“I hate to say this, Baron,” Blake whispered, “but are you sure you’re doing the right thing coming with us? I mean—”
“I’m your leader, and that means in times of trouble, as well as peace,” Alien said hoarsely.
“Baron not much good if chilled,” Jak commented pithily.
“Time to worry about that later,” Downey whispered over his shoulder. “We’re getting closer.”
It was superfluous for him to mention that. The sound of the mutie raiding party was now loud, and its direction easy to trace. As Harvey had surmised, they were heading straight through the only viable path that led through the forest, beaten down by several generations of travelers to and from the sites of the underground ville’s entrances. They were now trampling the undergrowth flat, the Sunchildren chanting and loosing shots into the air with no thought of stealth. Other, clumsy and high-pitched voices were mixed in with the chanting, arrhythmic and confused. These were unmistakably the stickies, carried along by the Sunchildren, hyped up to a fever pitch of destruction.
“How many of the fuckers?” one of the sec men asked.
“Can’t see from here,” Downey commented. “We need to get nearer if we can.”
“Let me see,” Jak whispered, moving forward. “Better chance on own.”
Downey nodded consent, and Jak was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth in front of the group with barely a ripple of foliage, as though he had never been there.
The chanting grew painfully loud as Jak skipped across the creepers, dodging the raised tree roots and climbing up one of the stunted trees in order to raise himself higher, hoping to gain a better perspective.
He could see them, but not clearly enough. Leaping from one bough to another, he traversed three more trees before he could get a clear view of them.
He suppressed the urge to whistle. There were fifteen Sunchildren that he could count, plus twenty-eight—maybe thirty—stickies. It was hard to be accurate as they moved about in a milling, frenzied crowd.
This meant that the total sec force was outnumbered by more than two to one. Scanning the mutie party once more, Jak guessed that they had maybe a dozen blasters among them.
He was about to skip back into the forest from his position when something on the far side of the cleared path caught his eye. He showed himself a little more as he identified the waving branches as the movements of Dean, on the other side. The youngster had obviously had the same idea as Jak.
Their eyes met across the roof of foliage. Jak signaled ten to Dean, indicating that they should both attack after ten minutes tracking the party. Dean nodded, then was gone. Jak grinned, teeth drawn back in a predatory smile, then returned to his group.
“Well?” Downey asked as Jak came into view. When the albino had explained the position, he added, “Okay, we’ll trail them and then go for it. If we take them from behind, it’ll buy us that extra few fractions of a second.”
“Mebbe more,” Ryan added. “The stickies will be too freaked to react that quickly. Good call.”
“Thanks for the praise,” Downey returned sarcastically.
As they moved off, Krysty noticed Alien casting a quizzical eye over the sec man, obviously bemused by his comment to Ryan a few moments before.
Her hair coiled tight, and she knew it had nothing to do with the current chase.
MILDRED FACED Harvey with anger blazing in her eyes.
“What the hell do you mean, leave it until they’ve made the first push? They’ll be expecting us to go in ten and be backing them up. Why let them take the brunt?”
“Why not?” Harvey replied calmly. “I just say that we wait until the muties’ve got their attention focused one way, then hit the fuckers from the other way.”
“But without them knowing, there’s no telling—”
“Listen, bitch,” the sec chief snarled, “who the fuck’s in charge here?”
J.B. stepped forward and pulled Mildred back. “Not now, Millie,” he said, adding in a softer voice when the sec chiefs attention was taken by one of his own men, “Who says we do what the bastard says anyway?”