Taking a deep breath, Jonny activated his omnidirectional sonic weapon.
There was a tingle in his gut, a slight vibration as the buried speakers brushed harmonics of natural body resonances. Straining his ears, he could almost hear the ultrasonic pitch changing as the sound dug into the walls, seeking resonances with the tiny audio and visual sensors open to it....
The full treatment was supposed to require a minute, but Jonny had no intention of giving the Trofts that much warning. He didn't need to knock out the sensors permanently, but just to fog as many of them as possible while he made his move. He gave it five seconds; and just as Ilona began looking around the room with a frown he lifted his left leg slightly and fired.
The upper hinge of the door literally exploded, scattering solid and semisolid bits of itself in a shower to the floor. Beside him, Ilona yelped with surprise; in a single smooth motion, Jonny slid forward so that he could target the lower hinge and fired again. This shot didn't hit the inner sections quite as cleanly, and the explosive vaporization that had taken out the upper hinge didn't occur. Jonny fired three more times, adding his fingertip lasers to the assault, and within seconds the hinge was dangling loosely against the wall. Gripping the edge of the table, he hurled himself feet-first at the hinge side of the door like a self-guided battering ram. The door creaked under the impact, displaced by a centimeter or two. Regaining his balance, Jonny jumped across the room, turned and tried it again, his hands providing a last-second boost from the table as he passed it. The table survived; the door, fortunately, did not. With a shriek of scraping metal, it popped out of its frame and sagged at an odd angle, held off the floor only by its lock mechanism.
"You said ten-thirty," Ilona growled. She was already at the door by the time he got his balance, peering cautiously outside.
"I got impatient," Jonny returned, joining her. "Looks clear enough; come on."
Stepping past the ruined door, they headed out into a dimly lit hallway. Enhancers on full, Jonny scanned the walls and floor quickly as he led Ilona in a quick jog. Nothing seemed to be there—
They were nearly on top of it when Jonny spotted the slight discoloration in the wall that indicated a disguised photocell at knee height. "Detector!" he snapped, slowing to let Ilona catch up. Pointing it out would have taken unnecessary time; grabbing her upper arms, he swung her over the invisible beam and then jumped over himself. Too easy, he thought uncomfortably. Far too easy. He knew the Trofts wanted him to get through their gauntlet alive, but this was ridiculous.
It stopped being ridiculous at the end of the hall.
Jonny paused there, at the threshold of a large room; but neither a complete stop nor a full-speed sprint would have done him a scrap of good. Flanking the hallway exit were two quarter-circles of armored Trofts.
Stepping back into the hallway would have been no more than a temporary solution. Shoving Ilona back into that modest protection, he bent his knees and jumped.
The ceiling here wasn't as sturdy as the one back in Freyr Complex's Room C-662, the one Bai had first demonstrated on. But it was sturdy enough, and Jonny hit the floor with balance intact and only a minor snowstorm of shattered ceiling tiles accompanying him. Hit the floor, twisted... and as the Troft lasers began to track, he threw himself spinning onto his shoulderblades.
Bai had called the maneuver a break, for obscure historical reasons; the trainees had privately dubbed it the backspin. Curled up in a half-fetal position, knees tucked almost to his chest, Jonny's antiarmor laser swept the line of soldiers, flashing instant death. Only three of the dozen or so soldiers escaped that first salvo, and they died on Jonny's second spin.
The metallic clink of armor-clad bodies hitting floor had barely ceased before Jonny was back in a crouch, eyes darting around. "Ilona!" he stage-whispered. "Come on." Peering into the hall, he saw her leap to her feet and trot toward him.
"Good Lord!" she gasped. "Was all of that you?"
"All of it that counted." Which proved all by itself he'd been right about the Trofts' plan. He should at least have picked up some light burns from that exchange. "That door?"
"Right. Remember that it's a stairway."
"Got it."
Like the hallway, the stairs proved to be free of major threats. Probably, Jonny decided, whatever sensors it contained were designed to study his equipment immediately after use, perhaps looking for theoretical limits or emission signatures. Triggering his sonic again, he led Ilona around the two photocells the stairway contained and braced himself for whatever he would find above.
The Trofts' first try had been a straightforward attack. This one was only marginally more subtle. Stretched across the floor, between the fugitives and the room's only exit, was a three-meter-wide black band. Jonny sniffed, caught a whiff of the same smell he remembered from the net at the Wolker Plant. "Glue patch," he warned Ilona, searching the walls with his eyes. A vertical strip of photocells stretched from floor to ceiling at either end of the adhesive; six almost-flat boxes adorned the walls beyond. Unlike the more permanent-looking photocells back in the hall and stairway, this trap had the air of having been hastily set up for the occasion.
Ilona, for a change, was right with him on this one. "So we jump and get hit by something while we're in mid-air?" she murmured tensely.
"Looks like it." Jonny stepped to the side wall near the adhesive and extended his right arm. "I'll try some simple sabotage. Get back into the stairwell, just in case."
His arcthrower flashed even as she obeyed... and he discovered just how badly he'd underestimated the Troft ability to learn.
Across the room one of the flat boxes abruptly disintegrated before a spinning mass that shot out directly toward him. The mass flattened as it came, its spin unfolding it into a giant mesh net.
He had no time then to regret having demonstrated his arcthrower's range a few hours previously; no time to do anything but get out of the way fast.
And his programmed reflexes did their best. Dropping him toward the floor, his servos threw him in a flat dive at right angles to the net's line of motion. But the room was too small, the net too big; and even as he somersaulted into the wall near the stairway door, the edge of the mesh caught his left shoulder, pinning him to the floor.
Ilona was out of her shelter like a shot. "You all right?" she asked, hurrying toward him.
He waved her away and twisted up on one elbow. Cutting the mesh would perhaps be simplest, but if the glue contained a contact soporific again, he didn't want to risk carrying a patch of it along with them. Bracing himself, he jerked abruptly, tearing the trapped sleeve neatly off at the shoulder.
"Now what?" Ilona asked as he scrambled to his feet.
"We give up on the subtle approach. Get ready to move." Sequentially targeting the remaining five wall boxes, he raised his hands and fired.
He was half afraid the attack would trigger the firing mechanisms instead of destroying them. But as each box shattered and the briefly lingering laser beam swept the coiled net behind, it began to look like the Trofts had missed a bet. Until he noticed the pale brown smoke rising from the burning nets....
"Hold your breath!" he snapped at Ilona. Stepping to her side, he grabbed her in a shoulder-and-thigh grip and jumped.
Not simply across the adhesive strip, but all the way to the door at the other end of the room. A potentially disastrous maneuver, but the Trofts fortunately had not hooked any more booby-traps to their photocell strip. The door was closed, but Jonny had no intention of pausing to see whether or not it was locked: he landed on his left foot, his right already snapping out in a servo-powered kick beside the doorknob. The panel shattered with gratifying ease, and—still carrying Ilona—he charged on through.