Several stun bolts followed the cool breeze through the narrow slot between the doors into the cell block. Almost everyone in the line of fire dropped senseless to the floor; the Galka and the Ronso grunted but did not fall, nor Gil, who happened to have been standing behind the Ronso. Most of the rest scattered, a few rubbing numbed skin where the bolts had grazed them. Rand executed a smooth toe pivot from his spot next to the door, slamming his broad armored back against the widening slot. His hands pressed hard against the panels, trying to keep the slender Guado fingers curling around their edges from pulling them apart, but not having much success. He blocked the Guado’s line of fire by virtue of sheer size; the shots aimed at Rand’s armored back ricocheted back into the corridor with high-pitched whings, but not without taking their toll on his body heat. Gil’s four-armed attempt to haul Rei aside was rewarded with a stun bolt fired over Rand’s head.
“Raijin, lock the doors!” Jeremy snapped, fumbling for the edges of the door inside the bulkhead but finding no purchase; to his telekinetic fingers, there was nothing there.
“I can’t!” Raijin wailed. “The circuit’s fried, ya know?”
Tehuatl, the Galka, rushed the doors, holding one huge forearm in front of his face to protect it from shots coming in above Rand’s head. In the time it took him to reach the door, he took several stun bolts to the chest and stomach, none of which slowed him in the least. He smacked one hand on the door on each side of Rand’s shoulders and slammed them together; mashed Guado fingers retracted hastily, letting the Galka shut the gap.
“T-t-th-thanks,” Rand breathed, shivering violently. His four-fingered hands wrapped around his thick biceps, his shivering easing not one bit. He slid down the doors, scraping a rime of frost off his dorsal plates, ending in a supported crouch, eyes closed, breathing in quick gulps.
“Are you all right?” Tehuatl asked, concerned for his fellow escapee.
Rand managed a nod. “J-ju-just c-c-cold,” he stuttered, the corners of his mouth turning up for a breath or two.
Jeremy, having been in earshot of the exchange, ducked under the Galka’s bulging tricep to seize Rand’s wrist. “C’mon, Rand.” The big Daspadi allowed himself to be towed out from Tehuatl’s embrace and into a cell.
“What the hell’s the matter with him?” Zell demanded, springing to his feet as the two entered.
“He’s freezing. See if you can warm him up, will you?” Jeremy said.
Zell shot a look of puzzlement to Baito and Tomarik, temporarily his cellmates; but he helped Jeremy seat Rand on the narrow wall-molded bunk, a hand still on his shoulder as Jeremy left.
Meanwhile, Danae had recruited Tomarik and Quchuq to help carry the five unconscious bodies into a cell. Korcha followed them in. Crouching next to Baito, he bowed his crimson-mohawked head, eyes closed, the fingers of his right hand coming up to touch lightly on the bridge of his nose. Luminous white strings reminiscent of audio-visualizer effects surged up silently around him, stretched to the ceiling, faded off. A small sphere the color of new snow under a clear noon sky, coated in spicules of white light, came away in Korcha’s fingertips. He pressed it to Baito’s solar plexus, causing a second surge of white strings to surround the unconscious Hylian. Baito immediately opened his eyes and rose on his elbows. Korcha nodded, moved to crouch by Gil’s side, repeated the procedure.
Straightening, Korcha stepped back into Ox’s hip just as the Bovo entered the cell. Korcha whirled and was about to apologize when Ox cut him off. “The others?”
“Those were the only two I had.”
Ox nodded. Baito and Gil made way for him to squeeze in next to Gau. A chant, a motion, and Gau bounced to his feet and raked the cell with his glare, looking for his attacker, clearly disappointed at not finding him. Growling, he bounded out of the cell. Jeremy, just coming out of the cell he’d pulled Rand into, dodged aside to keep from being body checked.
Tehuatl waited patiently at the exit, thick fingers splayed wide on the smooth surface of the doors; Jeremy wondered how exactly he was holding them closed without warping them out of their tracks. “Are you all right? I can’t believe you took those shots like that.”
“It stings, but I’ll be fine,” the Galka replied. “It takes much more than that to knock me out.”
“Obviously,” Jeremy replied, impressed. “All right, can you hold on there for a few minutes?”
“Of course.”
Jeremy went to the cell Danae was sitting in. After a nod to the Bovo — Ox, Jeremy guessed — bent over Rei’s inert figure in the back of the cell, he turned to his fellow operative and opened his mouth. “Grab a gun,” she said before he got a word out.
