Riley Brandão finished building his ham and cheese sandwich, snagged the open bottle of beer from the counter at his elbow, and settled back down in front of the surveillance system. Technically, he was supposed to stay glued to the display, watching it with steely-eyed attention as if the fate of the universe depended upon it. Actually, nobody could get anywhere near the lodge without passing through one of the outside men's field of view and it was past lunchtime, so it was fortunate the universe had been able to get along without him for two or three minutes.
He chuckled at the thought and double checked the household diagnostics panel, just to make sure the damned receptor hadn't stopped working all over again. It hadn't, although he questioned how much longer that would be true. Overaged piece of crap, that was what it was, and Manischewitz should have listened to him about it in the first place. He felt a mild glow of satisfaction at having his estimate of its decrepit condition confirmed, but he wondered idly why Sugimoto hadn't already reported back on what had caused the problem.
Probably still bitching about getting sent out to check it in the first place, he thought and snorted in amusement. He and Sugimoto didn't much like each other, and he was pretty sure the other man had figured out why Brandão had chosen him for the job. Serves him right. Brandão grinned. Bastard thinks he's such a killer ladies' man? Right—sure he is! If he hadn't come sailing in with that stack of credits . . .
He chewed a mouthful of ham and Swiss cheese and reminded himself that it was small-minded to dwell on past grievances. But that was all right with him. He was as small-minded as it got when it came to women, and Sugimoto had known that when he horned in. Good old Sawney still had plenty to make up for in Brandão's book, and he was sure ample opportunities to make Sugimoto's life miserable would present themselves. He swallowed and reached for his beer, reflecting on the grievance in question. That prick Ardmore had probably put Sugimoto up to it, for that matter. Of course, it was safer to get even with Sugimoto than with Ardmore, but someday he'd get around to—
As it happened, Riley Brandão was wrong about that.
He was just bringing the beer bottle to his lips when the kitchen door opened behind him. The lodge had been built with deliberately rustic and archaic internal features, and its doors were old-fashioned, manually operated things with actual knobs and hinges. Brandão's beer hovered in mid-air, just short of his mouth, and his eyebrows started to rise. He didn't know what he'd heard—or sensed—from behind him. Perhaps it was the latch turning, perhaps it was the squeak of the hinge or simply air moving as the door opened. Brandão didn't know, and he never found out.
Alfred Harrington pushed the door open with his toe, and the pulse rifle Sawney Sugimoto no longer required came down like a pile driver. Its butt smashed into to the back of Brandão's skull and crushed his occiput like an egg shell.
* * *
Alfred stood half-crouched, head and ears cocked. His eyes never even flickered as the man he'd just killed slid bonelessly out of the chair to the floor. The corpse's head hit the floor with a thud and blood pooled, spreading out across the tile, sending tendrils oozing like thick, crimson tentacles. There was no expression at all on Alfred's face as they spread, but his nostrils flared, and he made himself wait, listening for any sound, any movement.
There was none, and after a moment, he straightened. His virtual tour of the lodge had told him where the kitchen was, and Sugimoto had “volunteered” the information that the external sensor net—such as it was, and what there was of it—had been wired into the household systems monitoring station. He'd been far from certain about trusting any of Sugimoto's information, but a quick look around showed him it had been accurate . . . this far, at least. But there were at least eight more men in and around the lodge, and there was only one of him.
Perhaps there were, but he had one advantage they couldn't know about. He had his monster, and it quivered within him, red-fanged and ready, eager to be loosed. It was a dark thing, his monster—the thing which had driven him into the field of medicine, where it would never again be offered the freedom it had achieved on Clematis. He'd promised himself that, not because what he'd done on Clematis hadn't needed doing, but because of what it had threatened to do to him. What it had threatened to transform him into. And now, despite his promise, he had no choice but to turn to it once more.
