Jak was the only traveler in the back of the wag not to be affected by the sudden change of equilibrium. The same innate sense that had made him such an excellent hunter enabled him to adjust within a fraction of a second to the sudden movements and maintain the poise that had enabled him to win fights against heavier, better-armed opponents. Rysh’s falling had just made Jak’s task easier, for the youth had already launched himself through the momentum of the head butt, his legs uncoiling beneath him, with the sole purpose of driving his larger opponent to the deck and using the man’s own weight to make him land heavily and drive the breath from him. The fact that Rysh had already started the fall made it easier.
Too easy for Jak. As the workman lay on his back, straddled by the wiry and immensely strong albino, with his eyes still unfocused and his brain failing to register what was happening through the pain, he was only aware of the fact that he could now taste the blood from his nose down the back of his throat, and it was starting to choke him.
Jak punched him hard, one, two, three times. Each blow was with the full force his forearm, to protect his knuckles, and was aimed at the prone man’s temple. Quite simply, Jak wanted to cave in the man’s skull at its weakest, most vulnerable point.
The other workmen had been stunned by the sudden ferocity and speed of the attack, but now it was beginning to dawn on them that the albino would actually kill their colleague unless they intervened.
“Nuke shit! Rysh’ll buy the farm unless we stop the little fucker,” Tilson roared. He was the wiriest of the workmen, and also the one who had been the least antagonistic toward the companions. But this was too much for him. With a speed that his wiry frame suggested, he reached for his blaster. A snub- nosed .38 Smith & Wesson, it nestled in a holster in the small of his back, and it was only that fact that saved Jak from a chilling. For it took him a fraction of a second longer to reach to his back than it would have done to reach to his waist. And that fraction of a second was all that Ryan needed.
Tilson may have been quick, but the one-eyed man was quicker. The almost incoherent roar of rage from Tilson had drawn Ryan’s eye to him, and as the man’s hand began to move toward the small of his back, so Ryan began to move. Pushing himself from his seat, he took an explosive spring step that propelled him past the prone Rysh and Jak. He twisted his heavily muscled torso so that his body began to spread full length across the workers seated on the bench seat. Because Ryan had one big problem—if Tilson had been seated diagonally opposite, then he could have leaped across and tackled him head-on. But the workman was actually seated on the same side of the wag as the one-eyed warrior, and so he had not only to leap from one end of the wag to the other, but also to change direction so as to be facing his opponent.
It was tight, but he managed it. He felt sinews strain as he tried to attain enough momentum, and as Tilson’s blaster hand emerged from behind his back, thumb already cocking the blaster’s hammer, Ryan was able to reach for the man’s wrist and pinion it in his own iron grip.
Tilson gritted his teeth and hissed a barely suppressed yelp of sudden agony as Ryan’s muscular wrist tensed, and the fingers like rods of steel closed on his own bony wrist, crushing cartilage and bone and cutting off the blood supply to his fingers.
The nerves in his fingers twitched, enough to make his trigger finger squeeze and loose off a round within the wag. His arm had been forced right back behind and above his head by the sudden action of the one-eyed man, almost wrenching the arm from its socket. His hand now pointed toward the roof of the wag, the muzzle of the blaster almost touching the rounded metal top of the vehicle.