If he lived through this harebrained adventure.
A door halfway down the corridor stood ajar. The three dragged the chill into the pitch-black room and shut the door on him. Friendly followed orders and pitched in the same way he did everything else, without speaking and with a glare on his face. He was ready enough to do what was asked of him, even if he did look fit to scare a vulture off a dead white-tailed doe.
If anything, she thought, he acted the slightest bit put out at not being tasked to shift the dead man by himself.
“Nobody coming,” Leto reported. “I don’t think anybody heard him.”
“Random cries for help and screaming aren’t uncommon down here,” Krysty said without raising her face. “Trust us on that.”
“Yeah,” the Angel boss said.
“Everybody back in place,” Ryan said. “Donut, lead on.”
The armorer faltered. “There’s an awful lot of blood.”
“Notice all the dark stains on the floor, Donut?” Mildred asked.
The fat man looked down in alarm. He hadn’t closed his visor yet.
“Spilled blood isn’t rare down here, either,” she stated. “And nobody who comes along in a minute or two is even going to notice this patch is still fresh unless they slip in it. Then they’ll just cuss and carry on.”
* * *
“
S
OMETHING’S HAPPENING,”
R
ICKY
reported.
“Define ‘something,’” J.B. demanded.
Ricky had instinctively ducked. Reluctantly he forced himself back up to peer over the blister-hatch rim.
“They quit loading stuff onto the wags.”
“And?”
“Well, there’s a bunch of sec men with longblasters coming out of the building and piling inside on top of the cargo.”
The two wags’ engines coughed to life. They’d been modified to burn ethanol, Ricky knew. He didn’t know much about wags yet—his mountainous, tropical home island didn’t boast many of them, in working condition, anyway—but under J.B.’s tutelage he was learning when and as he could.
“And now there’s a SWAT officer coming this way. He looks like he wants to talk to us.”
He looked down inside the dimly lit compartment.
“What are we gonna do? I don’t think he’s going to fall for the lost-voice thing.”
“Wait’ll he gets near, then blast him,” J.B. said casually, as if he were remarking on a change in the weather.
“But everybody’ll notice!” J.B. had handed him the suppressed Glock, but too many sec men and grunt techs in civilian clothes were running around for him to have a prayer of getting away with shooting an elite sec man in the face.
J.B. grinned at him. “Then rock and roll, son. It’s what you’re up there for. And you know you want to do it.”
Well, that’s true, Ricky thought.
“Lopez?” an imperious voice demanded from outside.
Knuckles rapped on the hull. “Lopez, FitzGibbons, if you taints are sleeping on the job, I swear by blessed Stephen I am going to peel the hides off your lazy backs and roll you in salt and apple vinegar!”
Ricky popped up. A man with a face like a hatchet was glaring up at him beneath the open visor of a SWAT helmet.
He looked puzzled. “You’re not Lopez. If you’re not authorized to be in there—”
“Oh, shut up,” Ricky said. He raised the Glock and pulled the trigger three times.
At least two of the heavy bullets hit flesh and bone from the blood Ricky saw squirt out. The lantern light touched it with crimson and fire as the officer collapsed with the utter bonelessness of the well and truly chilled.
“Shit!” Ricky yelled. “A dude’s running for the alarm.”
J.B. throttled up the engine. “Well, drown it out,” he said.
It actually took Ricky a confused eyeblink before he got it. Then he crossed himself and grabbed the pistol grip of the M240. Long practice as a rifleman made Ricky lean into the blaster and snug its butt against his shoulder. That turned out to be right. The sights were nothing like what he was used to, but he’d figured them out, too. Well enough for short-range work, anyway.
And for this big bad boy, anything less than a thousand yards was pretty close range.
The blaster was mounted on the blister on a kind of sliding ring. It slid around readily enough once Ricky gave it a good tug. He swung the M240 left.
He started firing short bursts. Despite the dazzle of the yellow muzzle-flare, which looked to be the size of a man, he used the dust kicked up by the 7.62 mm bullets striking the yard to walk them right into the sec man just as he reached for the handle of the Klaxon-style alarm. They cut right across the small of his back.
His upper torso actually folded over backward as he went down.
