Over the years, he’d heard different stories about how the man had come to be so horribly disfigured, with that skanky little ear, all shriveled and puckered like an albino bat’s butthole. Some said that his own mother had done it to him, shortly after his birth. Held him by his heels and dipped him into a bucketful of acid rain she’d collected, trying to chill him. Some said that he had done it himself by accident when he was stoned on jolt. Passed out and fell into a bonfire. Some said that norms had caught him bloody-handed and stacked hot coals on his head, trying to melt his murdering cannie brains. For his own part, Spadecrawler never said a single word about it, one way or another. Whatever the ugly truth was, it didn’t matter a blood drop. From the nose up, the man was largely fucked, and he’d stay fucked until the day his running buddies ate him, nasty scar and all.
Assuming there were buddies left to do the job.
The way Gore was leading the show, nothing was for sure anymore. He’d started the day with a couple of dozen cannies, the biggest, meanest pack of man eaters this side of the Shens, and in a few hours there were only the four survivors. To Egregious, it was no mystery why things had gone so sour so fast. Terminal oozies had old Gore by the coattails. The way his hands shook, pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of a blade, let alone use it to cut free a nice loin chop.
He turned his head to the side and spit into the dirt. Thanks to the pecking order of cannie culture, he was going to have to let Gore take the best stuff from this raid, which had the makings of the score to end all. The juicy bits were sorely wasted on the Right Reverend. The kindest thing, to Egregious’s way of thinking, would be to put a .58-caliber lead ball through both his lungs, then finish the job with the man’s own stag-handled, guthook skinner. Tough, stringy meat, for sure, but while chewing it, at least he’d know that he’d seen the last of Gore. By right of succession, he was scheduled to become the next leader of the pack. Or what little remained of it.
Spadecrawler entered a narrow dirt lane between shambling squatters’ huts, his weapon at the ready. Built on an Italian reproduction, the rifle-stocked carbine had an eighteen-inch, octagonal barrel. The ex-tralong barrel added some distance to the .44’s range, without making the blaster hard to handle in close quarters.
If the “Cowboy Carbine” was made to order for the job this afternoon, Egregious’s blaster wasn’t. As he followed Spadecrawler into the shantytown, he thumbed back the twin hammers of his Kodiak Express longblaster to half-cock. The black-powder big-game rifle had enough power in either barrel to bowl over a buffalo at seventy-five yards. The shooting distance would be about a hundredth of that, if things went right.
He and Spadecrawler were supposed to filter through the shacks without being seen, get as close as possible to their targets, and then when Gore opened fire with the scoped blaster, charge in and finish off the wounded at point-blank range. The success of the scheme depended on Gore’s accuracy with the Steyr. Egregious would have felt a lot better about the deal if the pack leader’s hands had been steadier.
As it turned out, he was worrying needlessly things never got to the charge-and-finish-them-off part. Neither Spadecrawler nor Egregious saw the minefield until it was too late.
With the sound of rattraps snapping shut, more than twenty dirt-colored spheres the size of hens’ eggs leaped from the ground. They jumped to various heights around Spadecrawler, all in a midchest-to-knees strike zone. As the mines rose in the air, they started to spin, and as they spun they chittered like a flock of sparrows. Invisible to either of the startled cannies, around the equators of each of the little spheres were alternating laser firing ports and tiny mirrors. When the mines reached their designated maximum altitudes, the lasers fired in a precise sequence. They weren’t targeted at living trespassers; they were aimed at the mirrors of the mines spinning opposite, which created a cat’s cradle of zigzagging, reflected green light beams.