I can hear sporadic weapons fire from all across the compound. Some of it sounds close. “Easy, boost up and see if you can get a look at what’s going on out there.”
Easy hops up, grabbing the window ledge with his fingers and then pulling his head up for a peek. No sooner does he do so than he falls back down in perfect timing with a boom that shakes us all so hard, we’re grabbing walls to stay on our feet. Dust and sand billow into the hall through the open window portals.
“What?” Lana manages.
“Missile,” pants Easy, lying flat on his back. “I saw it—I swear I saw it—streak right down and onto the main gates. Blew them out.”
Now the gunfire has increased tenfold. I’m hearing automatic blaster fire and the distinctive cracking of slug-throwing rifles spitting 7.62 bullets into the mix. Part of the rhythm of life on Kublar. The donks and the zhee both love that old tech. And without a Legion out there standing mostly impervious in their armor against it, why not?
Winters helps Easy to his feet. I feel Lana toying with the back of my neck.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, clicking a tiny ultrabeam on to better inspect whatever is wrong back there. I don’t feel anything. Maybe a trickle of blood seeping down my back.
“Can it wait?” I ask.
“Hold your repulsors.” She grafts on a small skinpack. “That needs to be cleaned out when we’re done, but you’re good.”
“Thanks.”
We hurry to the door, and I’m expecting it to burst open with zhee shooters set to fill this hallway with fire. But we get there with no contact.
The door is solid wood again, and locked. The space on either side is limited, so that we’re crowded together against the wall. I use my holo-wand again but can’t see anything from under the door. At all. It’s pitch black, too dark for the device’s night vision to work.
“Blind,” I inform the team. “Bangers.”
Easy and Winters each pull ear-poppers from their webbing and hold them ready.
“Lash.”
Lashley rolls out and gives the door a punishing kick. It doesn’t seem to budge. He tries another. Then a third. Still nothing.
“Back,” I say, not wanting him to be exposed in front of that door for too long. It’s thick, but thick enough to stop a hail of heavy weapons fire from going through and putting holes in him? Not worth the risk.
“Too tight for a det-rope,” Easy says.
He’s right. The hallway doesn’t give us anywhere to go to be free of the blast—even a localized one like that—unless we move down a good ways. But that would prevent us from breaching the room quickly. We’d lose precious time running down the hall toward the door, not to mention the complications that could arise from throwing a banger at range that doesn’t make it out of the hall itself. I find myself wishing we were all in Legion armor. It would make life easier right now, if nothing else.
Looking at the lock, I take a guess that what we’re dealing with is a heavy iron bolt and that’s all. I mean, it could be barricaded from the other side, but that seems like a lot of precaution for the donks to take. And the zhee aren’t particularly known for industry or careful planning. Not usually.
I prime my shotgun with a pump and then roll out in front of the door. The rest of my team turn their backs to me, ducking low to avoid any blowback as I send an ionic-charged blast into the locking mechanism. It makes an awful noise that makes me thankful for the comm’s ability to serve as hearing protection while in my ear canal. There’s a definite smoking hole in the door. I give it a big boot, and the thing swings open, revealing a darkness that my goggles can’t penetrate beyond a few meters. But there are donks in the room, make no mistake.
The moment the door swung open, Easy and Winters tossed in bangers. I roll away from the opening at the same time, and we all shield ourselves from the concussive blasts. Those big booms hurt the donks particularly bad. Something about their ears.
“Beams,” I shout, and then thumb the ultrabeam on my shotgun to life, sending a searing streak of pure white before me, enough to make me squint reflexively on the other side of my NV goggles. But it’s enough for us to operate in.
A donk is swaying on weak knees, its claws pulling down on its ears, its eyes blinking non-stop as if to wick away the blinding. I send another shotgun blast into the zhee and drop him on the spot, moving straight for the right corner of the room while my men begin to clear the opposite corner and center, giving us a full view of everything happening inside. I can hear the guys sending suppressed bolts all around me. Probably not for practice because I can see at least four targets just in my little area, which makes me think this whole place is thick with zhee. Should have tossed in some fraggers.
Ahead, a staggering zhee raises an automatic blaster rifle with one arm and blindly pulls the trigger, sending a barrage of blaster bolts into his nearby buddy in a blind and panicked attack before I drop the shooter with another boom from Mel S. That leaves two more donks for me to take out. One is hunched over, clawed hoof steadying himself against the wall. He’s wearing a black flowing robe, like one of the holy men. I don’t see a weapon but I blast him. At the very least, he has one of those knives. More likely, a full auto blaster rifle that he dropped or hid inside his skirts.
They used to do that, the zhee. Back when the House of Reason dictated what war was supposed to be like. We’d raid a zhee terrorist cell and by
