Across the intervening space, Gifford grinned at him like a crew-cut ape. With his snub nose and flat boyish features he looked just as open and friendly and uncomplicated as he always had. He shifted his grip on the ax.
“Too bad, Commander,” he said. “You overlooked a couple of the bugs.”
Chapter 28
Jameson threw the hammer. He threw it a couple of yards to the side of Gifford, reining in the cord that was tied to it as he did so. The six-pound maul caught Gifford in the ribs, knocking him sideways off the ridge. He began his long, slow tumble to the floor of the gorge, helpless to arrest his fall.
Jameson continued hauling in on the cord, imparting further momentum to the hammer. Next it caught one of the Chinese missile men in the side of the head, sending him rolling in slow motion down the steep slope, his crowbar clattering and bouncing along with him.
Jameson kept the hammer twirling like a lariat. It whizzed full circle around him and knocked the girl’s legs out from under her. She toppled backward and floated toward the floor of the metal canyon. Her head hit the cliffside about a hundred feet down. She’d gathered enough inertia by then for a broken skull, despite the low gravity.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jameson saw Ruiz scrambling up the slope with his spear, Dmitri and Maggie behind him. One of the Chinese stepped inside the whirling arc of the hammer. As he raised an ax, the rope twanged into him from the other side and the hammer, its pendulum swing shortened, wrapped him round in a cocoon of rope. Jameson tugged sharply, and the man went sprawling down the slope, taking rope and hammer with him.
In a split-second glance, Jameson saw that Gifford’s feet had made contact with the slope about two hundred feet down. He was running desperately, trying to keep on his feet, unable to stop because of his momentum. He’d have to keep running, faster and faster, all the way to the bottom, hoping that he wouldn’t take a tumble. If he survived without broken bones, he wouldn’t be back up here in a hurry.
With the whirling hammer gone, the other Chinese were closing in on Jameson. One of them was almost on top of him, raising an ax over his head with both hands. Jameson reached for the wrench in his belt, with the sickening realization that he wasn’t going to get it out in time, wasn’t going to be able to dodge out of the way, before the ax blade came crashing down on him.
But then, in a slow-motion dream that was partially pumping adrenalin and partially low gravity, he saw Ruiz scrambling the last few feet to the top and thrusting with his spear. The Chinese screamed as the lashed butcher knife slid into his liver, and the ax went spinning out of his grip.
Then Dmitri was there, wading into the fray with the fire ax. His face looked white and determined. Chopping people up wasn’t in his temperament, but he’d made himself realize that any hesitation, any flinching, could be fatal. He swung the ax two-handed at the nearest Chinese, his eyes closed. The Chinese dodged the ax easily, and one of his friends brought a steel bar crunching down on Dmitri’s shoulder with a force that lifted his feet off the ridge. Probably he’d been aiming at Dmitri’s head, but the blow disabled Dmitri anyway, smashing his clavicle. Dmitri, with a surprised expression on his face, slowly crumpled. He landed in a sitting position on the metal slope and began a toboggan slide back down where he’d started from.
Ruiz was trying to fend off an angry-looking opponent with his fiberglass pole. The knife had broken off in his victim’s body. Jameson crouched, the wrench in his fist, keeping his eye on the other two surviving Chinese.
Where the devil was Maggie?
The question was answered a moment later when a Molotov cocktail came soaring up from the cliffside below. She’d aimed too high. Instead of shattering at the feet of the Chinese, the bottle, trailing a flaming wick, arced high over their heads and began to fall slowly down on the other side of the ridge. It hit about a hundred feet down and exploded in a puff of bright flame. Fiery rivulets coursed their way down the incline.
Shouts and movement came from below. All she had succeeded in doing was to attract attention. Jameson caught sight of her, clambering up the cliff with a knife in her teeth, her red hair billowing, her skinny knees scraped and bloody. And then he was ducking under a blur of metal as a bandy-legged fellow with an earnestly murderous expression swung a pry bar at him. Jameson thrust with his crescent wrench and caught the man under the chin. There was a sickening crunch, and the man folded, choking to death on a crushed larynx.
Ruiz’s opponent got past the fiberglass pole, club raised. Ruiz was still tough and smart, despite his age. He was a graduate—or survivor—of the duckboard streets of the New Manhattan refugee camp, after all. He resisted the natural impulse to back away and give his enemy a clear swing at him, and instead got under the club and started hugging him. The man struggled to stay on his feet as Ruiz began gleefully to bite, gouge, and use a bony knee where it would be most painful.
The remaining Chinese had frozen, club in hand, to look at his dying friend. His image had a snapshot clarity to Jameson as he crouched there with the bloodied spanner still in his hand. The missile man was a big fellow, with a jaw like a pelican’s pouch and a spare tire around his waist. Perhaps they’d chosen him for his size. He didn’t seem to have much stomach for fighting. Jameson reached under his shirt and threw a handful of chisels at the man’s face. The man threw up a thick forearm to protect himself. Jameson unfolded like a jackknife and pushed him heartily in the chest. The man yelled, “Aii!” and lost his balance. He rolled like a barrel down the slope toward his comrades. He was going to be a mass of bruises when he reached bottom.
A couple of people were coming up, scaling the slope. Jumping did no good; you were likely to find no handhold and have to start all over again at the bottom. It would be a while before they got here. There was a movement of blue ants toward the colossal clockwork down at the end of the cave; there must be an alternate route there.
He hurried to Ruiz on one hand and two feet. Ruiz and the missile man were doing their best to strangle each other. The Chinese had dropped his weapon; Ruiz had given him no choice with his gouging and biting. Ruiz was getting the worst of it now. The man was pressing his thumbs into Ruiz’s larynx. Ruiz lost his grip and weakly tried to break the man’s little finger—an old New Manhattan trick. Jameson laid his wrench along the missile man’s skull. Ruiz got up, rubbing his throat. Together they tumbled the stunned Chinese down into the metal valley.
Ruiz tottered unsteadily on his feet. He turned to face Jameson.
“Thanks, I—”
He never finished. There was a sputtering sound from the shadows at the end of the ridge, and Jameson was spattered with Ruiz’s blood.
Ruiz’s body began its nightmare drift down the slope. Jameson went flat and with a convulsive twist levered himself below the opposite side of the ridge. A stream of angry mosquitoes zzzz’d overhead.
“Get down!” he yelled to Maggie, just in time to keep her from sticking her head over the peak.
Before he could do anything, Klein’s thin face rose above the metal rim, about twenty feet away, where the shadowed hugeness of the Cygnan machinery overhung the cliff. Klein aimed his nasty little gun at him.
“Stay where you are, Jameson,” Klein called. “Stay alive a minute. McInnes, move away from him.”
“Do what he says, Maggie,” Jameson said.
Jameson weighed the situation. He could launch himself in a hopeless scramble toward Klein as soon as Maggie was out of the line of fire. He might as well die trying. Or he could stay where he was and wait for Klein to rake him with automatic fire. There was no cover on that featureless metal slope.