Jak held his own fire. There was no need for him to shoot. The lion hadn’t even scratched the carny chillers, and their ship was already sinking. Mebbe they had seen what the lion had done when it had gotten loose before, he thought. Or mebbe just the idea of what the beast was capable of made them crazy with terror. Bottom line: semiauto, high-capacity weapons, blind panic and no clear firing lanes were a recipe for self-inflicted disaster.
One of the rousties, his eyes bulging with fear, squeezed the trigger of his KG-99 over and over as he whirled, spraying a tight string of single shots through the chest of the man standing flatfooted and helpless in front of him. The multiple, close-range impacts lifted the guy off his feet and set him down four feet away, a look of astonished horror on his face. As his knees buckled and his shirtfront bloomed red, he managed to return fire. His two shots went wide of the guy who’d accidentally blasted him, but they hit one of the leggy women in the hip and thigh. She twisted away and dropped, unable to stand with a shattered pelvis. She writhed in the yellow dirt, her face ashen with shock, her mouth open, screaming.
The lion still didn’t chill. Ignoring the blaze of blasterfire, it played with the surviving five like a house cat with a brood of very stupid, very slow mice. One by one, it swept their legs out from under them, or batted them on the back of the head just hard enough to stagger them. It let them run a few yards toward cover, then hooked a single cruel claw in the back of their waistbands and dragged them back into the middle of the aisle. With dismissive, precise blows of its paw, it flattened them, one after another, facedown on the ground. The battering went on for several minutes until finally, all five chillers were on their hands and knees, unable to rise. Having lost their weapons, they gasped and sobbed, tears streaming down their cheeks.
Jak could see it in their eyes: they knew they lived or died at the whim of something far more terrible, far more merciless than they. Theirs were the faces of people lost at sea, floating far from shore. Doomed.
But the lion didn’t take their lives. It stood over them for a moment, panting softly, its long tail lashing, then it sat back on its haunches and began to clean itself. It wet the top of its huge paw with its tongue and rubbed it against its cheek and brow. As it did this, the idling-wag-engine sound rumbled up from its throat.
After a few seconds, one of the rousties began to stir. Jak drew a bead on the slowly moving man with the Python, but held his fire. He could see the chiller was unarmed and had no fight left. Head down, the roustie crawled over to Baldoona’s trailer and meekly climbed into the cage. After he pulled the door shut, he threw himself belly down in the semi-solid piles of scalie shit on the floor and tried his best to become invisible.
The four who were left on the ground were playing possum. Seeing one of their number make it to safety, realizing that this was their last opportunity to escape, they struggled to their feet and staggered away. Jak and the lion followed them around the end of the trailer. They watched the beaten quartet limp across the compound. As the chillers neared the foot of the berm, they started yelling at their comrades hidden along its ridge. They yelled for them not to shoot, then started clawing their way over the rubble to the top.
Jak raised the big Colt in a two-handed grip, bracing himself to take out targets of opportunity as the other group of ambushers laid down covering fire for their friends. Heads and weapons popped up, all right, but there was no shooting.
Wait.
Jak had already let off pressure on the wide combat trigger. He sensed that none of the rousties on the berm wanted to fight the lion. They didn’t even consider taking cover and massing their fire because they knew they couldn’t defend themselves. All they wanted was to get as far away as they could, as fast as they could. The berm-top shooters abandoned their hide and set out across the plain on a dead run, with their injured companions trailing behind.