Chapter Thirty-Three

 

 

As he was tossed sideways by the force of the explosion, part of Ryan's combat mind told him that the ronin had gotten in and blown the armory, and part of him was trying to cope with the sudden burst of violence that sent him rolling over the cobbled yard, deafened and blinded.

 

He instinctively kept hold of the butt of the SIG-Sauer, taking a jarring blow in the small of the back from the walnut stock of the Steyr SSG-70.

 

Ryan was conscious of bits of wood and masonry thudding all around him. He opened his eye, finding that he could see bright flames and a curtain of billowing black smoke that boiled from the shattered ruins of the tower.

 

His head was ringing and he could hear voices, echoing around him, hollow and distant.

 

Someone tugged at his arm, trying to get him to his feet. Rubbing at his eye, Ryan saw that it was J.B., his fedora still miraculously perched on his head. The Armorer was shouting something to him, but the words were distorted.

 

"Back inside"

 

"What?"

 

"Best get inside. They got a hold."

 

"How about the others?"

 

J.B. nodded. "All right. They're all right. You were nearest explosion."

 

Ryan was standing, coughing at the smoke and dust. J.B. was at his side, holding the scattergun at his hip. A figure in the colors of the palace sec force loomed out of the darkness at them, holding a Nambu 9 mm pistol.

 

Without a moment's hesitation, the Armorer squeezed the trigger on the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000, firing one of the murderous Remington flechettes at the man's midriff. The twenty darts, each an inch long, tore into the stomach, puddling the intestines, sending the invader staggering backward. He dropped his blaster, hands reaching to try to hold his ruined body together.

 

"How you know he was ronin?" Ryan yelled.

 

J.B. grinned mirthlessly through the mask of dirt. "Didn't. Wasn't going to wait and find out."

 

There was another muffled boom, and more of the tower was demolished, what Ryan guessed had to have been some of the store of grens going up.

 

"Have to get inside," J.B. repeated. "Now!"

 

 

 

THE RONIN HAD ALSO managed to hit the fortress's main power source, forcing them onto emergency lighting, which consisted of dim lamps placed at irregular intervals.

 

Inside, everything was chaos.

 

Men were running around, and Ryan could hear women screaming, not short, sharp cries, but a long, high, keening sound that grated on the nerves.

 

Krysty was waiting inside the doors to the main part of the ville with Jak, Doc and Mildred. She hugged him as he appeared. "All right, lover?"

 

"Shaken a little."

 

"Saw you go down like a ton of bricks off the tailgate of a wag," Krysty said, her voice raised above the hubbub of noise that surrounded them.

 

"Ryan was ever an exponent of the big-bang theory of life," Doc said, his white teeth grinning in the gloom.

 

"Best try and find the shogun." Ryan looked around. "Where he is'll be the defense."

 

"Better be good." Jak had his blaster drawn, the metal gleaming in the light of the lamps. "Ronin well in. Done good damage. Take stopping."

 

Ryan led the way back into the heart of the huge wooden fortress, followed by the others. Nobody tried to stop them or threaten them. Half the sec men were running in short, scampering steps toward the main gates. The rest seemed to be simply running, like ants when the walls of their nest have been broken down by a giant enemy.

 

"Hideyoshi!" Ryan spotted the balding head of the samurai in the distance, near a cross corridor. "Hey!"

 

The warrior stopped, his face worried, the scar still making him appear as if he were sharing a private joke with himself. "Cawdor-san? I heard you had fallen in the attack."

 

"Bit ruffled. Your armory's gone."

 

"The yagura is exploded?"

 

"Yeah. Ronin are in. About thirty or so. And we reckon that some of your new sec men are traitors to Mashashige. Got real trouble."

 

The samurai nodded furiously. He was wearing armor above the waist, but he was helmetless, and he gripped his drawn sword in his right hand.

 

"Lord Mashashige is at the heart of the fortress. There we will make our stand."

 

"Could try and hit them before then," J.B. suggested. "Take some out."

 

"If you can."

 

At that moment Mashashige himself appeared, walking slowly toward them, his face as untroubled as the surface of a summer millpond. He wore, as usual, the loose black kimono, and his sword was still tucked into the wider sash.

 

"This is what you Americans call 'the crackle,' I believe," he said.

 

"The crunch," Ryan stated. "Sure looks like it. What plans you got?"

 

"To gather my men and attack the ronin. Drive them from my walls and slay them all."

