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doesn’t clear a bus wreck. It is a bus wreck. If anarchy’s too structured for you, immigrate to Dead End.”
    Apparently, the noble libertarian frontier needed fine tuning before Eden lived up to its name.
    One hundred yards before the pavement entered the blocked Cageway, Kit spun the wheel. The Sixer leaned left up a dirt ramp, then bellowed as it climbed a switchbacking gravel trail up the hill, parallel to the closed main road.
    I smiled at the empty road ahead of us, then realized that beyond the gravel’s edge, a foot from my elbow, the hillside dropped away in a hundred-foot cliff. A Sixer’s high ground clearance is handy in negotiating swamps, fording streams, and crossing boulder fields. But its top-heavy center of gravity has a literal downside. I glanced at Kit while I gripped the door handle. “Should you slow down?”
    She muttered, let the wheel go, and ducked two hands beneath her seat.
    I sucked in a whistling breath as the Sixer drifted toward the cliff.
    Kit straightened back up, and wrenched the armored car back on course. In her hand shuddered a sawed-off Barrett Double Express. She thrust it toward me, stock-first. “Make yourself useful, Parker.”
    I broke it at the receiver, peered in. Loaded. I clicked the weapon shut, felt the safety with my thumb, and frowned. “What am I supposed to do with—”
    Whump !
    The Sixer, all two armored tons of it, shuddered on its suspension like a baby buggy hit by a bowling ball.
    I ducked as, inches above my hairline, a fanged, red-eyed, armored bat as big as an anti-ship missile wedged a winged claw between the overhead bars. The beast’s other claw thrashed, tangled in the armored cage by the impact when the diving monster had struck us.
    “The gun, Parker!”
    The shrieking beast’s weight rocked the Sixer like a dinghy in a gale, hanging me out over empty space.
    Pus-yellow liquid drizzled onto my forearm, and singed the hair off it. “Crap!”
    Kit swung the wheel back so hard that the driver’s side door screeched against the rock wall. “Gort drool’s not fatal, Parker. But the fall will be if you don’t get that weight off our roof!”
    A sawed Barrett’s a close-quarters-battle weapon to a GI, a saloon peacekeeper to a civilian. It fires just two rounds, from side-by-side barrels, like a vintage shotgun.
    I thumbed the safety off, swung the saloon gun up between the groaning roof bars, and triggered the left barrel into the gort’s armored belly. The Barrett kicked gently, like a cough in church. After all, it’s recoil damping that makes a Barrett a Barrett. But the .60 caliber round’s impact sprung the monster up off our roof, where the vehicle’s slipstream somersaulted it away like wet cardboard.
    I broke the breech, ejected the smoking shell, and rummaged splay-fingered under paper maps that littered the Sixer’s teetering dash. I panted, craning my neck at the clouds that seemed close enough to touch. “Where’s your ammo, Born?”
    She wrinkled her nose while she drove. “Why?”
    I jerked my thumb skyward. “Where there’s one monster, there’s more, right?”
    She lifted off the throttle and smiled. “Exactly. Look behind us.”
    I twisted in my seat and peered out through the rear cage. The gort, back flat against the gravel road, thrashed a shattered wing. A second gort fluttered onto its chest like a sparrow onto a birdbath.
    The first one screeched while its predator splashed its beak into the downed monster’s wound. A third gort, wings back, talons out, dropped into the melee while two, then three, more circled, black shadows in the mist.
    “Dead End lesson for today, Parker. You never have to shoot two gorts if you can shoot one.”
    The road wound up, then over the hill ring that separated the port from town. We crested the crater’s barren lip, and, for an instant as we descended, we saw the settlement nestled in the natural bowl below. On my scale of planetary capitals visited, Eden looked to rank above