The two cargo wags sat parked with their rears toward the V-100. The supplies loaded onto them had come out of what Ricky thought of as the annex building, which occupied the northeastern end of the block that the mighty Temple took up. Sec men began to bail from the one nearer the structure. Muzzle-flashes winked as they fired at Ricky.
Bullets cracking past his ears really kicked his heartbeat into overdrive. He swung the M240 toward the wag, loosing a burst at a man who stood in the middle of the yard with more balls than sense, firing a semiauto longblaster from his shoulder. He completely missed, but the man instantly dropped his weapon, turned and raced full-speed to dive into a fire pit by the Cass Avenue wire.
Ricky gave another round of fire to the other wag, which was already starting to roll. He thought he scored a couple hits on the crates stacked inside, but not on the sec men lying and kneeling on them and shooting at Ricky. Then he got the barrel aimed at the wag by the annex.
Not even three or four direct torso hits from 147-grain copper-jacketed bullets traveling more than twenty-seven hundred feet per second was enough to knock a man around. But the sec men did tend to go right down as the bullets tripped through them. He pulsed quick bursts, shifting the barrel left and right. Men dived frantically aside or threw up their arms and fell.
In a moment no men were visible around the wag. A half dozen or so bodies lay on the ground. At least one man he’d shot was wailing like a wounded woman.
Mebbe it
is
a woman, Ricky thought. He shoved that aside. He couldn’t afford to let it matter.
He fired a couple bursts into the canvas shell stretched over what he suspected were improvised hoops into what he hoped was the cab.
The other wag had peeled away and was gathering speed on a run toward the gate. The crew there had been brave enough to roll the wag-bed barricade out of the way to allow the supply truck to escape.
Ricky caught it with a burst into the engine compartment just as it rolled through. It promptly exploded into yellow flames and stopped.
“Woo-hoo!” Ricky said, throwing his arms up in triumph. “I got ’em! I got ’em!”
“Great, kid,” J.B. called from below. “Don’t get cocky.”
A bullet spanged off the sloping front deck of the war wag, snapping Ricky back to reality even more definitely than his mentor’s voice. He grabbed back onto the machine gun.
Men were shooting at him from various directions. A lot more came tumbling out the grandiose front door and down the steps.
Ricky turned the machine gun on them. The quick-pulsing rips of fire cut them down like wheat. Within a matter of seconds the survivors had turned and fled back inside.
He eased off the trigger. He had been strict with his fire discipline, never once letting off more than four rounds at a time. He was proud of himself. He hoped J.B. was, too. But he also felt an instinctive need to let the barrel cool so that it wouldn’t burn out.
The waves of heat making the air shimmer above it, so intense he could feel it on his cheeks and hands, might have had something to do with it, too.
Blood ran in a river down the ancient, weathered stone steps. It lay in a lake at their base, not just on concrete but on earth too saturated with the stuff to drink any more down. Bodies lay sprawled all over the steps. Some writhed, moaned or howled in intolerable pain. Some just lay.
Ricky’s ruthless execution of the sec men on the Temple’s door step had won him a few moment’s respite, though. All the sec men in the yard had taken cover. For the moment, at least, no one was shooting at him.
That ended as a burst of full-auto longblaster fire snarled at him from one of the firing pits by the gate. Bullets bounced off the Commando’s sharp prow and cracked or howled past his ears.
He heard and felt a click from below. “Got a new box of ammo bent onto your belt,” Mikhail said. “You’re good to go.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Then, riding a wave of exaltation and sheer power—and just a hint of nausea and regret—he began to systematically sweep the yard clean of human life with his relentless fire.
* * *
“
J
.
B
.,”
R
ICKY CALLED.
The Armorer sat at his ease in the driver’s seat. The kid seemed to have everything under control. It would’ve been nice if one of the Angels had opened a firing port to shoot out on the off chance he could see if anybody came out of the HQ to aim a rocket launcher at them. But on the whole he was just as glad they hadn’t; he preferred to let Ricky do the brunt of the blasting. It was too easy for a bullet to come in one of those ports, small as they were, and then they just bounced around forever, and help whoever happened to get in their way.
“What is it?” he called back.
