The explosion turned her armor layer completely rigid and slammed her against the wall. A big chunk of balustrade and ramp vanished in the blast, smoldering debris cascading down onto the tiles two floors below. People who’d been on the spiral ramp were struck by the brutal blast wave, bodies flung into the structure, limbs broken, flesh torn and burned. In the first few seconds’ aftermath, the atrium was claimed by a vacuous silence. Then the screaming started.

“What the fuck was that?” Jessika yelled. “What’s going on?”

“Weapons drone,” Kandara grunted. Zapata splashed a fast suit status for her. External damage minimal, all systems functional. She pushed herself away from the wall and powered on toward lab five. Its metal door had buckled in the explosion. Kandara shot it with a mini-grenade.

Her armor stiffened up again as the grenade detonated, flinging shards of metal in all directions. She skirted the missing hunk of ramp carefully and launched three microdrones through the gaping hole into lab five.

Their images splashed across her tarsus lenses as they flew forward. The laboratory followed a standard layout: big bioreactor cabinets lined up along one wall; benches laden with glassware, tended by robot arms; workstations orbited by complex holographic data grids. A tall cylindrical fish tank stood in one corner. The mini-grenade had reduced the room to chaos: cabinets warped and cracked, glassware shattered into avalanches of shards saturated with sticky chemicals. Arntsen and Fasan were on their knees behind a bench, blood dripping from their eardrums, exposed skin cut by flying glass. Fasan was holding a small black tube that the drone’s sensors revealed as a beam weapon, while Arntsen seemed to be dazed and disoriented.

The drones completed their scan of the lab. There was no one else inside.

Kandara flattened herself against the wall to one side of the ruined door and shoved her hand out across the gap. Three more mini-grenades were fired into lab five, programmed to detonate close to the back wall so the fugitives wouldn’t be shielded by the bench.

The drone sensors showed her the overlapping explosions. She saw the fish tank finally disintegrate, sending water sloshing across the floor, with thrashing fish surfing the churning ripples. Several of them slithered to a halt around Arntsen, who was now facedown, his clothes badly ripped by the blasts. Several of his ribs were visible in the gashes where skin had been flayed and burned from his back.

Fasan, by some miracle, was still relatively undamaged. He was crawling toward the shattered window wall. Kandara selected a projectile for the magrail rifle and spun around the warped doorframe. There were three benches between her and Fasan. Target graphics locked on to his head—a coordinate supplied by the microdrones. The rifle fired, punching the projectile through the benches as if they were holograms. His head exploded in a cloud of gore-vapor and bone shrapnel.