He inhaled again, deeply, and closed his eyes for just one heartbeat. They were no longer actively hurting her, but she hovered weakly on the very brink of unconsciousness from what they'd already done. This close, the link between them clawed at him with talons of fire, and he knew exactly where she was. Above him and to the left. The virtual tour replayed itself in the back of a mind that was ice and steel over a roiling sea of lava, and his eyes opened once more. The exercise room, he thought. The third-floor, east end of the building. There were three ways he could get there from here, but two of them led through the main foyer and past several “public” rooms on the ground floor. The third was a little longer, but the back stairs led past what had been designated as staff bedrooms when the lodge was built. It seemed unlikely that anyone was simply sitting in his room in the middle of the day. He might be wrong about that, but he had to pick a route, and he turned towards the stairs.
* * *
Allison Chou raised her head weakly. Red waves of agony washed through her, and her arms felt broken, aching with the strain of supporting her weight. She was barely conscious, but something . . . something had reached into her hopelessness and despair. She felt it. It was coming closer, and it was focused with deadly purpose upon her . . . and filled with a terrible, burning anger.
Her brain was barely working. She didn't have the least idea what these people wanted from Jacques, but she'd already realized they were going to kill her in the end. It was the only way it could end, and after the last two hours, part of her hoped that end would come soon. But it was only a part of her, and the rest reached out to that flame of hatred. Its searing fury ought to have terrified her, a tiny fragment of her mind reflected, but she'd learned what true terror was. And, even more than that, she knew that furnace flame's purpose. She rolled her eyes to one side, seeing the back of the man who had hurt her so terribly, and as she felt that seething tide of hatred come steadily closer, she smiled.
* * *
Alfred went up the final flight of stairs with the pulse rifle at his shoulder, trained up the stairwell. He reached the top and stepped out into the third-floor hallway.
* * *
Allison licked her lips. It had to be now, she thought. She couldn't be wrong about what she was feeling, and there was a pulser on the desk beside the HD her torturer was watching. He had the audio turned down, but she recognized the sound of her own screams, and her mind flinched away from the memory of what had wrung them from her. But that pulser was too close to his hand.
“Please,” she managed to whisper. “Please, let me go.”
He heard her, and he looked up, his smile evil and hungry as he realized she was conscious once more.
“Sure, honey. We'll let you go,” he sneered, and she twisted weakly as he picked up the neural whip and stepped towards her once more. “We just can't let you go yet, though,” he told her, and she moaned as he pressed the button and the whip began to hum once more, but every step towards her was one step away from the pulser. “First you have to do a little something for us.” His eyes glittered. “Don't worry, I'm sure it will come to you.”
“Please, don't!” she moaned through a sudden choking surge of terror, but he only laughed and raised the dully gleaming baton of the whip.
* * *
A sudden, sharper stab of fear went through Alfred. It wasn't his; it was hers, but he tasted a spike of panic all his own as he realized she was doing something. He didn't know what, but he'd felt the flare of her determination. She was . . . she was deliberately goading her tormentor!
He was in two worlds at once. In one, he raced down a hallway on feet which were preposterously quiet for a man of his size; in another, his throat closed with another's terror; and in both of them, the monster was awake and hungry.
* * *
Giuseppe Ardmore paused for a long, lingering moment, savoring the fear in her eyes, tasting the whimpers she couldn't suppress however hard she tried, watching her try to shrink away from him, letting her hear the hum of the whip and remember what it had already done to her. The power burned through him, sweeter and more addictive than any drug, and he cocked his wrist.
The door crashed open behind him, and he spun in disbelief as a complete stranger, at least twelve centimeters taller than he was, came through it with a pulse rifle in his hands.
* * *
It hit Alfred Harrington with an instant totality and clarity that he knew even then would live in his nightmares forever. Allison Chou stood in the center of the large, sunny room, surrounded by exercise equipment, with her hands held above her head by a tightly knotted rope. Her wrists were raw and oozing from the rope's bite, she was three-quarters naked, hanging heavily from those wrists, and he recognized the red, ugly marks stippled across her skin. He would have recognized them even without the hard, painful muscle spasms wracking her long after the marks had been inflicted.
Even without the neural whip in the hand of the big, fair-haired man between her and the door.
