The square was a lot emptier than it had been when J.B. and Ryan had taken part on the recce mission. Back then, making your way across it without being spotted would have been easier. Now was going to be harder. The baron’s call to arms had left the ville dwellers with tasks of their own to undertake and their pilgrimages to the shrine much curtailed.
The companions held back after watching Jak and Marissa being carried in. A sec guard manned the doors around the side of the building where the wag had stopped, and as it pulled away they could see there were two sec men on guard, each with what appeared to be an MP-5.
“Five on two is good odds,” Mildred murmured.
“Yeah, but what are the odds on us alerting a whole shitload of others on our way?” Krysty returned.
In truth, this was their problem. They had to get across the square without attracting attention, and then overpower the sec men—the easy part—and get into the building without being noticed—the not-so-easy part.
Dr. Jean inadvertently gave them a helping hand. As they lurked in the shadows, the vid screen around them blared a fanfare, followed by the face of the baron, broadcasting once again.
“My people, we have secured a great victory. The swampland scum have failed in their pitiful attempts at insurrection. With your help, our sec forces have captured those who led this sacrilegious attempt to defile our ville. As I planned to take them and offer them as messengers to the gods after we had raided their hovels, so now they have come to me. Truly, my friends, this is a sign from those who seek to guide our hand. In honor to them, I will still send forth these wretched souls as our messengers, but I will do it tonight. In just one half of a passing hour, they shall be sent on their way to the gods with our blessings and wishes for our greater victories.”
The fanfare blared once more and the burble of regular broadcasts continued.
“Our friend does not believe in leaving any loose ends, does he?” Doc mused. “It doesn’t give us a wealth of time with which to plan.”
“Mebbe that’s for the best, Doc,” Ryan said grimly. “Besides which, it’s going to give us a little cover.”
“You can say that again,” Krysty said, looking over her shoulder. Already, those ville dwellers living nearest to the square were beginning to leave the streets and buildings they had been defending, and were flocking into the square in preparation for the night’s ceremony. All were still armed, and it seemed that this would give the companions clear cover.
“Follow me, keep close,” Ryan whispered from the corner of his mouth as he slipped into the crowd that was beginning to congregate. The others followed him, keeping close as commanded. It was easy to keep each other in sight as the square was still quite sparsely populated, the crowd naturally drifting to the shrine that was built on the steps of the old courthouse building. As they neared the front, where people were headed, they peeled off toward the side. The attention of those in the square was so firmly fixed on the shrine, in their drugged haze, that they didn’t really notice the deviation of five people.
The sec guards on the side door did, however. Both turned to face the companions as they approached. All had their blasters holstered or shouldered, so that they presented no obvious threat. The sec men nonetheless raised their own weapons cautiously.
As they drew nearer, Ryan took the scarf from around his neck and started to mop his perspiring brow, shifting the weight of the loaded material in his palm. Doc appeared to lean more heavily on his cane with each step.
The sec men said nothing, eyes unreadable behind the infrared goggles. They stood their ground, waiting for the companions to make the first move, utter the first words.
“Hey, any chance we can get a look at these scum before anyone else?” Ryan asked, adopting what he hoped was an innocent tone. “They were taken right by where we were defending, so we kinda feel like we’ve got our name on them.”
The sec men said nothing for a moment, exchanging glances from behind their goggles. They might not have been able to see each other’s eyes, but it was easily understandable when one of them shook his head.
“No, you know no one comes in here except the chosen ones who work for the baron. You’ll get your chance soon enough, so why don’t you just go and wait around the front like everyone else.”
While the sec man had been speaking, J.B. and Mildred had been checking out the crowds behind them. No one was looking in their direction, and with Krysty they moved closer together to block the angle from the square, so that anyone looking would see five people who had approached the sec men cluster around them. Nothing more.
“Okay,” J.B. murmured, only loud enough for Ryan to hear.
