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but he did love his hand signals. By constant exposure, Ricky had learned to interpret them with at least as much ease as he did Jak’s notoriously abbreviated speech.
    Oh, he thought. He wants me to pick the lock.
    He grinned. For all of his love of gadgets, growing up in Nuestra Señora had offered little opportunity to practice lock-picking. His home ville had seldom bothered to lock its doors. But his new idol and mentor, J. B. Dix, had proved willing to teach Ricky the art. For his part, Ricky was an avid student.
    The problem was that the only door in the site was up front right beside the driver’s seat, which, naturally, would likely be watched, if not alarmed. As quietly as he could, Ricky stole to the rear of the vehicle and peered around. While there was a sort of rack affixed to the back, there was evidently a cargo hatch back there.
    Uncertain how to proceed, Ricky glanced back at the outer circle of wags. Ryan was crouched behind the trailer hitch of the wag with the image of the sleeping woman on its side, and he gestured peremptorily for Ricky to proceed.
    He seemed to be getting pretty hot, so Ricky swallowed his misgivings and decided to proceed. He duck-walked around the corner of the mobile home.
    A massive weight slammed onto his back and shoulders. His vision was blacked out an instant before he landed face-first on the cold, hard ground.

Chapter Five
    “Fireblast!”
    Ryan saw a shadow-shape like a giant, limb-deprived spider drop suddenly onto Ricky’s back.
    His first thought was that things were already out of control and it was time to forget about Dark Lady’s instructions. He’d learned early on that it was easier to get forgiveness than permission. And hardest to get either when you had dirt hitting you in the eyes.
    But he’d no sooner thought of reaching back over his shoulder for the pistol grip of his Steyr Scout longblaster than he felt the blaster being grabbed from behind. It was rudely yanked away. The sling spun him half around as if he were a mutie child’s rag doll before it slid off his arm.
    Nightmare loomed behind him. His flash impression was that he’d been attacked by a scalie. But a scalie taller than he was and much broader through the shoulders. And with something wrong with the head—for either a scalie or a man.
    He fired a straight right hand into the misshapen scaled face. It had a muzzle, he saw now, more like a dog’s than a lizard’s, and two eyes mounted on the face’s front like any human or other predator’s. In the bad light they still looked disturbingly human-like.
    His fist connected on the left underside of the chin. That was the “button,” and it tended to overload people’s brains and cause them to temporarily go blank, or rattle their brains around hard enough in their brainpans they got concussed and blacked out.
    The weird lizard man’s head barely rocked back on what Ryan now noticed was a massive neck. The creature had lips, too. They pulled back in a smile from alarmingly pointy teeth.
    Ryan went for the grip of his panga. Before he could so much as start to tug the broad blade out of its sheath the lizard man shot out a black-taloned hand twice the size of his own in a straight palm to his sternum. The blow hit so hard that Ryan’s one-eyed vision blacked out for a split second as his heart skipped a beat.
    When he came fully back to himself he was flying through the air. Not for long. He hit the ground so hard the breath was knocked out of him.
    Around him was shadowed chaos, screams and curses. Something—many somethings—were grappling with his friends. He caught a glimpse of Ricky, in the middle of the laager beside the lit-up mobile home, teetering in circles and flailing uselessly at a shadowy form that seemed to envelop his head and shoulders.
    At the same time Jak was menacing a second dark figure with a big trench knife. This mutie appeared to be mostly arms and legs, though only two each despite its own marked similarity