by James Axler
He wasted no time leaping to his feet after that. Now that she knew where he was, altitude was no longer his friend.
He skirted the brim of the hill, following the blood trail below until he ran out of trail. Somehow, she’d stanched the bleeding enough to take it out of the equation, at least long enough to confuse him.
Then, where the hell was she?
Ryan continued to ease along the brim, keeping the SIG up and ready for quick action. A little farther, and he started to wonder if she was nearby at all, if perhaps she’d given up the hunt and gone in search of a medic.
Just then, something caught his eye: a single red spot on the sandy hillside up ahead. Blood.
Somehow, she’d gotten the higher ground.
Turning to look up the hill, he saw her sprawled six feet above him, grinning behind the sights of the H&K. The barrel of the longblaster was pointing right at him, and she started to squeeze the trigger.
Chapter Forty
Doc and Fixie huddled together at the end of the ventilation shaft, watching the shifters at work on the other side of the grate in front of them.
“Ready, Theo?” Fixie whispered.
“Yes.” The two of them had followed a convoluted path through the duct work of the redoubt, staying well hidden all the way from the mat-trans chamber to their destination: what Fixie said was the transmitter vault. Now they faced the prospect of taking on the three shifters who were working there—none of them visibly armed, but potentially dangerous nonetheless.
“Okay, then.” Fixie squirmed around so that he was sitting back with his feet against the grate. He kept his weapon—a red-handled fire ax—beside him on the sheet-metal floor of the duct. “Once this opens, we need to move fast. We need to take them out of action—boom, boom, boom.”
“Right.” Doc shivered nervously and battled the butterflies in his stomach.
“Here goes.” Fixie drew back his knees, getting ready to kick out the grate.
Doc gripped the monkey wrench he’d brought with sweaty hands. Was he ready to use it on the shifters? His freedom, and the future of the entire Shift, depended on it, yet he still had his doubts. It wasn’t so easy, attacking someone who was simply doing a job, who hadn’t acted with malice directly against him.
But the result of their actions was the same, he reminded himself. Malice committed under orders from another was still malice, wasn’t it?
“On three. One.” Fixie pulled his knees back farther. “Two.” A little farther. “Three!” Suddenly, he thrust his feet forward, kicking the grate free of the surrounding duct.
The metal grate clanged to the concrete floor, and Fixie scrambled out after it. Behind him, Doc took a deep breath and followed, clutching the handle of the monkey wrench.
The three shifter workers instantly abandoned what they were doing and looked toward the duct. One ran toward the new arrivals without hesitation; another tossed aside the clipboard he was holding and ran to grab a length of metal pipe from the floor. The third shifter turned tail and sprinted for the door, which evened the odds.
Except for one problem. If he ran to get help, Doc and Fixie would be in trouble.
Doc did the math for a split second, then abandoned Fixie to the two fighters and went after the runner.
Instantly, Doc regretted not having a gun. The vault was huge, and the runner had a big lead on him; Doc sprinted as fast as he could, but he still couldn’t catch up. Any second now, the shifter would be out the nearest door, and Doc might lose him.
Though perhaps the weapon at hand might be sufficient. Closing to within twenty feet of the runner, Doc hauled back the monkey wrench as if it was a medieval war hammer. Then he swung it forward with all his might and released it, aiming at the runner’s back.
The big wrench soared forward and came in lower than Doc had expected, but it still hit the target. The makeshift weapon crashed into the backs of the runner’s knees, colliding just hard enough to jolt his stride out of sync. He tripped over his own feet and flew forward, floundering as the floor raced toward him.
Doc retrieved the monkey wrench from the floor and charged up to stand over the shifter. But when he got to that position, he found himself at a loss as to what to do next. The little mutie cowered with his hands over his head; he didn’t seem to possess a single drop of military-style aggression.
Doc’s first thought had been to knock him unconscious with the wrench, but he couldn’t get himself to do it. It would be too easy to injure the mutie fatally with the big, heavy wrench.
