Viktor waved for them to come, then whispered his response via his comm-patch, not wanting to yell when he was certain more men waited inside. “Go. I’ll cover you. Both of you.” He found Ankari’s gaze through the leaves and the distance, and gave her a reassuring nod.
A clang came from the hallway leading to the offices. Viktor resisted the urge to peek down it to see if someone had walked out of a door. He was not ready to start a firefight, not until Ankari and Azarov were safe on the balcony. He did point one of his pistols toward the mouth of the hallway, watching it with his peripheral vision in case he needed to shoot an interloper. But he focused on Ankari, who was creeping out on one of the thickest remaining branches, following the same route Viktor had taken. He stuck his head through a gap in the leaf-and-vine framework underneath the railing bar, making sure those on the ground were concentrating on him rather than on the tree. The leaves should still be hiding Ankari and Azarov, but he didn’t want to take chances.
Another laser blast zipped up from below, and he yanked his head back. The beam sizzled through the air, glancing off the railing again.
Ankari crouched to jump, but lurched, an arm flailing. Terror shot through Viktor. He stood, reaching out, as if he could help her from here. He nearly revealed himself to the snipers below before he realized his mistake and stepped away from the railing.
Ankari dropped to all fours, gripping the branch with both arms. She was scowling at something Viktor could not see, something in the leaves.
“Is it one of those dragons?” he asked over the comm-patch, though he doubted she could hear him. Azarov, several feet behind her still, was the one with a matching patch. Viktor shifted one of his two pistols in that direction, watching the foliage for movement.
“Ralph? Killer?” someone called from the hallway. “Anyone trying to come up that way? You got trouble?”
Ankari swatted at something, then shook her head. Viktor finally saw it. It was one of those damned cameras, not a dragon. At least the small black sphere could not poison her.
He crouched down between two tables, so someone coming out of the hallway would not see him right away. He thought about shooting the camera, but the person who had spoken walked out of the mouth of the hallway.
“Ralph?” he repeated. “Kill—”
Viktor had never stopped aiming his other pistol in that direction, and he shot before the man spotted him. His aim was true and blasted his target between the eyes. Viktor knew he should move the body so it wouldn’t be visible to the next person who walked out, but he could not take his gaze from Ankari. She was back on her feet, one hand on a cross branch for balance. Seeing that she meant to jump, Viktor leaned through the railing again. This time, he fired. Not at the snipers—though he was tempted, since the louts were shooting at him—but at the water in the fountain next to them. Instead of unleashing a quick burst, he held down the trigger.
As Ankari took three steps along the branch and leaped for the railing, water and marble sheered from the fountain sprayed everywhere. The snipers raised their arms, shielding their faces. As Viktor maintained fire, they rolled away, perhaps realizing he could as easily hit them. He had the high ground, in all senses of the term.
Ankari flew through the air, her jump strong enough to carry her to the railing and over it. She just missed knocking into one of the tables and came down behind it, landing in a deep crouch. She found her balance immediately and ran toward Viktor. Though he wanted to race to meet her, he kept spraying water below, to keep the snipers busy while Azarov jumped. He lopped the tail off one of the lions that made up the focal point of the fountain. Thanks to all of those cameras around recording everything, he would probably get a bill for that later.
Taking the same route that Ankari had, Azarov ran along the branch next. He opted for sheer speed and power rather than balance, and he leaped for the balcony, his arms flailing. He cleared the tables and almost crashed into the wall.
Ankari reached Viktor’s side of the balcony, sweat bathing her dirty face and her hair full of twigs, but her eyes alight with excitement.
With his allies safely on solid ground, Viktor backed away from the railing. As much as he wanted to give Ankari that hug, his instincts demanded he pay attention to the enemy instead. A good thing, because as soon as he turned back toward the hallway, movement in the shadows caught his eye. He pushed Ankari toward the wall, so she wouldn’t be visible to anyone coming out, and he dropped to one knee behind a trash receptacle.
