D'khara crept down the dark hallway, shotgun stock tight against his shoulder, nervously swinging the barrel back and forth; left-to-right, spinning around to check behind him, spinning back, peering at dark corners, looking for movement, anything to pull a trigger at.

He was tracking back westward, following the occasional distant whump that signaled another one of Roger's grenades going off. Roger, at least, was clearly still having a good time.

The upstairs hall was tall and broad and moodily lit, with small spotlights picking out the art and statuary stationed in regular niches. White paneled wainscoting came up to the middle of D'khara's back as he slid along the walls, and deep maroon wallpaper climbed the rest of the way to the ceiling.

Roger's shenanigans fell silent, and an unnatural, fuzzy stillness fell over the scene. D'khara grew more tense as he stalked the dim hallways. Had Roger run out of grenades? Or was it something more sinister? And where was everybody? They should have guards crawling all over them by now.

If all were going well, Oliver should be inside the mansion. Fleer hadn't been able to dig up the layout of the mansion, so Oliver would be hunting for the file room with the rest of them, while they kept the heat off of him.

D'khara realized he wasn't being enough of a distraction. It was against his nature to draw fire to himself. He didn't have Little Timmy's ability to make noise without purpose, nor Roger's natural chaos. He could practice clearing drills, though.

Experimentally, he tried one of the doors on the north wall. The doorknob rattled loudly in the stillness, but it was locked. Oliver had told them to expect that. The little information they'd been able to glean about the mansion suggested that there was a central security station somewhere. They'd probably remotely locked everything down once the shooting started.

Glancing up and down the hall, D'khara took a deep breath.

"Here goes nothing, maybe," he said.

He fired one round at the doorknob, vaporizing it, then launched himself at the door, crashing into it with the heavy pauldron on his left shoulder.

Once through, he frantically waved the barrel of his automatic shotgun around, screaming to terrorize anybody who might be there while trying to see through the gunsmoke. All he found was a spacious, well-lit bathroom with pale, cream-colored walls and hunter green accents. It was a calm room, with prints of bamboo stalks and chrysanthemums hanging on the walls and the gentle tinkling sound coming from a small fountain in one corner.

No bad guys here.

He looked longingly at the toilet, but now was definitely not the time. Especially since the door wouldn't lock any more.

A quick peek back out into the hall. Nobody.

He moved out and across the hall. Same routine, blast, smash, wave his gun around in an empty room, except this time it was a roomy closet.

Across the hall and down a bit, he did the same thing for the next room (a bedroom) and the next (another library) and the next (an ornate office). He reloaded his shotgun and continued.

Each door he went through took him closer to the stairs at the end of the hall. The stairs loomed in his imagination-- he did not relish the thought of climbing another flight.

In surprisingly short order, his shoot-bash-sweep routine became automatic, giving him room to think. He considered whether to keep shooting the doorknobs out. On the one hand, it was a waste of ammo, as these interior doors weren't reinforced. He could just bash through them. On the other hand, making noise was part of his job, so...

It was while he was considering his course of action that he smashed into another room, straight into two serious men with guns, preparing an ambush, with silver stars shining on their maroon uniforms.

They fumbled their submachine guns up, blazing brrrrrrrrt as D'khara squawked and fell backward, squeezing his trigger on the way down, his automatic shotgun spitting rounds into the ceiling, butbutbutbutbutbut. He rolled inelegantly across the floor and scrambled back out into the hallway as the two guards took cover inside the room.

Leaning against the wall next to the shredded door, gasping for breath with his heart pounding, D'khara tried to recall what he'd seen of the room, to guess where they'd take cover. All he could recall was a vague sense of brown walls.

Just his luck to run into what were probably the only two guards left in the house.

Gritting his teeth, he stood, slung his shotgun, pulled one of the grenades loose from his leather belt, and flung it into the room. He snatched his arm back, since SMGs started buzzing the moment his hand appeared.

There was a scuffle from within, and the muffled whump of an explosion. Everything fell silent.

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D'khara unslung his shotgun and waited a small eternity, straining his ears for any sound. He edged toward the ruined door frame, preparing to ease one eye into the room.

"I need an assist!" screamed his radio.

He jerked back in surprise, falling again, and fumbled for his radio with his left hand.

"Assist!" he called back, and realized he'd missed keying the mike, and was yelling into the back of the thing. He pressed the button and hollered "Assist what?" at his radio.

"I'm pinned down by a bunch of these saucetags!" screamed Little Timmy in scratchy radio static.

"Where are you?" D'khara asked, backing away from the door.

"I'm in some closet, first floor," Little Timmy replied, the sound of gunfire ringing through in the background. "I moved back west and I came through some kind of utility room, full of pipes and stuff. Some of these ragnuts saw me and started shooting, so I ran in here, and it's a dead end."

D'khara thought quickly, his barrel trained on the door.

"Are they in there with you?" he asked.

