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.The light was much brighter inside.Ryan could see a kind of entrance hall, about a hundred feet across, with several smaller sec doors leading off it.All were shut.The floor was patterned with zigzag black-and-white squares, with silver wire in between the large tiles.Blaster in hand, Ryan slipped through the part-open doorway into the weapons research unit of the complex.Somewhere to his right, from a large black box with dancing green lights, he heard a faint click.He moved forward, his boots ringing on the tiles.To his surprise, he found that they were made of metal.Somewhere behind the walls, in the utter silence, Ryan could hear a humming, swelling noise, becoming louder, sounding like a generator building up a powerful electrical charge."Sec traps," he said."Termination levels."Then, before his brain could make all the connections, the murderous booby trap detonated itself and exploded into terminal action.Chapter EightRyan's fighting reflexes had sustained him through thirty-five or so years in Deathlands.They'd carried him out of innumerable life-threatening situations.But what he'd also had was luck.This time it was luck that saved him.The patterned floor was simply a huge death trap, triggered by his weight.A massive jolt of electricity ran through the steel tiles, designed to fry anything and anybody.The mechanism was a hundred years old, designed in the megacull times before the ancient Earth died.The nuke generator responded nobly to the sudden call on its resources, providing the surge of power.But the wiring had rusted and frayed, attacked by damp and cold.Ryan was already starting to move, diving forward to try to get off the black-and-white patterns.His heart pounded with the bitter realization that he'd likely be too late.There was a crackling and a choking stench of ozone and burning insulation.Sparks erupted behind him and around him.He felt the blast of electricity as it hit him, sending him spinning off balance.The breath was driven from his body, and every muscle went into a spasmodic paroxysm.But the aged sec trap had malfunctioned before anything near full power had been able to lash at the intruder.It had still been enough to knock Ryan on his ass, leaving him shuddering and shocked."Fireblast!"He lay on his side, the SIG-Sauer twenty feet away, near one of the sec doors.When Ryan tried to sit up he found that his left arm was jerking, the fingers opening and closing, all utterly beyond his control.It took a quarter hour before he could stand.He staggered backward, whistling between parted lips, finding that his pulse was finally back somewhere toward normal.He looked at the floor by the entrance and saw that some of the metal tiles appeared to have melted, and that thin tendrils of smoke were still snaking up from between them.The box on the wall that had been gleaming with green lights now hung off at an angle, its interior blackened and charred."Terminal sec trap," Ryan muttered."Wonder if there's any more like you."His blaster safely holstered again, he made the rounds of the other doors, finding that all of them were securely locked against him.All but one.Ryan was puzzled why a double sec barrier should have been used for a single room, and why it had been left unsealed when all the others were triple bolted.The room was empty, except for a huge dust sheet draped over something.Or some things.Ryan grabbed a corner and pulled.The cloth disintegrated in his fingers, falling apart in a cloud of stinking dust.Coughing and blinded, Ryan staggered away, rubbing at his eye.Blinking through tears, he tried to recognize what it was that stood on a low stone plinth.It was some kind of machinery.He wiped his eye with the sleeve of his coat, finally clearing his vision.He could now see there was a wide red line painted on the floor around the plinth.The word "WARNING" was repeated several times.A rectangle of white card, which looked as though it had been propped against the machines, had fallen over when he tugged the cloth away and now lay facedown inside the red line
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