“Run or fight?” J.B. whispered, the Uzi braced at his waist, ready for action.
“Fight. What’s in the side room next along?”
The Armorer slid along and peered around the corner. “Set of steel tables. About a dozen of them.”
“Fixed or free?”
J.B. disappeared for a moment, then reappeared. “Freestanding. Notice says the viewer should feel free to rearrange them as they wish.”
Ryan only hesitated a moment. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get ready.”
MOVING CAT FOOTED, Ryan had gone along the row of doors, using the blunt edge of the heavy panga to knock off all the handles, letting them clatter to the stone floor. He waited after each one to listen, making sure that the intruders weren’t advancing on them. But there was no sound. From the stillness of the air, he guessed that the big entrance sec door had been closed again, meaning that the villagers, assuming it was them who’d crept in, were all in the first large room with the mixed sets of cubes. They probably were waiting to work their way in and pin J.B. and himself down at the far end of the art complex.
Ryan swung some doors open, leaving others closed, then called out to J.B. “Get in one of the rooms and keep quiet.”
The Armorer picked up on the plan immediately, and in a stage whisper said, “Sure thing, Ryan. You doing the same?”
“Yeah.”
Tiptoeing back to the room with the tables, he helped J.B. to lift them and silently place them at an angle that covered the area with the blank doors, setting them on their sides in a random pattern.
He crouched behind one, with the rifle unslung and cocked, lying the SIG-Sauer on the cold floor at its side. J.B. was hunched two tables along, the Uzi ready to fire. He turned and winked at Ryan, the overhead light glinting off the lenses of his spectacles. “Old times,” he mouthed.
They waited.
Ryan thought he heard someone testing the lock on the single door immediately behind them and swung around anxiously. But it sounded as if it was locked. He crawled over, cursing himself under his breath for stupidly leaving the door untested, finding there was a simple triple-bar sec lock that opened from their side.
He turned back to cover, giving a thumbs-up sign to the Armorer.
Their attackers were very cautious now they knew that their approach had been detected.
Ryan guessed they were probably into the part of the exhibition with the long table and the row of pyramids, meaning they’d appear any minute now.
It wasn’t surprising that they were being so careful, knowing the weight of firepower that the outlanders could lay down against them.
There was the shuffling of feet, and Ryan peeked around the corner of the table, seeing that Ephraim was leading a hesitant move into the room where some of the doors now swung open. The man was ignoring the section of the gallery where Ryan and J.B. were hiding, convinced that they’d taken cover behind the doors.
He had several men gathered behind him and he glanced back, pointing at the doors, then standing and giving a shout of encouragement, charging at them, kicking them open and firing his musket blindly into the narrow rooms, followed by his whooping comrades.
It was like taking candy from a blind child.
Ryan opened fire with the Steyr, while the Uzi burst into life with a noise like ripping silk. The range was less than thirty yards in perfect light, and the villagers went down like bowling pins. Blood sprayed and blasters clattered on the floor. The rooms filled with screaming and panic as the few survivors of the opening blast of lead fought to turn and retreat, boots slipping in the splattered pools of crimson.
Ryan had aimed at Ephraim as the leader, the 7.62 mm full-metal-jacket round ripping into the man’s forehead, distorting and spinning, slicing off a circle of bone from the top of the skull, the exit pressure sucking most of the brains from the cranial hollow. The door and ceiling were dappled in overlaid shades of pink and gray as Ephraim went down.