by R. L. King
“You got anything defensible in here?” Dreja demanded to the Gypsies.
For the moment, Bluey seemed to have forgotten their animosity. “This place is fortified—probably safest in here. I don’t think the ceiling will come down, but—what was that, a fraggin’ grenade?”
“Drone,” Scuzzy said. “I think they dropped it on us. Probably why Bodge and I didn’t spot it until it was too late.”
The door opened and more bikers poured into the room, all holding weapons. Mostly they had rifles and handguns, but a couple held battered SMGs and one had an assault rifle. “You know who it is?” Rhino demanded of them.
“No idea. Haven’t got a good visual yet.” The bikers spread out, pushing over tables and taking defensive positions with their gun barrels pointed out through the slits in the windows.
“We can’t just stay in here like sitting ducks,” Ocelot said. “And the rest of our gear’s in the Bison. I’m goin’ out. Bodge, pop the door.”
Winterhawk glanced at Bluey. “We’ll help you defend against this, whatever it is,” he told her as another loud BOOM sounded somewhere off in the distance. “But we’ll talk again after.”
She nodded, looking fearful.
The mage hurried out after the rest of the team. They were already inside the Bison, quickly gathering their bigger armaments. “Maya, have you got more detail?”
“Looks like about fifty of them,” she sent back. “Motorcycles, a few small four-wheeled vehicles. I don’t see any magic to speak of, but they have a lot of weapons.”
“Fifty,” he said aloud to the others.
“Come on,” Dreja said. “Let’s spread out. If they have heavy weapons we’re in trouble. Need to take ’em out fast.”
Winterhawk, a rush of adrenaline driving off the poison’s attack for the moment, climbed back out of the Bison in time to see a hatch on its roof open and an autocannon slide smoothly up and snap into place.
Winterhawk headed outside, pulling an invisibility spell over him and levitating up to the roof of the central building where he could get a better look. He braced himself against a crumbling chimney, pulled a pair of optical binoculars from his jacket pocket, and scanned the area outside the perimeter.
Maya had been right: there were about fifty of them out there, circling the Gypsies’ compound. He could hear them whooping and yelling, firing their weapons at random into the center of the town.
Winterhawk paused to study the circling group before casting any spells. He was tired and in no way at his best right now; he didn’t want to be throwing around magic at random, so he needed to pick his best targets. Most of the riders were one-up on their bikes, though there were a few carrying a passenger who was free to fire from the pillion seat. There were big old Harley Scorpions, trikes, off-road bikes, a few four-wheeled ATVs, and even an ancient-looking rig with a sidecar that might have been built in the previous century. It was hard to pick out details in the moonlight, but he didn’t spot any obvious gang patches on the backs of their jackets. They all rode fast and erratically, doing a good enough job avoiding returning fire that it was obvious even to him that they were better than they were trying to appear.
Below, the Gypsies scrambled around, taking defensive positions behind piles of old machinery, wrecked vehicles, and buildings. Gunfire roared, splitting the silence of the night. As Winterhawk watched, one of the attackers yelled and fell, their bike sliding away.
Dreja’s voice came over their link, calm and steady.
Winterhawk gathered mana to him, hoping that his spell would perform as expected. You could never count on that in the Outback: the mana out here was beyond erratic, which meant that anything he cast could do any number of things—only one of which was function as intended. The others were mostly all bad, ranging from fizzling out to hitting the wrong target to being significantly more taxing to cast than they should be. Fond as he was of offensive spells with big flashy effects, he opted for something less likely to kill him or his friends if it went awry. Pointing his hands at a patch of ground in the path of two of the enemy bikers, he murmured a few words under his breath and released the magical energy.
The bikers were going so fast that they had almost no time to react when the glowing barrier popped into being directly in front of them. Even from his vantage point Winterhawk could hear their yells of terror as they braked, their bikes sliding sideways and slamming into the magical wall. It went down—it was meant to—but so did the bikers, and they didn’t get up.
He was right. Another BOOM and the compound’s front gate exploded, throwing its two sections in two different directions. One of them hit a Gypsy, who went down screaming and bleeding.
Winterhawk, watching from above, wondered if the attackers had any idea what they were up against. Tiny and Ocelot moved with the precision of partners who’d been working together for years. Ocelot leaped up in one of his trademark feats of impossible athleticism, landing on the back of the lead Harley and shoving the passenger off with barely a second thought. The Harley’s rider, struggling to keep the bike upright, dropped his small SMG. Tiny, meanwhile, braced himself in the path of the second Harley, aimed his assault rifle and fired, hitting the rider in the neck. The rider died with a thin scream and a spurt of fountaining blood, the bike continuing to slide forward. Tiny leaped over it and spun, sizing up his next target.
Ocelot, meanwhile, had popped his cyberspur and run through the rider on his own bike, jumping free of the wreckage as the dying man lost control of it. That left only the off-road bike, which had made a quick turn and was bearing down on him and Tiny, its rider spraying fire from another SMG.
Ocelot and Tiny looked at each other and acted as one. From Winterhawk’s vantage point, it looked like Ocelot had reached into his pocket but failed to find what he was looking for. Winterhawk knew better. Ever since the two of them had run together in the old days, Ocelot’s weapon of choice when he didn’t have to worry about who he killed was the tiny, deadly monofilament whip. He was damned good with it (which was a good thing—those who failed to master the monowhip usually didn’t survive long, at least not with all their limbs intact) and had apparently gotten even better since Winterhawk had last seen it in action. Ocelot made an acrobatic little spin, more like a ballet move than a combat maneuver, but suddenly the off-road bike’s rider and his bike were going in one direction while his head flew lazily in another. At the same time, Tiny’s assault rifle spoke again, stitching a line of red across the man’s dusty synthleather jacket.
positions of his allies: aside from Ocelot and Tiny in front of them, Dreja was on the other side of the compound, and Scuzzy was inside the main building. Bodge, of course, was inside the Bison. Another BOOM sounded, but this time it was the Bison’s autocannon raining death down on a couple of the bikers far out in the distance.