“That’s a real pity,” Ryan continued, addressing the sec men, “because would have made things a lot easier for you.”
Without warning, the scarf snaked out from his fist, flung with a flick of his strongly tendoned wrist. The weights sewn into the end of the scarf affected its angle of flight, and it coiled around the neck of the nearest sec man, choking him as Ryan pulled it. The one-eyed man pulled it tight, and the force tugged the sec man to his knees, tightening the scarf even more. Forgetting his blaster in the desire to draw breath, he put both hands to the scarf and tried to free it.
Behind him, the second sec man had reacted at Ryan’s action, but not quite quickly enough. As he raised his blaster, leveling it on Ryan and tightening his finger on the trigger, Doc took action. In the blink of an eye, he had withdrawn his sword from the sheath of the swordstick and, in one fluid motion, brought the blade up, proscribing an arc in the air that caused the honed Toledo steel blade to cut through the wrist of the sec man wielding the blaster. Nerves and tendons cut, blood pouring down useless fingers as he attempted to adjust his aim and still fire, the switchback of the arc sliced across his throat, ripping through the purple-and-orange camou shirt and scoring across his shoulders before opening a red maw across his throat. He stumbled forward, not knowing whether to staunch the flow at his throat or at his wrist, fumbling for the MP-5, which he had dropped.
His stumble took him onto the tip of the sword, which Doc had thrust up and under, bringing it to a position that took it under the breastbone and up into his heart. His deadweight nearly toppled the old man as he sought to retrieve his blade. He was forced to turn the chilled sec man over with his foot and heave the blade from the corpse.
While he had been doing this, Ryan had chilled his own target. Increasing the pressure on the scarf, he had pulled tighter, the weights in the end acting as counterbalances to keep the scarf firm despite the attempts of the sec man to get his fingers underneath and gain himself—literally—some breathing space. As he choked more and more, so his color changed from a pale tan to a darker, blood-red hue, his tongue poking from his mouth and swelling as he tried to gasp for breath with small, stifled choking sounds. It was impossible to see behind his infrared goggles, but there was little doubt that by now his eyes would be bulging, clouding over as consciousness started to slip from him.
He was on his knees, slumping more and more with every second that passed, every second that was precious if they were to evade detection and get into the building.
Ryan pulled tighter, not relinquishing his grip until the sec man had stopped moving. Unraveling the scarf, he could see the deep indentations and weals in the sec man’s neck where the scarf had bitten into the flesh.
J.B. looked over his shoulder. “Clear so far. Let’s get these bastards out of the way before someone wanders over here.”
Mildred and Krysty took one sec man between them, while Ryan and J.B. took the other. Doc covered them, keeping an eye on the crowd beyond the side of the building, which seemed oblivious to all except the shrine at the front of the old courthouse.
Inside, the companions found themselves in the well of a staircase that led upward, with glass-inset doors leading through to corridors beyond. Ryan looked around for a camera, but couldn’t see one. He hoped that the reconditioned old tech didn’t extend to an interior vid sec system. Opposite the glass-inset doors was a plain wooden door. It was open, and inside was a darkened cupboard, used possibly for storage…if not before, it certainly was now, as they bundled the chilled sec men into the space before shutting the door.
“Okay, where would you suppose they keep prisoners in a place like this?” Ryan asked. He was rewarded by a series of thoughtful expressions, but little input. “Yeah, that’s kind of the way I figured it,” he said with a wry grin. “We’re just going to have to work it out as we go along.”
This part of the building was obviously a service stairwell for the entire block, and was used only for the removal of large objects and for use in an emergency. That was the only conclusion to draw, as on each level there were glass-inset doors on each side of the mezzanine, with corridors leading off that were occupied by active ville dwellers. It didn’t take long for them to realize that not only was this where Dr. Jean lived and kept his captives, it was also the nerve center of his empire. They could see that this was where the broadcasts to the vid screen emanated from—one floor in particular seemed to lead straight onto a studio floor from one set of doors—and as they climbed higher, they were aware that they were entering the more private areas of the baron’s domain. Here there was less activity, but there was also a higher quotient of sec men. They walked freely along the corridors and moved from room to room.
