Chapter Eighteen

Major Oswaldo Lujan slithered over mounded heaps of bacterial slunk, and under the trailing edge of a massive slime curtain that hung suspended from a ceiling lost in pendulous greenery. For Lujan, the oppressive environment and the biohazard battlesuit he wore brought back memories of his early years as a soldier. Not unpleasant memories, either. Though he had been trained for infantry combat in the Slime Zone, he'd never gotten a chance to use the skills. The Consumer Rebellion, which was the only war he had ever served in, had been quashed long before it could move onto this slick horror of a battlefield.
The Slime Zone was a living desert; instead of sand, there was bacteria. Most soldiers couldn't handle the bleakness, the smothering dark and the ever-present threat of death. But Lujan appreciated the quiet and the emptiness, the peacethere was nothing like it left above condensation level. Between the galleries of slime that filled former city streets, with the aid of a suitable, high-intensity light source, a person could see for blocks and blocks, and best of all as far as the major was concerned, not see another single person.
After Lujan crawled into position opposite the rear end of the semi-trailer, he stopped and panned the scene through his helmet visor. The battlesuit's infrared sensor showed four lemon-yellow figures beside the hulking box on wheels. All were wearing rain slickers and boots, and antiphage bubbles. If they had body armor, it wasn't artificially intelligent. All of them carried the laser weapons that Mitsuki had provided.
He unslung his own pulse rifle, which was already umbilicaled to his suit. When he powered up the weapon's optics, the sights and range finder appeared in his visor, and the view behind them shifted as he swung the barrel onto the trailer and lined up the cross wires.
The distance to his targets was seventy-five yards. A piece of cake. One of the joys of sniper work with the tribarrel was that gravity wasn't a complicating factor. Because there was no bullet drop to compensate for, he could have just as easily hit the sentries in the eye from ten times as far away. Lujan picked his kill order, working from left to right.
That done, he turned up the gain on his external microphone, snuggled into the bed of slime and lined up the first shot.
Lujan wasn't by nature a trusting soul. As commander of the Mitsuki Tactical Unit, he had objected strenuously when his Global CEOs told him they were going to turn the abduction of the man from Shadow World over to a band of mercenaries led by a former Marine Corps sergeant. There were good reasons why Lujan himself couldn't be directly involved in the kidnapping. If Mitsuki were linked to the operation, it would bring down the united wrath of the other members of FIVE. But Lujan was convinced that using Damm and his crew was a big mistake, that based on their combat records they couldn't be trusted. Unfortunately the CEOs didnt see it that way. They saw the insubordinations, the failures to obey, the suspicious deaths of some of their commanding officers as the ideal background for members of a ruthless kidnap teamand the perfect cover for their own involvement. At Lujans insistance, they had authorized him to monitor things from a distance, unofficially, and to take all necessary action if the situation called for it.
When the mercs bypassed the turnoff for their arranged hiding place, the major knew he had guessed right about them, and that gave him no small sense of satisfaction.
It wasnt clear whether Mitsukis deep-cover operative, Nara Jurascik, was in on the double cross or not. At this point, she might well be a hostage, too. She didnt interest Lujan, one way or the other, because she had NVCno commercial value. The only life worth anything inside that semitrailer belonged to the Shadow man.
Because he wasnt a trusting soul, weeks earlier Lujan had used all his connections to get a look at the ultrasecret Shadow World transport manifest. Among other things, it contained a list of names, just 50,000 in all, which was the nucleus of society that Mitsuki intended relocating to the other Earth. The seeds of humanitys future had been carefully selected by the CEOs. NO way would they cross over without their families and their personal support staff, without scientists and engineers, without serious offensive and defensive capability. Lujan had been deeply relieved, and gratified, to find his own name among the others.
When the mercs made their move on Gloomtown, departing from the agreed-upon game plan, the major was following them at a discreet distance in one of the six metal-tracked armored personnel carriers. Though they were slower than wheeled vehicles, hed picked the tracked APCs because he thought the chase and the skirmish would take place on the wreckage-strewn freewaysthe personnel carriers could climb over just about any barrier they encountered. Hed guessed wrong about the freeways, but it still turned out to be a lucky break on his side. Wheeled APCs didnt provide good traction below condensation level. Tracked vehicles worked much better in the slime beds, and they were much quieter.
As Lujan put his finger on the front trigger of his pulse rifle, the six APCs were concealed in the pitch-darkness around him, ringing the semitrailer with laser cannon. He held the cross wires of his sites in the middle of his targets head. The man stood at the left corner of the trailer. Behind him, roughly at the boxs middle, was a second merc. The other two sat on the bottom of the ramp angling down from the back of the trailer.
Being a sentry in the Slime Zone with no lights and only a Evac-Bubble for protection was grim duty, Lujan thought, then squeezed the trigger.
There was no recoil, so he could watch the instantaneous result. He could hear it, toothe wet pop as the protective bubble depressurized and a six-inch bolt of green lightening passed through the mans skull. As the man fell, behind him so did a huge clump of downhanging greenery, which had been severed by the through-and-through.
