Junebug slapped another clip into her submachine gun, ignoring the heat that radiated from the barrel shroud from the continuous firing. She dropped the weapon and let her patrol sling take the weight then unslung the disruptor rifle. It was increasingly clear to her that the information they had been given was wrong, and maybe not accidentally so. In mercenary service there was always the possibility your employer was keeping you in the dark for their own reasons. Things like that tended to get people killed and were rarely appreciated.

"Junebug?" her comm sounded in her ear and she realized it wasn't the first time Taya had tried to get her attention. She stood up from behind her cover and fired six rounds into the wall, in paired shouts. The first round punched a whole in the wall allowing the second to pass through and she was rewarded with the scream and thump of a fallen man.

"Go ahead Taya," she replied, ducking back into cover as bullets spewed from the freshly punched holes, a predictable if futile reaction.

"I think I have a fix on the target, he is heading for a panic room two flights below you," she said, a map overlay appearing in a 25 percent transparency in the lower right quadrant of Junebug's visor.

"Roger. Break. Neil we..."

"I got it," Neil replied guesturing with his weapon to a small elevator at the rear of the room. Junebug ran to it and pulled open the control panel as Neil joined her. Saxon howled in rage and lifted one of the heavy metal supply crates and hurled it at a door that sprung open. There was a rending crash of metal and a crunch of bone and the the lizard was in the elevator and Junebug slammed the simple gearbox into drive, lobbing a grenade underhand into the room they had just vacated. The elevator dropped them fast. They sank two levels as their evidently wasn't a stop on the intervening floor. The cage sank into a large open area perhaps thirty meters square. The roof was festooned with banks of glow lights and the floor was covered with vegetation similar to the jungle outside. A vast beast, fully ten meters long rounded on the elevator.

"Well," Junebug said a little abashedly.

"I guess that explains the rations." The creature let out a terrifying roar, so loud that the sound filters in Junebug's helmet notched it out to save her hearing. Then it lowered its head and charged towards the descending elevator cage.