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The gasoline exploding had been so horrifically violent and rapid that pirates
traveling inside the two wags had no chance. Only one of them was even able to
get free as far as the turret of the trapped war wag, appearing for a moment,
standing upright amid the inferno.
It wasn't possible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. Just a dark
figure, clothes blazing, hair flashing to a scorched stubble in half a second.
The arms were raised, fingers spread, the blinded, blackened face turning
helplessly and hopelessly from side to side.
Mildred had lifted her target blaster, steadying it, then lowering it again.
"Not a lot of point, is there?" she said quietly, watching the pirate fall to
its knees, head hunching into the shoulders, before it rolled over like a
charred collection of withered branches, vanishing into the burning lake of
fuel. "Oh, God, my father& " she whispered, turning away.
The screaming didn't last very long.
In less than two minutes the desiccated timbers of the trestle bridge had
burned through enough to allow the war wag to tip gracefully forward. Its
glowing iron tumbled through into the dry sandy creek below, followed less
than a half minute later by the smaller armored wag. There was no possibility
of there being any survivors.
J.B. had called out a warning to all the defenders to keep low and under
cover, guessing, rightly, that the attackers would open fire.
Which they did, with a prolonged burst of shooting, all along their front,
accompanied by shouting and cursing. Most of the bullets were wildly aimed and
flew wide or high. A few tore chunks from the walls, or shattered windows or
ripped away long splinters of white wood from the gates.
But it was mediocre stuff, very poorly directed, and didn't cause a single
serious casualty among the men and women in the institute.
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Ryan heard a voice bellowing for an end to the shooting, a hoarse, angry voice
that he recognized as being Red Jack Yoville. It was a disappointment that
their trap had failed to chill the pirate gang's leader.
"What'll he do now?" Tomwun asked, lying flat on his face behind the wall, his
hair sprinkled with stone dust. "Mebbe he'll go away."
Ryan touched a finger to his cheek, where a tiny shard of wood had nicked the
skin and drawn a bead of blood. "No. No, he won't."
Thorund was next along the line. "They've took dreadful losses, Mr. Cawdor.
Surely they'll see sense. See that we aren't a ripe peach to be easy plucked."
"No. Not the way it works. Man like Yoville has control through fear and
power.
He backs off from us, and he's lost his authority and his power."
J.B. nodded. "Ryan's triple-right. Yoville might as well suck his blaster as
retreat from us. He'll come in again. Soon."
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG.
Having lost his most potent weapon, as well as the small armawag, with
probably a quarter of his total force, Yoville had to rethink his strategy.
There was no point in the mindless sacrifice of sending in a skirmish line
over a hundred yards of fairly open ground against armed defenders who'd gun
you down from the safety of good cover.
Yoville chose to wait for the arrival of his seaborne attackers, knowing that
this would force Ryan to divide his limited power and weaken the frontal
defenses of the institute. The pirates went to ground, crawling through the
dunes, occasionally offering a burst of sniper fire to keep the frustrated
defenders pinned down.
It was a desultory few minutes, with nobody taking a serious wound, with the
exception of a skinny pirate with one arm who made the mistake of showing
himself for a moment too long. He was rewarded with a .38-caliber bullet
through
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the chest from Mildred's ZKR 551.
Yoville, in the last of his wags, had retreated toward the ribboned remains of
Highway One, reappearing on foot, his brilliantly crimson shirt and pants
making him conspicuous among the rolling sand hills.
Ryan tried two shots at him with the Steyr, but the pirate baron was too wily,
burrowing into the dips and hollows, gradually worming his way nearer.
"Not so good," J.B. called, sitting with his back to the wall, holding the Uzi
in his lap. It wasn't the right weapon for that kind of cautious firefight,
any more than the Smith & Wesson M-4000 12-gauge that lay at his side.
"You want to hold here, while I go out and take a look around the harbor."
"Sure, Ryan."
"Can I come, Dad?"
"Yeah. If there's a message to bring back to J.B., you can carry it."
Tomwun grabbed at his sleeve, nearly pulling Ryan off his feet. "You can't
leave us."
"Do that again and you get to pick teeth out of the back of your throat."
"Sorry."
"Checking out those boats that was coming our way." He glanced at Krysty.
"That were coming this way. Those sons of bitches out front aren't going to
rush us."
"Suppose you're wrong?"
"Suppose I am? What the fireblasted difference will it make, Tomwun? They
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still got a big edge over us, and if their boats come in and they take
possession of the
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quayside area, then we're in deeper shit than I care to think about."
He turned his back on the scientist and moved quickly away from the entrance
of the institute, Dean jogging at his heels. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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