Demon

The man came hurrying along, still intent on pursuit from behind. Conal had the feeling the man had heard those screams and they had rattled him. He did what Conal had expected, which was hold the baby up in front of him while he went for Conal with a knife in his right hand, Conal grabbed his wrist and broke it; the man cried out and the knife fell. With his other hand, Conal reached around and stabbed the man in the back. He dropped the baby and Conal caught it, then pulled his knife out and eased the man down onto the wooden dock.

He made sure the baby was all right, then knelt beside the kidnapper.

Man. Okay, in Bellinzona, thirteen or fourteen years was enough to make you a man. It still didn't feel right to Conal. He still looked like a boy. He was Japanese, Conal thought. That wasn't rare, either. The human population of Gaea was roughly proportional to the population of Earth, which meant there were a lot more brown and black and yellow skins than white.

The boy was in a lot of pain, babbling something in his native tongue, and it looked like it was going to take him a while to die. Conal held up the knife and raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a universal questioning gesture. The boy nodded excitedly. Conal slipped the blade between the ribs and into the heart, and the boy was dead in a moment.

He wiped the blade and put it away.

"The big hero," he muttered. It was a shitty world when you couldn't kill a baby-murdering human carcinoma and feel good about it. As usual, Cirocco had the last word. There were just not a hell of a lot of things you could do in this life that didn't taste bad in one way or another.

There was the problem of what to do with the baby.

He could think of several things. There were religious orders and some other organizations that took in orphans. Of these, the strongest was the Free Females-also, in his opinion, the likeliest to provide proper care for an infant.

The baby was bundled in some sort of spacer's carrying pack; it was not immediately obvious how to unfasten it. But he finally managed. He looked in the pertinent place, and shook his head. Okay, so the Free Females wouldn't want the little guy. Who was the next best?

He had a fu

So he headed back toward the Portal.

They were still there, still alive. Unless something happened soon, though, they would not be alive much longer.

There was a crowd of about a hundred of the toughest, meanest types Bellinzona had to offer, standing in a semi-circle fifty meters away from the rock wall where the two women were cornered. The area in between was littered with bodies. Conal stopped counting after two dozen. There were many more than that. He stood at the back of the crowd, trying to figure out what had happened.

The clue was in the bodies. Most of the ones close to the two women had died of knife wounds. The more distant ones had wounds seldom seen anymore in Gaea: round wounds about the size of a dime. His guess was confirmed when one of the people in the crowd threw a spear, and one of the women shot him in the stomach. Conal ducked. The crowd moved back, but inexorably began to close in again. The temptation was just too great.

It was a stand-off. No one in the crowd knew how much ammunition the two had left. Had they charged as a group the mob could have overwhelmed them, but there was no organization among these jackals.

He thought about it, and saw the irony. Obviously, the two had a limited number of bullets, or they would simply have shot everyone within range. Nobody in the crowd wanted to soak up a bullet just to enable someone else to grab the treasure. So the outcome, in minutes or hours, would be for the women to run out of bullets, in which case they could be attacked again-but then it wouldn't be worth it.

Conal took another look at the tall one. Seventeen, he thought. Maybe eighteen. Long blonde hair, fierce blue eyes. She was beautiful, as he had already observed. But there was something else about her, something she shared with the older woman-her mother? It was a look that said she would die on her feet, fighting, that she would never be taken alive. He respected that. He had learned what it meant to be taken alive, and it was never going to happen to him again, either.

Another spear was thrown, and the tall one snapped off another shot. This one went through the spear-thrower and into the heart of a man standing behind him. Nice gun, Conal thought.

Where were the Free Females? he wondered, then saw them. They were also backed to the wall, but one was dead, another badly wounded. The third crouched by her sisters, an arrow ready, looking very frightened. The two groups were twenty meters apart, and the newcomers showed no signs of wishing to join up with the archer. Who the hell were these people, anyhow? Apparently they didn't trust anyone. He hadn't seen anybody so suspicious since ... well, since Cirocco Jones. It wasn't going to be easy to rescue them.

Until that moment, he hadn't realized he was going to rescue them. He wasted a few minutes trying to talk himself out of it. Looked at reasonably, it seemed the most foolhardy thing he had tried since the day he swaggered into a bar and told the most dangerous woman alive he pla

He looked down at the face of the baby boy.

"What the hell do you have to smile about, mister?" Conal asked him. Then he turned and hurried back over the bridge.

"A hundred, did you say?" the Titanide named Serpent raised a dubious brow.

"Hell, Serpent, you know I can't count to twenty-one without opening my fly. There's about a hundred, maybe a hundred twenty."

"Describe the smaller one to me again?"

"Drawings on her face. A real fright mask. The other one-"

"They are tattoos," Serpent said.

"You mean they don't come off? How do you know?"

"She has a third eye drawn on her forehead, doesn't she."

"Yeah ... yeah, I think so. Her hair was bouncing around a lot. They were pretty busy trying to look six ways at once... How did you know?"

"I know her."

"Then you'll come?"

"Yes, I think I will." He looked around the big warehouse that served the Titanides as a trading post, picked up two other Titanides with his eyes. "In fact, I think we'll make it a troika."

They sounded like the Apocalypse minus one as they thundered over the wooden bridge. Conal, clinging to Serpent's back, wished he had a bugle. It was the friggin' cavalry to the rescue, by God. The people in the back of the mob spent only a moment gaping at the sight, then scurried like hyenas from a carcass. They ran anywhere they could go. Many of them jumped into the putrid waters of the lake.

But a lot didn't have time to flee. The Titanides waded in, weaponless, and began breaking necks.

Conal had worried the women might fire at these apparitions, but apparently their suspicious natures didn't extend to Titanides. They watched, alert for an opportunity to break through and get away from the wall. Then Serpent lifted Conal and tossed him over the heads of the circle of people.

He landed on his feet and just managed to stay on them, stumbling forward, holding the baby out in front so they wouldn't be tempted to shoot him. He had been gone for almost a rev, and during that time the women had been stoned by the crowd. He tripped over a large, loose rock, fell, and crawled around the makeshift barricade of luggage they had been crouching behind.

He looked up into the face of the blonde amazon. Nineteen, he decided. There was a line of drying blood down the left side of her face. He felt a surge of anger; he wanted to kill the bastard who did that. There was more pressing business, however, such as the gun she held to his temple. He held out the baby and put on his most wi