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in front of the deadly cannons. He hated to park there, but it was the only way to leave. The baron was a triple-cursed bastard, but not a fool.
    Impatiently the companions waited for a sec man wearing sergeant stripes to leave the others and saunter their way. The man was clearly in no hurry, and deliberately took his sweet time crossing the scant few yards.
    Somewhere in the ville, a bell began to toll.
    “Nobody can leave,” the bored sergeant said as a greeting.
    “We got a pass,” Ryan countered, lifting the window to hold out the paper.
    Scowling in disbelief, the sergeant took the slip and unfolded the paper, reading it carefully. His cocky smile slowly vanished. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “It’s real!”
    “Mind getting a shake on there?” J.B. added, resting an elbow out the window. “We got some business to handle for the baron. And you know how he hates failure.”
    “Sure, sure, no prob,” the sergeant replied, thenlooked up and cupped his hands. “Ahoy, the wall! Open her up!”
    “Say what?” a guard yelled down. “Nobody ever leaves, Sarge. You know that!”
    “You been smoking wolfweed again, sir?” Another guard laughed.
    “I said, open the fragging gate!” the sergeant boomed, a hand going to his blaster. “They have a pass from the baron himself! So move your asses, or you’ll go to the mines!”
    That threat clearly startled the sec men, one of them dropping a smoking cig from his slack mouth.
    “Yes, sir!” the first guard replied loudly, snapping off a proper salute. The second guard merely dashed into the thickening shadows.
    A few moments later there came the sound of a gasoline engine sputtering into life, then rumbling gears, and the titanic gate slowly scraped aside, moving slower than winter ice.
    “Be back soon,” Jak cheerfully lied, and shifted gears to casually drive through the widening crack between the gate and the wall. They were less than halfway through when somebody unexpectedly shouted for them to stop.
    “Fake!” a sec woman shouted. “The pass is a fake!”
    “Chill them!” the sergeant shouted at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth.
    Instantly, Ryan triggered the Steyr, and the woman flipped over backward, her red life spraying into the air. As the rest of the companions opened fire at the sec men behind the sandbags, Jak stomped on the gaspedal and shifted into high gear. The engine paused as it revved to full power, then the armored bus shot forward with a roar, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipes.
    Releasing the handle on the gren, Krysty threw it backward over the bus and it hit the ground to roll a few feet then violently detonate. A score of screaming people clutched their faces, blood gushing from the hundreds of tiny shrapnel wounds.
    Twisting the steering wheel hard, Jak guided the wag at an angle where the cannons couldn’t reach. One of the Napoleons thundered anyway, the cannonball humming past the rear of the vehicle and missing by the thickness of an atheist’s prayer.
    “Move this heap!” Doc bellowed, holding down the trigger of the single-action LeMat and fanning the hammer with the palm of his other hand. The big-bore blaster fired a fast three times, and two more sec men tumbled into eternity, one of them discharging his own handblaster impotently into the sky.
    “It’s a break!” somebody shouted on the wall, and a blaster boomed, sending out a thick cloud of dark smoke.
    Something zinged off the roof of the bus, and J.B. responded with a short burst from the Uzi. A man cried out in pain and fell back into the ville.
    “Hug the wall!” Mildred shouted, snapping off shots from the ZKR. “The machine guns in the towers can’t reach us there!”
    However, a flurry of arrows shot down from the sec men on the wall and something crashed to the ground just behind the bus and exploded into flames.
    “But their Molotovs can,” Krysty cursed, her hair flexing wildly. “We can’t risk going all the