By the time they had reached the eighth floor, it was starting to look as though they would need some kind of a miracle to locate where Jak and Marissa were being held.
As they recced through the glass insets on the eighth floor, Ryan and J.B. taking one side, Doc and Mildred taking the other, Krysty peered over Ryan’s shoulder and gasped.
Ryan turned to her, puzzled. He had seen what she had, but had failed to grasp the significance: two sec men wheeled a clothes stand on which were arrayed a half dozen costumes of colorful design, complete with headdresses. They turned left into a room, then came out minus the pole and headed on down the corridor, talking inaudibly to each other.
“Jak and Marissa are to be a sacrifice, right? That implies ritual. People will be needed to assist Dr. Jean, and they’ll wear those costumes.”
“And those masks,” Ryan finished. “Good. The least ripples we cause now, the easier it’ll be to snatch them back later.”
“You mean, you want us to take Jak and Marissa in front of the whole ville?” Mildred asked, coming over. “And that’s not causing ripples?”
“We fuck it up now by getting into a firefight before we’ve found them, and what are our chances of saving them at all?” Ryan queried.
Mildred had to concede. “Okay, guess you’re right.”
They moved through the glass-inset doors and toward the room where the sec men had left the costumes, checking each room as they passed. They weren’t the only ones on this floor, but those working in the other rooms were too engrossed in their tasks to notice them pass, and too sure of their own security to suspect intruders.
The companions made it with ease to the room where the costumes were housed, and found that the room was empty. J.B. kept watch while Ryan inspected the costumes. It might be a tight fit for himself and Doc—who was considerably taller than the average ville dweller—to get into the costumes, but the others should be able to manage easily.
“Hey, there are six of these and only five of us,” Mildred said. “We’re going to have to take one of them with us.”
“Could be a good thing,” Ryan replied. “We won’t know what to do, so one of them could be a useful guide, ’specially if they know they’re chilled meat for one wrong move.”
They settled back to wait for the occupants of the costumes to enter. As they waited, they could feel the pitch and hum of activity and tension build outside in the square. Somewhere in this building, they knew that Jak and Marissa could hear it, too.
J.B. kept watch on the corridor, making sure that although he could note all the comings and goings, he himself wasn’t noticed. It seemed as though these stupes were leaving it until the last moment until they dressed for the ritual, and he was starting to get edgy. So it was with a palpable sense of relief that he saw six people enter the corridor through a set of double doors at the far end. They were talking among themselves, and an armed sec man trailed behind them. They, too, were armed, but their blasters were holstered, which meant they could be taken by surprise. The Armorer relayed this to the others.
Ryan nodded, and quickly climbed onto a table to take out one of the bulbs illuminating the room. It was small, lit by two sockets, and Krysty followed his lead, rapidly unscrewing the other and blowing on her burning fingers. To knock the bulbs out would cause too much noise, and stealth was their greatest ally.
“Shit, Frank, the fucking lights are out again,” said the woman in lead of the party as she entered the room and flicked the switch. “Power’s on, as well. Don’t maintenance do anything around here?”
“All right, all right, I’ll see to it,” the sec man replied wearily, turning to move away from the threshold of the room.
This was the biggest risk. He was outside in the corridor, and anyone looking would have seen Ryan’s scarf snake out around his neck, lock with the weighted ends and pull him back. The one-eyed man kicked the door closed as the sec man fell back into the room, and all was plunged into darkness.
Ryan drew the panga from his thigh and wasted no time in chilling the sec man with one swift stroke. “Krysty, light,” he said hoarsely. The Titian-haired woman screwed back the bulb in its socket, and the room was once more illuminated. The stunned ville dwellers took in the four companions with blasters trained on them, and the fifth, who was standing over the chilled corpse of the sec man, Frank. They knew that they had no chance of reaching their own weapons.
