"Wait. I want him to see it coming," Angel said over his shoulder.

Hodak pressed his fingernail against a pip on the instrument in his hand and felt it vibrate with energy. Thrusting his arm further into the tunnel's bend he hurled the boomerang toward Angel.

The weapon reached its maximum velocity within two meters of the throw. Moving at a speed that made it invisible to the naked eye, it flew silently and true.

The slender implement curved around Angel's neck and, without stopping, completed its return to Hodak's hand.

Angel's head was gone from his shoulders.

The sound of Angel's falling body startled the two staring expectantly at Ram, waiting for the execution shot. Turning, they gaped at what had been Angel. They scrambled in panic to press their backs against the tunnel wall. Dropping the soil-fusers, they drew and waved their weapons about.

One of them shouted, "Flume. Can you hear me, Flume?"

"Yeah, I hear you. Whatta ya want?"

"Get back here, quick."

Flume came running, took in the scene and joined the other two against the wall. Together, they stared at Angel, then along the tunnel, one direction then the other.

"What the h.e.l.l's goin' on?"

"How do I know? We didn't hear anything, then the noise of him falling. We looked and there he was and there was his head. We had our eyes on the big guy; couldn'a been him did it."

"What do we do now?"

"Search me."

"Let's get outta here."

"Can't. We gotta finish the job, or Scarf'll burn us alive."

"Then we better stick together from now on,"

Flume said. "You two finish cutting the hole but now make it deeper. I'll keep watch. Soon as you're ready we'll load 'em in, seal it up with stuff from around here, and scram."

As Hodak watched, Patch and Swat recovered sufficiently to raise their soil-fusers and direct the nozzles at the tunnel's wall.

An amber glow formed on the fuser's tips and the tunnel wall's surface bubbled and flowed toward the floor in the light gravity. Wielding the fusers expertly they distributed its liquefied substance in a rough, irregular pattern, blending it in with the surrounding surfaces. The excess that reached the floor quickly hardened to match the rubble strewn about.

Flume, back against the opposite wall, weapon high and ready, peered tensely about. Finally satisfied, Patch switched off his fuser and tapped Swat on the shoulder. Swat glanced at him, switched off, and they stepped back.

"This'll do it," Patch said. "Load Angel in first.

The back of the hole is too small for the big guy."

He leaned over, grasped the open-eyed head by a hank of hair and flung it into the hole. The head disappeared with a soft thud. Swat joined Patch; each grasped one of the body's arms and legs and they heaved it in after the head. Patch leaned into the hole and pushed the solid flesh as far as it would go. Turning, he motioned Swat toward Ram.

For a moment Flume faced away from Hodak.

He did not see the boomerang before it twisted around his throat and was gone.

Intent on Ram, Swat and Patch saw neither the strike nor the weapon. They heard a gurgling sound and whirled. Flume was on the tunnel floor, blood pulsing from the neck of his headless torso. The head, itself, had rolled against the opposite wall, eyes open.

Panicked, they fired frantically down the tunnel in both directions.

The boomerang back in his hand, Hodak waited. An open a.s.sault was unacceptable, both for himself and for Ram. He would be cut down with a single sweep of the killers' heavy handguns, and with his ident.i.ty revealed, Scarf would track down the Sentinels with a vengeance.

Snapping a quick peek he saw Patch and Swat back to back in the middle of the tunnel, facing in opposite directions and whispering to each other in terror.

Guessing the distance between the two he extended the boomerang slightly and pressed the pip.

Stepping away from the wall Hodak threw the boomerang around the bend.

One of the targets must have seen it coming.

There was the beginning of a scream.

Boomerang back in hand, Hodak walked around the bend. Patch lay quietly; Swat's body still quivered.

Hodak took less than five minutes to enlarge the hole, load the newly dead in with their companions, and smooth the surface to match the tunnel's wall.

Ram, groggy, sat against the opposite wall and watched.

Chapter THIRTY

The s.p.a.ce was little more than two meters across, a vault cut into the side of a tunnel to store construction supplies. It was enough.

Leaving Ram in the dimly lit s.p.a.ce to recover, Hodak rushed to an exit, surfaced, took his bearings, and found Brad in his office. Brad immediately sensed the urgency from Hodak's expression.

"Let's get our people together," Brad ordered.

Hodak quickly pa.s.sed the word and, within minutes, the Sentinels convened in an empty air lock.

Myra left for headquarters to cover; the remainder strung out behind Hodak to the subsurface vault where he'd left Ram.

"And that's it." Ram finished recapping his trip as he gingerly rubbed the large bruise on his head.

"They're lining up for a confrontation," he said, "both political and military, and Slingshot is the club they'll hold over us. They think they smell the blood of victory, and there isn't a cool head among them."

He turned to Brad.

"Your message was incomplete," he said. "What was left out?"

"Narval's planning guidance on the a.s.sault launch point," Brad replied, citing the coordinates, bringing Ram up to date.

They were silent as Ram mulled over his options.

Sighing, he rose and stretched his frame, bending slightly to keep his head from sc.r.a.ping against the vault's roof.