Shaking Earth

From the direction of the camp came shouts, shots, which changed everything. With Krysty ghosting along at his side, Ryan moved fast and crouched, not directly back to where the others were but at an angle down the mountainside. That way they might either take a force attacking their friends in the flank or possibly intercept enemies attempting a flanking maneuver of their own.

The forest had come alive again with sounds of a different sort: yells, the thudding of hooves, the crack of branches breaking. Apparently a substantial band of mounted raiders had stumbled upon their camp. Ryan had time to be thankful his group had camped so near the redoubt entrance. There were too many attackers to stand off and even in these woods a party of six would have had a hard time evading them.

The possibility of negotiation never entered his mind.

A warning cry from Krysty brought his head around. Three horsemen had appeared not twenty yards downhill, heading directly for them, trying to outflank J.B. and the others. One carried a dilapidated lever-action carbine with brass tacks hammered into stock and foregrip for decoration; one, a slab-sided 1911-model .45 autopistol; the third, a steel-headed lance decorated with feathers and what seemed to be scalps. Both riders and mounts were painted in fanciful patterns.

The horsemen faltered in surprise at encountering the pair. The carbine man threw his weapon to his shoulder. Ryan already had his Steyr up, cheek welded to stock. He laid the crosshairs just below the wrist of the coldheart’s left hand, which supported the carbine’s fore end. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked and slammed his shoulder. The 180-grain, boat-tailed bullet, painstakingly loaded into the cartridge a hundred years before at the Rock City Arsenal in Illinois, passed through meat between radius and ulna without slowing, drilled a neat hole through a rib, began to yaw as it tore through his heart, knocking a huge plate of his right scapula out along with a bloody chunk of trapezius muscle as it exited his back. His horse, a buckskin with a blue ring painted around one eye, reared. He toppled right over the rump without firing.

The spearman uttered a blood-curdling scream and kicked his horse into a charge. Krysty crouched, holding her blaster at full reach of both arms, coolly waiting with her hair stirring around her shoulders. When the rider got within ten yards she began squeezing off shots. The rider screamed as a bullet entered his belly. Another smashed his shoulder. He fell and screamed more as his horse, sheering away from the redheaded woman, dragged him off through the trees at a panicky run.

The third rider had hesitated when the man with the carbine was hit. Then he turned his pinto away and booted its sides. He was just about to vanish among the trees when Ryan, having thrown the bolt and brought the Steyr SSG back online as quickly as he could, broke his spine just above the level of his heart with a shot. Ryan had no qualms about blasting an enemy in the back. It was just a way to make sure he didn’t circle around once out of sight to try his luck again, hopefully when your guard was down.

He looked at Krysty. She had the cylinder open, had spilled both empties and whatever unfired cartridges remained into her hand and transferred them to her pocket, and was feeding in reloads quick as she could. She could sort the spent casings from the live rounds later; what counted now was a full handblaster.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded and snapped the cylinder shut. “Let’s go,” she said.

AT THE CAMP J.B., Mildred, Doc and Jak had fanned out and taken cover. They didn’t have long to wait before more coldhearts arrived, eight riders charging them across the thirty-yard-wide clearing.

J.B. sprayed them with one long burst from his Uzi. A 9 mm slug was unlikely to drop a horse, at least right away. But back in the Trader days the Armorer had noticed something about horses: they had minds of their own and they didn’t like getting hurt, and they especially didn’t like the smell of equine blood. Also their legs, skinny by comparison to their big muscular bodies, were relatively fragile. So he deliberately fired low, hoping to cripple or wound as many mounts as possible as fast as possible.

Horses screamed, reared. Two went down, one pinning its rider’s leg. One began bucking uncontrollably, and a fourth simply turned and ran away despite its rider’s cursing and hauling back on the reins.

Like most late-twentieth-century people, at least from Western cultures, Mildred hated seeing animals suffer. She was actually fighting tears when she unloaded a charge of buckshot from J.B.’s M-4000 into the glossy brown chest of a bay. It reared, shrieking in an almost human voice. Its rider calmly aimed a sawed-off double gun at her. She fired at him rapidly and had to have hit him because he fell before his horse did.

