The corridor turned sharply to the left. Splits and bulges showed in the walls and ceiling where the vanadium alloy had buckled. Redoubt Papa may not have received a direct strike, but even a thermonuclear near miss had come very close to collapsing it.
Stenz suddenly froze, gesturing behind him for the squad to halt. The patina of dust filming the floor showed markings, but they were so unlike footprints he couldn’t quickly identify them.
Easing down to one knee, he silently cursed the feeble light. As he gazed at the marks, he felt his heart suddenly trip-hammer inside his polycarbonate-encased chest. A cold hand seemed to stroke the buttons of his spine.
The prints were small, like a child’s, but they didn’t look like feet. They resembled the impressions made by distorted, malformed hands, with all the fingers the same length and a stubby thumb crooked at a forty-five-degree angle. He experienced a momentary irrational suspicion that a gang of mutie children had broken into the complex and walked around on their hands simply to bewilder any Mags that might stop by one day.
Stenz knew that the prints were recent and, judging by the other markings, whoever made them had alternately pulled and pushed a heavy object. Double rows of straight lines cutting through the dust suggested wheels.
He rose to his feet, whispering, “Triple red.”
Moving forward again, he cautiously peered down unlit side passages before passing them. After a dozen yards, the corridor dead-ended at a closed sec door, the green control lever on the frame in the down position.
Turning to Presky, he said quietly, “I’ll throw the switch. You stand ready.”
Stenz stepped into the corner between the frame and the wall and gripped the lever in his left hand. He waited until the rest of the squad shifted around the corridor so they could fire without hitting Presky.
The lever was stiff, but Stenz wrenched it up. Presky Icnsed as the squeaking hiss of hydraulics filled the passageway, holding his Sin Eater in a two-fisted grip.
The slab of vanadium alloy slid upward far more smoothly than the main entrance door. Stenz was dismayed by that, knowing it meant the sec door had been operated in the recent past.
The door’s upward progress stopped, clicking into yhce. The squeal of the lifting mechanism faded and seemed to blend with a new sounda faint, high-pitched whine so distant that Stenz couldn’t really be certain he heard it.
Presky thrust his head forward. “Nothing. No lights. All dark. Can’t see a thing.”
Stenz began to step away from the lever when he felt a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation all over his body, as if he were skirting a low-level electrical field. The tingling became a prickle. The fine hairs all over his body seemed to vibrate, to bristle. The air pulsed Kke the beating of a gigantic, invisible heart.
Presky opened his mouth and half shouted, “I see a light”
With a ripping whiplash sound, the door seemed to gush a torrent of blood. A wavering funnel of intolerably bright crimson light washed from the darkness and spiashed over Presky. For an instant, his body swayed as if he stood in the path of a stiff wind. He rocked back on his heels. In the space of a heartbeat, his armor bubbled like boiling tar, then flapped away in black streamers, splattering the walls and floor with thick, semiliquid tendrils.
The twenty 9 mm rounds in the magazine of his Sin Eater exploded simultaneously in a flare of flame and an eardrum-jarring concussion. Presky didn’t fall. His body flowed, smearing itself across the floor like a viscous ebony pudding bearing only the vaguest suggestion of a human outline.
Stenz stood wedged between the door frame and the wall, paralyzed by terror and shock. His eyes watched Presky ooze over the corridor, and his ears heard moist, slithery sounds as the man’s jellied remains stretched slowly along the passageway.
Then all the Magistrates began to scream, to curse, to retreat in panic. Stenz slammed down the lever in a spasmodic movement, but the sec door didn’t drop. Hughes and DeCampo, on the run, swiveled around to hurl indiscriminate blasterfire in the direction of the open doorway, forcing Stenz to jam himself sideways against the wall to avoid the wild slugs.
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