Crimson Waters. James Axler

      Calmly yet decisively Krysty reached up and removed the hand from her breast.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, strong but not shrill.

      Her eyes turned like emerald lasers to the table of Monitors sitting across the room. They were all watching.

      “I thought the Syndicate had laws against assault,” she said clearly.

      As one, the four sec goons turned their heads away.

      “Well,” J.B. murmured, “remember what Oldie said about some dogs being more equal than others? Reckon this gang’s the most equal of all.”

      “Right,” Ryan said, rising from his chair. He didn’t hurry as he walked toward the tableau a few paces away.

      The pirate saw him coming and showed him a gap-toothed grin. “What you want here, Patch? You triple-stupe? You think you can fuck with the Sea Wasps? You think wrong, man.”

      And he grabbed Krysty’s breast again.

      “If you don’t remove your hand,” Ryan said, “I’ll remove it for you.”

      The guy just grinned wider. His hand squeezed the full breast again quickly, then began to move down toward the flat plane of her stomach.

      Rattlesnake-fast, Ryan’s left hand whipped to the sheath on his hip, freeing eighteen inches of steel blade. Before the pirate could so much as blink it rose and slashed down.

      The panga’s razor-honed edge chopped the Sea Wasp’s hand off just above the wrist. The hand seemed to pulse on Krysty’s breast one more time and then it fell to the floor. It lay on its back in the sawdust like an overturned beetle, fingers twitching like bug legs.

      The pirate stared down at the blood jetting from his stump in slack-jawed amazement. Krysty sidestepped quickly out of the way of the pulsing blood, then she and Mildred grabbed their own weapons. As Ryan had quickly and covertly undone the peace-bonding on his weapons when the Wasps came in, they were obviously undoing theirs now.

      But not all of the party’s armaments had been sealed in sheath or holster, of course.

      The wounded man began to shriek like a horse in a burning barn. Grabbing his stump with his remaining hand, he danced in a circle, painting the patrons, the tables, the chairs, the walls, even the ceiling with arterial spray that gleamed dark in the fish-oil light.

      With startling power, Doc kicked the table. It flew across the room into the faces of the other Sea Wasps. They were too startled by this completely unexpected turn of events to react with what would surely be their normal rapid savagery.

      The Monitors, a beat slower, jumped to their feet, unlimbering their scatterguns.

      A dully glittering disk spun across the room. The black Monitor who’d come back from the first party grunted audibly as one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives buried itself in his bare, muscle-ribbed gut. It was probably only a flesh wound. As strong as he was, Jak couldn’t throw one of his relatively light holdout knives hard enough to punch through the tough abdominal wall at that range. But the man stared down at himself and shrieked in terrified surprise as if it had gutted him like a fish.

      His female companion was faster and firmer. She had a sawed-off pump shotgun with a pistol grip on its shortened forearm as well as in the back. She brought the stubby weapon rapidly online, ready to spray Ryan and friends with lethal buckshot.

      Instead, a loud bang went off in Ryan’s right ear and a red dot appeared right above the woman’s collarbone, above the neckline of her black T-shirt. More shots blasted in quick succession, forcing Ryan to squint as side-blasts from a short barrel stung his cheek.

      J.B. was half standing from his chair, his right arm locked out. His right fist clenched a little black Kel-Tec P-32 blaster. It was his latest pet holdout pistol, though it didn’t have much punch, being only a .32 ACP.

      Which was why J.B. kept shooting, walking shots up the Monitor’s chin and cheek and putting a last one through the right side of her forehead. At twenty feet, J.B. was shooting near the absolute accuracy the tiny handblaster was capable of. But with a blaster in his hands, any blaster, J. B. Dix was both lucky and good.

      Ryan stood, bloody panga in hand, while the Sea Wasp whose hand he’d amputated had gotten hold of himself. He tugged furiously at one of his machete hilts with his remaining hand, even though he was bleeding out fast enough through his stump that he’d go down inside another minute, unconscious or dead.

      Until then, he was a threat. Krysty booted him in the balls, the impact lifting his soles a good five inches off the sawdust.

      When he landed again he doubled over in agony that overrode even the pain from his arm, which shock was likely dulling already, anyway. Krysty held the short muzzle of her Smith & Wesson 640 revolver almost to the back of his head and blew what brains he had onto the sawdust in front of his boots.

      At last Ryan got his SIG-Sauer out and started blasting toward the Sea Wasps as they sorted themselves out from under the table Doc had kicked into them. He didn’t think he hit any of them. The bar was suddenly full of patrons who decided all at once that getting out of the Blowing Mermaid was the best survival strategy, even if it meant racing through a horizontal hail of bullets and buck. He did see Silver-Eye Chris vanish over the bar with startling alacrity.

      One of the other Monitors lit off both barrels of his sawed-off. The big pirate who’d been enjoying JaNene’s ministrations was just darting past him to the door and took both charges full in his hanging gut. Screaming shrilly he went down, trying to stuff purple-pink coils of intestine back into his ruptured belly.

      J.B. fired again, but Ryan wasn’t sure at what. They’d stepped away from each other.

      Doc streaked past, his coattails flapping like stork wings. In a flash, Ryan saw he had his sword in one hand and the ebony sheath in the other. The Monitor with Jak’s throwing knife stuck in his belly had apparently realized the thing hadn’t punctured anything vital. Ignoring it, he swung his own pump gun to bear.

      With a fine fencing lunge, Doc ran him through the right shoulder. He cried out again, dropping the scattergun.

      The blaster was slung around his neck on a waist sling. Rather than falling free, it dangled. Even though neither wound seemed fatal, the Monitor decided two new holes in his hide was enough for one day’s work. Letting the blaster hang, he turned and joined the crush of customers trying to fight their way through the open door.

      Shouts from outside suggested others were trying to fight their way in. Ryan dashed toward an overturned table and took cover behind it, to see J.B. grinning at him from behind another.

      Shots were coming from behind the bar. Ryan risked a look out to see a couple of heads seeming to stand like apples on the upper surface, with handblasters stuck out in front of them. As he looked a head jerked. A whole divot of long black dreads was knocked off the back.

      The head vanished. The hand and the silver Beretta handblaster it held slithered back out of sight. Ryan glanced over to see Mildred, crouched behind a jumble of chairs and a table, bringing her .38 Czech target revolver back online.

      Then he saw two forms struggling off to the side. Krysty was still in the open. The biggest of the Sea Wasps was grappling with her. He was a great black bear of a man with a grimace full of gold teeth, a black beard and a vast mass of dreadlocks swinging from his cannonball head. He held a big butcher knife point-downward in a ham-sized fist. Krysty held the knife off with one hand while the other held his hand away from her throat.

      “Krysty, get down!” Mildred shouted. Ryan raised his SIG, looking for a clear shot, but the pair was battling too wildly for him to risk it.

      Of course, it wouldn’t normally be possible for a woman to resist a near giant like that, hand to hand. Even a woman as tall and well muscled as Krysty.

      As Ryan watched over the three-dot sights of his handblaster, a change seemed to come over her. He couldn’t have put his finger on what it