All of which made alarm bells ring deep in the recesses of Doc’s mind. There was something about this design that was familiar to him. He had seen it somewhere. And somewhere recently. Through the labyrinthine corridors and avenues of his mind, he searched for where this sighting had been. So much so that he very nearly missed one of the hidden cameras, about twenty feet up and hidden behind a dust and begrimed pillar that had once been adorned but was now starkly desolate. It was this starkness that allowed the camera to show where once it would have been hidden.
Doc raised the LeMat and fired, the heavy metal smashing the deep-set lens of the camera and twisting the metal casing, raining shards of loosened glass into the arena below. It crashed harmlessly to one side of the armory tent, watched by Jon and Petor.
“Nice shooting, Doc,” Petor remarked, “but try to look where you’re landing it, yeah?”
“My apologies, dear boy. I was temporarily distracted,” Doc replied with a grin, one that spread farther as he suddenly recalled, memory spurred, where he had seen a similar interior building design.
Around the large central hall, which was beginning to sound less empty as the Gate filled it and built their base camp with defenses that deadened the sound of the empty stone and baffled them against echo and attack, the air rang with solitary spaced shots, as Ryan’s people took out the sec cameras. Mildred relished the task, leveling the Czech-made ZKR at regular intervals, lining up along the barrel sight and picking a spot dead center to the small, opaque lens of each camera. Shutting out the noise and bustle around her as she stood deathly still, her plaits loose around her shoulders and her feet rock solid on the floor, she was almost back at the last Olympics before the nukecaust, competing in another time, another place. It was only a temporary escape, but it helped her to focus herself. It created within her an oasis of peace. It also enabled her to take out her targets with ease.
On the other side of the hall, Krysty and Dean had taken a section of the wall and high ceiling space to themselves, and started side by side, then worked slowly away from each other. Dean’s Browning Hi-Power was a better target pistol, and perhaps better suited to the task than Krysty’s .38 caliber Smith & Wesson blaster. Nonetheless, the Titian-haired beauty was no less accurate than the young Cawdor, just of necessity slower as it took fractionally longer to sight on the Smith & Wesson for the higher cameras.
Jak had disdained the use of his Colt Python. The blaster was an excellent man-stopper and could cause considerable damage, but wasn’t the right handblaster for the task at hand. He had handed the Python to Gloria and requested the use of her Vortak. It had a larger round capacity than the Python, and the smaller caliber shot along with the gas-buffered recoil system enabled him to shoot with a greater swiftness and accuracy over longer distances. The speed was a necessity as they had to knock out as many cameras as possible before the enemy in the redoubt below had an opportunity to make a clear overall picture of what exactly the Gate were doing. And the accuracy was needed for those cameras that were secreted high in the vaulted ceiling of the chamber.
“Dark night, this is like one of those old churches I’ve seen in pics,” J.B. murmured to Ryan as the two men stood side by side in the sector of the chamber that they had elected to clear.
“Mebbe it is,” the one-eyed man replied. Then, noticing the puzzled look in the Armorer’s eyes, Ryan expanded. “Some people believed in a god who would bring them salvation from the shit around them, and some people believed in blasters and bombs bringing them salvation from the shit around them. Same old shit, different solution. So why not the same kind of building for the same kind of faith?”
“Whatever.” The Armorer shrugged. “The only thing that mattered was who could beat the shit out of who when the going got tough. Blasters and bombs would sure help then.”