“Well, yeah, I know that,” Nita said, “but couldn’t we blast open some of these doors, like J.B. did back there?”
Mildred shook her head, answering before Tammy had a chance to speak. “John blew the door stanchion to stop the thing from closing. The amount of plas-ex you’d probably need to get through a door would risk bringing the tunnel down with it.”
“Well, what about jamming the circuits like you did to let us in?” the blonde countered.
Again, Mildred had to answer in the negative. “That just blew out the remote when the door was open—but it also blew the manual. I’m afraid that one only works when the doors are already open.”
“Shit,” Nita cursed. “So what do we do?”
Tammy jabbed her in the chest with a long finger. “You, lady, get your ass back to the main part and let Ryan and Gloria know what’s going on here, then get back. We’ll keep going on and see what’s ahead, yeah?”
Nita turned and began to run back to relay the message. Tammy watched her go, then turned to Mildred.
“What the fuck are we gonna do about getting to the lab?” she asked with a despairing tone. It seemed that the woman was, for once, less than optimistic about their chances.
Mildred shrugged. “We do the only thing that we can—we get going and see what these assholes have in mind for us.”
The scout party and the lab party, now resigned to being together on the same course regardless of intent, moved off as one, gradually stringing out until they were in formation, with Dette in the lead and Tammy bringing up the rear. They maintained distance between each member of the line, so that they wouldn’t present a clustered target, but were still in close contact with one another.
“What are we looking for?” Dette asked.
“You’ll know when we hit it,” Dean replied.
The nerves of the invaders were stretched as taut as their formation, strung out and on edge.
“Hope something happens soon,” Dette whispered. “I’d rather face buying the farm than endure much more of this.”
It was almost as though the Gate warrior had prophesied her own doom.
The corridor curved sharply, and the line took the curve without closing, so that sight of Dette was lost to Tammy. So it was that the first the Gate number two knew of any trouble was when she heard the crackle of blasterfire and heard the young warrior scream.
As they rounded the corner, a side sec door opened suddenly and two Illuminated soldiers sprang from cover, crouching low to clear the door quickly as it rose, both clutching laser blasters and firing from the waist. The deadly light beams were wide of the mark, but as the two Illuminated soldiers moved across the corridor, and the front half of the advance party line— those who had taken the curve in the corridor—sought cover behind the buttresses along the wall, Dette found herself in no-man’s-land, with nowhere to take cover. She dived to the ground, seeking to go low and avoid the laser blasts that flew high, but she wasn’t quite quick enough. No matter how fast her reactions, they couldn’t compete with the speed of light. As she fell, the beam cut down the line of her spine, burning the flesh and opening a cauterized weal that ran the length of her back. She screamed, high and piercing, and hit the concrete floor in a state of shock.
Mildred was slow in making for cover. Her reflexes had slowed with the onset of the disease, and her legs felt leaden, refusing to move as she directed. When she heard Dette scream, she twisted, bringing up her Czech-made ZKR and using the reflexes that hadn’t suffered too many ravages: the accuracy of her eye and the ability to exert gentle pressure on the delicate trigger mechanism of the precision blaster.
Two shots in such quick succession that they sounded as one, took care of the immediate threat. One of the sec men was caught in the throat, the bullet ripping out his jugular and carotid in one explosive blast as the shell hit yielding flesh. The other sec man, a few inches shorter, took the bullet in the middle of his forehead, a clean, precise hole being drilled at the point where the bridge of his nose moved between his eyes.