Playfair's Axiom Read Online Free PDF

check J.B. His cheeks were pale, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Now meeting Doc’s eye, she jerked a thumb upward.
    “That’s why.”
    Thunder split the sky. Something wet struck the back of Ryan’s left hand. It stung like an ant bite.
    He looked up. “Shit.”
    A blue-white crack appeared in the roiling orange and black clouds above, jagged and blinding. It pulsated three times. A sound like a colossal explosion beat down on them, a sound so loud Ryan could feel it.
    “Acid gully washer on way,” Jak called.
    “Tell us something we don’t know,” Mildred said, hastily moving to shield the wounded Armorer’s face with his hat. No other raindrops fell in the vicinity. But none of the companions doubted it was only a question of time.
    “Here they come!” Krysty called.
    Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.
    Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure who had sprung up from a clump of brush that had grown around an old fire hydrant and was charging forward, holding a beat-up semiautomatic longblaster diagonally across his chest. He squeezed off a quick shot and saw the man jerk as the bullet took him in the left shoulder.
    The attacker kept coming. Ryan cursed and dropped his aim. His second shot punched the man in the gut right above his web belt. He fell, rolling and squalling like a catamount.
    The Armorer going down had rattled even the hard-core Ryan more than he realized. Until now. He’d just forgotten one of the prime rules of combat: the chest was mostly air, the very fact J.B. owed his survival to—for however long it lasted.
    A man well-wired on jolt or just adrenaline overdrive could keep motoring on even with a collapsed lung, and the fact he might die horribly in a matter of minuteswouldn’t hold him back from busting your head open with a club before collapsing. The heart, like the head, was a tricky target actually to hit. And even a clean heart shot didn’t always drop a man, or big animal, that was already in furious motion. The working of his limbs could keep his blood circulating long enough to inflict a chilling wound on you. The best target for stopping a man was from the ribs down.
    “The miscreants to the west of us are advancing as well,” Doc reported. He was reserving his own fire until the enemy gave him closer targets. It took a long time to reload his own black-powder revolver.
    The M-4000 shotgun bellowed. Ryan heard Mildred grunt as the 12-gauge’s heavy recoil punished her shoulder. She was running rifled slugs through the blaster against targets too far away for buckshot to be effective. She knew to snug the steel butt-plate hard against her shoulder. But it was a painful weapon even for a man as big as Ryan or as battle-hardened as the stricken J.B. to shoot in sustained fire.
    “Jak!” Ryan called, racking his bolt and slamming it shut on a fresh cartridge, one of his rapidly dwindling store. He wasn’t sure whether his last shot had hit the red-bearded scavvie he had targeted or if the man had dived to cover. They were under fifty yards away now. It would seem to be a walkaway for a precision-sniping piece like the Steyr, in the hands of an expert marksman such as Ryan, to take down targets that close at hand. And it would have been—had he been shooting at pebbles on fenceposts.
    It wasn’t quite so simple when the targets were running, ducking and weaving. And shooting back. The heavy bolt-action rifle was never meant for close-in combat: it was meant to reach out and touch enemies hundreds of yardsdistant, a slow, measured, precise form of warfare. Nothing at all like close combat, which was crude and dirty and above all fast.
    Ryan was just wondering if it was time to forget the longblaster and