Two men ran to the corners of the hallway, painting the balcony on either side with laser fire. Partially hidden by the trash bin, Viktor squeezed off two bursts with his pistol. One man spotted him and returned fire even as he was hit. The trash receptacle proved poor cover. It exploded even as Viktor rolled away from it. He fired as he rolled and came up near the mouth of the hallway. He jerked his pistol around the corner, intending to finish off the men, but his rolling blasts had been effective. The two men had crumpled to the floor next to their fallen comrade, one dead and one groaning and clutching a smoldering wound in his abdomen.
There was no time to tie up prisoners, and he refused to worry about enemies at his back. Besides, he recognized the gasping man as the one who had been covering the escape of his comrades in the docking bay, the one who had been blowing up androids and security officers. He shot the man between the eyes without remorse.
He glanced down the hallway and did not see anyone else rushing out, though people could have been hiding behind any of the dozen open doors that stretched ahead of him. The gloom also made it hard to pick out details, though he got a sense of potted plants and furnishings lining the lushly carpeted space. Out in the atrium, the light from below—and the light from the trees themselves—had not gone out with Borage’s sabotage, but the office area lay dark.
Viktor was tempted to plow in on his own, trusting in his reflexes to handle the situation, but he reminded himself that he had a team, and his team members were sometimes brighter than he was. All right,
often
that was the case.
“Any ideas?” he asked, expecting Azarov to have joined Ankari right behind his back. His sergeant, however, had stopped several paces back and was squinting at something high up on the wall.
“Azarov may have one,” Ankari whispered. “Either that, or he’s admiring that snazzy no-throwing-anything-from-the-balcony sign.”
A soft tink came from within the hallway. Viktor would not have heard it, except that someone had finally turned down the alarm pounding through the station. Maybe the assault teams had decided they needed to be able to communicate with each other to be effective.
Viktor squinted into the gloom, his pistol lifted. He expected to catch someone trying to sneak up on them, but something rolling along the carpet caught his eye. Not certain it was the smart choice, he shot at it before it could reach them. He leaned away from the opening, expecting gas or an explosion. He was not disappointed. Fire roared out of the hallway, an orange inferno shooting past him. Even though he had backed up, pushing Ankari behind him, heat scoured his face. The corpses lying in the mouth of the hallway took the brunt of the attack, skin and clothing charring and melting before the flames died out.
“Erg,” Ankari said, covering her mouth with her hand at the sight—or maybe the smell.
He shifted slightly, so he would block her view with his body. It probably did not matter—they were going to have to walk over the charred corpses to get inside, anyway—but if he could alleviate some of her discomfort, he would do so.
The whine of laser fire sounded behind them. Azarov was shooting the wall. No, a sensor high up on the wall, above the sign Ankari had mentioned. He held the shot, his crimson beam at first bouncing off the wall, but eventually heating it enough to bite into the metal and melt it.
“Azarov,” Viktor said. “What are you—”
The wail of a new alarm sounded around them. An instant later, sprinkler heads popped out of the ceiling in the hallway, and a mix of fire-stifling chemicals shot out in moist droplets.
“Another distraction,” Azarov said, joining them.
“Let’s go,” Viktor said, knowing the spatter of chemicals wouldn’t distract the mafia men for long. “Time to end this.”
Chapter 13
Ankari followed Viktor around the corner, grimacing as she stepped over the burned bodies. She was glad the men had been dead before the blast struck them—nobody deserved that kind of excruciating pain.
With Viktor in front of her and Sergeant Azarov right behind her, Ankari did not know how much help she would be in this battle, but she gripped two pistols in her hands, ready to protect the men’s backs if she could. That might be a challenge with the damp chemical concoction spraying down from the ceiling and plastering her hair to her head. She used the back of her sleeve to shove strands out of her eyes.
“We may have to revisit the double shower head, Viktor,” Ankari whispered. She didn’t expect a reply, not with the focus she had seen burning in his eyes.
“Promise?” he murmured without looking back.
“Only if you agree not to kick me off the ship for at least another six months.”
