The armored car was raking the wall with a heat ray. Reave could imagine the defenders crouching behind the stones as the roaring washes of flame lashed over their heads. Then there was a blinding flash, and a twenty-foot section of wall vanished into a smoking crater. The armored car had tossed a nukeling. Baptiste was ever the one to crush gnats with a hammer, Reave reflected. It was extremely lucky that Stuff Central had imposed an absolute prohibition on the templates for weapons of real mass destruction, or without a doubt Baptiste would have committed holocaust on a grand scale and his body count would have risen to truly astronomical figures. He would have smashed stars if he had had the means. The limits on his viciousness were strictly a matter of available technology.
The nearest riders converged on the gap in the stone wall. Reave was one of them. Once through the gap, he hauled his charger around to go after the defenders who were still crouching behind the wall. Then he was in among them. Menlo was beside him, hacking with an ancient cavalry saber that he kept honed to a razor edge. Reave found himself in the seemingly timeless chaos of close combat. He was fighting on instinct, and the world was coming at him in vivid, threatening visual flashes. The noise was so dense that it was akin to silence. A burly militiaman in a green jerkin grabbed for his left stirrup, looking to unseat him from the lizard. Without an instant's hesitation, Reave blew the top of the man's head off. At his right, another man was raising a weapon, a smooth blast tube with an ornate polymer stock. Reave fired again and again. Firepower was the raiders' watchword: Just keep firing. His pistol made a continuous high-pitched roar.
The defenders were determined, but they were no match for Baptiste's savages. After a few furious minutes of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, they broke and ran. Most were cut down by pursuing riders. Menlo seemed to be taking a barbarous delight in lopping off the heads of the fleeing defenders. Then he changed his trick. He hung low in his saddle and slashed open a running man's stomach. The man's intestines spilled out and tripped him. The entire column pounded down the main street of the town, pouring indiscriminate fire into the buildings and scattering terrified people before them. The riders shot at anything in their field of fire: men, women, or children. The slaughter was nothing more than a mindless frenzy, and it would probably last through the rest of the day, or longer if they came across a cache of native alcohol. On their tall reptiles, their weapons flashing, the riders must have looked like demons from the pit.
The column wheeled on the square in front of the ziggurat and started back down the street on a second pass. Already three buildings were burning, and there was a definite lack of readily available targets. Some riders had to make do with merely trampling the bodies that were lying in the dust. Then there was a flash of green fire from the roof of a small adobe. Someone was foolhardy enough to still be fighting back. The weapons of half the column came to bear on the spot, and the small flat-roofed structure was quickly reduced to nibble.
After a good deal of aimless milling about, riders started dismounting. Pickets held the mounts while the rest began a methodical house-by-house clearing of the town. Foot soldiers were dispatched into the surrounding fields to hunt down any inhabitants who might be hiding out there. Reave was content to remain in the street and hang on to the reins of his charger along with those of Menlo and another man while they joined in the house-to-house combing for booty and victims. Reave was beginning to feel sickened. As he wrestled with the lizards, which still had their wattles up and were ready to go, Baptiste's armored car rolled to a stop beside him. The driver, Gord, a squat sociopath with hulking shoulders and a blankly brutal frog face, swung down from the armored car and was pulling on the backtanks of a flamethrower. Soon he would be hosing liquid phosphorus into any building that took his fancy.
Although there were regular outbursts of gunfire, the intent was not an immediate, wholesale massacre of the population. Baptiste liked to have a few prisoners to play with. A makeshift pen was set up on the square, and title townspeople who had been unfortunate enough to have been taken alive were forced to squat on the ground, guarded by a dozen foot soldiers. There were raucous shouts from back down the street. Someone had discovered the town brewery.
Up to that point no raider had attempted to enter the ziggurat. Anything that had a connection to metaphysics was reserved for Baptiste himself. He had an intense and all-encompassing hatred of anything to do with the spiritual, an attitude that Reave considered a little incongruous in a man who was so fascinated by death. Baptiste stepped down from the armored car and stood staring at the ziggurat. Reave had to admit that the guy had style. He was short but compensated for it by constant nervous aggression. He was the classic little dictator, and his stance as he looked at the ziggurat was typical. His boots were planted in the dirt in a manner that indicated to the world that he was ready for anything it cared to throw at him. He looked tough and weather-beaten. His long leather coat was dusty and stained. The perennial goggles had left permanent marks on both sides of his jutting nose. With Napoleonic understatement, his only concession to any kind of battlefield dandyism was the flowing aviator scarf and a collection of small gold trinkets on a chain around his neck. He wore a second short flight jacket under the long coat. His hands were clasped determinedly behind his back, but the solid certainty of the stance was betrayed by fingers that were in constant motion.
Baptiste nodded to himself as though he had made some sort of decision. Looking neither left nor right, he started walking toward the ziggurat. He seemed transfixed. A number of men fell in behind him. Reave decided that he would go, too. He wanted to see the inside of the thing on the square. The lizards had calmed down, and he handed the reins to a foot soldier. With his pistols stuck in his belt, he strode after Baptiste.
Only five men actually mounted the steps to the ziggurat: Baptiste himself; Reave; a horseman called Yar Gracka; the Old Metal Monster, one of the originals in Baptiste's army; and I-shiire, who kept his face veiled in the manner of the Nulites. The remainder of Baptiste's followers hung back. Despite their absolute callousness in most things, the nomad raiders had a certain reserve when confronted by the metaphysical. It was not a matter of belief or even fear. In the Damaged World, belief was wholly relative. Metaphysics was something that most of the army did not understand and thus did not care to mess with. They left it to the fanatics like Baptiste and I-shiire the Nulite or to the inquisitive like Reave and the Old Metal Monster.
The flight of stone steps ran straight and very steep almost a third of the way up the structure. The pseudosun was well into the sky, and the day was getting warm. The Old Metal Monster, who weighed some four hundred pounds, was panting and red-faced, sweating into his steel armor. Reave wondered what they would discover at the end of the climb. One could never tell with religion. The shrine might hold some inexplicable piece of technology or a sacrificial altar crusted with the blood of centuries.
The first thing they found was a set of imposing bronze doors, ten feet high and looking as though they weighed several tons each. They were ornamented with coiling serpents and the double helix symbol enclosed by a seven-pointed star. Baptiste pushed back his goggles and pulled off his gauntlets. Without a word, he handed the gloves to Yar Gracka and placed his bare hands flat on the metal, as though he were trying to sense some kind of vibration. It seemed to Reave that Baptiste's behavior was getting stranger and stranger. After a few moments he flexed his arms as though trying to push the doors open. They refused to yield. The other men joined him, applying their shoulders, but still the doors would not move. Baptiste stepped back. He motioned to I-shiire. The Nulite reached under his burnoose and produced a tiny shaped limpet change. Nulites attached great significance to the act of blowing things up. According to their violently relentless faith, any explosion was a symbol of the Primal Birth. The explosion was not to be, however. Just as I-shiire was placing the charge on the hairline division between the two doors, they made a noise like a deep sigh and slowly swung back.