by James Axler
"Men on horses. Gray clothes, I think. Could be thirty or so. It's hard to tell. Looks like they're riding in pairs."
"Sec men?"
"Can't tell."
"Whites or Indians?" Doc shouted.
"Can't see."
"Blasters?" hissed J.B., who'd taken up position on the end of the line.
"Gaia!" Krysty called. "I know my sight's better than most, but I can't count the damned fleas on a pig at twenty miles. They're still too far off for me to make out."
In the stillness that followed they could all hear Jak's little voice, babbling jagged, broken phrases. Moments from his past. From his imagination. Moments from nowhere.
"Baron Tourment gripping…swampies closing on me with teeth bloodied… Slain waxwing's shadow in eyes… Let's lick breasts sweet and sweet and… Seen into night… Father!"
"Want Lori to try to keep him quiet, Ryan?" Doc asked.
"No. We're not worried about hiding. We want them to see us. Let the kid rave all he wants to. Mebbe help him some."
Gradually the horsemen, in double column, drew closer. They were all wearing uniforms of light gray and were mostly mounted on bay steeds. Ryan could see the sun dancing off shining metal, indicating that they were all armed. He couldn't rid himself of the nagging feeling that there was something wrong. They rode too tight together, and it looked as if they wore similar uniforms. And that meant sec men.
And sec men meant trouble.
"Don't all show yourselves," Ryan called to his companions. "Keep undercover and keep 'em covered. Wait for my word. If there's any threat, then pour it in them. Keep careful."
Ryan waited until the men, twenty-seven of them in all, were level with their hiding place, on the narrow trail.
"Hey!" he shouted, standing behind the boulders, waving his hands above his head. The SIG-Sauer was unholstered and the Heckler & Koch rested at his feet, ready for use.
His sudden appearance had a dramatic effect on the mounted patrol.
There was a shouted command from a tall rider at the front and the column wheeled, straggling a little, stringing out along the side of the trail. It halted at another command.
Ryan stood still, the others remaining hidden and silent. He held his hands out wide in the universal gesture, showing that he held no weapons and meant no harm. Over the years, Ryan had also often come to recognize the gesture as that of someone about to spring an ambush.
The line of men watched him. Ryan ran his eye along them, noting a variety of things: they all wore the same uniform, dusty and gray, with what looked like a golden stripe down the sides of their pants; most wore slouch hats, all had boots; some had swords slung at their hips, others holstered pistols; nearly all of them had long blasters hidden in buckets on the side of the saddle, but he couldn't make out what type they were. The leader was much taller than most, riding a well-muscled black stallion.
"Hi, there," Ryan shouted from his vantage point, knowing from the position of the sun that the patrol of sec men—for that's what they had to be—couldn't see him clearly. "Got a man sick here. Can you help?"
The leader had a thickset man behind him, with three stripes faintly visible on his upper arm. Behind him came a single rider, holding a guidon that fluttered at the tip of a spear. The rest of the men were strung out at the rear.
With his eyes locked on Ryan Cawdor, the leader took off one of a pair of leather gauntlets and began to brush at the dust on his clothes. The rest of the column followed his example, the men disappearing behind a quivering wraith of reddish-gray. The cloud cleared away slowly, and Ryan and his concealed companions could see the sec men properly for the first time.
The uniforms weren't gray. They were dark blue, with a stripe of yellow down the side of the breeches. The saddles were a peculiar, high, old-fashioned kind of design. Ryan could only see the hilts of the long, curved sabers, but they looked like brass. It wasn't possible to make out any of the blasters that the sec men carried.
The leader took off his hat very slowly and deliberately, revealing a tumbling mane of golden hair as long and lush as Lori's blond tresses. The face was thin, with a yellow mustache, the eyes narrow. It seemed to Ryan that there was something wrong with the thin-lipped mouth. It looked skewed, as though from some old wound.
And it looked oddly familiar.
But his eye was then caught as the wind unfurled the flag atop the lance, held by the young galloper. It was dark blue, and it carried only a large golden number: seven.
