Annja slashed the man with the machine pistol across the back. He uttered a gargling scream and fell.

Light poured out from the open door. Tex wheeled. Annja was moving already, whipping around the door frame into the compartment where the gunman had emerged.

Another man in a stained undershirt and dark running pants sat blinking sleepily, his bare feet dangling off the edge of his bunk. His eyes grew wide when he saw Annja. He grabbed for a Beretta lying on a table nearby.

She lunged. The point of her sword pa.s.sed through his thick unshaved neck. He screamed briefly as his blood splashed against the bulkhead. In the light of a lamp clamped to the bunk it was a blaze of scarlet against shades of gray.

Annja yanked the weapon free. The man slumped.

Tex was just rising from squatting beside the body of the first man as she emerged into the pa.s.sageway. He held the dead guard's weapon. He offered it to Annja. "Walther MPL," he said. "Nine millimeter. Controls are pretty standard. Can you use it?"

She took it with her left hand. She intended to keep the sword in her right. Turning the Walther on its side, she found the charging lever and the safety.

"I think so," she said. "Thanks. Gives me a little better punch than the pistol."

"Thank you you," Tex said with a quick grin. "Reckon I owe you one." He took his shotgun in both hands and led off again down the corridor.

The levels above were better lit. They moved through them rapidly but warily, but saw no one. If there were really over twenty people aboard the platform they weren't walking the hallways. Then again, the rig was big bigger even than Annja had antic.i.p.ated. Clearly deep-sea drilling was a complex, demanding operation, requiring much by way of both room and personnel.

As they reached the second-highest level a door opened and Jadzia popped out right in front of them.

Her eyes went wide. Then she hit Annja in a flying arms-and-legs hug that almost bowled the older woman backward off her feet.

"Annja! You came!"

"Of course," Annja said, blinking. She held her sword gracelessly away from her side. It was just luck the young prodigy hadn't impaled herself on it.

"What took so long? I saw you land "

The door to the compartment she'd left opened, and a skinny, unshaven guy with a rat's nest of dark hair emerged. "Girl, why you go so quick?" he was asking in a dense accent, sounding more perplexed than suspicious.

That changed when he saw Jadzia clinging to a tall, striking woman holding a broadsword.

He opened his mouth to shout. Tex, moving with speed even Annja found remarkable, skipped in and b.u.t.t-stroked him across the side of the head with his shotgun. He may have intended to be merciful, or merely to avoid rousing the dead with a shotgun blast echoing through the vast steel structure.

The man reeled back into the open doorway, clutching his head. Blood streamed from a split in his forehead and ran in rivulets down the back of his hand.

Then he began to jerk and writhe as automatic gunfire snarled from behind him. Bullets punched through the far door and bounced off the far wall to tumble whining down the corridor.

Annja took Jadzia to the floor beneath her to protect her from the ricochets. The girl cried out in alarm as the young man slumped into the corridor. From the way he went down it was clear he wouldn't get up again.

The head-hammering racket went on and on. Then suddenly it cut off.

Tex had gone down, too. He lunged to a crouch and spun around the side of the open door, shouldering the shotgun.

Inside the security room an older man was trying to cram a fresh magazine into a little black Skorpion machine pistol.

Tex fired twice. One charge, the shot still a tight column, smashed and all but severed the man's right forearm. The other punched through his sternum. He fell back, flailing wildly. The Skorpion cracked the screen of a monitor, which imploded with a pop.

As the ringing faded from Annja's ears she heard a siren begin to wail somewhere. It seemed to vibrate in the steel bones of the structure around her, setting up sympathetic resonances in her own skeleton.

"Time to go," Tex said, straightening. He leaned over, offering a hand to the women.

Annja sprang up. Jadzia likewise spurned the outstretched hand in favor of another surprising leap that wrapped him up in her long, surprisingly strong arms and legs.

"Tex Winston!" she cried. "I love your show! You really are an action hero!"

She planted a huge fervent smooch on his lips. He squirmed his face to the side. "I'm gonna be one dead action dude if we all don't get a move on!" he managed to get out as the girl smothered him with kisses.

Annja stood by scowling thunderously. Twenty feet along a door opened and a shaved head with a dark-bearded face poked out. Annja raised the Walther and sprayed bullets down the corridor. The head snapped back and the door banged shut.

Clutching Jadzia with one hand and the Benelli with the other, Tex started to stagger clumsily down the corridor. Annja slipped past him to take the lead.

As she reached the stairwell they had left, she heard Tex apologetically disentangling himself from Jadzia, who kept bubbling about what a huge fan she was and how he was so much more handsome in person.

The girl really needs to be slapped, Annja thought.

Annja slung the Walther to open the door, then unlimbered it and used the barrel jutting from beneath the gas cylinder to hold the door open. The first thing she heard was shouts, followed by footsteps. They were coming up.

"This way may be blocked," she shouted back. Tex was trying to fend off a renewed a.s.sault from Jadzia as delicately yet as decisively as possible. Annja realized the emotional reaction to being rescued had pretty well un-bolted all the young woman's inhibitors. Of which she had not many to begin with.

