Elsewhere, the battle raged on in a present that all involved knew could end for them at any second with just one wrong move.
Both Krysty and Mildred weren’t renowned for their skills with knives, and both women were finding the going tough. They had blades with them, handed out earlier in the trip by Margia, but they weren’t the experts that the Gate warriors had trained to be. Somehow, by some instinct the stickies could sniff this out, almost as if they could smell the apprehension coming off the women.
The larger proportion of stickies they attracted left some of the Gate warriors free to chill their attackers quickly and with a ruthless efficiency. Pangas and machetes hacked at heads after first disabling the attackers by severing their suckered hands with one swift blow of the highly honed blades. The Gate women were thus able to dispose of the stickies almost on a production line of chilling, and it wasn’t long before some of those closest to Krysty and Mildred were able to assist them in disposing of the vast numbers they had clustered around them.
Dean and Ryan were fighting back to back, the older Cawdor slashing at his enemies with his panga, cleaving skulls and arms with ease. At his back, his son fought with an equal savagery, only his age and relative lack of experience showing in his lower chill rate. He held a machete that he wielded with an economy of effort that showed he had studied the methods of Jak Lauren when he had watched the albino practice. Behind his father, Dean could almost have been a shadow, with the same sculpted musculature and broad shouldered build, smaller only because he hadn’t yet reached maturity, the curly hair glistening and dripping with the sweat of exertion. The only thing to separate the two was the livid and puckered scar down one side on Ryan’s face, disappearing into the empty and patch covered socket, while Dean still had both eyes.
J.B. was fighting alone, his Tekna knife wielded with a scientific accuracy that marked him as a mechanically minded man. The savagery of his strokes was controlled, directed at the most vulnerable points on his attackers so as to disable and kill with the minimum of effort. His wiry frame crackled with an electricity that made his usual mild-mannered appearance disappear, and he seemed almost to grow in stature as he fought. The Armorer knew the strong points of his weapon as an attack blade, knew the best way to angle each stroke so as to inflict the maximum amount of damage, and cut through his assailants as though they weren’t there.
The Gate were faring well against the army of stickies. So far, there had been no fatalities, as the stickies had been unprepared for the way in which the tribe had stood its ground, and for the manner in which the women had fought. The muties might have outnumbered the Amazons, but they didn’t have blades or blasters, and although they surrounded the Gate on all sides, they couldn’t easily break through their strong defensive formation. There was a number of minor injuries among the Amazons, but nothing that had disabled any of the warriors enough to bring them down and make them vulnerable to chilling.
Out in front, Gloria and Jak were setting the best possible example. The soulmate warriors who had forged a strong bond over the course of the trip were fighting superbly together. Each knowing that the other was there to cover their back meant that they could take chances that would otherwise have been too risky.
Jak’s hands were a blur of movement, the lethal leaf-bladed knives slicing through the soft flesh of the stickies with little or no resistance, cutting through to vital organs and severing them so that no amount of rapidly clotting blood could prevent death, penetrating eyes and soft flesh to cut into the even softer tissue of the brain. Those stickies who managed to dodge the flashing blades were met with kicks from his heavy combat boots that snapped necks and limbs, disabling them long enough to fall prey to Gloria’s panga.
The Gate queen herself was dispatching more than her fair share of stickies. Knowing that Jak was at her back gave her the confidence to take the offensive against the horde of muties, rather than lie back in defense and wait for them to come to her. Launching herself forward in a series of flying kicks, she snapped necks and knocked the muties to the ground, following this with a series of slashing moves from her panga that severed heads with ferocity. Her eyes blazed like the sunlit sky, and her mouth was opened in a roar of fury that echoed her movements.