Hearing a cry from across the vault, he turned and saw Fixie facing off with the other two shifters, swinging the fire ax at one and missing by inches. The shifters kept circling at a safe distance, armed only with metal pipes but looking as if they had the upper hand.
Doc needed to join that fight, though he still had the runner to contend with. Thinking fast, he ran and grabbed a spool of cable from nearby, then brought it back to bind the shifter’s hands and feet.
When he had the shifter secured, Doc retrieved the wrench and bolted over to help Fixie. He had to hope the runner wouldn’t break free, though he hadn’t had time to test his bonds properly.
As Doc ran up on the standoff in progress, one of the shifters immediately broke away to attack him. The shifter wielded a three-foot length of iron pipe over his head like a Cro-Magnon with a club, ready to cave in his enemy’s skull.
But when he heaved the pipe down, Doc checked the swing with the monkey wrench. The two bludgeons crashed together with a loud clank, stopping inches from Doc’s forehead.
Grunting, Doc struggled to push off the pipe with the length of the wrench. He clenched his teeth and strained every muscle in his arms and shoulders, causing a chain reaction of pain to light up his back.
Hand-to-hand combat was not his strong suit, and the mutie was much younger than he, but Doc held his own. He couldn’t quite drive back the pipe, but he kept it from pushing in closer.
Remembering a move that Ricky had tried to teach him, he slid the pipe over, away from his head, then suddenly released the pressure and sidestepped. The shifter dropped hard, all the way to the floor, as Doc yanked the wrench out of his path.
As the shifter went down, Doc hurried out of his reach. At that exact moment, Fixie bolted past him with the fire ax clutched in both hands.
As Doc watched, Fixie swung the ax back from his side. For an instant, Doc feared his ally might have a fatal blow in mind for the shifter.
But Fixie used only the flat of the blade, not the sharp edge, smacking the shifter hard in the chest as he tried to crawl to his feet. The blow knocked the mutie down on his back, where he thrashed like a beetle trying to flip itself onto its legs.
Then Fixie followed up with a glancing kick to the side of the shifter’s head. After that, the shifter went limp on the floor.
“Thanks for the assist.” Fixie grinned. “You handle yourself pretty good in a fight.”
I do? Doc caught himself before he said it. “Same to you,” he said instead.
“Let’s get these guys tied up.” Fixie looked over his shoulder at the third shifter, who lay unconscious on the floor some thirty feet away. “Then we’ll do the work we came here to do.”
“Is that the transmitter?” Doc pointed at a huge apparatus in the middle of the room—what looked like a giant cannon swaddled in cables and studded with nodes and antennae. It was not at all what he’d expected.
“The one and only.” Fixie headed for a reel of cable on the floor by the wall. “It fires the modified mat-trans beams that reshape the terrain of the Shift.”
“I see.” Doc frowned at the apparatus, which was mounted on a swivel base and pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle. “So if we blew up this one device, it would instantly stabilize the Shift?”
Fixie scowled at him. “I guess it would, but we won’t. We’re here to restore Dr. Hammersmith’s vision, remember?”
“Of course.” Even as Doc said it, he wondered how he might
best destroy the transmitter. Ending the transformations and associated side effects might be the best thing he could possibly do for the people of the Shift and his own friends.
And now might be the only chance he would have to do it.
“Help me tie up these two.” Fixie rushed past him with a reel of cable in each hand.
Doc took one more look at the transmitter apparatus. The tip of the device glowed with a pulsing blue light that struck one ring of polished glass lenses mounted in the ceiling. Doc guessed the lens had to focus the beam through channels of some kind, leading it to the surface and angling it toward its targets.
“Come on,” Fixie snapped as he wrapped cable around the ankles of one of the unconscious shifters. “I need help here.”
“All right, yes.” Doc nodded and walked over to assist him. “Let us get this done.”
Chapter Forty-One
Ryan was dead meat and he knew it.
