Elgars directed the next three children to the side of the room then ducked out of the way as Wendy ran through the door. "About time."
"Sorry," Wendy said. "I was hanging around."
She had been carefully planning the quip so she was mildly annoyed when Elgars just grimaced in anger at the inconsequential.
"Grab the MP-5," the captain said as another child came through the door. "They're going to be back here in a second."
"Nobody has a sense of humor around here," Wendy said with a shrug, picking up the submachine gun and racking in a round. "It's worse than dealing with Danes."
"What are you talking about?" Elgars snarled.
"Never mind," Wendy answered, kneeling on the opposite side of the door as the first Posleen came around the corner. "It's a human thing," she added, hitting the shotgun-toting normal in the chest with a three-round burst.
Behind that one, however, there were four more. The first stumbled over one of the bodies in the corridor and was easy meat for Elgars, but two of the others simply jumped the blockage, landing in the middle of the intersection.
Wendy fired at one of them in the air, spreading the fire like shooting at skeet, and hit it on the flank. The damage from the relatively small rounds was not fatal, however, and the normal spun in place and fired its railgun down the main corridor.
The last child, Kelly, was crossing as the normal fired. Most of the rounds flew wide, but one slashed through the back of the child's calf in a bloody mess.
The girl slid to a stop on the hydroponics side of the tram-track, lying on her stomach and screaming.
Wendy emptied the rest of her magazine into the centauroid with a shriek of primordial anger as Elgars neatly dispatched the last survivor.
"Motherfuckers!" Wendy shouted, her nostrils flaring. "I hate the fucking Posties!"
"Give me a hand," Shari gasped, dragging her daughter through the opening.
Elgars ripped the knife out of the juncture of the door and sealed it, coding the lock to indicate a biochem emergency on the inside; it wasn't going to open without heavy explosives or a supervisor's codes.
Wendy pulled out her first aid kit and first numbed the wound then wrapped it tight, cutting the flow of blood down to a trickle.
"It missed the artery," she said, tightening the bandage. "It hit the veins, but they'll keep. It's going to be hard to walk on, though."
Shari rocked her daughter, who was still wailing like a lost soul. "It's okay, Kelly. Shhh."
Elgars suddenly leaned forward and struck the child across the face with an open hand slap. "Quiet."
"God damn you!" Shari shouted leaning towards the captain. She suddenly found a pistol socketed in between her nose and her cheekbone.
"We don't have time," Elgars said coldly. "We have zero time. She has to get up and move. And she has to do it without shrieking. Or we all die." She pulled the pistol back and holstered it. "Now go pick up your rifle and harness; we need to go. Now."
Shari nodded after a moment and stood the now quietly weeping Kelly on her feet. "Can you walk on it?"
"It doesn't hurt," Kelly said quietly. "I think so."
"Then let's get out of here," Wendy said, putting the MP-5 on safe with a distinctive "click."
Elgars suddenly realized the younger woman had been standing directly behind her. She turned around and looked at her, but Wendy just returned her appraisal coldly.
Wendy walked over to the table and looked at the remaining weapons and ammo. "Shari, come over here."
Shari took the combat harness from the younger woman and threw it over her shoulders and accepted the Steyr bullpup assault rifle.
"You arm it by pulling back on the charging handle," Wendy said, pointing to the device. "And here's the safety."
"Got it," Shari said nervously. "I've fired before, but not much."
"That's why I want you to take the nitrogen," Wendy added, pulling off the pack. "You've seen how I do it. You open the doors, we'll cover and do the entry on them. I'm also going to pile you with anything that the kids can't carry; that means I can move faster."
"Okay," Shari said.
"Billy," Elgars said. "You're going to have to carry more ammo."
"He's just a boy," Shari protested quietly. "He's carrying enough."
"He can carry more," Elgars pointed out. "Can't you?"
The boy nodded and took the additional boxes of ammunition and a harness.
"You know the different kind of magazines?" Elgars asked. "If you do, when we're running out, come up and give us more ammo. And reload them when you have time. Clear?"
Billy nodded and smiled then pulled out a magazine for the AIW and gestured at the rifle.
Elgars smiled back and dropped her partially expended magazine, replacing it with the one he had offered.
"Okay," Wendy said. "Let's roll."
* * *
Wendy looked at the PDA and at the doors; according to the schematic she had picked up there should only be one door at this point, but there were two.
They had passed through a processing area for the fruit and vegetables produced by the section; much of it piled high and already beginning to wilt. Billy had sniffed out a bin full of boxes of strawberries and the children stuffed their mouths full of the tart-sweet fruits. Wendy realized at that point how long it had been since the attack. It must have been at least three hours with the humans staying just ahead of the front ranks of the Posleen.
Now, though, they were in an actual "green" room; the sixty foot high, several hundred meter long room was packed, floor to ceiling, with trays upon trays of legumes growing in nutrient solution. The ones closest to their position were just sprouts, but in the distance she could see full-sized plants and harvester bots passing back and forth across them.
None of which helped her determine which of these two doors was right. The area that they were headed for was the seed and grain loading zone. There were eight supply elevators, most of which the Posleen would have already taken. But there was also a grain elevator that went two ways. It was possible that they could activate it and ride to the surface. Barring that, she was willing to gather some more climbing gear and climb them out. It would take some time, but if they sabotaged the elevator they would have all the time in the world; as long as they were in the tube, the Posleen weren't going to be catching them.
The problem was getting there without using any of the main corridors; the two times they had intersected corridors there had been Posleen in the area. To do that they needed to go into the nutrient pumping section next, then into the seed storage which connected. From there it was a hop, skip and jump to the main receiving area. There might be, probably would be, Posleen there. But they'd deal with that when they came to it.
"What's wrong?" Shari asked, nodding at the door. "Left or right?"
"I dunno," Wendy said. "There's only supposed to be one door." She palmed the controls for the right-hand door, but it wouldn't open even after she punched in the override code. Neither would the left-hand door. But they'd dealt with that before.
"Blast the right door," she said.
Shari stepped forward and carefully pointed the nitrogen wand at the center of the door; she had been splashed lightly once, painfully, and had, thereafter, donned one of the hazardous materials suits. The light ramex suits were no proof against Posleen railgun rounds, but they were dandy for keeping off the occasional splashes of hyper-cold liquid.
Normally the door would harden and turn brittle; the memory plastic was not proof against the cold of the liquid nitrogen. In this case it simply cascaded to the floor and ran off to the side, rapidly boiling off.
"Step back," Wendy warned. "That stuff could make you anoxic in a heartbeat. Interesting, the door looks like memory plastic, but it's blasplas."