The pulse rifle was at Alfred's shoulder, but Allison's torturer was directly between the two of them. If he fired, the darts would rip straight through his target and hit her. He saw the shock, the total surprise, on the other man's face. Saw the panic which followed the surprise. But whatever else he might have been, his brain obviously worked quickly. His eyes widened as he, too, realized Alfred couldn't shoot without hitting Allison. He spun towards the door, simultaneously circling to be sure he remained between her and Alfred, and the neural whip shrilled as his thumb shoved the rheostat to lethal levels.
Alfred never hesitated. He took one long stride forward, and his eyes were ice. His left hand retained its grip on the pulse rifle's forestock, and his right hand brought the butt down from his shoulder, swinging it below his left.
Giuseppe Ardmore's scream was cut short as the rifle came up in a short, vicious arc that shattered his jaw. The impact was so powerful it lifted him from his feet, and he flew backward, losing his grip on the neural whip as he crashed to the floor. The pain was worse than anything he'd ever experienced. It exploded through him, smashing any vestige of rational thought, but pure survival instinct took over. His hands pushed at the floor, shoving as he scrambled away from the door on his back.
Alfred Harrington took two more long, quick strides. His eyes were cold, focused, and the pulse rifle rose in his hands again. He slammed one foot into the other man's chest, driving him flat on the floor once more. A hand clutched at his ankle; another rose in a useless gesture of self-defense . . . or an even more useless plea for mercy. But there was no mercy in Alfred Harrington. Not that day, not for that man. He was retribution, and he was justice . . . and he was death.
The butt of his pulse rifle came down on Giuseppe Ardmore's forehead like the hammer of Thor driven by all the power of his back and shoulders and hard, hating heart.
* * *
Alfred glared down at the dead man, and all he felt in that moment was regret. Regret that he couldn't kill him all over again. The monster roared within him, seeking fresh victims, and Alfred's soul quivered with the need to feed it.
But then he closed his eyes. He made himself inhale and he turned away from that hunger to something infinitely more important.
* * *
Allison felt her head wobbling as weakness, shock, fear, and pain washed over her, yet even as she hovered once more on the edge of darkness, she recognized him. She'd known—known, without question or doubt—who that flame of hatred had been. Who'd been coming for her. She had no idea how she'd known, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that she knew no power in heaven or hell could have stopped him from coming for her.
“Alfred,” she whispered, and then his hands—those strong, deadly, gentle hands—were there. She felt them freeing her, felt them gathering her close, and behind them she felt him. She didn't even know him, yet she was the most precious thing in his universe, and she let herself sink into the cleansing furnace heat of his need for her.
* * *
Alfred felt her droop in his arms. She weighed so little. How could someone so small be larger than all the rest of the universe put together?
His jaw tightened as he felt the uncontrollable residual muscle spasms lashing through her. He gathered her close, pressing his face against her sweat soaked hair, feeling her cheek against his chest, and he wanted—needed—to hold her there forever. To soothe her until the spasms faded and the pain vanished. But he couldn't. There was too little time.
He set her gently in a chair. It was hard—hard to let go, and hard because her hands clung to him so tightly—but he did it. Then he stripped off his windbreaker and draped it around her. She looked so small inside its vastness, but it least it covered her, and he recovered the pulse rifle and slung it over his shoulder. Then he gathered her up once more, laid her gently across his other shoulder, drew his pulser with his right hand, and headed back down the stairs.
* * *
“Rinaldo, you a*shole,” Kuprian Grazioli growled as he trudged around the corner of the building, “you're supposed to be at least halfway awake! The next time I com you, you damned well better—!”
Grazioli's complaint chopped off as he realized why Rinaldo Mönch hadn't responded to his com request about the sound which had drawn Grazioli's attention. And he knew what that muted “Crack!” had been, as well. Lost as it had been in the sound of the wind in the trees, he'd half-thought he'd imagined it when it wasn't repeated again. Now he knew better.
He could see only the back of the chaise lounge, but that was all he needed to see. White stuffing had been blasted out of its back, just at head level for someone sitting in it. Whatever had done the blasting had obviously been traveling at a very high velocity, and the center of the tufted white flower of ruptured stuffing was a dark red, glistening rose.
He ran towards the chaise lounge and grabbed for his com again.
* * *
“Tobin!”
“What?” Tobin Manischewitz looked up from his paperwork as his name crackled from the com.