“Okay, we can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Ryan said simply. “Easy way is that you let us knock you out and leave you for later while we take your place. Hard way is we chill you all like Frank, here.”
The woman who had been berating Frank as she’d entered the room went for her blaster. “Dr. Jean’d chill us all anyway,” she muttered, a sentence she hardly had a chance to finish as J.B.’s Tekna streaked through the air and took her in the side of the neck. The force knocked her sideways, the blade penetrating skin, tendon and her carotid. The shock rendered her immobile as she began to drown in her own blood, which flowed thick and free down her throat and into her lungs and stomach.
“Who wants to be next?” Ryan asked. The remaining four backed off, hands clear of blasters. “Rather take a chance, eh? You,” he added, pointing with the blood-dripping tip of the panga at the smallest of the group, “you’re going to help us. The rest of you…” He nodded to the companions, and without warning they launched into four of the group of five. It was a swift, brutal assault using hand-to-hand skills. Before the group had a chance to respond, three of them were unconscious.
J.B. took the Tekna from the throat of the woman he had chilled and sheathed it before joining the others in binding and gagging the three they had disabled. Ryan sheathed his panga and took the remaining ville dweller by the arm.
“What’s your name?”
“Roisin,” she said with a stammer and the hint of a cleft palate. Her eyes were wide with fear.
“Okay. You do this right, and you’ll be okay. You try to fuck with us and you’ll be joining them,” he said, indicating the two corpses. “Is that clear?”
She nodded frantically, too frightened to trust her own voice.
“Good, then let’s get started,” he said, suddenly brisk and businesslike.
“OH DEAR. I DO HOPE YOU haven’t gone and bought the farm before I’ve had a chance to give you my message to the gods. That would be very inconvenient, to say the least… Wake up, scum!”
The order was delivered in a harsher, louder tone, and accompanied by a backhand slap that made the teeth in Jak’s jaw feel like they had been loosened. The albino opened his eyes and spoke lazily through a mouth filling with blood. His voice was mushy.
“You made point.”
Dr. Jean stepped back and threw back his head, roaring with laughter. Both Jak and Marissa were in a state where nothing much registered: no pain, no sound, no sense of danger. A part of Jak, deep inside, was screaming at him that this was wrong, but there was nothing he could do to break out beyond the torpor. Shortly after Dr. Jean had spoken to them before, the scar-faced sec man had come back into the room and injected them with something that had given an immediate rush. Mebbe it was because it was straight into the bloodstream, or mebbe it was because Jean’s old tech labs had developed a more pure strain than had been known before, but this jolt had hit them straight between the eyes.
Jak had felt himself slump on the frame, knowing that the pull on his shoulders would strain his muscles, but not caring: he couldn’t be bothered to lift himself up, and anyway his joints weren’t giving him any grief. And if they did at some unspecified future point? Why the hell should he care about that?
The drug had washed any semblance of care from his mind, had numbed any pain that he might feel, and had left him feeling as if he were floating on a cloud. That part of his brain that was still the ever-alert hunter, sniffing out danger, told him that this was a dangerous way to feel. Some jolt induced speedy, hyperactivity, some gave you visions, some made you feel as though nothing mattered and just lie down and drift. It depended on how it was cut and how it was made. But this was something else entirely. Jak knew that the point was to make Marissa and himself completely subservient, to make them pliable and easy meat for Dr. Jean to sacrifice. And it was working well. He felt on one level as though he hadn’t a care in the world, and that he could just stand there forever.
He had meant to look over at Marissa to see how she was doing, but somehow he hadn’t been able to motivate himself into doing this, and before he knew what had happened he had drifted into a dreamless sleep, broken only by the soft, sibilant voice of the baron and the sharp blow of his hand.
