“Cap-what if this tunnel has a defense barrier, too?”

The copper-haired man shook his head. “Once inside a fortress, it’s inefficient and dangerous to put deadfalls and booby traps everywhere. Dandridge is too smart to put himself in mortal danger every time he strolls around here.” He moved a foot toward the threshold.

“What if,” Rock suggested, “Dandridge has own implant to tell his creatures to stay away?”

The captain smiled. “Whom would he trust to implant it? More accurately, does a man such as Dandridge trust even his own creations?”

Tex spoke up. “Didn’t y’all call him-and I quote-’dangerously mad’?”

Cap stared at Tex for a moment, then put his foot down on the deck of the corridor. Nothing happened.

“Let’s go,” he said. Sun Ra, pistol still in hand, joined him. Rock and Tex drew their pistols and followed, Tex bringing up the rear.

As they silently approached the stairway they heard it-an inhuman moan that rose to a wail and fell again, like waves of despair on a sea of dread.

Jonathan Madsen stared at the strange contraption in the cargo hatch.

Leila threw a switch on the instrument panel and they both watched the device flip up from beneath a plate in the titanium flooring. At one end of the black and blockish four foot long box was a small hole, around which a circle of inward-pointing arrows had been painted in canary yellow, with the simple yet understated notice DANGER printed in the same color neatly below.

Four thick tubes wrapped in shiny gold-hued insulation entered the left side of the box and exited the right side. The top of the box sported a large and impressive-looking telescopic sight. Below it sat a smaller black tube marked with a laser trefoil.

Johnny-at Leila’s suggestion-stood behind the weapon and studied the control panel.

“These are the cooling pumps,” she said, flipping up four switches. From beneath the deck of the gently rocking Seamaster arose the sound of small compressors. The golden tubes feeding into the railgun grew frosty with condensation. “This is the main power switch.” She turned a dial halfway. Johnny felt a tingle in the air around him. “And this is the laser sight. Forty watts, so don’t even get near it.” She put her left hand on the left grip and pulled the trigger, then stretched to put her right hand out in front of the laser. A dazzlingly bright red spot blazed on her ivory-white palm.

“It feels warm. If I left my hand there long enough, I could actually get burned. And it would definitely blind you if you looked into it.” Her tone grew steadily more enthusiastic as she spoke about the weapon. “The laser’s used for sighting. Here.”

She swung the box about on its gimbaled base and pointed it toward a rock thrusting up from the waters a few hundred yards away between them and the shore. She let him stand at the controls and look through the scope.

The scope’s point of focus hung about eight inches in front of the lens, which made sighting in easy. He saw the brilliant red spot of the laser reflecting off the rock about a foot from its top.

“Want to fire it?” she asked.

“Sure!”

“The rail gun has a very flat trajectory, so wherever you point the laser is generally where the projectile will hit. The accuracy begins to drop off at about three miles, though.”

“What does it shoot?”

She pulled a small steel slug from her pocket. “One of these.” It looked like a miniature rocket about an inch long, pointed on one end with slots cut in the trailing end that gave the raised parts the impression vanes. It felt remarkably light compared to a lead bullet of the same size, which was about.40 caliber.

She stood behind him and directed his hands with hers. Her hair smelled like springtime and her touch was gentle and warm. “Your left hand controls the laser beam for the sight and your right hand fires the rail gun. It can cycle as fast as five hundred rounds a minute, but we usually keep it on single shot. You’ll see why.”

Johnny actuated the laser and sighted in again on the boulder. He aimed lower, toward the middle of the rock where the crash of waves left a wet, dark waterline. The red dot scintillated brightly like a ruby aflame. His right hand squeezed the trigger.

With a sharp schrack and a brilliant flash, the rail gun kicked backward on its mount.

“Whoa!” Johnny said in surprise. “I didn’t expect recoil.”

Leila smiled. “The magnetic field pushes backward against the bullet as it moves the bullet forward. Nobody breaks Newton’s laws.”

Through the lens of the scope, Johnny saw the boulder explode in a flash of light and dust. An instant later, the booming thunder of impact reached them. When the sea breeze swept the air clear, he saw a deep crater in the rock.

“Wow!” was all Jonathan Madsen could say. He swept his long blond hair from his eyes and sighted through the scope again, centering the laser dot in the deepest part of the rock and squeezing off another round. The same flash and report followed. This time, the top of the boulder shattered into three big pieces and a lot of gravel. They toppled over and fell into the waves with large and satisfying plumes of foam. The roar reached them like the sound of a bomb.

“Sweet!” Johnny shouted out. “The biggest thing Id ever fired was my dad’s skeet gun. This is great!”

Leila smiled and stepped away from the weapon. “Captain Anger developed the rail gun to overcome the inadequacies of gunpowder. There’s a limit on the expansion of gases when gunpowder ignites, so there’s an upper limit on the muzzle velocity of a bullet. The rail gun uses superconducting electromagnets to accelerate the projectile up to about ten thousand feet per second.” She leaned against the side of the aircraft and put her hands in the pockets of her skin-tight black jumpsuit. “That bang when you fired it was the sound of the pellet breaking the sound barrier as it shot out of the muzzle. It superheated and ionized the air by friction, causing the flash. At night it leaves a glowing trail, sort of like tracer bullets. It’s pretty.”

“What do you do for Captain Anger?” Madsen asked.

“I’m an industrial design engineer. Whatever Cap wants, I model and test it on computer and then we manufacture it.” She nodded toward the rail gun. “I designed that.”

Johnny cocked an ear toward the hatchway. “What’s that sound?” he asked.

Leila straightened, listening to the high-pitched, distant buzzing noise. “Sounds like a swarm of mosquitoes,” she said.

“But this far from land?”

“Over there!” Madsen shouted, pointing toward the shore.

A transparent darkness whose shape changed from instant to instant in chaotic, random patterns drifted over the shoreline heading out to sea.

Directly toward the Seamaster.

Jonathan gaped in fascination at the pulsating, flying mass. “It looks more like a swarm of bees. Or locusts.”

Leila shook her head with grim realization. “Those aren’t insects,” she said.

The buzzing grew louder. Darkness filled the sky.