Behind that clump, another dropped and another.
The major tightened down on his second target, the man at the middle of the trailer, and fired once. When he heard the pop he was already swinging the sights to the right. As he did so, he pushed the afterimage of a yellow figure collapsing from his mind. Before the third man could rise from his seat on the ramp, Lujan shot him in the forehead. Pop! The fourth man, confronted, and no doubt animated, by the sudden deaths of his three comrades, managed to get to his feet.
The major had intended to make a final head shot, but couldn't risk it because of the likelihood of another through-and-through that would alert his quarry. The man's brain lined up almost level with the floor of the trailer. Lujan dropped his aim five inches and put the petawatt pulse through the bubble's canister and under the point of his chin. His spinal cord neatly severed, the sentry buckled and he slumped to the slime.
Immediately, the major keyed the signal to advance to the rest of his tactical unit. He didn't attempt to stand. One of the things he'd learned in basic training was that it was dangerous to attempt any serious fighting on foot in the Slime Zone. Sometimes the green slunk drifted six feet deep. It filled elevator shafts and stairwells. A wrong step and a person could sink down and never be seen again. To move about safely over unmapped terrain, you had to bring along your own secure walkways.
Behind him, his crew was busy unrolling yard-wide lanes of ribbed plastic sheeting, first connecting the ring of APCs, then advancing toward the tractor trailer.
As Lujan waited for the walkway to unroll past him, he scanned the trailer with infrared. The box on wheels leaked light and heat like a lime-green beacon. Based on the slime growth on its roof and sides, he judged it hadn't been parked there for more than half an hour.
The scheme to hole up in the Slime Zone was ingenious; Lujan expected no less from a cunning bastard like Damm. Lucky thing for Mitsuki, the ex-Marine didn't really have the resources to pull off a triple cross. The tactical unit's audio sensors had isolated ten beating hearts inside the trailer. The major doubted very much that they had biohazard battle-suits for everybody inside. That kind of gear was even more strictly controlled than shoulder-fired laser weapons, as it offered a degree of invulnerability to the wearer. And the battlesuits couldn't be worn off-the-rack. Each suit had to be carefully tuned to the user's nervous system and reaction timethe black material was, among other things, a solid-state, microcrystalline computer. If the mercs inside the semi had protection from the hostile environment, it would have to be primitive at bestsimple pressurized polymer suits to keep out the spores. Lujan was sure they had no real defense against lasers.
So killing them all wasn't going to present much of a problem.
The hard part was going to be getting the visitor out alive, if possible, which was what Lujan had been ordered to do. If it looked like the one-eyed man was going to escape and fall into the hands of FIVE or one of the other Globals, as a last resort, he was to be terminated with prejudice, and the kidnapping laid at the feet of the dead Damm and his crew, as had been originally planned.
The ideal scenario was a live recovery of the information source, with no one the wiser. With what the one-eyed man held in his mind, Mitsuki could maneuver to acquire the choicest pieces of Shadow World real estate, the richest deposits of natural resources, prime arable land, and even more important, it could gain control of strategic routes that would strangle the efforts of the other Globals.
All of the economic superpowers had paid dearly for the opportunity to move their operations off-world. It had taken most of the Globals' remaining material resources to construct and energize the transfer pathway. In order to finance this last desperate gamble, FIVE had been forced to tell Earth's one hundred billion at least part of the truth about the Totality Concept and its hope for human survival. This pacification was necessary because when the power was diverted from food processing, from water and air purification, millions of people had died millions who weren't missed by the CEOs and who were replaced in a matter of hours by screaming, hungry newborns. Millions upon millions more had died when, at the peak of the drain, the power grids browned out, and the populace had gone mad. Recent history had taught them to be afraid of the dark. When the lights went out, bad things happened. Whole neighborhoods got walled in, the trapped multitudes were left to starve or to commit suicide by inhaling carniphages.
Lujan suspected that once the transfer of population began, all the gloves would come off. The treaties that held the FIVE together would be broken. A war would ensue on both sides of the reality passageway for control of the human future. No matter who won, one outcome was certain society on Earth, which had been on the verge of consuming itself for decades, would take the final, irreversible plunge to extinction.
In his visor, the major saw yellow figures slowly unrolling plastic sheeting along both sides the trailer. When that job was complete, the members of his tactical unit used telescoping rods to reach high on the sides of the box and place limpet mines under the slime, on its metal skin. The precisely set charges would blow off the trailer's roof and peel back its walls to the floor.
As the demolition crew hurried back to the cover of their APCs, Lujan unclipped the remote detonator from his breastplate.
Damm would get no warning. Only shock, shock and more shock. Lujan was about to take his opponents from a place of relative safety and light into the deadliest of darks. A few moments of panic would give him the chance to pull the visitor to safety.
He enabled the detonator and put his thumb on the boom button.