He turned his attention to the front of the building as bullets chipped the stone outer surface and whined from the layers of steel underneath.
“Kennedy,” Burroughs called over the radio.
“Sir.”
“The inside team?”
“Their communications are breaking up, sir,” the man replied. “Best we can figure out, they’ve been shut off in the old Project Calypso area.”
There were only two ways out of the structure. Over the years trapped inside, Burroughs had made certain of that. If the other team had been shut off in the project area, that way was closed. And Ryan Cawdor couldn’t hope to hold the other one, even if he’d had the water and supplies and could tolerate the rad intensity still baked into the terrain.
Burroughs crawled to the crest of a dune and fisted his pistol more tightly and shifted the sand so he could lie prone. He sighted along the barrel and waited for his shot with a patience that had been perfected over decades.
KRYSTY FROZE against the wall behind her. The Samp;W Model 640 .38 pistol was in her hand, loose and ready. Air moved against her face, and she turned and moved slowly in the direction it came from.
Unable to see in the complete darkness, she felt with her gift, probing what lay ahead of her. Something. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it had an alien feel to it. And it bore the cool, serrated touch of death.
Machinery hummed, low and almost indistinct, from a few yards away. It was an amorphous presence that held an unfocused promise of threat.
The hum deepened, then something clattered overhead. Krysty aimed the pistol in the dark, not doubting that it was pointed directly at the source of the noise. She reached out to the side with her free hand, leaning out from the wall she was using as her guide. Her fingertips brushed against the rough, rusty surface of the opposite wall. There was nothing in front of her or behind her.
A glimmer of light ignited inside a rounded hull almost three feet above Krysty’s head. The movement that accompanied it was stiff, filled with off-kilter vibration. She squeezed her pistol’s trigger as rapidly as she could. Six rounds spanged off metal with long, loud screams that left blazing comets of sparks in their wake.
At the same time her extra senses sent a quiver through Krysty that triggered an immediate reaction. In response she threw herself forward. Her arms covered her head before she landed, protecting her face and skull from whatever might be covering the ground. Instantly she rolled to one side and put her back to the wall. As she craned her head up to take in the blazing pyre that remained of the sentry drone, she broke open the .38 pistol and shook the empty brass free. In only a matter of seconds, she refilled the chambers and snapped the cylinder closed.
The drone was a spherical shape almost a foot and a half in diameter. Twin tracks only a couple inches apart threaded across the center of the tunnel, hanging from occasional braces from the ceiling. The drone hung from one track like a dead crow with one foot latched around a power line. The fire fed on the circuitry inside the mechanical sentry. A pall of gray blue smoke whipped against the ceiling, then began to drop toward the bottom of the tunnel.
Knowing the illumination from the fire wasn’t going to last long, Krysty pushed herself to her feet. The tracks hanging from the ceiling were powered, and the power had to be coming from somewhere.
She went forward, ducking under the tangle of flaming wires that hung from the security drone. The tunnel ran almost straight, but on a decline that she could feel in her sense of balance and in the way her feet turned as she walked.
The fire in the security drone went out with a collection of little hisses. But before it did, she spotted the oval door at the end of the tunnel.
Krysty had to pass through the last few yards without any light, working from memory. She reached out with her hand, seeking the door. It took six more measured steps to find it.