go,” he said and led them through the ruptured entrance.
In Earthglow’s main security station, Kuhl studied the flashing light on his electronic display’s building schematic. The blast’s location supported what he had already construed about the goal of the intruders. And the connection between their goal and identity was like a match brightly struck in his mind.
His eyes went from the screen to his chief lieutenant. “Keep abreast of developments at the penetration site,” Kuhl said, thinking of the alternate path he could take to investigate the target area. “I will be in contact.”
He did not await the lieutenant’s nod of acknowledgment before leaving the room.
Looking up the corridor, Seybold realized he’d not only cut the opposition’s numeric advantage but dramatically shifted it to his own band.
It was a thing that gave him some relief, a thing he’d trained for, prepared for. But he was still human, and the violations combat weapons inflicted on human flesh sickened him.
Five or six of the guards were down in grotesque positions, sheeted in blood, the floor around them slick with blood. Some were screaming in pain. Another guard was pinned to the wall like an insect caught on a fly strip, drenched with superadhesive, his limbs tangled by the impact that hurled him against it, strips of skin flapping off his cheek where he’d torn himself from the concrete in a blind panic. Yet another guard stared dazedly on his knees at a baseball-sized hole in his abdomen.
Seybold had a bare moment to register the damage. The rest of the guards were advancing past the sprawl of bodies, their weapons stuttering, and it was his job to stop them.
He took a deep breath of air, slung the Benelli over his back, then gripped his baby VVRS in his hands and fired a tight burst. To his left and right, hunkered close to the walls on either side of the exploded steel door, his companions were also firing their weapons.
More guards went down, and then another came running forward in a kind of wrathful, aggressive hurtle, yelling at the top of his lungs, his gun blazing away. A couple of feet to Seybold’s left, Beatty grunted and was slammed back against the wall, smearing it with blood as he sank to the floor. Then bullets rippled from one of the other men’s VVRS rifles, and the charging guard spun around in a circle and fell dead, his weapon slipping from his fingers, clutching his chest with both hands.
That left two of them. One dove onto his belly to present a low target, skidding over the blood of his companions, sustained fire pouring from his weapon. Carlysle and Newell trained their guns on him and fired in concert, a brief chop. These were men whose partnership went back, and it showed in their expert performance. The guard jerked once on the floor and then ceased to move.
A single guard remained now, and he was unwilling to commit suicide. He turned down the hall, running, his uniform splashed with blood that may or may not have been his own.
“We gonna let him take off?” Carlysle asked Seybold.
Seybold looked at him. The question had sounded almost distant through the loud throbbing pulse beat in his ears.
“The son of a bitch isn’t important,” he said. Seybold rushed over to Beatty, on the floor now, propped into a sitting position with his back to the wall. Barnes and Newell were already huddled around him, getting their first-aid kits out of their packs. Perry had raised his helmet visor.
“How bad?” Seybold asked. His eyes went from Beatty’s bloodied shoulder to his face.
“Feels like a slug drilled through my arm, but I think I’ll be all right,” Beatty said. He licked his lips. “Can’t say I love it, though.”
Seybold breathed and nodded. “We’ll get you patched up,” he said.
“Wait,” Eric Oh said. “That one. No, no, you’re pulling the wrong disk. Count two up. Okay, that’s it.”
Ricci slid the gem case from the cabinet and turned it over in his hand so the print on its index label faced his helmet’s digital camera lens.
Silence over the comlink.
“Doc…”
“I need you to slip it into your wearable,” Eric said. “Send me its contents so I can have a look.”
Ricci bit his lip. He could hear gunfire somewhere in the direction of the blown security door.
Reaching down to the miniature computer on his belt, he ejected its CD-ROM tray, set in the disk, and pushed the tray shut. Then he hit the preset UpLink intranet key and uploaded the disk’s contents as a wireless E- mail attachment.
Tortured seconds passed.
“Well?”
“The data’s coming through now, I’m going to scan it on-line, give me a chance to—”
Ricci’s heart knocked. “
“My God,” Eric said. “Oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
His SIG-Sauer P220 in his hand should the enemy be waiting near its door, Kuhl rode the pneumatic elevator up from the biofarm sublevel. The underground passages he’d taken had enabled him to bypass the breached security entrance on Earthglow’s main floor. When the tubular car opened, he would be in the microencapsulation section, a few turns of the hall from the room that was the intruders’ certain objective.
He did not know the size of their invasion force or how far they had penetrated. If he determined that they could be prevented from accomplishing their mission, he would. But his survival had always rested on being a swift contingency planner.
The elevator stopped.
Outside in the corridor, Simmons and Rosander heard the whisper of the arriving car and raised their VVRS weapons.
Kuhl caught a glimpse of them before its door fully opened. His edge over them in speed might have been narrow. In his merciless capacity to kill without restraint, he was a creature alone.
Simmons was on the left of the elevator, and as he prepared to give its passenger a warning, Kuhl pivoted toward him, stepped in close under his gun arm, and brought his own pistol up to Simmons’s side, pushing the muzzle between his fourth rib and underarm, where he knew the straps of his soft ballistic vest would leave an unprotected gap. Three shots of Teflon-coated.45ACP rounds against his body, three muffled blats of sound as the snout of the gun discharged through layers of cold-weather clothing, and Simmons went down to the floor.
With the man who’d come out of the elevator pressed close against Simmons, Rosander had been unable to do anything but hold his fire, fearing he might accidentally hit his teammate. But as Simmons crumpled, he brought his weapon to bear.
He was almost fast enough.
In a streak, Kuhl spun toward Rosander on the ball of his foot, moved in at him, grabbed his wrist behind the outthrust VVRS, and twisted it sharply around, wrenching it, simultaneously slamming his powerful forearm up under Rosander’s chin to crush his windpipe.
His eyes rolling back in their sockets, Rosander sagged back against the wall and fell.
Kuhl crouched to take the VVRS from his hand, heard movement behind him, turned again to the left, in the direction of the laboratory where the inhibitor formulas were stored. His side sticky and wet from point-blank bullet wounds, the intruder Kuhl had shot still clung to life and was weakly raising himself onto his elbows, fingers fumbling for the grip of his own weapon. Kuhl bent, shoved his knee into the man’s diaphragm to crush the air out of him, lifted his helmet visor, and, looking directly down into his eyes, finished him with a shot to the center of his forehead.
Rising then, he heard footsteps down the hall.
Another enemy in winter camouflage was rapidly approaching from the lab area, his weapon ready to fire.
Hearing gunshots down the corridor to his right, knowing Ricci desperately needed more time in the room behind him, Nichols turned and rushed toward the sound of the reports.
