As Lujan put his finger on the front trigger of his pulse rifle, the six APCs were concealed in the pitch-darkness around him, ringing the semitrailer with laser cannon. He held the cross wires of his sites in the middle of his targets head. The man stood at the left corner of the trailer. Behind him, roughly at the boxs middle, was a second merc. The other two sat on the bottom of the ramp angling down from the back of the trailer.
Being a sentry in the Slime Zone with no lights and only a Evac-Bubble for protection was grim duty, Lujan thought, then squeezed the trigger.
There was no recoil, so he could watch the instantaneous result. He could hear it, toothe wet pop as the protective bubble depressurized and a six-inch bolt of green lightening passed through the mans skull. As the man fell, behind him so did a huge clump of downhanging greenery, which had been severed by the through-and-through.
Behind that clump, another dropped and another.
The major tightened down on his second target, the man at the middle of the trailer, and fired once. When he heard the pop he was already swinging the sights to the right. As he did so, he pushed the afterimage of a yellow figure collapsing from his mind. Before the third man could rise from his seat on the ramp, Lujan shot him in the forehead. Pop! The fourth man, confronted, and no doubt animated, by the sudden deaths of his three comrades, managed to get to his feet.
The major had intended to make a final head shot, but couldn’t risk it because of the likelihood of another through-and-through that would alert his quarry. The man’s brain lined up almost level with the floor of the trailer. Lujan dropped his aim five inches and put the petawatt pulse through the bubble’s canister and under the point of his chin. His spinal cord neatly severed, the sentry buckled and he slumped to the slime.
Immediately, the major keyed the signal to advance to the rest of his tactical unit. He didn’t attempt to stand. One of the things he’d learned in basic training was that it was dangerous to attempt any serious fighting on foot in the Slime Zone. Sometimes the green slunk drifted six feet deep. It filled elevator shafts and stairwells. A wrong step and a person could sink down and never be seen again. To move about safely over unmapped terrain, you had to bring along your own secure walkways.
Behind him, his crew was busy unrolling yard-wide lanes of ribbed plastic sheeting, first connecting the ring of APCs, then advancing toward the tractor trailer.
As Lujan waited for the walkway to unroll past him, he scanned the trailer with infrared. The box on wheels leaked light and heat like a lime-green beacon. Based on the slime growth on its roof and sides, he judged it hadn’t been parked there for more than half an hour.
The scheme to hole up in the Slime Zone was ingenious; Lujan expected no less from a cunning bastard like Damm. Lucky thing for Mitsuki, the ex-Marine didn’t really have the resources to pull off a triple cross. The tactical unit’s audio sensors had isolated ten beating hearts inside the trailer. The major doubted very much that they had biohazard battle-suits for everybody inside. That kind of gear was even more strictly controlled than shoulder-fired laser weapons, as it offered a degree of invulnerability to the wearer. And the battlesuits couldn’t be worn off-the-rack. Each suit had to be carefully tuned to the user’s nervous system and reaction timethe black material was, among other things, a solid-state, microcrystalline computer. If the mercs inside the semi had protection from the hostile environment, it would have to be primitive at bestsimple pressurized polymer suits to keep out the spores. Lujan was sure they had no real defense against lasers.
So killing them all wasn’t going to present much of a problem.
The hard part was going to be getting the visitor out alive, if possible, which was what Lujan had been ordered to do. If it looked like the one-eyed man was going to escape and fall into the hands of FIVE or one of the other Globals, as a last resort, he was to be terminated with prejudice, and the kidnapping laid at the feet of the dead Damm and his crew, as had been originally planned.