by James Axler
“These work?” he asked.
Ryan laughed. “Only one way to find out.”
That wasn’t true, strictly speaking. Master armorer and weaponsmith that he was, J.B. and his equally gadget-crazed sixteen-year-old protégé Ricky Morales had taken each and every gren apart and inspected it to ensure that the charges and initiation mechanisms were intact, not time-degraded enough to be duds or worse, more dangerous to the user than to the intended targets. All checked out.
Of course that wasn’t guarantee they’d go off as advertised, but it was the best possible method short of actually lighting them off. Which of course wouldn’t leave much to trade.
At Ryan’s remark Tug shifted his stance to ferociously glare at him. Ryan ignored him as effortlessly as J.B. had. Looking mean was part of his job—as a sec boss in general, and apparently, here specifically during the baron’s daily appearance at his trade center to oversee the serious transactions. Such as this one.
That didn’t mean Tug was all show and no go. Ryan understood that perfectly well. A person didn’t last over twenty years as a baron’s sec boss without being hard enough to back the hard eyes with harder hands. That was a given. Especially considering the rep Doyle and his heavy hitter enjoyed in the Zark region.
Doyle looked at Tug, who cocked an eyebrow. Doyle tossed him the gren.
One of the sec men actually flinched. Ryan set his jaw. It was a triple-stupe reaction as well as a yellow one. If the grens were touchy enough to go off just by being thrown around—even dropped on the stained concrete floor—they likely wouldn’t have survived the hazards of retrieving them from the redoubt and transporting them here.
Ryan was proud that of his crew only Jak snickered. That didn’t much bother him. Jak was Jak; you didn’t look to him for sophistication in dealing with other people.
Tug frowned at the small, round bomb. There were things you could tell by exterior inspection of the things, mostly obvious signs of corrosion. In the hidden redoubt where Ryan and his friends had uncovered the treasure they’d been properly sealed away so they were as fresh as new the day they were made—at least as far as anything short of using them could reveal.
Tug looked back at his boss and nodded.
J.B. cleared his throat. Ryan didn’t turn his head. Though he couldn’t consciously hear anything extra over the general hubbub in the trade center, he could feel extra presences closing in behind. He didn’t need to look around to know they were more Doylesville sec men, hemming in Ryan and the others.
No surprise. It wasn’t the outcome he’d hoped for, but...
Baron Doyle took the gren from Tug and laid it carefully among the others in the open green metal box.
“You have delivered the goods, just as you promised, and that’s a fact,” he said, then grinned. “So I’m sorry to announce there’s been a slight change of plans. I’m placing you all under arrest for transporting and possessing illegal ordnance in the sovereign barony of Doylesville. And I’ll just be confiscating these dangerous contraband goods.”
Chapter Two
“Bastard,” Mildred Wyeth hissed.
“And then some,” Baron Doyle agreed. “But then, we hold the whip hand here, don’t we?”
Behind him Ryan heard a sec man yip a curse. He guessed the man had made the mistake of laying a hard arm on Jak’s shoulder and discovered the hard way that the shiny metal bits sewn onto the camou jacket were razor sharp and meant to discourage just that kind of familiarity.
“Baron,” J.B. said, “you’re making a mistake.”
Doyle laughed. “Then we’ll certainly find that out during the forthcoming investigation,” he said, “carried out by our own elite investigators under the direction of my good friend Tug. We’ll soon get to the bottom of this matter, and you can trust me on that.”
He put back his big-hatted head and laughed at his own cleverness and at his latest victims’ futile display of anger.
Too bad, Ryan thought, he didn’t know it was all for show.
* * *
RICKY SAT on the chair in the sec-booth overlooking the trade center floor. He had already slid back the window to clear his field of fire. He held his stubby-barreled DeLisle carbine ready across his lap, out of sight from below.
When the sec men made their move on his friends, he went to an even higher level of alert than he had been, which was quivering eager. Now, though, an odd calm settled on him.
Ryan had clenched both fists by his sides. Ricky had good eyes and had no difficulty seeing that from about forty yards away, nor did he have any trouble seeing it when Ryan suddenly stuck out his right thumb without moving the hand from beside his jeans-clad leg.
With practiced smoothness Ricky raised the carbine to his shoulder, thumbing off the safety as he did. Pulling the longblaster into a tight shooting configuration, with his left elbow properly placed directly below the foregrip, he got a flash picture over the open sights. As he did so, he gulped down a big breath.
He let it out to steady himself, caught it, squeezed.
The weapon bucked. The steel buttplate hit his shoulder, well padded by the puffy jacket he wore against the cold he hated.
The DeLisle made but the slightest whisper of sound. Far louder was Ricky’s reflex throwing of the bolt to eject the short, fat empty shell and slam in a new round as he rode the recoil and brought the longblaster back online.
His target went straight down. Immediately Ricky sighted on the man who stood to the chill’s right. That sec man turned his head to gawk at his inexplicably collapsed buddy lying in a black leather heap on the floor.
Ricky put a bullet in the second man’s left earhole. He fell as limply as the first.
Then the door lock clattered behind Ricky.
