"Tenners. Twelve, Four, Eight, let's go."
We huddled under cover as Psycho opened the door. A tacstar isn't subtle, even on minimum power, but it always works. When the echoes ceased, we walked in past the glowing edges of the massive hole Psycho had punched in the cenite door. We found a room with a scattering of shocked, twitching civilians. They had been at the far end of the room and had escaped death but they were in bad shape from the blast. They were all completely naked, males and females, huddled against the wall, shivering. It was dark and cold. The ceiling was full of those damned escape hatches. It made us nervous.
"Psycho, you've got the ceiling."
"Thanks. I appreciate that."
There was another sealed door at the far end of the room and a message: PACKS ONLY.
A little naked girl came out of the shadows and looked up at Snow Leopard, completely unafraid. "Our mommy went in there," she said. "Can we open it?"
"Aw scut," Psycho said.
"Thirteen, on me," Snow Leopard ordered. "You've got the techprobe Mark 2? Can you open this door for us?"
"I can open it, One," Psycho said cheerily.
"I know, Five. I was thinking about something a little less noisy this time."
"I'll try, One." Twister went to work on the activator with the techprobe.
"Heavy and continuing deceptor activity," Sweety announced. "This may precede an Omni attack!"
I approached the nearest adult civilian, a male. They had all struggled to their feet and were standing patiently, as if waiting for an airbus.
"What goes on here?" I asked. "What's beyond that door? Do you know?"
"That's where we're going, Cit," the man responded, "in there. We have to go in there." He looked into my eyes, dead serious.
"But what's in there?"
"We don't know, Cit. But that's where we have to go." He seemed totally convinced. "We hope it can open the door for us."
"They're psyched," Tara cut in, "totally psyched. Going into that doorway is all that's in their minds. The O's don't even have to be here. They use the Systies to divide up the civilians the way they want, then they psych the different groups to go where they're supposed to go. I hope we get a chance to kill some O's while we're here. I think that would make me feel very good."
"I believe you're going to get your wish."
###
"Bring us back a souvenir, Thinker!" I was backing down the drop on the end of my climbing cable and my boots were sliding freely over the oily surface. The door had revealed a steep slide, falling down to an invisible room far below.
"Just don't let go!" I pleaded.
"Can I have Priestess if you don't come back?" Psycho asked. He was on the other end of the line. I was sweating ice, and in no mood for humor. My boots shot out from under me and I landed on one hip.
"Damn! I can't even stand up here!"
"Can you see anything below?"
"It's hot down there—there's steam rising!"
"I think it's time to re-negotiate that hundred credits you claim I owe you. What say, Thinker?"
I landed almost waist-deep in a pool of sticky, viscous liquid. My darksight was on. It was almost pitch dark except for the flashing from my psybloc, which cut through it all like lightning. Things were moving slowly all around me. It was some kind of awful mechanism.
"No life," Sweety reported. But it was all moving. I eased forward, sloshing through the mess. Something flashed out of the dark and banged off my armor, raising sparks, sending me to my knees. It whirled and circled back. A mechanical device. I avoided it the second time—it hissed harmlessly past me. Something brushed up against me in the water. I glanced down. A body, swollen and putrefied, half submerged. My skin crawled. I pushed it away.
Something moved up ahead, a dull red glow. I sloshed forward. A horrific scene came into view. A line of corpses, bloody meat, stripped of all skin, dangling from hooks. An assembly line—a meat factory. I stopped. I did not want to see any more.
"There are no O's here, One," I reported. "Only bodies—lots of bodies."
"Return, Three—fast!"
"Gladly!"
###
"Valkyrie's found something," Psycho informed me when I crawled out of the chute. "Let's go." The rest of the squad was gone, the room deserted.
"What's she found?" I asked.
"A way in, we think. What's down there?"
"You don't want to know." We stepped out the hole Psycho had blown in the outer door. The civilians stood around outside, naked, shivering, their skin turning blue. The little girl who had asked about her mommy stepped past me into the room. I managed to grab onto her arm.
"Hold it! Where do you think you're going?" I hauled her back into the corridor.
"We're going to see our mommy," she said gravely. She was so cold her teeth were chattering.
"Excuse us," another civilian said. It was the man I had talked with earlier, now stepping into the doorway. Psycho pulled him back roughly.
"What's the holdup, Psycho?" Snow Leopard asked on the tacnet. He was getting impatient.
"Stop! Everybody stop! You can't go in there! You'll all die in there!"
"We have to go in," the man responded. There were nods of agreement from the rest of the civilians.
"The inner door's open," Psycho said, "and it won't close!"
"Deadman! Snow Leopard, we've got a problem!" I suddenly realized that the corridor was filling with civilians—they were coming along the corridor from Processing, where Valkyrie had cleared the room. Men, women and children—with only one thought in their fully-psyched minds.
Priestess suddenly appeared, running up the corridor past the civilians. She knew something was wrong.
"Thinker! Where are they going?"
"They're going to die if they go into this room." The civilians were trying to push their way past us. I swung a left at one particularly aggressive fellow, and my armored fist crushed his nose and hurled him across the corridor. It made no difference. They were frantic to get in, clawing at our A-suits.
"Stop it! Stop it! Go back! Go back!" Twister called out, frantic, recognizing the problem immediately, running back and throwing herself into the crowd. She hurled bodies left and right to clear them away from the door.
"We've got to get that ship, guys!" Snow Leopard told us on the tacnet. "Get back here now!"
"The ship is not important!" Twister cried out. "We have to save these people!"
"She's right, One," Priestess added. "The ship is not important! These people are important! They're human beings—and they're going to die if we don't help them!"
"Get in here, Twister!" I said. "Get that inner door closed! Then laser it shut!"
"I'm on it!" She scrambled past me.
"Priestess—get out of the corridor! In here!" She forced her way in, past the frantically struggling civilians. Psycho blocked the doorway.
"Psycho," I said. "Do a low-power stunstar in the corridor."
"You're right!" Psycho said. "It worked on that Systie! It'll scramble the psych programming!"
"Three, Five, Thirteen, Nine, rejoin the squad immediately!"
"We're on the way, One!" I responded.
"Attention! One-two-three Systies in armor, in the corridor, near Holding."
"How did they do that?"
"The children!" Priestess called out.
"Heads down!" Psycho fired the stunstar. It was the thunder of the Gods, a great fist from the sky, flattening everyone in the corridor. The echoes rolled away. When the dust cleared the civilians were all out cold, sprawled everywhere.
"The psyching will be gone when they regain consciousness. Have you got that door yet?"
"It's done!" The inner door snapped shut, closing off the slide to Hell.
"One, we're attacking the Systies!" Psycho said, stepping out the door with his Manlink raised.