normality.
Baptiste had briefly halted the column at the head of the pass. For some minutes he had sat on the turret of the armored car, a hunched figure in a leather field coat with his white aviator scarf flying in the breeze. He had stared down at the town long and hard, as though savoring the carnage to come. Finally he had pulled down his goggles and waved the army forward. There was little doubt among his soldiers that their leader was mad. His taste for random and wanton destruction seemed to grow by the month. There was no reason to sack and burn the little mountain community beyond the simple fact that it was there and Baptiste had found it. Reave was becoming heartily sick of the whole bloody business. He would have liked just to leave and ride away on his own, but that was a good deal more difficult than it sounded. Lately Baptiste had started hanging deserters.
There had once been a time when the word 'deserter' would have been quite meaningless. They had been a loose company of freebooters then. Admittedly, they had been a little wild and some of their number had definitely been psychopaths, but they had largely confined their activities to the Lanfranc Margins, where everything was pretty wild and woolly, and, if they messed with anyone, the victims were more than likely to give as good as they got. The normal thing was to ride into town, get drunk, raise a little hell, and move on. It was simple, and those who got hurt probably deserved it. At first the change was so gradual that nobody really noticed. The gang became larger, growing from a dozen to twenty and then to thirty. Baptiste seemed to be making most of the decisions. He even organized a kind of uniform. He somehow acquired a load of short, frogged hussar's jackets in federal gray, and everyone got to wear one. Each man made his own modifications. Not even Baptiste could expect regimentation among his motley, walleyed bunch. Reave wore his with a plumed hat and black thighboots. Menlo Welker, who rode beside him, had his hair in braids and sported a steel pot helmet with a bayonet blade welded to it, pointing straight up.
The turning point had come when they had burned Lovelock Springs after a protracted firefight with angry townspeople who did not particularly relish their rough brand of tourism. After that, Baptiste seemed to have had the taste in his mouth. They stopped being mere hell-raisers and became destroyers. Baptiste started talking about 'his army,' and instead of having fun, they went on 'raids.' The Margin towns began arming against them, hiring shootists from other nomad gangs as mercenaries to defend them against Baptiste and his constantly growing band of cutthroats. Their raids took them farther and farther afield, and soon they were regularly leaving their old stomping grounds in the Margins and making sweeps through the nothings, preying on unsuspecting and usually undefended stasis settlements like the one in front of them.
The town seemed to be slowly waking to the new day. Thin ribbons of smoke drifted up from a number of the buildings. They really did have to be neoprimitive if they insisted on using fires for cooking. At first nobody in the town seemed to notice the body of men coming down the road from the pass. A few figures came and went among the buildings, but their movements had the calm normalcy of any daily routine. Nobody seemed to have looked up at the mountain. Then the routine was abruptly shattered. It took only one to give the alarm. The one was walking across the small square in front of the ziggurat. He or she stopped dead in his or her tracks. It was impossible to see the face or even determine the sex, but the reaction was unmistakable. First the shock and then the response. The figure ran to the nearest building and quickly returned with four others. They were pointing.
Menlo grunted. 'Looks like we've been spotted.'
'We're kinda hard to miss.' Reave's mouth twisted.
Figures were spilling out of buildings all over. Some were running toward the far end of town, but one large group, emerging from a big, barnlike building near the ziggurat, was forming into orderly ranks. They wore what looked like green sleeveless tunics and were carrying weapons.
'They've got themselves some sort of militia, damn it.' The figures in green were reinforced by a number of regular townspeople.
'And they're planning to make a fight of it.'
'I don't think they know who they're dealing with.'
There was a dry stone wall, three or four feet high, around the perimeter. The defenders were running toward it, obviously planning to use it as cover from which to hold off the attackers. Reave knew that his own bunch was going to take casualties and that Baptiste's response would probably be the massacre of everyone in the town. He drew one of his two pistols from the holster on his saddle. It was a long-barreled flintlock, lavishly ornamented, a reproduction of an ancient Moorish design. The antiquity, however, was only on the outside. The weapon's operation was deadly state of the art. A subatomic pellet discharged a stream of lethal accelerated ions each time the trigger was pulled. He checked the pistol's charge, then replaced it and ran a check on its twin.
