Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

Akaku'akanene had seen the spirits, too… and she was smiling. One of them shot by me so close I could feel the heat of its passage. The other made an equally close approach to Kono, who flinched away and almost capped off a reflex round into it. Both totally ignored us as they fell on the mangled body of Pohaku, gleefully completing me dismemberment my long autofire burst had begun.

As time snapped back to normal, realization went click in me back of my brain. Okay, so that was why the guardian spirits didn't leave us alone even after Akaku'akanene had told them we wanted to stop the Dance. They'd sensed that somebody in me group had wanted to protect the Dance- Pohaku, to be precise. Maybe the spirits couldn't identify just which one of us was the enemy of the pattern (perhaps the antispell barrier that had protected the gillette had confused them). Or maybe the conflict between Akaku'akanene's reasurances and their own perceptions had decided them not to take any chances and geek us all, just in case. Whatever the case, I seemed to be in the clear.

In a manner of speaking, of course.

Again, I acted before I had a chance to paralyze myself with second thoughts. I flashed Alana Kono my best frag-the-world smile, and I took off down that scree slope at a dead run, toward the Dance half a klick away.

Bad move, chummer, real bad move. I'd made it maybe 100 of those 500 meters when I put a foot wrong, turned an ankle, and did a classic one-and-a-half-gainer to land on my neck and shoulder. My injured shoulder, of course. I did what anyone would do in that situation-I screamed bloody blue murder, as I did this graceful skidding roll down the loose scree slope. After what seemed like a frag of a long time, I came to rest upside down against a car-sized boulder.

Well, okay, maybe it turned out not to be such a bad move after all. Apparently what gods there be look out for babies, drunks, and overconfident drekheads. An instant after I fetched up against the backside of that boulder, fire washed over it from the front in a great roaring, flickering sheet. I tried to curl up so tight I vanished into my own belly button as the heat-pulse washed over me, crisping my hair and tightening my skin.

It was over in less than a second, almost like the wash of a single fireball. I popped up and risked a look over the top of my smoking boulder.

I must have attracted the attention of at least one of the Dancers, that was for fragging sure. The Dance continued, but one of the loincloth-clad kahunas had pulled out and was glaring out toward me over the intervening territory. Obviously, he'd cut loose with some nasty fireball-like spell. (An unpleasant thought struck me then: Were the Dancers able to draw energy from me site of power that was Haleakala? If so, all the guidelines I'd learned about the limits on just how much juice a mage can cast without keeling over had just gone right out the window.)

Well, frag it, now he'd attracted my attention, too. I brought the HVAR to bear and hosed off a short ripping burst. (Burning the entire clip in the progress. Man, that puppy fired fast!) I didn't dunk I'd hit him-he probably had some kind of magical barrier up-but reflex made him hunker down… which is the purpose of suppression fire anyway. I ducked down into the blast-shadow of my boulder again.

Again, not a moment too soon. Something-some things, to be precise-spattered off the other side of the boulder. The impacts were hard enough to be bullets, but the sound they made weren't quite right. Shrapnel of some kind cascaded over the top and down my side of the boulder, and some went down my collar. Cold, wet… ice chips. The fragger was firing high-velocity icicles at me, or some damn thing. Then and mere I decided that yes, maybe I was a magophobe after all.

This was not going to be easy. I looked back upslope for Alana Kono. A second gun would make all the difference down here. Maybe we could each take turns giving covering fire while the other leapfrogged forward.

No luck on that score, I saw immediately. I'd been shielded from the super-fireball by my boulder. Kono hadn't been so lucky. She was down in a huddled heap, unmoving. Sullen flames licked over her body, sending a twisted totem of greasy smoke up toward the clouds. Frag it to hell…

The almost subliminal vibration-the low, cosmic thrumming-I'd felt from the rock underfoot (now underass) changed its timbre, almost as though its frequency had been kicked up an octave. My bowels knotted again, and my vision blurred as the vibration conducted through my hoop, up my spine, and into my skull. Once more I could feel the magic that was being worked 400 meters away from my boulder, sense the almost limitless power that was being harnessed. Not so many minutes ago Akaku'akanene had told me the Dancers were far along with their ritual. Now, I didn't need any shaman to tell me that the ritual was approaching its climax.

I had to do something, and I had to do it right fragging now! What was it both Akaku'akanene and bug-boy had told me? That I was woven into this all-fired important pattern they were yammering about? And that I had influence, that events would revolve around me (or some such drek)? Well, now was the time to check out if they were telling the truth or feeding me a line of kanike.

Crouching there, with my back against a fire-scorched and ice-spattered boulder, I took the HVAR in my left hand, settling the stock up against my ribs under my arm. In my right, I took the grenade-pistol I'd requisitioned from my dead benefactor aboard the Merlin. (Daisho, I thought, suddenly recalling my friend Argent. He'd have approved of my weapon load-out, I realized. Put the autofire weapon-the one that can hose down an area in a hurry-in the off hand, the one with which you have less accuracy. Let the enhanced strength of the cyberlimb handle the recoil. Put the single-shot weapon in the hand I normally shoot with.)

I forced those thoughts aside. They were just ways my brain was trying to put off the moment when it might get itself blown to bits. I made sure both weapons were loaded and locked, safeties off. And I burst from cover like a pop-up target on a combat range.

The kahuna was waiting for me. The moment I came up and around my rock, he started a kind of shuffling dance, and I could see a nimbus of power building up around him. With the same supernatural clarity of vision I'd enjoyed earlier, I saw him smile nastily, baring his teeth.

Well, let him chew on this. I cut loose with a grenade from the pistol launcher, shooting from the hip. The recoil was grotesque, and the thing that had already gone gruntch in my shoulder definitely made its presence known. Even with that much kick the mini-grenade flew slowly enough that I could track its trajectory, could see it arcing down under the effects of gravity. The shot was going to fall short, but the concussion and splinters might still give the shaman something to think about other than geeking me.

The grenade did fall short. Or, at least, it would have if it hadn't struck some invisible barrier between me and the shaman, about five meters in front of my loinclothed antagonist. The grenade detonated, filling the area with a cloud of thick, viscous smoke. Ah, frag… I almost threw the launcher aside in terminal frustration. I'd picked up a weapon loaded with a full clip of fragging smoke grenades! If I thought I was going to live more than a few seconds more, I'd probably have felt humiliation for my stupidity. I hadn't even checked the fragging load!

What was that old joke? Death's better than failure, because you have to live with failure. Odds were, I wouldn't be having that problem. I cut loose with a short burst from the HVAR as I sprinted forward, knowing the bullets would deflect off the same invisible barrier that had stopped the grenade. But what other fragging choice did I have? Just stand there and wait for the shaman's spell to lash out through the thick cloud of smoke and smite me dead?