Palaces of Light Page 15

  J.B. could see that whatever else she may be, she was in no fit state to be receptive to anything he might have to say. He tried to hold on to her, even though it was like trying to keep a grip on water, and turned to yell for Krysty and Jak, hoping that he could make himself heard above the general melee. He called, staring around and hoping that he would be able to catch sight of them. And that it would be quick. In response to the girl’s wordless cries of distress, those who had been moving in a pack were turning on J.B., jostling around him. They weren’t hostile—they moved too slowly and in too much of a stupor for that—but nonetheless they still had weight of numbers, and he tightened his grip on the girl as he felt fingers and hands clutch and pull at him, trying to separate him from the girl.

  Dark night! he thought. Jak and Krysty better hurry. He could see two tall, older men moving through the throng with a greater deliberation. Although he had never seen them before, K’s description had been vivid enough for him to know they were two of the men who had visited the ville and spirited away these youngsters.

  If they reached him, then the game was up.

  “Come on, J.B., don’t make a big deal of it. She’s only a little girl after all.”

  He felt two pairs of hands ripped away from his arm and chest before he heard Krysty’s wry tones. She joined him at his side, pushing back the kids who threatened to overwhelm them.

  “They don’t look like they want to go,” he muttered through clenched teeth, still grappling with the girl as he started to drag her back the way they had come.

  “Whatever these coldhearts feed them, it makes them subservient enough,” Krysty agreed. “Only one way to handle this.”

  Before the Armorer had a chance to realize what she was about to do, Krysty pulled back her arm and delivered a roundhouse punch to the point of the girl’s jaw. J.B. saw the light go out in her eyes before her eyelids dropped and the rest of her followed suit.

  “Aw, now I really didn’t want to do that,” he complained. “Now I’m going to have to carry her back the way we came, and she’s going to be bastard heavy after a while.”

  “I get the feeling that’s going to be the least of our worries,” she remarked, looking across the milling crowd at the heads of the two tall men as they moved closer. Their grim, hard stares left no doubt as to their intent. “Shit, I wish Jak would show himself,” she added in an undertone.

  And then a wry grin crept across her face. The albino teen might not have shown himself, or indeed been visible, but his presence was more than adequately felt. For as she looked across at the two men, first one and then the other vanished swiftly from view. It was as though they simply crumpled and folded up on themselves. Why this should be would have been a mystery if not for the fact that a spray of red shot from the throat of each a fraction of a second before they fell. A spray that seemed to draw the eye to the briefest gleam of metal, the merest flash of bone-white skin and dark fabric that was there and gone before it could be truly registered.

  “Come on, let’s move,” she said to J.B., using her elbow to deflect one of the youths who was trying to grab her from behind, and both feeling and hearing the satisfying crunch of bone on bone as the grip was loosened and a slack-jawed voice groaned in surprise.

  “Easy for you to say,” the Armorer said as he hefted the girl over his shoulder in a motion that was impeded not by her deadweight but by the actions of those who still sought to claw at him. He lashed out at them but was still thwarted in his intent by the necessity of only using one hand and a foot.

  Krysty understood what he meant. As soon as she had freed herself enough to move, she was at his side, helping him to free himself. She would be able to take care of one side and ride shotgun through the crowd for the hampered J.B., but she would require Jak to make his way through the crowds and assist her if they were to have any chance. Right now they were doing little more than treading water, and at that were in danger of sinking beneath the tide of slow-moving but insistent youth who milled around them.

  If she hadn’t been so busy punching and hacking her way through this tide, she would have expressed relief as the path suddenly opened in front of them, cleared by the flashing blades of Jak, a knife in each fist as he fought his way through.

  “What you waiting for?” He grinned as he saw them.

  Krysty cursed, which only made him laugh, but was thankful as she now found herself able to forge a path forward for herself and J.B. The Armorer had his hands full—literally—as he carried the girl with one arm and fended off grasping hands with the other. If she regained consciousness before they reached the path to the canyon, and some kind of clear way where they could outstrip the slow-moving horde, then he was in real trouble. If she struggled, she would take him down, and then they would be on him before he could protect himself.

  Without having the need to speak, the three companions had made a decision that the baron’s daughter was the primary target. The kids who had been clawing at them and trying to stop them were also from the ville—the way they moved as a pack made this obvious—but they were beyond help. Whatever malign force was at work in the city, it had them firmly in its grip and there was no way that just the three friends could extract all of them, unwilling as they seemed to be.

  Get the girl away first and worry about the others later: that was the best option. They couldn’t harm them, as they were all equally precious in terms of the jack they were worth if the companions were to take them home. And as they fought their way through this particular pack, that was why they used fists and boots, not blasters. Jak had palmed one of his knives, and was using it to slash a path but only if it hit fleshy areas and not organs. The other hand was empty, the knife secreted away as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

  Now the grens had exploded, and gas drifted chokingly across the lip of the city. There was precious little breeze in the canyon other than that stirred by the mass movement of the people who had come out in answer to the first crack of blasterfire. But it was enough to push the mist of noxious vapor over to where Krysty, J.B. and Jak were struggling to make their way off the ledge. The first drifting wisps of gas started to tickle at the backs of their noses and throats, causing them to cough and wretch. They knew they had to move fast, before it took hold of them.