“Kuprian,” the voice identified itself. “Rinaldo's dead! Somebody put a pulser dart between his eyes!”
“What?!” Manischewitz exploded out of his chair. “You're sure?”
“Of course I'm goddamned sure!” Grazioli shot back. “I'm standing here looking at what's left of his head! And I tried Riley before I tried you—he didn't answer.”
Manischewitz' expression tightened. If Brandão hadn't answered, that meant whoever had killed Mönch was already inside the lodge. Not only that, he'd known enough to go for the security post in the kitchen first!
For just a moment, his brain refused to function. This couldn't have happened. It just wasn't possible! Even if Benton-Ramirez y Chou had gone straight to the authorities—even if he'd convinced the BSC to back an operation right here on Beowulf despite Prescott-Chartwell—he couldn't have found them yet!
Could they have somehow traced the com signal after all? But that's crazy! We put our own com satellite into orbit and bounced the first signal off of it, and that's the best software in the galaxy. We bounced it through so many nodes God couldn't've unraveled it yet. There's no way they could have back-traced it this quickly! Unless she had a tracer on her we didn't know about? But we checked. And even if she did—
He shook himself. How they'd done it mattered far less than the fact that someone had done it. But if it was the SBI or the BSC, where the hell was the rest of the attack? No SBI SWAT team would have taken out one perimeter guard and then penetrated the lodge without backup! And while the BSC was capable of finesse, it also believed in overwhelming firepower delivered in a single, finely focused strike designed to paralyze its intended victims before they could even begin to think about responding. So what kind of—?
He stabbed the all-stations button on his com.
“Com check!” he barked, and made himself stand motionless as the startled members of his team responded.
They came up four men short: Brandão, Mönch, Sugimoto . . . And Ardmore.
Shit! The damned power receptor! Manischewitz thought. Whoever this bastard is, he sucked one man out to check the receptor, took him, and made him talk. And then he walked right through our perimeter, killed Riley, and—
Then the implications of Ardmore's silence hit him squarely between the eyes. If he'd taken out Giuseppe, then that meant he had to've—
His brain was still racing after that thought, his thumb already stabbing the all-stations button again, when Kuprian Grazioli came back up on the com.
“Tobin! Somebody's coming back out the—!”
Manischewitz heard a pulser whine over the com, and then Grazioli's shout chopped off with abrupt finality.
“Somebody's gotten inside the lodge and the bastard is headed back out!” he barked into the com. “Whoever it is, he's breaking for the west! Palacios, Tangevec, Mészáros—you three hold the perimeter. He may try the ravine—if he does, kill his arse! The rest of you, head for the back veranda! We'll link up there!”
He went on talking as he jerked open a desk drawer and snatched his own pulser out of it.
“Whoever the bastard is, he's already taken out four of us—five with Grazioli—so watch your arses! I'm guessing he got through to Giuseppe before Grazioli found Mönch, so he probably has the woman with him. I want her back alive if we can get her, but the main thing is to make sure this son-of-a-bitch is dead. If that means losing her, too, that's just the way it is.”
* * *
Alfred swore as the man standing beside the chaise lounge tumbled backward. The Descorso's dart had struck just above his upper lip and hydrostratic shock blasted a cloud of bone splinters, finely separated brain matter, and blood from the ruined back of his skull. But he'd been shouting into a com when Alfred fired, and Alfred's heart turned to ice as he heard someone else shouting from the wind-tossed woods to the north.
His only real chance had been to get in, find Allison, get her back out again, and reach the waiting taxi before the Manpower killers realized what had happened. Only he hadn't, and he had few illusions about the kind of men he faced.
He almost turned to make a break for the woods, but a burst of pulser fire ripped over his head in the long, rippling crack of the darts' supersonic passage. He snarled another curse and took the only option he had, sprinting not for the woods but to the south, circling to put the power receptor's shed between him and that rifleman to the north.It covered him for a few, precious moments; then another burst shrieked past him. He jinked and swerved as he ran, then flung himself down into the ravine.