 

It was said as calmly as if the shogun were giving a recipe for pecan pie to a ladies' auxiliary.

 

"Why not invent a cure for cancer and create world peace while you're at it?" Mildred snorted. "Get real."

 

He turned toward her. "This is a problem?"

 

Ryan answered, ticking off points on his fingers. "One, they got in. Two, they blew your armory. Three, from the smoke they started a fire. Wooden building like this could go in an hour. Four, we're certain some of your new sec men are already on the wrong side. And five, they all got blasters. Odds might favor you. Might just favor you. But not by much. You don't hit them now and hit them hard, then you can get out your wakizashi and start cutting open your belly. You and the rest of your warriors."

 

It was an unusually long speech for Ryan, and the shogun considered it for several seconds.

 

"You will help?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Yet you know of my plan to bring my people into your Deathlands?"

 

"Sure. You haven't done much to try and hide it from us, have you? After this fight, I'm not saying we'll go along with your ideas."

 

Mashashige nodded, taking in a slow breath. "I see. This is good. Let us go then and defeat my hen-shit brother."

 

"Chicken-shit, Shogun," Ryan corrected. "You mean chicken-shit."

 

"Thank you, Cawdor-san. Go and do what you can. I will rally my people. May our gods go with us."

 

 

 

RYAN'S IDEA HAD BEEN to try to reach a point where they could either ambush the invading ronin or launch a counterattack against them, somewhere near the main entrance.

 

But it was impossible.

 

The ville was such a rambling complex, now poorly lighted, with smoke already showing where fires were taking hold, that there was no way to find their way through or to locate any position to commence a firefight.

 

And there was the constant ebb and flow of humanity, with no hope of determining who was for good and who for evil. Jak very nearly shot Issie through the face as she suddenly jumped on him from a side room, weeping, her makeup so smudged she looked like a heartbroken panda. She begged to be allowed to stay with them, as she feared for her life.

 

"All do," Jak muttered.

 

 

 

THE RONIN HAD ALREADY spread out through the fortress.

 

Ryan spotted several of them gathered in a side room, where they were handing out ammo to three or four of the turncoat sec men.

 

"Still got your grens?" he asked J.B. and Jak. "Give them a couple of implodes."

 

The light was very poor in the corridor where they all waited, but both the Armorer and the teenager fumbled in pockets and pulled out a pair of grens with two-step firing mechanisms.

 

"Now!" J.B. called, arming his, then lobbing it across and through the paper walls, the dark shape followed immediately by Jak's implode gren.

 

Ryan turned away, putting his hands over his ears, opening his mouth to minimize the effects of the shock.

 

There was the familiar, oddly inverted sound of the implode going off, sucking all matter into it like a reverse explosion. But the second gren made a different sound, louder, accompanied by a flash of vivid yellow-and-orange fire.

 

"Shit," Jak hissed. "Mine was flamer. Couldn't see colors in dark."

 

The two grens together had done their lethal work, killing or maiming every man in the room, sending a couple of them staggering away, screaming, burning. The fiery grens contained a highly concentrated form of napalm that splattered everywhere and stuck and burned.

 

And burned.

 

Ryan squinted at the dazzling inferno, seeing that gobbets of flame had burst onto adjoining walls, starting fresh fires. "Whole place could go unless someone starts fighting it," he said. "Wood's like tinder."

 

"Reckon the shogun's goin' to be too busy trying to save his life to worry about the fire," J.B. replied. "And we sure don't have the time."

 

"Best try and get to the center. See if we can hold there."

 

Doc clapped his hands. "Well said, good Master Cawdor! For if the center cannot hold, then what hope can there be for the rest?"

 

 

 

THEY KILLED THREE MORE of the ronin, or their treacherous allies among the sec men of the castle, as they struggled to find their way through the dark, reeking maze toward the courtyard at the heart of the building.

 

Behind them they were aware of the roar of the fire as it gathered momentum, fanned by a rising northerly wind that drove the hungry flames deeper into the ville.

 

"Not going to be anything left to rescue, lover," Krysty panted.

 

Ryan stopped, struck by the thought that they could end up trapped in the heart of the fortress, with the holocaust swallowing them as it raged by.

 

"Mebbe we should head for the outside and get into the water," he said.

 

"The open courts should act as some kind of a break," Mildred stated. "Like they cut spaces in a forest fire. Might slow it down some."

