And for once, despite the odds against it, the pushing of a button in a mat-trans control room had an effect.
Before the pair’s shocked eyes, the digital display began to change faster than the eye could catch. The monitor and base comp flickered into frenetic life, colored lights glowing and dancing, internal disk drives whirring, and a series of coded messages and graphics began to pop up on the screen. The other operating computer stations also fired into new life, each of them linked.
Directly behind Mildred and Dean, at the same time the boy’s hand had pressed down the three keys at once, one of the massive-information storage units suddenly erupted into a white shower of sparks. A sizzling sound instantly followed, as the flickering lights on the master comp unit went out. An acrid-smelling haze of smoke hung in the air as a second, then a third comp unit followed suit within the span of a second.
Mildred swung back while Dean dived for the ground, pulling her Czech-made target revolver—a ZKR 551—from her hip holster. She leveled the pistol at where the sounds had erupted from, ready to take out whatever had caused the commotion with a 38-caliber Smith & Wesson round.
Until she saw what it was, and who had caused it. Dean looked sick in the wrath of her glare, slouching in his hiding place from beneath one of the mildewed steel desks. Mildred opened her mouth to speak, then turned on her booted heel and faced the gathered party, all of whom had drawn their own various weapons when the fireworks started.
“What the hell did you do, Mildred?” Ryan barked.
“It wasn’t me!” the stocky woman protested. “Look closer to home, Ryan!”
She pointed to the ashen-faced Dean. The comp terminal where he had pressed the keys had stopped functioning. The screen was no longer blinking, and the tiny green light at the bottom of the console had winked out. All of the ambient noise in the room had also stopped with the deaths of the last few operating systems.
“If that had happened when we were reassembling in the mat-trans chamber, no safety would have saved our asses—thirty-minute automatic reset be damned,” Mildred added as Ryan stepped around the desk to face his son.
“It was an accident—” Dean began, but was cut off when Ryan picked him up by the upper arms and slammed him on his butt on the dirty desktop.
“Is this the way it’s going to be?” Ryan bellowed, his normal raspy tone going up in pitch as he stood, glaring at the shaken boy. “You lose most of your survival skills during your stay at Brody’s? If you have, you’re going to get all of us chilled real fast.”
“Sorry, Dad.” Dean started to cut his eyes away from his father’s piercing glare until the one-eyed man grabbed the boy by the chin and pulled his face back up. Ryan sighed, a long, extended exhalation from deep within his belly, and brought his anger back in check as Krysty’s words whispered through his mind, the advice she had given to him back in Vegas when Dean had rejoined them only to fall back into unsafe habits that could get them all shot.
He’s still a child, Ryan, no matter how quickly you want to mold him into a man.
Ryan didn’t agree. Dean was becoming as seasoned as any of the rest of them. He was just being slack. After nearly a year of being locked away at the Brody school, the boy’s survival mechanisms were rusty. Hopefully they’d get a proper oiling before the boy got himself—or one of the group—chilled.
“I know I screwed up, Dad.”
“Fine. Don’t do it again.”
“Actually,” Mildred mused, “Dean might have solved the question of whether this redoubt’s gateway was safe for future use.”
“Mildred’s right,” J.B. agreed. “The kid did us a favor. We’ve pushed our luck and then some with this redoubt. If I had any doubts before, this made the decision for me. I’m for walking.”
Ryan turned from Dean to look at Mildred and J.B. “All right, then. Mildred, you make sure all the mat-trans control comps are really dead. We can leave the sec door open for extra safety in case something else happens. Close the door when you’re through and come out after us. While you’re checking the comps, we’ll fan out to the stairwell and see about making our way up to the top of the redoubt.”