She shook her head, her hair still luminous even in the blackness. “Quiet, Ryan.
I can… Someone’s coming.”
The gun was in his hand, faster than a thought, his finger tense on the slim
trigger. Good though his own senses were, Ryan had been around long enough to
know that a lot of people had better.
“Where? How many? Creepy-crawling?”
“Southerly. Several. No. Moving fast and noisy. I guess five or six.”
“How far off?”
“Difficult in this wind. Among trees. Maybe a klick or two.”
That was close. Too close.
“Go warn the others. Now!” There was a bite to his words like the cut of a
whiplash, and Krysty turned and vanished from his side.
Ryan headed toward the south. His life depended on the girl being correct. Half
a dozen unknowns moving fast toward them. Odds were it was Strasser and an elite
of his sec men, pushing quickly after them, hoping to wipe away their escape.
A hard rain began to fall on Ryan, slanting through the upper branches of the
immense stand of lodgepole pines all around him. It sluiced through, turning the
ground beneath his boots into a quagmire of mud and leaf mold. He knew now that
his greatest hazard was running straight into the attackers. If there was to be
any surprise, he wanted it on his side.
Holding the LAPA at the ready, he dropped to his knees behind a fallen tree,
steadying his breathing, wiping rain from his forehead. If he’d grabbed one of
the laser rifles with the night-sights he’d have been in better shape.
He knelt and waited. The Trader said that a man who cried over spilled milk got
blinded by his tears.
By now Krysty would be back at the camp. The fire would have been stamped out
and most of the party would be inside War Wag One, manning the entrances and
gun-ports. There would be four outside, covering each compass point, watching
for the attackers, ready to give him covering fire. If he made it back.
Fifty-five gifts of instant leaden mortality for the group of hostiles coming
toward him with three extra sticks inside his coat, ready to slot in.
If they were muties with dark sight, he would be in the greatest danger. Then it
wouldn’t matter much if they were armed with flintlock muskets; he’d still be in
a load of trouble. That thought made him tuck the weighted white silk scarf out
of sight under the coat. He hunched and waited.
The lightning hit a tree less than a hundred paces away from him. He flinched,
closing his eye against the instant blindness. The brutal thunder enveloped him,
numbing his senses. He licked his lips, tasting the harsh, metallic flavor of
ozone. If the attackers had been close enough, they could have taken him like a
light-dazed rabbit.
“Scorch it to hell!” he cursed. Rubbing furiously at his right eye, seeing only
a crimson mist, he blinked again and again. His head was lowered against the
driving rain as he desperately fought to clear his vision.
He peered cautiously around the bole of the tumbled tree.
And saw them.
“Six. Seven,” he muttered. All wearing the black waterproof slickers favored by
the sec men from Mocsin. Hooded. High black boots. Oddly, not one of them was
carrying a weapon at the ready, though he could make out rifles slung across the
shoulders of some of them. It looked as if two of them were wounded, leaning on
the arms of others.
They seemed more like refugees than a raiding party.
Either way, Ryan was going to wipe them from the face of this place of nukeshit
and soul death called Earth. He set the LAPA on automatic and readied himself,
bracing for the kick of the gun. At a range now of less than forty paces, he
could take them all out in one savage raking burst of fire.
More thunder and lightning issued from a swirling sky that now glowed red in the
west. Ryan waited, picking the moment when all of the enemy would be out in the
open at once.
At thirty paces the sec men stopped and the leading figure turned around,