The pitch of the armored car's drive changed. It was revving and picking up speed. Its siren cut in. The captain shouted 'Charge!' and Reave put long roweled spurs to his charger. The advance was a practiced maneuver. The lead riders moved sideways until the whole mounted force was strung out, yelling like banshees, running line abreast while the foot soldiers sprinted behind them.
Despite their bulk, the marma lizards could cover ground at alarming speed. They ran with a high-stepping, roadrunner gait, their long, pointed tails ramrod-stiff behind them and level with the ground. The pounding of their clawed feet shook the earth. The defenders had reached the stone wall. Reave had to give them full credit for courage. It would have been quite understandable if they had fled in the face of the attackers' demented charge. There were flashes of green fire from along the wall's length. They had to be using some kind of crystal-based particle weapon. So they were not that neoprimitive; they were not fighting with bows and boomerangs. A marma was hit. It staggered headfirst into the ground and crashed on its back, crushing its rider. Reeve stuffed the reins of his mount into his mouth to free his hands to use both pistols.
The armored car was raking the wall with a heat ray. Reave could imagine the defenders crouching behind the stones as the roaring washes of flame lashed over their heads. Then there was a blinding flash, and a twenty- foot section of wall vanished into a smoking crater. The armored car had tossed a nukeling. Baptiste was ever the one to crush gnats with a hammer, Reave reflected. It was extremely lucky that Stuff Central had imposed an absolute prohibition on the templates for weapons of real mass destruction, or without a doubt Baptiste would have committed holocaust on a grand scale and his body count would have risen to truly astronomical figures. He would have smashed stars if he had had the means. The limits on his viciousness were strictly a matter of available technology.
The nearest riders converged on the gap in the stone wall. Reave was one of them. Once through the gap, he hauled his charger around to go after the defenders who were still crouching behind the wall. Then he was in among them. Menlo was beside him, hacking with an ancient cavalry saber that he kept honed to a razor edge. Reave found himself in the seemingly timeless chaos of close combat. He was fighting on instinct, and the world was coming at him in vivid, threatening visual flashes. The noise was so dense that it was akin to silence. A burly militiaman in a green jerkin grabbed for his left stirrup, looking to unseat him from the lizard. Without an instant's hesitation, Reave blew the top of the man's head off. At his right, another man was raising a weapon, a smooth blast tube with an ornate polymer stock. Reave fired again and again. Firepower was the raiders' watchword: Just keep firing. His pistol made a continuous high-pitched roar.
The defenders were determined, but they were no match for Baptiste's savages. After a few furious minutes of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, they broke and ran. Most were cut down by pursuing riders. Menlo seemed to be taking a barbarous delight in lopping off the heads of the fleeing defenders. Then he changed his trick. He hung low in his saddle and slashed open a running man's stomach. The man's intestines spilled out and tripped him. The entire column pounded down the main street of the town, pouring indiscriminate fire into the buildings and scattering terrified people before them. The riders shot at anything in their field of fire: men, women, or children. The slaughter was nothing more than a mindless frenzy, and it would probably last through the rest of the day, or longer if they came across a cache of native alcohol. On their tall reptiles, their weapons flashing, the riders must have looked like demons from the pit.
The column wheeled on the square in front of the ziggurat and started back down the street on a second pass. Already three buildings were burning, and there was a definite lack of readily available targets. Some riders had to make do with merely trampling the bodies that were lying in the dust. Then there was a flash of green fire from the roof of a small adobe. Someone was foolhardy enough to still be fighting back. The weapons of half the column came to bear on the spot, and the small flat-roofed structure was quickly reduced to nibble.
After a good deal of aimless milling about, riders started dismounting. Pickets held the mounts while the rest began a methodical house-by-house clearing of the town. Foot soldiers were dispatched into the surrounding fields to hunt down any inhabitants who might be hiding out there. Reave was content to remain in the street and hang