Then, suddenly, there was a thunderous boom and a powerful shock wave ripped through the hill, jarring Union just as she pulled the trigger.
Her shot went wide in a big way. Ryan, who’d managed to stay on his feet through the blast, charged up the hillside before she could fire again.
He grabbed the H&K by the barrel and tore it away from her, hurling it off into space. But the lack of a weapon didn’t keep Union from fighting back. She lunged at him like a panther, catching him at the knees and sweeping his legs out from under him.
Ryan came down on top of her, and she flung herself backward so he was pinned beneath her weight. He used the position to his advantage, snaking an arm around her neck and clamping it tight.
Teeth clenched, he cinched the choke hold tighter. Union strained to roll to one side to break the pressure, but Ryan used his own weight to hold her in place.
She tried to maneuver a booted foot to kick him in his crotch, but the move was impossible. Union pushed up and slammed herself down on him, trying to hurt something, but then the choke hold finally took effect. The pressure of his arm cut off the blood flow to her brain, and her thrashing struggles diminished.
Union went limp. Ryan waited a moment afterward to make sure she was out before letting go of her and rolling her body aside.
Then he got to his feet and jogged around the hill to see where the artillery had hit this time. It didn’t take long; there was now a smoking crater midway between his hill and Jak’s.
As Ryan took in the damage, he heard a loud whoosh from the opposite side of his hill and scrambled to get there. He arrived just in time to see a small guided missile race from below and soar out over the battlefield, leaving a trail of curdled gray smoke.
In a heartbeat, the missile flashed over the heads of the approaching muties, zooming unerringly toward a single huge target behind enemy lines.
As Ryan watched, the missile hit, and the big blaster exploded. Even before the smoke cleared, he could see that the barrel of the weapon had been destroyed.
As the army of attackers turned to see what had happened to their biggest asset, Ryan ran a little farther and saw the source of the missile. Below, between his hill and the next one over, stood a man with a portable rocket launcher braced on his left shoulder.
Instantly, Ryan recognized him. Dr. Hammersmith was front and center, and he was loaded for bear.
Ryan grinned and shook his head. Thanks to the pot-smoking whitecoat, the biggest threat on the field was out of action. The sniper nests were secure for the moment and still running hot; he could hear the crackle of shots being fired up and down the line by his companions.
Now, if only that mutie army wasn’t quite so big. Whittling it down a few heads at a time with sniper fire wasn’t shrinking it fast enough.
Fortunately, Hammersmith had the right idea. After taking a moment to reload, he fired the rocket launcher directly into the approaching front line. Muties blew apart in the blast, sending body parts churning into the air and leaving a nice gaping hole in the middle of the line.
Keep it up, Doc, Ryan thought. Even as the thought crossed his mind, he chastised himself. That man with the rocket launcher might call himself a doctor, but he would never be Doc.
As bullets from the muties below hissed past him, Hammersmith fired another rocket. This one opened an even bigger hole in the front line, scattering twice as many muties as it blew them to pieces.
Ryan saw fresh confusion in the ranks as the battle’s momentum shifted. Some of the shifters turned and fled, unable to take the heat now that the enemy had a big blaster of their own.
But not all of them retreated. A large contingent moved up to fill the gaps, focusing their fire on the man with the rocket launcher.
To his credit—or the credit of the drugs in his system—Hammersmith stood his ground and calmly reloaded. But he wasn’t bulletproof, and Ryan knew he wouldn’t last long.
Running around and down the hill, Ryan retrieved Union’s H&K from the ground where it had fallen. Charging back up the slope, he found his Scout longblaster and grabbed it, then made his way back around to the hillside above Hammersmith.
Picking a spot with good visibility of the approaching force, Ryan hunkered down with the longblasters and went to work. Cranking off round after round from the H&K’s drum magazine, he knocked down key shooters who were going after Hammersmith. The heads of determined shifters popped like balloons along the new front line; apparently, the H&K’s magazine was currently loaded with explosive rounds.
