14.

The exhausted quartet halted behind a flipped-over, bullet-riddled police cruiser. Several SU infantrymen lay dead within it. Squat, gray cylinders hummed all around them—Sydney’s power generators. The lift they’d tried to take to Level Forty had pinged an emergency warning and they’d been forced to exit at Level Thirty-eight. They were looking for a stairwell down. Up the street they heard the crump of mortars, the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns, explosions and screaming.

“I don’t wanna be no hero,” whined Turbo.

“What’cha you gonna do then?” asked Stick.

“Pop topside and run.”

“How many times I gotta tell you that you’d never get to the surface. The Highborn would blast you.”

“Right,” Turbo said. “I’ve been thinking about that. We could tell them about the deep-core as our ticket out.”

Stick jeered. “Sure! They’re gonna believe a junkie.”

“Why not? I ain’t no liar.”

“Yes you are,” Stick said. “And look where we’re at: in the middle of a battle. Soldiers shoot first and ask later.”

Turbo blew snot out his long icicle of a nose as he grumbled. His drugs had worn off a half-hour ago and Marten had refused to hand him the medkit for more.

Their eyes were hollow, and like Marten sweat shone on their faces and their chests heaved. Marten’s legs quivered as he leaned against a twisted piece of car framing.

“Look,” Omi said, pointing into the crumpled police cruiser. “There are guns in there.”

“Where?” asked Stick.

“In there with the soldiers.”

Stick looked into the wrecked vehicle, but made no move for the guns.

With a grunt, Marten rolled onto his belly and crawled into the pile of dead men. They stank of blood and guts and he avoided looking into their staring eyes. With their dead fingers, some of them held on to their weapons tightly, forcing him to pry and jerk to free them. He rummaged through torn armor, body parts and slags of metal. Soon he handed back short assault carbines and extra ammo clips. He even found a few grenades for Turbo’s Electro-launcher. He crawled out and wiped gore from his hands and checks. A small part warned him that it wasn’t good he was becoming used to such carnage.

“Hey, you’re not saying we join them up there?” Turbo said as he slapped the grenade clip into his launcher.

Marten peered over the wreckage. Omi rose and peered with him. He saw explosive flashes among the smoking rubble and half walls of former generators. Most of the sunlamps over there were broken shards in the ceiling, so it was eerily dark amid the red glares. Marten jerked his head, and in a crouch, he sprinted for a gray building closer to the firefight, one that still seemed intact. Omi sprinted after him. They threw their backs to the wall and slid toward a corner, peering around it.

Tracer rounds, plasma and lasers crisscrossed the darkened street in either direction. Orange plasma gobs gouged sections of wall, causing them to slide molten to the ground. Bullets chipped concrete. The bright lasers hurt their eyes.

Marten and Omi ducked back around the corner.

“That route’s blocked,” said the tough Korean.

“Perceptive. But did you notice the dead?”

Omi shook his head.

Marten found that he was shaking. Watching war videos was one thing, being near the real thing was infinitely more straining.

“Several of the dead were PHC,” Marten said.

“Red suits?”

Marten gave him a wan smile. Then he sprinted back for the overturned police cruiser. He soon lay panting behind it. Turbo and Stick chewed on protein bars, a pile of them at their feet. Marten noticed that some of the wrappers were bloody.

“You didn’t get them from in there?” Marten asked in outrage, jerking his thumb at the dead infantrymen.

Turbo shrugged.

Marten blanched. “That’s… that’s ghoulish.”

“You grabbed the guns,” Turbo said, his mouth full of chewed bar.

“I’m not eating my gun!”

“Relax,” said Stick. “It’s not like we’re cannibals.”

Marten dropped it. He inspected his assault carbine, figuring out how it worked.

Omi shook his shoulder. “The red-suits must have gotten caught before they made it to the emergency elevator. My guess is they’ve having a tough time ordering people out of their way.”

“You think the red-suits are in charge of Sydney?” asked Stick.

Omi jerked his thumb at the firefight. “The Highborn are deep in the city. Bet they know, or guess at least, what the PHC are capable of.”

“So what?” said Stick. “What I wanna know is how to get around this battle and to deep-core.”

Marten cudgeled his mind, thinking back to his planning meetings in Construction of Level Sixty. There were three different types of levels, each conforming to a preplanned pattern. The ones with power generators like here on Level Thirty-eight were business levels, so…. He snapped his fingers. “There should be a maintenance shaft….” He glanced at the ceiling to get his bearings. “South,” he said, pointing away from the firefight.

“Down to Level Forty?” asked Omi.

Marten nodded.

Omi took off running the direction Marten had pointed. Stick and Turbo followed, getting away from the firefight as fast as possible.

Marten glanced at the leftover pile of bloody protein bars. He wrinkled his nose, shrugged and grabbed a fistful, shoving them into his pockets. Then he took off after the others.