Small fires dotted the lobby, the charring carpet giving off thick clouds of smoke. Returning to the bikes outside, Mildred and Jak got the extinguishers, while Krysty and Doc beat out the flames with their coats. If the building went up, there was no way they could find the gateway.
Going to the rubble of the kiosk, Ryan prodded the droids with the SIG-Sauer to made sure they were aced, then pumped a few rounds into their exposed circuitry just to make sure. The armored sheeting of the hull warped apart, CPU and circuit boards shattering easily under the 9 mm rounds.
In short order, the fires were under control. Assuming the position of guard, Ryan stayed at the kiosk with the flamethrower ready as the rest of the companions did a quick recce of the first floor. They came back in only a couple of minutes.
“Nothing,” J.B. reported, walking from the shadows rear of the lobby. “Just an elevator bank and a big cafeteria. A lot of people worked here.”
“Like to know what it was they did,” Ryan growled, going to the office directory hanging from the ceiling above the kiosk. Unfortunately, the bullets from the rapidfires had slammed the board pretty hard, punching dozens of holes through the material and knocking off most of the letters. Only a cryptic scrambling of names and departments remained. Totally useless.
“Okay, we do this the hard way,” Ryan said, trimming the preburner and lowering the pressure on a feeder valve. “We go floor by floor. Stay tight, and ace anything that moves.”
“No prob,” Jak agreed, tossing aside the Armbrust and swinging around his M-203 to work the arming bolt.
“Droid!” Dean shouted, and hit the floor, throwing a gren toward the bathroom.
Slipping out of a men’s room, a droid strode into view as the sphere bounced along the floor and detonated. The blast lifted the sec machine off the ground, slamming it against the marble wall. Broken to pieces, the droid fell back to the carpet, sparking steadily from a dozen short circuits.
Pulling both handcannons, Doc leveled the Webley and triggered a single thundering round, the .44 slug blowing open the armored hull protecting the mini-comp. Then he fired the LeMat, the massive miniball punching through the CPU and smashing it into a million pieces. The sparks ceased abruptly.
“We’ve got to move fast,” Ryan stated, lowering the vented muzzle of his flamethrower. “These things are gonna be on our ass every step of the way.”
“Which direction, basement or penthouse?” Krysty asked, removing a spent clip and slapping a fresh mag against the stock of her weapon before ramming it into the receiver.
“Penthouse,” Ryan answered promptly. “If nothing else, we’ll have a good view of the city from up there. That might be helpful.”
“Agreed.”
Heading for the stairwell, the companions braced for another ambush, but the stairs proved to be clear to the next level.
“The programmers probably have the machines set to protect the elevators first,” Mildred guessed as they swept through the array of office cubicles filling the second floor. “Places like this always have emergency generators for the mainframes in case the city power grid went down.”
There was nothing on the second floor except for some rats, and the third floor was merely vacant conference rooms, as large and empty as the graves of giants. The fourth floor was strictly maintenance. However, the fifth had carpeting once again, the wooden doors elaborately carved, and old paintings in gilded frames adorned the plaster walls. A glass-topped mahogany reception desk was set in a small alcove with several plush wing-back chairs set nearby.
“Protoculte Bio-Medical Corporation,” Ryan said with a frown, reading the name in brass, or maybe gold, letters on the front of the reception desk. “Anybody know what that means?”
“Most certainly, it is a polyglot of classic and antiquarian Latin,” Doc said, placing the strap of the M-16 combo around his neck to distribute the weight more comfortably. “It roughly translates as ‘wondrous new science.”
“Don’t like the sound of that,” Mildred muttered, lifting a business card from a cut-crystal stand embossed with the company logo.
Scowling, she threw it away. “Might have guessedthis is a damn genetics firm. The kind of idiots who play with DNA to make juicier apples whose blossoms poisoned bees, and bigger cows that freeze to death in summer.”