“They’re on to us now,” Kane gasped, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “They’ve got some kind of weapon. I don’t know what it is, but it’s pretty nasty. They almost got me.”
“Yeah,” replied Grant, looking around warily, “they were trying to outflank you. Guess they thought you were alone, didn’t expect to see us. The little fuckers are sure light on their feet.”
The air suddenly shivered with a hum, and Kane jerked reflexively. The surface of the tank near his head suddenly acquired a deep dent, accompanied by a whang of sound. Wiry slivers of metal and scraps of paint burst up all around the impact point.
The three of them started to run. Brigid said briskly, “Ultrasonics, I imagine. Infrasound. Electric current converted to sonic waves by a little gadget called a maser. Something the military fooled around with as part of their nonlethal-weapons experiments.”
Still battling waves of vertigo, Kane said, “Nonlethal, my ass.”
Brigid saw how he swayed unsteadily on his feet, how he had to clutch at the pipelines on the wall for support. “You took a hit?”
“Yeah,” he wheezed. “More than one.”
“If it’s any consolation, all you probably suffered was a little inner-ear damage. Nothing permanent.”
The three of them reached the wire-mesh door and plunged into the tiled corridor. Grant stopped to look behind, digging into his war bag. “Keep going!”
He held the DM5 frag gren in his left hand, pulled away the pin with his teeth and tossed it underhanded. It landed where the wall joined with the floor, directly beneath the pipelines. He turned and sprinted down the corridor, counting backward beneath his breath. When he reached Three , the passage reverberated to a sharp explosion and rattling of steel balls. They punctured the pipes, and clouds of steam mixed with the billowing smoke. Even through his armor, Grant felt the puff of heat.
He caught up with Kane and Brigid. “Don’t know if that slowed ’em up any.”
“Let’s assume it didn’t,” Kane said.
Foul-smelling vapor drifted toward them, and they jogged away from it. When they reached the glass door leading to the alley, they slowed to a trot. Kane didn’t want to walk through it again, unless the circumstances were dire. He was on the verge of suggesting they seek an alternate route when he heard a humming buzz, like an angry insect. Grant cried out and fell forward, back arched, arms outstretched as if he had received a blow between his shoulder blades. As he toppled, Kane saw the fist-sized dent in his armor.
Simultaneously the door exploded inward in a shower of glass.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Brigid’s reaction was the fastest. Finger already on the trigger of the Hamp;K, she swiveled from the hips and fired a whole magazine down the steam- and smoke-filled corridor, the reports coming so fast they sounded like a single, prolonged bam .
Grant pushed himself to his knees, wagging his head from side to side. Brigid stepped beside him, her eyes probing the mist. “You caught an overspill of the ultrasonics. You’ll be okay.”
Kane dragged him to his feet.
Grant kept shaking his head. “Something’s wrong with my eyes. Everything’s out of focus”
“We’re in wonderful shape,” Kane observed dryly, hustling him toward the doorway. “The motion impaired leading the blind.”
Brigid ejected the spent clip from her handblaster, thumbed in a fresh one and said, “Get going. I’ll cover your backsides.”
Kane and Grant kicked through the shattered ruin of the door and entered the alley. Grant Said, “I’m better. Things aren’t as blurry.”
Releasing him, Kane turned to see Brigid backing through the scattering of broken glass, blaster trained on the corridor. “Don’t see them,” she said. “Maybe the going got too rough.”
“It’s apt to get rougher,” Kane replied. “They probably have another way topside and they’ll be waiting to cut us off.”
He glanced at his chron. “We’ve got twenty-one minutes. That’s not enough time for all of us to get back to Level Four.”
“It’s more than enough,” she said grimly, “if you stop making gloomy predictions and get moving.”
Grant shook his head and declared, “This situation is the classic one-percenter.”