That changed his next word to “What?”
“Grab a gun,” she repeated, poking at her holokeyboard. “One with charges still in it.” She gave him a significant look.
Jeremy thought he understood. He went by the pile of unconscious Guado next to the conduit where they’d entered the cell block and selected a pistol. He took it back to Danae. “So how do you use this thing?”
Danae showed him. It was, like everything the Guado made, not at all an intuitive firearm; although it was held like a pistol, the index finger served only to close a circuit, while the thumb activated the firing stud. Setting the power level was a simple matter of sliding a finger down a sensor strip along the left side of the barrel, but it worked only if the firing circuit was not closed …
“OK. Great. You have a gun and I have a gun. Are we gonna shoot our way out or what?”
“Sure,” Danae replied, not at all sarcastically. “Just as soon as you figure out how to get a hold of more guns.” She gave him another significant look.
Jeremy stared at her for a moment, then he closed his eyes. His free hand came up and slapped his forehead. Of course. There was literally a walking armory in the corridor outside the cell block, carrying weaponry for every occupant and then some — provided he could yank the guns out of enough Guado hands ….
Springing to his feet, he searched out the Klingon and showed him how to use the Guado pistol (except for the power setting). Then he directed everybody except the Galka to cells eleven through fourteen, installing Danae, Quchuq, Bo and Michael at the threshold of each cell.
“Tehuatl?” Jeremy queried, coming up beside him again.
“Just Tehua will do,” the Galka grunted.
“Tehua it is,” Jeremy acknowledged. “I’m going to take over for you here, then you go join the others in the far cells. Let go on my mark.” Jeremy pulled down his balaclava.
Tehuatl shifted his stance a little while Jeremy retreated behind the console at the other end of the corridor. He spread out his arms and sensed the doors: he could now clearly detect the outer edges. They fit almost perfectly within his armspan without rescaling. He had to stretch a bit, but when he had a good hold on them, he gave the mark. The Galka peeled his hands off the door and shook out his arms, leaving damp-looking handprints on the doors. Immediately the doors jerked in Jeremy’s telekinetic grip, jarring him, but his grip held fast. Tehuatl ducked into cell twelve.
“Everybody ready?”
“No,” Danae groused. “Gimme a couple of minutes.” She concluded her brief lesson on the use of Guado firearms, went across to the groups gathered in the opposite cells, and repeated the briefing. She made sure everyone had the procedure right, which didn’t take long; she was glad to have found an intelligent bunch, and a cooperative one.
“All right, you’re green,” she told Jeremy at last. “Everybody ready?”
A chorus of yes rippled through the end of the cell block.
Jeremy released his grip on the doors. The doors clunked a centimeter, then paused momentarily before the mechanism reengaged and trundled open. The delay gave Jeremy all the more opportunity to reach forward and grab a pulse rifle in each hand, successfully tearing them free of their respective startled grasps, and flung them as near to the occupied cells as he could. Then the entrance filled with Guado, and the firefight was on. Bolts rained through the corridor, spattering harmlessly against the various components of the console or on the wall behind it. Shielded by a cluster of gravlocked displays, Jeremy began to reach and pull, reach and pull, alternating hands, sending pistols and rifles skittering up the corridor towards himself. Several times he didn’t quite manage to free a firearm out of its grasp, but it was enough to ruin its aim. Now and then he diverted a bit of his attention to the foreground, batted to one side or the other a firearm that had somehow bounced into the middle of the corridor, then turned back to the job at hand.
Rand Marks, rifle cradled in his arms, vaulted out of his cell and rolled, ending prone on the floor in the middle of the corridor. A moment later, blue stun bolts began to fly at the doorway from behind the bulwark of Rand’s own body. Far from being an easy target, the bolts the Guado sent in his direction invariably spanged off the coppery armor plates of his back, forearms, and even his head, ricocheting into the walls and ceiling. Meanwhile, Rand knocked down Guado after Guado in the bottleneck of the door.
Quchuq, Raagrakyysh and Michael seemed to have discovered how to set their rifles to semi-automatic fire, and were soon spraying stun bolt bursts across the corridor. Gil seemed to be an especially good shot: where others had to land two or three rifle bolts to drop a Guado, he could knock one down with a single quad shot from his pistols.
