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besiegers would pop off a shot as if to remind the companions they were still out there. None of Ryan’s crew was stupe enough to shoot back.
    At a soft-voiced request from Mildred, Doc helped her shift J.B. up close to the short wall on the west side, where there was some shade. Doc had a surprising wiry strength to him. The Armorer had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Mildred poured water on a hankie from her canteen and bathed his face.
    “How’s it look?” Ryan asked her.
    He could feel her shrug. “I’ve done all I can do. Doesn’t seem to be much internal bleeding, thank God. He’s tough, but I don’t give him even odds of living to nightfall if we can’t get him some kind of better care by then.”
    “Dear lady,” Doc said softly, “do I understand you give any of us even odds of living until nightfall?”
    “You got me, Doc,” Mildred said. She was too depressed and worried even to rise to the bait. Under normalcircumstances she and Doc spent plenty of time sniping good-naturedly at each other.
    “You know,” Doc said, “one would certainly think the base of the elevator shaft and the stumps of the structural members in these collapsed buildings should have survived the blasts. Yet many have become little more than mounds.”
    “Elevator probably went to a basement level,” Mildred said.
    “But structural members usually survived at least partially, even near ground zero,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen pillar stumps standing right next to craters.”
    Ryan bit down on a caustic remark about wasting air on speculation that wouldn’t load bullets in a blaster. Under the circumstances idle chatter was far preferable to thinking too deeply about their situation.
    “Why don’t you take over the scattergun, Mildred?” Krysty asked. “You’re more comfortable with it.”
    The physician shrugged. “Sure.” Krysty passed the weapon, then drew her more-familiar Smith & Wesson 640.
    As she did, a storm of blasterfire erupted from the north. Bullets struck sprays of concrete powder off the top of the low circular wall and whined mournfully overhead as they tumbled through the thick, hot air. A short burst from an M-16 snapped over Ryan’s head like a sail in a brisk wind.
    “Get ready for it,” he said during a lull in the shooting. “They’re nerving themselves to make their move.”
    “No doubt they sense the immediacy of the impending storm,” Doc said. “I can smell the rain and sulfur already.”
    “Hear that?” Jak called from the south wall.
    “Hear what?” Krysty asked.
    Ryan was switching his vision back and forth between the scavvies lying up in the weed-grown field to their west and the forted attackers to the north. Though the western bunch weren’t firing, he was pretty sure they weren’t sharp enough to have backed off and left without him or one of his sharp-eyed friends spotting them. Apparently they were biding their time and awaiting events.
    “Whine,” Jak said. “Triple high. Like giant mosquitoes, you know?” He winced and shook his head. “Not like.”
    “I can’t hear it,” Krysty said.
    Mildred and Doc said they heard nothing out of the way, either. Of course with the blasters cracking off from not so far away that was perhaps not so surprising—the wonder being Jak could. But he had the sense of hearing of a white-tailed deer.
    Ryan heard a loud rattle from his left. He risked sticking his head up to scope it out. Flashes and billows of smoke were coming from the pancaked structure.
    “Black-powder blasters,” Ryan said. A ball sailed over his head. “Shooting at us.”
    “They want to help the other bunch crack us,” Krysty said. “Then roll in, take them down, get all the swag themselves.”
    “But why, dear lady, would they act now? Why not let us and our pursuers settle things and then eliminate the victor—in accordance with the ancient Oriental adage that when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded?”
    Mildred had turned away to