"Yerby?" he said. "We'd better stop before you open the door to the corridor. The racket'll wake the guards up even if they've all been dead for three days."
Yerby got to the first landing and reached for the door latch. He hadn't heard Mark's warning over the clatter of feet.
"Yer-" Mark shouted.
The door opened inward to the hallway before Yerby touched it. An Alliance soldier, half turned to say something to his companion in the corridor, jerked his head around. He faced Yerby Bannock in the dim light of the stairwell.
Amy peered around her brother's shoulder with the three lenses of her camera spread like the eyes of a monstrous insect. Mark was on the first step behind the Bannocks, trying to aim his gas gun. In back of him the stairs were full of hairy, ragged frontiersmen, armed to the teeth.
"Mother!" the Alliance soldier screamed. He flung his repeller down the corridor in one direction and fled in the other.
His companion raised and pointed her own weapon. Her face was pallid in the light in the ceiling above her.
"The door!" Mark cried. He couldn't level the gas gun because the sling swivel in the butt was tangled in the belt of the man behind him.
The door was made of quarter-inch armor plates that sandwiched an insulating honeycomb. The hypervelocity pellets would disintegrate on the panel's first layer without penetrating. If Yerby could pull the door closed-
Yerby jumped straight toward the gun and clouted the soldier with a sweep of his left arm. He held his flashgun to the side in the other hand, out of the way.
The Alliance soldier bounced like a rubber ball off the far wall of the corridor. Her repeller sparked and skidded along the concrete flooring. Mark grabbed it, trying to glance in both directions to see if there were more soldiers coming.
Mark couldn't tell anything except that there was nobody in the two pools of light in the distance to the right. The other way there was no light at all, though an occasional clatter suggested the fleeing soldier was caroming from one side to the other at a dead run.
The rest of the raiders crowded into the corridor, jostling Mark aside. "Hey, now," Yerby said. "Don't step on the poor child I whacked on, here. She's had enough trouble tonight."
Mark slung his gas gun and peered at the repeller. Yerby cradled the dazed sentry in the crook of his arm like a mother with her infant.
"Yerby," Mark said, "that was a crazy thing to do. She'd have blown your head off if her gun was in better shape!"
He'd thought the repeller might be on safe. It wasn't. The receiver was so corroded that the trigger hadn't made contact when the sentry tried to shoot.
"Well, lad," Yerby said judiciously. "There's a lot of things that can happen in a fight, that's true. But I generally find the best rule is go right at the other fellow and not stop till he's down."
The thirty Woodsrunners in this group were milling in the corridor. The single overhead fixture lighted them grotesquely. Yerby bent toward his captive and said, "Well, little lady. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting to find you awake. How many of you lot are on guard?"
"Nothing to report, Lieutenant Hounslow, sir," the soldier mumbled. Her eyes didn't focus, but at least the pupils were the same size. "Just like every other bloody night in this bloody place."
Yerby propped the soldier in a sitting position against the wall. "Somebody set here with her," he said. "I wouldn't want the poor thing to wander off before she comes around proper like and hurt herself."
He straightened. "Let's finish this, fellows," he said, starting toward the barracks and command post. Mark took long strides to keep up, but Amy had to jog to stay on her brother's other side.
Glowstrips lighted the corridor alongside the enlisted barracks; there weren't any soldiers standing in the hallway as they had been the previous times Mark visited the fort. Although the garrison seemed to spend no more time in the upper world than a cave fish does, they kept a day and night schedule religiously. Mark didn't understand that, but as he saw more of life he was beginning to realize that nobody understood why other people lived the way they did.
Three of the barracks doors were closed; the last was only ajar. Yerby gestured four raiders to each door. At the end, he pointed four more to watch down the corridor in the direction of the Command Center and officers' quarters. With Mark, Amy, and old Pops Hazlitt poised behind him, Yerby pushed the panel fully open. Mark ducked past and turned the bank of light switches to the left of the door on.
There were loud crashes from down the hall. The other raiders were smashing their doors open, though Mark didn't imagine that any of them were locked.
Roused sleepers groaned and shouted in irritation. Something between a dozen and twenty of the bunks were occupied.
"Oh, who's the joker?" a soldier cried as she sat up in bed. "Carstairs, if that's you I'll break your-"
Her eyes focused on the shaggy faces glaring over the muzzles of their guns. She fell completely silent.
"Now you all sit tight," Yerby said with cheerful nonchalance. The flashgun's short, fat barrel enclosed a nest of mirrors which multiplied the laser beam's lens path. He waggled the big weapon toward the captives as if it were his index finger. "The fellows here are going to tie you up for a little bit, but nobody's going to get hurt. Everybody hear me?"
The flashgun nodded from one awakened soldier to another, sweeping the room. The weapon was a single-shot. After firing, it couldn't be recharged until daylight. It still looked horrifying, and Mark knew that the real effect of the gun's momentary pulse was even more shocking than the threat.
Some of the captives nodded agreement; others held themselves as stiff as statues chipped from rock salt. None of them looked as if they were even thinking of resistance.
"You lot tie them up," Yerby said, sweeping his left hand to indicate all the raiders who'd entered by the other three doors. He crooked his arm to rest the barrel of his flashgun on his right shoulder as he walked out of the barracks. Whistling an old tune, "The Irish Washerwoman," Yerby sauntered down the corridor with his usual lack of concern about whether anybody was coming with him.
The door to the latrine was slightly ajar. Amy pulled it closed with a click; Mark assumed she felt a perfectly understandable queasiness at the odor oozing through the previous opening.
Yerby paused in the hallway outside the door marked COMMANDANT. He motioned the others to stand clear and pointed his flashgun at the panel. Mark turned his head aside; so did Amy, though her camera continued to whir as it recorded the scene.
"Come out, you damned old rat, or I'll smoke you out!" Yerby bellowed with all the strength in his lungs. He fired.
The flashgun's spike of coherent light was saffron verging on chartreuse. Its millisecond brilliance was swallowed in a deep red fireball as the plastic door panel disintegrated. The shock wave slammed Mark into the far wall and knocked several Woodsrunners down. Yerby remained as solid as a crag in the surf.
The room beyond the blasted door was being used for storage. Racks of gardening implements, drawers containing bulbs, and bags of lime, fertilizer, and potting soil filled all but a narrow path to the bed.
The bed was empty except for two more bags of potting soil.
Lieutenant Hounslow burst from the adjacent room. "What's going on!" he cried. He was wearing a uniform shirt, a conical cloth nightcap with a tassel, and a pair of polka-dotted boxer shorts. "What's-"
Yerby poked the flashgun, discharged and as harmless as a club of the same size, in Hounslow's face. "Surrender, you son of a Paris whore!" he thundered.