A corpse sprawled as a mass of indigo and purple in the midst of the tunnel’s cool gray. The man had been partly dismembered by a bolt that struck at collarbone level. His right arm, tangled with a gun sling, hung by a few fleshless tendons; the spine was all that connected the head and torso.
Steep concrete steps led up from the other end of the tunnel. There was a handrail. Two bodies were tangled in it as they sprawled down the steps.
The armored door at the upper landing was open into the tunnel. Light flooded the passage. The panel started to swing shut. Vierziger triggered a burst at the doorway, perhaps hoping to ricochet a bolt into whoever was operating the powered mechanism.
Malaveda stopped and switched his visor to straight optics. He braced himself against the wall to aim the reloaded shoulder weapon past his partner. He was panting, drawing gasps of poisoned air through his mouth. Ozone burned the back of his throat.
He fired. Vierziger hunched at the base of the stairs, the submachine gun’s muzzle questing back for the unexpected shooter. The door’s upper hinge blew away in a cyan flash. The plating glowed white/yellow/red in circles concentric with the point of impact.
Malaveda ignored his partner’s gun. The door sagged, kinking the lower hinge and freezing the panel half-open. Tears blurred Malaveda’s eyes, and the sight picture danced wildly. He fired anyway and hit the lower hinge squarely. The door toppled onto the concrete landing like a dropped safe.
Vierziger was already up the stairs. Malaveda followed. He could no more have made that pair of shots during a training exercise than he could have ripped the door loose with his bare hands.
In the newbie’s company, Malaveda was operating at well above what he would have guessed his best day could be. He didn’t know whether the cause was emulation or a justifiable concern for what Vierziger might do to him if he screwed up.
The steps were slippery with body fluids. Malaveda grabbed the left rail; the 2-cm bandolier clanged against the tubing.
Vierziger tossed a grenade left-handed ahead of him. It was an assault bomb with a contact fuze. The blast was instantaneous, but the glass shrapnel was safe beyond a two-meter radius. Vierziger was through the haze-veiled doorway while the echoes still sounded.
The sub-machine gun snarled out four separate bursts with only a heartbeat between them. Malaveda caromed off the transom as he followed his partner. He wasn’t in shape for this. His body armor felt as though he were wearing a well-stoked oven.
Nobody was in shape for this except Johann Vierziger, who wasn’t human.
“Feed—” Vierziger said.
Malaveda snatched the sub-machine gun away and replaced it with the 2-cm weapon. He tried to say, “Only three in the magazine!” but his voice was a croak, and he didn’t imagine the devil who led him didn’t have the information already.
The room was an unfinished basement, open except for concrete support pillars. It held stacks of cased weapons and ammunition, as well as crates Malaveda couldn’t identify at first glance.
Three bodies, two of them women in nightclothes, lay between the tunnel door and an elevator at the opposite end of the basement. Single-person lift and dropshafts couldn’t have serviced the heavy goods stored here. A woman’s legs wedged the cage doors.
The grenade had pretty well devoured a man holding a bell-muzzled mob gun near the doorway. Vierziger’s powergun bolts had lifted off the back of his head anyway.
Malaveda didn’t see a fourth corpse, but he knew there must be one. Vierziger had fired four times, after all.
Vierziger ran to the elevator. Malaveda reloaded the sub-machine gun as he followed. The barrel was badly burned by use. He’d have changed it for a new one if he’d been sure there was time. He wasn’t sure of anything at all.
He saw something to his left, down a cross-aisle among the goods stored on pallets. He pointed the sub-machine gun but it was a corpse lying on its back, the face blasted away by a tight quartet of powergun bolts.
Vierziger drew his pistol and fired twice to his right, down another aisle. Cyan bolts chewed the ceiling above him as he shot, blasting gravel and a spray of calcium burned from the cast concrete.
The man in ambush had clamped his sub-machine gun’s trigger as he arched backward in death. Vierziger had seen, drawn, and killed before the victim could react to the appearance of the target he’d heard running toward him.
Beside the elevator was a firedoor of mesh-reinforced vitril, displaying a concrete staircase which led to the upper floors. No one was on the stairs. Vierziger tested the door to be sure that it opened from outside the smoke tower. It did. He tugged another grenade from his pocket, armed it, and tossed it up the stairs. He slammed the door shut.
Malaveda hunched aside. Vierziger grinned horribly at him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gas.”
The grenade bubbled open in waves of black haze that quickly filled the volume beyond the vitril. The doorseal, intended to prevent smoke from entering the stair tower, acted equally well to keep the contents of the grenade inside.
It was gas all right—KD nerve gas, which would oxidize harmless within two hours of use in an Earth-type atmosphere …and would paralyze the diaphragm muscles of anyone who breathed it or had skin contact before that time. Malaveda would have suffocated slowly and inexorably if a bullet had hit his partner’s grenade during the firefight.
Vierziger ejected the nearly empty magazine from his pistol. To reload, he had to pluck a fresh clip from a belt pouch with the thumb and index finger of the left hand which still gripped the 2-cm weapon.
The woman jamming the doors had been very beautiful. Her filmy pajamas were of a natural fabric that had flashed like guncotton when the bolts struck her, leaving only a net of ash on the body.
Malaveda faced about to guard their backtrail. He felt as if he were in a bubble, he and Vierziger together; cut off from everything he’d for twenty-six years thought was the real world.
The 2-cm gun firing spun him around again. Vierziger had blasted the lock from the emergency hatch in the elevator’s ceiling.
“Feed me!” he ordered crisply. Then, as Malaveda traded submachine gun for 2-cm weapon, Vierziger added, “Give me a leg up.”
Malaveda made a stirrup of his hands. The dangling bandolier and sub-machine gun clattered on the cage floor. Bloody hell it could have gone off! But that was only a vagrant thought as he straightened his legs and boosted Vierziger through the narrow opening.
“Come on!” Vierziger said, thrusting a hand—his left hand— down toward Malaveda. “I need you to open the doors now!”
Instead of obeying instantly, Malaveda yanked open the latches of his ceramic body armor and shrugged the clamshell away. He probably wouldn’t fit through the emergency access with it on, and he was already dizzy from the heat and confinement of exercise while wearing the armor.
He didn’t try to explain what he was doing to Vierziger. Malaveda had to concentrate on what he was doing if he was going to achieve a fraction of what his partner expected….
Re-slinging the gun and ammunition, Malaveda rose and took Vierziger’s offered hand. He jumped and the little man pulled—like a derrick. Vierziger’s physical strength was as shocking as everything else about the deadly man with the features of a child. Malaveda’s right elbow scraped the edge of the opening and the sub-machine gun’s muzzle rapped on metal, but Vierziger’s tug was precise as well as effortless.
The sergeant knelt in the litter and lubricant sludge on top of the cage, then rose to his feet. A sagging cable brushed his shoulder. He had his second wind since he’d dropped the back-and-breast armor. A moment before, he hadn’t been sure he could go on.
“Switch,” said Vierziger, offering the 2-cm weapon. The elevator shaft was vaguely illuminated from above, but most of the light streamed up through the access port.