Free The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith

nothing you do has any effect. Bullets whistled, tearing leaves and branches, plucking at my hair. The slide locked back on the Browning—empty.
    Dipping and weaving more from fear and pain than strategy, I thrust both weapons into my coat and twisted, running, tearing at my hip for the derringer. A house rose huge before me, “626” embossed in foot-high characters on its broad garage door. I ran that endless curving drive as bullet-shredded paving stung my ankles. Halfway there, as if on cue, the door began to rise. Would I die, trapped in a garage like that miserable soul on Emerson Street—what?—only yesterday?
    Ragged holes began appearing in the door, an erratic hemstitch working in my direction. I swam toward it in slow motion as the hovercraft, guns blazing, started up the drive.
    My face slammed into the rising door as the bullets slammed into my body. Blood splashed the panel in front of me! The bottom edge rose past me as I fought to clear the derringer, bring it to bear for its one pitiable shot. No strength to pull the hammer back … the pavement rose and smacked me in the face.

VI: Retaliatory Force
     

    “Reach for the sky, hombres!” Red Cloud levelled his trusty Rogers & Spencers at the desperados, thumbs ratcheting back the hammers, loud in the sudden, dust-filled silence.
    “It’s the Marshall!” their leader exclaimed. No mask could disguise the voice of Max Goldstein, alias “The Colorado Kid.” “That varmint was hiding in the luggage boot all along!”
    “Right you are, Kid,” Red Cloud winked assuringly at Hua Chong, the pretty new schoolmarm. “You brigands have robbed your last steamcoach—now you’ll answer to the Nevada Pinkertons!”
    —Ted van Roosevelt
The Steamcoach Pillagers
     

    Ever wake up in a darkened room and a soft bed, with a headache clear down to your knees? My arms wouldn’t move. When I inhaled, sharp pains skewered me from spine to sternum. I was alive, but leaking.
    “Hold these,” the first voice, softly feminine, said. “And feed them into the cutter. We’ll have to remove it all, I’m afraid.” Sound of rasping, scraping. Whatever they were chopping off, I hoped I wouldn’t sing falsetto afterward.
    A fuzzy shadow loomed over me. “Great molten muskets! Look at these!”
    “Don’t jog my elbow, Lucy!” A masculine voice, and somehow familiar. “You’re in Clarissa’s light!”
    “She’s right, though,” the first voice said. “Such crude dental prosthetics! And he’s in advanced geriosis—see the swollen belly, the sagging tissue around the eyes? What little hair he has is turning gray!”
    “Radiation or old age?”
    “Neither, Ed.” It was the first voice again, worried. “But you should see the scanner—poisonous congestion, ulceration. And the arteries! Even without these bullets in him”— plink ! plink!— “he’d be gone in another ten years.” Plink! I’d heard that sound before, watching buckshot pulled from a prisoner after a liquor-store holdup. I’d have resented the conversation that went with it this time, but the agony made everything else seem trivial. “Lucy! There’s no response to somasthesia. Give it another notch!”
    “Right … Any luck?”
    “We’re at redline already. The painkillers just aren’t working.”
    “What painkillers?” I wheezed past the red-hot pokers in my chest.
    “Take it easy, friend,” the male voice said. “You’ll be all right—won’t he, Clarissa?” Even out of focus, he reminded me of somebody.
    “Yes, yes, you will.”
    “Shucks, sonny, you’re not missing any important parts!” It was an old lady. She leaned over me and winked.
    “That’s g-good news …” A whispery croak was all I could manage. “The pain …”
    “I give up,” the beautiful voice said. “Lucy, electrosleep— out in a van, a blue case under the regenerator.”
    “Sure thing, honey, Anything else?”
    “Yes,” the male voice said. “Check the ’com again. If that Frontenac