James Axler - Shatter Zone

“Alive,” Jak growled. “Like for experiments?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Nuke that,” Jak muttered, tightening the grip on his blaster.

Just then, the elevator gave a musical chime and the doors parted. As the companions stepped into the corridor, they became instantly alert. In spite of the warm breeze from the wall vents, there was a dry chill in the air. This was something they had encountered only once before, a long time ago.

“Just like that redoubt in Zero City,” Ryan said as a warning, bringing up the barrel of the Steyr longblaster. The two blasters were rock-steady in his hands.

“Just as long as it isn’t another Alaska,” Krysty added grimly, her hair tightening in response. The old madman in charge of that redoubt had a lot of funny ideas about breeding, and the companions had been triple glad to leave that place far behind. A recent visit had spooked them all.

Easing along the corridor, the companions saw only bare, blank walls until taking a corner. A huge steel door stood at the far end of the next passageway, the metal-and-ceramic surface touched with patches of snowy frost along the edges. There was no doubt that this was the source of the cold.

“A deeper,” Jak stated, stopping in his tracks.

Ever so slowly, Ryan gave a nod. Yeah, definitely looked like a Deep Storage Locker. He remembered the first time the Trader had told him and J.B. about such things. Just another legend, they’d thought at the time, only this one happened to be true. A deeper, a Deep Storage Locker, was a special vault filled with dead air—inert gases, Mildred called them—and then made colder than winter ice. The combo was supposed to keep everything from aging, suspended animation was the whitecoat term. The ammo would be live, the canned food fresh, the blasters in perfect condition, the medicine still potent. The companions had found only one of these before in all of their travels, and that deeper had been guarded by a sec hunter droid.

“How much C-4 do we have, John Barrymore?” Doc asked, using his left hand to pull back the massive hammer of the LeMat. It locked into place with a solid click, the single-action revolver now ready for immediate firing.

“Plas? Not a scrap left,” J.B. said around the cigar. “I’m down to road flares and bad language.”

“Mebbe we should check the blast doors first, lover,” Krysty said hesitantly. “Just in case we have to run.”

There was logic to that, Ryan had to admit. But there was also no denying the fact that somebody had rigged their last jump, and he’d sure as hell feel a lot better about that with some spare brass jingling in his pocket.

“We keep going,” the one-eyed man growled, hefting his longblaster. “But spread out more. We’ll need space if there’s a sec hunter droid inside the locker.”

“What we’d need is a freaking bazooka,” Mildred muttered under her breath, shifting her grip on the scattergun.

Proceeding warily along the corridor, the companions took their time and checked every room along the passageway in turn, making sure there wouldn’t be any surprises left behind them if the locker proved to be guarded.

Once past the last door, the companions gathered in front of the icy portal and studied it carefully. There was a painted curve on the floor to show the swing of the armored slab, and a keypad on the wall offered easy access.

Holstering the SIG-Sauer, Ryan started forward, but the moment he crossed the painted line, a siren started to bleat, and a red light began to flash above the icy locker.

“Warning!” a mechanical voice blared from the ceiling, rattling the tiles. “Warning! Intruder alert! Intruder alert! All security personnel to Section 9! Repeat! All security personnel to Section 9!”

Swinging the Steyr upward, Ryan blew the speaker apart with a single shot and blessed silence returned to the hallway.

“Stupe machines,” J.B. commented, using the barrel of the Uzi to push back his fedora. “Can’t tell the difference between—”

The Armorer never got to finish the statement as there came a soft hiss and the corridor behind them was suddenly closed off by a grid of steel bars that dropped from the ceiling to violently slam onto the floor. If anybody had been standing under the gate, he or she would have been mashed into bloody pulp.

“Good thing…” Ryan started, then felt cold adrenaline flood his body as a second sigh sounded. On impulse he dived forward. While in the air, something smacked into his left boot, sending the man tumbling. He hit the wall hard, gritting his teeth against the pain shooting through his ankle. Nuking hell!

Looking backward, Ryan scowled at the sight of a second gate sealing off the corridor, the other companions now trapped between the array of steel bars. Caged like rats.

Her hair flexing wildly, Krysty started to speak, but then jerked her head toward the ceiling as panels swung open and a Vulcan minigun dropped into view. The deadly rapidfire was covered with armored cables and enclosed in cascading ammo feeds.

“Drop your weapons!” a voice boomed through the speaker mounted on the Vulcan, the volume almost deafeningly loud. “Drop your weapons, or die!”

Wasting no time, Ryan ignored the pain in his ankle and stood up to grab with both hands the electrical wiring attached to the bottom of the minigun. He pulled with all of his strength, and the smaller wires easily snapped free. But the larger cables were sheathed in flexible metal and only bent under his weight.

“Alert! Alert!” the speaker loudly announced as the robotic weapon swiveled, trying to target its attacker. The barrels began to spin and the Vulcan cut loose, the armor-piercing rounds chewing a path of destruction along the floor. The tiles disintegrated, spraying out rubbery pieces in every direction and exposing the hard concrete floor underneath. But hanging suspended directly underneath the Vulcan, Ryan stayed just outside its range.

Ricochets flew everywhere, several of the slugs zinging off the steel bars of the security cage holding the companions prisoner. In response, J.B., Krysty and the others shoved their blasters through the cage and hammered lead at the shielded control cables of the deadly rapidfire. The incoming barrage tore the flexible casing apart, and Ryan dropped to the floor with two fistfuls of sparking wires. Instantly the deadly Vulcan stopped firing and the spinning barrels slowed until they went completely still, the metal ticking as it radiated away the tremendous heat of the brief barrage.

“Anybody hurt?” Ryan demanded, tossing away the circuitry. As the wires hit the floor, miniature computer chips broke off from the ends. He had never seen tech like that before. Curious.

“No blood in sight,” Mildred reported, glancing quickly about as she slung the shotgun over a shoulder. “Damn, that was lucky!”

“Lucky my ass,” Krysty retorted, grabbing the steel bars and trying to shake them. The metal grating didn’t budge. “We’re locked in tight, and you’re trapped between this and the door.”

Walking the perimeter of the cage, J.B. studied every section. Steel bars closed off both sides of the corridor, and more had slid into existence along the walls when he hadn’t noticed, probably when the Vulcan was blasting.

“There’s no way out of this that I can see,” J.B. said in disgust. “There’s no lock to pick or keypad to short out.”

“Pity young Dean is no longer with us,” Doc said slowly, biting a lip. “He could have easily slipped out between these bars.”

“What good would that do?” J.B. demanded. “We need to liberate everybody, not just one of us.”

Jak dropped his backpack and started to remove his boots, then the rest of his clothing. In a few moments the teenager was stark naked and forcibly throwing himself at the smooth bars. Sheer momentum got Jak halfway through before he became stuck. Wiggling, the teenager gained another inch, but then stopped, unable to advance or to retreat.