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  “Customers aren’t much use to chills,” the proprietor called back. “Anyway, I’m not asking you to turn yourselves over. Just give them that creepy little girl.”

  Truth to tell, Ryan would be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t been tempted. She still put a chill up him, and although he was grateful to her for saving their hides on more than one occasion—he still didn’t consider her one of them, and gratitude didn’t load many magazines. They’d ditched helpful outsiders in the past and never looked back. Or scarcely did anyway. Of course, Krysty might never speak to him again. But he’d still rather that she choose not to talk to him nor forgive him, than to have her not be able to choose anything at all.

  But he had no reason to trust Hammerhand. He might have already made himself a baron, and not an inconsequential one, by the force at his command, but Ryan knew full well that the thinking processes of barons and mere coldhearts weren’t always that much different.

  Or different at all.

  “Don’t you think you’re giving this Hammerhand too much credit for keeping his word, Helga?” he called down.

  Then, more quietly, “Morning, Jak. Situation change much?”

  The albino shook his head. He was perched like a buzzard on the peak of the roof, right up against the smoking chimney.

  “He’s got a name for being hard but fair,” he heard the trading-post owner call. “I’m not even worried about the reward. It’s the ‘burn down my hotel and chill everybody’ part that occupies my thoughts.”

  Ryan hunched down on the other side of the chimney from the albino. It felt like a solid enough platform. No more shingles wiggled under his boots.

  “Fair enough,” he called back down. “But no.”

  He looked around. The sun had cleared the horizon to the east. Below him, the lower floors of the big central structure were revealed in a crazy quilt of angled roofs: the gaudy, the kitchens, the blacksmith shop, various storage sheds.

  Several dozen locals in the streets around the Bodacious all looked up at him. Some called entreaties or demands, which he ignored. If anyone had taken a shot at him—and risked hitting Mariah by accident—Helga had offered to stuff his or her offending blaster straight up her or his butt. And apparently the spectators took her at her word.

  Ace on the line. It might not protect him forever but it didn’t have to.

  He settled his rump down on the roof. The shingles were rough and cold through his jeans. Then he looked out to the west, past the roof of the kitchen annex.

  He could clearly see a distance-tiny human figure, standing next to a pickup with a pair of big speakers on its flat bed. A generator, presumably remodeled to burn alcohol for fuel the way most wag-engines were, stood discreetly behind him. Ryan’s depth perception was not prime, what with the whole one-eyed thing and all. But he had learned to seat-of-pants estimate distance well enough through sheer experience that he was actually better at guessing range than most two-eyed folk. And it looked to him as if Jak’s distance estimate was right.

  He unslung his longblaster, stuck his left arm through the loop of the shooting sling and cinched it up tight to help support the weapon. Then he propped his elbows inside his knees, pulled the butt plate up tight against his shoulder and peered through the scope set to maximum four-power magnification.

  That didn’t bring much detail to his eye. It showed him a tall man with a dark face and long black hair hanging over the shoulders of an army jacket. He looked like a big bastard.

  “Think what you’re doing to us, Cawdor,” Helga yelled. “There’s children here. Babies.”

  “Not my people,” Ryan muttered. He adjusted the scope to allow for approximated range. Then a couple of clicks to his left to allow for the rising wind. Finally, he centered the crosshairs on the middle of that broad chest. He sucked in a deep breath, released half of it, caught it, held it and fired.

  The short longblaster kicked up. He rode the recoil with seasoned skill, working the bolt action as he did. It didn’t come close to unseating him from his rooftop perch.

  The longblaster came back down online while the noise of the shot still echoed among the ramshackle buildings and out across the low, grassy hills. At first he could see no sign of Hammerhand at all, meaning the bullet hadn’t dropped him where he stood.

  Then he saw something dark behind the flatbed wag’s hood. He centered his scope on it and realized he was looking at the upper half of Hammerhand’s head. The coldheart chieftain was looking right back at him, though he’d have had to have literal eagle eyes to make him out at this distance.

