House of the Sun (45 page)
I looked into Akaku'akanene's face from a distance of maybe ten meters. Her dark, beady eyes were calm, accepting. She had to know the thoughts that were going through my head.
Too
bad,
old
lady,
you've
got
a
lot
of
jam
.
But
there's
more
at
stake
here
than
one
woman's
life
.
May
Goose
have
mercy
on
your
soul
... I shifted my grip on the assault rifle. One quick burst into Pohaku's head and trust the impact of the rounds will knock his gun hand off-line before the pistol splatters the
kahuna's
brains ...
"Don't even
think
it, Montgomery!" Pohaku growled. "Look!"
I looked.
And started to sweat again. Most of the guardian spirits were still flailing about where Quinn had vanished. But two of them—big, nasty, fiery ones—had turned their attention back to us and were orbiting us slowly at a distance of fifteen meters from Akaku'akanene.
Drek!
"Don't do it, Montgomery," Pohaku repeated, vocalizing the thoughts that were running through my own mind. "You shoot me, I geek her, and those things have you for dinner. You try to get down there, they'll rip you apart. You saw what they did to the troopers."
I saw, all right. I ground my teeth, and lowered my weapon.
"Put it down," Pohaku ordered. "Both of you, weapons on the ground."
Kono and I exchanged helpless glances. Neither one of us knew what the frag to do. Slowly we crouched to set our weapons down on the broken volcanic rock. "What now?" I asked.
Pohaku grinned, possibly the first time I'd seen any expression other than anger, hatred, or scorn on his face. "Now we wait, and we watch. It should be an interesting show."
No drek. I looked downhill toward the shifting, churning light. The intensity of the Dance seemed to have increased. The fan of witch-light was brighter, and the wave-fronts propagating through it seemed sharper-edged. Static discharges licked along the lower margin of the cloud-deck, strobe-lighting the scene below. In the flashes some of the boulders dotting the scree slope seemed to be moving—slowly, like cautious animals. My feverish imagination, of course.
There had to be some way out of this stand off. I just needed time to think of it. "You're
Na
Kama'aina,
aren't you?" I said, turning back to Pohaku, more to keep him talking than because I really wanted to know the answer.
He snorted his derision.
"Na
Kama'aina?
Pigeon-livered cowards, all of them."
"Of course. Just like Ka-wena-'ula-a-Hi'iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele-ka-wahine-' ai-ho-nua."
For a moment I thought he'd lost it for some reason and had just started babbling. But then a couple of the fluid syllables clicked with something in my memory. That was Scott's name, wasn't it? The name that Scott, the chauffeur/assassin, had told me his mother had given him. (Like drek, I thought suddenly. He'd
taken
that name himself, just like Marky "Te Purewa" Harrop, hadn't he?)
"ALOHA, then," I echoed in agreement. I paused, my mind whirring. "So I guess you've finally convinced
Na
Kama'aina
to go along with your anticorp plan, haven't you?" I said at last, glancing pointedly down-slope toward the Dance.
Pohaku laughed harshly. "It took them fragging long enough, too,
haole
. But now we're going to see some
real
action."
I nodded slowly. "You
know
I'm trying to figure a way out of this," I said after a long moment. "Why don't you just cack me now and get it over with?"
He snorted. "I take my gun off-line and
she
drops me." He inclined his head toward Kono.
And
vice
versa
, I thought grimly. The only one with any real freedom of action was Akaku'akanene herself. So why wasn't the shaman doing something? Couldn't she cast some kind of spell, blow the gun out of his hand, and drop the fragger in his tracks?
Then,
no,
I realized. He had to have some kind of magical protection, some antispell barrier or
something
—maybe spell-locked to him, or even Quickened so it was part of his aura. So Akaku'akanene was as immobilized in all of this as we were.
Downslope, I could feel the waves of magic spun off by the Dance. My stomach knotted and churned; my bowels felt like they were full of ice water. Frag it, I had to do
something
. I had to gamble. Maybe if I dropped Pohaku—and managed not to get Akaku'akanene geeked in the process—the shaman
could
shield me from the guardian spirits while I made a run for the Dancers ... I took a deep, energizing
breath, locating my assault rifle
precisely
in my peripheral
vision. I wouldn't have much time to do it right. I tensed ...
And that's when
it
hurtled into my field of view. A
nene
—a fragging goose. Honking and flapping, it soared in from Akaku'akanene's right, seemingly straight for her head.
Pohaku reacted instinctively, bringing up an elbow to protect his face. His
right
elbow, the elbow of his gun hand. The hold-out pistol came off-line.
Time seemed to flick into slow-motion mode. As I dived for my assault rifle, I saw the goose as it hurtled in.
Pohaku's reaction was an instant late, and the big bird's clawed feet tore at his face. He yelled in pain and alarm, rearing back from the threat to his eyes.
And then everything seemed to happen at once. The instant the barrel of Pohaku's hold-out was away from Akaku'akanene's head, the shaman drove an elbow up and back. The bony joint sank deep into the bodyguard's throat, knocking him back and off balance. Almost simultaneously a single shot rang out as Kono—who'd had the same idea as me—drilled a round into Pohaku's ten-ring. And then the Ares HVAR was in my hands, barrel coming up, laser sighting dot tracking onto the stumbling Pohaku's torso. I clamped down on the trigger; the rifle didn't so much stutter as
scream
on autofire. The stream of bullets did Pohaku like a chain-saw.
And then it was over. Of the three of us, only Akaku'akanene seemed unshaken by what had just happened. She brushed at her baggy clothing as if to rid it of some offending dust. Then she looked at me with those dark, glittering eyes and said quietly,
"
Go."
Like
frag
I'll
go,
I almost said. Then I saw the two guardian spirits that had been circling us. They were hurtling in, almost like the goose that had already vanished back into the shadows that spawned it. Akaku'akanene must have dropped her magical shield in the excitement. Instinct brought up the assault rifle again, even though intellect told me it was useless.
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 the dismemberment my long autofire burst had begun.
As time snapped back to normal, realization went
click
in the 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 the 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 gilette had confused them). Or maybe the conflict between Akaku'akanene's reassurances 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 the 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 think 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 there 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 singleshot 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.
