“Dad?” Dean asked anxiously, his knuckles white from the tight grip on his blaster.
“That could have been a child,” Krysty said, remembering a particularly gruesome event at a redoubt where the companions had arrived only seconds too late to save a young girl who was starving to death from taking her own life.
Anxiously, Doc added, “Knowledge is power, my dear Ryan.”
Yeah, the Trader used to say that, too. “Okay, we move as a group,” Ryan decided, almost against his better judgment. “I’m on point, one yard apart, two on two formation. Let’s go!”
“Just a sec,” J.B. countered, walking to the elevator and hitting the call button. The indicator lights in the lintel chimed in response as the cage started to descend from the upper levels.
Ryan nodded in approval at the distraction; every little bit helped. Doc and Mildred quickly joined the others in the stairwell and, moving fast, the companions quietly started up the ancient stairs of the redoubt, blasters leading the way.
At each level they paused, straining to hear anything, but there was only dusty silence. The dining hall, barracks, communications, medical, storage, each section was as still as a empty tomb. At the top level, the companions paused before the last door and were rewarded by some sort of humming noise.
“Dark night, but that’s familiar,” J.B. said, setting his fedora farther back on his head as a prelude to a fight. “Just can’t recall what the nuke it is, though.”
“I don’t like this,” Krysty,whispered, her hair coiling tightly in response to the tension.
“Got something?” Jak asked, flexing his left hand. A knife slipped from the sleeve of his leather jacket into his palm at the gesture.
“No,” the redhead said slowly, as if unsure. “I’m not reading anything. This just feels wrong, a gut instinct.”
“Same here,” Mildred added, chewing at her lip. With a worried expression on his young face, Dean grunted in agreement.
There was no light coming from under the jamb, so working the latch carefully, Ryan opened the door slightly, and held out a hand toward Doc. The scholar passed over his ebony stick and, easing it through the crack, Ryan reached toward the nearby light switch, flicked it on with a loud click and threw open the door.
This top level was the garage of the redoubt, tool benches and storage rooms to the left, the exit corridor to the distant right. The rest of the cavernous room was filled with vehicles, mostly civilian wags—compact cars and station wagons, some falling apart from body rust, others in decent condition. However, a few of the larger machines were military wags, 4X4s, some Hummers and even an APC. The armored personnel carrier was lacking wheels, the axles resting on the stained concrete floor above a dark grease pit, but the chassis seemed intact.
“Hot pipe, over there!” Dean cried and started to fire his blaster.
Ryan turned fast and triggered his longblaster without conscious thought. Across the garage was a three-foot-wide crack in the nukeproof wall. That was unusual, but not startling. They had found damaged redoubts before. Some of the weapons used in skydark had been fantastically powerful. But standing directly in front of the crack was something potentially more dangerous than any nuke.
At first glance it resembled a chrome-plated humanoid, stooped over slightly like a hunchbacked ape. Its domed head was fronted with large crystalline eyes, the body composed of chrome rods, two elongated arms, one armed with a pneumatic hammer, the other sporting a set of tarnished blades that spun at blinding speed. That was the source of the humming noise.
Even as he fired the Steyr, Ryan narrowed his eye. A sec hunter droid! The companions had previously encountered the mech guardians of the redoubts. Once a hunter got your “scent,” it could track a person through a crowd of a thousand other people and across ten thousand miles, locked on to the target’s genetic code. The droid couldn’t be turned off, diverted from the chase, and never stopped until the allocated target was aced.
With a grinding noise of rusted gears, the machine turned away from the crack and started for them, the hammer thumping loudly as the spinning blades thrust forward.