Now Jak moved his head so that he could see Marissa off to the side. Her head was lolling uselessly, shaking slightly as she tried to clear it. Her head turned and her eyes met his. He hoped that his own eyes didn’t look as wide and clouded as hers. Wherever she was, he doubted that it was in this room.
“Good, I’m so glad that you’ve awakened fully. I must admit, that was quite a powerful jolt—if you’ll pardon my little joke—that I had Diamond administer to you. Necessary, as you could be a threat. You think I don’t remember you, Jak Lauren? I was with Tourment when it all fucked up, I saw what you did to him with the help of those other bastards. Fortunately, they seem to have deserted you—or perhaps you parted company with them some time back. Who knows—and frankly, who cares? I know I don’t, not now.”
The baron was dressed in a costume covered with rags and feathers that had been dyed a variety of bright colors. Bones—some obviously chicken others just as obviously human—hung from the costume. He had a top hat perched on his head with a feather plume at the crown, and ribbons tied around. His face was painted a ghostly white, his cheekbones etched out in charcoal. It made his eyes seem larger than normal, the whites of them yellowed and shot with red veins. The pupils were like pinpricks.
He loomed up in front of Jak so that the albino could smell the crude spirit on his breath.
“You’ve done me a big favor, really. You’ve offered yourself up to me and taken away the threat of the swamp scum. Played right into my hands—” he clapped them loudly in front of Jak’s face and laughed wildly “—and saved me the effort of clearing out the swamp for myself. And now you’ve come to me to be my messengers to the gods.”
“You really believe that stupe shit?” Jak asked, aware of how mush-mouthed he sounded, how strung-out and distant the jolt had made him.
“An interesting point, my little man,” Dr. Jean mused, waving a finger in Jak’s face. Despite himself, the albino found he was following the finger as it moved, and he vaguely realized the suggestibility that had been fed to him by the drug in his system. Jean continued. “You know, at first I thought it was crap myself, just something I could use to control people, mold them to what I wanted. But the strange thing is that after a while I began to see that there were gods out there, and that somehow they were shaping my destiny. Driving me on so that I can move beyond the pest-ridden swamp and to the lands beyond, where I can accrue greater riches, and greater power. Where I can fulfil my destiny.”
“Bullshit—just jolt talk,” Jak said.
Dr. Jean brought his hand around in a swing, openpalmed as before. The hefty flesh of his palm slapped Jak on the side of the head, making him spin, opening more cuts in his cheek from his jarred teeth.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Dr. Jean mused mildly, in contrast to his action. “But does it matter, really? If you want something to be so much, then you make it so. Enough—time to go on with the show.”
Jak spit out a glob of blood and phlegm. It was meant to be a last defiant gesture at the baron as he limped away, but the albino was so weak that it landed almost at his feet, splattering on the concrete.
Dr. Jean hadn’t noticed. He was already at the door, beckoning the sec men waiting outside and ordering them to take Jak and Marissa down from the racks and carry them out to the shrine in front of the building.
As his bonds were released and he flopped off the frame of the rack, Jak tried to move. Not too much. He knew he couldn’t fight back right here and now, but he wanted to try to flex some muscles, see what kind of response he got from his drugged limbs. There was no response. No matter how much he tried to use his muscles, they failed to be anything other than jelly.
He had no choice. He had to let the sec men carry him. Even if he had been offered the chance to go on foot, he could barely have crawled or shuffled his way out of the room. He could see that they were doing the same with Marissa.
As he let himself be carried through the building, Jak got little more than a series of impressions. The corridors were lit like the redoubts, and the air hummed with the same kind of predark tech that he had witnessed before. There were people moving through the corridors who paid no attention to himself or Marissa, as though this was always happening; he did notice, however, that they were deferential to the baron, who followed a few steps behind.
