Marten and Stick exchanged glances hardly daring to breathe. Marten flanked the door, his two-handed grip tight upon the baton. Stick waited on the other side. The sounds came closer and closer. Plastic body armor rattled. Then a guard exploded through the door, a short-barreled gun in his hand. Stick chopped and his knife sang. The guard’s knee disintegrated in a spray of blood and bone. With a scream, he went down. Marten roared and swung.
Marten nodded after a moment. They let go.
Without a word, Omi picked up the dead guard’s short barreled .44 off the floor. He checked the slide and tested its heft. Then he rummaged the dead man for extra bullets.
Stick knelt beside the corpse and began unbuckling the body armor.
“What about me?” complained Turbo.
“The helmet is still good,” Stick said.
Turbo scooped it off the floor, inspected it, put it on and snapped the chinstrap. “What do you think?”
“Beautiful,” said Stick.
Marten trembled and forced himself to move. He wiped the gory shock rod on the dead man’s clothes. He felt surreal. Hollow. Used up.
Stick said, “Bet I know what happened.”
“Huh?”
“Where everyone went, bet I know.”
Marten focused on him. “Yeah?”
“Highborn! They must’ve finally got here and gone underground. The army needed the cops to help fight.”
Marten nodded. Could be.
“So what now?” asked Turbo, his face twitching in the manner of the over-stimulated.
Marten glanced at the cylinders, at the floaters, at their dull stares. Something in him hardened. He said, “We kill more of them.”
12.
Endless corridors and empty rooms, wherever they trudged the vast algae production center had become a desert. They found regular clothes in a storage bin and donned splay jackets, dungarees and boots. Marten found an extra energy cell for his baton. In a guardroom, Turbo shattered a candy bar machine. Several floors down, they opened a hatch into a settling tank. Turbo peered at the thick soup below. He blanched, drew back and shook his head.
Marten looked in. About a hundred workers floated dead in the brine. They’d been shot in the back or in the back of the head. Their blood slicked the goop like oil.
Marten clenched his teeth until they ached.
“Mass murder,” slurred Turbo.
“Like they’re covering their tracks,” said Stick.
“Who is?” snapped Marten.
“PHC.” Stick must have noticed Marten’s incomprehension. “Things got really rough in the pits several months ago.”
“Yeah,” said Turbo. “When the war started.”
Stick nodded in agreement. “When Major Orlov arrived.”
“No way are they gonna lose to the Supremacists,” Turbo said.
“But why are they gunning down all the prisoners?” growled Marten.
Omi smiled sourly.
“Did I ask something stupid?”
“Naw,” said Stick. “It’s just that Omi does the same thing, only in the slums. He takes out the troublemakers, makes sure those he’s hurt can never come around to hurt him back.”
“It’s insurance,” Omi said flatly.
“It is cold-blooded murder,” slurred Turbo. “It’s because they’re bastards.”
Omi shrugged.
They moved on warily, to scenes of greater mass death. Gleaming corridors often ended in piles of gory butchery. Many of the dead had been dumped unceremoniously into the various stages of algae production.
They rode an elevator down to an office section and prowled the next corridor. The halls were shorter and narrower, constantly twisting and turning.
Marten felt overwhelmed. The mass death appalled him. What kind of choice was there for anyone? Earth was trapped between implacable enemies, with PHC killers on one hand and Highborn on the other. There was no hope for a better future.
Turbo stopped short, his long face twitching. “No, no, no!”
The others watched him.
Turbo tore off his helmet and threw it at the floor. “Why’d they kill everybody?” he yelled. “It don’t make sense.”
“Easy,” said Stick.
“Easy?” shouted Turbo. He laughed wildly.
Marten jerked around. He thought he heard a click from ahead.
“You’re just feeling the stims wearing off,” Stick told his friend.
Turbo laughed even more wildly, a bit hysterically.
“Look—”
“Duck!” shouted Marten. He hurled his body against Omi, throwing him to the floor. He saw a blur fly past, strike the wall, bounce and ricochet around the corner. It exploded with a roar, hot metal pinging off the walls.
With eyes blazing and mouth open, Turbo zigzagged in a crazy-man’s rush around the corner. They heard him roar an insane oath, and then a thud and a rattle sounded. A second later, Turbo yelled, “It’s safe!”
Gingerly, they turned the corner and found Turbo with a short, stubby, shotgun-like weapon, the Electromag Grenade Launcher. It was a small mass-driver that used a magnetic impulse to propel grenades. The guard who’d shot it lay on the floor, gasping. There was a trail of blood leading up to him. It was like a smeared barcode, thicker in the places where he’d stopped to rest. The man had been crawling a ways to get this far.
“Someone must’ve gut-shot him,” said Turbo, his voice ominously flat.
The man’s face was pinched and his eyes were glassy. He had thinning white hair plastered to a sweaty skull and a colonel’s emblem on his shoulders.
Omi crouched before him. “Why’d you shoot at us?”
The colonel lay panting, his life ebbing away.
Marten marveled at the trail of blood: so thick and wet.
“What made him to crawl so far?” asked Stick.
“Wonder who shot him?” said Turbo.
“And why?” Stick added.
Marten crouched beside Omi as he dug the medkit out of his jacket. He pressed it to the colonel’s neck. For a moment, it did nothing. Then it beeped shrilly, as if it couldn’t figure out what to do.
“Override it,” suggested Stick.
Marten waited.
Turbo swore and bent down to do it. Omi grabbed his arm.
Marten thought about it. “No. Let him.”
Omi’s stiff face stiffened a little, but he let go of the lanky junkie. Turbo tapped in override and shot a batch of