"Where does the other door lead? Jadzia! Snap out of it," Annja ordered.

She put an edge in her voice that brought Jadzia's head around as if she actually had been slapped. "Stairs up to top level, and down to engine and generator room." She was flushed and breathless, and also dropping articles, which Annja had never heard her do. Usually she spoke English better than Annja.

"Engines?" she asked. "I thought the platform was supposed to stay put."

"For the drills," Tex said. "Hey "

Annja was already sprinting past him and Jadzia. From the way she'd seen him handle himself, the rumors he had seen combat were likely true, but she was stronger, quicker and generally more lethal than he was. He knew it, too. But his gallant-cowboy self-image would make him uncomfortable letting her go into danger first. So she didn't hang around to discuss it.

She yanked the door open with her left hand, shook the Walther sling down her arm, grabbed the pistol grip and plunged into the stairwell.

A voice exploded in her left ear. She wheeled. A beefy crew-cut blond guy in a black ribbed pullover was almost on top of her, holding some kind of a.s.sault rifle. She slashed him across the face.

He fell back into the black-clad legs of the man following him down from the top deck. That man sat down hard against the stairs, cursing in hoa.r.s.e French. Curses turned abruptly to screams. The hapless first man's blood and brain matter had just poured into his partner's lap.

She swatted the French man hard on the side of the head with her sword, stunning him to silent slackness.

That minor mercy did not extend to his fellows pounding down the stairs after him. She directed a quick burst up the stairs, into the shins of the next man. He fell backward, howling louder than the Frenchman. Annja blasted more bullets up the stairs into the dark. The reports were so loud in the metal stairwell that she felt the pressure on her eyeb.a.l.l.s. Shouting men retreated rapidly upward.

"I got it!" Tex shouted, barging into the landing behind her. "Go!" Covering the stairs with the Benelli in his right hand, he hunkered down and relieved the dead sentry of his rifle.

From below, Annja heard more voices hollering at each other in apparent confusion. Then more footsteps pounding up fast.

Chapter 17.

Annja raced down at full speed to confront a group of heavily armed men charging up the steps. She slashed crosswise as a man turned toward her. He fell back with blood spraying from his belly.

She cut down two more men. The others turned and ran before her, down onto the engine-room floor, off among the enormous shadowed bulks of engines like dormant t.i.tans.

From the room's far side a big yellow muzzle flare winked at her. Bullets cracked and keened around her, sparking off the railing. She dashed for the cover of what looked like some kind of chest-high control panel. She shrugged the Walther's sling off again, caught the pistol grip and fired a burst toward where she thought the shots had come from.

She ducked down behind the panel. The thin-gauge metal would provide little protection against rifle or even jacketed pistol bullets, although if there was some kind of solid mechanism inside it would give some cover. It did conceal her from view, however, and that was something.

Shots crashed and echoed, the bangs seeming to grow in volume as they dropped in tone, filling the huge, mostly empty s.p.a.ce. Muzzle-flashes lit the machinery around her in otherworldly yellow flickers. No bullets came near her.

A shotgun boomed from above. She wasn't sure what real chance Tex had of hitting anyone at that range. She heard the spatter of rubber soles on pierced steel decking, and turned to see Jadzia running up on her from behind. Long arms and legs were flailing everywhere. It was gangly and wasted lots of energy, but the girl did get some velocity, Annja thought.

"Come on," she said. She put the sword away in its special place to s.n.a.t.c.h Jadzia's thin wrist and tow her at a full sprint toward a giant semicircular housing that rose from the floor twenty feet away. It looked like a colossal casting of some kind. It also looked as if it would shrug off a big hit.

Bullets cracked at the heels of Jadzia's tennis shoes. If her run had been uncoordinated before, it was now totally out of control. It was all she could do to keep her feet more or less beneath her, as fast as Annja was pulling her along.

Annja turned to let her back slam against the hard housing. Jadzia cannoned into her, squashing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s uncomfortably and knocking her breath out of her.

Tex came running and firing the shotgun. He slammed up against the steel housing next to Annja and began feeding fat plastic sh.e.l.ls into the Benelli from a pocket of his vest.

"You can move, move," he told Annja approvingly. She noticed he had the recovered rifle slung barrel-down behind his own left shoulder.

"You have spare magazines for that?"

He nodded. "Oh, yeah. Twenty rounds each, 7.62 mm NATO ball. Full-length rounds. None of this underpowered a.s.sault-rifle stuff. Hoo-ah!"

"Good." She stepped past him, leaned out to fire off the last of the rounds in the magazine of her own scavenged machine pistol. To her dismay there were only two.

She tossed the weapon aside. "Keep their heads down," she said.

Before he could respond she gathered herself and climbed straight to the top of the housing, a dozen feet above the deck.

A shot cracked out from right beneath her, sharper than the 12-gauge's boom and a lot more authoritative than a 9 mm weapon. Tex was doing what she asked.

She jumped. Nearby a house-sized motor hunched, long dormant and now probably rusted beyond repair. She caught its upper edge with her hands and pulled herself onto the top. It's not too hard if you don't let yourself think about it, she thought.