Winterhawk watched from the roof. he sent.
The troll on the oversized trike was bearing down on them, its trajectory putting it in a straight line for the opening where the gate had been. There was no way the two Gypsies with rifles would be able to take out the troll before she could get inside, and if she had explosives on board, things could go downhill fast.
But before he could gather energy for another spell, a small glowing object flew out of somewhere in the interior of the compound. Winterhawk got one brief look at the troll’s astonished face as a grenade landed neatly in her lap, and then it blew with a spectacular explosion. She screamed, flying off the trike as it continued forward and smashed into one of the smaller buildings.
In the link, Dreja whooped.
They didn’t have communication with the Gypsies, but apparently at least one of them was thinking. As Winterhawk continued to watch and tried to identify another target, a large, rusty open-bed truck rolled forward, blocking almost all of the opening where the gate had been. The Gypsy slid out of the passenger-side window and, ducking low, hurried back toward the main building. A round from one of the bikers slammed into her arm, spinning her around, but she regained her balance and kept going until she was out of Winterhawk’s sight.
Bodge sent.
“Boss!” Maya’s terrified voice cut into Winterhawk’s mind.
“What?”
“Manastorm! Big one! Coming fast!”
CHAPTER 29
GYPSIES’ COMPOUND
KOOKYNIE
MONDAY NIGHT
Winterhawk froze in place as his ally’s warning sunk in. “Oh, bloody hell! That’s the last thing we need. How fast?”
“Fast. Minute or two at most.”
“Come back here and help me.”
“On my way. Be careful, boss. This one is bad.”
Teeth gritted, Winterhawk levitated down to the ground, staying low and moving as fast as he could toward the main building’s front door.
<’Hawk, we can’t,> Dreja sent.
What next?
“Oh, my,” Maya said again, appearing on the astral next to Winterhawk as he reached the door to the central building and headed inside. Her mental voice sounded more agitated than before. “I got a look before I left. It’s very bad. The leading edge of the spell hit a kangaroo. It tried to get away, but the storm hit it and took it apart. All that was left was bones and bloody meat. Boss, please get under cover.”
Winterhawk swallowed, breathing hard.
“I’m here,” she said. Her tone was still worried, but now that he was inside the building she had calmed some. Outside, the enemy gang continued circling the compound and shooting at it. Through a window a grenade had blown the wooden cover from, he could see one of the outbuildings burning.
People were pouring in through the door now, shoving past each other, dragging injured comrades. “What’s going on?” Rhino demanded. “They said to come in here—”
“Manastorm!” Winterhawk snapped. “Bad one, coming fast, and the shelter’s buggered.” He glanced around the room. Counting the team and the Gypsies, there were at least thirty people. Some of the Gypsies were dead, but it was still going to be a tight fit. “Make sure everyone’s in here, now. No argument. If you’re not in here, you’re dead.”
“What about Bodge?” Scuzzy demanded. “He’s still out in the Bison!”
The confused Gypsies milled around the room. Bluey grabbed Winterhawk’s arm. “How do you know this?”
“Spirit,” he said, barely acknowledging her presence. “Go. I need to concentrate.” He lowered himself to the floor. If the lower end of Maya’s estimate was true, they had no time to waste. “Gather in tight and stay put. And stay quiet.”
Ocelot pulled the dwarf away from Winterhawk and shoved her away. “I’m gonna go get Bodge.” He leaped up and hurried out the door.
He didn’t get a chance to send more. Ocelot standing in the doorway, aimed his grapple gun at the rigger and fired, snagging his armored jacket and jerking him inside. Dreja and Tiny grabbed him and pulled him in.
“We all here? Anybody missing?” Ocelot yelled.
“All here,” Bluey said. She and the other Gypsies huddled in a tight group r
inging Winterhawk.
“Go!” Dreja yelled. “Do it, ’Hawk!”
Winterhawk concentrated. All the spellcasting against the attacking bikers had taken its toll, and this wasn’t going to be easy. His head lit up with pain, his chest tightened like someone was grabbing his heart and squeezing. Sweat poured off his forehead. He gathered the mana around him, focusing on forming it into a large dome, shaping the magical forces into an impenetrable barrier that nothing but the strongest spells would be able to breach. If the manastorm was stronger than his magic than they were all dead, but it was the only chance they had. “Maya. Help me…”
He felt the cat-spirit add her strength to his, and the barrier flared brighter, stronger. “Best I can do…” he got out through gritted teeth. “Now…just have to…hold it…”
He felt the leading wave of the manastorm touch the barrier, felt its power as it battered the dome and tried to drive it down, like an ocean wave pummeling a child’s sandcastle. There was nothing personal to the power, nothing malevolent: it simply was, a vast wave of magical energy made manifest by the chaotic forces that had taken over the Outback’s manascape.
Winterhawk clenched his fists, clamped his eyes shut, and concentrated with everything he had, holding the barrier as the storm washed over it.
“Is it here yet?” a troll woman demanded, rising to a standing position.
“No, don’t—” somebody yelled.
Too late.
Winterhawk cracked an eye in time to see the woman’s head and the top of her shoulders disappear in a whirling red haze. Mana barriers didn’t stop anything physical: anyone who wasn’t dual-natured could just walk through them any time they liked. The troll woman was tall enough that standing up had taken the top part of her body outside the barrier’s protection.
The manastorm had flayed the unshielded part of her alive.