Six soldiers had been enough to subdue the entire office. Jen was still trying to figure it out. Twenty-seven personnel hadn’t been enough. She was glad that her sister Judy had taken the day off. Jen kind of doubted that Judy’s presence as the twenty-eighth guard would have done anything.

The white-and-green walls of her third floor window office had frosted glass walls, but she could still see them all moving just outside. Jen wasn’t privy to the initial attack - two of them coming in the fourth-floor skylight while the rest entered via the cargo entrance - but she’d heard, and she had run right away.
Her managerial suite had provided her with constant updates as every grueling moment of the attack had dragged on. Jen felt a perverse joy that it had gone so swiftly.
Messages flooded her computer. Displays on the glass of her walls described security breaches in physical and digital spaces. Images showed guards squirming on the ground, tied to chairs, taped up and thrown in lockers. Those had only been the cameras that still worked.
Jen racked her brain, crouching below her ultramodern faux-wood desk and staring at the figures through frosted panes. This had almost surely been an inside job, but no one person would have been enough. Some of the codes needed two people with insider knowledge to activate them at the same time. It seemed plausible that one employee would be disgruntled, but two? Jen thought she knew her staff better than that.

She stared at the phone on her desk, utterly useless and dark. The red light on her desktop silently thrummed, reminding her to call the information tech wageslaves to come and fix it. The last thing she’d seen from IT was an image of one tech in a thick hood squirming, mewling, and moaning into her webcam. The bound-and-gagged image of someone tightly tied to her chair had continued broadcasting until the attacking soldiers cut the network entirely.

They didn’t just know the codes. They knew the layout of the building. The last thing Jen saw before she dashed into her office and feebly locked the door was seeking out the managers.

The beeping sound of her door unlocking was utterly unsurprising, and simultaneously terrifying. She buried her head between her legs, pretending that she wasn’t there. The soldiers were not impressed, and she soon found herself dragged out from beneath her desk with callous, impersonal rigor.

The three intruders worked in utter and complete unison, as though they were three fingers from the same hand. Two held her down while a third slipped a tight PVC sack up and over her legs, then her knees, then her waist. One of the two keeping her down on the carpet zipped it up with one hand.
Once the sleepsack reached her waist, they considered her restrained enough to spend energy keeping her bound and not simply held down. Each of her hands were stuffed into internal sleeves within the sack, keeping her arms comfortably and stringently bound at her sides. She flexed her triceps inside shiny, stretchy material with no luck or hope for a quick rip or tear.
The third attacker was unspooling a line of tape over every zipper as though she were sealing a cardboard box for shipping. Once the sack reached her head and an open-face hood went over her hair, the tape was put to another use - wrapping around her mouth and keeping her gagged.
The tape wasn’t just to keep her quiet, though. More strips criss-crossed her torso and waist, binding her arms further within a growing cocoon. They bet her thighs - keeping her in a kneeling position - and taped her legs in place to make sure she’d be easy for transport. Jen noticed handles at her shoulders and waist. She shuddered.
Three soldiers now lined up, staring straight at her. She thought that they were speaking to her, but the audio seemed to be coming from a speaker in their suit.

“Manager Jennifer Ionce,” said a high-pitched and haughty voice, “Your freedom is forfeit, and possibly your career as well You can minimize your trouble by cooperating.”
Jen moaned something, chewing on the tape tight against her lips.
“I want you to know that your staff are all my prisoners. We know just about every security detail there is to know, and a few that you don’t know. We’ll need your help getting into your corporate database. Are you going to help us?”
She tried to defiantly wriggle, but only managed to fall on her side.
There was a pause, and the voice continued. “You are going to help me. The rest of the staff here have already been very compliant. Some of them have done it with threats, sure, but others have been more than happy to throw your employer under the bus.
Now, please; do me a quick favor. Nod, and we’ll take you to your computer and we can get this all settled out. There’s no shame in it. You have lost. You really didn’t have any chance at all, you know. We’ve had help from your staff for a long time. Lots of them.”
One by one, the soldiers helmets’ unfolded, revealing the blank and hypnotized faces of staff members. Judy’s unmoving, natural, peaceful face was the polar opposite of Jen’s grunting groans as she was picked up and hauled right back to her office.
“Be good,” said the voice, “And maybe we’ll hire you. Consider this a job interview.”

==
An old and fabulous piece drawn by Rosvo (rosvo twitter/patreon/da links) . Featuring @Latex-Literarian ‘s Piper as the unseen Rat-Catcher. (twitter / deviantart links)