Pyramid Scheme by Dave Freer and Eric Flint

But Cruz kept his cool. A few M16 rounds would change the bastards’ cocksure attitude.

Lieutenant Salinas wasn’t keeping his cool. “Shoot ’em!” he shouted, his voice shrill. “Shoot ’em all!” His pistol was still in his hand. He brought it up to a two-handed grip, stepped back a pace—and stumbled over an empty rower’s bench and landed on his ass.

“Single shots!” ordered Cruz. “We’re next to a whirlpool! We can’t afford to hit the rowers!” He took a careful bead on the son of a bitch who’d so casually killed Hooper.

Then, from behind him, the little guy with the wild hair shouted, “Look out! Scylla!”

Cruz ignored him, still gauging the tactical situation. Take the lead two with those big cheese cutters out. And then the one who had a spear ready to throw. Turn and check out what the guy was shouting about . . . What was that yowling noise, anyway?

A thousand drills kept him calm. “It don’t mean nothin’ . . . ”

He squeezed the trigger—and felt his stomach tie itself into a sick knot and his pulse start hammering.

When you’ve fired a rifle often—you know exactly how it should kick, sound and feel. It shouldn’t—do what it had just done!

The “explosion,” if you could even call it that, was piteous. The bullet plopped out and landed a few yards off. What could only be voices, tiny reedy little voices, issued from the muzzle. Anibal tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly dry. He risked a glance over his shoulder to see what the new problem was.

Facing up to that, with a badly designed club—which was all his M16 was now—nearly doubled his already racing pulse rate.

“Fix bayonets,” Anibal croaked.

* * *

The monster poured herself sinuously out of the dark cave. The black cave-mouth was perhaps forty feet above the water level. And the monster was going to reach them . . .

The six gleaming mottled necks weren’t the worst part, thought Liz. They were like thigh-thick pythons with odd dangling clawed feet. But the heads! The heads were a terrible mixture between a woman and a shark—complete to the gill slits. Liz realized that the glisten on the scaly necks was water. The cave up there must be water-filled.

She also realized something more terrible still: the channel narrowed just here. Scylla’s lair was perfectly positioned. The suck of Charybdis was now a furious roar of angry surf. The black ship barely moved, although the rowers stroked with frantic intensity. Actually, if they were moving anywhere, they were going backwards. Looking across, Liz realized she was looking straight into the terrible vortex. Such a volume of water was disappearing down the throat of the whirlpool that you could see the exposed rocks and sand . . . and even a few wildly flip-flopping fish.

This vessel would be lucky if it managed not to be sucked into that terrible hole. They certainly weren’t going anywhere. Scylla could feed at her awful leisure. Her dreadful, high-pitched, puppy-in-fear yowling cut through even the wild sea-roar, echoing between the two cliffs.

Liz started to rummage hastily through her capacious shoulder bag. There was something for any emergency in there. The problem was always to find anything specific. Well, she could always just hit them with the bag. As usual, it weighed a ton. It seemed to accumulate junk faster than she could clean it out. Ah. Pepper spray!

* * *

McKenna looked briefly at the inoperative M16. No time to field-strip it now. He dropped it and grabbed a spare oar from between the rowers’ benches. The damn thing was heavy. It would be like trying to fight people off with a telephone pole. Then the black guy yelled, “I’ll be the rowlock! You swing it about.”

It worked well. They could hold off the guys with the swords just as long as nobody threw a spear. Or the thing behind them didn’t get them. Jim had risked one quick glance behind him . . . his mother was a fanatical conservationist. She’d even gotten him to like spiders, but snakes still freaked him out. Cruz and Dietz would just have to deal with that thing.