They left the corridors and began to descend a staircase, turning right to come out into an airy lobby with a high ceiling. This had to be the front of the old building, before the steps that had been turned into the shrine facing the square. Jak had seen old buildings designed in this style before, and knew they would soon emerge into the night air.
But it was more than that idle impression. It was something he could feel, a palpable change in the atmosphere as they approached the exit onto the shrine. The chanting had grown louder, and seemed to carry with it a note of humming, vibrant excitement, an electricity that made the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stand to attention, and made his spine buzz. It started to get adrenaline pumping as he rode the wave of energy coming off the crowd. Mebbe, just mebbe… He tried to flex his muscles, get some life flowing back into them. There was some response, but not enough to be of any use to him. Not yet.
As they left the lobby of the old building, he noticed that Dr. Jean held back, turning and muttering something to one of his sec men. Jak tried to catch it, but it was lost in the exultant roar that broke from the crowd as the sec men carried Marissa and himself out onto the platform of the shrine. It was a shrill, animal cry that oozed bloodlust and expectancy.
All else was lost in this consuming atmosphere of lust and hate. He felt himself be lifted onto a stone slab that was decorated with feathers and stones. He could feel the stones press into his back, causing him discomfort, but couldn’t control his own muscles well enough as of yet to move from them. He looked up at the night sky beyond the electric lighting, which was augmented by blazing torches. The naked flames cast warmth into the cold air, streams of which flowed around the slab and contrasted with the occasional bursts of heat from the torches and from the massed ranks of humanity that stood in front of him.
Jak tried to look across at Marissa. Her slab was to his right, some two yards away, and he could just about see her lying there, inert. The angle was too acute for him to see any more.
The cheers and exultant cries suddenly gained volume, melding together into one mass chant, a voice of the crowd that was so strong and vibrant that it was almost a physical force, hitting Jak in the stomach.
They were chanting Dr. Jean’s name.
The baron had walked out onto the shrine, his arms held aloft in recognition of his people.
“WHERE ARE THOSE STUPES?” Dr. Jean had asked Diamond, keeping back as his sacrificial victims were taken out onto the steps of the old courthouse.
Diamond furrowed his scarred brow. “Should be down by now, sir,” he said. “I’ll check ’em out. It’s not like they usually keeping you waiting.”
“I should hope not. They know what the consequences are,” Dr. Jean said with a mildness that belied his meaning. “Ah, here they are,” he added as another of the doors onto the old lobby opened and six people in costume entered. Five of them were already masked, but the woman in lead had her mask under her arm.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, “costumes late in arriving.” She was hesitant, sounded terrified. Dr. Jean took this to be a sign that they were worried about their slack performance. After all, they were all masked already.
“These things happen. I will look into it later,” the baron said magnanimously, little realizing that her fear was caused by Ryan’s SiG-Sauer, trained on the small of her back and concealed in the long sleeve of the costume. “Now get ready, like the others,” he urged, almost avuncular, “we have a ceremony to conduct.”
He turned and strode out onto the platform, where the sec men were tying down Jak and Marissa. The people cheered at his arrival, and began to chant his name as the sec men finished their task and pulled back into the old lobby.
Watching the crowd and also their backs, the companions found that their skin began to crawl and prickle with sweat that dripped down their backbones. There was a sense of power and menace in the air that was solid, and was almost like another presence up there on the platform with them.
Dr. Jean began to chant in a high, keening voice, his tone breaking on the highest notes as he tried to reach them. He held his arms aloft and then gestured at the two prone sacrificial victims with a sweep of his arms. He broke into a garbled chant that was in Cajun French. It was difficult for the companions to understand, as none of them had a firm grasp of the patois, but to Jak it became clear. As he lay there, he could hear Dr. Jean call on the gods to accept these messengers and the hopes of the people that they conveyed on their journey. He called on the gods to help him and the people in their search for a better land and a greater life. He began to sing again, setting up a call and response chant that was taken up by the crowd below, the sound swelling into a mighty roar as the people joined with him.