"By the three Kennedys!" Doc exclaimed, close by Ryan on one side. "We've chron-jumped by mistake. This is 1875. That's Autie Custer and the Seventh Cavalry!"
Ryan had read about General Custer and his blue-coat pony soldiers. Forty miles a day on beans and hay had been one of their slogans. Custer had been the brightest and best young officer in the country, and he'd ridden to his death in some dreadful ambush in the nineteenth century.
To his right Ryan glimpsed J.B., his angular jaw dropped in amazement.
"Is it a chron-jump, lover?" Krysty whispered from the other side.
"I don't know," Ryan began.
At a signal from the yellow-haired officer, the shooting began.
Chapter Ten
RYAN DIVED SIDEWAYS to save his life, his brain a jagged maze of swirling confusion.
Had they stumbled on some distant ville where the baron used a military force of sec men, armed and uniformed like something out of a Remington painting or a Brady daguerrotype?
Or was Doc right? Had they accidentally triggered the gateway into operating on a chron-jump system?
Which century were they in? The nineteenth or the twenty-second?
Doesn't much matter, he thought, as he landed in a rolling dive behind the barrier of the boulders. Splinters of rock stung his face and neck as a bullet missed him by less than a hand's span. By the time he'd come up from the somersault, he had the G-12 and was crouching behind cover, ready to join the firefight.
"Let them have it?" J.B. shouted from his right side.
"Yeah. Hold 'em off." Ryan raised his voice so that all four could hear him. "Don't let them get close, but watch the ammo."
Ryan had been in firefights where thousands of rounds had been blasted off in a couple of minutes of bloody action. That was when you had the supply wags at your back. Now, they were friendless in a strange and hostile land, more hostile than he'd imagined at first. All they carried was all they had. That and no more.
"What blasters are they using?" he yelled to J.B., ducking instinctively at the weight of lead hissing around them.
The Armorer's knowledge of firearms was legendary, his ear for a make or model of blaster almost infallibly accurate.
"Can't believe it, Ryan. Sounds like they got Springfield carbines, 1873 models, .45 caliber. But there can't be that many left working in all Deathlands."
Ryan knew the guns, single-shot center-fire weapons with a long, slow trigger pull. In the back country you sometimes came across one, generally rebored and rebuilt, held together with rusting baling wire, the butt long rotted. For all of the sec men attacking them to be armed with the same type of blaster was stretching coincidence to such an extent that he began to think Doc was right. They must have chron-jumped.
It was a weirdly exciting idea, but one that had to be set on the back burner. Survival came first.
"Hold fire!" came the shrill yell from the leader of the sec men.
Ryan risked a glance around his boulder, seeing that the blue-uniformed sec men had spread out in an efficient skirmishing line, each man picking his own cover from the range of hollows and scattered rocks. The officer was just visible near the center of the men, holding up his drawn saber, the sunlight glittering brightly from the blade.
Ryan picked the momentary silence to try again. "We got a man wounded. Don't mean no harm! Why d'you blast us?"
For fifty heartbeats there was no reply. Then he heard the harsh voice of the skinny blond sec officer. "If y
ou speak the truth, then all of you come out, hands high, blasters in the dirt."
Doc's voice hissed from Ryan's flank. "Not a chron-jump. They didn't call guns 'blasters' in Custer's day. There's something rather suspicious here, Ryan. I advise some caution."
The warning wasn't necessary. There was something about the tall, lean man that rang a distant bell in Ryan's memory. And the memory was tainted with a dark shadow.
At least it was good news that they hadn't traveled centuries back in time. Yet why were these men all clothed in such outdated uniforms? Dressed as the old Seventh Cavalry, which had been wiped away by Crazy Horse and the Sioux up on the Little Big Horn?
Ryan wasn't a doomie or a senser, but the prickling of the short hairs at his nape gave its own warning.
"Come out and show yourself!" the sec officer shouted.
"Don't, lover," Krysty whispered. "Something's real bad here."
"First, you come here and talk some about it," Ryan replied to the hidden man.
