There were five uniformed, heavily armed men on the gantry. Under fire from the railed landing above the perimeter walkway, three of them strained to haul a trolley laden with an assortment of weapons and ammunition towards a gap in the steel shell - in fact towards the Gate - while their two colleagues gave them covering fire.
Now that Trask and Nathan's eyes had grown accustomed to the sudden brightness, the brilliant glare of the Gate itself, which was dazzling even through the smoked-glass window, they could see that these would not be the first of Tzonov's men to cross the threshold. Others of his soldiers had already passed through the 'skin' of the dazzling sphere, its event horizon, and were visible on the other side as glowing slow-motion silhouettes against a uniformly milky backdrop. They were strung out, a straggling line of burdened, luminous figures dwindling into the alien white distance, leaving only a handful of their colleagues in the foreground to beckon eerily, with an agonizingly slow urgency, to those still outside where they crossed the gantry.
A white-smocked technician or scientist emerged from hiding behind the curve of the Gate. With his hands over his head to signify surrender, spreadeagling his body against a section of the steel shell, the frightened man inched his way into view. One of the men on the gantry saw him, turned the ugly, blued-steel snout of a machine-pistol in his direction, and let go with a burst of a dozen rounds. It was murder, pure and simple, totally unnecessary; obviously the soldier and his colleagues had been hand-picked by Tzonov. The scientist jerked and shuddered as smoking-hot lead stitched him across and back, passed through him and fragmented against the carbon steel, and then ricocheted from the metal back into his body. His white smock turned scarlet in a moment. And staggering forward, crumpling as he went, he fell to his knees at the rim of the platform, then tilted forward and noseped into sixty feet of thin air between the stanchions and rams. And his querulous dead-speak voice was added to that of the others near the console.
Nathan had no time to comfort them, could only watch. More men came at the run down the circular shaft onto the landing. They joined those already there in firing at the soldiers on the gantry, pouring lead at them. One of the latter was hit in the chest, went down kicking and screaming, twitched and lay still. But they had almost got the trolley to the Gate, a few more paces would do it. Sparks flew from the gantry where bullets splintered against the metalwork, and the two covering soldiers returned fire.
As yet more men came through the entry shaft onto the landing, so a group of eight broke off from the original party to go clattering down the stairs onto the perimeter walkway. But when they were only halfway down, that was when things really started to heat up.
Nathan had been hoping to see Turkur Tzonov, and that Tzonov would see him. He had wanted to remind the man just who it was he'd treated so badly, and who he might still have to deal with in the future - also of the price to be paid for what he had done to Siggi Dam. So far the Necro-scope had been disappointed, but no longer. The Russian was here after all; except, now, if Nathan were to show himself, it might easily work out that he'd be the one who paid. Trask, too, of course, because they were together. Beyond the stairway to the entry shaft, on the far side of
the gantry spanning the gaps in the Saturn's rings, a twin-mounted Katushev cannon suddenly swung into action. The weapon was situated against the wall on a supporting platform; it sat there like an armoured blister of steel, on a tripod of shock-resistant legs. Quiescent until now, its electric motor droned into life, the grey-domed hood cracked open, and as the assembly telescoped back on itself, so the operator in the heavily plated bucket-seat came into view. Seeing who the gunner was, none other than Tzonov himself, Nathan and Trask gave simultaneous gasps of shock. This man would be menacing enough without deadly armaments, but at the firing controls of a Katushev .. .?
Turkur Tzonov was part-Turk, part-Mongol, all man. Definitely an 'Alpha' male, his was an outstanding mind housed in an athlete's body. His grey eyes were the sort that could look at and into a man - literally. They were the instruments of his telepathy.
The Russian's eyebrows were slim as pencilled lines, silver-blond against the tanned ridges of his brows. He was bald, but this was so in keeping with his other features as to make it appear that hair was never intended. Certainly it wasn't a sign of ill-health or aging; he glowed with vitality, and the only anomaly lay in the orbits of eyes whose hollows seemed bruised from long hours of study or implacable concentration. The purple was a symptom of his talent. Tzonov's nose was sharply hooked, probably broken in some accident or fight. Most likely the latter, for the head of Russia's E-Branch was devoted to the martial arts. His mouth was well-fleshed, if a little too wide, above a strong square chin. His small pointed ears lay flat against his head. It was undeniable that Tzonov was good-looking, but the overall picture was of a too-perfect symmetry.
Even as the shock of seeing him receded, so the Katushev's motor whined as Tzonov traversed the twin barrels of his weapon from its target at the core's centre until it lined up with the scaffolding supporting the railed landing under the entry shaft. The men on the landing and those descending the stairs had seen the movement and were frantic to take whatever cover they could. Those still on the landing made to pe headlong into the shaft; those on the stairs hurled themselves over the rail to land on the perimeter walkway.
And Tzonov ignored the squad on the walkway, aiming right through them at the spidery scaffolding.
Nathan and Trask saw the expression on the Russian's face as he applied pressure to the Katushev's triggers, and 'good-looking' or not, it was a look of sheer malice. His lips drew back from his perfect teeth in a death's-head grin, and the cords of his neck stood out in ridges where they met his collarbone. Then . .. the grin turned into an animal snarl! And the Katushev went whoof, whoof, whoof!
Men were blown apart as exploding steel gutted them and used them to colour everything yellow, scarlet, grey, brown. Their liquids splashed everywhere as the scaffolding was reduced to so much twisted, smoking metal. Those on the landing who hadn't made it into the shaft went sliding from the slumping structure into the bowl of the core, or hung on like grim death to the warped metal rails or the teetering skeleton of the platform.
Tzonov laughed his scorn at them, glanced at the Gate and saw that his men were through its skin with their trolley-load of arms. Two of them waited on the far side, beckoning to him in the Gate's weird slow-motion. He would be the last of them to go through. Whatever else the Russian was, he wasn't a coward. The savage grin slipped from his face as he elevated the snouts of the Katushev's barrels and put two more rounds into the screaming, mangled mess on the landing platform.
Behind their fragile shield, Nathan and Trask ducked down and covered their ears as shrapnel flew everywhere. A six-foot length of scaffolding pipe whipped end over end through the air and tore the top half of their aluminum cover away in a shriek of tortured metal. The smoked-glass window went with it.