the floor. Like Ryan, he chose to keep something close to hand—the leaf-bladed
throwing knives stayed secreted on him, hidden in the folds and patches of his
jacket.
“Okay—sounds good to me,” Murphy said from beyond the door. “Now come forward
slowly.”
Almost as one, the companions stepped around the flimsy barriers of the
overturned desks, Ryan fractionally ahead of the others. All kept their muscles
as tight as whipcord, nerve ends jangling for the slightest sign of movement. It
was a fairly large room, looking identical to the ones in all the redoubts they
had come across. It was cleaner, and had less of an empty, desolate feel than
the others. For all that, it was just a standard control room.
So there was that advantage. They knew the territory. Whoever they were facing
wouldn’t expect that.
It wasn’t much of an advantage, but it might be all they needed. Behind them, in
the chamber, J.B. clamped his fedora on his head and adjusted the wire rims of
his glasses. He could feel, rather than see, Dean tense up for action with the
same granite stance as his father. Doc raised the LeMat, tension transforming
him from a seemingly mad old man into a taut killing machine.
They were ready.
MURPHY HEARD THE MOVEMENTS around the blind corner. He had sharp ears, honed by
a lifetime of avoiding stickies and the ambushing gangs of outsiders he
encountered every time he led a party from the redoubt. It was part of the
hereditary chain that he had been trained for this since birth.
When he knew they were in the center of the room, he nodded to one of his sec
corps.
“Okay, Panner. Now.”
Pri Firclas Panner was a short woman with hooded eyes and a heavy body build. In
spite of the extra weight, her uniform was too large for her. It showed the
marks of being altered and gave her a deceptively unbalanced and clumsy look. In
fact her father had been a born killer, and her mother an outsider who had slit
her throat after her daughter had been born, as though knowing the psychotic
offspring she had produced. Panner liked her work. Too keenly. Panner was
Murphy’s most trusted ally, and it was only gene-pool regs that stopped him
joining with her.
A flicker of a sadistic smile crossed Panner’s face.
“Those fuckers’ll wish they’d never tried to invade, Sarj,” she said in a lusty,
throaty voice. The thought of what they were about to suffer excited her. She’d
seen these grens at work before. They didn’t kill, but were far more subtle in
their pain. It lasted longer and left the sufferer alive for other tortures.
Before Murphy had time to take in Panner’s arousal, the stocky sec woman soldier
swung her body in front of the doorway with a rebel yell that had been passed
down her line since the days of skydark.
As she yelled, she adopted a classic firing stance, bracing her legs apart. The
gren launcher in her hands was of an experimental type rarely seen in the
Deathlands, and was one of only two that were left on the redoubt.
AT THE SOUND of Panner’s voice, the friends scattered across the room, diving
for whatever scant cover they could find. Jak flipped over and landed on his
feet behind a desk, one of the leaf-bladed knives balanced in the palm of his
hand, perfectly weighted for throwing. Ryan also sought cover, rolling and
coming to a halt with the SIG-Sauer in hand, his eye trying to sight the woman
in the doorway.
But she was already gone.
The yell had covered a loud popping sound as the gren had launched. It hit the
wall above the chamber door and bounced in front of Krysty.
“Shit…” She threw herself away from the strangely shaped gren, which was oblong
with a squared end and unlike anything she’d ever seen before. Not that it
mattered—a gren was a gren. It didn’t have to be just one shape to be able to
chill you.
J.B. appeared in the chamber doorway, holding his Uzi, preferring its accuracy
to the less controlled M-4000, which could hit the rest of his party as easily