Jak blazed away at a rider charging him. Scarlet bloomed against the horse’s white neck but the animal only stumbled, then came on. The rider was returning fire with a handblaster but only throwing up clumps of pine needles near the albino. Jak rolled to the side as the injured horse ran right through the place where he’d lain prone. Its rider reined it in, pivoted in the saddle, trying to turn his blaster to bear on the albino youth.

Then the coldheart dropped the handblaster and clapped his hand to his neck just below his ear. It wasn’t quite enough to stem the violent spray of blood from the carotid artery, severed by the leaf-bladed knife Jak had thrown.

A wiry rider armed with a machete, to which some enterprising postnuke weaponsmith had added a spiked knuckle-duster by way of a handguard, rode a black horse with a white blaze straight for Doc, who was kneeling with his LeMat in one hand and his swordstick in the other. Doc had already fired several shots at other targets, but he emptied the remaining .44 rounds into the horse before the beast collapsed. The rider rolled over his mount’s neck, somersaulted, came up on his feet running right at Doc. He raised his machete over his head for the deathstroke.

Then he looked down at his chest. A slim length of steel had transfixed it, right through the heart. Doc had unsheathed a rapier from his swordstick, and the coldheart’s run had forced him to impale himself. The marauder looked at Doc with an expression of complete surprise and collapsed.

One of the coldhearts whose mount had been downed was kneeling, firing wildly with a .22-caliber Ruger autoloading rifle. Abruptly the right side of his head opened up in a cloud of pink spray. Ryan and Krysty had arrived in some brush at the edge of the clearing. The one-eyed man had popped a 7.62 mm round through the raider’s temple.

There was a rustle and swirl of motion farther down the slope as the other coldhearts withdrew. From the shouting it sounded as if there were plenty of them left.

“Go!” Ryan yelled, breaking from cover. Shots cracked from the trees, knocking out chunks of bark and raising little sprays of fallen needles from the ground. “We’ve gotta clear out while we got the chance. They won’t hold back for long!”

Mildred looked toward the deer carcass she’d been gutting. A bullet cut the rope that suspended it from the branch. It fell into the dirt. Not even she had enough twentieth-century squeamishness left to care much about that—it’d wash off—but the damned thing was simply too heavy to try to pick up and haul off under fire.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. She grabbed her pack and, still clutching J.B.’s shotgun, ran toward the redoubt entrance.

With a running start Ryan reached the entryway first. Instead of ducking behind the granite protrusion that sheltered the entrance from view, he spun, knelt and began firing to cover the others. They came—Doc Tanner first, running with surprising alacrity, his elbows out to the sides and pumping; Jak, hair trailing like a cloud of white smoke; J.B. crab-walking alongside Mildred to make sure she made it while spurting quick bursts from his Uzi toward the unseen foe.

Realizing their quarry was somehow getting away, the coldhearts raised an outcry of cheated fury. Riders burst from the trees and scrub like steel marbles from a Claymore mine, hurtling toward the redoubt entrance.

Ryan dropped them as fast as he could throw the Steyr’s butter-smooth bolt. Krysty was beside him, knowing he’d insist on her getting to safety before he would, but wanting to stand by him as long as she could. “Go!” he told her. She turned to dart inside the entrance they’d left open as he fired the last shot in the SSG’s detachable magazine.

A quick blur of motion, a sound like an ax hitting wood, a gasp, more of surprise than pain. Ryan took his eye from the scope to see Krysty slumped against the granite face with a crossbow bolt protruding from her back, just inward of the left shoulder.

“Krysty!” he shouted. The word seemed torn from him like skin from his back.

The woman came around. With her right hand she raised her blaster. The crossbowman was closing fast, dropping his spent weapon to reach for a Bowie-type knife in a beaded sheath under his arm. With cool deliberation Krysty aimed and shot him through his thick, dirty throat. He roared, the noise drowning in a gurgle of his own blood.