"Ma didn't raise me to lay my neck under the ax, stranger. Come out now, or we come and take you. Better my way."
"You say!"
"Mister, I don't have the time to wait here in the sun while you fart around with me. You got ten seconds to come out." A pause. "How many you got yonder?"
"Enough," Ryan called. "With enough blasters to make you pay a price."
"You say!" mocked the yellow-haired man. Ryan could still see the last foot or so of the sword's blade, protruding behind the boulder. A rising wind blew a veil of dust between the two sides.
Behind him, Ryan heard Jak moaning in pain.
"Ten seconds, stranger. What you got to lose? One way or another, we get you."
"I know the voice," Krysty hissed. "Can't place it though."
"And I," Doc added. "I associate it with past wickedness, but I fear that the memory is blurred. Like so many."
"Five seconds!"
Ryan leveled the smooth muzzle of the G-12, holding his breath as he drew a careful bead. The laser-enhanced scopesight gave him a perfect view of his target, though it shimmered a little in the desert heat.
"Two seconds, stranger. You show yourself and you don't get harmed. You got the general's word on that."
"You first… General."
"For a man with just two seconds left to live, you got a lotta gall, stranger. Show yourself to me. Seems like I might know you from somewhere."
Ryan didn't reply, concentrating his attention on a difficult shot, the caseless rifle steady on the rounded edge of the boulder. The range wasn't anything to the G-12, but the target was almost impossibly small.
"Ready, troopers? Harknett, take five men and go left, along the draw, come around behind him. Bulmer, do the same to the right. Go on my word." The orders carried clearly to the five friends as they waited, hidden from the sec men.
"Wait," Ryan breathed, finger tightening on the trigger of the blaster.
"That's it, stranger," screamed the man in blue.
The sound of the gun, suppressed by a system of baffles, was no louder than a spinster's genteel cough in the middle of a Sunday sermon on the sin of sloth.
The recoil pushed against Ryan's shoulder with an insistent nudge. Straining his ears, he heard the sound of success. The thin ringing noise of steel on steel, then the piercing whine of the bullet as it ricocheted into the air. There was a yell of inarticulate anger and through the sight Ryan could see the blond man shaking his jarred wrist. The saber had been sent spinning from his fingers and now lay a half dozen paces beyond the ridge of stones.
"Put the ace right on the line." J.B. grinned. "Should stir some shit down there for the sec men."
"Yeah," Ryan said with a wolfish grin that puckered the scar on his cheek.
They all heard the order to fire, and ducked against the crescendo of bullets that sang and spit around them. But they were safe in the dip. Ryan knew that if the sec men managed to get around back of them, on the top of the ridge behind, then their time would be counted down in seconds.
"Die, you bastard!" came the scream from behind the swirling cloud of powder smoke.
The carbines were single shot, and there was a momentary but appreciable delay in the volleys. Ryan sensed the rhythm, waiting for the moment to squint around the right-hand side of the covering rocks, trying to find a target for the G-12. His friends were doing the same, but only he and the Armorer possessed blasters capable of causing problems for the distant sec men.
"Wait for them to try moving," he called. "Some'll go left, and some right. J.B., you take any going to the left."
"Sure."
The golden-haired officer didn't waste any time. Obviously angered and shaken by having his sword shot clean out of his hand, they heard him snapping orders to his patrol. Moments later, screened by another burst of fire from the carbines, the sec men made their move.
"Now," Ryan said, showing himself for a moment, the Heckler & Koch now set on triple burst. He squeezed the trigger three times. The innovative blaster had a built-in dispersal factor, to allow for any normal variability of aim. Of the six men scurrying along, partly hidden by the dead ground, Ryan saw four go down, the other two diving flat for the minimal cover. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that J.B.'s racketing mini-Uzi had knocked down three of the half dozen sec men trying to circle them on the left.
The double burst of lethal fire had the temporary effect of silencing the remainder of the hidden sec men. From where they waited, Ryan and the others could hear a man screaming, gut shot, kicking up a whirling cloud of orange dust.
