“Who the fuck’re”
The room was only a couple of strides from one wall to the other and Ryan wasted no time. He swung the blaster with all his strength, catching the wincing boy across the side of the head with the barrel. There was a loud crack and the boy went down like a felled calf.
Then a woman stood in the doorway, hand to her mouth in shock at the sight of the armed figure and her child slumped at his feet. “What are you”
Ryan shot her through the center of her narrow forehead, the bullet exiting from the back of her shattered skull and striking a uniformed guard of some kind who was pressing immediately behind her. His face was covered with her blood and brains, and pocked by splinters of bone. The partly spent 9 mm round, distorted and tumbling, ripped a gouge beneath his left eye, driving a crimson furrow through the stubbled flesh of the cheek, removing most of his left ear before angling upward and burying itself in the plaster of the white ceiling.
The entrance to the mat-trans unit became a screeching, flailing chaos.
Half of those outside didn’t know what was going on and were trying to push forward, while the other half had seen the woman and attendant shot and were shoving back in panic. Everyone was shouting and screaming, the wounded man loudest of all.
“Chill the bastard spy!” someone yelled, and a knife flashed through the air, missing Ryan by a hand’s span.
He snapped off a couple more shots, aiming into the press of bodies that jammed the doorway, dodging backward, intending to get straight into the chamber. Once the lock had engaged, the armaglass walls would protect him from anything short of a concerted gren attack.
But he’d forgotten the red rope that blocked off the gateway, and it caught Ryan behind the knees, sending him toppling over on his back.
“Cut the balls off the murdering bastard!”
A stout man had drawn what looked like an old cavalry saber and was running boldly toward Ryan, flourishing the weapon above his head. But the dying woman was thrashing around and he caught his foot on her arm, fighting for balance, feet slipping in the spreading lake of blood.
An alarm bell had started to ring, and Ryan could see a flashing light above the heads of the throng in the doorway.
He scuttled back, still on his ass, until he was finally inside the chamber, firing half a dozen more bullets from the SIG-Sauer, more or less at random, seeing and hearing most of them strike home in the angry mob.
“We got him now!”
“Yeah, the shithead can’t escape from there.”
Ryan stood quickly, pulling the purple door closed, whistling between his teeth with relief as the massive sec lock clicked shut.
“Right. Time to move on,” he said, squatting with his back to the wall, facing the door.
Despite its thickness, the glass still showed the distorted faces of the strangers, pressed against it, and he could hear their vicious yelps for his life. Fists and metal banged and crashed all around the gateway.
Ryan held the SIG-Sauer in his hand, waiting calmly for the jump to start. He felt confident that nobody would break in, but he’d been counting bullets. As the mist began to gather and thicken around the silvery disks in the floor and ceiling, he calmly reloaded the blaster.
“What the fuck’s happening in there?” someone bellowed. “Break the door down!”
“No chance,” Ryan whispered, hearing his own voice swirl and echo around his brain, shifting into some unguessable and infinite distance. The darkness closed his eye and then began to squeeze his brain in a shroud of raven’s velvet.
Ryan slipped once more into unconsciousness.
Chapter Four
Outside the actual chamber of the gateway, the air was even more perishingly cold. Mildred rubbed her hands together, the Czech revolver stuck clumsily in her belt. Though the greeny-blue door was wide open, she hadn’t taken a single step into the small adjoining room. She was aware that her pulse and respiration were both racing.
Through the half-open door beyond she could see into the control room. The air itself felt as though it were shimmering with suspended frost crystals. Already Mildred was aware of tiny lumps of ice forming inside her nose, and her facial skin felt like a badly made mask.