She clambered through the musty dark, picking her way carefully across chill, slick metal and between tangles of conduit and cable. Icy water dripped down her neck. Outside the storm howled. The platform rocked continuously to its blows. Below her a firefight raged. By the sounds, Tex was augmenting aimed shots from his borrowed battle rifle with handgun rounds and even the odd shotgun blast, to conserve his limited stock of 7.62 mm ammo and perhaps to give the guards the impression they faced more intruders than they did.

Annja scrambled up a twisted conduit thick as her thigh, grabbed a dangling cut cable and swung up to a catwalk. She felt a strange sense of disconnection, of unreality. Am I really here, doing this? How did that happen, exactly?

The catwalk led her to the vast compartment's far wall. Ahead and to her left muzzle-flashes strobed from an oblong of brightness. It took her a moment to recognize the gray light of the storm and sunset outside, a.s.sisted by some backscatter from a spotlight.

She selected a cable bundle running along overhead, summoned her sword and hacked through it. She winced, half expecting a blast of electricity to flash-cook her arm and knock her from her perch in a final fatal spasm. She knew the platform occupants must have fired some of its powerful generators. But she'd heard and felt no motor hum in this room, immense as it was. She'd gambled the cables weren't hot.

It paid off. Unshocked, Annja moved quickly along the catwalk, cutting through the straps holding up the wire bundle she had severed. When she had freed enough, she ran back to the cable's full extent, caught a good grip with her left hand and leaped over the catwalk rail to swing down.

If I live through this, she thought as she whizzed down, I'll never make fun of bungee jumpers again The improvised Tarzan vine came out about ten feet shy of the deck. That proved about ideal. Annja swept down at an angle, out of the shooters' lines of fire. Her boot soles skimmed above the rain-washed metal. As she started to swing up again she let go.

A man stood just inside the door firing a short- barreled CAR-4 loudly from the shoulder. Her feet caught him in the left side and slammed him to the steel. He nicely cushioned her fall.

The man beside him spun, trying to bring an MP-5 to bear on her. Annja slashed down. The stroke severed his left arm a handspan below his shoulder. He dropped the machine pistol to concentrate on screaming and clutching at his stump in a futile attempt to stem the spray of blood from his severed brachial artery.

Quickly Annja moved out the door into the storm's full force. A tall, gaunt man with a pointed-looking shaved head and a dark beard pointed the barrel of a full-length M-16 at her. With no defense, she launched into a forward roll, right toward him. The rifle snarled a 3-round burst. She felt the heat, felt muzzle blast slapping her face and forehead, but oddly heard nothing. She came up onto her feet, knees bent, grasping her sword with both hands. She drove forward, twisting counterclockwise. The blade bit through the rifleman's belly to erupt out his back in a cloud of black spray.

A second man turned and ran, still holding his MP-5. With no hesitation Annja used her forward momentum to come up sprinting. She ran the man down through stinging rain and cut him down with a diagonal slash. She could not afford to let him find cover and his composure and shoot at her friends.

She looked around. She had been instantly drenched. The storm had struck Claidheamh Mor B hard and true. She guessed she had come out just south of the northeast corner of the rig. She took a few steps to her left until she could see around the superstructure to where Tex had tied plucky little Ariel Ariel to a landing on the platform. to a landing on the platform.

At once she ducked back. She sensed movement, wheeled to face it. Tex and Jadzia were pelting toward her.

"Great job," Tex said, panting a little. Jadzia was looking everywhere at once with her blue eyes saucer huge.

"Good news," Annja told him. "We don't have to worry about flying out in this."

He turned his head to look at her with one quizzical eye. "And the bad news?"

"We can't fly out. There are guards swarming all over the plane."

"What?" Jadzia yelped. Her initial reaction of elation at being rescued, and then her not-quite-moored-to-the-real-world sense that this was all some fantastic action-flick adventure had begun to curdle in the cold blast of reality. Maybe she'd seen enough spilled blood to realize it was real. real. Annja hoped so. Annja hoped so.

"You mean we're trapped here? You were too stupid to have a backup plan?" Jadzia said.

"Oh, no," Tex said with indefatigable cheer. "We have a backup plan. It's pretty stupid, too, but it's not like we have much choice."

They sprinted east, toward the near edge of the platform. "I hate Plan B," Annja shouted through the storm.

Just barely over the din she heard shouts from behind as somebody spotted them.

"Given how iffy Plan A was," Tex said, "how good could Plan B be?"

Shots crashed as if challenging the thunder. Slowing just shy of the platform edge, Annja looked over her shoulder to see muzzle-flashes flicker from high up in the superstructure.

"Down the hatch," Tex told Annja. A rectangular opening railed on three sides was cut through the deck. A fixed steel ladder was just visible inside.

"Don't be a hero," she told him.

His response was to kneel, bring the G3 to his shoulder, sight briefly and squeeze off a hefty slamming shot. Annja looked up to see a figure fall over a railing on the third level.

She grabbed Jadzia by the wrist and propelled her toward the ladder. Then she pulled the girl's wet face close to hers.

"Follow me down as fast as you can," Annja said.

"But "

"No buts. You mess around, you die."