“Always better to avoid trouble. I thought you’d know that, even if others don’t,” Margia snapped, with a glare at Jak that could have dropped the albino where he trod, if Jak Lauren could be affected by such things.
Gloria, who had spent some time since the fight between her sister and Mildred keeping them apart, didn’t bother to answer. She looked at Jak, whose eyes met hers with the message that Margia couldn’t rattle him. The Gate queen accepted this, and was about to ask her sister why she had strayed to the front of the column rather than stay back with the armory wags when her attention was distracted by a cry from Tammy.
“On the edge—right hand, just to the rear… Dunno what, but there’s a lot of it.”
Ryan spun at the same moment as the warrior queen, and could see that there was movement on the edge of the plain.
“Not just there, over to the left, too.” J.B. called, pulling binoculars from the canvas bag he was carrying. Focusing them, he whispered to himself, “Dark night, what the fuck are they?”
Ryan’s monocular gaze tried to penetrate the vast distance and pick out detail, but even with the piercing gaze of that blue orb, the exact detail of the mass movement was still indistinguishable.
“J.B., quick,” he snapped, holding out his hand. The Armorer handed him the binoculars, and Ryan raised them to his eye and the useless socket. “Fireblast! I don’t believe it—more of the fuckers, but worse than before.”
“More of what fuckers?” Mildred asked.
Gloria, shading her eyes with one hand and focusing her sharp blue gaze on the far side of the plain, said simply, “Stickies. More mutie than before.”
Ryan handed Mildred the binoculars, and the woman looked through them. To her, it appeared that the massed group of stickies had been in some way surgically or genetically altered like the ones they had encountered on their first meeting with the Gate. The shapes of the heads seemed bulbous on some, and others had a stronger musculature than the average stickie.
“Well?” Doc asked. He was now leaning in close to Mildred.
“Like the others, maybe more so.” Doc nodded, agreeing with himself on some point that he wouldn’t share. “That would make sense. Let the first ones go as a field experiment, then keep the new batch closer to home, easier to observe…and to act as guard dogs.”
“At least this gives us time to prepare our defenses,” Ryan observed. Then, to Gloria, “Well?”
The Gate queen gave the one-eyed warrior her lopsided smile. “My show, then?”
“Your people,” Ryan answered. With a brief nod, the woman turned to her people. She signaled them with a series of whistles, conveying her messages and instructions at high speed.
The men of the tribe formed the wags into a circle, protecting the armory, the food stores and the sacred papers and writings of the tribe. Jon and Petor passed out rifles and machine blasters to the other men, while the women of the tribe took formation around the wags. There was little cover that could be afforded to them, but they had the advantage of blasters, while the stickies who were advancing at speed across the plain from all sides carried only sticks and sharpened flints and stones. Glancing around at the advancing horde, Mildred noted two things. First, the stickies were also advancing from the area where the tribe had just emerged onto the plain, which suggested that they had the cunning of the previous horde of stickies, something added by surgery and genetic manipulation to the stickie psyche. Second, and perhaps more worrying in an immediate sense, was that the tribe and Ryan’s people were vastly outnumbered. Even with their superior strategic sense and their blasters, there was still a chance of the stickies breaking through and overwhelming them on sheer numbers.
It wasn’t going to be an easy battle.
“Hold fire until they’re in range,” Margia cried. “Every bullet must count.”
The tension was acute as the women of the Gate and Ryan’s people stood firm, blasters ready but holding back until the last moment to begin fire. They were fanned out in a circle, but kept it tight and close to the wags.