Needles of laser light burned yellow-green flames in the bricks just above bis line of travel. In the laser rifle's backlight, Shin saw the hulking shadow of a man silhouetted between the stair railing and the building wall. Shin swung his own weapon into line with the apparition, then jerked the shotgun's trigger and hit the laser's firing stud.

His laser bolt caught the Smoke Jaguar just above the waist of his dark green jumpsuit. The shotgun slug slammed nto the laser rifle, destroying its energy coils in a brilliant electric-blue flash, then ricocheted into the invader. It enered his chest just above the laser wound and spun the warior away into the wall. The Smoke Jaguar hit the bricks hard, then rebounded and cascaded limply down the stairs to Shin's feet.

Two more yakuza ran up the stairs. One knelt beside the Smoke Jaguar and checked his throat for a pulse, while the other dropped to Shin's side. "Are you hurt?"

Shin shook his head, then rubbed his right hand against the left side of his chest. "The gun was just seated wrong. It recoiled into my ribs." He rolled forward and scrambled to his feet without assistance. He straightened up slowly, then pumped another shell into the shotgun's action. "Wait! What are you doing?"

The man who had knelt next to the invader had drawn a knife from his boot. "He still lives!"

Shin felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He nodded to the man, who then cut the Smoke Jaguar's throat. Shin motioned to another member of the team to move up the stairs and pointed toward the steel door set back from the top of the stairs. As the man unlimbered a portable rocket launcher, Shin carefully deployed those yakuza who had not already taken up their assigned positions. "Go!"

The armor-piercing rocket's depleted-uranium tip punched through the door like a bullet through an apple. Two meters beyond the thick steel slab, the rocket's warhead exploded within a narrow rectangular chamber. A jet of fire stabbed back out of the entry hole to scorch the stairwell wall, then subsidiary flames created a reddish-yellow corona around the door seconds before it tottered from its tracks and smashed flat against the ferrocrete floor.

Smoke billowed from the chamber beyond the door. The upper half of each wall had been blown out by the blast, sowing glass shrapnel through the guard chambers on either side of the security checkpoint. Through the smoke and beyond, Shin saw into the Gallery.

Two yakuza moved in low, then lofted anti-personnel grenades into the guard stations. Twin explosions sounded one after the other, and some of the barbed, plastic flechettes from the grenades bounced out to the stairs. One of the two men rose up and took a step forward, then hesitated for a fatal second.

Three scarlet laser bolts shot through the smoke and punctured his chest. Energy only partially spent, they burst through the back of his black tunic, igniting cloth as they did so. The yakuza spun around, collided with the railing at the top of the stairs and pitched head over heels. His body landed with a wet thud at the bottom of the stairs and lay very still.

The blood-streaked Smoke Jaguar in the guard's chamber disintegrated in the withering hail of return fire. Dozens of little fires burned like votive candles in the wall beyond his position. The furthest-forward yakuza stayed low and moved through the checkpoint. His appearance on the other side of the doorway brought a cheer from the inmates while more detonations shook the building from outside.

"Yamato, prepare to blow the bar-locks." Shin waited until Yamato had climbed through the empty windows to the guard station before he charged into the Gallery. Even though he'd studied plans of the building to where he found himself wandering through it in his dreams, the reality of it shocked him. This is a wastebin for humanity!

Rising up to a height of ten tiers, the Gallery formed a gray, cold ferrocrete canyon separating dark walls dotted with even darker holes. Arms and legs jutted between prison bars like insect appendages hanging from the mouth of a lizard. Thousands of voices echoed through the room, filling it with a murmuring chaos that drowned out all but the sharpest explosion from outside.

Shin darted toward the staircase leading to the upper levels of the cell block. A shotgun blast blew the lock from the wire-mesh door. Shin ripped it aside and sprinted up the stairs. Hohiro is in Cell Seventeen, Tier Three.Another shotgun slug mangled the lock on Level Three and gave Shin access to the tier's balcony.

People jammed the doorways, stretching their arms out to claw at him and draw him closer, desperation on their faces. They all want to be free, but they're terrified they'll never make it. We've got to get them out.

He found the mouth of Cell Seventeen and leveled his gun at the inmates choking it. They melted back, leaving Shin a clear view of Hohiro seated on a cot. He'd raised himself up on his elbows and had an expectant look on his face, but the circles under his eyes and the bloody rag wrapped around his right leg gave the yakuza the true story of Hohiro's condition.

Shin stepped to the balcony and raised his right hand. Someone down below relayed the signal to Yamato. A sharp flash of light preceded the report of an explosion and the resulting alarm signal. A series of metallic clicks sounded up and down the cell blocks, and inmates quickly pulled their limbs back through the doors. The steel-bar portals slid back throughout Katana Block, and the denizens of the cells poured out.

Shin fought his way through the press of prisoners into Cell Seventeen. He pulled his faceplate back onto the top of his head and seated himself on Hohiro's bunk. Pulling free the medical pack from its straps at the small of his back, he smiled at his Sho-sa."Sorry we could not come for you sooner."

Hohiro laughed with relief as tears rolled down his ashen face. "I am glad you came for me at all. Even when word got through that something was going to happen, I couldn't believe it. I should have known you would come up with something."

Shin shook his head. "I am merely the servant of a master craftsman, doing what I have been told." He ripped open the leg of Hohiro's prison togs up to mid-thigh, then pulled a white adhesive patch from the medical pouch. He pressed it to Hohiro's leg, just above and behind the knee. "That's for the pain. Can you walk?"

Hohiro nodded, the tension lines around his eyes beginning to ease. "I can walk, maybe run for a short distance."

"Good. Bare your right forearm." As Hohiro complied with the command, Shin slapped a blue patch to the crook of his elbow. "You'll sleep for a week after we get out of here, but this stuff should keep you going until then."

Screams and the sounds of gunfire echoed up to the cell. Hohiro grabbed Shin's arms, the second drug having already sharpened his reflexes and increased his strength. "What's going on?"

Shin freed himself from Hohiro's grip. "I don't know. Crawl along the balcony to Cell Fifteen and wait for me there." The yakuza pulled his faceplate on again, fed three more shells into the shotgun, and ran to the cell's entrance. What he saw below brought him up short and took his breath away.

Marching relentlessly through the milling throng, a Smoke Jaguar in a bulky suit of powered armor lashed out right and left with his arms. Even a glancing blow crushed bodies and sent them flying deeper into the crowd. Short bursts from the laser burned swaths through the inmate population. The Gallery was so packed that none could escape, try as they might to flee, and people involuntarily filled in the bodystrewn path behind the warrior.