sudden explosion of excitement which echoed through their link as she caught it in trembling fingers. He started to say something more, then whirled as a burst of fire came from the direction of the main lodge. He returned fire and heard someone shout in alarm, although he was certain he hadn't hit anyone. There were at least four or five of them coming from that direction, though. He was going to have to take his chances on what might still come from the woods, and he flung himself across to the south side of the ravine. He got there just in time to catch one of them rising to dart forward while the others covered him. Darts screamed everywhere, but they were firing blind, without a hard fix on his position, and he squeezed off a quick three-round burst.
The running man went down screaming, right leg blown off at mid-thigh, and Alfred ducked back, squirming several meters to his left while a storm of darts flayed his firing position. He waited, holding his own fire until he had a target.
“Jacques!” He heard Allison's voice behind him.
* * *
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn't recognize the com combination when the caller ID came up. It wasn't Allison's, but perhaps the people who had her were willing to use additional coms now that they'd made their point. He stabbed at the acceptance key, but someone else spoke before he could answer.
“Jacques!”
“Alley?”
He stiffened in his chair, wondering why they'd given her the com again, terrified it was so that he could listen to her scream once more. But then he heard a sound which could never be mistaken by anyone who had heard it before and bolted to his feet as the crack and scream of pulser fire came over the circuit.
“Jacques, it's me! Home on this com! We're in a ditch near a lodge of some kind and they're closing in on us! Hurry, Jacques!”
“Alley!”
There was no reply, but the connection was still open, and he heard more pulser fire. Lots of pulser fire.
“Sergeant Brockmann! Saddle up! Move, damn it!” he shouted, flinging himself through the office door and racing for the waiting assault shuttle.
* * *
Alfred fired again—more to keep heads down than anything else—and started working his way farther to his left. They'd expect him to break back to the right . . . or he hoped so, anyway.
Something tugged at him and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Allison pulling the pulser which had once belonged to Giuseppe Ardmore out of his belt. He looked at her, and she managed a shaky smile.
“You watch that side; I'll watch the other,” she said.
“You know how to use one of those?”
“Not as well as you do, but my brother's taken me to the range a time or two. Besides,” she gave him another one of those heartbreaking smiles, “I'm all the backup you've got.”
“True.” He actually felt himself smiling back, then he shook his head. “Keep your head down. Just pop up, take a look, then duck back down—and never put your head up in the same place twice!”
“Yes, Sir,” she said and crawled towards the other side of the ravine.
It was absolutely insane, of course, but at that moment, as he watched her crawling towards a firing position with the pulser of her torturer in one hand, clutching his enormously too large windbreaker about her with the other, still shaking like a victim of old-fashioned palsy from the neural whip, he knew he'd never seen a more desirable woman in his life.
Not the time, Alfred! Not the time! a voice in the back of his brain told him, and no doubt it was right, but that didn't make it untrue.
He lifted his head just far enough to get his eyes back up above the lip of the ravine, saw something move from the corner of his eye, and waited patiently. The main lodge was flanked by half a dozen topiaries in the shapes of various species of Beowulfan wildlife, and he watched the shrubbery where that movement had vanished. A moment later, the greenery stirred again. A head poked cautiously up over it, and the immaculately groomed branches exploded in a spray of red as he put a pulser burst into them.
* * *
Who the hell is this guy? Tobin Manischewitz thought furiously as Emiliano Min died. The corpse thudded to the ground less than three meters from Manischewitz, and his jaw clenched. The man behind