The Internal Guard officer wasn't entirely bluffing.
They were in a passageway on the forty-eighth basement level of the Alliance Capitol, a full two hundred meters below ground. At the end of the passage was an information control room. There were no other exits.
It was merely a subsidiary control room beneath the Capitol, one of little importance and with no structural connection to the main building. Even if an ion-salt bomb went off inside, it couldn't damage the advanced shock-absorption system buried beneath the ground. At most, it would cause a slight tremor. Even the staff on the forty-seventh level next door would probably think there had been a minor earthquake.
Of course, weapons of mass destruction were another matter. But transporting, carrying, or detonating such weapons required extremely demanding conditions. The high-tech and occult methods at their disposal had already reconstructed the movements and actions of this small band of terrorists. They could confirm that the group of fewer than a hundred included at least two or three psychics, but none were the kind of powerful experts who could take on a thousand men alone. And they certainly weren't carrying any dangerously unhinged contraband.
The security department had also identified them by now.
They were remnants of the Sons of Loha who had fled after the Ice Valley City incident. The officer didn't understand how these terrorists had infiltrated the Capitol's underground, but now that his unit had trapped them in a dead end, the rest was routine.
There had, admittedly, been a few minor complications along the way. For instance, some security robots had malfunctioned and attacked them—but they were no match for the fully armed Internal Guard. And when he'd just reported the situation to headquarters, his superiors hadn't responded right away. The generals at the