Chapter Twenty-Two

Ryan peered around the sheet-tin outer wall of a roadside, shanty. The first of the series of concrete berms designed to keep insiders in the ville—and outsiders out—lay across the dirt track ahead. It was four feet high and triangular in shape, with the widest and heaviest part flat on the ground, which made it virtually impossible for even the biggest wag to ram it aside. The configuration of berms formed an offset pattern, like a herringbone tweed, so incoming or exiting wags had to make a series of hard alternating turns to get around them. All vehicular traffic slowed to a crawl, and was forced to move broadside to the sec men’s massed blasters.

Ryan’s biggest concern was the safety of the wags they’d stolen. Any hope the crew had depended on them. Even if he and his people managed to get past the barricade’s defenders and out the ville’s gate, if the wags didn’t make it all in one piece, too, they were never going to catch up with the convoy and Trader. And worse, being then stranded on foot, it would just be a matter of time before the baron’s sec men chased them down in off-road wags and ran them out of ammunition.

At Ryan’s side, Poet was thinking the same thing. “Got to leave the wags well back,” he said. “Can’t risk getting them all shot up. Try and take the barricades on foot.”

Ryan looked behind them, where, around a bend in the road and hidden from view of the berms, the three captured wags sat idling. “Poet,” he said, “better collect the crew and have them move up with me. Leave three behind to drive the wags.”

Ryan knew that Poet would assign the driving jobs to crew members he knew were steady. The same ones Ryan would have picked.

As Poet hurried off without hesitation or complaint, as if he were the lieutenant and Ryan the captain, the one-eyed man felt no rush of satisfaction. Which surprised him a little when he realized what had just happened. The balance of authority between them had subtly shifted without his even noticing it. The ground rules of their relationship had changed. Competition had given way to cooperation, at least for the time being. A function of their desperate straits, perhaps, and perhaps because of the absence of Trader.

Perhaps even because of a new mutual respect.

Ryan craned his head around the wall once more. He scanned the top of the barricade and what little of the bunkhouse he could see. There was no sign of movement, anywhere. Which he took to mean that the sec men were already all in position, forewarned by the clatter of blasterfire from the heart of the ville. Their object was clean to keep the would-be escapees pinned inside the ville long enough for the rest of the sec men to arrive in force at the rear. Then it would just be a matter of mop-up, single bullets behind the ears of those still breathing.

Ryan had left the Remington back in the wag. He figured it would be nothing but a hindrance in the coming fight. It was too long, too slow to come on point and too slow to reload. He thumbed open the Ruger’s loading gate and spun the cylinder, making sure that every chamber was loaded with an unfired cartridge. He had no idea how many of the opposition were hiding in among the berms, but based on the sec men he had seen on the way into the ville, and the size of the bunkhouse, it figured to be an even fight.

The crew members hurried up along the edge of the road with Poet in the lead. When they arrived, Ryan waved over those who were unarmed. “You follow us over the obstacles,” he told them. “Pick up the blasters from the dead sec men, then move ahead.”

To Poet, he said, “We can’t wait until we reach the gate to start moving the wags forward.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. So I told the drivers to head into the barricades as soon as we gain some ground. That way, we can defend the wags using the berms for cover if more sec men come at us from behind.”

“We go at them straight on until I give the signal,” Ryan told the assembled crew. “Then we split wide, right and left. The idea is to flank them, make them bunch up in the middle of the barriers. When you’ve cleared out an area, wave the wags forward. We’ve got to move fast. This can’t turn into a pitched battle, or we’re all going to get chilled. It’s got to be hit-and-git.”

With that, Ryan sucked in a deep breath, waved his Blackhawk in the air and broke from cover. He sprinted into the center of the road, running right into the muzzles of the blasters along the berm. The others followed him, also on a dead run.

The blastershots started almost at once. Slugs zipped past Ryan’s body and struck the ground on either side of him. He didn’t think about them, about how close or how far away they landed. All he thought about was getting to the break-off point as quickly as he could.

When he was close enough to see the faces of the men shooting at him, he cut right, his long legs pumping.

One of the sec men abruptly rose from behind the concrete cover, thinking he had a clear shot at the dark-haired escapee in front.

