Chapter Two

"Give me back my daughter!"

Mrs. Jennings' voice cut through the slaver's conversations. I had my optics active a moment later, showing me the tableau in the hollow below. Cartwright still sat on his horse, two of his slavers standing by his foot. Three more slavers stood near the fires holding steaming buckets full of food. The other four men were spread through the camp.

Cartwright looked as surprised as I was. He opened his mouth to speak, but Mrs. Jennings cut him off. "I said give me back my daughter! If you don't I swear to God on high I will shoot you!"

Cartwright's expression slid from surprise to slick sympathy. "I would love to, ma'am, but all the children in this convoy are orphans. Your daughter can't be here."

My enhanced ability to detect sound is often as much a curse as it is a blessing. Just then it let me be the first to hear Ms. Jennings' daughter condemn her mother to death.

"Mommy?" Neither Cartwright nor Mrs. Jennings heard at first, but Evelyn repeated her cry again, and again, louder each time. With the second cry Cartwright's hand went tense where it hovered near his pistol. Evelyn's third plaintive wail pulled her mother's head around like a lodestone drawn to steel. The moment her gaze left the leader of the slavers, he drew, shouting as he did so.

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"Kill her!"

Mrs. Jennings wasn't stupid, but as I'd noticed before she wasn't a soldier. She fired the moment Cartwright shouted. With her gaze pointed away, her shot missed, catching one of the two men next to him directly in the chest. Cartwright's return fire went wide as his horse went wild, probably from pellets lodged in its flank.

All but one of the other slavers were slow off the mark, their holsters secured or, in one case, dangling from a wagon. One of the men carrying food managed to bring his pistol clear in the time it took me to leap to my feet, electric sling in hand. I had no time to consider. The slaver I knew only as a criminal, Mrs. Jennings a mother trying to defend her child. I wasn't fast enough. He fired at the same time I did. Out of the corner of my vision I saw Mrs. Jennings stumble backward. Most of my attention focused on the slaver.

Electric slings were made for destroying Main Battle Mechanicals. They make almost no sound when fired, but the sound of a human sized body being hit with a projectile fired from one is unique, like wet popcorn popping. My aim was off by four inches, but even on a glancing blow the outlaw never knew what hit him. One moment he was a live man shooting at an innocent woman, the next a slab of meat flying sideways into the side of a wagon, a chunk the size of his head carved clean out of his side.

Before that sound could finish etching itself onto my permanent memory, I spoke, my vocoder amplifying my words until they echoed from the far side of the hollow. "Attention outlaws! I am Marshal Tina..."