A plump, graying man snarled at Dona as he brought his weapon up to aim it between her eyes. She spun aside like a bulldancer, avoiding the pistol’s hissing tritium spray. As she whirled to face the gunman again, her forearm snapped out. A quantum dagger thudded home in the gunman’s left eye. His mouth gaped in a silent scream as he toppled into the roadside weeds.
Dona’s neurocomp filled her brain with a sensor image of a tall whippet of a man drawing a bead on the back of her head. She whirled, jerking her hoopskirt up to her thighs, and kicked upward in a merciless arc. Her heel crunched into the thin bones of his nose, driving the resulting splinters into his brain. Pain lanced up her calf, and she grimaced, silently cursing her too-thin dancing slippers. That move is a hell of a lot easier in armored boots.
Drawing another stiletto from her hair, she scanned the surrounding trees. Her eyes narrowed as her neurocomp pinpointed a man aiming a shard rifle at Alerio. She killed him before his finger could tighten on the trigger.
You may call yourself an Enforcer, but under that pretty armor you’re still Kavel’s Killer. Just another assassin with delusions of morality.
Shut up. She slid another blade from her tightly braided bun. The needle-thin length of tritium felt cool and familiar in her fingers before she sent it on its way with a snap of her wrist.
Out in the ring of trees, someone screamed. The cry drowned in a gurgle, but she was already tracking her next target. Thinking nothing at all, she killed one Xeran after another in a bubble of silence and peace.
Monster.
Shut. Up.
Alerio’s reinforced fist crunched into bone, shattering the would-be kidnapper’s skull. The Warlord had gone to riaat as he’d leaped from the coach, and now his blood burned with cold biochemical fire. As the berserker state amplified his strength by a factor of ten, it numbed his awareness of pain and exhaustion. He could fight until he dropped. His lips stretched in a wild wolf grin. He’d missed the feral pleasure of cutting loose, of giving no quarter and expecting none.
This mob of killers deserved anything he did to them.
Relentless as a machine, he ground through his foes with punches, kicks, and ripping thrusts of his combat knife. He’d lost count of the number he’d killed.
Need to leave one alive. I’ve got a few questions . . .
Dona raced by, and his eyes flicked to follow. Even deep in a berserker haze, he was acutely aware of her. Skirts bunched in one hand, she punched and kicked, flattening every Xeran in her way. Now and then she paused to reclaim one of her knives before plunging it into someone else.
There was no rage on her face, no bloodthirst or desire for revenge. Just calculation, blinding speed, and the flash of steel. He had to suppress the urge to grab her for a kiss whenever she went by.
A pistol roared once, twice, a third time, followed by three booming shots in rapid succession, the gunfire deafening at close quarters. Alerio jerked his head around to see Julia Reginald reloading a revolver, grim concentration on her face. She’d evidently decided to stop panicking and start fighting.
“That’s enough!” an unfamiliar voice shouted.
Eyes narrowing, Alerio turned, his sensors locking on the last remaining Xeran. The one they’d have to leave alive.
“All you fuckers throw down your weapons and get the hell away from my men!” He had a thick Xeran accent, all slurred vowels and harsh glottal stops.
And he had a hostage.
CHAPTER SIX
The Xeran’s fist was wrapped in Geneva’s glorious hair as he jammed a shard pistol against the thin white flesh of her temple. Her golden eyes rolled in animal panic.
Dona and Alerio started easing toward the hostage-taker in tandem. One step. Two. Three. Slow and stealthy as a pair of wolves.
“Stay back!” the Xeran shouted, grinding the gun against her head. She cried out, cowering while simultaneously trying to pull away. He jerked her in close again, glaring at the two Enforcers as he backed toward the carriage. “Stay the fuck back!” His face twisted in the furious terror of a man who’d thought he’d had the situation in hand, only to see it sucked right out the air lock. “We had you outnumbered, damn you!”
“Not on your best day,” Dona muttered.
The highwayman jerked Geneva by her hair past the horses, ignoring her yelps of pain. Tears rolled down her perfect cheeks, and her shoulders began to shake. She was terrified.
“He’s trying to drag her into the carriage,” Dona murmured to Alerio. “Must have spotted the enhancements.”
“Yeah, well, I’m damned if I’ll let him . . .”
Which was, of course, when the Xeran finally got a good look at the chief’s face—and the hot riaat glow of his eyes. His eyes widened in horrified realization.
“Oh, shit.” Dona tensed. “Alerio . . .”
“Fuck me!” the man howled in tones of outraged betrayal. “You’re a goddamn Warlord! The botfucking priests didn’t say nothing about no gods-cursed Warlords!” Jerking his pistol from Geneva’s temple, he aimed at Alerio and started to squeeze the trigger.
The lead carriage horse kicked him right in the ass.
Howling in astonished agony, the Xeran fell on his face, both hands flying back to cradle his abused butt. The forgotten pistol fired as it fell, forcing Dona and Alerio to duck.
With a growl, Alerio pounced on the hapless kidnapper, smashing him into the dirt as he jerked a set of restraints from a pocket of his coat. Ignoring the man’s writhing, he started tying the Xeran’s wrists together with the thin magnetic cable.
Before Dona could join them, Julia shouted at her from the carriage box. “Enforcer, Jorge’s bad! If you don’t get him to the Outpost now . . .”
Dona veered toward the couple and began to run. “Alerio . . .”
“Go!” Alerio snapped.
Reaching the box, she bounded up beside Julia and bent to lift the injured coachman into her arms. He didn’t stir.
“Save him,” the guide begged. “Please.” A tear meandered down her cheek.
“There’s time, Julia. But you have to move back so I can Jump.”
The woman jumped down from the box and backed away, watching them with desperate hope. Dona gave her a tight smile, gathered the injured man closer, and Jumped.
The temporal warp flared as bright as a star as the sonic boom made the carriage rock on its great wheels. The three mares jumped and bucked, whinnying in panic. The white horse that had bit the Xeran barely flicked an ear.
Alerio straightened from the hog-tied kidnapper to give the big animal a nod. “Good work, Enforcer Pendragon.”
The stallion shook his mane in a jangle of harness. “Botbangers fall for that trick every time,” the horse grumbled, his deep voice resonant. He had a distinct cockney accent. “Gods’ truth, the idea of a cyborg horse never even crosses their tiny ape minds. It’s bloody insultin’, it is.”
Alerio watched Geneva Kamil waltz past in the arms of some planter’s son, a beaming smile of pure delight on her inhumanly lovely face.
He’d taken both women back to the Outpost so he could interrogate the captured Xeran; leaving them alone was obviously not an option. Actually, he’d half expected Geneva to abandon her dream of dancing at a Victorian ball, but evidently she was made of sterner stuff. The break had given the actress time to recover her composure, and they’d returned with a backup coachman. This time, though, they’d Jumped in a great deal closer to the Northram rice plantation—as they would have done in the first place if Alerio’d had his way. Unfortunately, at the time, Geneva had refused any change in her half-million-galactor itinerary, and he’d been unable to explain because of Colonel Ceres’s ill-conceived orders.