It disabled her at a crucial moment, especially as the increasing deadweight of the mutie dragged her forward and off balance, no matter how hard she dug in. It was all the encouragement the others needed, as they swarmed over her and pulled her even more off balance.
Mildred stumbled forward, her free arm flailing to strike out and away at as many as she could, her plaits whipping around her head and blurring her vision as the fetid breath and sharp teeth nipped at exposed flesh.
How she would get out of this, she had no idea, but she refused to panic, knowing that as long as she retained some kind of calm and kept striking out she could get lucky, remove enough of them with one good haymaker to give her the time to scramble back to her feet. Maybe.
Doc, on the other hand, was faring better than perhaps would have been thought. He was wily, and the very fact that he always teetered on the brink of sanity meant that he was sometimes better equipped to keep hold of his reflexes in moments of great stress. This was one of those times.
Although Doc carried the LeMat percussion pistol, the shot charge of which would have ripped the life from a fairly large group of stickies with little problem, his racing mind realized that he wouldn’t have enough time to draw the large blaster and then discharge it accurately before the group was upon him. He decided within the blink of an eye that his only option was to trust the blade.
Eschewing his blaster, Doc drew the swordstick from the silver lion’s-head cane that had been assisting him in his passage. The blade of tempered Toledo steel, finely honed and gleaming in the late afternoon rays of the sun, cut through the air in a preparatory series of shapes that betrayed Doc’s fencing skills, and seemed to have a temporarily mesmerizing effect on the group of stickies who had singled out the old man.
It was for less than a second, but it gave Doc enough of an opportunity to take guard and size up the potential targets. Five of them were directly in front of him, with one off to his left and attempting to flank him. It crossed his mind that a stickie with intelligence was a rare thing…a thought that he dismissed with a sudden pivot of the heel and a thrust and parry that inscribed a slashed arc across the white flesh of the stickie’s throat. Hot blood gushed out onto the grass, staining it a dull crimson.
It was no longer that most dangerous of things, a clever stickie…now merely chilled.
Doc turned his attention to the main group. They attacked as a mass, and Doc swept an arc of the blade across them, trying to inflict the maximum damage with the minimum of effort, realizing that the one thing he, of all the companions, couldn’t afford to do was waste effort and energy in such a battle.
Although he inflicted flesh wounds that made the stickies yell and squeal in agony, he was unable to deliver a chilling blow. The fact that they attacked in such a mass meant that they—perhaps inadvertently—protected one another, preventing him from piercing vital organs. He was able to keep them at bay, but for how long? He grinned in a humorless, vulpine sneer, his white teeth exposed in grim determination. Doc hadn’t come this far to be defeated easily by a bunch of stickies. If the whitecoats of Operation Chronos couldn’t see the end of him, if Cort Strasser couldn’t see the end of him, if every human enemy they had encountered couldn’t see the end of him, then he would be forever damned if he would let a bunch of stickies finally snuff out the life of Dr. Theophilus Tanner.
It was a thought that would keep him going: the question was for how long.
And where would help come from?
THE ANSWER to Doc’s silent question—the question that all of the companions, in their own way, had asked themselves—came from an unexpected source.
The noise of their battle had obscured all else, and they were unable to hear the progress of a large group of people through the forest. Now they emerged, both from the path that Jak had picked out for his group, and also from the bushes and treetops that the stickies had so recently used. Using the noise of the fight in the enclosure to mask their own progress, they formed a pincer movement that also saw them close off the open end of the enclosure, cutting off any escape the stickies might try to make into the open veld beyond.