  Missed him clean, Ryan thought. He was an ace marksman, but the Scout was never made for really long-range sniping. It was a long shot, and he reckoned he had misread the crossing wind.

  He felt no disappointment. He hadn’t truly expected to hit his target.

  But then he didn’t have to.

  “Naughty, naughty,” came Hammerhand’s voice. It sounded more amused than angry, though the man could have just been a good actor. Had to be, considering his position and his rocket rise to it. “I come to you with the open arms of friendship, and you try to chill me? Not cool, Lone Calf. Not cool. So it looks like death for all for you. Bloods, draw blood!”

  “That was cold, Cawdor,” Helga shouted up at him. “Triple smart. But cold. I’ll remember that.”

  “Not a problem,” Ryan replied. “But keep in mind that to do anything about it, you’ve got to stay breathing.”

  With an angry snarl of engines, the half-dozen wags that had been waiting for the Blood boss’s time limit to run out surged forward across the fifty yards that separated them from the settlement’s first outbuildings.

  “So as of now, it looks as if we’re all on the same side for the duration.”

  “Damn your eye!” the proprietor roared. “All right, everybody. Defensive positions! Like it or not, we’ve got a fight on our hands!”

  Ryan sighted in on the driver of the lead wag, a topless, battered Toyota Land Cruiser. He fired. The wag was hardly more than a hundred yards off and making almost straight for him—a gimme shot, after the one he’d just tried. He had aimed for the driver’s shaved head, right between the lenses of her sunglasses. When he got the scope lined up again, he could see the vehicle slowing and a man standing up to lean over the back of the driver’s set to grab the driver by the shoulders. The driver’s head lolled back.

  “Didn’t miss that time,” Ryan said.

  Shots cracked from the attacking wags. Other shots, distinguishable by their lower tones because they didn’t come from blasters pointed at Ryan, answered from the ville. Behind the first wags the whole mass of vehicles, horses and coldhearts began to advance, raising a shrill many-throated yipping that froze Ryan’s blood.

  But not his brain and actions. “Best get back down under cover, Jak,” he called. “We’re exposed up here.”

  Jak nodded and slid on his butt down the eastern slope of the roof, as if the slightest misjudgment wouldn’t splat him on the street like a bug on a windshield. He caught himself, and swung as lithely as a monkey out of sight beyond the roof’s edge.

  Slinging his longblaster, Ryan followed at a much less breakneck speed.

  Someone cut loose with a 5.56 mm blaster just below him. “Coming through!” he shouted between 3-round bursts.

  “Holding fire, Ryan!” he heard Krysty yell.

  A moment later she was helping him clamber in the window.

  She hugged him briefly, then she looked him in the eye.

  “Ryan, that was cold.”

  He shrugged. “It worked, though. There’s not much chance the locals are going to power us down and turn us over to the bastard now, is there?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “As much as I hate to admit it, you’re right.”

  “It happens.”
<
br />   Jak was at the window, blasting into the street with his Python. Mariah, who had passed the night with Mildred to give Ryan and Krysty a little privacy—J.B. had bunked with Doc—had come into the bedroom the couple had shared. She just naturally gravitated toward Krysty. Ryan was ace with that; the redhead acted like a control rod for the temperamental girl.

  Mariah sat on the bed, huge eyed with worry, twisting her hands in her lap. The others were interspersed among the other five rooms on the top floor.

  The roar of wag engines from the street below was powerful and immediate. Ryan could smell the exhaust fumes. He moved quickly to the window next to Jak.

  A stream of wags was rolling past the big compound structure. The Bloods seemed to be circling the big building. A brisk fire was being exchanged between the painted coldhearts in the open-topped trucks and the Spotted Elk defenders.

  “The locals didn’t manage to keep the bastards out long,” he said.

