Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [11]
Crake replaced the whistle, then leaned out of cover and unleashed a wild salvo of pistol fire. His targets yelled and pointed fearfully, then scattered for cover, throwing themselves behind sacks and barrels that were waiting to be loaded into the warehouses.
“Ha!” Crake cried in triumph. “It seems they don’t doubt my accuracy with a pistol.”
An instant later, his hair was blown forward as Pinn’s Skylance tore through the air mere feet above him, machine guns raking the street. Barrels were smashed to matchwood, and several men jerked and howled as they were punched with bullets. The Skylance shrieked up the street, and then twisted to vertical, arrowing into the clouds and away.
“Yeah,” said Frey, deadpan. “You’re pretty scary with that thing.”
The dockers had all fled inside by now, leaving the way clear for the combatants. Macarde’s men were at the edge of the landing pad, fifty feet away. Between them was a small, two-man flier and too much cover for Frey’s liking. The smugglers had been shocked by Pinn’s assault, but they were regrouping swiftly.
Frey and Jez began laying down fire, making them scuttle. One smuggler went down, shot in the leg. Another unwisely took shelter behind a large but empty packing crate. Malvery hefted a double-barreled shotgun, aimed, and blew a ragged hole through the crate and the man behind it.
“Silo! How we doing?” Frey called, but the mechanic couldn’t hear him over the return fire from the smugglers.
“Darian Frey!” Macarde called from his hiding place behind a stack of aircraft tires. “You’re a dead man!”
“Threats,” Frey murmured. “Honestly, what’s the point?”
“They’re trying to flank us!” said Jez. She fired at one of the smugglers, who was scampering from behind a pile of broken hydraulic parts. The bullet cut through the sleeve of his shirt, missing him by a hair. He froze mid-scamper and fled back into hiding.
“Cheap kind of tactic, if you ask me,” Crake commented, having recovered sufficient breath for a spot of nervous bravado. He knocked the shells from the drum of his revolver and slotted five new ones in. “The kind of sloppy, unoriginal thinking you come to expect from these mid-level smuggler types.”
Jez peered around the side of the crates, looking for the man she’d shot at. Instead, she saw another, making his way from cover to cover, attempting to get an angle on them. He disappeared before she could draw a bead on him.
“Can I get a bit less wit and a bit more keeping your bloody eyes open for these sons of bitches coming round the side?” she snapped.
“She’s no shrinking violet, I’ll give her that,” Frey commented to Malvery.
“The girl’s gonna fit right in,” the doctor agreed.
More of Macarde’s gang had moved up and taken shelter behind the two-man flier. Crake was peppering it with bullets.
“Ammo!” Malvery reminded him.
Frey ducked away as a salvo of gunfire blasted chips from the stone floor and splintered the wood of the crates. Malvery answered with his shotgun, loudly enough to discourage any more, then dropped back to reload.
Jez stuck her head out again, concerned that she’d lost sight of the men who were trying to flank them. Despite her warning, her companions were still preoccupied with taking potshots at the smugglers approaching from the front.
A flash of movement: there was another one! A third man, edging into position to shoot from the side, where their barricade of crates would be useless.
“Three of them over here!” she cried.
“We’re a little busy at the moment,” Frey replied patiently.
“You’ll be busy picking a bullet out of your ear if you don’t—” she began, but then she got shot.
It was a white blaze of pain, knocking the wind from her and blasting her senses. Like being hit by a piston. The impact threw her backward, into Crake, who half-caught her as she fell.
“She’s hit!” he cried.
“Already?” Frey replied. “Damn, they usually last longer than