head. “Nothing, I guess. Must have just been the air vents.”
Doc frowned at the comment. “Indeed, madam. I also thought there had been a noise before,” he rumbled. “But dismissed it as superfluous clatter.”
Holstering his 9 mm blaster, Ryan eased the butt of the Steyr SSG-70 out of his backpack and worked the bolt. First it was too hot in the redoubt, now mysterious noises.
“Okay, get hard, people,” Ryan ordered. “Jak, Dean, watch the elevator. Anything that comes out, blast it. Doc and Mildred, guard the stairs. The rest of us will walk down to the reactor on the bottom level. Then come back up before searching the upper levels. This way we can know nothing is coming from behind.”
Cradling his Uzi, J.B. added, “Any trouble, fire a round. If nobody comes back in ten, then come running.”
“I shall serve as Horatius,” Doc rumbled, taking position near the corner of the hallway. This offered a clear field of fire in two directions and possible cover in case of incoming rounds.
“Horatius had two companions with him on that bridge,” Mildred muttered, joining the scholar, “and they both died.”
Leaning against the wall, Doc smiled widely, displaying his oddly perfect teeth. “Which is exactly why,” he said politely, “I was very careful to state that I alone was Horatius, and not you.”
Glowering at the man, Mildred said something in Latin that made his eyebrows rise in shock while Ryan eased open the door to the stairwell. As he did, a sound was clearly heard echoing down from the levels above. Something metallic and moving. Then came a horrible scream.
Chapter Three
“Air vent, my ass,” Ryan cursed as the scream echoed away.
He started forward, then paused, and for a tense moment sharply debated leaving. Whatever was happening here probably wasn’t their concern. Then again, the redoubts were the lifeline of the companions. If there were people in here, they needed to know how they got inside and what, if anything, they knew about the mat-trans system.
“Dad?” Dean asked anxiously, his knuckles white from the tight grip on his blaster.
“That could have been a child,” Krysty said, remembering a particularly gruesome event at a redoubt where the companions had arrived only seconds too late to save a young girl who was starving to death from taking her own life.
Anxiously, Doc added, “Knowledge is power, my dear Ryan.”
Yeah, the Trader used to say that, too. “Okay, we move as a group,” Ryan decided, almost against his better judgment. “I’m on point, one yard apart, two on two formation. Let’s go!”
“Just a sec,” J.B. countered, walking to the elevator and hitting the call button. The indicator lights in the lintel chimed in response as the cage started to descend from the upper levels.
Ryan nodded in approval at the distraction; every little bit helped. Doc and Mildred quickly joined the others in the stairwell and, moving fast, the companions quietly started up the ancient stairs of the redoubt, blasters leading the way.
At each level they paused, straining to hear anything, but there was only dusty silence. The dining hall, barracks, communications, medical, storage, each section was as still as a empty tomb. At the top level, the companions paused before the last door and were rewarded by some sort of humming noise.
“Dark night, but that’s familiar,” J.B. said, setting his fedora farther back on his head as a prelude to a fight. “Just can’t recall what the nuke it is, though.”
“I don’t like this,” Krysty whispered, her hair coiling tightly in response to the tension.
“Got something?” Jak asked, flexing his left hand. A knife slipped from the sleeve of his leather jacket into his palm at the gesture.
“No,” the redhead said slowly, as if unsure. “I’m not reading anything. This just feels wrong, a gut instinct.”
“Same here,” Mildred added, chewing at her lip.
With a worried expression on his young face, Dean grunted in agreement.
There was no light coming from under the jamb, so working the latch carefully, Ryan opened the door slightly, and held out a hand toward Doc. The scholar passed over his ebony stick and, easing it through the crack, Ryan reached toward the nearby light switch, flicked it on with a loud click and threw open the door.
This top level was the garage of the redoubt, tool benches and storage rooms to the left, the exit corridor to the distant right. The rest of the cavernous room was filled with vehicles, mostly civilian wags—compact cars and station wagons, some falling apart from body rust, others in decent condition.
However, a few of the larger machines were military wags, 4×4s, some Hummers and even an APC. The armored personnel carrier was lacking wheels, the axles resting on the stained concrete floor above a dark grease pit, but the chassis seemed intact.
“Hot pipe, over there!” Dean cried and started to fire his blaster.
Ryan turned fast and triggered his longblaster without conscious thought. Across the garage was a three-foot-wide crack in the nukeproof wall. That was unusual, but not startling. They had found damaged redoubts before. Some of the weapons used in skydark had been fantastically powerful. But standing directly in front of the crack was something potentially more dangerous than any nuke.
At first glance it resembled a chrome-plated humanoid, stooped over slightly like a hunchbacked ape. Its domed head was fronted with large crystalline eyes, the body composed of chrome rods, two elongated arms, one armed with a pneumatic hammer, the other sporting a set of tarnished blades that spun at blinding speed. That was the source of the humming noise.
Even as he fired the Steyr, Ryan narrowed his eye. A sec hunter droid! The companions had previously encountered the mech guardians of the redoubts. Once a hunter got your “scent,” it could track a person through a crowd of a thousand other people and across ten thousand miles, locked on to the target’s genetic code. The droid couldn’t be turned off, diverted from the chase, and never stopped until the allocated target was aced.
With a grinding noise of rusted gears, the machine turned away from the crack and started for them, the hammer thumping loudly as the spinning blades thrust forward.
“Double line!” Ryan shouted, and the companions hit the droid with everything they had, knowing only seconds remained before it would reach them, and in the cramped confines of the stairwell they would be chilled.
Dropping to their knees, Jak and Doc threw thunder at the hunter with their big bore blasters, while the others fired over their heads. Lead and steel hit everywhere on the machine in a deafening cacophony of firepower, but the droid seemed undamaged. Then the impossible happened—one of the chrome rods dented, then another and a third broke apart. Encouraged, the companions concentrated on the opening in the droid’s armored body. Wires snapped, and something crackled with electricity inside the machine. When only yards away, smoke began to pour from the battered torso, then the spinning blades jammed motionless almost tearing off the arm. The droid slowed its advance, but the companions continued to fire, expending ammo at a frightful rate. Suddenly, the pneumatic hammer stopped, the lights dimmed in the crystal eyes, fat
