James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

Krysty and J.B. were there to steady him, preventing him from falling back into the monstrously polluted, stinking watercourse.

“My good, good comrades My thanks. I would not have cherished tumbling into that brimming cesspit.” A dried leaf stuck to his lapel, and he plucked it off, allowing it to drift into the stream.

There was a puff of dirty yellow smoke and flame as the leaf ignited on contact with the water. Or what had once, possibly, been water.

“Gaia!” Krysty exclaimed. “I thought you might have got a soaking if you’d fallen in. I didn’t expect you to run the risk of spontaneous ignition.”

Doc smiled a little shakily. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” he said mysteriously.

Mildred laughed.

RYAN FOUND what he was looking for.

A broken pine, forked where it had been struck by lightning, provided a shooting platform about thirty feet in the air. It was easily accessible by the tumbled top half, which provided a simple ladder for him to climb.

Ryan shinnied up, the rifle bouncing on his back. He saw the muzzle-flash from the Oerlikon and flattened against the trunk of the pine as the half-dozen rounds whistled by, forty yards or so to his left, blowing a hundred-foot pine completely out of the ground.

He steadied himself in the fork and brought the Steyr SSG-70 to his shoulder. The bolt-action rifle fired a full-metal jacket 7.62 mm round, with ten in the clip. In the morning sunlight, there was little use for the night-scope, but the laser image enhancer was vital.

His initial guess at the range to the Oerlikon wasn’t far off. It looked like about six hundred and fifty paces across the wooded valley to the long-barreled gun.

Ryan put his right eye to the sight and squinted. A vague thought crossed his mind that it was lucky that it had been his left eye cut out by his brother. It was almost impossible, even for the best of marksmen, to fire a standard bolt-action rifle left-handed and left-eyed.

He eased off the safety and took up the first pressure on the trigger, bringing the sight around to cover the Oerlikon emplacement.

There was a group of at least fifteen or twenty men around the light artillery piece, several of them shifting it by hand, while a man in a horned helmet strutted around giving orders. It struck Ryan that this might be Mashashige’s renegade brother, Ryuku.

In which case, it would be a good idea to try to take him out early on.

The gun pit was the scene of frenzied activity. Before opening fire, Ryan used the laser sight to range around the wooded ground between himself and the ronin. He tried to spot some sign of Krysty and the others to see how far they’d gotten across the dead ground toward the enemy.

At first there seemed to be nothing moving among the deep shadows of the forest. Then he saw a flicker of light, a glimmer of white where there had been only blackness. Ryan focused on it, seeing that there was a splash of brilliant crimson close behind the magnesium flare that he knew was Jak Lauren. Krysty was right on his heels.

They were closer to the ronin than he’d expected, less than a hundred yards and moving cautiously upward.

“Time to get started on the chilling,” he whispered to himself.

He set the sight and calculated drift and windage, then took up the pressure on the trigger again, the walnut stock firm against his shoulder.

Ryan braced himself and squeezed the trigger, feeling the familiar jolting impact run through him, the muzzle jerking upward.

He worked the bolt to lever another round under the hammer, the ejected spent cartridge tinkling against a jagged branch of the shattered tree, glinting in the morning sunlight as it fell to the soft carpet of leaf mold.

He peered again through the sight, seeing to his chagrin that the samurai who had appeared to be in charge of the ronin was unwounded. At a quick first glance, it looked as if he’d completely missed.

Then he saw a man just to the left of his target clutch at his chest and fold onto the ground.