Shouts echoed from the direction of the stairs. Gregor wanted to run back and check on Val, but this would only take another second, and he believed her capable of handling herself. The pockets gave up nothing, but when he tugged off the man’s boots, looking for secret compartments, he found a silver-blue residue on the heel. He scraped off a smear and sniffed it. It smelled similar to old-fashioned gunpowder, but Gregor recognized it as a much newer explosive: Flash-5. As with gunpowder, a spark could ignite it, but a far smaller amount could do far more damage. It could be encapsulated in bombs, but it could also be smeared across a surface and lit with a match or a laser tool. Either way, a couple of ounces of the substance could take down the mountain, crushing everyone inside of it.
Gregor kneeled back. He had to find the admiral and figure out what the intruders had rigged to explode.
Though these needs filled him with urgency, he forced himself to clean every hint of the residue off his finger before leaving. The last thing he needed was to forget it was on there and touch something with a charge. He shuddered.
He was about to step into the hallway when the sound of boots pounding toward the room stopped him. It was
probably
people from the base, but he stood to the side of the doorway, Val’s pistol ready in his hand.
Two men in brown miners’ garb ran into view. Their strides faltered when they spotted him. Yes, he was supposed to be locked in his room, not roaming around the base.
Gregor lowered his weapon and spread his free hand. “The admiral isn’t here, but I have temporarily nullified one of the assassins.”
The men frowned suspiciously at him, but they looked inside the room.
“Another one, damn,” one said.
“Where’s the admiral?” the other demanded.
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I only recently escaped my own room.” He eased toward the doorway, eager to reunite with Val. And, despite his current predicament, he felt compelled to join the search for Admiral Summers. These people needed him.
“Stay here,” one ordered, and they both ran back into the hallway.
That was poor form. They should have searched the body, and they certainly shouldn’t have left him alone here when he was, in their people’s eyes, an escaped prisoner. Gregor slipped into the hall. He would take advantage of their ineptitude.
Two more men in brown ran past him, barely blinking an eye. Maybe they didn’t recognize him. Another black clad man lay crumpled on the stairs, smoke still wafting from his uniform. Gregor gave him a quick search, but since Val wasn’t at the top of the stairs where he had left her, he was more eager than ever to locate her. Also, since she had been the one to let him out, she might know more about where the assassins had come from—and where they might have gone to set explosives.
He spotted Squadron Leader Zimmerman in the intersection at the far end of the hall and almost jogged past an open door at the bottom of the stairs. Since it was the room where the sounds of copulation had been coming from before, he couldn’t imagine it would hold any interest for him, but he did glance in as he ran. He halted in mid-step, spotting familiar unruly brown hair. Val. And Jamie was there, too, looking the other way as a naked gray-haired man pulled a set of trousers down from a sprinkler head on the ceiling. A strange place to store clothing.
Gregor ran inside and would have hugged Val, but the naked man looked at him, and Gregor nearly cursed in surprise. “Admiral Summers.”
“There’s the fine eyesight pilots are known for,” Summers growled, then dropped onto his knees, fishing for something under the bed. There was a fourth person
in
the bed, a pretty young woman with the blankets pulled up to hide her nudity.
“I was just explaining to the admiral…” Val waved at the pale butt sticking in the air—ah, that was a shirt Summers was pulling out. An even more bizarre place to store clothing than a sprinkler head. “His sexual exploits have likely saved his life because there are assassins on the base.”
“Now we’re guarding him while he dresses,” Jamie said, gazing up at the ceiling as she spoke.
“I didn’t ask for guards,” Summers growled, climbing to his feet with his shirt and boots in hand. “Where’s my underwear?” He looked at the woman, who only shrugged and glanced toward the doorway. She probably wanted everyone to leave. Or maybe
she
wanted to leave.
“I found Flash-5 on one of the assassin’s boots,” Gregor said. The admiral’s presence and state of undress had distracted him momentarily, but this news must be shared so a search could be started immediately.
“What?” Summers cursed and stuffed his legs into his trousers, sans underwear. “Anstrider!” he bellowed.
