watched as the women converged on the lone man. William rose from his crouch and shouted, “Die! Damn you all!” before blasting wildly at the women, again and again, shifting his aim to shoot the next and the next and the next.
Still gliding toward the man, the women moved gracefully but swiftly, sidestepping the shots with breathtaking ease. Jak watched, incredulous, as one of the women, honey-red hair piled on her head, leaped from the ground and kicked out at a tree, using it to lever herself higher as a bullet whizzed beneath her. It was an exceptional move, both in terms of speed and agility, and the timing was nothing less than perfect.
The woman landed back on the ground in a swish of billowing robes, now just three feet from the man with the blaster. He depressed the trigger again, sending another .45 slug at the woman’s face from almost point-blank range. The woman darted aside at the same time, and a combination of her speed and the man’s fear sent the bullet wide.
Then the woman grabbed the barrel of the man’s blaster in her right hand, yanking it aside as he fired again. All around them, the other figures had converged on this spot and stood just a few feet away, surrounding the two combatants as the unarmed woman overpowered her blaster-wielding foe.
Jak winced as the weapon blasted again, sending another bullet toward the woman’s shoulder. It missed her but it was close, and Jak saw the wide shoulder strap of her dress shred as the bullet breezed past, a trace of red kicking into the air as the bullet clipped her skin.
The man was shouting in nonsensical sentence fragments now. Something about stopping them... Something about love... Jak could see the man’s trigger finger squeezing again and again, but there was no ammo left in his blaster.
The white-robed women converged on him. What happened next, Jak couldn’t see. All he saw was the billowing robes circling the spot where the man had gone down, fluttering there like waves.
* * *
MILDREDAND RICKYwaited in the redoubt monitoring room as the explosion shook the walls. Dust escaped from the ceiling fixtures and a great cloud tumbled down from the bank of television screens that dominated one wall.
“You think...” Ricky began.
But Mildred was too focused on her task to respond. She was crouched beside him, her face close to the bloody mess that dominated the left side of Ricky’s shirt. “Ready?” she asked, and Ricky nodded. She lifted his shirt in a single, swift gesture and Ricky yelped in pain. “Okay,” Mildred soothed. “You’re okay.”
The blood made it look worse than it was, the way it had spread across Ricky’s skin. But it had started clotting and had dried with Ricky’s shirt, sticking flesh to material. That was why it had hurt so much when Mildred had ripped his shirt away.
Mildred prodded at the wound. You had to move quickly in the Deathlands, and field medicine like this was often the only option. Keeping the companions patched up was Mildred’s job, and she was damn good at it, too. “How does it look?” Ricky asked, breathing through clenched teeth.
“Nasty,” Mildred told him, taking an inch-high bottle of ammonia from her supplies. “You’ve lost a lot of skin, but we’ll clean that out and get you bandaged up. You’ll live.”
Ricky winced, holding back the tears. “Hurts bastard bad,” he said as Mildred knelt to clean the wound.
The physician arched a brow. “Boy, you listen too closely to J.B. and Ryan’s turns of phrase.”
* * *
DEBRISLITTEREDTHEfloor of the corridor and a coating of dust covered the two figures that lay inside the door.
Ryan moved first, pulling himself up to a sitting position and brushing plaster dust from his dark hair. Beside him, J.B. stirred and flinched at the movement, turning to Ryan with a coating of dust on the lenses of his spectacles.
Ryan looked at him and smiled. “You still alive?” he said.
“Hundred percent,” J.B. confirmed, rubbing at one ear to stop the ringing. “Let’s go check on the damage.”
Warily, the two men entered corridor. It was a mess, but just surface mess—nothing a dustpan and brush couldn’t smarten up in a few minutes. There was a hairline crack running up the wall beside the door to the control room, as thin as a spider’s web. Ryan gestured to it as he passed. “Could have been your skull,” he said.
J.B. laughed and rapped his knuckles on the wall. “Nah, my skull’s thicker than this,” he responded.
Moving quietly, Ryan and J.B. returned to the control room and surveyed the damage. The control area itself had barely sustained any damage other than a coating of plaster dust, but the mat-trans chamber was billowing with dark smoke and two-thirds of the toughened-glass walls that surrounded it had shattered, leaving a carpet of twinkling shards that spread out from the chamber like projectile vomit.
The chamber’s fans were whirring loudly as they worked to clear the smoke while ancient, ceiling-mounted water sprinklers made a hissing, fizzing sound though nothing came out of their pipes. Presumably, in the hundred years since this facility had been built, the contents of their supply tanks had either leaked or evaporated, leaving just the sound of the taps as they opened and closed, opened and closed.
When Ryan and J.B. entered the anteroom, they could see fire within the hexagonal chamber of the mat-trans itself, spots of flame licking at what was left of the walls and burning in patches on the tiled floor. Black smoke poured from the smeared remains of the crate-like device that had once abutted the back wall, but almost nothing remained of the device itself other than the basic shape of the box that had held it, now seared into the floor in a black rectangle.
Ryan shook his head, waving smoke out of his eye. “We won’t be using this again in a hurry,” he said grimly.
J.B. nodded solemnly. He left the anteroom and peered around the control room before spying the fire extinguishers. He strode over to them and reached for the boxy cabinet that clung to the wall above them, removing the fire blanket that was strapped there. The fire blanket had waited a century for someone to use it, and it smelled of mildew.
The Armorer strode back to the mat-trans and shook the blanket, throwing it across the flaming scar of the explosive, his feet tramping in the shattered armaglass. “Could be our only way out,” he reminded Ryan as they watched the blanket smother the flames. “Best do what we can to contain the damage.”
Ryan eyed the damaged floor tiles and the missing armaglass with concern. “You think this is repairable?”
“If it has to be,” J.B. told him. “Mebbe it won’t come to that.”
They waited a moment for the flames to stop burning and watched the smoke ease to a wispy trail in the air like a squirrel’s tail.
Ryan watched the smoke dissipate, voicing the question that neither of them could answer. “Who did this and why?”
J.B. just shook his head. “For now, I guess we should be grateful we didn’t arrive three minutes after we did,” he said dourly.
* * *
ONTHESLOPEoutside the redoubt, the white-clad women stepped away from the figure they had surrounded and Jak saw that the man was dead. His neck had been snapped and his head was poised at an awkward angle as he lay on the dirt, his eyes wide-open
