brought the weapon to his shoulder and pointed toward where the spear had come from.
He saw a creature gazing back down at him from the edge of the braid of thick, spiky vines. At first he thought it was another mutie animal, an outsized lizard of some sort, or mebbe a bird. It was about four feet tall, with a black-banded gray face and an off-white, streaked belly. It had a crest of turquoise feathers. He couldn’t see more of it for the growth.
Then he noticed the thing had something like a bandolier slung across its chest. It looked as if it had bags and pouches attached to it, and a knife in a beaded sheath.
A second one appeared, with an arm cocked back to throw another spear.
By this point Ryan had his longblaster pointed in the right direction. He caught a flash picture through the ghost-ring iron sights mounted beneath the scope and gave the trigger a compressed speed break. The lightweight rifle bellowed and bucked. When Ryan pulled it back online, both inhuman faces were gone.
“They’re on both sides!” Ricky shouted. “What are those things?”
“Trouble,” Ryan yelled, rolling on his back in the stream and jackknifing to stand back up by the sheer power of his gut muscles. “They’re not just animals! They got hands and weapons.”
Muzzle blasts buffeted Ryan’s ears as his friends opened up. He hoped they were picking their targets. They couldn’t afford to just bust caps, lost in the Wild like this.
He got his boots beneath him and, first things first, quickly sidestepped. It got him out of the stream, onto soft and slightly slippery, but still more reliable footing, and also shifted him out of the target zone for any other arm-launched missiles that might heading his way.
The vines atop both walls rustled with a seethe of drab-colored bodies, as the lizard muties appeared to throw stuff and duck back out of sight. After the first one missed Ryan, few spears seemed to be coming their way. The muties seemed not to want to waste their prime weapons. Mostly what came raining down on Ryan and his companions was hefty chunks of vine, many with long thorns still attached, tumbling end over end.
He slung his Scout and drew his handblaster. Now that the enemy knew he and the others could hit back he wasn’t going to get many good shots. If he was going to waste ammo he preferred to burn the lighter, easier-to-come by 9 mm than the 7.62 mm his Scout used.
To his relief the others had stopped their brief flurry of fire as they realized they were just busting caps. Now they were concentrating on spotting objects thrown their way, ducking and dodging, or batting them aside.
Ryan looked quickly around. When in an ambush, he remembered, Trader always advised the best thing to do was assault right into it.
The problem with that was, the most obvious way to do it in this case was to charge straight up one of the steep and wet-slick clay walls of the little canyon, which would almost certainly turn into a particularly grubby and arduous type of suicide. Likewise, charging straight ahead the way they’d been heading might send them straight into the heart of the nest. Or whatever the lizards lived in.
“Back the way we came,” he yelled. “Triple fast! J.B., take the lead. I got the rear.”
With his short, bandy legs, the Armorer was unlikely to set a pace that any of them couldn’t keep, and risk falling behind—fatally. Even Mildred could keep up with him.
“What about the centipedes?” Mildred demanded.
“Let’s all try to stay alive long enough to get back to them,” Ryan called back. “We can sort that out then.”
For the first few moments, as Ryan trotted along the stream bank, he thought their attackers would be content to let them just back out of their domain. The hail of vine chunks tapered off rapidly.
Then he had to yell a warning as another spear came zipping down from the right bank.
“Why would we help you?” one woodcutter demanded.
Cutter Dan stood facing the two men, rubbing the side of his face. Then he snatched his hand away. The cut the coldheart bastard had given him had far from truly healed, and it itched like blazing blue death.
“Fair question,” he said.
He turned slightly, drew his big handblaster, and shot the man’s partner through the belly. He fell, clutching his ruptured guts, screaming and kicking at the bare red dirt yard of the ramshackle shack.
“Now,” Cutter Dan said, turning back to the first man, whose sandy-bearded face was slack with shock and white behind its soot and grime. “I sure hope you know the Wild hereabouts better than this gentleman, my friend. What’s your name?”
The man’s thick, callused hands quivered in the air by his shoulders as he looked down at his black-bearded companion. The man’s screams had turned to a visceral bubble of pain and sorrow.
Cutter Dan cocked his handblaster with his thumb. “I asked you a question.”
“Uh, Torrance. Sir.”
“All right, Torrance. Now you see why you should help us, right? If you do, I don’t shoot you in the belly, too. Painful way to die. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen a lot.”
He tapped the often-broken bridge of the man’s nose with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson 627. The man’s pale green eyes blinked rapidly at the still-stinging heat of the blaster barrel.
“And since I’m in such a generous mood,” the sec boss went on, “I’ll even put your friend here out of his misery as a bonus. But only if you help.”
The man drew in a long, shuddery breath.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll help you. Now, please. Take care of poor Elliott.”
“Right. Wise choice, Torrance.”
He was a man of his word. A man was nothing if he wasn’t as good as his word. He holstered the Smith & Wesson and drew his trademark Bowie knife. Stooping, he cut the wounded man’s grimy, stubbly neck to the backbone with a single swift cut.
Torrance fainted. Maybe it was the arterial spray of his best friend’s blood splashed across the shins of his faded jeans.
Cutter Dan wiped his big blade carefully on the chill’s black coat. As he straightened, he sheathed it again.
He looked down at the prostrate form of their new guide and shook his head.
“I hope he’s not going to be such a lightweight on the hunt,” he said.
“Mebbe he just don’t like the sight of blood,” Scovul stated.
“Well, that could be a problem, too. Seeing as the object of this expedition is the shedding of blood. Though not too much, at least when it comes to our fugitives. We need to take ’em back to the Judge in presentable shape and not too drained out.”
Yonas laughed. “Well, if he does turn out to be a weakling, you can always chill him, too, boss.”
Cutter
