Bradley sprayed the interior with his nozzle set on mist. The gas glowed like a fluorescent rainbow in the flicker of distant plasma discharges.
Another team sprinted past Kowacs and broke left at the cross-corridor. Automatic fire blasted.
The team leader spun and fell. His Number Two dropped her bottle of gas and dragged the leader beyond the corner of the main corridor, across from Kowacs.
The Number Three, under cover also, started to lean out to return fire with his automatic rifle. Kowacs waved him back, then whipped a cluster of fragmentation grenades around the corner with a motion that exposed none of his body.
The cluster rebounded as a unit from the far wall of the cross-corridor, separated into its component sections with a triple pop, and detonated in a white sleet of flame and glass shrapnel.
Kowacs dived into the corridor in the shadow of the blast. Bradley was beside him and Sie covered their backs, facing the opposite direction in case company tried to intervene down the other leg of the cross-corridor.
There were three uniformed Syndicate personnel in the corridor, two sprawled on their faces and a third staggering toward safety as a barrier ten meters away slid to seal the hall. Kowacs and Bradley both fired.
The security man flung his arms out and lurched forward. His back was splotched with slits from the airfoil charge of Bradley’s shotgun; there were three neat holes between his shoulders—Kowacs’ aiming point.
The barrier ground to a halt. The security man’s body might not have been enough to stall out the motor, but his helmet was. There was just about enough room for a man to squeeze through the opening between the barrier and its jamb.
Somebody on the far side of the barrier fired. The bullets ricocheted through the gap, howling like banshees and all the more dangerous for the way they buzzsawed after deforming on the corridor wall.
“Cover me!” screamed the other team’s Number Two. She bolted past Kowacs and Bradley, snatching up her bottle of gas as she ran.
Kowacs poured the remainder of his rifle’s magazine through the opening. Bradley unhooked a grenade cluster. His shotgun’s pattern was too wide to get much of the charge through the opening at that range, and the airfoils wouldn’t ricochet effectively anyway.
A bullet zinged past the running Headhunter, close enough to pluck a pouch of ammo from her belt and half-spin her, but she reached the dead zone behind the barrier without injury. She fumbled with her bottle of gas. Bradley’s arm went back with a grenade cluster.
“D—” Kowacs shouted, but he didn’t finish the “Don’t” because there wasn’t much chance the sergeant would miss the risky throw—and anyway, Bradley was going to do what he pleased in a firefight, whether Nick Kowacs thought it was a good idea or not.
The grenade cluster arced through the narrow slot and burst with a triple flash waist-high above the corridor floor. At the blast, the Number Two poked her gas bottle into the opening and began to spray a mist of anesthetic into the other side of the barrier.
The firing slackened. A woman in the bright, loose clothing favored by Syndicate bigwigs slumped across the opening and lay still. A pistol slipped from her hand.
Unexpectedly, the Headhunter dropped her gas bottle and collapsed also.
The fucking seventeen-minute delay. The gas antidote was wearing off!
“Headhunter Six to all personnel,” Kowacs said as he lurched to his feet and another Syndicate bullet whanged through the slot. “Stop using gas! The antidote’s—”
Sienkiewicz fired the last round from her plasma weapon through the opening. The wall thirty meters down the corridor bloomed in a sun-hot fireball as the jet of directed plasma sublimed the metal-and-ceramic structure into vapor in a microsecond.
“—wearing off!” Kowacs completed as he hit the slot a step ahead of Bradley, who’d been that much slower getting to his feet, and two steps before Sie, who rocked back with the violence of the bolt she’d unleashed.
The major went through sideways. His equipment belt hooked on the edge of the barrier anyway, twisted but didn’t hold him.
The corridor dead ended. The four rooms on the left side were glowing slag from the plasma charge. A security man knelt in an open doorway across from where the bolt had hit. He’d dropped his rifle and was pawing at his eyes, possibly blinded already and certainly dead when Kowacs walked a one-handed burst across his chest.