Kane gestured to the chamber. “He ran in there, transported himself somewhere else.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“This thing was winding down when I got here,” Kane declared. “Where else could he have gone?”
Brigid studied the keypad affixed to the armaglass next to the door. “This is pretty much like the schematic I saw. I think we can activate it.”
“There’s no power in here,” said Grant. “Salvo shot up the generator.”
“It has an independent power source, a nuke engine below it.”
“We get in it, and it takes us away?” Domi asked skeptically.
“No!” Grant’s tone was harsh. “We’re not getting in that thing. We don’t know for sure what it is.”
Down the corridor, stealthy footfalls echoed.
“Pollard and his gunner,” murmured Kane, and edged past Brigid into the passageway. He took position at the T junction. He waited as the steps got louder.
Then Pollard called out. “You’re trapped, all of you. It’s time to die, and it’s time for you to accept the inevitable. You’ve got no food, no water. You’ll perish anyway, but it’ll be a long and lingering and painful passing. I promise to make it quick. The choice is yours.”
“Have we tired you out?” Kane called. “We haven’t accepted anything as inevitable except your next fuckup.”
Pollard’s reply was the characteristic dut-dut-dut of a Copperhead slamming dully down the corridor. Kane pulled back as a storm of slugs chiseled chips out of the angle of the junction.
He returned the fire with the Sin Eater, ricochets screeching and striking sparks from the metal girders and stonework. Grant shouldered up beside him, and for a long minute they exchanged fire with the two Mags at the end of the passageway.
“I don’t care for our options,” Grant said tightly.
“They’re better armed and have more ammo, and more Mags are probably on their way.”
“Unless you want to accept the inevitable, then you better reevaluate your fear of the gateway.”
“I’m not afraid of it!” replied Grant vehemently. Then he shrugged and added, “I just don’t like the whole idea.”
The firing tapered off to a sporadic crackle. Kane signaled for Grant to stay while he returned to the mat-trans unit. Brigid had the flashlight on the keypad, and her fingers hovered tentatively over the buttons.
She said, “According to what I read, a fallback program can be accessed by this button.” She pointed to a square key at the bottom of the pad. It glowed with two letters “LD.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Last Destination. If pressed within five minutes of a successful jump, it’ll reactivate the gateway and transport us to the last reception point.”
Kane replied uneasily, “I don’t know that’s such a good strategy. We might end up in the baron’s harem or something.”
Brigid nodded distractedly. “Five minutes have passed anyway. I’ll punch in the codes as I remember them. There were three in New Mexico alone.”
Lips moving as she extracted the numbers from her memory, she tapped in a sequence of keys. A glass-fronted liquid-crystal display at the top of the pad flashed the word “Inactive.”
She made a sound of dismay. “I was afraid of that. If the receiving units aren’t powered up, we can’t achieve a destination lock. Or maybe there is a security lockout to prevent what we’re attemptingunauthorized transmissionand if that’s the case, none of us are going anywhere.”
“Try another code.”
She did, and again “Inactive” glowed on the display. The process was too stressful for Kane to simply stand and watch, and he sensed he wasn’t helping by anxiously hovering over her. He left her to rejoin Grant at the junction.
There came another flurry of cracks from the Copperheads. The bullets hammered ineffectually against the walls. Grant fired a single shot, and then a triburst, but Pollard and his gunner were safely out of range in the adjacent room.
“What’s going on back there?” Grant whispered.
“She’s working on it.”
Kane went to one knee, bracing the Sin Eater on his left forearm. He took careful aim. He waited until he saw the snout of a Copperhead ease into the passageway and he pressed the trigger once.