“Looks like we’re gonna need these again, bro, and sooner than I would have liked.”
His twin returned the look, gazing at his own weapon with sadness. “Sure looks so. You reckon that one-eyed dude and his sprog are right, or should we go with Harv?”
Ant gave his twin a look of disbelief mixed with disgust. “You kiddin’? Harv hates anything and anyone except himself and mebbe that weird bitch. Think we’ve got any chance of a good life with him as big boss?”
Dee laughed, a hollow, bitter sound. “Yeah, like fuck.”
Ant shrugged. “Then let’s get to it, dude.”
And with a cry that sounded as one, both twins let out a bloodcurdling shriek, turning in opposite directions, waving their blasters and cutting themselves a swath through the crowd until they reached the exit, where they came up against the twin longblasters blocking their path.
“Where you going, boys?” asked one sec man.
“Who you with?” asked the other, so rapidly the two almost sounded as one.
“What do you think?” Ant asked in an exasperated tone. It was, however, a neutral question. It elicited exactly the kind of response they both wanted.
“I knew you’d be good ol’ boys for a pair of blacks and side with us,” one sec man said, grinning.
“Yeah, make the new order work,” the other added.
Ant and Dee exchanged the briefest of glances before moving as one with a speed like a striking rattler. Their powerful arms pumped, using the stocks of their respective blasters as baseball bats, coming from the level of their elbows in an upward arc that caught each sec man under his chin, jawbones shattering on impact as both sec men crumpled into unconscious heaps, neither having time to respond to the attack.
“Never did like those dudes, bro,” Ant said sadly.
“Yeah, even the best of places get insects,” his twin replied. “Figure we should find Cawdor and the baron. Reckon Blake and Downey’ll be with us, if no one else.”
“Yeah, they’re good people. But where the fuck were they going?”
Dee grinned. “Shit, you got the one flaw in my plan, dude!”
WITH THE SEC GUARD now rendered ineffective, the fighting in the main hall spilled out into the tunnels and passages of the ville. Men and women who had peacefully coexisted in the enclosed ville all their lives now found that they hardly knew their neighbor at all. Those sec men who were still loyal to Alien tried in vain to calm the crowd and prevent the violence and conflict, but they were outnumbered both by the crowd and those sec men who wanted to stick with Harvey.
It wasn’t long before the crowd had separated into two distinct forces, and lines of demarcation were drawn up in the ville as each side took whatever cover it could, using whatever came to hand as weapons to augment the few sec blasters.
It was clear that whoever controlled the armory would win the war. Something Harvey was already attending to…
“HEY, HARV. What the hell are you doing, you rad-blasted gaudy spawn!”
The chief armorer had elected to miss the meeting in the main hall, figuring that her presence wouldn’t make much difference. Besides, someone had to clean and stockpile the blasters, grens and plas-ex after the raid on Samtvogel. It would be a lengthy task, and she figured that the sooner she got to it the better. Besides, she’d taken a liking to J.B. Dix, and had the feeling that his people would be hitting trouble. It made her feel uneasy, and she felt happier with complex but inanimate pieces of metal than she did with complex but animate human beings.
She had been in the middle of stripping one of the RPKs when Harvey, Jenna and Bodie burst in on her. It was hard to know who was the more surprised. Harvey had truly believed that everyone was in the main hall, and that he would find the armory empty. The chief armorer had no idea what to make of the sec chief, one of his trusted lieutenants, and the baron’s wife bursting in on her, wild-eyed and looking for all the world as though they were about to commit mass murder.