Meanwhile, Krysty picked up on what he was doing and joined the action from the next hill. Her shooting was almost the equal of his own as she did her part to shield Hammersmith. The snipers gave Hammersmith time to fire another rocket at the crowd, turning a slew of muties into blown-apart fragments and fluids. This time, the slaughter gave more of the shifters pause; again, a group of retaliators moved forward, stomping on their comrades’ remains in their push to the front line, but there were only half as many as there had been last time. And the slow leak of retreating fighters from the rear echelon had become a steady pour.
Ryan kept shooting, but he knew what the end of a battle looked like. The tide had turned, and there would be no further reversals.
All that was left was the cleanup—speeding the enemy soldiers’ retreat until they’d all abandoned the field of battle. Then Ryan could turn to the next problem on his list, the one he’d stepped away from long enough to give Hammersmith the cover fire he needed.
Union.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Hand me that circuit board,” Fixie said. “I’m almost done with this thing.”
Doc did as he was asked, handing over the circuit board in question to Fixie, who was half-buried in an access hatch at the base of the transmitter.
“Thanks.” The circuit board quickly disappeared inside the access hatch, just as numerous tools and parts had done over the past half hour. Fixie had done most of his work inside that hatch, which he said contained the heart of the transmitter’s control system.
Though, for all Doc knew, it could just as easily have been the core of some doomsday device that Fixie was nursing back to health. He seemed trustworthy, but anything was possible, and Doc was on guard.
“There, that did it.” Fixie popped out of the hatch and handed several tools to Doc. “The transmitter has been restored to the operational state that Dr. Hammersmith intended. Once we connect the mat-trans system to the nuclear batteries and throw the switch, everything will finally be running perfectly.”
“The nuclear batteries?” Doc repeated. “I take it that is our next order of business.”
“Yes, and we need to get to there fast.” Fixie boosted himself out of the hatch and planted his feet on the floor. “People will start noticing things soon, if they haven’t already. Like the fact that we’re not where we’re supposed to be, for example.”
“Are there regular check-ins with the people manning this facility?” Doc looked across the room to where the three workers were bound and tied to iron cleats
mounted on the wall.
“I’m sure there are.” Fixie gathered up his gear in a hurry. “All the more reason for us to get moving.”
Doc gathered up the rest of the gear and headed for the ventilation duct, but Fixie stopped him with a loud whistle. Turning, Doc saw him gesturing toward a closed door on the far end of the vault.
“This way,” Fixie said.
“Are there no guards?” Doc asked.
Fixie shook his head. “I don’t think most people even know that the batteries exist.”
Doc looked back at the duct opening. “Maybe it would not hurt to be on the safe side anyway.”
“Go that way if you want, but I’m taking the hallway, Theo.” Fixie laughed and headed for the door.
Doc still worried they might come across trouble that way, but he followed Fixie. Splitting up didn’t seem smart at that stage, and besides, he had no idea how to find the nuclear batteries via the duct work on his own.
Luckily, Fixie was right. No guards or workers awaited them at their destination.
After a short trip down the corridor, Fixie opened the door on a much smaller room, at most, a fourth of the size of the transmitter vault.
The room was brightly lit and lined along three walls with various monitors, displays and control panels. The fourth wall looked like heavy armaglass, but it was completely transparent and without color. On the other side of the armaglass, Doc saw a water-filled space. Opaque gray cubes the size of refrigerators occupied the area, suspended from long metal racks and wired together with cables and conduits that hung in sagging loops like vines in a jungle.
“The batteries are underwater?” Doc asked.
“For cooling purposes.” Fixie immediately marched over to a panel on the wall and went to work, fiddling with knobs and dials. “The batteries produce far less heat than the reactor, but the heat they do generate has to be controlled and dispersed. Otherwise, big problems.”
“I see.” Doc walked the perimeter of the control room, stopping at the window wall to place his palm against the glass. The surface was warm to the touch.