by James Axler
Reaching up for a mike clipped to a ceiling stanchion, Roberto thumbed the switch. “Goog…” He paused to cough and clear his throat. “Good shooting, Tex,” he said, the words echoing slightly along the metal hallway. There was the faint trace of an accent in the words, a whisper of his Spanish ancestry. “Quinn, I want a damage report in ten. Abduhl, check the tanks to make sure we don’t have any leaks. Eric, Suzette, check over the comps and get us up and running again pronto. Jimmy, check the laser for any cracks in the lens, and you better bring a rag and a bucket, it’s pretty messy out there.”
The control room crew chuckled weakly at the joke, their hands moving across the array of controls, checking electrical systems, water, air, fuel, tires, motors and the all-important blasters.
“Well, that was fun,” Jake Hutching said, forcing his hands to release the steering wheel. The pulped remains of small animals covered the front windshield to mix with the melting snow to form a ghastly pink sludge that oddly resembled human brains.
“Kind of nice to know what skydark looked like, eh, boys?” Jessica Colt said, trying not to grimace, both arms wrapped tight across her chest. The pretty woman barely reached five feet tall. Dressed in tanned buckskin, her long blond hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. Knives jutted from the top of each of her boots, and a hulking big Russian T-Rex .44 revolver rested on a shapely hip.
“What’s wrong?” Roberto demanded, noticing her odd posture.
His second in command might be small, but she had generous breasts, and they bunched up like a gaudy slut on the prowl for business with her arms in that position.
“Nothing, just a bruise…” Jessica started, then saw his stern expression. “I busted a rib.”
“Healer to CNC,” Roberto said, thumbing the mike again. “Shelly, on the jump, we have injuries!”
“I’ll be there as soon as somebody removes whatever the frag is blocking my door from opening,” a woman replied from the intercom on the wall. “I swear that this…Okay, I’m free. On the way, Chief!”
“Acknowledged,” Roberto said.
“Nuke that drek,” Jessica shot back, hobbling to the corridor door. “I can still walk.”
Roberto glared at the woman, but she just glared right back defiantly, and he dismissed her with a curt wave. The man had never met a woman more aptly named. She resembled a Colt blaster in every way: small, cold and deadly, yet smooth to the touch of the right man. She was even a pistol in bed, too.
Shying his mind away from those kinds of thoughts, Roberto hung up the mike and pulled a walkie-talkie from a recharging unit set into the metal wall. “Scorpion to Big Joe, what’s your status?”
“Alive and undamaged,” Scott Gordon replied from War Wag Two. “We just have to clean what used to be a moose off the windshield and we’re good to go.”
“Acknowledged,” Roberto replied, feeling a knot of tension ease in his guts. He took every conceivable safeguard to protect his crew. They were like kin. The one time he had been reckless, Kathleen got aced. He would never forgive Ryan Cawdor for his part in the loss of the Lady Trader, even if it was accidental.
Just then, the ceiling speaker crackled.
“This is Tiger Lily to Scorpion,” Diana Dunn said in a thick Southern accent. “We’re undamaged and hot to trot. Say the word and we’re good to go!”
“Roger that, Tiger Lily, we just have to patch some ribs,” Roberto replied, sitting again to ease the pain in his stiff leg. “We should be back on the move in an hour.”
In less than half that time, the three war wags rumbled into motion and started carefully forward, zigzagging through the steaming wreckage filling the valley. The explosion had toppled over trees and uprooted boulders, which was not really surprising, but mixed with the gigantic chunks of the battleship, the combination made for difficult and treacherous passage. Several times, crews had to plant explosives to blow clear a path, and once, Roberto was forced to unleash the laser again. At such a short range, the beam didn’t just punch through a target, it damn near vaporized the steel, and then the convoy had to wait for the pool of bubbling metal to cool enough for them to cross without risking the tires. This was going to take longer than expected. But the prize on the other side was worth any effort. Civilization.
