He had two choices go back the way he came or investigate what was causing all of the stickie ruckus.
“Follow the ruckus,” he decided. Perhaps he could gain the upper hand somehow. He hadn’t spent all this time hoping for a big score to see it pissed away by a bunch of idiot muties who liked to set fires.
ONCE RYAN HAD FIRED the first shot, the battle was on. He flattened against the wall, firing a few more rounds blindly into the smoke.
“Come on,” he barked, and the rest of the group filed in past the burning parts of the room. The fires didn’t seem to have opened into full flower yet, blossoming out in red-and-yellow petals. The walls, while scorched, weren’t ablaze.
“Want to seal off the gateway, Dad?” Dean was standing at the door, where a twin for the sec keypad was recessed in the door frame.
“Do it,” Ryan replied. “We might need a back door if things get bad in here.”
The boy reversed the order of the locking code, and the door gave off the same queer clicking noise that indicated the magnetic lock had thrown true.
“The fire may burn itself out,” Krysty said. “Not much here to flame on, really.”
“Mebbe,” Ryan agreed, coughing from an unintended lungful of smoke. He strained to see as they stepped farther into the burning room and near a doorway that led into a wide corridor. He could see more humanoid figures at the far end of the wall, slowly moving closer.
“More stickies heading this way,” he reported to his friends.
Then, before any sort of battle could begin, the ceiling fell in, the smoky air above them transformed into a mass of cool white clouds, jetting down violently and without warning.
“What is this bastard stuff?” Ryan bellowed.
“Stay calm,” Mildred yelled back over the rattling of the released emissions. “It’s halon gas! I’ve seen it before. They used it in predark times to fight fires instead of water in sensitive areas with computers.”
Looking up, they all saw that the gas had been released from a series of shiny sprinkler heads mounted into the ceiling tiles.
“Can it hurt us?” Krysty asked in a concerned voice. “Should we hold our breath or something?”
“No. It’s a chem dump, a deluge. Expensive as hell, but it won’t harm anything, including people. It’s inert. Can’t damage equipment or paper and disappears like a vapor. Leaves everything behind except for fire untouched,” Mildred replied.
“Sounds more like the neutron bomb of the firebug set,” J.B. observed sourly.
Already, the chemical was doing its magic, beating back the flames and clearing the air, revealing the damaged lounge area and the remaining three stickies who now could see the humans quite clearly, and vice versa.
“Feel wet,” Jak said, running the palm of a hand down his pant leg.
“Halon gas dries quickly, Jak,” Mildred told him. “You’ll never know it was there in a few minutes.”
“This fire was big enough to trigger any safeguards. I wonder what took the gas so long to launch?” Ryan said, watching the stickies regain their equilibrium from the sudden appearance of the artificial cloudburst.
“No telling,” Mildred replied, sharing Ryan’s attentive gaze on their foes. “Since this isn’t a standard redoubt, I’m wondering what’s keeping this place powered up enough to operate a gateway anyway.”
“Must be a nuke gen somewhere around here,” J.B. said bluntly.
Mildred chuckled. “If this is more of a private setup, I’ll bet the locals never dreamed there was a small nuclear power plant right under their feet.”
Like others of their kind, the muties were clumsy as they entered chaotically into what passed for a stickie attack stance. The freakish deformity of their bodies was painfully obvious as each of them turned to face Ryan and the rest of the group of friends.
The only weapons they carried were torches, and a few blades and other sharpened hand-to-hand weapons. No blasters were in evidence.
Normally the muties didn’t need them. However, in such close quarters, their attack against human rifles wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds. Chilling the stickies would be a simple task.