Ryan nodded. “Try it. You’re the only one I’d trust with such a crazy idea.”
J.B. swung his canvas bag off his shoulder and began to mold a small lump of plas-ex, which he extracted from the interior. “I hope to hell that I’ve judged this right,” he muttered as he molded and added a timer fuse to the small bomb. “If not, I’ll bring down the whole tunnel.”
“We’ll just have to trust to luck. It’s got us this far,” Ryan said as the Armorer completed his bomb and set the fuse.
“Ready,” he stated. “Keep me covered. I’ll keep low, so just fire over me and try to stop those coldheart bastards firing back!”
Ryan nodded. “Good luck.”
J.B. gave him a wry grin, then dropped to the floor, the M-4000 in one hand, the bomb in the other.
Laser fire heated the air above his head as he crawled past the door stanchion and into the no-man’s land beyond the trapped door. Following their cue, the war party on the other side of the wag began a heavy barrage of fire, keeping the Illuminated Ones pinned in their cover.
Climbing to his knees, J.B. raised the M-4000. He knew instinctively that some of the Illuminated Ones would break cover to fire on him. As they leveled their laser blasters, he fired at them, then dropped and began to crawl again. He was already flat by the time that the barbed metal flechettes from the shotgun charge had ripped into the Illuminated soldiers, chilling some instantly as vital organs were ripped to shreds, wounding others as they were hit in the arms and face.
This and the laser fire from the war parties caused the Illuminated Ones to drop back.
Acting as fast as his prone position would allow, J.B. rolled against the wall so that he was covered by the buttresses, and righted himself so that he could inch along the wall until he was up against the door stanchion. Taking a deep breath, and noting that there were only seconds left on the timer fuse, he pushed the plas-ex against the stanchion, pushing the soft, puttylike explosive into the groove that ran down the length of the stanchion to allow the door to fall.
He was never closer to buying the farm. Any Illuminated soldier with fast enough reflexes or who was close enough could easily have taken off his arm with a laser blast.
But they were in ignorance of J.B.’s plans, and so were in no position to react. The Armorer was able to place the plas-ex, turn and fling himself to the ground, huddling close to the wall as the plas-ex blew, hoping that no flying rubble would injure him.
“Damn.”
Mildred was the first to react after the explosion. The corridor was filled with a choking dust as the stanchion blew out, buckling the metal runners so that the sec door couldn’t be lowered, and causing the Illuminated soldiers to pull back in a panicked state. Meanwhile, Mildred keyed in the sec code scratched on the key plate. When the door had risen, she blasted the circuitry with the laser rifle to prevent it being closed again by remote means. Thanking the consistency of human nature, she turned and made her way to J.B., who was huddled against the wall, coated in a layer of dust and concrete chip.
“John! Are you all right?” she yelled as she reached him.
Taking his arms from over his head, where he had flung them to provide whatever protection he could from the blast, he grinned at her.
“You know, for a moment there I thought I might have got the amount wrong and arranged my own burial,” he said matter-of-factly.
Chapter Thirteen
As the Armorer dusted himself off, Ryan and Gloria had already sped past him to the damaged sec door, taking cover and scanning the corridor that lay beyond. It was empty up to the point where the dog legged descent into the bowels of the earth began. There would be elevators and an emergency staircase that they would have to check out, but it would seem that their best and safest option—both from the point of view of sticking together and also affording themselves the best protection—would be to keep taking the main tunnel downward.