Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [107]
Already the gunners were rushing up to the door. Marannis and Sanchez covered them, leaving Ruiz and Teal to make sure there were no guards lurking in the corners. Within thirty seconds all six SEALS converged on the large door. The other three men leveled their weapons while Ruiz pushed the button that sent the barrier sliding quickly upward.
The opening portal revealed a large, well-illuminated corridor extending inward so far that it appeared to shrink to a tiny dot before they could make out the other end. The floor was smooth and well polished, and each wall had a series of stairs and catwalks leading up to four levels of barred enclosures. Ruiz knew at once that those enclosures were cages holding the vast numbers of Assarn captives Parvik had talked about—and, he hoped, Dobson, Sanders, Parker, and Doctor Sulati. According to the schematic printout, they were secured in a special cell several hundred meters in from the outer door.
Surprisingly, their arrival seemed to have attracted no attention. There were no interior guards in the vicinity of the door. Ruiz could see a pair of glass-lined cubicles up on the fourth level—one to either side of the wide, long corridor—that were apparently security posts. However, the guards he could see there, wearing the traditional Eluoi white, all seemed to be paying attention to unseen instruments or watching the prisoners who were lined up against the bars of their cages in numbers that could only be described as teeming.
“Let’s take those security posts,” the master chief ordered quickly. “With luck, we can open the cages from there—five thousand escaped prisoners oughta create a bit of a distraction.” He quickly gestured to Teal and G-Man, sending them to the right. Rodale followed him up the frame steel ladder toward the left-side guard post. Marannis and Sanchez stayed on the ground just inside the open doors, covering the advance and watching for any unpleasant surprises that might develop outside the building.
A high-pitched scream echoed through the huge space before Ruiz was halfway up the ladder. He looked across the central space and saw Teal holding his assault rifle in a firing position, aiming upward. An Eluoi guard dropped his gun, balanced on the waist-high railing for a moment, then toppled over to fall the four stories down to the hard, shiny floor. The body seemed to take a long time to fall, and the prisoners, guards, and SEALS all watched in utter silence until, with a sickening thwack, the corpse impacted.
Then all hell broke loose. A horn of some kind, piercing and high-pitched, began to shriek. The prisoners erupted into cheers and wild howls that sounded almost animalistic. The Eluoi guards shouted to one another in their sibilant tongue.
Breaking into a sprint, the master chief scrambled up the steep steel steps, pulling himself with his left hand while keeping his weapon trained upward in his right. Guards emerged from the glass-enclosed room above him, guns trained on Teal and LaRue across the hall. Harry Teal snapped off several quick three-round bursts with enough accuracy to drive the Eluoi back toward their hardened compartment, the shells ricocheting off the glass.
After checking that the backblast area was clear—he was standing in front of one of the few empty cells—G-Man let loose a slug from his rail gun. The superheated copper and uranium slug punctured the armored glass and spattered around the interior of the cubicle, slicing and dicing the bodies of the guards who had sought shelter there.
Ruiz opened up with his own short bursts, coming up the last flight of steps and dropping three guards who were outside of the cubicle but fatally focused on the two SEALS across the