“There’s some clothing there for you to use if you like, and the shower. No problem with it cycling. There’s plenty of water here,” he told her. Hirald nodded, placed her drink down on a glass-topped table, and headed back into the rooms Snow had come from. Snow watched her go. She would shower and change and be little fresher than she already was. He had noted with some puzzlement how she never seemed to smell bad, never seemed dirty.
“Whose clothing is this?” Hirald asked from the room beyond.
“My last wife’s,” said Snow.
Hirald came to the door with clothing folded over one arm. She looked at Snow questioningly.
“She killed herself about century ago,” he said in a flat voice. “Walked out into the desert and burnt a hole through her head. I found her before the crab-birds and sand sharks.”
“Why?”
“She grew old and I did not. She hated it.”
Hirald had no comment to make on this. She went to take her shower, and shortly returned wearing a skin-tight bodysuit of translucent blue material, which she did not expect to be wearing for long once Snow saw her in it. Snow was occupied though; sat in a swivel chair looking at a screen, he was back in his dust robes, his terrapin mask hanging open. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at. She saw the hover transport on the sand and the two women pulling a sheet over it. The Merchant Baris she recognised, as she recognised the four hired killers.
“It would seem Baris has found me,” said Snow, his tone cold and flat.
“What defences does this place have?”
“None, I never felt the need for them.”
“Are you sure they are coming here?”
“It seems strange that he has chosen this particular rock field on the whole planet. I’ll have to go and settle this.”
“I’ll change,” said Hirald, and hurried back to get her suit. When she returned Snow was gone, when she tried to follow she found the elevator car locked at the bottom of the shaft.
“Damn you, Snow!” she yelled, slamming her fist against a doorjamb, leaving a fist-shaped dent in the steel. She then walked back a few paces, turned, and ran and leapt into the shaft. The rails pinned to the edge were six metres away. She reached them easily, her hands locking on the polished metal with a thump. Laboriously she began to climb down.
Jharit smiled at his wife and nodded to Trock who stood beyond her strapping on body armour. This was the one. They would be rich after this. He looked at the narrow beam laser he held. He would have preferred something with a little more power, but it was essential that the body not be too badly damaged. He turned to Baris as the Merchant sent his two women back to the transport.
“We’ll go in spread out. He probably has scanning equipment in the rock field and if there’s an ambush, we don’t want him to get too many of us at once.”
Baris smiled and thumbed bullets into his rifle, adjusted the scope. Jharit wondered about him, wondered how good he was. He gave the signal; they spread out and entered the rock field.
They were coming to kill him. There were no rules, no challenges offered. Snow braced the butt of his pistol against the rock and sighted along it.
“Anything?” asked Jharit over the com.
“Pin cameras,” Jharilla told him. “I burnt a couple out, but there has to be more. He knows we’re here.”
“Me too,” said Trock.
“Remember, narrow beam, we burn too much and there’s no money. A clean kill. A head shot would be nice.”
There was a whooshing sound, a brief scream, static over the com. Jharit hit the ground and moved behind a rock.
“What the hell was that?”
“He’s got a fucking APW! Fucking body armour’s useless!”
Jharit felt a sinking sensation in his gut. They had expected projectile weapons, perhaps a laser.
“Who…?”
There was a pause.
“Trock?”
“Jharilla’s dead.”
Jharit swallowed dryly and edged on into the rock field.
“Position?”
“Don’t know?”
“Meck?”
“Nothing here.”
“Baris?”
There was no reply from the Merchant.
Snow dropped down off the top of the boulder and pulled the remaining two spheroids from his belt. With his teeth he twisted their tops right round. The dark skinned one was over to his left. The Marsman over to his right. The others were further over to the right somewhere. He threw the two spheroids right and left and moved back then flicked through multiple views on his wrist screen. A lot of the cameras were out, but he pulled up a view of the Marsman. Two detonations. As the Marsman hit the ground, Snow realised he had thrown too far there. He was close. He flicked through the views again and caught the other stumbling through dust and wreckage, rock splinters imbedded in his face. Ah, so. Snow moved to his left, checking his screen every few seconds. He halted behind a tilted slab and after checking his screen once more he squatted down and waited.
With little regard for his surroundings, Trock stumbled out of the falling dust. Snow smiled grimly under his mask and sighted on him. Red agony cut his shoulder. The smell of burning flesh. Snow rolled to one side, came up onto his feet, ran. Rock to one side of him smoked, pinged as it heated. He dived for cover, crawled amongst broken rock. The firing ceased. Now I’m dead, he thought. His pistol lay in the dust back there somewhere.
“He dropped the APW, Trock. He’s over to your left. Take him down, I can’t get a sighting on him at the moment.”
Trock spat a broken tooth from his mouth and walked in the direction indicated, his antique revolver in his left hand and his laser in his right. This was it. The bastard was dead, or perhaps not. I’ll cut his arms and legs off, the beam should cauterise sufficiently. Trock did not get time to fire. The figure in dust robes came out of nowhere to drop-kick him in the chest. The body armour absorbed most of the blow, but Trock went over. Before he could rise the figure was above him. A split-hand blow drove through his visor and deep into his eyes, two fingers each, and burst them. It was a strike Snow had learnt over a thousand years before. By the time Trock started screaming and firing Snow was gone again.
Snow coughed as quietly as he could, opened his mask and spat out a mixture of bloody plasma and charred tissue. The burn had started at his shoulder and penetrated his left lung. A second more and he would have been dead. The pain was crippling. He knew he would not have the energy for another attack like that, nor would he be likely to take any of the others by surprise. The man had been stunned by the explosion, angered by the injuries to himself. Snow edged back through the rock field, his mobility rapidly decreasing. When a shadow fell across him, he looked up into the inevitable.
“Why didn’t you take his weapon?” asked Jharit, nodding back in the direction of Trock, who was no longer screaming. He was curled foetal by a rock, a field dressing across his eyes and his body pumped full of self-administered painkillers.
“No time, no strength… could only get him through his visor,” Snow managed.
Jharit nodded and spoke into his com. “I have him. Home in on my signal.”
Snow waited for death, but Jharit squatted in the dust by him seemingly disinclined to kill him.
“Jharil was a hell of a woman,” said Jharit, removing a stasis bottle from his belt and pushing it into the sand next to him. “We were married in Viking city twenty solstan years ago.” Jharit pulled a wicked ceramal knife from his boot and held it up before his face. “This is for her you understand. After I’ve taken your testicles and dressed that wound, I’ll see to your other injury. I don’t want you to die yet. I have so much to tell you about her, and there is so much I want you to experience. You know she—”