* * *
FROM THE WAY Baron Doyle was suddenly frozen in the act of drawing his hand back from the ammo box and the direction of his stare, more frowning concern than wide-eyed amazement—Ryan formed a quick flash picture in his mind.
He knew what was supposed to happen, too. That helped. But he knew well that what was supposed to happen didn’t always. He was already in motion when he heard the unmistakable crunching impact of a bullet entering a man’s head.
Ryan’s own head snapped around and he gazed over his left shoulder. A red-bearded guard with a shaved head was frowning down at the floor to his right, where Ryan guessed lay the huddled heap that a moment ago had been a brother sec man. Rank-and-file sec men weren’t usually recruited for their quick wits and discernation. A good sec boss had those things, and he wasn’t eager to see them expressed in his subordinates, unless it was one he was grooming as a successor.
This one didn’t seem to be on what Mildred would’ve termed the fast track to promotion. His eyebrows were creeping up his head as he grasped the fact that his buddy was dead, just about the time Ryan’s left boot heel slammed into his breastbone right over his heart and launched him backward.
Ryan felt a crunch, just before the man went flying backward into the mob of shoppers, knocking over a table full of metal parts that clattered to the floor. He might have stove in the man’s ribs, maybe even into the heart directly below. Then again, he’d known a man’s heart to be stopped by a powerful blow right over it.
It didn’t matter to him now. He followed through into a counterclockwise turn to face the other sec man who remained on his feet out of the six who had hemmed them in from behind. The man was grabbing Mildred’s beaded plaits from behind. Big mistake...
Worse, Sec Chief Tug had grabbed Krysty around the waist from behind and jammed a short-barreled revolver beneath her ear.
Ryan caught a quick impression of the crowded floor, of pale and dark brown faces turned their way in blank surprise. The very large number of weapons that the hefty sec crew posted around the trade center were lifting in the
direction of the companions.
And from high up at the rear of the vast and echoing floor came the sound of a handblaster shot.
* * *
RICKY MORALES GOT the bolt of his DeLisle carbine thrown about halfway home when it locked up tight. Though he still wasn’t all that seasoned a shooter, Ricky already knew his way around weapons malfunks. Even as his heart threatened to stop dead in his chest he realized what had happened. In his excitement he had short-shucked the empty, failing to yank the bolt back to its full extent and properly eject the spent casing before ramming home a fresh round off the top of the 10-round magazine. As short as the .45 ACP cartridges were, he’d never anticipated he could even do that.
But he had, and somehow instead of panicking he reacted.
A wiry sec man with a shock of dust-colored hair sticking up above shaved sides to his head gaped at him from the open door. As the wind reached inside to stab its icy claws into Ricky’s marrow, he grabbed for the sling of the longblaster hung over his narrow black-leather-clad back.
Clinging to the momentarily useless DeLisle with his left hand, Ricky was already fumbling his Webley handblaster from under his coat with his right. The man came up with an M-1 carbine.
As the barrel came level with Ricky’s face, the burly handblaster bucked in his hand. He hadn’t been aware of pulling the trigger.
The muzzle-flash underlit a look of shocked surprise in yellow.
Ricky wasn’t sure he’d actually hit the sec man. So making an effort to squeeze the trigger instead of just yanking at it, he went ahead and cranked through the rest of the six rounds in the blaster’s chambers.
By somewhere around number three the sec man vanished completely from Ricky’s sight. But the youth was in full-on shooting mode, and kept cranking out the big booming blasts until the hammer clicked on empty.
Only then in the ringing silence did he notice how deafeningly loud the shots were in the enclosed booth.
Without even popping open the top-break action to swap the empties for a fresh magazine of cartridges, Ricky jammed the blaster back in its holster. Somehow he managed not to drop it or spend more than a minor eternity getting it to fit back in. Then he grabbed the DeLisle with both hands, banged the buttplate hard on the windowsill and yanked the bolt hard for all he was worth.
Sometimes when a person jammed up a cartridge on a failure-to-eject, it stayed well and truly stuck. But this time the reflex tap-rack-bang drill his Uncle Benito had taught him worked its magic. The dented empty shell flew off to bounce tinkling on the floor. A loaded round slid butter-smooth into the waiting chamber.
Ricky raised the blaster to his shoulder. He knew his companions needed him more than ever.
* * *
HEADS TURNED at the sudden bellow of blasterfire from an utterly unexpected direction: high up at the back of the Doylesville trade center. Blasters turned with them.
A flash of fast red motion drew Ryan’s eye back around to what was now his left. He was in time to see Krysty, who was almost as tall as Tug, smash her head straight back into his nose. He grunted, and his grip around her weakened.
More importantly, when his attention had strayed up to the sec booth, his handblaster had slipped away from Krysty’s ear. Not that that made a load of difference; all of Ryan’s people knew what a bad idea actually touching someone with a blaster’s muzzle was. It let the victim know exactly where the weapon was pointed and made it dead easy to get out of the way of the bullets. If one had the presence of mind.
In danger, Krysty had the speed and chill purpose of a catamount. She twisted in her captor’s grip, grabbing his gun wrist with her left hand and pushing it toward the rounded ceiling.