“She’s dead,” Val said.
“I’m going to look for the explosive.” Gregor pointed to Val. “You were the first to discover the assassins, right? Do you know where they came from or where they might have been already?” He had studied a map of the complex when they first arrived, and he could make some guesses as to structurally likely places to set explosives, but it would be most useful to know the intruders’ incursion route.
“I first heard them in the hangar,” Val said. “I even thought I heard something in the tunnel leading in, but at the time, I didn’t think much about it. I assumed the defense shields were up.”
The admiral cursed again and ran out the door, still holding his boots. He grabbed someone in the hallway, shouting, “Get a bomb team out. Search the hangar and then the rest of the base.”
“A bomb team? We don’t have a bomb team, sir.”
“Then get some of those geologists and science people. They must have equipment for searching for more than rocks.” Summers raised his voice. “Zimmerman, we have trouble.”
“No shit,” came the woman’s distant shout.
The admiral ran off, and Gregor didn’t hear any more of his orders. “Let’s check the hangar ourselves,” he said. “Maybe you can make suggestions based on where you heard the sound.”
Val was already running into the hallway.
“I’ll get Sparks and the others,” Jamie said.
Gregor gave her an affirmative wave—the more eyes out there searching the better—then raced after Val. He caught up and they ran side-by-side to the intersection—Zimmerman and Summers had already moved on.
“Any idea how much of an explosive they planted?” Val asked as they rounded the corner toward the hangar.
“Not from the smudge I found, but I deem it likely their goal is to bring down the mountain.”
“Wonderful.” The grim way she nodded made him think she had already guessed that. Maybe she had hoped he would provide a less ominous answer.
“We will find it before the explosive is detonated,” he said.
“I hope so.”
When they reached the hangar, Val ran straight for their shuttle, not for the ramp but for the far side of it.
“I was here,” she said, facing the hull, “and the sound seemed to come from…” She closed her eyes, groped in the air, then pointed. “Over there, yes.”
Gregor stepped out from behind the shuttle, trying to follow her pointing finger through the craft to see what might be the target. “The fighters?” They weren’t parked quite where Val was pointing, but he didn’t see much in the corner she had indicated.
Val’s head came up, her eyes meeting his. “That might be it.”
Other men and women were running into the hangar by the time Gregor ran to the fighters. A couple of people carried handheld element detectors, but most looked like they would be searching by sight alone. Gregor thought about calling them over—as depleted as the base’s resources were, there were still twenty aircraft parked in the hangar—but he didn’t know how much stock to put in a sound Val had heard. Better perhaps to let the others search more systematically. And they were doing that. Someone had turned the lighting up to full strength, and Zimmerman had appeared. She was pointing people in different directions and talking about establishing a search grid.
Gregor ran to the first fighter, but paused. Might he apply logic to the situation to eliminate some of the options? Would the intruders have chosen randomly or perhaps picked a craft positioned where it could do maximum damage?
Val caught up with him and looked like she was going to search the closest craft, but she paused. “You remember which fighter Summers was flying?”
“Twenty-four,” he replied before realizing why she would have asked. If the intruders were here to kill him, maybe they would have chosen his craft, to ensure that he would be blown up later even if they missed finding him or if they were captured. If that were the case, the explosive wouldn’t be on a countdown; it would be tied into the ignition system of his craft.
“Here’s twenty-four,” Val called from a fighter near the back.
She was shining a light and sliding her hand along the bottom of the hull. Gregor ran and jumped, catching the lip of the open cockpit. He pulled himself in headfirst so he could look at the ignition system. Was that a faint silvery smudge on the start button?
“Light,” he called, his head upside down under the controls. The guards had taken all of his weapons and tools from him, and he didn’t have so much as a tablet in his pocket.
“Here.” Val tossed her own tablet up, the illumination program already running.
Gregor caught it and shone it on the button. It might be dirt, but it might be more. The panel that held the button was secured and didn’t show any sign of tampering.