As he fell, Krysty turned at last and stumbled into the redoubt. A rider loomed above Ryan. He was a big man with flying blond braids and an eagle feather at the back of his skull, grinning all over his bearded, painted face as he raised a battered CAR-4, a 9 mm submachinegun version of the venerable M-16. Ryan knew at once he was the coldhearts’ leader.

“You lose, fucker,” the blond man said.

But Ryan had already released the empty rifle with his right hand, still holding it in his left. His panga whispered from its sheath. With a thunk, the heavy blade severed the coldheart’s gunhand right above the wrist.

The raider boss stared in gape-mouthed amazement at his own hand lying on the bare dirt, spinning as random dying neural impulses spasmed the finger on the subgun’s trigger. Blood sprayed from his arm like a hose.

Ryan followed his injured woman into the redoubt, then keyed the blastproof door shut.

Chapter Three

Hardness against his cheek. Pulsing warm—or was he only feeling the heat being drawn out of his face into a floor cold as a baron’s heart?

Ryan lay on his belly. He was unaware of having fallen. The world, slowly, ceased to spin around him.

The groans of his companions made their way through the fog that wrapped his brain. It had been a bad jump, the kind that reached down your gullet and yanked your guts out your mouth.

Krysty!

His eye felt as if it were glued shut. He forced it open. The upper lid came away from the lower with a sick gummy sensation. His empty socket throbbed with scarlet pulses of ache.

Krysty at least had begun the jump on her back, carefully laid down by Mildred and Ryan. She remained pretty much as they had left her, left arm strapped across her sternum to immobilize it. The right, which had been crossed over her stomach, now lay by her side. A thin trickle of blood ran to the floor of the gateway where she had clenched her fist so hard during the jump that her nails had pierced her palm. Her face was unnaturally pale, almost blue, contrasting harshly with her hair, which lay limp around her head like a tangle of red seaweed.

Ryan crawled to her, more lizard than man, feeling as if a mutie the size of a mountain were squatting on his back jeering at his misery. He grabbed her right arm, felt for pulse inside her wrist. It was there and strong.

Now that he knew his woman lived, Ryan allowed himself cautiously to become aware of more of his surroundings. The chamber had walls of orange-red armaglass that passed the dim illumination of the room beyond, which had automatically come on when the gateway powered up to materialize them, like the glow of a fire. There were bad smells, not the bland sterile smell of a long-unused chamber. There were sounds, too: dull distant thumps like giant stone fists being slammed together; pops and cracks like the fire of heavy blasters, the kind needed to be toted with a big war wag; and under everything a deep-note noise that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite a roar, with a bit of crackle and sort of a seethe. A sound you could hear through your bones if both eardrums were shot.

Ryan braced himself on one elbow and looked around. J.B. had hauled himself to a sitting position and was helping Mildred do likewise. Jak already sat with his knees drawn up and his crimson eyes sunk in his face like blood spots in a sheet. A dribble of puke, semidried, still trailed from the corner of his mouth.

“Shit,” the albino said. “Look like Doc croaked.”

Doc lay on his back, arms outstretched, mouth agape, rheumy eyes staring unblinking at the top of the mat-trans chamber. Seeing him like that made Mildred shift to rise up and tend to him. Then she settled back down on her haunches, gazing sorrowfully at him and shaking her head. There was obviously no point.

“I never thought one of us would go like this,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “Dean, now Doc.”

Ryan’s mouth was a thin line. “Doc looks about as peaceful as he ever gets,” Ryan said. His heart weighed down his rib cage. Seeing Doc lying there stark and dead was like losing another part of his body.

He lifted Krysty’s hand, kissed the back of it, laid it across her other arm. Then he got up, wobbled, fought for and regained his balance, and walked staunchly upright the few steps to where his comrade lay. He knelt, reached down and, with thumb and forefinger of his right hand, started to close the lids of Doc’s eyes.

The old man jerked and blinked. “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, my dear boy? Blind me?”