A third burst ripped into the inside of the ravine's southern wall, pulverising grass, dirt, and leaves, but the shooter could no longer see them. He had to be shooting blind, not that it was going to matter much in the end. They knew where he'd gone into the ravine, and that bastard to the north was closer to its western end than he was. They'd post that one to watch that end, send someone else to watch the eastern end, and then they'd systematically close in on him.
He slid Allison off his left shoulder as gently as he could and snatched the captured pulse rifle off his right shoulder. At least the man he'd taken it from had been carrying three spare magazines. That meant he was unlikely to run out of ammunition before they closed in and killed both of them.
He elbow-crawled up to the brink of the ravine and raised his head cautiously. The dry water course was almost two meters deep at this point, which was good, and he had wide fields of fire in all directions. Unfortunately, he could only cover one of them at a time, and yet another fusilade of pulser darts screamed overhead. These had come from a different direction, farther east than the other fire, and his eye caught a flicker of movement as the man who'd fired darted towards another of the lodge's outbuildings, closer to the ravine.
The pulse rifle was at his shoulder, like an old, familiar companion, and his right forefinger squeezed.
The running man seemed to trip in mid-air, then went down in the bone-breaking slide of eighty kilos of dead meat, and the monster snarled inside him. That was five of them. At least they'd by God know they'd been in a fight!
The thought flashed through him, and it was poison bitter on his tongue as he darted a glance over his shoulder at Allison before he turned back towards the enemy. It didn't matter how many of them he killed before they killed him, for he'd failed, and she was going to die anyway.
Stop that! Maybe you have, but she's not dead yet, and neither are you! Keep it that way, you stupid bastard! And—
“Alfred?”
His eyes widened as Allison called his name weakly.
“Yes, Allison. It's me.” He was astounded by how gently his voice came out, but he dared not look back at her.
“You . . . came for me,” she said.
“Of course I did.” He considered lying to her, telling her everything was going to be fine, but he knew she would read the lie the instant he said it, and so he shook his head. “It's not looking too good just now, though.”
She astonished him with a ghost of a laugh, but the laugh ended in a sob. A sob of hurt, he knew, but also of inner pain. The pain of knowing he was going to die, as well.
“Here!” He pulled the uni-link from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Screen the cops and tell them to home on your signal. Maybe they'll get here in time.”
He knew there was no hope in hell of that, but he was astounded by the sudden explosion of excitement which echoed through their link as she caught it in trembling fingers. He started to say something more, then whirled as a burst of fire came from the direction of the main lodge. He returned fire and heard someone shout in alarm, although he was certain he hadn't hit anyone. There were at least four or five of them coming from that direction, though. He was going to have to take his chances on what might still come from the woods, and he flung himself across to the south side of the ravine. He got there just in time to catch one of them rising to dart forward while the others covered him. Darts screamed everywhere, but they were firing blind, without a hard fix on his position, and he squeezed off a quick three-round burst.
The running man went down screaming, right leg blown off at mid-thigh, and Alfred ducked back, squirming several meters to his left while a storm of darts flayed his firing position. He waited, holding his own fire until he had a target.
“Jacques!” He heard Allison's voice behind him.
* * *
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn't recognize the com combination when the caller ID came up. It wasn't Allison's, but perhaps the people who had her were willing to use additional coms now that they'd made their point. He stabbed at the acceptance key, but someone else spoke before he could answer.
“Jacques!”
“Alley?”
He stiffened in his chair, wondering why they'd given her the com again, terrified it was so that he could listen to her scream once more. But then he heard a sound which could never be mistaken by anyone who had heard it before and bolted to his feet as the crack and scream of pulser fire came over the circuit.
“Jacques, it's me! Home on this com! We're in a ditch near a lodge of some kind and they're closing in on us! Hurry, Jacques!”
“Alley!”
There was no reply, but the connection was still open, and he heard more pulser fire. Lots of pulser fire.
“Sergeant Brockmann! Saddle up! Move, damn it!” he shouted, flinging himself through the office door and racing for the waiting assault shuttle.
* * *
Alfred fired again—more to keep heads down than anything else—and started working his way farther to his left. They'd expect him to break back to the right . . . or he hoped so, anyway.
Something tugged at him and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Allison pulling the pulser which had once belonged to Giuseppe Ardmore out of his belt. He looked at her, and she managed a shaky smile.
