Damm grabbed Ryan by the arm and pushed him up the ramp after her. “We’ve got a little bit of space,” he said. “We’ve got to make the most of it.”
He said nothing about the other three mercies, the ones who had been bringing up the rear, the ones his satchel of high-ex had blown all to hell. Damm gave Ryan another shove. “Go!” he said. The one-eyed man headed for the wall of fog that lay across the tunnel, fifty yards ahead. Behind and below them, powerful engines roared and there was a grating sound as one of the intact APCs tried to push the overturned vehicle out of its way.
Ryan felt as if he had a couple of bags of wet concrete in his chest, dragging him down. He could barely lift his feet, and he wasn’t the only one who was slowing down. With the fog still a good distance away, Damm and Nara were fading fast, too. None of them was going to make it, he could see that. Before they reached cover, before the APCs even got close, they were going to collapse and die.
Unable to go another step, Ryan put a hand against the wall, bent over and vomited green slime. Nara was right there, by his side, helping him back up. As he straightened, Damm gave him a hard shove, pinning his back against the wall.
Ryan opened his eye and saw that the mercie had something gripped in his fist. Protruding from the heel of Damm’s hand was a bright needle, as thin as a hair, and three inches long. He wielded it like a killing dirk, in a downward stab.
There was no way Ryan could deflect the blow.
He gasped as the full length of the hypodermic pierced his chest, driving in to the hilt. He gasped again as Damm thumbed the plunger home, as fingers of fire squeezed his wildly beating heart.
THE LIGHTS WENT OUT for Major Oswaldo Lujan, and as they did, a stunning impact hurled him against his shoulder harness. Plunged into darkness inside his APC, all of his external sensors blacked out, the major unleashed a ferocious string of profanity. He’d been buried under a mountain of slime by a sweep of laser fire from the kidnappers’ van. Still cursing, he rocked the APC back and forth, shifting from forward to reverse, grinding a little more breathing room, and a little more, until he could finally reverse his way out from under the smothering heap.
With his optics cleared he saw two of his APCs already diving into the darkness ahead. The other vehicles had been caught in the trailer’s explosion. Overturned and buried by slime fall, they were out of the picture. How much explosive had gone off, he could only guess. The blast had collapsed the ceiling on top of the crater where the trailer had once sat. There was no sign of it or the tractor that had pulled it.
He should have guessed the bastard would pull something like that, Lujan told himself as he roared after the others. The mercie had a history of desperate escapes that bordered on the suicidal.
Laser-cannon fire lit up the terrain ahead, and as Lujan approached the mouth of the tunnel ramp, he saw that there was still plenty of opportunity for him to make amends. The ruined van sat empty, covered in drapes of slime. The man from Shadow World and his surviving kidnappers were on foot.
Lujan checked the elapsed time since the trailer explosion. Three minutes. Inside the black helmet, a fierce smile lit up his face. Add three minutes to the time the mercs had already spent in Slime Zone and what you got was torpor, fading rapidly into death.
One way or another, the story was going to end real soon.
Throttle pinned, Lujan fought to catch up with the other two APCs before they reached the tunnel. It was impossible; they had too big a lead. He had just entered the foot of the ramp when somewhere above the bomb blew.
The tunnel was lit by hard white light and rocked by an awesome thunder crack. A fireball devoured the lead APC, rolled over the second vehicle and kept on rolling down the ramp. The major met it head-on, and it passed right over him.