them both into something akin to chickens with their heads lopped off. They
dived in front of the two sec men, yelling in a frenzy. One tripped on a rug,
the other tumbled over her. Ryan swore and dived to one side as a sec man, quick
off the mark, unslung his piece and fired what must have been half a mag in his
direction, the rounds flaying the thick curtains behind into wildly flapping
cloth shreds. Ryan was firing the LAPA, its butt smacking into his pelvis, but
his aim was wild and rounds hammered into the mirrors behind the pyramid, the
glass exploding into a million flying shards.
Hunaker hadn’t fired at all. She was rolling across the floor toward the wall in
a desperate scramble as bullets from the second guy tore air above her head. She
was now regretting that she hadn’t jumped into this one with a piece—engineered,
as this particular piece was, so it fired only in the fully automatic mode—that
did not have the ferocious blast power of the MAC, which was fine for blazing
out whole groups of targets with a light squeeze of the trigger but lousy when
it came to the one-man job, and especially lousy when that one man was
surrounded by others you did not want to hit. Sometimes, she thought as she let
the machine-pistol go and dragged an H&K P-7 from inside her jacket, you could
be over overconfident.
She rolled fast and scrambled around onto her stomach, fast-sighting as her head
rose from the rug, and the compact snug-gripped P-7 barked twice, the first
round missing her man by mere centimeters, the second, because of hand quiver on
the roll, whipping at his coat. He yelped, jumped to his left, stumbled and
fell, a third bullet from the P-7 tearing air where he’d just been. He rolled,
too, and took a dive like a sprinter off the block into the comparatively calmer
waters on the other side of the pyramid, joined a half second later by his
companion, who’d had the same idea.
That idea was not to face up to Ryan and Hunaker at all but get the hell out of
the room in one piece by diving through the still-open mirror door through which
they’d arrived.
Except Ryan was ahead of them. Where he was he could not hit them, either of
them, but the door itself was another matter. He sent three rounds into it,
smashing the glass into a wild kaleidoscope of candle-reflected glitter and
punching the door into its frame.
It was a standoff. Neither Ryan nor Hunaker had a direct bead on the two goons,
who were now crouched behind the pyramid. On the other hand Ryan, from where he
was positioned, could destroy anyone who tried to make for that doorway. The two
goons were in a slightly better state, although only very slightly. They at
least could snipe if they’d a mind to, or poke their pieces up and over the
nearest step treads and blaze off in the general direction of their targets. And
by doing that they could at least stop Ryan and Hunaker rushing them from the
other side.
Ryan bared his teeth in an icy grin as he stared at the reflection of the two
men, one of whom was staring back. Their eyes met. The goon wasn’t grinning. He
looked as though his bowels were about ready to go. That did not, however, make
him any less dangerous.
Ryan’s gaze roved. The two women were now trying to burrow under the rugs,
shrieking and yelling in total-flap hysteria. The old guy called Doc seemed to
have disappeared. Ryan couldn’t see him anywhere, had not caught his bolt route.
Probably he’d managed to flee through that door. Pity. Ryan would like to have
talked to him. He’d seemed a wreck—not surprising if, as it appeared, he was
some kind of… well, court jester or scapegoat for Teague and Strasser—but he had
not seemed completely off his head, which made all that stuff he’d been gabbling
about mildly attention grabbing. Or perhaps rather more than mildly attention
grabbing. Where had Teague picked him up? He’d not been around two years back.