The seconds crawled past with an agonizing slowness, the tension in the wag making it seem all the more oppressive. Cursing to himself again, louder this time so that it could be heard—albeit muffled—by the others, Ryan pulled off the metal and Plexiglas that had been stifling him.
“Fireblast, that feels better!” he exclaimed.
“Something’s wrong, right?” Krysty asked as she removed her helmet, shaking loose red, sentient hair that refused to unfurl and uncoil. It was obvious that her mutie sense had picked up some danger, and it only confirmed Ryan’s own suspicions.
“Reckon so,” the one-eyed man replied. “Why aren’t they here to greet us, if we’re the long lost wag crew?”
“Hot pipe, it’s my fault,” Dean said bitterly. “If I hadn’t got the radio going again they wouldn’t have had the chance to get in contact, and they wouldn’t have figured out that we weren’t the real deal.”
Ryan shook his head. “No, I figure that mebbe that didn’t matter too much. Without the radio, they still could have been suspicious about us. Blaming yourself is just going to waste time and energy. We’re here, we need to get the sec door open again and we need to cover our backs while we do it.”
“One thing,” Tammy said in a small voice. “Even if we get the sec door open again, what’s to stop them shutting it like they did when we came in?”
“She’s got a point,” Mildred said. “If they’re using a remote system, we need to keep the door up once it’s up.”
Ryan turned to Dean. “Would a remote system and the manual keypad be on the same circuit?”
The younger Cawdor, who had learned some pre-dark electronics at the Brody school, pondered this for a brief moment. “Mebbe, mebbe not. Even if it isn’t, you shoot enough of a charge into the hardware and you’ll blow out all the circuits. Get it up, then use the laser blaster on the keypad and the resulting charge should short out every piece of fiber optic or wiring in the system.”
Ryan nodded. “Okay, so we know what to do when the door is up. Let’s get to raising it.”
“Wait! What the fuck are they doing now?” Gloria asked, staying the one-eyed man with a hand on his arm.
While he had been speaking, Ryan had been facing away from the windshield, with the other occupants of the wag watching him. Only the Gate queen had been watching through the windshield, keeping her eyes on the sec door that lay a couple of hundred yards from them.
At her words and her touch, Ryan swung around, bending low over the dash to get as wide an angle as possible on the area in front of them.
The sec door was beginning to rise. For the first couple of inches, there was little that could be seen through the narrow gap that made any sense. But as the door rose higher, the one-eyed man was able to discern several pairs of legs, and also the wheels and undercarriage of what seemed to be a small wag…not a personnel carrier of any sort, but rather some sort of attack wag, possibly heavily armed and wheeled for ease of transportation.
It was not a sight that boded well.
“Shit, we’ve got real problems,” he said quietly. “It looks like they’re bringing up some heavy hardware.”
“And we’re sitting targets in here,” Gloria added. “Guess it’s time to check our own hardware.”
“You got that right,” Ryan agreed as he checked the laser blaster, and also his SIG-Sauer and Steyr, which had been sitting on the floor of the wag. All those in the Illuminated uniforms had brought their own blasters with them, keeping them in the wag. The original plan had been to exit the wag with the laser blasters and with the helmets in place, apparently the returning Illuminated crew. Only when they had opened the sec door and begun to establish the bridgehead in the redoubt would they collect their own blasters, with which they felt much more comfortable in battle. But now, if they were going to stand any chance and come out fighting, then the only thing that they could do was to load up with their own trusted weapons and hit the ground firing.