The guard chief frowned, then thumbed inside. “He’s in his office,” she said. “If he sees you or not’s his business.”
Lacey pushed through the cordon of naked women who tried to entice him and strip his empty pockets. He flung open the door to Allen’s office before a house man could stop him. “Bill, I gotta see you!” he said, slamming the door.
“What the bleedin’ hell!” the black chieftain snarled. He was alone in the room, punching buttons on a computer console with one hand while the other held a sandwich. An open floor safe protruded 200 mm from the rock beside him. He banged the heavy lid closed with his foot. “How did you get loose?”
“Bill, Black May’s going to kill all of us,” Lacey whined. The enclosed privacy of the office was disconcerting to him. “She’s going to take her buddy-buddies into the Basement and gas us, gas all Underground to keep the topsiders from finding where she’s hid!”
Allen was frowning, but he set down his sandwich. Before the chieftain spoke, Lacey blurted, “Look, Bill, I’m afraid your guards’d grab me ‘f I tried to go topside alone. You need to get out too—you can take me! Bill, you ever seen what K2 does to a guy?”
“Balls,” Allen said flatly. “Let’s see what May says about this.” He began to punch out a phone code, keeping a corner of his eye on Lacey.
The Southerners’ face tightened into intersecting planes of despair. “Bill,” he pleaded, “Take me topside and I’ll give you a gadget you wouldn’t believe.”
Allen paused, his finger above the last digit of the code. “Talk,” he said.
Lacey licked his lips. “Well,” he said, “You got the stylus Mooch took off me?”
Allen nodded, his forehead wrinkling. He slid open a drawer in the console and pulled the ivory-colored instrument from the varied truck within.
“It’s not just a stylus,” the hunter said truthfully. “They learned a trick from Tesla—its a laser that’ll cut forever if you just hold the base against a good ground. The wall behind you’d do. You press the button on the side and it shoots forever.”
Allen stared eye to eye at the smaller man. “You’re lying,” he said. With the beginning of a smile, the leader touched the back of the stylus against the wall and pressed the button. The tip was centered on Lacey’s breast.
The ground conduction signal shivered into the rock. Nothing visible occurred in the room.
Lacey relaxed. He smiled like a shark feeding. Bill Allen blinked in surprise, not at the failure of the “weapon,” but at the hunter’s reaction to his attempted murder. “This far away, there’s maybe a ten-second delay,” Lacey said. He dropped flat on the floor beside the safe.
“What—” Allen began. He groped for the powergun in his belt. The shock wave from the explosion in Black May’s quarters reached him before he could draw. The wave front drove the mahogany bar at an angle before it, pulping all of Allen’s body between his neck and his diaphragm.
Lacey did not really expect to live through the blast. It drove down the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels like a multi-crowned piston, shattering whatever stood in its way. The Boxcars and everything in it were gone, driven meters or kilometers down the tunnel in a tangle of plastic and splinters and blood; everything but Lacey and the safe that shielded him.
There was no sound, but Lacey found he could see after the ground stopped quivering like a harpooned manta. A hundred meters of tunnel roof had been lifted by the blast. It collapsed when it fell back, close enough to Lacey that his feet touched the concrete morraine when he tried to straighten from the ball into which instinct had curled him.
The air was choking, but with dust and not K2—yet. The rebounding shock waves of the blast would suck the stockpiled gas into every cranny of the tunnel system soon, but at least the lethal cargo had not ridden the initial wave front. Even with the safe to turn it, the blast had pounded Lacey like a rain of fine lead shot. He rose slowly, sucking air through the hard fabric of his sleeve. Once the ground beside him came into focus, he saw a dropped powergun. Lacey picked it up and began to stagger toward an unblocked staircase.