He pushed open the door, flattening himself to the wall, the rest of the group following suit When there was no immediate chatter of blasterfire, or the coruscating beams of the laser blasters raking the now empty center of the corridor, J.B. waited a couple of seconds before inclining his head toward the empty stairwell and leading the war party.
AS J.B. HEADED OUT, Mildred was already halfway down to the first level, leading her party down the twisting concrete spiral that was lit in a dim glow by recessed fluorescent lights placed at regular intervals. Some of the tubes had blown out over the years, and Mildred was surprised that the sec force hadn’t thought to either shoot out the rest of the lights or simply to turn them off at source. But she was glad that they had overlooked that, as it made progress easier.
One of the warriors, close by Mildred’s elbow, leaned over a little farther and whispered in her ear.
“Guess they’re waiting at the bottom for us—a last line from the first.”
“Best not to assume that, girl, but I reckon you could be right. Just what the hell are they playing at? It’s almost like they want us to walk into there.”
“Could be ’cause we can’t really go back,” the woman replied. “You and me would make more fight of it, but mebbe they figure they’re like spiders, and we’re the willing flies.”
Mildred looked down at her Czech-made ZKR. “Then we’d better be the kind of flies that have a nasty bite.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Fireblast! What are they doing?”
Ryan’s bewildered yet triumphant cry cut through the sound of blasterfire and acted as a rallying call to the rest of his party. The triumphant whooping of the Amazon queen at his shoulder bolstered the spirits of the attack party yet more, and they tore into the opposition with relish.
As the elevator doors had opened, Ryan flattened half of the party into the recesses at the left-hand side of the car, while beckoning Gloria to do likewise on the right. As the doors opened with a gentle hiss of hydraulics, a crackle of laser blasts rent the air, and the beams uselessly hit the back of the car, scorching the metal and making it glow white with heat. The party within the car was hit by the wave of heat as it spread around the metal of the car, and huddled as close to the metal as they dared without actually touching it.
But this initial blast was followed by a confused silence as the secluded defense force on the outside wondered what to do.
Ryan was loath to put that down to incompetence, and felt it safer to figure on a plan that would lure the attackers away from the elevator car and into a trap. There was only one course of action. Pulling a gren from one of the vest pockets stuffed with ammo and weaponry, he pulled the pin and stepped back a pace, enough to give him an angle to toss the gren out into the corridor without revealing enough of himself to be a blaster target.
The gren sailed through the air almost in slow motion. Using a gren in such a confined area was a risk. A quick enough reflex could pick it up and toss it back into the car before it went off, leaving the inhabitants of the car entirely at the mercy of shrapnel in the explosive charge.
The one thing he hadn’t bargained for was what happened next. Instead of trying to clear the gren, someone in the defending party thought it would be a great idea to shoot it out of the air.
A laser blast ripped through the empty space between the elevator car and the concealed position of the defense force. Unfortunately for the sec man who chose to fire, it took him too long to level his laser rifle and take aim. So long, in fact, that by the time the laser blast reached the gren it was already too close to the defense nest. The laser hit the gren full on and caused it to explode before the fuse had expired. The shrapnel within the explosive charge was charged white hot and molten by the extra heat of the laser as it hit home, and the resulting shower and spray of semisolid, semiliquid metal, spread out over a wide arc by the explosive charge, came down on the defense force.