  They were fortunate in two ways: first, the gas was sucked into the lungs of the milling crowd, unaware and perhaps even unknowing of what they were breathing in, causing them to falter in their attempts to stop the intruders. Second, the echoing crack and roar of blasterfire at their backs spoke to them of the diversionary tactics that were taking place. Doc’s LeMat and Mildred’s ZKR were each, in their own manner, distinctive sounds that could be picked out from the general melee, while Ryan’s SIG-Sauer was lost in the blur of handblaster and longblaster fire that answered the war party’s cover fire.

  This latter firefight had undoubtedly attracted the majority of the older inhabitants of the city—they seemed, after all, to be the only ones who carried blasters in the gleaming palaces—and so left the second attack party with only the youngsters to fight their way through. Which, considering the burden that was handicapping J.B., was a major blessing.

  They were in sight of a clear path, a steep rocky incline that would enable them to gain distance on the shambling crowd on their backs, their slowness now accentuated by the gas that was starting to decimate them as it took hold, paralyzing those who breathed too deeply and making them drop to the rock floor.

  In sight, but not close enough. Suddenly, a bolt of pure pain shot through Krysty’s head. She screamed, falling and flailing as she lost control, knocking J.B. to one side.

  The Armorer stumbled, staggered and fought to keep his balance and on his feet. But it was to no avail. The weight of Baron K’s unconscious daughter on his shoulder was enough to tip him. It was just bad luck. If Krysty had been at his oth
er shoulder, then perhaps he might have been able to use the weight of the girl as a counterbalance. But she was in the perfect position to tilt him in such a way that her weight only added to his momentum. As he fell, he let go of the baron’s daughter, but too late to thrust out an arm and break his fall.

  The unconscious girl’s flailing knee caught him in the side of his neck as his ribs impacted hard on the rock floor, driving the breath out of him as though with a hammer. That was bad enough, but the real damage was done by the knee, which caught his carotid artery. If felt as though the impact blocked the artery for a second, depriving his brain of blood and causing him to black out momentarily. That was all, but it was enough to cause his vision to blur and mist as he fought back nausea and the taste of bile in his throat. Desperately, he tried to get to his feet, but muddled messages from his brain wouldn’t let his limbs respond.

  He knew he was down, and he was sure Krysty was, too, after that scream. That only left Jak to pull it out of the bag for them.

  He couldn’t see what was happening to his left, but the rising swell of triumphant moaning told him that Jak was falling beneath the sheer weight of numbers. The occasional scream told him that the albino teen was going down fighting, as he would have expected, but that wasn’t enough. Jak was overrun.

  They all were. He wondered vaguely, through the mist of pain, what had made Krysty scream and collapse in such a manner. It was completely without warning, and the suddenness of it had been the major contribution in their downfall. He wondered how Ryan’s side of the operation was doing, and what they would do if they got away and found that his companions hadn’t succeeded. He wondered again about what had made Krysty suddenly act as she had. He tried to fight the flashing lights and throbbing pain in his head, to make the limbs that felt simultaneously like lead and like elastic work as he wanted them, rather than at random.

  And then some bastard kid kicked him in the head. The little fucker moved slowly and sluggishly like all of them, but to J.B.’s frustration he was even slower, even more sluggish. The kid’s boot connected with his temple and the lights flared brighter for a second before going out totally.

  * * *

  “WHY THE FUCK are we doing this?” Murphy moaned as they traipsed across the wasteland, the flat rock spreading across the horizon ahead of them.

  “Because the baron says we have to. And are you gonna tell him you really can’t see why the fuck we’re bothering when it’s his daughter we’re tailing?” Taggart, the crater-faced and rake-thin sec man who had fought with K for almost as long as Murphy, shrugged and spit on the ground as he spoke.

  Murphy sniffed. “Yeah…’cept we’re not really trailing her, are we? It’s the other kids, too, though you wouldn’t think any of us had fucking kids except him. And it ain’t even them, is it? It’s the fucking outlanders… .”

  Taggart shot him a sideways glance. Like Murphy, he had felt that it was some kind of a slight that the baron hadn’t let them go after their own, but had taken advantage of outlanders with some kind of chilling background. If a man was so inclined, he could take it as a slight on his own abilities. K had explained it to them like this: why waste your own men on a vanguard action when you could send in outlanders you didn’t give a fuck about? They could take the brunt of whatever the enemy had to throw at them, and then all your own men had to do was to mop up after and bring home the prize.

  Taggart could understand that. Maybe you could still call it a slight on your own ability, but you could also call it a damn fine piece of tactics. There was always risk, but if you kept it to the minimum, then that was okay by him.