They were getting close to the first set of doors, one opening on either side, and he did not respond. He flicked a finger for Azarov to come up and check the right while he took the left. The men disappeared inside, and Ankari pressed her back to the wall, watching both ends of the hallway, in case someone came out. That was her intention, anyway. When a cacophony of laser fire and shouts arose from Viktor’s room, she almost lunged in after him. But the outburst was brief, the noise replaced by the continuing splatter of fire-extinguishing chemicals landing on everything.
Azarov stepped out. “Mine’s empty.”
He looked curiously toward the other open door. Viktor stepped out before he or Ankari ventured inside.
“Mine’s empty,” he said, turning back into the hallway. “Now.”
Ankari told herself not to look inside as she passed it, but her gaze was drawn through the doorway. She spotted several dead men on the floor, some in business suits and some in darker clothing with weapons belts around their waists. Presumably, the mafia men had killed the business people and Viktor had killed the mafia men. Another armed man who had been shot in the forehead sprawled across a desk littered with fuses, along with a sack full of bulging disks. Bombs? If the mafia men had been preparing more, Ankari was glad Viktor had taken them out first. She spotted a couple of vaults in the back of the room, the design similar to the one that had been in the pet store—she hoped nobody had been locked inside these, but made a note to remember them in case they didn’t find the hostages anywhere else on the floor.
The hairs on the back of Ankari’s neck stirred. Uneasy, she glanced back the way they had come, afraid someone might be sneaking up behind them. They were being followed, but not by a person. One of the cameras—maybe the same one that had startled her on the tree and almost caused her to fall—floated after them.
“We’re sure those are news cameras, right?” she asked. She and Azarov had discussed this on the way up the tree. “And that the mafia people aren’t spying on us?”
“If they were spying on us, they’d be doing a better job of fighting us up here,” Viktor said.
They passed two more open doors, but the rooms were empty of everything except furnishings and decorations, some quite extravagant, even though the offices themselves were not large or ornate. Perhaps the druids who had built the place had not been thinking of satisfying the needs of highly paid executives.
“No sign of hostages yet,” Viktor said, following a curve in the hallway and approaching another set of doors facing each other, these two closed.
The shadows had grown deeper since they left the balcony, and Ankari thought about pulling out her flashlight. But that would make them targets if someone lurked in the darkness ahead.
“Is it possible they took them down one of the elevator shafts while we were climbing up?” Azarov asked.
“Possible. But it looked like all of the stairs and elevator shafts were guarded.”
Viktor waved at the door sensors, but neither opened. He pressed his ear to one, then the other.
“I don’t hear anything. We’ll come back and force the locks if we don’t find anything else in the other rooms.”
“Wait.” Azarov had pressed his hand to one of the doors. “This is warm.”
“Not from fire.” Viktor glanced toward the ceiling. The spatters had slowed down but not yet stopped.
“I wouldn’t think so, but the warmth is worrisome.”
“You still have the Lock Master, Ankari?” Viktor asked.
“Yes.” She pulled it out of her pocket.
“You two check it, then catch up.” Viktor jerked his chin toward the hallway. They had not come to the elevator yet, but the route ahead continued to curve. There were more doors in that direction too.
The idea of splitting up did not appeal to Ankari, but she pressed the device to the door. It should not take long to check the room. Instead of sticking, the Lock Master plopped to the floor.
“Er.”
Azarov used his sleeve to wipe the surface free of the slick white-green chemicals flecking it. “Try again.”
The second time, the device attached itself to the door. Ankari shifted from foot to foot while it worked.
Gunshots came from up ahead—not the laser fire of Viktor’s weapons. She almost raced after him, but she hadn’t seen which room he had disappeared into.
“He probably doesn’t need help,” Azarov mumbled, but he glanced back and forth from the lock-picking device to the hallway, as if he was also struggling with whether to stay or whether to go.
More gunshots rang out, this time accompanied by the whine of laser fire. Ankari could not tell how many people were shooting, but it sounded like a battle between platoons rather than between a few men. She shifted in that direction, but the lock picker clicked before she had gone a step. Azarov removed it, and the door slid open. Warmth, smoke, and the stench of something burning flowed out.