The thugs were panicking. They had grown used to throwing their weight around with the cowed populace in town. Worse yet they had allowed that to convince them that they were tough. That they were fighters. They were going to learn different tonight, or the survivors would at any rate. For a moment the fear of looking like cowards drove them forward. A bullet shattered to fragments a few centimeters from Sabtatine’s hand and she twisted to find one of the attackers aiming at her through a window, his pistol blazing wildly. He ducked back behind the wall as she made him. Sabatine fired a three round burst into the thin corrugated iron, the projectiles cutting the metal like tin foil and dropping the gunman behind it to the ground in a screaming heap. Sabatine clicked to semi automatic and fired twice more at  ground level, blasting little star shaped holes in the wall. The screaming stopped.


The rout was on now. The survivors were fleeing in terror. One leaped into the cab of the truck and gunned the engine. The exterior of the glass crazed a moment before the interior exploded red, Tiber having no difficulty simply waiting for the hapless henchmen to climb into his sight picture. Sabatine lifted herself into a shooters crouch and aimed at a fleeing thug. She fired once and missed high, fired again and went wide, then clicked to full automatic and emptied the remainder of the magazine in a long sweeping burst. Bright flashes of blood burst from the fleeing tough’s lower back and he dropped in a heap howling in pain. Sabatine aimed a finishing shot but the weapon was already empty. She fumbled for a fresh magazine as the man tried to crawl away, his legs hanging limply from a shattered spine. Two more cracks rent the night and the side of the enemy’s head burst like a dropped melon, dropping him bonelessly to the dirt path. The echoes faded away to silence. After a few moments the sound of nightlife, briefly startled by the gunfire, returned.


“Clear behind,” Sabatine reported mechanically.

“Clear up front,” Tiber responded with a similar rote reflex.


Sabatine listened for long moments, sucking in lungfuls of air tainted with blood, shit, and the sour-sharp smell of burnt chemical propellant and cordite. It reminded her of LZs she had flown into after the ground pounders blew down trees to make a hole for the birds to come in and take off wounded. She didn’t doubt one or two of them had gotten away, she was also similarly certain it would be a long time before they stopped running. Gradually she became aware of a pain in her right hand.

“Ow,” she complained and flicked away the hot cartridge that had landed on the back of her hand, something she hadn’t noticed in the chaos of the fight, but had been hot enough to raise a red wheal on her wrist.




“Fucking cartridges,” she muttered, vaguely embarrassed for no reason she could articulate. 


“You ok?” Tiber asked, Sabatine nodded and stood up, finally managing to get the fresh magazine home and charge the weapon.

“Who has the time to dig this many flower beds?” she jested feebly.