Even so, the impact of his sonic-wave weapon knocked the hat off my head. But it told me what I needed to know, giving me time to roll aside and dodge the second shot before firing back. Not at Weekman (I wanted to leave him to Vasily—after all, those two had an old score to settle) but at the hulking mass that had to be the Colossaur—unquestionably the most dangerous opponent in an encounter of this nature.
I missed him, firing like a rank beginner. They had realized by then that they’d been discovered, and so I learned that Makrow was now using his powers.
But even the Cetian’s abilities had limits. Warding off simultaneous attacks on both of his henchmen was probably pushing it. Evidently he considered the Colossaur more useful in a fight like the one that had just broken out—or rather, I suspect, he allowed Vasily his just revenge on his former human partner, now that Weekman was becoming more of a burden than a help.
In any case, El Afortunado flung himself to the floor and, sliding along it while firing two of his masers without bothering to aim, reached the still unconscious body of a fallen human, which he used as an improvised shield.
Not that he really needed the protection. Whether it was his Gaussical powers or simply his good aim, my partner’s first shot tore the visored hood off Weekman’s blindingly white bioprotection suit.
With Weekman’s head still inside, of course.
I hoped with all my strength it had hurt him. A lot.
Of the three criminals, he was the one I worried about the least. But still: one less. So now things were close to even. Two on two.
Except in the meantime the Colossaur had managed to embed his imposing bulk behind a customs counter, and he was now firing at me from that vantage point with a weapon that no other species would consider a sidearm. The cannon must have weighed over a hundred pounds and measured nearly a foot wide.
I tried to respond with my own comparatively diminutive maser. Powerful as it had looked when I grabbed it, it couldn’t do much damage compared to the Colossaur’s portable artillery piece. Especially if I couldn’t aim straight. Under a constant rain of high-power microwaves, it was risky even to stick my arm out and fire, let alone take time to aim. The first time I tried, the cloth of my precious English trench coat caught fire and I had to turn up my thoracic bellows to blow it out.
By the time his blasts had melted a good portion of the titanium crossbeam I had taken refuge behind, woken up three of the unconscious bombing victims (two of them fainted again when they saw what a hopeless mess they were in; the third, a Grodo, showed a surprising amount of common sense for one of his kind and didn’t attempt to join the brawl, scuttering away instead on his six appendages as fast and as far from there as he could), and set fire to my trench coat three more times, I realized that I was never going to get him like this. If I insisted on continuing to play his game, I’d only be making more victims of those who hadn’t scooted out of there yet.
I was like a guy facing off with a slingshot against a tank. In an elementary school playground. During recess.
I analyzed the situation as coolly as I could in the middle of roaring flames. What else should I try? In the old gangster movies, when the good guy finds himself cornered in a warehouse basement or in some cheap hotel, he always leaps out, turns a somersault or two, and runs off with both pistols blazing, saving himself. But I wasn’t too sure the Colossaur had watched those movies, so I decided not to try. Most likely he wouldn’t know that he was supposed to miss me when he fired his gun, and given the perfect aim he’d shown so far it seemed more like a suicide plan than a solution.
I took a slightly desperate peek at Vasily. The fact that he hadn’t washed his hands of the affair, after settling accounts with Giorgio Weekman once and for all, spoke very much in his favor. I decided to thank him—if we ever got out of there.
At the moment, he seemed kind of busy. He and Makrow were trying to part each other’s hair with gunfire. But all the time, their own curious Psi powers were at play, and the results were much more spectacular than in my duel with the Colossaur and his microwave cannon.
To start with, they each seemed to be affected by implausibly persistent bad aim. The microwave beams, the lasers, the various classes of projectiles ricocheted all over the place at unbelievable angles, none coming within a few feet of their intended targets.
Now, one stray maser blast did hit the metal counter that the Colossaur was using for cover. The furious roar he let out made it plain that he did not appreciate the heat wave.
A moment later it was my turn for a close shave. A hail of poisoned darts hit within inches of me. The toxin obviously couldn’t have harmed my inorganic body, but the closeness of the call told me my position was precarious. Next time it could be something truly destructive, like a thermal tracking missile. I had already noticed that Makrow 34, like Vasily, didn’t rely on a single type of weapon. The Cetian Psi was carrying a whole arsenal around with him.
Finally they both decided simultaneously to get smart, shift strategies, and aim anywhere but at their opponent. After this they each had slightly better luck, but only slightly. Gaussical powers to the max. Almost involuntarily I recalled that first Grodo Gaussical fifteen years ago, and I looked around for the two-headed centaurs that some had claimed to see. But fortunately I didn’t see anything equine circling us—just one tiny orange Pegasus flitting around in terror, dodging the web of maser and laser fire.
I did notice, however, a whole bunch of other stuff—what my friend Einstein might have called the collateral effects of a binaural disruption of the probability curve, something like that. In plain language: the results of a desperate encounter between two Gaussicals using all their powers without restraint. I suppose a physicist could have discovered some very interesting phenomena, such as the multicolored fluorescence around the ceiling, which would have made the brightest aurora borealis seem like a parlor trick. Or the hail that had started falling around us, contrary to all the laws of meteorology and thermodynamics. Or the restless scampering of a troop of little gnome-like creatures that had apparently been asexually reproduced by budding (or by fission; cellular biology was never my strong point) from one of the fallen humans, in Olympic disregard of evolution and its precepts.
As for me, a simple pozzie, I didn’t find any of that particularly interesting—much less reassuring. All it did was remind me of the magnitude of the psychic powers at play. And also that Makrow 34’s powers were, unfortunately, thought to be much stronger than Vasily’s. My human friend wouldn’t hold out much longer.
I must admit that even then, except for the occasional microwave beam rebounding a little too close, I didn’t feel frightened or even very worried. The situation was deadlocked, true, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least not for us. We couldn’t move from where we were, but neither could they. Time was now on the good guys’ side for a change. Vasily and I only had to hold on until the cavalry showed up with the heavy weaponry, all the pozzies in the world. Then it wouldn’t matter how many guns Makrow 34 and his stinking Colossaur had, or how formidable and Gaussical they were; they’d be forced to yield to our superior numbers and firepower.
Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly stupid, and they quickly realized that if they didn’t escape and right away, they’d never get out at all.