“You watch that side; I'll watch the other,” she said.
“You know how to use one of those?”
“Not as well as you do, but my brother's taken me to the range a time or two. Besides,” she gave him another one of those heartbreaking smiles, “I'm all the backup you've got.”
“True.” He actually felt himself smiling back, then he shook his head. “Keep your head down. Just pop up, take a look, then duck back down—and never put your head up in the same place twice!”
“Yes, Sir,” she said and crawled towards the other side of the ravine.
It was absolutely insane, of course, but at that moment, as he watched her crawling towards a firing position with the pulser of her torturer in one hand, clutching his enormously too large windbreaker about her with the other, still shaking like a victim of old-fashioned palsy from the neural whip, he knew he'd never seen a more desirable woman in his life.
Not the time, Alfred! Not the time! a voice in the back of his brain told him, and no doubt it was right, but that didn't make it untrue.
He lifted his head just far enough to get his eyes back up above the lip of the ravine, saw something move from the corner of his eye, and waited patiently. The main lodge was flanked by half a dozen topiaries in the shapes of various species of Beowulfan wildlife, and he watched the shrubbery where that movement had vanished. A moment later, the greenery stirred again. A head poked cautiously up over it, and the immaculately groomed branches exploded in a spray of red as he put a pulser burst into them.
* * *
Who the hell is this guy? Tobin Manischewitz thought furiously as Emiliano Min died. The corpse thudded to the ground less than three meters from Manischewitz, and his jaw clenched. The man behind that pulse rifle had already killed Gualberto Palacios and Häkon Grigoriv. With Min added, that made eight of Manischewitz's team, and nobody had even seen the bastard yet!
Aside from the ones he's already killed, anyway, he corrected himself.
He was down to eight men, including himself, and he didn't like the situation one bit. It was obvious he'd been right, that this character was some sort of lone wolf, because otherwise the SWAT teams who'd been waiting for him to get the woman out of the lodge would be swarming all over their arses. That didn't mean it was going to stay that way, though. The bastard had to have a com, and he had to've used it now that he had her out in the open. The question was how quickly he could reach someone and get them to believe him . . . and how quickly they could respond once they did. And the reason that question was important was that they'd managed to pin him down in the worst place imaginable because it gave him a direct line of fire to the vehicle park. There were three air cars and the “ambulance” in that parking area . . . and they couldn't bug out when someone that good with a rifle was waiting to kill them the instant they tried to.
God, this sucks! Somehow I don't think he'd believe me if I told him all we want to do is leave. Hell, I wouldn't believe it! Let somebody in an air car get high enough to fire down into that frigging ditch? No way.
Their only hope was to take him out before anyone could respond to his call for help, and at least they could count on a little grit in the official gears. It wasn't as if the SBI kept a SWAT team on full-time standby, and one of the reasons they'd bought the lodge in the first place was that it was outside the jurisdiction of any metro police force. The local yokels were more game wardens than cops. It was unlikely they'd be able to get themselves together in a hurry, and even if they did, they wouldn't have the heavy weapons and training of someone like the Grendel PD or the SBI. So they still had a little time, but not much of it.
“O'Connor, you and Schreiber cut back to the north. Get beyond his field of view, then swing across the ditch and link up with Tangevec and Mészáros. We need to rush this bastard from both directions, and we need to do it now! Zepeda, I need you, Yang, and Meakin with me. Keep your damned heads down, though!”
Acknowledgments came back, and he made himself wait despite the desperate sense of seconds ticking away into eternity. He'd seen too many men killed by impatience, and he wasn't going to rush himself into a fatal error against somebody who could shoot the way this son-of-a-bitch could.
* * *
“There's more of them on this side than there were,” Allison said. “At least one more. Maybe two.”
Her voice was weak, frayed around the edges, and he knew she was hanging onto consciousness only by sheer, dogged determination and guts.