Chapter Four
Hopping to the floor, Krysty started looking among the piles of wreckage, turning over this and that. The others joined her and tried to stay out of the way.
“What exactly are we looking for, dear lady?” Doc asked, using his ebony stick to nudge a partially melted hunk of droid.
“This,” Krysty said, lifting a laser from the piles of loose rubble. The weapon was in good shape, with only a few scratches on the barrel, but the lens at the end reflected the candlelight like a mirror. “Now all we need is some wiring and a live battery!”
“Burn through mil armor?” J.B. cried out. “Unless we find a nuke battery, I don’t think we’ll have that kind of power. Mebbe a shot or two, but not much more.”
“That might just be enough,” Ryan muttered, studying the UCV. “Not on the doors, but on the roof hatch. The lock is probably made of regular steel, nothing special. If they were trying to save jack, why armor something nobody is ever going to reach?”
“Makes sense,” Jak said hesitantly. “But how shoot something inside locked wag?”
Mildred burst into laughter. “How? We shoot it through the window!”
“Exactly,” Krysty declared, hugging the laser.
Long ago, when the companions were battling a robotic tank armed with a laser cannon, Mildred had told them how a laser worked on light absorption. A green-colored laser did very little damage to a green target, or a blue laser to a blue target, and so on, which was why most military lasers were polycyclic, able to shift through the entire spectrum every second. That way they always did maximum damage. Back in high school, Mildred had seen a demonstration of the principle. Her teacher had inflated a blue balloon inside a clear one, then zapped it with a blue-colored laser. The blue balloon popped, but the clear one was unharmed.
If the Lexan plastic was clean enough and could take the heat expansion, Mildred thought, then the energy beam should go through the window as if it were empty air. It had been an interesting demonstration, one of her favorites, and now it was coming in handy to unlock a tank.
Placing the laser on the flattened hood of a Hummer, J.B. and Mildred checked the weapon to make sure it was in working condition. The rest of the companions scavenged through the assorted wreckage and hauled out a wide variety of batteries and power couplers. Each droid seemed to have a unique power source, almost as if they had been individually constructed. It was a ridiculous concept, but nothing else made any sense.
Wrapping his hands in some dry cloth, Ryan went through the batteries, checking the power level by touching the terminals with a piece of wire and studying the resulting spark. Most simply gave a weak crackle, but one flashed like a miniature lightning bolt.
“All right, this one will do,” Ryan said, unwrapping his hands. “It’s full of juice.”
“Nuke?” Jak asked curiously.
“Don’t think so, more likely it’s just an accumulator, with a limited amount of stored power.”
“Which means only a brief test shot before we try to burn the lock,” J.B. muttered, attaching dif gauges of wire together to try to regulate the voltage. “This may take a while…Nope, we’re ready. Okay, here goes nothing. Fire in the hole!”
When the others were out of the line of fire, J.B. touched the ground wire to the main terminal of the droid battery. At first nothing seemed to happen, then the laser began to softly hum, rapidly building in volume and strength. A scintillating beam shot from the end across the truck garage to hit the far wall. The cinder blocks exploded from the thermal expansion, then the already weakened section tumbled down in a cloudy avalanche of powdered concrete, sand and salt.
“Excelsior!” Doc grinned, brandishing a raised fist. “A weapon fit for Ra
himself!”
“How aim?” Jak asked, kneeling to squint along the device. Instead of a smooth barrel like a blaster, there were rings, metal fins and all sorts of odd stuff to block a clear view.
“Couldn’t aim, not really,” J.B. replied, laying aside the wires. “I had to shoot from the hip. How’s the arm, Millie?”
“Still pretty sore,” she said suspiciously. “Why? You…you don’t want me to fire this Frankenstein monster, do you?”
“Sure. Aside from me, you’re the best shot,” Ryan said in blunt honesty. “And you’ve had a bastard lot more experience with lasers.”
“Plus, madam, with such limited resources,” Doc continued, displaying his oddly perfect teeth, “the task may require, if you will excuse the pun, surgical precision.”
