Larry Niven - The Moon Maze Game

We’ll get them for you, he thought. Every one of the bastards.

The airlock’s inner door bore a single window, inch-thick composition plastic harder than glass and stronger than steel. And all he could see beyond it was an empty corridor.

“Unhook the door from the grid,” he said, “and open it.”

Chambers opened the inner panel, and slotted a handheld scanner into place. Piering watched as the guy manipulated glowing red and green lines, effectively isolating the door from the maintenance grid. If the pirates were monitoring, this might… might… bamboozle them.

He held his breath as the door slid open. No explosion.

Piering and his three partners stepped out onto a metal walkway. He motioned Hazel and Lee around to the right, while he and Chambers went left. The walkway curled around the inner wall, separating it from a maze of pipes, wiring and support struts. The microphone in his suit helmet picked up his own footfalls, and a mixture of small hollow machine sounds.

“Anything, Lee?”

Lee was a tall brunette from the tool and die workshops, a veteran of the Second Canadian War. “Nothing so far. Hazel and I are on point. Can you find our gamers?”

A map of the inner bubble layout played on his faceplate, a framework of intersecting green lines. The gamers’ last known location was marked in red. Around the curve of the dome, and then in through a few rows of bubbles, then down a level. They just might make it. If they could find their targets, it might be possible to evacuate the gamers to the Scorpion, or at the least form a security wall between the innocent and the guilty… and then hang on for dear life until more help arrived.

His nail gun had an effective range of about a dozen meters. Beyond that they would tumble and act as dull projectiles, still capable of stinging but no longer lethal.

“Piering…” Lee whispered. “I see something-”

Red mist clouded Shotz’ vision. He fought to keep it from swallowing logic, wished desperately to maintain perspective. He had known that Prince Ali Kikaya III could be grabbed. Anyone could be kidnapped or killed, given the appropriate resources and commitment. He had trusted that political pressure on Earth could control the security response. It had always been possible that the gamers might try to escape, but his soldiers had bottled them in the dome. Conceivably, even if their targets escaped, but remained within the dome, the political situation in Central Africa would not be negatively affected.

And now, in defiance of her own superiors, the Griffin woman was striking against them. Though it was invisible to their monitors, Douglas Frost had finally done something useful and spotted the Scorpion transport through one of the dome’s few external windows. Shotz had positioned his people to protect the unmined doors. Pure strategy: Give your opponent an apparent entry point, bottle them there and set up a kill zone.

And then: Demonstrate the price of disobedience.

Two of his men were positioned at the dome’s base level, with complementary fields of fire directed at different doors and maintenance ladders in the southern section of the dome. Others were positioned on levels C and E.

When he first glimpsed his adversaries, he cursed silently. Damn! They were wearing pressure suits. Well, of course they were, but frankly he hadn’t factored that in when designing their assault and defensive gear back on Earth.

Celeste might be right: There was no way to deal with these problems if their highest priority was zero casualties. Celeste was often right.

That was one of the reasons he cared for her. He wouldn’t call it love, exactly. Wasn’t entirely certain he could actually feel that emotion. He considered it, and infatuation, and even sexual attraction to be snares. As he had used it to snare that silly little chocolate heiress in Switzerland There! A head popped back up for a moment. Someone was climbing the ladder. Shotz counted three and then pressed the wireless detonator. A sharp explosion and a shower of sparks from the ladder. A scream, and the climber tumbled down out of sight.

Shotz was scanning for their communications frequency, but so far had picked up nothing. Communications along a private, hidden frequency? Possibly.

He shifted position until he could see the shattered ladder and the three men clustered at the bottom, one still apparently stunned.

This was the moment. He raised his hand, motioning for Frost and Fujita to follow his lead. He aimed the air gun carefully, and pulled the trigger.

Piering heard the scream as the first explosion rocked the dome over around to his left, and a second howl of dismay a moment later, elongated as someone plunged a long distance, to a solid impact. Then… his external mike picked up a short, sharp explosion, and another scream.

Damn! Lee and Hazel had been discovered. “Get back,” he screamed. They would try from the second ladder! If he failed, there were still his A team down on level F… if any of them had survived that first explosion. If he could even keep these bastards busy, that might be enough to give his compatriots a chance. The makeshift weapons put everyone on a more equal footing. These men were experts. Perhaps trained killers, but certainly willing to use violence. In comparison his own people, however well intended, were mere amateurs.

Moving farther left around the catwalk, he and Chambers reached a second ladder. Helmet infrared showed no one lurking around the edges, and visual failed to detect anything dangerous. Still, his heart thundered as he began to climb.

Piering got halfway up, then motioned the ex-cop to follow.

He reached the next level and crouched as much as the suit would allow him, cradling his nail gun, scanning the shadows. Nothing. Perhaps he could circle back around and help Lee and her people. “Lee?” he asked into the helmet. “What’s happening over there?”

“Hazel is down,” she said. “An arrow stuck in the suit, didn’t rupture, thank God. But the explosion knocked out her visuals, damaged her faceplate.”

“Stay where you are,” he said. “But make noise. Make them think you’re still an active threat.”

He duck-walked into a shadow, pressed himself against the bulk of a compressor, peering around the corner trying to pierce the shadows.

Then… the second ladder exploded. A wall of light and air, followed a moment later by a high-pitched scream from Chambers. He knew what had happened: Their enemies had outthought them, split their forces rather than simply destroy access to the next level. Now he was stranded on C level, with the wounded Chambers isolated on F. Smart.

“Chambers. Are you all right?”

“Damn! My faceplate cracked, and the sealant is clouding my vision. The explosion screwed up my suit balance somehow. I’m having trouble getting up.”

He was being watched, and somehow the watchers had avoided his scans. With a ping! something struck his air cylinders, and swung him around. Damn! If those cylinders were damaged, he was completely A quick check of his indicators suggested that no such disaster had taken place. The pencil-thin red beam of a laser lanced through the murk.

“Damn it!” Chambers swore. “Bastards!”

“What?”

“Ah, fall like that should have killed me. Tweaked my knee, too.”

“Stay where you are. Snipe if you get the chance. Let’s see-”

Another explosion, short and viciously sharp, and his suit doppler fixed it at a hundred meters distant. That would be his first team. “Gypsy!” he called. “What’s the situation?”

“We have snipers. Boss, we didn’t blind ’em. They knew what we were doing. What do we do?”

“Can you see any of them?”

“May have blinded one. Not sure.”