  But he figured that Murphy didn’t see it that way. The big man took it more personally because he had a kid of his own among the ones who had been spirited away by the weirdos. Taggart didn’t have kids, so it didn’t hit him that way, though he had enough of an imagination to put himself in that position. For Murphy it was more a matter of a man taking back his own. More than that, if there was going to be any risk to the kids on getting them back, he wanted to be the one who took those chances and assessed that risk. Not leave it to some outlander.

  So that made him kind of jumpy. And complain like fuck, of course… Taggart was starting to get really pissed at the complaining, as it never seemed to stop. For that reason alone, if for nothing else, he hoped they reached the end of the line soon.

  It was a wish he shouldn’t have made.

  Trailing the one-eyed man and his people hadn’t been that easy. They had kept the original party in view from a great distance once they had gained ground. In the same way, Murphy had kept his own men at a similar distance. It was obvious that the mercenaries were shit hot, and would soon know if they had people on their tail. But at the same time, they had to keep some kind of eyeball on them. Now and again they were slipping over the horizon, and it felt like they were coming dangerously close to losing touch with them.

  And then, when that seemed to be happening, they would come into view again and Murphy would have to halt his party while the outlanders seemed to just wander around in circles like they were doing something really weird and unexplainable before starting to move forward again, causing Murphy to let them get out of sight again.

  Those weird moments when they seemed to be just moving in circles just doing weird shit sent a shiver down Taggart’s spine as he watched them through the binoculars he had slung around his neck. These were his prized possession, won in a firefight years before, and Murphy knew better than to ask to use them. But sometimes Taggart had wanted to hand them over as he found himself at a loss to explain what the hell was going on. There seemed to be no reason why the outlanders were acting in such a strange manner, and yet there was something about it that he couldn’t explain that somehow chilled him to the marrow. It was like they were doing real shit—stuff that was for real—but there was actually nothing there for them to be doing it to… Hell, it was so hard to explain, especially without coming across as some kind of stupe or crazie, that he kept quiet about any ideas he may have about what could be going on. Something to do with the way that they had all been weirded out back in the ville, but he couldn’t explain it, so he opted to say nothing and look like a crazie himself.

  Now the outlanders had moved out of sight but not over the horizon. Instead, it was as though they had suddenly dropped down into the earth. It was pretty obvious that they had found something like a crack in the earth, and had gone down on the tail of the weirdos and the kids.

  It was time for the sec force to catch up to them. Accordingly, Murphy had gotten his boys to pick up their pace as they followed. Like the two groups they were pursuing, they were on foot. They carried emergency rations to lighten the load, but still it was a bastard of a trek into lands that they wouldn’t otherwise traverse even with pack horses or wags. The heat and the hard rock beneath their feet took their toll, even at the pace they had previously set. Now it was faster, and they felt more and more drained. Frustration and exhaustion chipped at their patience, making them determined to get this action over and done with as soon as possible.

  It made them edgy and blunted their caution. None of them apart from Taggart had paused to ask why the one-eyed man’s people had stopped to act so strangely. Now that they were in even more of a rush to make up the ground, they were ill-prepared for what was about to happen to them.

  They weren’t to know that those who had gone before had experienced the anomalies of sudden canyons or rock walls springing up in front of them. They weren’t to know as these forms of psychic defense weren’t to be practiced on them. Instead, the intelligence that defended the mysterious palaces of light from all interlopers reached into the psyches of the men now approaching and took a different path, one that was, nonetheless, equally as terrible to the approaching sec men.

  Perhaps it had intelligence able to assimilate the way in which it had been breached, or
perhaps it just had a variety of mental games that it randomly selected. The intent was, in truth, irrelevant. It was only the result that mattered.

  As they trudged closer to their goal, it seemed as though the very ground in front of them started to rise up and form a barrier. Bizarrely, as they found themselves instinctively shifting their balance for an upheaval that didn’t come, it seemed that the earth crumbled and split asunder, re-forming without any tremor to indicate the vast forces that had to be causing such a schism. The dirt spilled and spun through the air, and yet they weren’t covered with so much as the slightest film of dust. That alone should have struck them as weird, if not for the fact that they were dumbfounded by the suddenness of the action in front of them, and the way in which it seemed to cut off their path.

  Murphy and Taggart exchanged bemused and fearful stares.

  “What the fuck is that?” Murphy whispered.

  Taggart had no words. He just shrugged as he looked along the length of the wall of rock that had sprung from nowhere with an uncanny and breathtaking speed. The barrier seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in every direction. Somewhere at the back of his mind, connections were forming with some of the strange movements he had seen through his binoculars. Some of it had looked as though the mercenaries were attempting to climb something.

  This? But why hadn’t he seen it then? He looked down at himself, brushing away dirt that wasn’t there. He smiled to himself.

  “It ain’t real, that’s what it is,” he said cryptically as Murphy shot him a puzzled glance.

  “You gone stupe or crazy?” the big sec man asked.

  Taggart shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “Neither. Though mebbe that’s what someone or something wants me to be. All of us. Listen, how the fuck could that have come out of nowhere, with no dust to cover us? No fucking earth moving underfoot, either,” he added, stamping down to prove his point.