into a stupor in order to appear calm in the face of death and not let the side down. Intoning slurred prayers to Tlazolteotl, goddess of purification, eater of sins, they presented themselves at the altar. There were moments of almost comic confusion as each, professionally tactful to the end, insisted that the others should go first. Finally they settled the matter by lining up in order of seniority. The priest despatched them with the rapidity and dispassionate efficiency that their status merited.
After that came an aristocratic family, three generations all wishing to die together. The dynasty was not completely extinguishing itself, however. An adult male heir had been singled out to be exempt from martyrdom. He would inherit the family wealth — minus the odd death duty — and carry on the lineage.
The Sun Broadcasting aerodisc dipped even lower until its bulbous underside was mere metres above the temple roof. The bassy throb of its negative-mass drive vibrated through the ziggurat’s stonework.
One of the Jaguar Warrior sergeants waved the disc away, but the pilot either didn’t notice or chose to ignore the irritable gesture. The sergeant scowled. TV news people. They thought they were hot shit, especially when covering state occasions like this which garnered huge ratings and similarly huge advertising revenues. They thought themselves as important as, if not more important than, the law of the land.
By now the topmost of the ziggurat’s steps were slick with spilled blood, making them treacherous for the participants who followed in the wake of the initial wave of the great and good. Several of these people, middle- class professionals mostly, slipped and lost their footing as they neared the summit. They were bloodstained even before they reached the wet red altar and prostrated themselves on it.
The sergeant waved yet again at the TV news disc. The aircraft was literally casting a shadow over the blood rite, and its engine thrum was making the priest’s words hard to distinguish. The sergeant flipped down his helmet mike and instructed the patrol disc to intervene. There was an edge in his voice. The Sun Broadcasting disc’s antics were making him very nervous. Was this what Chief Superintendent Kellaway had warned them to be on the lookout for? The suspicious activity that might herald a terrorist attack?
Wary, the sergeant unshipped and primed his lightning gun. Meanwhile, the Jaguar Warrior disc drew alongside the Sun Broadcasting aircraft and hailed it over the aviation frequency. “By order of the High Priest of Great Britain, and in the name of the law, please ascend to a safe distance. This is your only warning. Fail to comply and we will open fire.”
At that moment, a shrill cry came from within the TV news disc. The sergeant spied movement in one of the hatches from which a camera protruded. He glimpsed a shape, a silvery silhouette, darting.
Next instant, a cameraman came flying out, fell flailing, and hit the temple roof with a bone-crushing thud. He was followed by an armour-clad figure who leapt nimbly down from the disc, landing on the roof and dropping straight into a crouching, catlike stance.
The sergeant swore softly.
Him.
Bold as brass. Clear as day.
Top of the Jaguar Warriors’ Most Wanted list. Public enemy number one.
The Conquistador.
The lightning gun was warm and humming in the sergeant’s hands, plasma generator charged. He raised it to fire, but the Conquistador reacted quickly — too quickly. He snatched up the injured cameraman and threw him at the Jaguar Warrior, a kind of moving human shield. A bolt of blue-white brilliance leapt from the l-gun and struck the hapless cameraman full on. He howled and writhed and burned, laced with crackling light.
The cameraman’s smouldering corpse tumbled towards the sergeant, who twisted aside to avoid being hit. When he regained his balance, he found himself directly face to face with the Conquistador. Implacable blue eyes stared out from slits in the terrorist’s face mask. A rapier flashed. The sergeant looked down to see snakes emerging from a gash in his abdomen. He tried to catch them but they slithered out of his hands, falling at his feet in coils. That was when he realised the snakes were his own intestines. He looked up again at the Conquistador, who opened his throat with a swift transverse stroke of his sword.
The sacrificial victim currently on the altar started screaming — not in pain, but in alarm and horror, as the sergeant slumped to the floor. The priest gaped, dagger hanging uselessly from his fingers. The other Jaguar Warrior sergeant sprang into action. It would cost precious seconds to prime his lightning gun, so he drew his macuahitl from its scabbard and lunged at the Conquistador.
