“Yeah, I can use it,” Ryan replied, “but why would I want to bother? Bullets won’t penetrate that armor they’re wearing.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn about battlesuits,” Damm said.
Down the hallway, the sounds of fighting died away, but the screaming continued.
It wasn’t a good sign.
Thrill Bill pounded on the wall’s black armor with his balled fist. “Under the plasterboard of the walls, the floor and the ceiling, the hallway out there is lined with this stuff. It reflects the battlesuits’ defensive pulses. If you pack a lot of suits in a confined, reflective environment and then put them under heavy fire, things get all fucked up in a hurry. The defensive pulses from one suit are read as offensive attacks by the others. They counteract and cancel each other. In other words, what we have out there is a shooting gallery. I want you to open fire when I tell you to and don’t stop firing until I give the all clear.”
Ryan hunkered down behind the machine gun, found the actuating handle and chambered round number one. Then he looked at the blank wall that filled the firing port
“Better turn your heads,” Thrill Bill said. “I’m five seconds from blowing that wall.”
The warlord had a small detonator in his hand, and was staring at a video monitor that showed a view of the hallway, looking down from ceiling height. Ryan watched the monitor, too. After no more than a couple of seconds, men in black appeared in the distance.
Fifty or more, Ryan thought.
The troopers at the head of the line fired their weapons, cooking the people still trapped in the hall, then booting the corpses out of the way.
“We got them!” Thrill Bill said, tripping the switch.
With a whomp, the front of the wall blew out into the hall. Before the plaster dust cleared, Nara, Damm and the sec men had their tribarrels shoved through the port.
“Fire!” the warlord shouted.
The range to the troopers in the front of the pack was less than forty feet.
Ryan pinned the machine gun’s trigger. As the weapon roared to life, its buttstock rammed hard against his shoulder. He fanned the front-runners with hot lead, sending an unbroken string of brass hulls clattering against the wall to his right.
On his left, the others cut loose with pulse rifles cranked up to the max. If he hadn’t already lost the eye on that side, he would have had to close it to keep from being blinded by the green glare. The whistling noise of their sustained laser fire was deafening.
For a fraction of a second the battlesuits’ defenses seemed to hold. The four men in the lead continued to advance as their armor deflected the incoming fire. The full-power laser beams veered off their chests and into the side walls, only to veer off again when they struck the concealed armor sheathing. Over and over, the beams deflected off armor and reflected off walls, only to strike armor again farther down; laser light zigzagged the entire length of the hall, turning it into a screaming green inferno. Ryan poured a torrent of slugs straight into their black helmets; it sounded to him like the machine gun was putting out better than a thousand rounds a minute, but the men in black kept coming.
Then, as Thrill Bill had predicted, it all fell apart.
So many rounds, so little space.
The row of black helmets shattered under Ryan’s hail of lead, the armored bodies were flicked aside by probing lances of green.
The pressure of their concentrated firepower peeled back the point of the attack, melting men, rattling them inside their armor. As the targets disintegrated and fell away, Ryan adjusted his aim, reaching farther and farther into the corridor.
If the sustained lasers were largely bloodless, the conventional military rounds he fired were anything but. They blew through the black chest plates and exited the other side, taking with them plumes of red mist.
There were no screams audible over the whistling of the laser rifles. There was no return of fire from the opposition.
Thrill Bill had laid his trap well.