Ryan had never seen the old man so angered. He seemed to grow in stature, his eyes blazing with a menacing fire, his fists clenched at his side.

"I'll ice him, Doc," Finnegan said, glancing at Ryan for confirmation.

"Do it," Ryan said.

It was so simple for an experienced killer like Finnegan to take out the frail scientist. In the brief struggle, the false hand became detached and began to make its own laborious way across the floor, trailing wires and a green circuit board behind it. As it neared the door, Lori followed it and set her foot on top of it. There was the tiny crackling sound of shorting circuits, and the hand was still.

J.B. broke the sudden silence. "These guns are totally U.S. All of 'em."

Lori turned to the Armorer. "What is that meaning?"

"Unserviceable," J.B. replied, dropping the blaster on the bed. "For once Finnegan's right. Odds must be hundred to one on them working. They're fine at low power but fucking useless if you push the dial around."

"What now?" Jak Lauren asked.

"We go get our own weapons," Ryan replied. "And our clothes."

"And if we meet trouble?" Krysty asked, shifting her stance to avoid the spreading pool of blood that oozed stickily from the open mouth of one of the dead sec men.

"We've taken four. We can take the rest."

The corridors were empty when they made their move.

Now that they were irreversibly committed to a course of bloody action, there was no point in concealment. No point in anything except speed.

"Place they stored our stuff's around the next corner," J.B. called, holding his handmade map of the complex.

In his other hand he held one of the blasters; he, Ryan, Finn, Jak and Krysty had each taken one. Despite Finnegan's lack of confidence in the weapons, and the evidence of their own eyes, they were better than nothing. At the suggestion of the Armorer they set the illuminated pointer on ten rather than maximum power.

"Take a look, kid," J.B. said, motioning for Jak to sneak ahead of them.

The boy flattened himself against the wall of the corridor, brushing his mane of snowy hair away from his eyes. He cautiously edged his face around the corner, then pulled back sharply.

"Nobody," he said, grinning.

The storage room door was sturdier than many others around the complex, but it yielded to a succession of crushing kicks from Finnegan's right foot. The hinges squealed and finally split, and the door burst open, revealing shelves and lockers.

"Let's get ready, people," J.B. said, leading them inside.

Jak waited in the corridor, keeping watch for sec patrols while the others quickly found their own clothes, tore off their coveralls and changed. They also found their own weapons — a far more important discovery.

"Let's fucking go take 'em," Finnegan said, waving his HK54A2 submachine gun. The big butcher's cleaver in its leather sheath dangled menacingly at his left hip, balanced by the 9 mm Beretta pistol on his right hip.

Jak carefully checked his satin-finish .357 Magnum, peering along the six-inch barrel at one of the overhead lights. Slowly he reloaded it, not taking any chances that someone had tampered with the heavy pistol.

Doc Tanner swung his sword stick, the thin steel blade hissing and whistling as he cut and parried like a fencing scarecrow, shuffling and dancing, muttering to himself from some archaic guide to fighting.

"Punto and reverse, stoccata and imbroccata. Passada. Parry and lunge. By the three Kennedys, but we'll purge this place, my friends."

Ryan held up a hand for silence. "We've been lucky so far. Let's realize that. Seems these people are too damned busy with their experiments and research to watch what's going on. But there's still a chance that someone might look at the security vid screens. So we still move quick and quiet. And from now on we take out anything and anyone we see."

"Main thing's to get in and find what we can use to blow this mother a mile into the sky," the Armorer said. "We'll have to string out a little."

"Yeah," Ryan agreed. "I'll go point. Krysty second. Then Jak, Doc 'n Lori, with you and Finn holding the rear. From now on there's no stopping. The security in this section is old and all fucked up. Once we reach the research sections, I guess it'll be harder."

J.B. gave directions from his map as they moved toward the core of the complex. Each person had a favored blaster in hand, ready for instant fire. It was one of those situations, as Doc had pointed out a couple of minutes earlier, when those that weren't for 'em were ag'in 'em.

There was no danger of accidentally shooting down a friend.

There were no friends.

Just then two helmeted mutie guards stepped simultaneously from a side corridor only thirty short paces in front of Ryan. Standing close together, they began to turn slowly and awkwardly.

The caseless G-12 was already at Ryan's hip. He took lightning aim, leveling and squeezing, bracing himself even though the H&K automatic rifle was virtually without recoil. It was set on triple burst, the three bullets so close together they sounded like a single round.

Ryan squeezed the trigger twice, shifting his aim slightly from one sec man to the other. The two corpses slid and kicked on the blood-slick tiles of the corridor.

"Nice," Jak said, just behind Ryan.

The sec man on the right had been hit by all three rounds in the center of his chest, five inches below the thorax, the bullets within a finger's width of one another. The force of the impact had lifted the mutie clean off his feet, hurling him backward. Another three rounds, again tightly grouped, had hit the second guard a touch higher, knocking him sideways, his helmet rattling and spinning, still rolling after both sentries were dead.

As the seven began to move on, the loudspeaker above them crackled to life. "Sec report terminal malfunction? Query intruders? Report? Report?"

Somewhere behind them, apparently at some distance, a siren began to wail. The lights above them flickered. Ahead, a door was slammed shut.

"Chill's on," Finnegan muttered.

"Let's go," Ryan said.

Moving quickly but with stealth, they approached the nearest entrance to the research section, which was just around the next turn. Oddly the screeching siren had stopped.

Suddenly around the corner came the two pretty young women they'd seen on the day of their arrival at Wizard Island — Louella Hall and Angie Pflaug. A sec man walked behind them, carrying cleaning tools, ready for the two blue-eyed blond girls to have an antisocial accident.

"Central be with you," Dr. Pflaug said, already starting to giggle at the sight of Jak's bleached hair.

"White head was for anthrax-derivative testing at Cin amber," Dr. Hall said, her fingers working nervously at the collar of her cherry-red lab coat. "Why with you? And uniformwise unorthodoxy?"

Ryan had the ruthless instincts of the true killer, but even he hesitated at chilling these poor, mentally deprived girls. They were merely victims of a crazed policy of research and inbreeding.

"Terminate them all," Dr. Pflaug said, hardly able to speak to the sec guard due to her rising laughter.

"They're mine," Jak said.

And they were.

Ryan admired the careful way the fourteen-year-old braced his right hand with his left, steadying the heavy pistol against the inevitable kick. The boom of the shots was deafening in the narrow corridor.

The first bullet pierced the front of the guard's helmet, carrying splinters of black plastic with it into pulpy brain tissue. Blood spurted all over the cream colored walls. For a moment, as the powder smoke drifted around them, the two young scientists continued to snigger, holding onto each other, their laughter as bright and tinkling as drops of crystal.