The Conquistador countered the first blow with ease, the macuahitl ’s obsidian blade glancing off the rapier’s steel. The sergeant went for the Conquistador’s neck on the back swing, but again the blow was deflected, this time rebounding off the rapier’s hilt guard. The two men thrust and parried. Metal and volcanic glass chimed as they met and met again. The sergeant managed to get a jab past his opponent’s defences, but it glanced off the Conquistador’s cuirass, leaving nothing but a scratch.
The Conquistador retaliated with a downward slash that cleaved the sergeant’s left arm almost all the way through at the shoulder. The limb dangled, flopping, at the Jaguar Warrior’s side. Shock greyed his face and turned his legs to jelly. He tried to lift his macuahitl for one last swing, but the sword’s weight seemed too much for him and he toppled sideways.
The Conquistador polished the sergeant off matter-of-factly, plunging the rapier deep into his armpit. Then he turned to the priest.
The priest’s face was a mask of pure panic. In a quavering voice he shouted at the acolytes, “It’s me he’s after. Don’t let him get me. Stop him! By the Four Who Rule Supreme, that’s an order!”
The acolytes obeyed, if a little hesitantly. They ran at the Conquistador, throwing themselves at him singly and in pairs. These were not fighting men; they belonged to a caste accustomed to luxury and soft living. Not one of them knew what it was like to land a blow in anger. The Conquistador cut them down like poppies.
The priest came to the realisation that no one was going to save him. He bounded down the steps, barging aside the blood rite participants who were coming up. Down below, the onlookers milled about uncertainly. Disquiet was growing in the plaza. It wasn’t entirely apparent what was going on up there on top of the ziggurat, but the blood rite had been interrupted, that much was plain; people were getting killed who weren’t meant to be getting killed.
The Conquistador eyed the fleeing priest and, with something like a shrug, pulled out a pistol. This was no sleek, contoured weapon like a lightning gun but closer in appearance to a flintlock or an blunderbuss, with a flared tip to the barrel. Primitive by modern standards, it fired physical projectiles rather than a bolt of ionised, superheated gas.
The Conquistador took careful aim. The pistol barked in his hand, spitting out a cluster of flechettes. The tiny brass arrows entered the priest’s back and exited through his chest in an expanding burst. His ribs erupted outwards so that, as he crashed to the steps, his body resembled any of the countless hundreds whose deaths he had presided over in the course of his career — hollowed, heartless.
Terror now gripped the people in the plaza. There would have been a stampede, only there was scant room to move and nowhere to go. The streets that fed into the plaza were crammed. All exits were blocked. The onlookers surged and swirled but stayed in one place. The Jaguar Warriors in their midst tried to reach the ziggurat, but couldn’t forge a path through.
The Conquistador didn’t have long to survey his handiwork. As the priest’s corpse came to rest halfway down the steps — although his headdress bounced on all the way to the bottom — the Jaguar Warrior patrol disc loomed overhead. Its forward guns fired, left and right alternately, strafing the top of the ziggurat with coruscating, percussive blasts.
The Conquistador sprang this way and that, dodging the l-gun salvos. Stonework shattered. Sprawled bodies were incinerated. The altar was destroyed. Yet somehow the Conquistador managed to stay alive. He was fast on his feet, and a small target. The patrol disc’s guns were designed for bludgeoning, not sniping. Ground vehicles and other aircraft were its principal quarry, not a lone man who kept scurrying about like a cornered mouse.
Then, perhaps inevitably, the patrol disc’s gunner scored a hit. The Conquistador had taken refuge in the temple doorway. The gunner let loose with both forward guns at once, and the temple more or less evaporated. Roof collapsed, walls crumbled, and when the smoke and dust cleared there was nothing but a heap of broken granite slabs. No sign of the Conquistador.
Whoops of joy echoed through the disc’s interior. Pilot and gunner yelled at each other, grinning from ear to ear.