“True enough,” Mildred said, hefting the weapon to guess the weight. “There’s not much play on this power cable. Can you make it any longer?”
“No prob,” J.B. said, reaching down to rip a handful of high-voltage cable from the guts of a spider.
Going to the UCV, Mildred found the roof hatch, and with the assistance of Krysty and Doc built a low mound of debris to stand on. Then taking supplies out of her med kit, the physician cleaned a section of the Lexan plastic until it sparkled. Sadly, there was nothing she could do about the inside surface, other than hope that the laser would burn away any fingerprints or smudges. If not, the beam might reflect and go wild, possibly even coming right back into her face. It was a chilling possibility.
Just then, Ryan appeared on top of the vehicle. “Anytime you’re ready,” he said, waving a pry bar.
Nodding, Mildred went back to J.B. and got the laser. It now had several yards of wire attached, and she could move the cable freely.
Returning to the UCV, Mildred stood on the mound of debris and raised the laser, aiming carefully at the ceiling hatch. Briefly the woman wished that she had a laser pointer to check the angle. Then again, I might as well just wish for the door combination, Mildred thought.
“Everybody better get back in case of a ricochet,” Mildred warned, raising the laser. It felt light, not bulky enough to be a proper weapon. A gun had heft; you knew you were holding something deadly. This felt more like a toy, which was a good thing as her arm was kind of weak. But she could handle this small weight without undue effort.
“All clear!” J.B. shouted from far behind.
Centering herself, Mildred banished any distractions and felt herself slipping into the mind-set for surgery. There was no outside world, nothing else existed except her hands, the scalpel and the patient. Easy now…gently. Taking a deep breath, she held it for a few seconds, then exhaled and fired.
The rainbow beam shot through the window, and there was a brief flash as something was burned off the inside surface. Oddly, the Lexan plastic darkened slightly, as if trying to repel the beam, but it only lasted for a second, then the laser hit the roof hatch, missing the locking bar by an inch. Changing the angle, Mildred smoothly moved the beam back and forth along the slab of metal, breathing steadily as it turned bright red, then began to melt, white drops of molten steel dripping onto one of the cryo units. That almost made her falter, but the physician did not allow herself to react, and kept at the job. The Lexan plastic window was beginning to move, warping from the heat of the beam passing through, and she could feel the power cables growing uncomfortably warm against the back of her hand, but she was almost through the resilient handle when the beam abruptly died.
“Now, lover!” Krysty shouted.
On the roof, Ryan stepped to the hatch, shoved the pry bar into the thin crevice edging the smooth hatch and heaved with all of his might. For a long second, it seemed as if nothing was going to happen, then the muscles on his neck and arms started to distend, the bar started to bend slightly…and with a loud crack, the hatch flipped back to crash onto the roof.
Caught off balance, Ryan stumbled and nearly fell, but caught himself just in time.
“You did it, Millie!” J.B. laughed. “We’re in!”
“Hallelujah!” Doc cried, and Jak gave a whoop.
“Don’t go inside yet!” Mildred commanded, forcing her hands to release the laser. There was smoke trickling from the heat vents, and a silvery metal was dribbling from a melted hole in the side. The laser was aced beyond any conceivable repair, but it had done the job. “It’s been decades since this wag was open! Let the old air out first!”
“Way ahead of you,” Ryan said, dropping a burning piece of cloth through the open hatch. The fire went out before the fabric reached the floor, but the next one landed intact, the flames steady.
Satisfied, Ryan crawled through the hatch and landed inside the vehicle, his boots oddly silent on the cushioned flooring. Now he could see that everything seemed to be cushioned, floor, walls and ceiling. Even the jumpseats. Having once been inside a damaged APC as it rolled sideways down a hill, the man appreciated the need for the cushioning. Whoever built this thing knew about combat, that seemed for damn sure.