 

"Yeah. Could be. But if I yell for us to get out, then follow on tight. You're responsible for the girl, Jak."

 

"Sure."

 

 

 

THEY WERE IN AN ARCADE of oipachinko machines, running past them when someone opened up with an automatic rifle, sending them diving for cover on the floor. Whoever it was had no skill as a marksman and fired high, ripping through the chrome and glass and bright colors of the games, scattering thousands of the tiny metal balls across the floor.

 

Ryan didn't risk getting to his feet, surfing on his stomach on the waves oipachinko balls, followed by the others, until they were all safely out of the room.

 

 

 

A LITTLE FURTHER ON Ryan almost bumped into one of the few samurai who still lived in the ville, loyal to Lord Mashashige, one of the nameless warriors who had allied himself with the venomous Yashimoto and hadn't even bothered to introduce himself to the outlanders.

 

Now he was dying.

 

One of the long war arrows had pierced his neck, from right to left, the shaft standing out by more than a foot on each side. Blood ran down over the collar of his armor, seeping from his mouth and nose.

 

Ryan came within a whisker of shooting him through the chest with the big 9 mm blaster, checking at the last moment as he recognized the man's tortured face through the coils of choking smoke.

 

The Japanese knelt, slowly and carefully, as though he were about to dine, one hand touching the blood-slick arrow, his face puzzled. The leather bindings on the heavy armor creaked as he moved, and his helmet, with a heron's beak in inlaid silver, tilted backward.

 

"What happen?" he mumbled.

 

"You got chilled," Ryan said.

 

"You help ronin?"

 

"No. Where's the shogun?"

 

The man gestured wearily with his thumb, pointing behind himself. "Some ronin there. Saw Ryuku. Think race is lost, outlander."

 

"Never over until it's over," Ryan said.

 

"And the fat lady sings," Mildred added.

 

"Shogun still alive?"

 

"Alive, Cawdor-san."

 

"Sure?"

 

" Shinda tsumori . We all ready for that." He coughed, his whole body jerking with the pain, a lump of blood the size of a fist filling his open mouth, flooding over his breastplate. "We anticipate death."

 

"Could try getting arrow out," Jak suggested.

 

But Mildred held up a hand. "No point. Might quicken his passing. That's all."

 

The samurai looked up at the strangely assorted group, his pain-filled eyes catching the terrified Issie. He pointed a blood-drenched finger at her.

 

"It is all bad joke," he said very quietly, then slid forward on his face on the floor, the feathered flight of the arrow rasping on the planking.

 

"Best get on," Ryan said.

 

A figure in dark blue erupted out of a door on his left, holding a Nambu blaster. For a moment the man hesitated, and Ryan shot him carefully through the center of the chest, sending him toppling backward out of sight.

 

 

 

THEY HAD OUTRUN the flames, but paused in a room where an exotic buffet had been laid out, the platters of food untouched.

 

"Funny," Doc said, "but right now I think I could do me some eating after all."

 

Ryan looked all around, head to one side, listening for sounds of danger.

 

There was shooting, accompanied by screams, but all of it seemed to be far off. As near as Ryan could work out, the corridor to the heart of the ville lay ahead of them, through the room with the food, maybe forty or fifty yards away.

 

"All right to snatch some food, lover?" Krysty asked, eyeing an oval blue-and-white dish bearing a wonderful array of fruit.

 

Doc was already halfway through a pastry shell filled with slices of thin meat, covered in a spicy red sauce. "Delicious, friends," he grunted, spluttering crumbs on the floor. "Best I've eaten since Ma Thompson's ice-cold frankfurter and hot parsnip mayonnaise!"

 

Mildred stopped halfway through a golden sliced pineapple. "God, Doc, you surely do come up with the most bizarre and disgusting thoughts."

 

Doc looked thoughtful. "Now that you mention it, my dear, Dr. Wyeth, it was a somewhat revolting repast, though I had not eaten for several days at the time."

 

Ryan drank deeply from one of the cut-crystal vases of fresh ice water, washing away some of the heat and dryness from his throat.

 

"Better." As Ryan put down the empty jug, he noticed that the sound of the flames was getting closer and the smoke seemed to be thickening. "Time we got moving again," he said.

 

Mildred wiped her mouth on her sleeve, patting J.B. on the arm. "I'm beginning to think that we might've missed the fat lady, John."