Ranks of feral simianoids pushed forward from every direction.
Maybe they’ve gone so wild they’ve forgotten what weapons do, thought Rechs for a brief cold-water moment.
One of the younger moks, an aggressive male, surged out from the darkness and provided Rechs a chance to give another object lesson over what a scattergun did to an enemy closing with intent to kill. Rechs blew the thing’s brain and chest all over the floor. Hairy bowed legs went down with little else that remained of the corpse. Smoking blast vapor rose from the scattergun as Rechs jerked it forward and back in one practiced movement, racking another charge pack.
Five packs left and then he’d have to go for the hand cannon. He could pull the Jackknife and lay down a ton of fire… for a little while. But in a full moktaar rage, would they even care? They’d just keep coming and coming.
Rechs and his prisoner, the scrawny spindly old monkey-man, reached the top of the platform. They had let him go that far. So maybe the shaman was lying about how important he was. The bounty hunter could see one possible way out of this, but his window was closing fast. At the top of the platform was a large transport tube. Down the center ran a maglev rail where work crews were once brought into this section of the foundry to begin their workdays.
The clustering moktaar snarled as they closed their net. They looked like a furry sea, weaving back and forth as they shambled forward with broken pipes, jagged cuts of steel, and anything else that could be turned into a rude Stone Age weapon.
Suddenly Rechs flung the old monkey shaman away, ripped a banger from his carrying harness, thumbed it into activation, and tossed it into the crowd. Then he was running fast for the one possible exit.
If the screeching had been unholy before the banger went off, it was pure descent-into-madness lunacy after. This bought Rechs a little time, and he didn’t waste it.
Arms pumping and legs moving like pistons, Rechs ran into the entrance to the tube. Seconds later the monkeys were flooding in after him, sending a sonic wave of enraged insanity after him as he went.
It was like fleeing from a screeching madhouse into the unknown, half expecting something far worse to be waiting in there.
There was still some guardian ahead. Giles called it one thing, the old moktaar another. That came to Rechs’s mind as he fought to make it through the monkey noose closing about his neck.
The Watcher in the Water, one had called it.
The Sleeper in the Deep for the other.
As Rechs reached the far end of the short tunnel at the top of the platforms, he spun and fired a blast into the mass of surging moktaar at his heels. The scatterblaster tore several of his pursuers to pieces and sent the others scrambling away from his fierce presence for a moment. That gave Rechs just enough time to reach the exit from the transport tube.
He found himself in an open area that crossed a raised bridge. Beneath the bridge, dark waters spread away into a massive subterranean lake that must have been built to assist in the cooling operations for the foundry. Whatever was down below, Dreamer or Watcher, it would present itself shortly if it was going to.
Running fast, Rechs tried to put as much distance as possible between himself and his mass of his pursuers. He made the bridge as the savage moktaar surged out of the tube behind him. There were hundreds of moktaar now, shooting out of the tunnel and swarming every direction all at once like some living infectious virus that could not be contained. Some screeching moktaar ran across the tracks of the bridge, loping fast to catch up with him, while others swung along the rail and supports below, hoping to get ahead with their natural monkey jungle-tree-swinging skills. Still others seemed to swim along the walls, moving like vipers as they took the long way around in an effort to circumvent his escape.
In other words, they were trying to cut him off every which way they could.
Rechs fired into a gaggle of the feral aliens and blew several off into the dark waters of the brooding lake. Various body parts followed their larger parts with a series of light splashes.
Ahead lay Rechs’s next obstacle. As if things weren’t difficult enough, a portion of the bridge had collapsed into the waters long ago.
Or was dragged down into it, some distant part of his mind thought darkly.
A rickety rope bridge, probably one of Giles’s additions, had been suspended over the gap. Rechs chanced it and flung himself across it at full speed, feeling his chest heave and his breath come in ragged gasps as he pushed himself to keep moving.
Some voice was telling him he could only run so far and so fast. And that even with the augmented strength of the armor, by running blindly he could end up in one of their traps, and then they’d swarm. But he ignored that voice, because listening was the first step in quitting. He would have to spend some jump juice. He knew that. But he was saving that to put some final distance between himself and the raging moktaar at the last second. And he was hoping maybe something would happen so he wouldn’t have to use it after all.
Halfway across the rope bridge it collapsed, or was cut somewhere behind him, and Rechs threw himself forward onto its falling breadth, staring upward at the ceiling as he clung to what remained of the rickety span as it slammed into the far pylon of the actual bridge.
Moktaar behind him went shrieking into the water, screeching and enraged.
Rechs didn’t have time for the wind to be knocked out of him even though it felt like it had been. He pulled hard, hoping
