“She’s nothing like Captain Nara Jurascik.”
Krysty said. “Ryan, were there others like this one on the other side?”
“If there were, I didn’t see them, and I wasn’t told about them. I think this is something new.”
The creature came to, spitting blood and spitting mad. Her string of unintelligible curses was drowned out by the earsplitting squeal of a laser beam. Almost immediately the companions’ side of the cobbled wall of rock started to give off heat; after a few more seconds, it was glowing red in the center at waist height.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc cried, throwing up an arm to shield his face as he backed away.
The air inside the chamber became scorching hot and difficult to breathe.
It was obvious to Ryan that their enemy had turned loose something a lot more powerful than the tribarrel longblasters they’d seen before. He had to yell to be heard over the laser’s shriek. “When the beam breaks through, we’re going to cook! Get under the wall! To the next chamber! Go!”
J.B. and Jak fell to their knees and, digging like terriers, widened the hole under the rear wall. Dean squirmed under first, followed by Mildred and Krysty.
Ryan was the last to leave the middle chamber. In the light of the torch, he could see that by pushing with her arms and madly squirming her torso back and forth the trooper was actually starting to pull herself out from under the wall. He could also see why she was so frantic to get free. The glowing spot had grown much bigger, and its reflected heat had become withering. As he watched, its center changed from red to yellow to luminous white. And then the white began to drip, spilling down the edges and angles of the boulders. The drip became a torrent. Rivulets of melting rock cascaded toward the floor and the trapped trooper.
Her gauntleted hands couldn’t protect her from the rain of liquid rock. Beads of it rolled around and between her upraised fingers. She threw back her head and screamed, but it was lost in the screech of the laser and the explosive hiss as the cells of her face, eyes, skull and brain surrendered their water to four thousand degree droplets of quartzite.
An instant before the beam burned through the rock fall, Ryan squirmed down the hole, passing the torch and his scoped Steyr up to J.B. on the other side. As he climbed out, he found himself in a chamber so low he could only crouch. Then the laser struck the far side of the wall. The heat slammed his back through two feet of solid rock.
Crawling over the rattlesnakes that Jak had killed, Ryan hurriedly joined the others at the opposite end of the cramped enclosure.
“What are we going to do now?” Dean shouted over the squeal of the light beam. “There’s no place to run. We’re stuck.”
Ryan knew that strategically their situation hadn’t changed for the worse. He knew it couldn’t get any worse. He took comfort in the fact that they had managed to take out at least one of the enemy. But it wasn’t the kind of comfort his son was hoping for. Dean wanted a miraculous way out.
And there was none.
The facing wall glowed incandescent red. The air boiled. It was like being trapped in a bake oven.
“All we can do is survive as long as possible.”
Ryan shouted back, “Look for the chance to break free and fight back… and chill as many of the bastards as we can.”
Then the whistling roar stopped.
Moments later, when their ears stopped ringing, the companions could hear scrambling sounds from the next chamber as troopers burst through the site of the cave-in.
Another digitalized voice boomed at them, this time from the other side of the hole. “You have ten seconds to crawl out of there,” it said. “If you don’t come out, we will roast you alive.”
Ryan exited first, blinded for a moment by the headlamps of four battlesuits.
“Look who it is!” said one of the troopers as he ripped the Steyr out of Ryan’s hands. “A celebrity POW!”