“They'll probably try a rush,” he told her levelly. “One or two of them will get up to charge across the open space. The others will lay down covering fire. I want you to stay right where you are until you think they're ready to come at you. Then I want you to shift to your left or your right, pop up, take your best shot, and duck back down. Don't wait to see if you hit anyone! They'll probably go to ground when they hear the darts, even if you don't hit them, and you don't stay in one place long enough for the ones laying down the covering fire to find you. Understand?”
Allison looked over her shoulder at him, feeling the fiery concern under the icy focus of discipline and self-control. There was something else in there, too. Something that knew this was the sort of moment for which he'd been born. Something he hated. But overriding everything else was his desperate need for her to live, and she felt the strength of him flowing into her. The dark spots wavering across her vision faded, and she drew a deep breath, wondering what sort of bizarre, impossible connection let that happen.
“I understand,” she said, and her voice was stronger, steadier than it had been a moment before.
* * *
“We're in position, Tobin,” Terjo O'Connor said tautly over Manischewitz' com.
“Okay, he can only look one direction at a time,” Manischewitz replied. “On a three-count. Right?”
“Right.”
Manischewitz drew a deep breath and eased himself up onto one knee behind the concealment of the same topiary which had done such an inadequate job of covering Min. Not that Manischewitz had any intention of poking his head up where it could be shot off. He and Yang were going to provide covering fire for Rudi Zepeda and Lazare Meakin.
At least for the first bound, he thought grimly. Then it was going to be his turn, whether he liked it or not.
“One,” he said over the com. “Two. Three! Go!”
He threw himself to the side, staying low, and squeezed the trigger and his pulse rifle spat death at two hundred rounds per minute.
* * *
Alfred saw the first movement a split second before the covering fire began. He ducked instantly, rolling to his right, then came up with the rifle already at his shoulder, and his eyes were cold.
Pulser darts shrieked overhead, but he had a brief flicker of time before the minds behind those rifles could recognize what their eyes had seen and redirect their fire. And in that instant, Alfred Harrington found his own target, exactly where he'd expected to see it. Lazare Meakin was still straightening, still getting his feet under him, when a three-round burst ripped through his torso. He hit the ground, trying to scream with lungs which had been blown into bloody vapor, and Alfred ducked back into the ravine just as Manischewitz and Yang swung their rifle muzzles towards him.
Rudi Zepeda took one look at what had happened to Meakin and flung himself flat in the minuscule protection provided by a dip in the ground. He'd made no more than four or five meters towards the ravine before he hit the ground, and he dragged his own pulse rifle around, hosing blind fire in Alfred's direction.
Ardmore's pulser whined behind him, and Alfred felt Allison's desperate determination. From the undertones rippling through their link, he doubted she'd hit anyone, but her stark determination to kill snarled through him, calling to his own killer side. And if it was different from the darkness inside him, it was no less strong.
Movement stirred before him again, and he ripped off another quick burst. This time he hit nothing, and the return fire blasted grit and dirt into his face. One of the darts cracked past so close his head rang, and he dropped down, half-stunned, pawing frantically at his eyes. He blinked on cleansing tears, shaking his head and and praying none of them had guessed how close they'd come. His vision cleared—mostly—and he lifted his eyes above the lip of the ravine again. It was like looking through a sheet of wavy crystoplast, and he blinked again and again. Something moved, and he snapped off a quick burst at the motion even as Allison fired again—and again—behind him. He heard a shriek from one of her targets and felt vengeful satisfaction boiling through her, but he knew their enemies were gradually working their way closer to the ravine from both directions, and he prayed that none of them had grenades.
* * *
Tobin Manischewitz's jaw tightened as Kazimierz Mészáros reported Terjo O'Connor's death. That burst of pulser darts had sawn off O'Connor's right leg like a hypervelocity chainsaw. He bled to death in minutes, and neither Mészáros nor O'Connor's partner, Schreiber could have reached him to do anything about it even if they'd tried.
They were down to only six men now, but they were also within no more than forty or fifty meters of the ravine.
Only a few more minutes, he thought grimly, sending another long burst of darts screaming towards their objective as Yang dashed fifteen meters closer and flung himself back to the ground just in time. Next time, I frigging wellwill bring grenades, no matter what the mission profile says, damn it! But we're almost there. Only a few more minutes, a couple of more rushes, and we'll have them.
* * *