“Chill me, Salvo. Like you did Reeth. Before I start talking about Archons, the Trust, mat-trans gateways, about helping you to build a new world order of masters and slaves.”
Grant suddenly stepped away from the line, his Sin Eater trained on his friend. “Kane, I’m begging you. As your partner and your friend. Put away the blaster. Salvo told me you wouldn’t be harmed, and I believe him. If he meanl to hurt us, if he had planned the hit yesterday, I’d be dead by now. Right?”
He walked closer, voice low and beseeching. “He explained all of it to me, how that Preservationist bitch gave you a load of shit about what was on that disk you lifted, fed you a line about aliens”
Pain slithered through Kane as he watched Grant’s approach. “Stop. No closer.”
“You won’t shoot me, Kane.”
Kane raised his blaster, centering the bore on the middle of Grant’s forehead. “The hell I won’t. They’ve stolen your mind. Your will. I should have known the division conditioning was too deep. A superior officer tells you to spill a friend’s blood and you say, ‘How many gallons and in what color would you like it, sir?'”
“You’ve got it all wrong. Salvo talked and I listened. That’s all.”
“That’s right,” spoke up Salvo. “There’s no place for you to go. Tell me where you’ve stashed Baptiste, she’ll be taken into custody and I promise you that meaning will be restored to your life.”
Grant stopped walking. Barely four feet separated him from Kane. Matter-of-factly, he said, “You’ve got to make a decision, Kane. Now.”
Synchronized with his “Now,” Grant pivoted on his heel in a whiplash explosion of perfect coordination of muscle and reflexes. As he whirled, he brought his right hand up and under his left arm. Even before he had completed his turn, the Sin Eater blazed and roared.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Autofire raked the semicircle of Magistrates in a whipsawing wave. Grant hit a center Magistrate broadside, bowling him off his feet.
The Sin Eater in Kane’s hand spit flame and thunder, unleashing round after round of 9 mm slugs. One of the Mags stumbled and fell, and all of them voiced a garbled babble of screams and profanity.
The bullets didn’t breach the armor, but the kinetic shock was sufficient to numb them, maybe slam the air out of their lungs. And hurt like hell, too.
Return fire ripped the air around Grant, tearing through it in a frenzy, like a ground-level gale. A bullet snapped past his ear, sounding like the crack of a huge branch. He dived to his left.
Kane held down the trigger of his autoblaster, swinging the flame-belching barrel from left to right. Hot brass spewed from the ejector. He found himself subconsciously aiming for the red badges emblazoned on the left pectorals of the body armor. He glimpsed Grant on his knees a few yards away, a little to the rear of him, blasting away at the Mags still on their feet.
Wild rounds smashed into boxes and crates, filling the air with scraps of floating paper and wood particles. Flagstones shattered, the shards whining and buzzing in all directions. Bullets punched holes through the tin warehouse walls.
Salvo stitched Kane across the midriff with a zipper of slugs. They bruised him, beat him coughing to the floor. He rolled, came to his knees, his Sin Eater blowing a cavity in the floor at Salvo’s feet The exploding, sharp-edged bits of rock slashed his trouser legs, and he tangoed back, trying to shake the pain out of his legs, like a cat with wet paws.
Conditioning was a wondrous thing. Despite the heavy volume of fire erupting from all the blasters, the men were instinctively aiming to disable, not to kill. Mags chilling Mags, even Mags gone bad, was blasphemous, inconceivable.
Salvo hopped crazily around the base of the box pyramid, slapping at his stinging legs, screaming in maddened fury. “Chill them, you stupid bastards! Chill them !”
As if to punctuate his shrieked command, he drew a double-handed bead on Grant and held down the trigger. Grant backpedaled and plunged to the floor as flame sputtered from that deadly bore and a stream of 9 mm tumblers smashed up the flagstones around him, showering him with rock chips.