But it was more than that. Up on the platform of the shrine, and outside of the conditioning that Dr. Jean had placed on his people, it was obvious to see how his effects were achieved. Under the chanting of the crowd, a low humming sound was barely audible. It was unsettling and disturbing to the companions. But more than that, because they were free of the years of hypnosis and drugs, and because they had experienced similar phenomena before, they were able to identify the sound as something emanating from the vid screens around the square.
Ryan, Krysty and J.B. didn’t know quite how it worked, only that it did. But Mildred and Doc, for differing reasons, knew exactly what was going on. The sound was a trigger to impulses that the old tech had planted in the people of the walled ville over a period of years, augmented by the jolt that they were fed. Even now, they could see people all across the crowd snorting powder. Those who didn’t have their own were helping themselves from bowls of the drug the sec men were carrying.
All of this was designed to whip the crowd into the fervor and bloodlust frenzy for the ceremony, to spur them on to work harder for the baron and to help him extend his sphere of influence beyond the bayou.
So now they were five, standing on the platform in disguise, with an armed and frenzied crowd before them and a sec force behind them, hoping to save Jak and Marissa and somehow spirit them out of the square.
Behind their masks, they exchanged glances. Whatever else this was going to be, easy wasn’t the word any of them would choose to describe it.
The only member of the ville who didn’t seem to be affected in any way by the events taking place was the woman who had led them onto the platform. She had gestured to them to take their places—three at each slab—as they would if they were the genuine sacrificial priests. Any influence the hypnosis or drugs of the past may have had on her, had been temporarily wiped clean by the rush of her own fear.
She looked out at the crowd as if seeing it for the first time, which, in a way, she was. Other times she had been as influenced by the baron as the rest of the population. Now, she was apart, and it seemed an alien and scary presence to her.
She looked around, eyes wide behind her mask, no longer knowing quite what was expected of her by anyone. Dr. Jean finished the chant and spoke to the crowd in the broken French of the bayou. He told them that the time to begin the sacrifice was nigh. He turned to the nearest slab, which was Marissa’s, and held out his hands, chanting.
J.B. was nearest to the baron, with Mildred and Krysty around the slab. He cast a glance toward their captive, hoping that she would guide him. It was a vain hope, as her horrified and glazed glare spoke only of someone frozen in fear.
J.B. decided that now was the time to take matters into his own hands. As the baron drew near, J.B. pulled out his Tekna and stepped in toward Dr. Jean, using the folds of his costume to mask the thrust he made.
The baron’s eyes, already exaggerated by his makeup, became almost absurdly wide as the Armorer’s thrust took the knife up and into his stomach. Dr. Jean was a big man, sturdily built, with layers of fat and muscle that slowed the progress of the blade as it surged toward his intestines, intent on causing a massive internal hemorrhage.
The baron had the presence of mind and speed of reflex to push at J.B., thrusting him away. With a bellow that was part rage and part pain, Dr. Jean staggered backward as J.B. went sprawling, the bloodied knife still in his fist. The crowd began to hum with confusion, the people, in their trancelike state, not being sure of exactly what was going on.
But Mildred and Krysty knew. As soon as J.B. closed with the baron, they realized that they had little time in which to act. As quickly as they could, they released the bonds that kept Marissa on the slab. Because of her jolt-addled state, the sec men hadn’t bothered to tighten the knots on the bonds. They were there merely to stop her struggling too much when her heart was torn from her body.
Mildred and Krysty pulled the woman off the slab. She stumbled and tried to keep her feet, but they couldn’t assist her. They had to prepare themselves for the firefight that they knew would come. J.B. was already on his feet, Tekna sheathed and the mini-Uzi in his hands. He threw off his costume so that he would no longer be encumbered by it.
The revelation that something was very wrong sent a visible shiver through the crowd. The people could see Dr. Jean staggering across the platform, bent over and clutching at his stomach, blood staining the rags and feathers around his middle the same shade of red.
