by James Axler
Ryan caught a flash bead on the officer and shot three times. The man vanished from the saddle even as his men got their horses’ heads turned back the way they came and began galloping out of the death zone.
“To me!” Ryan shouted. “Let the horses go and form a defensive circle!”
Spattering a few shots after the departing riders, his friends complied. Ryan swung down from his saddle, yanked his pack off from behind the cantle and slapped his horse on the rear. It raced away.
Ryan heard Jak yell, “Coming back!” and knew that the lure of whatever reward they’d been offered for this sudden betrayal was great enough to overcome even their fear of death.
“What do we do now?” asked a big-eyed Ricky, who’d emptied his Webley and now clutched his fat-barreled carbine to his chest.
“Fight a lot, son,” J.B. said. “Mebbe die a lot.”
He chuckled dryly as he checked the load on the Uzi machine pistol he’d unshipped from his own pack.
“You weren’t planning on living forever, were you?”
* * *
FACE FLUSHING HOT, Cody Turnbull stepped forward.
“Lieutenant Peters,” he said formally, “kindly take this man into custody.”
“Sir!”
Al turned to look at his second in command. His face drained of color and his burly shoulders slumped.
“Et tu, Cody?” he said.
Cody stiffened. “My duty is to the Alliance, Baron,” he said. “That overrides all other concerns.”
A shrill caw of laughter followed that statement. Its note of wild malice—and madness—sent shivers down Cody Turnbull’s spine.
Scarcely less taken aback by its source, Al turned his ashen face slowly toward his wife.
“Jessie Rae? Sweetheart—”
“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me, you filthy boar hog!” she yelled. Her lovely face was bright red beneath high-piled gold curls and twisted into a shape that was anything but lovely. Had he not seen the woman herself walk into the room mere moments before, Cody would never have recognized this demon-masked creature as his light of love.
Al sagged back in his chair at the fury of her verbal assault. She leaped to her feet.
“You’ve pawed my naked flesh for the last time!” she shrieked. “You’ve poked and prodded my cunny with that nasty cock for the last time.”
Cody’s jaw fell open. Even Asaro was looking aghast, his normally dark features sallow. Only Phineas McCormac seemed to take Lady Sierbert’s shocking outburst in stride. He had his hands in the pocket of his gold-striped uniform trousers, leaning slightly forward on the balls of his booted feet, watching with a sort of detached interest.
At least Cody hoped it was that.
“Now you’ve fumbled and mismanaged your way out of command,” she shouted, “and now I get to wash my hands of you! Do you hear me? We’re done! And we’re going to march the army right out of camp before the sun is high, hunt down that little asshole Kylie and hang his hide up to dry, then take the treasure all for our own! And you won’t have any part of it, you miserable fuck.”
“But Jessie Rae,” Al protested. “Why are you acting like this? Haven’t I loved you? You can’t be part of this dirty scheme.”
“Part of it? Whose idea do you think it was?”
From the corner of his eye Cody saw a side of McCormac’s mouth twitch up in a smug, fat smirk. Cody refused to think that might imply anything.
“But,” the baron said, “I tried to give you everything.”
Jessie Rae’s small right fist came up from within the folds of her skirt. It held a two-shot derringer, which erupted with a colossal crack and a ball of flame that set the baron’s eyebrows smoking.
“Yes,” she said, looking straight into eyes with a blue hole suddenly between them, “and so you didn’t give me what every woman wants—a man strong enough to tell her no.”
For a moment Colonel Cody Turnbull could only stand rooted. “Wait,” he said weakly, then louder, “Wait! This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Don’t be such a pussy, Cody,” Jessie Rae said, turning a look of luminous contempt on him. “It was always supposed to happen this way. We just didn’t tell you because you’re so weak-livered.”
“I heard shots!” a new voice cried. “I— Baron!”
Cody turned to see Lieutenant Owens standing in the door to the parlor. His hat was off, his blond hair in disarray. His green eyes were wide in horror.
And in his hand he held a Peacemaker.
