Not because he was offering hopethere was nonebut because he was returning kindness, the one-eyed man smiled back.
Then he heard the tramp of running boots, more screams, and he could see green light flaring down the hall outside. The FIVE troopers had rounded the corner and were stomping over the slap charges.
Ryan could imagine the devices sticking to the soles of the soldiers’ boots like great wads of chewing gum. How long would it take to realize what they’d stepped on? How long would it take to strip them off?
Three seconds?
Four seconds?
The mines discharged in a tight string, rattling the walls and floor, and sending the people around Ryan staggering for balance.
“Let’s go!” came Thrill Bill’s shout from across the corridor.
Ryan exited the room and stepped into a charnel house. Blood dripped from the blackened ceiling, and the floor was awash in it. The broken bodies of FIVE troopers and Gloomtown residents lay mingled on the floor. Their legs blown off at the hip, some of the soldiers still thrashed, shrieking behind their black helmets.
There was no timeor inclinationfor mercy bullets.
Thrill Bill jumped over the bodies and Ryan followed, moving past the perimeter of the mines’ blast zone to the join of the connecting hall. The warlord didn’t pause at the corner, he threw himself across the gap. Ryan did the same, and as he jumped, he glimpsed more figures in black rushing down the corridor toward them, trampling over the piles of dead and dying innocents, those already well serviced by the legions of FIVE.
Damm, then Nara, leaped across the hallway. Ryan caught the blonde as she cleared the gap, then pushed her ahead of him.
Another pair of sec men made the jump without drawing enemy fire. But the next two who tried to cross were hit by a half dozen beams at once. Their bodies knocked sprawling in midair, they came down ten feet away, in pieces.
Hissing.
On the other side of gap, the warlord’s sec men hesitated, wanting to make the jump, but afraid to try. With the pulse rifles massed down the hallway to the right, to cross the corridor was death by firing squad.
Thrill Bill shouted to them, “Stay there! Don’t try to follow us! Just keep them off our butts!”
Ryan and the others had only moved a short distance down the hall, when they heard the sounds of furious fighting from the juncture behind them. The warlord’s sec men were doing their best to obey his final orders, to defend his back against all comers.
Then, above the grinding tumult of battle, it sounded like a hundred teakettles were blowing their tops.
“They’re cutting through the walls with sustained fire!” Damm told the warlord. “They’ll have your men flanked in no time.”
“Run!” was Bill’s reply.
To keep up with the tall warlord, Ryan had to break into an all-out sprint. High-kicking down the hall, they took a dogleg to the right. Twenty feet down, on the left side of the corridor was the first closed door that Ryan had seen so far. It was also locked. Thrill Bill quickly opened it with a key.
Once Ryan was inside it was clear why the warlord was concerned about security.
The room was a bunker.
Its left rear corner, the one that faced down the long hallway they’d just fled, was heavily fortified. The wall itself was defended with plates of the same black material as the battlesuits. Sandbagged in place, the armor ran from the floor halfway up the wall. More black plates extended from the ceiling, leaving a gap in the coverage of about a foot. It wasn’t a firing port, yet; the wall on the other side was still intact. The gap in the armor ran ten feet along the middle of the wallroughly the width of the corridor. There was plenty of room for four pulse rifles to line up along it.
“Know how to use one of those?” Thrill Bill said to Ryan, pointing at the air-cooled light machine gun that sat on a tripod at the far end of the firing port.
In front of its pistol grip was a huge drum magazine. Ryan checked the round counter. The thing was loaded with 2500 rounds. The barrel had a massive recoil compensator, but nothing else unusual.