“Need a screwdriver,” he called, but he didn’t have the patience to wait. He dug into the first-aid kit fastened beside the seat, threw pain-relief tabs and wound sealant packages in the air, and finally found what he was looking for: a laser scalpel. Careful to keep the beam precise, so it wouldn’t slip through, he burned the screw holes and tugged off the panel.
A surge of horror filled him at his first glance. The silvery residue was on everything, smeared across the wires and circuits and yes, there was a little device that would ignite it when the system sparked.
“Found the screwdriver,” Val called up.
“I don’t need it now,” Gregor said, his voice choked. He should have waited for it. By melting the screws, he could have ignited everything. He hadn’t expected such sloppy inelegance.
“What do you need?”
“A bomb expert.” Gregor forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. The presence of so much Flash-5 was alarming, but, as far as he could tell, there wasn’t a countdown timer, so nothing should be in danger of exploding as long as nobody fired up the aircraft. And as long as he kept the laser scalpel away from the panel…
“We can find someone qualified,” came Summers’s voice from below. “Don’t touch anything else.”
Gregor had been hanging over the side, his feet up, his head below the seat, so he had to shift around to look down to the deck. The admiral and at least thirty other people had gathered around the craft. Val stood on a ladder, his screwdriver in hand.
“I believe that’s a good idea,” Gregor said.
Summers was looking at the fighter’s number near the nose of the craft, a disturbed expression on his face.
“Looks like your enemies don’t like you much, Admiral,” Val said.
“My friends don’t, either,” Summers said.
“I believe that.”
He grunted. “I—”
“Look out!” came a cry from one of the dark tunnels.
Two men in black burst out of the passage, laser rifles firing. Orange beams streaked across the hangar toward the fighters.
“Hit the deck,” someone in the crowd shouted at the same time as another yelled, “Protect the admiral!”
Gregor almost jumped out of the cockpit, wanting to make sure Val was safe, but she was still up on the ladder. Instead of leaping down into the crowd where she might be protected by the mass of people and the planes between them and the snipers, she scrambled up the last couple of steps and flung herself into the cockpit with Gregor. There was barely room for one person, much less two.
“What are you doing?” he blurted. They were only a foot away from enough explosives to blow up half of the mountain range—what was she
thinking
?
“
Shooting
those idiots,” she growled at the same time as she fired. At some point, she’d grabbed another laser pistol in addition to her stunner, and its red beam lanced toward the running men. The elevated position did allow her to see them better, but they dodged behind a shuttle, evading her attack. The kamikaze wildness in their eyes promised they wouldn’t stay put for long. Indeed, they leaned out on the far side of the shuttle, firing back. One of their beams struck the wing of Summers’s fighter, less than two feet to Gregor’s side. The craft was designed to withstand higher-powered weapons than those pistols, but if there was any of that Flash-5 on the exterior, the hull material wouldn’t matter an iota.
Gregor ducked low for cover, pulling Val down with him. He wouldn’t stop her from firing, but he wasn’t going to let her stand up and make a target of herself while she did it.
A couple of people in the crowd returned fire, but a row of fighters blocked their view, and they were reduced to crouching, trying to find spots to shoot between the wheels of the planes in front of them. The intruders simply sprayed lasers everywhere, one aiming toward fighter twenty-four and one toward Summers. Several people were protecting the admiral and trying to drag him behind cover, but he kept resisting the help and yelling for someone to give him a gun.
“Almost got that one,” Val said, the whine of her laser pistol nearly drowning out her words.
She was crouching now at least, jammed in beside Gregor, their hips plastered together. She fired around the clear windshield of the cockpit—like the hull, the material would withstand laser blasts, but with so many obstacles in between the shooters and their targets, it probably didn’t matter. Still firing from behind the shuttle, the intruders were having trouble hitting anyone. But the base people were having trouble striking their targets, as well.
Gregor reached for the pistol in his holster, intending to help with the shootout, but he still had that laser knife in hand. He almost threw it aside in the same manner as he had ejected everything else from the first-aid kit, but he stopped himself before he let it go and peered at the controls. Maybe it had a delay option. Yes, there was a timer as part of the safety features. As long as he was going to throw things, he might as well make them do something useful.