* * *
RALLIED BY GREED—and mebbe equally by fear of the consequences failure might bring them—the ten or so surviving troopers came swarming back toward the companions.
“Down!” Ryan shouted. Whether they were badly trained, or just too caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the troopers were clearly not going to do the smart thing: get off their horses and shoot when they had a chance to hit something. Instead they clearly meant to overwhelm the companions with speed and superior numbers. And probably crush them under their horses’ hooves.
The cavalrymen started spattering shots as soon as they began moving. Ryan saw a horse rear up shrieking, then fall straight forward onto its face and lie still, tumbling its rider over its neck. Ryan didn’t hear a shot from his group, then realized the animal had been downed by Ricky with that tricky silent longblaster of his.
When first Ryan had laid eye on the homemade DeLisle, he’d dismissed it as a gimmick. And once again the weapon—and the kid who carried it—had proved him wrong.
A ball sang like an angry bumblebee past Ryan’s right ear, and he felt a slight tug. From the corner of his eye he saw a curl of hair, clipped free by the projectile, flutter away.
Then he was landing hard on his belly. It felt like his right upper side exploded. He felt wet, and realized he’d probably torn the half-cleaned wound open all over again.
Well, he was unlikely to bleed out from it. They’d either win this somehow and he’d get it bound up again. Or, well, a still heart didn’t pump blood.
Ignoring the pain and the leakage, he rolled onto his injured side to bring his SIG-Sauer to bear on the charging horsemen.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Till!” Cody Turnbull shouted. “Hold on!” Though he couldn’t see a reason on Earth why the eager young officer should hold on.
Tillman Owens began to swing up his handblaster.
Two shots roared out. The flashes came from Cody’s right. As the young officer spun down, still clutching his blaster, Cody spun to see Lieutenant Peters standing with a look of satisfaction on his flamboyantly mustached face, and a line of blue smoke drooling upward from the muzzle of his handblaster.
“What have we done?” Cody could only ask weakly.
Phineas McCormac rolled into amiably ambling motion. He tugged at the derringer in Jessie Rae’s hand. She clung to it a moment, then let go.
“Convenient,” the baron and nominal colonel said conversationally as he walked toward the fallen lieutenant. Owens was lying on his chest with his face turned to his right and a look of horror still in his wide-open eyes. A pool of blood spread around him.
Grunting with effort, McCormac hunkered down at Owens’s left side. His left hand was down by his hip, fingers up. Gently McCormac pressed the derringer into his palm and folded his unresisting fingers over its small curved grip.
“Here’s how it happened, you see,” he said, placing his hands on his thighs to aid in the considerable project of heaving his bulk back aloft. “Maddened by his general’s inactivity, the gallant young Lieutenant Owens snapped. He assassinated Baron Al with a hideout blaster, then tried to shoot his way clear before being felled by the heroic Lieutenant Peters.”
He turned a sanctimonious smile to Cody Turnbull, who had begun to tremble with reaction.
“Or should I say, Captain Peters?” the fat baron said. “How can you do anything less for the avenger of our noble, if toward the end tragically misguided, commander in chief, General Tu
rnbull.”
Jessie Rae moved to stand smiling beside the presumptively promoted Peters. He slid his left arm around her narrow waist. She rested her golden head on his shoulder.
Outrage erupted from Turnbull. “What’s going on here? This is outrageous. I can’t—”
“And then again,” McCormac said with a shrug, “we can always revise history again. On the fly, as it were.”
He turned, holding a slim Colt blaster in his hand. The weapon was leveled at Turnbull’s lean gut.
“In the new version,” McCormac said, still smoothly smiling, “Colonel Turnbull becomes the cowardly assassin of his beloved commanding officer, and young Owens the hero who died trying to stop him. Does that version of events appeal to you more, Colonel?”
Cody turned an accusing glare on the true object of his wrath. “You mean you’d go along with replacing me again,” he told Jessie Rae, “the way you replaced me with him?”
