Watching blearily from inches away, Thibodeau saw him sink onto one knee, then heard the bones of his opposite leg splinter with a sickening crunch under the relentless pressure of the gripper claw. His screams growing in shrillness, the invader continued to pull at the arm as the robot resumed its advance, shoving him implacably backward, out of reach of his fallen weapon.

Sonsabitchin' contraption's good for somethin' after all, Thibodeau thought, then let his head slump to the floor again, no longer able to keep it up.

His field of vision contracting to a small, fuzzy circle, he lay there motionless, the side of his face against the floor. He was vaguely aware of footsteps far below him, a lot of them. Someone shouted--first in Spanish, then English. He heard a fusillade of gunfire.

Before he even had time to wonder what any of it meant, Thibodeau's eyes rolled back under their lids, and he ceased to be aware of anything at all.

As the Sword ops bolted into the payload storage bay, they heard two reverberating shotgun blasts over their heads, and then saw a man in a black cammo suit fall from one of the catwalks, screaming and flailing as he dropped to the floor to their left, slamming down with a hard thud, then neither screaming nor moving anymore. An instant later there was a chop of automatic fire in the air high above them. Looking up, they spotted another dark form on the catwalk, this one suddenly folding to his knees as a hedgehog launched at him across the catwalk, its gripper arm rapidly whipping out to snatch him like the foreleg of a preying mantis. Several of the ops saw a third man sprawled on the catwalk behind the 'hog, and noticing his Sword uniform, realized instantly it must be Thibodeau.

But before they could react to this sight, a third figure in black sprang from a crouch below a towering work platform up ahead, leaving an object behind on the floor near one of its supports. All of them were experienced enough to know it was a satchel charge--and they could see two more in plain view below other platforms.

"Stay right where you are!" one of the ops shouted, raising his weapon.

The man wasn't inclined to listen to his warning, regardless of the language. He raised his gun and swung it toward the group of Sword ops.

The response from the Sword op who had called out to him was immediate and conclusive. Bullets spurted from his gun, cutting the invader down before he could fire a single round.

Lowering his barrel, the op sprinted past the invader to the platform support, knelt over the satchel charge, and rapidly assessed its threat. He was no demolitions expert, but it looked like it was on a simple timer pencil and fuze configuration... although looks could be deceptive. There could, he knew, be internal wiring that would detonate the explosives if he tried yanking out the fuze, or other types of booby traps totally unfamiliar to him. Yet the timer's pin was nowhere in sight, and it only had a couple of minutes left on it, leaving him with no chance to move the bomb or call for help--