Kane waited, made himself hold off, even after every cell in his body demanded action. Then he gathered himself, coiling his body like a spring. With all the speed his years of training and honed reflexes had given him, he sprang into a squat, then to a crouch. The Sin Eater roared with a prolonged burst.
Pollard reacted almost instantaneously, pulling back on the yoke for a fast, frantic ascent, but Plexiglass pieces of the cockpit canopy flying away in flinders showed he absorbed some damage. As the chopper gained altitude, it revolved, turning the port away from the bullets. Kane kept on blasting, and flame flared from the tail boom as an exhaust cowl was smashed away.
The overstressed engine whined, missed and cut out altogether. The Deathbird’s sudden rise halted, as though it had bumped into a transparent roof over the canyon. Listing from side to side, it sank from view behind the ramparts. Kane waited for the sound of the crash.
When, after a few seconds, it still hadn’t come, he bit back a curse, turned and ran up the canyon to rejoin his companions. They didn’t have much farther to go, but they still had a lot to do.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kane and Grant led the two women on a circuitous route through the Cliff Palace ruins. Brigid kept slowing to examine the shapes of the doorways, the layouts of the kivas.
“Starborn, that’s what the Anasazi tribe who built this place called themselves,” she remarked, apropos of nothing. “They disappeared without a trace nearly eight hundred years ago.”
Partly because of the stabbing pain in his leg, partly because he was exhausted and stressed out, Grant whirled on her, raging, “This isn’t a field trip! Pollard and his gunman could be right behind us!”
“So what?” she demanded. “Don’t we outnumber them?”
“We don’t outgun them! They’ve got Sin Eaters and Copperheads, both with full loads. Compared to that firepower, we’ve got shit!”
Brigid glowered at him, but she didn’t pause to examine anything more.
They reached the bottom of the palace itself, and Kane nimbly scaled the stone niches, waited for the others to climb up through the embrasure, then moved to the stairwell cut into the cliffside. It was very dark, and Grant put on his treated glasses, pulling his flashlight from a pocket, as well. Kane’s image-enhancer sensor lit his way adequately, if not satisfactorily.
The metal door was open, and he pushed through it into the tunnel. The neon light strips stretching along the ceiling were dark. As he had only two nights before, Kane stalked along the tunnel. He went just a few feet before he stopped, listening and sniffing. He heard something but didn’t smell anything. By all rights, he shouldn’t have heard anything and should have smelled something very unpleasant. The tunnel should have been redolent with the stench of decomposing bodies. As a general rule, Magistrates didn’t clean up after themselves, so somebody must have removed the bodies.
The sound he heard was very faint and innocuous, like papers ruffling. Turning, he used hand signals to inform the others to hang back. Kane walked down the tunnel on the balls of his feet. When the passageway opened onto the scaffold assembly, he dropped flat and belly-crawled forward. The bruises made by Salvo’s bullets twinged. His elbows and knees made near inaudible scrapes against the wood.
He peered down into the square room below. At first the light-intensifying polymer of his visor showed him nothing but bullet-riddled equipment and boxes. The corpses of Reeth and his crew, including his stickie strong-arm, were nowhere in view. Then a figure shifted in the shadows, at the extreme limit of his helmet’s image enhancer.
The figure was slight of build and very slim. Above the narrow shoulders rose a smooth, domed cranium, jet black and bald. The skull tapered down to a sharp chin, so the impression of the head was of an inverted teardrop.
The eyes were protuberant, completely round like an insect’s, and between the large eyes was a pair of insectlike antennae spread in a “V.” Kane caught his breath as the figure moved closer, deeper into the range of his enhancer. He got a better look at it.