The Guado kept coming. Unconscious bodies were dragged off down the corridor almost as fast as they tumbled to the floor, were replaced by sharpshooters that began to snipe at the ex-prisoners. One of them chose Jeremy as his target; his first two shots hit floating displays, but the third one streaked through a tiny gap and would have hit Jeremy in the ribs if, at that precise moment, he had not been leaning hard to the left, wrestling a pulse rifle away from its owner. Grazed, Jeremy clapped both hands to his right flank and dropped to the floor.
Stun bolts were no longer flying helter-skelter up and down the corridor, but had instead died down to the occasional potshot at the edges of doorways. No one had a good shot at anyone else; the escapees and their captors seemed to have come to a deadlock. Jeremy wondered if they would be able to get out at all.
Right about then, a flash of white light, accompanied by a high thin crescendoing sound (not unlike a metal-rasped cymbal edge), burst from cell thirteen — and all shooting stopped. In the lull, Sabin landed in a martial stance neatly centered in the corridor. Before a single bolt came in his direction, he drew a deep breath and let loose an earsplitting kiai as he thrust his palms forward.
A blast of heat redshifted the light in the cell block, the walls appearing to distort in the superheated air blazing down the cell block and returning to geometric regularity as it passed. Judging by the temperature of the backwash that reached Jeremy, the walls ought to have stayed distorted. At the doorway, several Guado bellowed incoherently and backpedaled, frantically slapping at scorched hair and uniforms.
The lighting returned to its depressing blue hue.
Wow, Jeremy thought, peeking over the console at the havoc, looks like our chances of pulling this off are a whole lot better than I guessed.
Zell peered around the doorway of his cell. With the Guado recovering from the effects of Sabin’s Fire Dance, it seemed a good opening to replenish his stock of magic. Selecting a guard, Zell touched two fingers to the bridge of his nose, focused on one of the guardian forces nestled deep within his psyche. Immediately he became aware of Ifrit, the guardian force he had lent to Rand, his fiery elemental nature keeping the Daspadi’s body warm despite the heat his armor plates lost to every deflected stun bolt. Another guardian force stirred within Zell himself, giving the blond man an impression of looking around hungrily. Zell directed Leviathan’s attention to the Guado soldier by indicating him with his two outstretched fingers, conveying his intention to acquire a clutch of spells. Leviathan agreed readily, showing Zell the guard through his senses. He spotted the familiar glow of magic, concentrated, drew it toward himself.
Faint columns of blue light cascaded out around him a moment before a duo of brilliant points of light burst out of the Guado, arced across the space between him and Zell on magenta contrails, and streaked into his chest. “Ha ha, sweet!” he cried, his eyes lighting up. A moment later, grinning, he drew another pair of points of light from the soldier. Stun bolts sent in his direction forced him to duck back into his cell.
Almost half a minute went by with nothing more than a few exchanges between the two ends of the cell block. Then Zell reappeared, two fingers already on the bridge of his nose. His hand swung forward — and one of the soldiers froze in place. Deftly avoiding a bolt, he paralyzed another soldier. The next bolt came much closer, but then another Guado stood immobilized. In the sudden pause, the sound of many hurried footsteps could be heard from down the corridor.
Jeremy shot to his feet and reached forward, grabbing two rifles. Their owners resisted, but Jeremy levered their weapons out of their grasps and flung them at himself. He did this once more to their replacements, and suddenly no one was firing at them anymore.
Zell took advantage of this at once. Racing forward with a shout, he descended upon the disarmed soldiers at the door like a blond whirlwind. One after another, he pummeled them to the ground, his callused knuckles emitting resounding meaty thuds as he struck again and again. It took him only moments to polish off the last four conscious Guado. Looking down the corridor, he shouted into the cell block, “They’re coming!”
“All right everybody out!” Danae yelled, darting out of her cell toward the exit, iPad in one hand, pistol in the other. “Follow me!” She danced through the litter of unconscious Guado, past the three motionless snipers, and sprinted away from the cell block, headed aft.
The stampede of green-clad prisoners out of the cell block intimidated the oncoming Guado troop just enough to make them slow down a little. Then someone shouted and the troop surged forward as one, but by then all nineteen were out, Danae in the lead. Jeremy, having started furthest from the door, tailed Rand, whose massive shoulders almost filled the corridor in front of Jeremy, but not for long. The Daspadi dodged into a side corridor a few dozen meters along. Jeremy slowed, only to get shoved on ahead. Rand used the momentum to slug an oncoming Guado squarely in the face, and ran after the rest.