“Oh, I didn’t replace you with anybody, Cody honey,” Jessie Rae said. “Randy’s been my man all along.”
“Then what about your promise—” Cody stopped dead. He realized there was no way he could finish that sentence.
She laughed. It was venomous music.
“You’re being offered a sweetheart of a deal, Cody Turnbull,” she said. “Swallow your pride and your principles—if you still pretend to have any—and accept a role as figurehead commander in chief of the Alliance Army. Or—” she shrugged “—be dead. It seems a pretty straightforward choice to me, but then again I’m only a woman. Weak-willed and simpleminded.”
It was as if Cody deflated. His shoulders sagged forward. The military starch left his spine. His bony chin sunk toward his collarbone.
This is how it feels, he thought, to have all your pride drain out of you at once.
He sighed. Then straightening, he pulled back his shoulders and raised his head.
“What are my first orders to be, then, since I gather you’re the ruling junta?”
Asaro looked to McCormac. The portly colonel nodded in turn to Jessie Rae.
“What that fat fool Al should have ordered long ago. The whole army up and on the march.”
Cody nodded. “To bring the Protectors to battle and destroy them.”
Her laugh was shrill. “Of course not. That can wait! The treasure first, you fool.
“Once it’s in our hands, we’ll have no trouble crushing Kylie and his pathetic Grand Army—then conquering the whole wretched Association. And maybe just getting rid of that bitch sister of mine once and for all.”
* * *
SHOTS MOANED OVER Ryan’s head. He held his SIG-Sauer up, gritting his teeth against the agony pounding in his wounded shoulder. He was a decent shot left-handed, not the ace he was with the right, and the P-226’s 9 mm projectiles didn’t have much punch at longer ranges.
He saw another rider go down, without the accompanying noise of a shot from his side, now spread out and spread-eagled in the grass. The new kid’s steady, all right, he thought with approval.
The Uplander cavalry—sec men—were pretty hard-core. They’d taken losses bad enough to send most units running for cover. But still they came on, whooping, shooting and waving their big curved swords in the milky dawn light.
To Ryan’s right, J.B. got up on one knee. He hosed the approaching riders with quick bursts from his Uzi. One horse reared, screaming, and fell. Another fell forward, tumbling into a flailing of limbs. The rider screamed in turn as his mount’s weight crushed him. The beast itself heaved violently and lay still. It had broken its neck.
That was too much at last for the Uplander forces. They now outnumbered their quarry scarcely, if at all. They turned their horses’ heads around and rode for camp as fast as the animals could run.
Silence fell heavy over the dewy grass. Slowly, Ryan lowered his blaster.
His friends began to rise like phantoms from the grass. Awkwardly Ryan thrust his blaster back in its holster. J.B. joined him, his stubby machine pistol slung and bouncing against his hip. He stretched down a hand. Gratefully, Ryan gripped his forearm and hauled him to his feet.
Ryan swayed. J.B. caught him by the arm and without comment helped steady him until he nodded.
The others were standing with weapons lowered but ready to swing into action should trouble abruptly return. Ricky Morales kept turning left and right, surveying the carnage in blank-eyed wonder.
“Twenty of them,” he said. “Twenty men. On horses. And we won.”
“If we survive, we win,” J.B. said. “That’s pretty much the whole story, right there.”
“But none of us are even wounded,” the boy said.
Ryan frowned. He was too messed up from the wound he’d suffered in the showdown in the gaudy.
“That true?” he demanded. “Everybody fit to fight?”
Everybody was. Jak had a bruised face but shook his head when asked if he needed help.
“Jak,” Ryan said, “start rounding up the horses.”
Jak nodded and moved off.
“We’re good at what we do,” Krysty told Ricky. “And we work well together.”
She looked over at Ryan critically. “You need to sit and let Mildred take care of you.”
Even though he’d just gotten up, Ryan was glad to sit down again. He was still a bit light in the head and loose in the joints.
Mildred bustled up. Krysty helped her remove Ryan’s coat and open his shirt. The bandages beneath had come loose, and Ryan’s side ran with blood.