"No, there's just this one little door they can't get through. I've got it covered but I can't get out and I'm low on ammo!"

If he were closer, D'khara could break into the utility room, surprise the guards from behind. Assuming they weren't defending the rear.

These guys seemed smarter than that.

D'khara couldn't go down the stairs now in any case, not with a possible pair of hostiles behind him.

A small plan began to form. He keyed the mike again.

"How far down the west hall are you?" asked.

"How should I know?" the frantic voice came back. "I didn't bring a measuring laser! Maybe a hundred feet?"

D'khara considered things for a moment. He'd grown up in a mine, and while there was not much to learn there, one definitely did pick up on three-dimensional spatial thinking.

He backed down the hall to the bathroom, keeping his gun trained on the brown room's door, in case one of the baddies in there decided to come out. Past all the doors he'd bashed in, all the way back to the bathroom. He backed carefully into the bathroom, through the ruins of the door, all the way back to the shower.

He considered the toilet for a moment. Classier than your standard porcelain throne, it was low and sleek, cream-colored, with a seashell motif and gold accents. Clearly not a working man's toilet. The toilet he grew up with, you could flush a burlap sack full of hockey pucks if you needed to, but this thing didn't look nearly so robust.

D'khara stared at the base of the toilet, briefly trying to work out the size of the integral trap in the toilet. He suddenly gave up thinking, shrugged, and blasted it to shards with a rattle of autofire from his shotgun.

"D'khara?" wheedled Little Timmy over the radio, with uncharacteristic humility. "Can you help me?"

"One sec," D'khara said, shifting his shotgun to his left hand. He pulled the last grenade off his belt with his right. He eyed the jagged porcelain exposing the Mess Formerly Known As Toilet's outflow pipe, weighing the waffle-printed device in his hand. He released the spoon, which pinged off into the hallway. He carefully counted to four, then dropped the grenade into the blackness of the outflow pipe.

If he was upstairs, and Little Timmy was downstairs, the pipe should lead...

A four-inch column of water fired up out of the remains of the toilet hard enough to blast the finish off the ceiling and leave a dent in the underlying material. The sound of gunfire drifted up through the floor.

"Brilliant!" the radio crackled. "It hit 'em like a, like a sewage truck! Yeah!" Little Timmy started yelling at the guards he was firing at. "Yeah! How's that for lunch! And the main course! And an appetizer!" The gunfire from below slowed. "I owe you one, short stuff!" Little Timmy crowed.

"No worries," D'khara keyed back.

He crept back out into the hallway, which was still quiet. He eased his way down to the brown room. He flapped his arm awkwardly in front of the door for a second, then yanked it back.

No gunfire.

He peeked around the ruined door frame into the room. The grenade had done its work. One of the guards was clearly no longer a threat. Threats generally came in fewer than two pieces.

Peeking further, he saw the tumbled remains of some sort of office, or reception area. An overturned desk here, a spill of files there, chairs scattered around.

D'khara stepped carefully into the room, leading with the barrel of his shotgun. He had a nasty start as a face loomed out of the corner of his eye, and snapped the barrel of his gun around, but it was just a life-sized portrait of Sir Oscar Byrd.

Breathing heavily, but trying to keep quiet, he scanned the room. Dark wood paneling covered the walls, and potted plants relieved the color scheme a little. Several marble busts stared passively at him. The desk was the only place that anyone could really be hiding.

He approached the overturned desk as quietly as he could.

As his head cleared the edge of the desk, he saw a flash and his ears rang. He reflexively hosed the area down with his shotgun.

After a few crowded seconds, the other guard lay messily disposed of. Ears still ringing, D'khara pulled off his helmet and stared dumbly at the two dents in it. His heart wouldn't slow down as he stared at those little bullet-shaped divots.

D'khara stood panting, verging on hyperventilating, the bullet-peppered walls and ceiling closing in around him.

"Hand cheeses!"

D'khara dropped his helmet and swung around at the sudden sound behind him, spraying autofire, butbutbutbutbutbut. His shotgun carved great swaths in the walls as he spun, recognized Roger, and yanked his barrel upward, his last round knocking out a clean hole through the wall not six inches over Roger's head.

"Roger! For crying out loud! I could have shot you!"

"Like water babies!"

Still shaking, D'khara turned away from Roger and examined the scene.

The room was certainly less classy now. The tasteful plants were now potted in more ways than one, the statuary was pocked with bullet holes, and several pieces of abstract art were now considerably more abstract. The shotgun had left a distinctive pattern along the walls, and even in the ceiling in a few cases. The sharp smell of burnt cordite tainted the hazy swirls of gunsmoke filling the room. The painting of Sir Oscar Byrd, miraculously undamaged, stared disapprovingly at the mess.

The two guards were clearly done with their time in the mortal plane. The door they had been guarding was a looming, ominous thing. D'khara crept closer.

There was a small brass plate screwed to the door, which read, "Files."