“Earth moving?” he asked.
J.B. considered that. “No. I can feel the shaking, but it’s going on for too long. Biggest quake I ever knew only lasted about a minute or so.”
“Then what?”
Both men stood together, one on either side of the big gun barrel, staring toward the dust and the noise.
It was Ryan who solved the mystery, a second before J.B. also realized what was coming their way.
“Buffalo,” he said.
It was only possible to make out the animals leading the stampede, all of the others invisible within the impenetrable blanket of reddish dust. They were big animals, full-grown, running at a full gallop, heads down, their hooves pounding the dirt behind them to fine powder.
As they swept around the lowest part of the bluff to the right, the herd was around six hundred yards away, heading straight toward the parked wag, with nowhere else to go, along the narrow spit of land.
Ryan’s combat-honed brain made the calculations before he’d even begun to think consciously about the enormous danger that he and J.B. were facingat least thirty miles an hour, around one-third of a mile in around
“Forty seconds!” he yelled above the swelling thunder of the buffalo.
To drop into the driver’s seat and start up the engine would take at least fifteen of those seconds, then to get the wag moving at even walking speed would be another ten to fifteen seconds. To reach forty miles an hour and keep ahead of the stampede would be close on a minute.
“No time,” shouted J.B., who’d just reached the same conclusion.
“Inside and lock everything.” Ryan led the way into the turret, hesitating a moment as his holster snagged on the rim of the steel hatch.
J.B. was so close behind that his boots clipped Ryan’s fingers. “Closing down,” the Armorer shouted, the hatch dropping with a resonant clanging noise.
For a moment there was the illusion that the threat from the stampeding herd was over, the sound of the hooves muffled by the armasteel walls. But the vibration was stronger, growing with every second.
“I’ll seal the ob slits as well,” Ryan said. “Strap yourself in.”
He slid the chromed tongue of the safety belt into the waiting mouth, feeling the click. All of the ob slits had closed, with the exception of the one directly in front of him, facing the oncoming herd. Ryan had left that on manual override, hand on the control, ready to shut it at the last moment. He wanted to watch the rushing wave of animals for as long as possible. The inside of the LAV-25 was almost completely dark.
His brain had been mentally ticking away the seconds, reaching beyond thirty.
“Ten to go,” he said.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” J.B. responded quietly.
The LAV-25, partly loaded for combat, weighed in around the eleven-ton mark.
A big mutie buffalo, full-grown, topped the ton.
It was beyond calculation how many animals there were in the galloping herd, but Ryan’s instant guess had put them well over one thousand, perhaps ten times that number.
One of his last sentient thoughts before the first jarring impact was to wonder whether, given enough time, Doc’s mathematical brain could have worked out details like momentum, inertia and deceleration, and what the odds were against their surviving.
He slammed shut the last opening of the armawag and braced himself.
In a bar in a gaudy just near the western foothills of the Sierras, Ryan had once been coldcocked by a sec man swinging a two-by-four at the back of his head.
The sensation of everything coming loose inside his skull was almost identical to being in the wag when the first wave of the buffalo hit.
Ryan’s good eye shuddered in its socket, and every one of his remaining teeth seemed to become loose in his jaws.
All of the vital organs of his body were on the move, liver, lungs, bowels and heart.
The back of the seat rapped him smartly across the head and consciousness slipped beyond Ryan’s control for a few moments.
When he blinked his eye open again, the world was pitchy black and he was upside down, supported by the straps. For a moment he thought that he’d been making a jump from a gateway and something had gone drastically wrong.