Doc Tanner swung his sword stick, the thin steel blade hissing and whistling as he cut and parried like a fencing scarecrow, shuffling and dancing, muttering to himself from some archaic guide to fighting.
“Punto and reverse, stoccata and imbroccata. Passada. Parry and lunge. By the three Kennedys, but we’ll purge this place, my friends.”
Ryan held up a hand for silence. “We’ve been lucky so far. Let’s realize that. Seems these people are too damned busy with their experiments and research to watch what’s going on. But there’s still a chance that someone might look at the security vid screens. So we still move quick and quiet. And from now on we take out anything and anyone we see.”
“Main thing’s to get in and find what we can use to blow this mother a mile into the sky,” the Armorer said. “We’ll have to string out a little.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “I’ll go point. Krysty second. Then Jak, Doc ‘n Lori, with you and Finn holding the rear. From now on there’s no stopping. The security in this section is old and all fucked up. Once we reach the research sections, I guess it’ll be harder.”
J.B. gave directions from his map as they moved toward the core of the complex. Each person had a favored blaster in hand, ready for instant fire. It was one of those situations, as Doc had pointed out a couple of minutes earlier, when those that weren’t for ’em were ag’in ’em.
There was no danger of accidentally shooting down a friend.
There were no friends.
Just then two helmeted mutie guards stepped simultaneously from a side corridor only thirty short paces in front of Ryan. Standing close together, they began to turn slowly and awkwardly.
The caseless G-12 was already at Ryan’s hip. He took lightning aim, leveling and squeezing, bracing himself even though the Hamp;K automatic rifle was virtually without recoil. It was set on triple burst, the three bullets so close together they sounded like a single round.
Ryan squeezed the trigger twice, shifting his aim slightly from one sec man to the other. The two corpses slid and kicked on the blood-slick tiles of the corridor.
“Nice,” Jak said, just behind Ryan.
The sec man on the right had been hit by all three rounds in the center of his chest, five inches below the thorax, the bullets within a finger’s width of one another. The force of the impact had lifted the mutie clean off his feet, hurling him backward. Another three rounds, again tightly grouped, had hit the second guard a touch higher, knocking him sideways, his helmet rattling and spinning, still rolling after both sentries were dead.
As the seven began to move on, the loudspeaker above them crackled to life. “Sec report terminal malfunction? Query intruders? Report? Report?”
Somewhere behind them, apparently at some distance, a siren began to wail. The lights above them flickered. Ahead, a door was slammed shut.
“Chill’s on,” Finnegan muttered.
“Let’s go,” Ryan said.
Moving quickly but with stealth, they approached the nearest entrance to the research section, which was just around the next turn. Oddly the screeching siren had stopped.
Suddenly around the corner came the two pretty young women they’d seen on the day of their arrival at Wizard IslandLouella Hall and Angie Pflaug. A sec man walked behind them, carrying cleaning tools, ready for the two blue-eyed blond girls to have an antisocial accident.
“Central be with you,” Dr. Pflaug said, already starting to giggle at the sight of Jak’s bleached hair.
“White head was for anthrax-derivative testing at C in amber,” Dr. Hall said, her fingers working nervously at the collar of her cherry-red lab coat. “Why with you? And uniformwise unorthodoxy?”
Ryan had the ruthless instincts of the true killer, but even he hesitated at chilling these poor, mentally deprived girls. They were merely victims of a crazed policy of research and inbreeding.
“Terminate them all,” Dr. Pflaug said, hardly able to speak to the sec guard due to her rising laughter.
“They’re mine,” Jak said.
And they were.
Ryan admired the careful way the fourteen-year-old braced his right hand with his left, steadying the heavy pistol against the inevitable kick. The boom of the shots was deafening in the narrow corridor.