The room echoed with the door-slamming bang of the blaster, followed a microsecond later by the high-pitched whine of a ricochet.
Ryan rose and pulled the shattered metal away from the hasp. Hanging inside the locker was a dress uniform of one of the Kings Point enlisted men. Frustrated, he slammed the door shut and returned to his position behind a desk.
He and Mildred repeated the procedure with the next four lockers. Each one contained uniforms or personal bric-a-brac.
Aligning the sixth and last lock with the sights of her blaster, she muttered, “After burning this many rounds, I don’t know if I’ll feel better if our stuff is in there or not.”
The revolver bracked, the lock jumped, flew apart and Ryan checked the container’s contents. He released a slow, relieved breath and removed his Steyr rifle, his eighteen-inch panga, his SIG-Sauer and Krysty’s Smith & Wesson.
Sourly, Mildred said, “It would have to be the last locker.”
“Depends on how you look at it,” Dean said with a grin. “It could have been the first locker. You just started on the wrong end.”
Mildred feigned a backhand slap at the boy. “Ryan, this kid of yours is entering the smart-ass stage.”
“Then he is in the proper company,” Doc observed sagely.
After Ryan buckled on his gun belt and slung the rifle over a shoulder, he felt about ten times better. Chambering a round into his handblaster, he said, “Time to go down.”
He led the way across the room to an alcove barred by a wood-paneled door. Turning the knob, he stepped out onto the concrete landing of a stairway that pitched downward. Having descended the stairs a few hours earlier, Ryan again took the point.
The walls were of blue gray concrete, lit by flickering fluorescent fixtures. Arrows painted on the walls at each landing pointed down. Small air vents just beneath the low ceilings played a continuous flow of cool, recycled air.
The stairwell led to a narrow corridor, which ended a hundred feet away at a vanadium steel door recessed into the wall. It was hexagonal in shape and a bright green in color. On the floor a few feet in front it lay the bullet-blasted corpse of one of Poseidon’s mercs, a bespectacled man Ryan had dubbed “Specs.”
He stepped over the body and approached the portal cautiously, careful not to tread in the wide pool of drying blood spread around it. The torso of a man floated in the crimson lagoon, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. His face was frozen in an open-mouthed rictus of agony. His body was bisected, cut neatly in half at the waist by the multi-ton door.
Krysty winced at the sight, gingerly circling the dark red puddle, not wanting to bloody the chiseled silver tips of her Western-style boots. Responding to her questioning glance, Ryan said, “Name was Jonesy. He fell down in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And then he was beside himself,” Doc muttered.
Mildred rolled her eyes. “I knew you’d say that.”
Ryan punched in the entrance code on the keypad panel fixed to the door frame. No matter how different the layout of the many redoubts they had visited, the one constant was the numerical sequence to release the sec door’s lock—3-5-2 opened the door, and 2-5-3 locked it again.
It was a sequence that had eluded Poseidon for years. He had gone mad in frustration at his inability to access the predark technical secrets that lay on the other side of the vanadium-steel door. In many ways, his obsession with those three digits had been his downfall.
A combination of hydraulics and pneumatics rumbled and squeaked, gears meshed and the sec door rose upward swiftly. As it did, it automatically tripped a photoelectric beam, and overhead lights flickered to a dim, yellowish life.
Ryan entered, stepping over the lower portion of Jonesy’s body. The first time he had entered a redoubt, his mind had reeled with impossible conjectures. He had been shocked, stunned, awed. Most of the technology he had seen held no meaning for him, because there had never been anything like it in any of the stockpiles he had uncovered with the Trader.