"That'll give them something to think on," Krysty said.
"Just be more careful when they creep at us," J.B. replied, taking a quick look around the protective rocks. "They're sitting tight. Didn't know how many there was of us." He paused. "But now they know better."
The silence from the sec men lasted several minutes. Ryan had a chance at a snap shot at the longhaired leader of their attackers as he scuttled across to join the rest of his men, obviously to plan their next moves without bellowing out orders that could be heard from higher up the hill.
Though the lay of the first deck of cards favored the defenders, Ryan had seen enough firefights to be pessimistically aware of how slim their chances were. The sec men were only armed with the single-shot carbines, but they seemed well drilled and disciplined. And there were still at least twenty of them alive, against the five friends. What was more relevant was that only the G-12 was really suited to distance shooting. The Uzi would take its toll if they were rushed.
The handblasters of Doc, Krysty and Lori wouldn't be of much use out in the open like this.
If the blond officer played the rest of the hand with adequate skill, then the troopers could surround them and get to the high ground and pick them off one by one.
It didn't look good.
WHOEVER WAS IN CHARGE of the sec men knew his job. He made sure that Ryan and the others didn't get a chance to relax or to grow confident in their position. Every half minute or so there'd be a ragged volley of shots, closely aimed, keeping heads down, leaving a bitter layer of dust in the baking air.
Ryan slithered back down to see how Jak was. Lori was still kneeling beside him, fanning with her hand to try to keep the horde of midges from settling in his open mouth and on the crusted, staring pink eyes. The boy had finally sunk into a coma, but his body still twitched and jerked and he was looking, open-eyed, into some unimaginable distance. Every now and again he blinked and his lips moved as if he were speaking, but no audible sound emerged.
"Can't you help him, Ryan?"
"Tried. Those bastards aren't feeling much like giving any help."
"Can I try?"
"That way you die as well as the kid. No."
"What do we doing? Just waiting?"
"Yeah. If they rush us, we can take a whole lot of them to get the ice."
"Ryan!" The voice was J.B.'s, urgent, calling him to the firing line.
"What?"
"Look." He pointed to their right, and then up the left. "Dust. They got men around the side."
"Fireblast!" He turned and looked behind them, up the hill to the skeletal row of boulders marking the ridge. "If I'd known they'd start blasting us, I'd have gone there. Too damned late now."
"Best we go out and try and take them?" the Armorer suggested.
Ryan shook his head doubtfully. "Can't. Can't leave Doc and the girls. Sec men'd overrun them in ten seconds."
"Can't stay here. Pick us off, easy as spotting blood on a snowfield."
"When one is caught between a rock and a hard place then one must pick the lesser of the twin evils," Doc said.
"Yeah. Best we do it now. You and me, J.B., dodge down, toward them. Pour it in. Doc and Krysty come after. Lori stays with Jak. There's still a chance for them."
Krysty glanced behind them, up the slope, staring. Ryan's eye was caught, and he, too, looked. Then Doc and finally J.B.
The ridge had been bare fifteen seconds earlier. Now it held a line of mounted men. Dark, in colorful clothes, all holding rifles.
"Apache Indians," Doc whispered with an almost religious awe.
"The hard place just got harder," Ryan said.
Chapter Eleven
THE SOLDIERS SAW the Indians at the same moment that Ryan and his friends did. There was a shout of recognition, and the carbines spit lead at the newcomers. Several of the sec men showed themselves, and Ryan and J.B. took advantage of their carelessness to cut down three more.
But the Apaches still showed no sign of wanting to enter the fight on either side. Ryan kept low, hearing bullets slice through the air above him. The horsemen were about five hundred yards behind them, sitting impassively. Ryan could make out that they were dark and stocky, and wore headbands of colored cotton.
At a yell of command from the sec officer, the shooting stopped.
"It's all wrong," Doc moaned. "The way it's always been, the Seventh Cavalry comes riding over the hill and rescues us poor whites from the demon Indians. And by the three Kennedys, there's General Cu-ter, looking like he rides well right here and now. And that's all wrong, too."