” Die, you fucker .” Ryan kneed the guard in the groin, feeling the satisfying jarring as he caught the mutie’s genitals against the bone. As the man slumped, Ryan crossed his wrists, making the silk tighten like fluid steel, immovable, inflexible.
“Die.”
The mutie’s tongue swelled, his hands fell limp, and his eyes burst from bloodied sockets. A thread of bright crimson blood wormed from his lips and nostrils, and as the creature’s body relaxed, Ryan could smell the noisome voiding of bowels and bladder.
Ryan unwound his scarf from the guard’s neck, prizing it from the deep furrowed folds in the corpse’s flesh. He wrapped it back around his own neck, feeling better for the killing, not stopping to mourn for Finnegan. There’d be time for that.
Later.
A PIECE OF PLAS the size of a button, a five-second fuse and a tiny copper detonator, that was all it took for the six to blast their way inside the holy of holies at the Wizard Island Complex for Scientific Advancement. The small explosion shook their ears, and then the outer door swung back.
The scientists, finally realizing they were under serious attack from the primitive outsiders, had taken precautions.
A handful of sec guards, blasters ready, were lined up to meet the intruders. There were six of them, but not one managed to fire his laser rifle. Each was gunned down on the spot in a hectic burst of shooting from the corridor.
Leaping over jerking corpses, nearly slipping in the spreading pools of turgid blood, Ryan led his friends in.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed, stopping dead inside the doorway, the others nearly knocking him over.
They’d realized the research part of the complex must be enormous, but even in their wildest imaginings they hadn’t figured on anything quite as massive as this.
Spidery scaffolding rose thirty stories high, interlocking in a delicate tracery of dulled metal. A viper’s nest of colored conduits and pipes wound in and out, so far above them that they seemed like thin wires. Red and green and orange and vivid blue. There were three basic sections within the research area, marked simply Land, Sea and Air amp; Space. Each one seemed to vanish into the diminishing distance. Each was bigger than fifty aircraft hangars.
A long list on the wall showed the innumerable subsections of research.
A catalogue of inhumanity and megadeath
Chemical.
Medical.
Nerve toxins.
Sight.
Audio-destroyers.
Neural synapse breakers.
RPV.
“What’s that?” Ryan asked.
“It stands for Remotely Piloted Vehicles,” Doc Tanner answered. “It was big around the end of the century.”
Sensors.
Avoidance.
LAMPS.
“Tell me, Doc.”
“It means Light Airborne Multipurpose Systems. Mainly antisubmarine stuff.”
Battle-Support Missiles.
Air-Defense Missiles.
Surface-To-Air Missiles (Fixed Emplacement).
Forward-Area-Guided Projectiles.
The list was seemingly endless, and it was color-coded and had a variety of letters and numerals after each item. By far the largest number of entries was under the subhead Antipersonnel Weapons.
“Don’t tell us, Doc,” Krysty said in a subdued voice. “It just means lots of ways of killing ordinary people. By Gaia, but this has to be wiped clean!”
But with Finnegan dead, only J.B. and Ryan had the basic explosives knowledge to start a chain reaction that would destroy the whole complex. Jak was fine on small, localized sabotage, but nothing bigger.
“Split up,” Ryan told them. “Krysty and Jak with me. J.B. to take Doc and Lori. Check chrons. I have 1113now. Meet back at the bottom of the main elevators in How long, you figure, Doc? J.B.? How long?”
The old man shook his head, as if overwhelmed by the pressure and the killings. “This gilded palace of sin, my old friend It’s walls of sardonyx and chrysoprase. Its mighty towers of sapphire and chalcedony, inlaid with wondrous lapis lazuli.” His voice was dreamy. “Is that not the most wonderful name for a gem?” He drew it out slowly, savoring it. “Lapis lazuli.”
Ryan shook him by the arm. “Don’t fuck us up now, Doc. Not fucking now!”
His eyes cleared and his jaw set. The old man squared his shoulders and stared Ryan straight in the eye. “My most humble apologies, my dear friend. What can I have been thinking of? You were asking?”