in a bundle of groans and limbs.

A boot crashes into my chestplate. I take a half step back and look up at my assailant. It’s Paul, yelling his war cry as he brings a baseball bat round in a wild swing at my head. He can’t see how broad my smile is and I raise my left arm to intercept the bat. It shatters as I block it and Paul shudders as I unleash a fierce right-left-right combo into his torso. A left uppercut lifts him up and lays him out on his back ten feet away. He might be dead. I step over to check on him -

My helmet rings and jolts forward as a large calibre pistol shot impacts the back of it. Of course, Carl. I straighten up and sigh, the sigh emerging from the speakers more like a growl. Well played, Carl. I turn to face him and the barrel of his gun fills my vision. Turns out it is an M1911. Another round spangs off my faceplate, and another, and another, a whole magazine’s worth.

“It won’t work. It never works,” I say. “You’d think word would get around after twenty years.”

Carl is pulling the trigger on a dry magazine over and over, his eyes blazing.

“I appreciate the effort,” I say.

Carl goggles and gapes at me, dropping his gun. A rock-hard fist to the gut drops him. I pull the Disco off the bodies of his comrades. I think one of them is still breathing. I check Mike and Paul for good measure. Mike will make it at least as far as hospital, but Paul I’m not sure about. It takes me a few minutes to zip-tie the hands of the crims, drag them into the yard and pile their guns up in one pace nearby. I wait on the roof of the barn as the sirens close in, the adrenaline draining out of my system, leaving behind only the hot rush of exhilaration. My faceplate swings up and the feel of the breeze on my face is delicious, a few strands of my hair tapping against my face, the country air clean and warm. I sit and the morning sun warms me through the armour.