From behind Ryan, a short burst of autofire ripped the air, the first fired by his crew. The standing sec man toppled over backward, his weapon flying out of his hands. For a few seconds, all firing stopped as the baron’s sec men took in the sight of one of their own, suddenly dead.

As the crew members following Ryan peeled off, left and right, Poet and Abe knelt in the middle of the road and sent bursts of skimming fire along the tops of the concrete barriers. The sec men kept their heads down long enough for Ryan to reach the far end of the first berm.

He vaulted it, slapping his left hand on the top, kicking his legs around over it. As he cleared the top, he saw three sec men crouching, spread out to his left along the inside of the wall. The Ruger boomed in his fist as he fired across his own body without looking down the sights. The closest man clutched at his chest and slumped to the road. Landing on the balls of his feet, Ryan thumb-cocked his blaster and charged the other two.

Maybe it was the confusion of the all-out attack, the noise of the big Magnum blaster, the threat of sudden death, because although they fired full-auto, neither of the sec men managed to hit the onrushing Ryan. He, on the other hand, nailed them both with successive shots to the center chest. He wasn’t fussy about where he hit them, just as long as they stayed down for the count.

Ryan turned away from the writhing bodies and vaulted the next barrier. Behind him, he could hear the others, the tramping of their boots, the grunts of effort as they cleared the berms.

Autofire rattled in his ears.

Bullets blistered at him, sparking off the top of the next berm, clipping free chips of concrete. Shielding his good eye with his hand, he dropped down to cover.

So far, the sec men were either dying or pulling back. As anticipated, they were playing the stall game. To Ryan, it looked like there were another four or five of the staggered walls between him and the gate. From the rear, he could hear the wags begin to advance through the maze, engines growling as they crept around the berms.

He quickly reloaded the Ruger with cartridges from his shirt pocket, then snapped the cylinder gate shut. Turning, he motioned for the crew members spread out behind him to stay where they were and wait for him to make his move. He then ran along the front of the wall toward the opening that allowed traffic to pass.

Ryan rounded the corner with the Blackhawk up and blazing in his fist. Like a giant’s finger, it flicked the bodies of the sec men clustered there, sending them twisting down, screaming, or dropping them stone dead in their tracks. Those who survived closed ranks and tried to return fire, but Ryan was already across the open roadway to the safety of the berm on the other side.

Straight ahead of him, he could see Poet and Abe hurdling over the barrier, and when he looked back the way he had come, he could see the rest of the crew jumping the berm there, as well. Just as he’d planned, the frontal assault had allowed the crew to get into chilling position on the flanks of the main sec-man force.

Autofire raged back and forth as Ryan moved out from cover. In the confusion of blastershots, he could pick out the sound of Poet’s CAR-15: it made an almost chimelike tone as it spewed death. And there was no mistaking the rocking boom of Hun’s 10-gauge.

As he ran down the narrow traffic lane, Ryan scooped up one of the dead sec men’s weapons. It was a KG-99 autoblaster that had been converted to select fire. He advanced along the ends of the openings in the berms, shooting the machine pistol in short, controlled bursts, driving the remaining sec men ahead of him. They were in full retreat, now, no longer even attempting to put up a fight.

At the edge of the last berm, he stopped and again took cover. Beyond it, the surviving sec men had their backs up against the mesh of the wire gate. One of them was fumbling with the gate’s bolt, trying to get it open.

“Put the blasters down!” Ryan shouted. “If you lay them down, you can walk away.”

Whether it was from their blind panic, or whether they were used to dealing with people who didn’t keep their word, the sec men instead opened fire.

It was a big mistake.

There was no gunfight. It was more like an execution. The sec men were held standing, quivering against the wire by the hail of lead Ryan and the rest of the crew poured into them.

“Enough!” Poet shouted over the din.

And the blasterfire faltered, then ceased.

Ryan tossed aside the empty KG-99 and strode over to the gate with the Ruger cocked and ready. It wasn’t needed. The sec men were not only dead, but they had also been torn to shreds.

As he looked over his shoulder, Ryan saw the captured wags rounding the final barrier, one by one. He kicked open the gate and waved them through.