“We’d better find this redoubt soon,” Mildred said, cleaning the wound with a fresh rag form her pack and water from a canteen. “This is going to come close to using up our bandages, if nothing else.”
“Best move on soon,” J.B. said, standing watch nearby, looking in the direction of the Uplander camp. “Those boys might come back with some buddies.”
Ryan nodded, then raised his right arm slightly to allow Mildred to wrap a fresh turn of bandage around his shoulder and chest. It hurt, but he was still alive to feel it, which was most of what counted.
“So what now, Ryan?” Mildred asked as she cut the bandage with her knife.
Ryan chuckled, then winced. “Well, we’re sure not going back for our pay.”
Like the Armorer, Krysty was standing guard as Mildred worked on Ryan. “Would Baron Al really put a price on our heads after what we’ve done for him?”
“You know as well as I do how far a body can rely on a baron’s gratitude,” Ryan said. “Which is as far as you can throw a war wag. Usually. I agree about Al, though. I doubt he had anything to do with this.”
“Okay, let me help you get your shirt on,” Mildred said. “And I sensed there was a ‘but’ in there.”
“Somebody sure as nuke shit offered those men a bounty for our hides,” Ryan said. “Fact they were sec men doesn’t strike me as a good sign. I’d say that means either somebody’s replaced Al, or somebody pretty high up feels strong enough to make a play like this on his own hook. Which in turn suggests it’s only a matter of time until Al’s replaced for sure.”
“Surely not so soon after he won the battle for them?” Mildred said. “And probably the war?”
“Politics,” Ryan said. “Especially in alliances of barons like the two sides are made up of, everybody’s always got one eye skinned for his own interests. Or even his own ego. I’d say somebody calculates Al’s just about used up his usefulness. And a lot of important people may worry Al’s gotten too big for his britches. Too powerful with the grunts and the peasant types.”
Mildred shook her head. “Back in my day,” she said, “we hoped humankind would evolve out of that sort of petty behavior by this time.”
“One might argue human behavior has followed a retrograde path,” Doc said sadly. “Although I suspect the truth to be, we act much as we have always acted since coming down from the trees. Although humankind’s present circumstances do conduce to an added degree of ruthlessness.”
Feeling stronger,
Ryan pulled his shirt the rest of the way on after Mildred helped feed his right arm into a sleeve. It was bloody on the right side but he’d live with that. He stood up by himself. She refastened the sling that had come loose from his arm during the fight, and stayed slung about his neck.
Jak came back riding his horse and herding their other mounts. Ricky was with him. He had his DeLisle slung and a dazed look on his young face.
“Right,” Ryan said. “Time to move.”
“Where to?” Krysty asked.
He swung up into the saddle and shrugged. “Away. Find a place to lie up and rest during the day, take stock when we’re in a bit better shape.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll live,” he said. “Been hurt worse, got less care. Don’t feel as sick as I was for a bit despite the fight. Some sleep’s what I need now.”
Mildred muttered her take on that but said nothing openly.
“One thing’s sure,” Ryan said as his friends began to circulate, quickly shaking down the chills for useful plunder. “We need to find the redoubt now, get stores replenished—if any are available there—and shake the dust of this whole little war off our boots.”
“Won’t be easy with two whole armies out looking for us,” Krysty said.
J.B. laughed. His companions all looked at him.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “however angry Baron Jed might be with us, and whoever’s after our hides in the Uplander camp, it’s not gonna be us they’re looking for.”
“The redoubt?” Krysty asked.
“The rumor’s out,” Ryan said. “We learned that back in the gaudy. The kind of supplies Old Pete made the place out to have could put whoever grabs it on top of the whole heap, regardless of how things stand now.”
“So fill me in,” Mildred said. “Doesn’t this mean we’re racing these two armies to find the redoubt? While making sure they don’t find us?”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” J.B. said. “Another is, why should we look when we got hundreds of people to do it for us?”
