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us, renegade."
Even concealed by the visor, everyone saw how Grant's eyes flashed with anger.
In a quiet, deadly tone he said, "These renegades do, Ramirez. You can watch
us leave or watch yourselves die."
"You'd die, too."
Kane joined the conversation with a snort of disdain. "You'd kill us anyway,
so what do we have to lose? And I'd get to finish the job I started with Baron
Sharpe months ago."
For a long moment, the tableau held. Everybody stared at everybody else Mags
and sec men stared at the Amerindians, who stared back, while Baron Sharpe and
Ramirez stared at Grant, Brigid and Kane.
Nobody spoke, moved or even appeared to breathe.
The frozen scene was broken by the sudden groaning creak of the elevator's
heavy metal doors opening.
A slender white wraith stepped cautiously out into the hangar, a streak of
blood showing stark and bright against the porcelain hue of her face. Domi
caught sight of the standoff, stopped in her tracks and blurted, "Grant!"
A Magistrate whirled toward her, the bore of his Copperhead rising. Domi shot
him broadside, the
.45-caliber round bowling him off his feet. The bullet didn't breach the armor
but when the man fell, his companions voiced a garbled babble of angry
profanity. Without hesitation they opened fire on Domi.
She leaped back into the elevator, returning the shots.
The Amerindian warriors triggered their assault rifles. The Magistrates
stumbled and staggered from the multiple impacts, and they swung their
blasters toward them. At the same time Ramirez yelled a wordless warning and
threw himself in front of Baron Sharpe, Grant depressed the trigger stud of
his Sin Eater and a triburst stitched across Ramirez's midriff, beating him
coughing and cursing to the ground. Sharpe uttered a sobbing laugh, and with a
surprising degree of speed and agility dived into the smoke-shrouded shadows.
Crawler wriggled along at his heels.
Sky Dog yelled a few words in Lakota, and his warriors began a retreat toward
the MCP. The
USMG-73 emplacements atop the Sandcat roared in stuttering rhythms, tracer
rounds cutting lines of phosphorescence through the massed warriors. Men spun,
clutching at themselves as the bullets clawed through the body armor.
Fragments of flesh and bone flew off in all directions, accompanied by crimson
sprays.
Kane flung himself between Brigid and the Cat, wresting the gren from her
hands. A line of bullets hammered into his back, painful punches even through
the armor, doubling the ache in his spine. He let the impacts shove him
forward, and he pushed Brigid ahead of him. "Get aboard!" he managed to shout.
He heeled around, flame sputtering from the bore of his handblaster. He and
Grant bounded forward,
their blazing weapons clearing a path in the massed Magistrates. The Sin
Eaters in their hands spit fire and thunder, unleashing round after round of 9
mm slugs.
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Return fire ripped the air around Grant, and he dived to his left. Kane held
down the trigger of his autoblaster, swinging the flame-belching barrel from
left to right Hot brass spewed from the ejector.
When the firing pin clicked dry, he retracted the Sin Eater into its holster
with a flexing twist of his wrist.
Even as the cables snapped the weapon back into its holster, Kane transferred
the gren from his left to right hand. He thumbed the arming button and whipped
his arm back, intending to hurl the gren over the heads of the Mags and plant
it right beneath the blunt nose of the Sandcat.
A sledge pounded against his right arm and sent him staggering. The gren fell
from his suddenly nerveless fingers and rolled across the concrete away from
the Sandcat and toward the elevator housing.
Domi darted out from the cupola, scooped up the gren in one hand and cocked
her arm back to throw it at the vehicle. Grant rushed toward her, bellowing at
the top of his lungs, "Domi, no! Get back in the "
A brilliant white incandescent glare suddenly swallowed her form. A tremendous
roar, half explosion, half gale-force wind slammed against Grant's and Kane's
eardrums. The shock wave of the concussion was more like a riptide, gripping
their bodies and yanking them forward in headlong tumbles, dragging them into
clumsy somersaults.
A cascade of air, dust, rock particles and powdery sand swirled around them,
irresistibly sucked toward the wedge of vacuum created by the detonation of
the implode gren.
Then the maelstrom effect created by the implosive device collapsed in on
itself and they felt fragments of stone pattering down all around onto them.
Kane found himself on his back, blinking up at the hangar's roof high above.
For a few seconds he had no idea of why he was lying there, then Brigid
appeared over him. She reached down and hauled at his arm. Her lips worked but
he could barely hear her. He struggled to stand, shaking the fog out of his
mind. At the periphery of his vision he saw Sky Dog pulling a stunned Grant to
his feet.
Kane shambled drunkenly toward the detonation point of the gren. He saw no
crater, only a charred star-shaped pattern on the concrete. From the center of
it wisps of smoke curled. Several black-armored bodies were asprawl near it,
their arms and legs elongated to unnatural lengths. Flat crimson ribbons
stretched from their heads toward the epicenter of the implosion.
He knew that beneath the polycarbonate the Mag's r § bodies were mangled lumps
of flesh, their eardrums
I shattered by the brutal decompression, their eyeballs
" - pulled from their sockets, internal organs burst, blood
from ruptured vessels flowing from every orifice, their lungs collapsed to
wafers of tissue. Several more men at die edge of the effect radius were
unconscious due to the sudden and absolute lack of oxygen.
l-ij "Domi!" Grant shouted. His voice had a nasal,
snuffling quality as he tried to staunch the blood riv-
ering from ruptured capillaries in his nose.
"She's gone!" Brigid cried, pushing Kane toward the MCP.
Both Grant and Kane resisted Sky Dog's efforts to pull them into the MCP. They
saw nothing that might have been the girl's body. Kane had never heard of an
implode gren vaporizing organic matter, but that *
didn't mean it couldn't happen. Soul-freezing horror numbed Kane's mind and
body.
The Sandcat's machine guns began to stutter again. t!j Raking autofire smashed
up concrete around them,
i' showering their legs with stinging rock chips. Putting
\
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I
j| her face next to Kane's, Brigid screamed, "We've got
"
',{
to go! We have wounded men to help! We're about jjf to be outnumbered!"
He started to shake her off, but she fought him, crying out, "Damn you, we've
got no choice!" A cold sickness crept over him, a realization that she spoke
the complete truth. Brigid's eyes glittered as she fought back tears. "Do you
understand?"
Kane stopped trying to pull away and bent to help one of Sky Dog's bloodied
warriors to his feet. Grant and the shaman did likewise. Only four of them
still lived. As they retreated toward the MCP, Grant saw
Ramirez pushing himself up to his elbows. As he went past him, Grant paused
long enough to kick him in the face.
They piled aboard the C2VI, and a warrior bleeding from a superficial wound in
his left arm slammed the hatch shut. Grant and Kane turned the wounded men
over to the warriors who had made it aboard.
In the control compartment, Grant threw himself into the pilot's chair and
Kane sat down beside him.
Brigid and Sky Dog sat in the pull-down jump seats along the back wall.
Kane's hearing came back, but he still felt as if his ears were plugged with
cotton wadding. "Why are we running, goddammit? We can't leave without Domi."
Brigid responded shrilly, "The other Mags will be here in a couple minutes.
And remember the five kilos of C-4? Any one of them can jam some in our tracks
and immobilize us."
"But Domi "
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