“What…?” Ryan furrowed his brow seeing this.
Next to him, Krysty felt her sentient tresses move and loosen on her skull, flowing and moving with the agitation of change in the air.
“They’re coming out,” Gloria said, expressing something that was now plainly visible in a voice that spoke of her disbelief. “Why the fuck are they—?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ryan snapped. “We’ve got them on our terms now.”
The one-eyed warrior and the Gate queen had no idea why the Illuminated Ones had changed their battle plan, but they knew that the odds had now tipped their way.
On both sides of the camp, the backs of both wags opened, and seven Illuminated Ones spilled from the tailgate, each clutching a laser rifle. They were dressed much as the companions remembered them from their previous brief encounter, back near the villages of Raw and Samtvogel. The colorful one-piece battle suits of a shiny fiber, each suit a different color, were topped by opaque glass helmets that obscured their faces.
The Gate warriors were stilled in their tracks, taken aback by the sudden apparition that stepped from the war wags. The companions, however, knew exactly what to expect.
The Illuminated Ones spread out in a fan formation and raised their blasters. They moved swiftly and took advantage of the surprise their sudden appearance had caused.
On the northeastern side, Jak was already within reach of the outriders, and could see that their surprise had made them sitting targets.
“No! Move!” he yelled, raising his .357 Magnum Colt Python on the run, and letting off a shot that rang over the heads of the stunned Gate outriders.
Audible in the sudden quiet on both sides of the camp, it was a shot that broke the silence and spurred all into action.
The first laser blasts were deadly, crackling beams of light, intensely bright in the darkness, that scored the air and caught some outriders, raising shrill cries of pain and chilling. The night suddenly reeked of charred flesh and death.
But the Illuminated Ones had lost the edge of surprise. As soon as Jak’s shot rang through the darkness, it snapped the Gate warriors back to a reality where they were up against a seen enemy rather than an unknown quantity. The fact that this enemy had strange weapons rather than the usual blasters or blades was unimportant. All that mattered was that there were more of the Amazons than the Illuminated Ones.
And numbers counted.
Gloria, covering the ground in long, swift strides that belied her size, soon reached Jak.
“You’ve fought them before,” she breathed rapidly. “Tactics?”
The albino snapped a shot at one of the figures clad in bright material. In the reflected light from the wag, the material made the Illuminated Ones an easy target. The heavy slug tore at the material of the figure, ripping the brightly colored fabric at the shoulder and raising a spray of blood where it gouged a lump of flesh. The gunner screamed and dropped the laser blaster.
“Blasters not always shoot straight, can’t always control,” Jak snapped. “Keep moving, not let them take aim, hit hard.”
“Simple enough,” Gloria replied before letting loose with a string of cries and whistles that signaled tactics to her warriors. A series of instructions that could faintly be heard on the other side of the camp by Margia, who amplified her sister’s orders by repeating the signals to the warriors on her side of the divide.
Whooping, the Gate Amazons used their handblasters to pick off the Illuminated Ones who were distracted by shots from Ryan’s Steyr. Two were chilled immediately, while another was hit in the left leg and arm. With so many down from their small number, the remaining fit warriors realized that there was nothing for them to do except to effect a retreat into the safety of the war wag.
One of them started to strafe the area with the laser rifle, sweeping the pulsing beam of light in a wide arc.
“Down!” Gloria yelled as she hit the earth, the beam sweeping over her head so closely that she could feel the heat of it as she fell.
It was unnecessary for her to cry—more instinct than conscious thought—as most of her warriors had already hit the ground, as had Ryan, Krysty and Jak. Krysty raised her Smith & Wesson blaster and took aim at the enemy rifleman who was laying down the covering fire. She squeezed gently on the trigger to keep recoil to a minimum and maximize her chances of an accurate shot at the distance and visibility she had. By a quirk of fate, the man was saved by the way in which he was firing, as Krysty’s slug was prevented from hitting him in the chest by the arc of his own fire, cannoning into the metal of his laser rifle and wrenching it from his grasp. The blaster flew harmlessly away to his right, and he grasped at his wrist, broken by the impact and force with which the rifle had been torn from him.