  Not that he’d expected them to. If they weren’t total stupes, most of the ville’s population would simply lie low and hope Hammerhand didn’t follow through with his promise to raze the place and chill them all. Ryan reckoned he might not. He’d won a rep as a triple-hard man in his rocket rise to fame and increasing power over the past few weeks. But he also showed no sign of loving to deal out either death or pain when he didn’t have to.

  Rumor even said he’d had the delegation of elders from his former tribe who’d done something to piss him off chilled before he had them skinned and their hides sent home.

  And he had also won a name for smashing absolutely flat anyone who stood in his path, then stomping them into the ground. Ryan had few illusions as to which category the Bodacious Creek Trading Post defenders fell into, including him and his friends.

  “You can leave off shooting,” Ryan told Jak when the albino stopped to reload his huge revolver. “Save your ammo for when the bastards get inside and rush us.”

  Jak frowned, shrugged and put away the refilled blaster. Then he brightened.

  “Got knives,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Go watch the stairs.”

  “Coldhearts not inside yet.”

  “They will be shortly,” Ryan said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The shotgun roared and kicked J.B. in the shoulder. A pair of Bloods riding in the back of an open Jeep Cherokee began thrashing and spurting blood.

  “These are some persistent sons of bitches,” he remarked to Doc as he pulled back to reload. The two of them were shooting from the window of the second room south toward the staircase from Ryan and Krysty’s room, on the east side, directly overlooking the rutted dirt street.

  “Indeed,” Doc remarked and triggered another 3-round burst from his M4.

  No fire was coming their way. Circling like vultures, the coldhearts were shooting exclusively at the ground floor of the main trading-post building, as were the Bloods who had scrambled onto the roofs, some flat, some peaked, some crazily slanted, of the buildings surrounding it. They were clearly exchanging brisk fire with Helga Spotted Elk and the other defenders. And had just as clearly been ordered to avoid doing any shooting that might risk hitting the goal of this whole mass attack: Mariah.

  Nonetheless J.B. pulled back out of sight behind the windowsill to stuff buckshot shells into the long in-line magazine beneath the barrel of his M-4000 scattergun. He didn’t want to take the chance of somebody taking an opportunity shot while he stood there in plain view, distracted, like a simp. Plus good habits were good habits for a reason, and to keep good habits you had to avoid varying from them. Just like checking the chamber of a blaster you had just taken hold of, even if somebody had just checked it before handing it to you.

  The roar of blasterfire was stupefying. J.B.’s highly tuned ears could even pick out the snarl of automatic weapons. He wondered where the coldhearts were getting all that ammo. The air was thick with shouts and screams; the smell of powder, both smokeless and smoky; lubricant and fuel, all burned; as well as the reek of guts voided in fear, the relaxation of death, or plain torn open.

  He poked the Smith & Wesson out the window again. As before, he found what could be called a “target-rich environment.” The coldhearts had poured into town and were washing around the trading post and hotel like floodwaters.

  He lined up the sights on another open wag. Like the rest of the attackers, its occupants, male and female, were dressed in a dizzy variety of random scavvied garments, modern manufacture and bits of decoration ranging from wild hair, and face and body paint to feathers, scraps of fur, cartridge belts, leather straps and less identifiable objects.

  He blasted into the crowded pickup bed. At that distance, about thirty yards, the shot pattern spread out to somewhere upward of a foot. It was enough to poke .24-caliber holes in two or three people—if he was lucky, four. His object wasn’t necessarily to chill any of the coldhearts. He was trying to wound as many as possible, to take them out of the fight, or at least reduce their efficiency, and to force other Bloods to do something to get them to healers for first aid. Or barring that, to mess with coldheart morale simply because they weren’t getting help.

  Trader had always been strict in his teaching: no chilling for chilling’s sake. And in this case, chilling wasn’t the most efficient way to cut the odds facing them.

