Rechs could see them in the highlighted darkness, moving to respond to the carnage he’d begun.
Blaster fire careened down the dimly lit hall. Bolts illuminating the darkness as they streaked toward Rechs. The armor’s sensors swept the area and detected multiple inbound threats. Rechs fired at a moving shadow and may have gotten a hit.
And then he charged.
It was the best thing he could do. He needed to close ground and find a new position now that they were coming his way. The common room he’d entered was open to fire from all quarters. Not a good place to hold out for a firefight. He needed to get in and among them. A short dash down one hall led him to a flimsy wooden door. Rechs shouldered right through it, taking him out of the line of fire but right into the midst of a pro who was busy with one of the young resister girls.
Or rather, had been busy. Most of her clothes were still off and the guy quickly brought a snub-nosed blaster to her head.
“I’ll kill her, buddy!” he screamed desperately at Rechs. His eyes were wild and freaking out.
“What’re you doing?” she shouted, struggling against this unforeseen turn of events.
Rechs fired using targeting assist and landed the powerful slug right in the guy’s brain pan. Eyes crossed as the back and top of the skull came off and painted the graffiti-laden wall behind him.
The half-naked girl slithered out of his grasp and streaked for her clothes near a mattress on the floor. Crying.
“Stay here. Don’t leave the room,” Rechs ordered, then re-entered the narrow hall, shooting. Immediately he took a hammer-blow blaster bolt right in the left pauldron. As the bolt exploded across his chest, the armor ablated much of the impact, but the tremendous kinetic force still knocked that side of Rechs’s body back and down. It felt like he’d been hit by a waterfall of fire.
Leading with his right side, following the sight of the hand cannon down the dark hallway that led into the interior of Basement Six, Rechs closed. The shooter ducked into a doorway farther down the hall.
The bounty hunter sent a hail of bullets across the wall and doorframe to keep his enemy back, then shifted the sight picture over to another shooter who’d popped out from another doorway on the opposite side of the hall.
Firing in bursts now, Rechs sent three slugs toward the man and tore him to shreds in a sudden fury of bullet impacts. The first shot hit the shoulder, destroying it in a spray of bone and matter, and the next two shots tore out the throat and blew off the side of the man’s face starting at the outside orbital socket. The guy ducked back, shrieking in pain, and Rechs aimed for that section of wall and sent another burst of gunfire at it. The bullets ripped through, and Rechs was rewarded with the sound of a morbid, final scream.
Rechs surged forward and threw himself against the wall facing the door the first shooter had popped out of. He saw the guy fumbling for a charge pack and sent a barely aimed burst of fire into his gut. The killer collapsed backward, and Rechs put a single shot into the pro’s head as he hit the debris-littered floor. Just to make sure the job was done.
Fire came at Rechs from the way he’d just come. They were pushing at him from behind. One of them lobbed a grenade, which bounced against a baseboard and then spun, wobbling in place. Rechs pushed off from the wall and dove into the room he’d just fired into.
The grenade went off a second later out in the hall, sending ceiling material down across the room. Dust and smoke bloomed through the doorway, but the HUD auto-switched over to IR once it sensed the light refraction diminishing within his field of view as the air became strangled with dust.
Moving back into the hallway, using the dust for cover, Rechs laid down burst fire in short staccato eruptions from the hand cannon’s smoking barrel. Anyone caught flatfooted out there would be dead. Anyone not yet attempting to follow shouldn’t be too eager to take up the pursuit.
They weren’t. Probably didn’t believe in this cause enough to go tramping blind into the kill zone. And that made them smart. If Rechs had to bet, he’d bet they were trying to pin him down here while they got their boss, Rattclopp, to the preplanned escape route.
As Rechs ran down the hall, he picked up on something out of the ordinary: a security door with some pretty good locking mechanism recently installed. Its high-tech nature didn’t match the surroundings.
He kicked the lock in with the strength of his armor.
The room was empty, but by the opposite wall stood a wire-mesh pen. This was where they’d most likely kept the leejes and the marine.
It meant he was on the right trail.
Enhanced audio detection picked up the sound of a speedlift off to his right, deeper in the shadowy maze. It sounded heavy-duty. Like something capable of lifting a vehicle up from a subterranean garage and onto the main streets.
Rechs raced toward the sound, burst through a door, and found an empty garage on the other side. The sound hadn’t been a lift; it had been a blast door opening in the ceiling above. Rechs heard the telltale whine of repulsors and an engine throttling up somewhere beyond the gap.
Without thinking, he fired his jump jet and rocketed up through the opening, rising up into a small courtyard girded by tall apartment buildings. The area had once been some kind of contrived small reflection park within the cityscape. Now it was overgrown, and the Soshies, or one of the gangs, had installed a blast door and escape route from the old maintenance tunnels they were using as a headquarters within
