Under other circumstances, he would have shouted orders to bring his men under control. Instead, he began to sob, hot tears springing from his eyes and scorching their way down his cheeks.
A red, shimmering spear engulfed DeCampo’s head. Polycarbonate, hair, bone and flesh slapped against the wall as if someone had tossed a basinful of sludge there. As the man’s headless body toppled to the floor, the liquid mixture of flesh, bone, brains and polymer trickled down the wall like silt.
Stenz kicked himself away from the corner and caught a fragmented glimpse of a light dancing in the darkness beyond the doorway. A periphery of radiance shone around it like a ghostly halo.
His boots gouged gashes in Presky with the sound of a man running through a bog. As he leaped over DeCampo’s decapitated corpse, he thought he heard another soundvoices raised in malicious, drunken laughter.
Stenz risked a quick over-the-shoulder glance and he cried out in horror. He had a fleeting vision of a broad, inhumanly flattened head peering over the threshold. Pendulous lips writhed, twisting in a wet smile of glee. Beneath the head, he saw a monstrously misshapen, stunted body.
Stenz ran, bleating in terror with every step. He ignored the hot stream of urine running down his leg just as he ignored the flow of tears burning his skin. He raced down the corridor, the drumming footfalls of Hughes, Miller and Lewis rebounding from the floors and wails ahead of him.
Even when he turned the corner and was presumably out of sight of the thing behind the door, he didn’t slow his pace. The square of light in the open entrance gaped like the gates of salvation. The three Magistrates were already plunging through it, scrambling recklessly down the rock face.
Stenz followed them, jumping from ledge to ledge. He had stopped bleating, stopped sobbing. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the crunching of boot soles on stone. His racing thoughts settled into a slightly more rational rhythm. The other marks he had seen in the dust indicated that whatever weapon had been unleashed in the redoubt was mounted on wheels. He had no conception what kind of weapon it could be or its operating principles. The Sandcat, with its shielded, armored hull, might offer some protection
Stenz stumbled, his grasping hands catching only thin air as he plummeted downward to strike his head at the bottom of the slope. Only his helmet saved him from a fractured skull. As it was, he lay stunned for a long moment. When he heard the roar of the Sandcat’s engine, he sat up groggily, gritting his teeth against the surge of nausea.
The Sandcat lurched backward, gears clashing. Stenz struggled to his feet, shrieking, “Don’t leave me, you fucking slaggers!”
A column of light burst from the recessed doorway of the redoubt. It touched the Sandcat, washing it down in a stream of crimson luminescence. For an instant, it acquired the red hue of the light. Then a billowing orange-yellow fireball swallowed it.
The shock wave slammed Stenz off his feet, the wave of superheated air instantly drying the tears on his face, blistering the exposed flesh. The concussion rolled over him like an extended thunderclap. Pieces of the vehicle banged and clattered all around him, bouncing from the rock tumble.
Lifting his head, peering through his soot-blackened visor, he watched the brilliant beam of scarlet carve a churning crescent in the ground around the smoldering, split-open husk of the Sandcat, then lance toward him. With stones against his back, he had nowhere to go. He flung up an arm.
As the polycarbonate sheath on his forearm splattered away like droplets of black wax, he thought bitterly of Ericson’s tiresome refrain “A Magistrate must endure.”
Chapter 2
Grant pressed his back into the cliff face and tried very hard to look like a rock. His dark brown coloring and equally dark clothing helped him blend in with the shadows cast by a granite cleft.
He turned his head, scanning the gorge floor some fifty feet below. He saw nothing but outcroppings and thickets. Still the sound of shod horse hooves reached him, beating distantly like flint against steel.