  Not that it seemed to matter. J.B. had no clue what Hammerhand had said or offered to this mob to get them so fired up to bring him one little girl—although having seen her in action, he could well understand why the Blood boss wanted her. At this rate, even though their stocks were plentiful, they’d run out of rounds long before Hammerhand ran out of willing blasters, even counting on the morale multiplier, which old Napoleon said was three-to-one, a figure J.B. always found on the light side.

  He heard hammering on the frame of the open door behind him. Somebody wanted to attract his attention without flat barging in and risking collecting a belly full of buckshot.

  He pulled back around with his back to the wall and his weapon held muzzle up. Doc was currently away from the window in the process of reloading his carbine.

  The newcomer was Ricky, his cheeks colorless and his eyes big and wild. “They’re storming in through the back!” he said breathlessly. “Already got inside the kitchen.”

  Ricky and Jak had been stationed in a room on the west side of the top floor, mostly to keep an eye out for just such eventualities. Although since Ricky had his replica DeLisle in his hands, he had likely been handing out hot-lead grief to the coldhearts on that side, just to keep their minds right.

  “Such was inevitable,” Doc said.

  J.B. nodded. “We’re not doing more than pissing in the ocean here anyway,” he said. “Time to brace ourselves for the rush and the real fighting. Has Ryan heard yet?”

  “Jak told him.”

  When J.B. and Doc stepped out, the others were gathered in the narrow corridor, even Mariah, ignoring the two grown women’s efforts to shoo the pigtailed child back into the shelter of Ryan and Krysty’s bedroom.

  Ryan had slung his Steyr and held his SIG blaster in his left hand and his big, broad-bladed panga in his right.

  “We need to get ready to pour fire down the stairs,” he said. “Krysty, let me borrow your M16.”

  “Not a chance,” the redhead said firmly. “Nor my Glock. I’d just as soon meet danger faceup than hunching back of the front line where I might get another ten seconds of life if the Bloods break through.”

  “It is kinda romantic how Ryan keeps trying to shield you from danger every now and then,” Mildred said.

  Krysty shot her a quelling look, but the stocky healer was hard to quell, which was one reason J.B. felt about her the way he did.

  She turned her attention on Ryan. “Do we have an exit strategy here, kemo sabe? I know you’re not co
unting on us running out of bad guys before we run out of bullets.”

  Ryan peered down from the top of the stairs. His brow was furrowed in concentration. From the look on his face, he wasn’t liking the banging and screaming he was hearing from downstairs. Jak stood beside him, quivering with eagerness like a pup who smelled a catamount.

  “I mean, get out on our own legs,” Mildred persisted, “and not roped together by the necks or anything.”

  “Hold on until night,” Ryan said, “then sneak out.”

  “It’s worked for us before, Mildred,” Krysty said.

  “Yeah. But right now it seems kind of like that ‘hang on until dark’ thing is not looking too workable.”

  “I can help,” Mariah said.

  “I know,” Ryan told the girl. He didn’t look at her. “I don’t want to get dependent on you, though. You’ve hauled our chestnuts out of the blast furnace a number of times now. But somehow we went all these years doing it on our own, up to the point we met you.”

  “Are you willing to lay down your life to prove a point, Ryan?” Doc asked.

  “I didn’t think you were all that attached to life yourself, Doc. Funny you should ask that.”

  The old man shrugged. His chin had sprouted white stubble, which made him look even older than he usually did.

  “Please do not misinterpret my intent. It is a question asked purely out of curiosity. Inasmuch as that would be a substantial departure for you.”

  “Well, I won’t say no to survival. But we’ve always stayed alive as a team, everybody doing their part. Not one of us relying on another all the time.”

  Jak brought his head up, whipping his long white hair way from the shoulders of his camo jacket.

  “Coming now!” he said.

  * * *

  RYAN HUNG BACK a few steps up the warped-plank floor of the hallway. He was feeling none too pleased with the choice, but it was the practical one.