Lightning flashed past the milky windows of the garage and thunder softly rumbled as Ryan sidestepped past the softly humming cryogenic freezers to reach the rear of the wag. Undoing the restraining bolts, he pushed both of the armored doors open wide. Holding candles, the rest of the companions were already waiting there, and everybody clambered inside.
But as they did, something in the ceiling of the wag flickered, and the UCV became brightly illuminated. Thankfully blowing out the candles, the companions could now see that the interior of the wag was spotlessly clean, as if it had never been used before. There was an area in the back for cargo, with rings set in the walls for restraining straps. Just past the cryo units, both walls were lined with cushioned jumpseats, spacious gaps between them allowing for access to the numerous blasterports set in the wide windows. Each jumpseat was equipped with a safety harness, and a hinged bodybar that could be brought down from above.
Bypassing the cryo units, Krysty and Jak went straight to the front of the vehicle. As she slipped behind the wheel, the teen began digging under the gunnery seat.
Studying the dashboard, Krysty found a row of meters and indicators showing the ready status of the engines. She had to check again to make sure it was correct. Mother Gaia, there were two engines! A tandem set of power plants. This monster had to consume fuel like it fell free from the sky! Mebbe they could only use one engine at a time. Leaning closer, she found the appropriate controls, but touched nothing. First and foremost, they had to decide what to do with those cryogenic units. Her curiosity wanted to see them open, but she was getting an uneasy feeling. Had the droids been fighting to gain possession of the units, or to try to destroy them?
“Well?” Ryan demanded from the rear.
“She’s hot,” Krysty replied, swiveling around in the mobile chair. “Plenty of power, and juice.”
“Excellent!”
With a cry, Jak triumphantly unearthed a pair of military backpacks and opened them on the spot, pulling out a ball of socks, mosquito netting, a cloth cap, a paperback book and finally an MRE food pack.
“Got dozen!” the teenager cried happily.
But there was no reaction from the people clustered around the bulky devices filling the rear of the war wag. The devices were roughly shaped like coffins, but each stood over three feet tall. The units were connected to power outlets set in the base of the jumpseats, obviously still drawing nuke power after all these decades. On the side of each was painted the bar-’n’-star of the U.S. Air Force. Nobody considered it odd that the marines were hauling air force equipment.
“Fascinating,” Doc said, both hands on the head of his ebony walking stick. “I wonder who is inside. Another civilian like our dear physician?”
“Not with this sort of protection,” J.B. answered, tilting back his fedora. “More likely some big-time politician, mebbe even the president.”
“If it is, I shall have strong words with the man,” Doc muttered, twisting the handle on the sti
ck to withdraw a few inches of the Spanish steel hidden inside, then slamming it shut again.
“Gonna kick his ass?” J.B. smiled tolerantly.
Doc pursed his lips. “Mayhap just a little.”
Silently running her hands over the complex controls, Mildred inspected the indicators showing the vital signs of the occupant. However, the readings were coded, the numbers meaningless to her.
“Wonder how we figure out what to do,” Mildred said.
“How about this.” Ryan rammed the stock of his longblaster directly onto the control panel.
There was a shower of sparks and the displays scrolled wildly. Then everything flashed brightly, and there came a hard series of sharp clicks, followed by a low hiss. The interior of the urban combat vehicle got cold as the gases vented, a white mist crawling across the soft floor. Then the lights began to strobe, rapidly increasing in tempo as a second control panel came online. The quivering needles of digital gauges swung into the red zone, then winked out of existence, closely followed by a fast series of hard clunks. The lid rose slightly, paused, then swung open all the way, revealing only a swirling cloud of icy fumes.
Rushing over, Krysty and Jak joined their friends as the inert gases slowly thinned away to expose an inhuman figure. Roughly the size of a man, the creature was a bizarre mixture of feline and canine characteristics, a doglike body topped with a cat head sporting two saberlike fangs over black lips. There was a hump on the shoulders, and the thing possessed a pair of long tails, each of them tipped with barbed hooks. The paws had claws on the front and spurs on the back.