Her right hand shoved her own snub-nosed Smith & Wesson 640 revolver into the pit of the Doylesville sec boss’s stomach, where she promptly blasted all five rounds through his gut.
That was the one time it helped—or didn’t hurt—to touch someone with a blaster: when you were blasting.
The sec boss fell to the floor puking blood that strangled his own screams of intolerable agony. Turning back to the table, Ryan saw that Mildred had also evaded her captor—and saw him falling, trailing a stream of blood and what was maybe a busted-off tooth, courtesy of a stroke from the steel-shod butt of J.B.’s shotgun.
The two goons backing Baron Doyle had been dealt with. Doc had the slim steel blade that had been concealed in his swordstick thrust through the throat of the man to Doyle’s left. The one on the right brought up a lever-action Winchester, and a terrifying roar slammed out from beside Ryan. It felt as if a spray of fine grit hit the left side of his cheek; he felt some patter off his eye patch. The side blast of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python was almost as damn deadly as what came out. But not quite; the sec man with the longblaster went over backward with a little hole in his front and a doubtless much larger one in his back.
The small army of sec men dotted around the giant room were for the moment fixing their attention on the booth where Ricky had just emptied his own big handblaster, presumably into one of their buddies. The place echoed to a barrage of shots that almost drowned out the panicked screaming of dozens of terrified customers.
Ryan paid no mind. Baron Doyle, his face chill-white behind his beard, was grabbing for the open box of grens.
“No, you don’t,” Ryan said. His big panga flashed from the sheath strapped under one arm.
Its heavy blade slammed into the tabletop and sunk in half an inch—and that was after chopping through the flesh and bones just above the baron’s thick wrist.
Blood sprayed over the table. Hot droplets splashed Ryan’s face as Doyle flailed his spurting stump. The baron grabbed at it with his remaining hand and staggered back toward the door through which he’d entered the center, howling like a tornado.
J.B. appeared next to the table, slamming the ammo box lid shut on the precious contents and sticking it under his arm.
The agonized yells of their baron began to penetrate the dim awarenesses of his sec man squad even through the yammer of their blasters and the roar of their own blood lust in their ears. They may have conspicuously failed to protect the man they were hired to guard, but as Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer handblaster he realized they were now looking to make up for the damage as best they could by killing his attackers.
Dozens of blasters swung their way.
Chapter Three
Curled up on the floor of the sec booth, in a half-fetal curl around the longblaster he clutched like a child would his teddy bear, Ricky said a prayer only he could hear over the terrible voices of all the blasters.
They were shooting at him and punching right through the relatively thin walls and even floor of the booth.
Some of the hard cases who had hung out in his uncle’s shop, to shoot the shit with Benito, had tried to impress upon Ricky the difference between cover and concealment. As quick-witted as he was, Ricky found that distinction somehow hard to grasp.
Not even the months he’d run with Ryan and the others had taught him quite the difference. But now he got it.
Lying there on the floor with shot-out window glass falling on and around him like giant razor-edged snowflakes, the pissed-off sec men couldn’t see him at all. That was concealment.
But the wood walls and floor offered almost no protection against their vengeful bullets. He could feel them punching through the planks all around him. He felt a couple yank at his coat like spiteful fingers.
The flimsy booth wasn’t providing any cover.
I’m dead. That phrase hammered in his brain louder even than his frantic, futile prayers and the blasterfire. It could only be a few heartbeats before some sec man struck an ace on the line. And Ricky Morales’s luck and brief life would run out at the same time.
And then...it stopped.
For a moment Ricky still
lay screaming and quivering. Then somehow he got control of himself enough to notice that nobody was shooting at him anymore.
He flinched as more shots cracked out. But even in his terror he recognized they came from farther away, even though still within the center.
My friends! I’ve left them in danger by acting like a little baby, he thought.
Cursing himself with a fluency that would’ve appalled his poor dead parents, he jumped up still clutching his DeLisle to his chest.
Not even considering what a fine target he’d make for any sec men still aiming their blasters his way, Ricky flung himself back to the now vacant window. His friends counted on him to give them fire support. He only prayed that he hadn’t let them down.
* * *
GRINNING LIKE A PALE DEMON, Jak stepped into Ryan’s field of view. In one white hand he held something that looked like a can, painted drab tan.
“Now?” he asked.
Ryan looked at all the sec men preparing to blast him and his friends. The only thing holding their fingers off their triggers was concern for hitting their baron, whose thrashing and screaming couldn’t be steadying their nerves. Sooner or later one would either remember to aim or they’d just cut loose regardless.
But the plan the master strategist Ryan Cawdor and his sly companion J. B. Dix had concocted in the event their little deal with the devil of Doylesville turned out as it had accounted for that, too.
Ryan wasn’t a soft man. His companions all knew that. Sometimes even they thought he acted too harsh, too stone-hearted. But he did what it took to keep them, and him, alive and struggling with their dream of eventual sanctuary and safety, which none of them could even clearly envision.
But he didn’t chill without need, nor was he cruel. At least, never for cruelty’s own sake.