Ricky had blazed through the second box of ammo. The skinny Angel with the ponytail and the glasses promptly clipped the loose link of a fresh box onto the tail end of the belt in the receiver of Ricky’s weapon and swapped the full box into the empty one’s place.
“I—I don’t think there are any more targets left.”
“Ace,” J.B. said. The kid sounded a little sick, which was to be expected. J.B. wasn’t big on history—he left that kind of thing to Ryan or Doc—but even he knew that men had been appalled by their first exposure to the terrible power of a machine gun. “How’s your barrel?”
“Hot. But I think it’s cooling off enough that in a little while—”
“All right.” J.B. turned, took hold of the wheel and revved up the engine. “Brace yourself.”
“What about us?” Keiser asked. He and his partner sat on fold-down seats aft of the gunner’s steps.
“Grab hold and hang on tight.”
He goosed it. No one would ever mistake the eleven-ton war wag for a slingshot dragster, but the burly V-504 V-8 engine did give it a surprising jolt. He slewed the vehicle counterclockwise as it accelerated.
“Uh, J.B.,” he heard Ricky say over the throaty roar of the V-8. Peering through the forward vision block, he slowed and straightened out the wheel. “You’re— That’s the Temple door!”
“Ramming speed!” J.B. sang out, and put the hammer down.
* * *
R
ICKY DUCKED ON
the shooter’s step, clinging to the M240’s butt as if he was a drowning man hanging on to a log. He kept his knees bent and hoped for the best.
What he got was a grinding crash so loud it felt as if his bones rang in harmony. The only thing that kept him from being dislodged and flung on top of J.B. was the vertical butt that smashed into his face to the right of his nose. It sent a white sheet of pain shooting to the back of his skull but arrested his momentum enough to let him hang on.
His consciousness drifted for a moment. When it came back, the first thing he was aware of was the powerful engine gunning, the sound of stone squealing and cracking under pressure and the smell of burning rubber.
“We’re stuck, kid!” he heard J.B. shout through the ringing in his ears. “Your wep should be clear. Get the nuke back up there and start blasting.”
The pinging of bullets striking the armor galvanized Ricky. Had he still had his wits about him he might have thought twice about sticking his head outside the comforting confines of his giant steel cocoon into what sounded like a hailstorm of lead. But he was still fuddled by the impact, and adrenaline sizzled in his veins like bacon frying on a griddle.
He was seized by a sudden terror that someone might manage to torch off the fuel tanks. Then he, J.B. and two Angels would be cremated alive inside an inescapable oven. Whatever vague misgivings he might have had to exposing his fragile skull—feeling more fragile than ever after colliding with the machine gun—to blasterfire vanished. He popped up through the hatch like a prairie dog.
Acrid limestone dust swirled around the trapped V-100. Flames flickered yellow from all sides of the ornate, cavernous lobby. The bullets flying by sounded like fireworks, loud even over the sounds of the blasts that launched them. Grit blasted free of the door arch behind him peppered the back of his head and neck like birdshot. It stung.
He whipped the machine gun around and ripped out a quick random burst. The dust was sucked into a vortex in front of the muzzle. Whether that actually got it out of the air quicker or not, he didn’t know. But suddenly he was able to see targets.
He swung the M240 to bear on a knot of four sec men standing roughly thirty feet away. How they’d missed him so far, he had no clue, but the roar of the 7.62 mm blaster seemed to have shocked them into momentary inactivity.
Blood sprayed in all directions from their bodies and heads as he hosed them down.
Because there were targets everywhere, he swung the blaster all the way around to the right. His mind was pretty well alert now, and he reasoned that because it was more comfortable for him to turn from right to left than clockwise, that might help him shoot better.
He swept the lobby side to side, firing bullets in quick spurts. Most of the sec men threw down their blasters and ran away before the death stream could reach them. Not all who ran made it; the bullets didn’t stop just because they happened to be heading toward someone’s back instead of his front. Or her front—Ricky could see some of the officers were women. But at least the ones who ran had a chance.
The ones who stood and fired their weapons didn’t. Ricky methodically cut them down, the jacketed rounds shattering ribs and skulls, pulping lungs and livers and hearts, breaking limbs or even tearing them off.