Baer smiled and shook his head with a sad laugh. “I’ll ask you again, where’s the amalgo?”
One of Marty’s eyes had swollen shut. “I’m just the dog-boy here, Baer. If you want to pull somebody’s legs off, you’re looking at the wrong guy. Ask, Jet.”
“Like this sack of shit’s going to tell us anything?” Baer snarled. He flashed a pistol and held it to my head. “This fuck looks as if he couldn’t blow himself out of a paper bag. Last chance, Marty. You’re ribbing with the wrong man, with this, ‘ask Jet, shit’.”
“That’s rich, boss,” guffawed Long Nose. He gave Marty a jab in the ribs with his truncheon that had him groaning.
“Shut up,” growled Baer. “If I want you to open your mouth, I’ll rattle my zipper.”
I twitched, almost wanting to laugh. Marty, the faithless fucker. He was going to sell me to the dogs before long with his good-guy talk. I could see the yellow look in his eye. Fuck Marty. I’d have to rely on my own devices to live through this. The hoodlums seemed sure of themselves to have kept us unbound. They wouldn’t kill me as long as I knew where their amalgo was. Torture, yes, but there was the Myscol. What was Marty’s game? Was he done playing sycophant, giving up his only leverage of having something of worth they wanted? Unless, of course, Marty was being trickier still with his old good guy, bad guy routine. My mind was not thinking straight. I was in shock from the last ten hits to my skull.
Marty was stalling, always good at that, mixing fact with fiction, hopefully creating possibilities out of thin air to keep the enemy guessing and scratching his head. That it would stall Baer long enough before one of us could break out of here, was another thing. Marty wasn’t looking as if he could hack too much more.
“Search him,” Baer said.
“Already did. We found this little phaso on him. This big explosive too.” My husky captor tossed it to Baer.
Baer nodded. “Got that. Explains the wrecked speeder. Demolitions man, are you?” he said, turning to me.
I smiled.
“Where’s the amalgo? The funny little roboty-looking googad with twin parallel plates. Glows green when armed.”
I tossed back my wavy dyed purple hair, trying for a gambit. Nothing to lose, right? Well, almost right. Sorry for what it cost Marty. I am sorry for that.
The Myscol, still pulsing in my veins, fueled fire to an inner strength we all have but rarely tap into. I’d taken a triple dose, something unheard of—my doctored batch, the one they had no clue I’d taken. It drew them deeper into underestimating me.
Long Nose, on a cue from his boss, stepped in to truncheon me as he had Marty. That was a mistake. My steely fist crashed into his thigh. It’s as close as I could get to the brute. Left a charley horse he wouldn’t forget. He buckled over with a painful rictus and my steel-toed boot caught him in the throat and that made his charley horse look like a love tap. Teeth and blood dripped on the ground with sticky white drool. Nasty scene.
Baer made his move, but I was quicker. I snatched the coin-sized explosive out of his hand, ducked in a drunken roll and tossed it right back at him, just as I armed the detonator.
The white flare caught his right side, lit him up like a candle, as he held up a hand to shield his face. Too late. The blast also caught Marty and singed half his hair and upper cheek off. Me, I was blinded for a second and my left side blood-spattered and burnt. The boss roared like a bear, clutching at his burning arm, shorn at the elbow. He’d mend it with some bio-regen, if he hurried. Doubted he had any on him at the moment.
The shaggy man staggered for the side door, coughing blood through the smoke. How he did so was beyond me; the man must not be human. I pocketed the phaso he’d dropped, grabbed Marty, and stumbled after.
I hauled Marty’s sorry ass out of that burning, smoking death crib, lips curling in crazed grin at Baer’s tumult. We stumbled through the gaping ruin of the loading dock. Across the tarmac we beetled like a couple of twisted scarecrows. An air speeder and two lorries stood out back of a communications tower surrounded by wire fencing. Screw the lorries. Useless against air attack. That air speeder looked like a heavenly prize, especially since it was one of Baer’s.
I hopped around the other side of it with Marty all gasping and limping. The first parked vehicle shielded us from the machine gun fire that would have cut us in two. We scrambled back, ducking to the rat-a-tat-tat of stray bullets. I clawed open the speeder door, hopped in, as machine gun fire clipped the tail fins.
I pulled Marty in head down and dove behind the wheel.
Kicking the throttle full on, I veered straight up, as black smoke and pressure gauges plummeted. “Come on, baby!” I roared. “Get us out of here before old man Baer grows wings. To the air depot.”
“We ain’t gonna make it, Rusco,” rasped Marty, caressing his soot-grimed cheek and ruined ear that oozed fluids.
I grimaced at the sight and smell of his burned flesh. “Sure we will, Marty. Shut up. Sit back and enjoy the ride. Course we’ll make it.”
For the first time I got a good look at Marty and shivered at what I saw. His lank mustard-colored hair was coated in slick dark fluid. His breath wheezed in and out like a terminal smoker. Coagulated blood caked the side of his
