It wasn’t; not quite, anyway. The horses had reached the clearing and immediately picked up speed, heading for the exact route they’d taken through the scrub—looking back, he could see the ferns and brush broken and matted by their passage, marking clearly the way they’d gone—and the front rider was still several meters away from where they’d been hiding when the laser reached overload. Had the timing been better and the horse directly above when it blew, it might have done serious injury to both horse and rider. As it was, however, the horse reared back, throwing the rider to the ground. His companions had been following closely enough that their horses also broke stride and milled about in frightened confusion as the rider who had been thrown remounted. Having lost their advantage of surprise, the riders circled each other, talking rapidly among themselves, and split up, one galloping away toward the path, the other two continuing the way they had run through the underbrush. Eric nearly laughed aloud at how well his plan had worked, good timing or no. In any event, their lead had increased tremendously, although Eric now realized that he felt suddenly naked without the laser.
The terrain became considerably steeper, and they were forced to continue their escape in a combination of running-sliding-running the last several meters before reaching the trail itself. They stood panting, trying to catch their breath, and considered their options.
“The one who took the path will most certainly turn back this way,” Brendan gasped. “The other two will be slower, especially on the steeper parts we just came down. If we turn west, back toward Woodsgate, we’ll have all three of them behind us; but if we turn east, toward town, we’ll have but one opponent…”
The words hung in the air only a few seconds before his father flipped open the chamber on the revolver to check the load, then deftly snapped it closed again. “I understand. Let’s go.”
They ran quietly to the east, listening carefully for the horse they knew would soon be coming their way. They had covered only a few hundred meters when—although they could not yet see him coming from around the curve of the trail—they heard the hoofbeats echoing through the backwoods and jumped for cover on either side of the trail. Brendan and his father fired simultaneously when he rounded the curve, the combined blasts of the shotgun and revolver sending the rider literally flying out of the saddle.
The two older men went into action immediately, and Eric was amazed at how they worked together, doing what needed to be done with only a few words spoken between them. While his father dragged the downed rider into the growth at the side of the trail, Brendan tried to retrieve the horse, but had little success with the terrified animal. Instead, he slapped it on the rear and sent it running down the trail to the west in hopes that it might slow down any pursuit from that direction. With luck, the frightened animal would keep going down the trail and the two horsemen who had followed their path through the underbrush would see its hoofprints in the soft, packed earth and follow in the wrong direction. Eric hurried to his father, who knelt at the dead rider’s side, and recognized the overweight man instantly as the one his brother had called Mobo.
Brendan came back to them with another shotgun, a single-barrel model, pulled from the saddle holster of the horse before he set the animal free. “Have you ever fired one of these?” he asked, tossing it to Eric.
Eric hefted the weapon in his hands, testing its weight, and allowed his fingers to explore the trigger housing. “No, not one like this.”
“It’s loaded, and it’s easy to shoot. Just point it in the right direction, like a laser—oh, nice bit of work back there with the pin laser, by the way.” Was that just the hint of a smile on his lips? “Let’s move.” As before, Brendan led the way.
The three of them continued running, stopping only briefly when they realized that the riderless horse must have indeed led the other two to the west. They shared the remainder of the water in the flask, then started off again, at an easy jog to conserve their strength, toward Somerville.
They had covered maybe two kilometers when the trail began to look familiar to Eric. He’d been here before, a number of times, and he tried to remember landmarks and potential side trails in case the need arose. He had dropped back behind the others, scanning their current location, and was visually separated from them around a curve in the trail when he heard a sudden gasp in front of him.
“Father!” He rushed forward, instantly recognizing the location as the same clearing where his brother had accosted him four years earlier. The downed oak was there, unchanged, the rough-hewn steps in its side just as he remembered them. Brendan and his father had been about to climb over it when they ran into a shield of some kind. They hung suspended in the clearing, their feet several centimeters above the ground as they struggled to free themselves from—what? It looked like they were caught in some invisible spiderweb as they groped and thrashed, almost in slow motion, against an unseen wall in front of them. Whenever their feet scraped the ground, they kicked up leaves and dirt that instantly became mired in whatever was holding them. Eric raised the shotgun, looking frantically for a target, and was nudged in the back by something. He whirled around and felt himself instantly mired in a thickness of air that seemed to hold him solidly. The more he struggled, the thicker the air became and the harder it seemed to be able to move at all. He lost his grip on the shotgun and stared incredulously as it floated in the air next to him, just out of his reach. He tried not to resist it, relaxing his arms and legs in an attempt to free himself by moving slowly, but to no avail.
“Well, what have we here?” a deep, booming voice asked. He heard the man’s boots scuffing across the bark of the downed oak tree behind him, then rustling through the dry leaves on the ground, and struggled desperately to turn around, trying to face the speaker. “Why, it looks like the former Master of House Valtane.” His commanding voice lilted sarcastically as he spoke to Brendan. “And look who you’ve brought me: Javas, son of Nicholas, Emperor of the Hundred Worlds.”
It was apparent that his father and Brendan were still held helpless by the section of the force field behind him, but it sounded like the newcomer was somehow walking freely about them. This isn’t one large field, Eric reasoned, but single fields around each of us. He struggled again, but managed only to turn his head a few centimeters. He might not have bothered because the newcomer walked to him next, circling him as if there was nothing there to hamper him. It was him—the tall, bearded man who had caught him as he fell on the shuttle ramp back on Luna. The man Brendan had called Johnson. There was a long plastiskin bandage running down his neck and into the open collar of his shirt, and he walked with a slight limp from the injuries he’d received in the shuttle crash the previous day. It was just as obvious, as evidenced by how well he seemed to be getting around, that he’d received a good deal of advanced medical attention. From the physicians at House Valtane, no doubt. He had no weapon that he could see, but held a small, flat object in his right hand.
“Prince Eric, I’ve been watching your development for some time. It’s good to make your acquaintance in less formal circumstances than our brief encounter on the Moon.” He walked up to Eric’s shotgun and ran the thing in his hand around the perimeter of the gun, then plucked it effortlessly out of the air, adding it to the weapons he must have taken in a similar manner from the others. He slipped the controller device into his shirt pocket.
Eric was furious and tried to speak, but found that although his breathing seemed normal, he couldn’t utter a sound.