Chapter 16

Annja slashed the man with the machine pistol across the back. He uttered a gargling scream and fell.

Light poured out from the open door. Tex wheeled. Annja was moving already, whipping around the door frame into the compartment where the gunman had emerged.

Another man in a stained undershirt and dark running pants sat blinking sleepily, his bare feet dangling off the edge of his bunk. His eyes grew wide when he saw Annja. He grabbed for a Beretta lying on a table nearby.

She lunged. The point of her sword passed through his thick unshaved neck. He screamed briefly as his blood splashed against the bulkhead. In the light of a lamp clamped to the bunk it was a blaze of scarlet against shades of gray.

Annja yanked the weapon free. The man slumped.

Tex was just rising from squatting beside the body of the first man as she emerged into the passageway. He held the dead guard's weapon. He offered it to Annja. "Walther MPL," he said. "Nine millimeter. Controls are pretty standard. Can you use it?"

She took it with her left hand. She intended to keep the sword in her right. Turning the Walther on its side, she found the charging lever and the safety.

"I think so," she said. "Thanks. Gives me a little better punch than the pistol."

"Thank you," Tex said with a quick grin. "Reckon I owe you one." He took his shotgun in both hands and led off again down the corridor.

The levels above were better lit. They moved through them rapidly but warily, but saw no one. If there were really over twenty people aboard the platform they weren't walking the hallways. Then again, the rig was big – bigger even than Annja had anticipated. Clearly deep-sea drilling was a complex, demanding operation, requiring much by way of both room and personnel.

As they reached the second-highest level a door opened and Jadzia popped out right in front of them.

Her eyes went wide. Then she hit Annja in a flying arms-and-legs hug that almost bowled the older woman backward off her feet.

"Annja! You came!"

"Of course," Annja said, blinking. She held her sword gracelessly away from her side. It was just luck the young prodigy hadn't impaled herself on it.

"What took so long? I saw you land – "

The door to the compartment she'd left opened, and a skinny, unshaven guy with a rat's nest of dark hair emerged. "Girl, why you go so quick?" he was asking in a dense accent, sounding more perplexed than suspicious.

That changed when he saw Jadzia clinging to a tall, striking woman holding a broadsword.

He opened his mouth to shout. Tex, moving with speed even Annja found remarkable, skipped in and butt-stroked him across the side of the head with his shotgun. He may have intended to be merciful, or merely to avoid rousing the dead with a shotgun blast echoing through the vast steel structure.

The man reeled back into the open doorway, clutching his head. Blood streamed from a split in his forehead and ran in rivulets down the back of his hand.

Then he began to jerk and writhe as automatic gunfire snarled from behind him. Bullets punched through the far door and bounced off the far wall to tumble whining down the corridor.

Annja took Jadzia to the floor beneath her to protect her from the ricochets. The girl cried out in alarm as the young man slumped into the corridor. From the way he went down it was clear he wouldn't get up again.

The head-hammering racket went on and on. Then suddenly it cut off.

Tex had gone down, too. He lunged to a crouch and spun around the side of the open door, shouldering the shotgun.

Inside the security room an older man was trying to cram a fresh magazine into a little black Skorpion machine pistol.

Tex fired twice. One charge, the shot still a tight column, smashed and all but severed the man's right forearm. The other punched through his sternum. He fell back, flailing wildly. The Skorpion cracked the screen of a monitor, which imploded with a pop.

As the ringing faded from Annja's ears she heard a siren begin to wail somewhere. It seemed to vibrate in the steel bones of the structure around her, setting up sympathetic resonances in her own skeleton.

"Time to go," Tex said, straightening. He leaned over, offering a hand to the women.

Annja sprang up. Jadzia likewise spurned the outstretched hand in favor of another surprising leap that wrapped him up in her long, surprisingly strong arms and legs.

"Tex Winston!" she cried. "I love your show! You really are an action hero!"

She planted a huge fervent smooch on his lips. He squirmed his face to the side. "I'm gonna be one dead action dude if we all don't get a move on!" he managed to get out as the girl smothered him with kisses.

Annja stood by scowling thunderously. Twenty feet along a door opened and a shaved head with a dark-bearded face poked out. Annja raised the Walther and sprayed bullets down the corridor. The head snapped back and the door banged shut.

Clutching Jadzia with one hand and the Benelli with the other, Tex started to stagger clumsily down the corridor. Annja slipped past him to take the lead.

As she reached the stairwell they had left, she heard Tex apologetically disentangling himself from Jadzia, who kept bubbling about what a huge fan she was and how he was so much more handsome in person.

The girl really needs to be slapped, Annja thought.

Annja slung the Walther to open the door, then unlimbered it and used the barrel jutting from beneath the gas cylinder to hold the door open. The first thing she heard was shouts, followed by footsteps. They were coming up.

"This way may be blocked," she shouted back. Tex was trying to fend off a renewed assault from Jadzia as delicately yet as decisively as possible. Annja realized the emotional reaction to being rescued had pretty well un-bolted all the young woman's inhibitors. Of which she had not many to begin with.

"Where does the other door lead? Jadzia! Snap out of it," Annja ordered.

She put an edge in her voice that brought Jadzia's head around as if she actually had been slapped. "Stairs up to top level, and down to engine and generator room." She was flushed and breathless, and also dropping articles, which Annja had never heard her do. Usually she spoke English better than Annja.

"Engines?" she asked. "I thought the platform was supposed to stay put."

"For the drills," Tex said. "Hey – "

Annja was already sprinting past him and Jadzia. From the way she'd seen him handle himself, the rumors he had seen combat were likely true, but she was stronger, quicker and generally more lethal than he was. He knew it, too. But his gallant-cowboy self-image would make him uncomfortable letting her go into danger first. So she didn't hang around to discuss it.

She yanked the door open with her left hand, shook the Walther sling down her arm, grabbed the pistol grip and plunged into the stairwell.

A voice exploded in her left ear. She wheeled. A beefy crew-cut blond guy in a black ribbed pullover was almost on top of her, holding some kind of assault rifle. She slashed him across the face.

He fell back into the black-clad legs of the man following him down from the top deck. That man sat down hard against the stairs, cursing in hoarse French. Curses turned abruptly to screams. The hapless first man's blood and brain matter had just poured into his partner's lap.

She swatted the French man hard on the side of the head with her sword, stunning him to silent slackness.

That minor mercy did not extend to his fellows pounding down the stairs after him. She directed a quick burst up the stairs, into the shins of the next man. He fell backward, howling louder than the Frenchman. Annja blasted more bullets up the stairs into the dark. The reports were so loud in the metal stairwell that she felt the pressure on her eyeballs. Shouting men retreated rapidly upward.

"I got it!" Tex shouted, barging into the landing behind her. "Go!" Covering the stairs with the Benelli in his right hand, he hunkered down and relieved the dead sentry of his rifle.

From below, Annja heard more voices hollering at each other in apparent confusion. Then more footsteps pounding up fast.