Thrill Bill led them to the rows of elevated skylights, then turned and started to run parallel to them. He seemed to know where he was going. He slowed after a few hundred feet, then stopped.
“What do you think, Captain? Shouldn’t this about do it?”
“There’s no way we can get any closer from up here.”
“Everybody dump out your packs,” the warlord ordered. “Cracking this baby is going to take some serious explosives.”
Ryan took a look at the skylights. They were made of the same stuff as the black armor.
The warlord cobbled together an assortment of mines, grens and blocks of plastic explosive and built a sort of pyramid on top of one of the skylight panes.
“Put the rest back,” Thrill Bill said.
Not that there was much to put back. Ryan had four grens and one slap charge left. The latter he slipped inside a front pocket.
“That should do it,” the warlord said as he finished the fusing.
“And if we’re standing too close, it’ll do for us, too,” Nara stated.
“Better move over a couple of rows to the side, then.”
The explosion was nothing if not spectacular. A billowing orange fireball sent a fountain of black shards high in the air. The stuff hadn’t stopped falling when Thrill Bill charged out from cover. He didn’t hesitate a lick, jumping through the big hole he’d made, feetfirst.
Nara did the same, then Damm. Ryan jumped last. He didn’t know for sure what he was jumping into, because nobody’d bothered to tell him, but he didn’t expect to deadfall twenty feet.
He landed on the seat of a conference room chair with his boot soles and it crashed apart under his weight, breaking most of his fall. If he was surprised, the people in lab coats standing around the conference table were stunned.
Damm had fallen on three of their colleagues, inflicting serious damage to them and none to himself.
“Out of the way!” Thrill Bill yelled at the room full of scientists. To emphasize the urgency of the situation, he cut loose with his pulse rifle, sending a superheated green slash through the air above their heads that brought down the ceiling light fixture and half the opposing wall.
The scientists hit the deck, pronto.
“Follow me!” Nara shouted.
Ryan fell in behind her. He was ready for anything, but he soon realized it was a case of the same old, same old. They jogged through hallways choked with noncombatants.
“It’s Shadow Man!” they shouted as he ran by.
Some of them surged forward with outstretched arms, trying to grab him and pull him down. Their expressions of eagerness and delight melted away when he charred a bit of ceiling above them. It took a snap-kick in the face to dissuade the really serious grabbers.
They encountered no sec men until they approached the entrance to the passageway. Nara stuck her head around a turn, then quickly pulled it back.
“There must be at least ten of them standing in front of the bulkhead door about seventy feet down the hall,” she said. “No point in saving anything.”
“Yeah, let’s use it all,” Damm said.
They set out all their grens on the floor. After they divided them up, it worked out to six apiece, mixed frag and flash-stun.
“Will these hurt them?” Ryan asked.
“Blast concussion should knock them all out at the very least,” Thrill Bill said. “No way battlesuits can handle this much concentrated high-ex.”
Ryan started to pull pins with his teeth. When the others let their grip safeties plink off, he followed suit. He had three grens in either hand, fuses burning, when the hallway lights dimmed. And then went out.
DR. HUTH STOOD on the edge of the catwalk with his fingers crossed. Unscientific or not, he needed all the help he could get. He would have sacrificed a live goat to Beelzebub, if such a creature had still existed. The whole operation was a house of cards. The intricate, Global power interfacings had to hold long enough to establish the passageway; then he needed a really big surge to kick open the door to Shadow World.