Ryan and Doc exchanged a quick glance. It was obvious what they had to do. The time for subterfuge had passed, and they needed to be ready for combat. Throwing off their costumes, they hastily untied Jak. The albino shook himself, stumbling as he attained his feet.
“Leave me. Okay,” he yelled as Doc made to come to his assistance. He was far from okay, however. Despite the adrenaline rush that had started to feed life back into his limbs as he was being carried out by the sec men, he was still nowhere near fighting strength, and it was all he could do to stand unaided.
He had no idea how Ryan and Doc had suddenly appeared from nowhere—he was equally surprised to see J.B., Mildred and Krysty standing near a faltering Marissa—but he had no time or inclination to wonder about that right now. He could see the crowd, could see the sec men beginning to rush the platform, and most of all he could see the bellowing, wounded figure of Dr. Jean stagger along the lip of the shrine.
Total choas was about to envelop them, and if he was to stand any chance of getting himself and Marissa out of this in any kind of shape, then he had to look after her and make sure that his friends could fight without having to worry about him.
Lurching alarmingly as his weakened limbs tried to deal with the urgent message of flight that his brain was feeding them, Jak made his way over to Marissa. Watching them go, Ryan knew that he and the others could get on with the more serious business of staying alive.
Sec men were pouring out of the front of the old courthouse building and onto the platform of the shrine. Diamond was at the forefront, noticeable primarily because he was the only sec man without infrared goggles. Not that this helped him as he charged straight into a hail of fire from the Armorer’s Uzi, which stitched a line of blood from his left shoulder down to his right hip, throwing him backward into a group of sec men who were on his heels, making them stumble. They were unable to aim and fire on the companions, and so were easy targets for the first wave of fire from Mildred, Ryan and Krysty.
To the left of the stricken Diamond, and coming from another set of doors, was another phalanx of sec men. Doc wasted no time in centering his LeMat on this group, and letting them feel the full force of the shot charge. The white-hot metal pellets ripped through them, tearing at flesh and bone, spreading a fine mist of blood across the group. The group were scattered, some chilled, others wounded too heavily to return fire.
Driven back by the hail of fire, and the flying bodies of those who were chilled and wounded, the sec force was temporarily pushed back into the old courthouse. But this was not the only source of problems for the companions.
An awareness of what was happening began to permeate the crowd in front of the shrine. They were hyped up, jolt-fueled, and in a state where they weren’t sure what was real. It was what Dr. Jean relied upon, and it was what had slowed their reactions. But however much it had dulled them, it hadn’t completely wiped them out. Down in the crowd, some of the ville dwellers were beginning to realize that something was wrong. The sight of their baron stumbling around the platform, blood dripping from his guts as he bellowed in agony, was a signal that those on the shrine weren’t all there to help him complete his task.
As they had discarded their costumes, the companions hadn’t revealed themselves to be swamp dwellers or part of the rebel army. But whoever they were, they were the enemy.
And they had to be destroyed.
One by one, increasing incrementally so that a volley of single shots became a hail of fire in a matter of minutes, the crowd in the square began to rain blasterfire onto the shrine.
Not thinking about who was in direct line of fire.
Dr. Jean straightened, outraged and shocked as the first of the fire began to hit him. “No—nononononono…” he bellowed, inaudible above the volleys of shells. Standing upright now, blood pouring from the wound in his guts, he was peppered by handblaster and rifle fire, his skin and flesh puckering as the bullets hit home all across his head and body, ripping chunks from him.
He was chilled long before he fell. His inclination was to fall forward, the direction of his weight, counterbalanced by the spread force of the fire that still ripped skin and flesh from his bones, his blood spraying over his people—the people whose bloodlust he had cultivated; the people whose bloodlust was now the cause of his own demise.
They didn’t even notice, in their frenzy, when his corpse finally collapsed and fell from the platform.