Sunchild

by James Axler

  The war party halted under the stars, gathering around the scouting party while Blake relayed the information gathered. There were no guards or patrols, but it seemed that Sunchild himself and a few trusted Sunchildren were preparing for something.

  "Did they look like they were ready for an immediate attack?" Ryan asked, aware of the stare Harvey gave him, aware that by speaking before the sec chief he was speaking out of turn.

  Jak shook his head, the pure white of his flowing hair seeming almost incandescent, like a flare in the darkness.

  "No. If Sunchild know to trigger nuke, it gone by now."

  Doc interjected. "May I?" he asked politely. Then without waiting for an answer said, "Did Sunchild have any kind of computer tech visible? Or perhaps he had the cone of the nuke open. Some of them have the tech within, so that they could be set off in the silos in the event of an invasion. Or it could be a remote control, handheld. But then he may have to—"

  "You know a fuck of a lot about this shit," Harvey growled, interrupting Doc.

  "I have had, um, some experience, you may say," Doc said softly, avoiding eye contact with the sec chief.

  He returned his attention to Jak. "Was there anything like that?"

  The albino shook his head. "Look like muties praying to it like god."

  Doc nodded, ignoring some of the nervous laughs from the war party. "This is good. I would say that we are in no immediate danger. Perhaps," he added, eying the baron speculatively, as well as a few of the older members of the war party, "we could rest awhile."

  Harvey shook his head. "Hit hard, hit fast and don't let the fuckers even get the slightest clue as to Sunchild what's happening to them. We rest, they could send out their own scouting party."

  "That's unlikely," J.B. murmured. "And if they do, then we just chill them. No one'll notice until it's too late."

  There was a murmur of agreement among the weary war party, stilled by a gesture from Harvey.

  "Who the fuck is the sec boss here?" he hissed at the Armorer. "We do what I say…right, Alien?"

  The baron looked uneasy. "Well, I feel like the rest would do me good. But in these situations, I put you in sole charge, and it would be wrong of me to override this just for my own convenience."

  "Okay," Harvey snapped, casting an eye over the assembled party. "Then we carry on."

  ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES of marching brought them close to Samtvogel. With Blake in the lead, they took the same oblique course as before, leading off and away from the sloping side of the valley and toward the obscurity of the steep inclines. The glow of the ville's lighting cast a wan illumination over the immediate area.

  As they stood outside the corpse-covered wire, two of the three women in charge of the armory came forward. They were each carrying one of the drum-fed RPK machine blasters. J.B. could see the mounting tripods, folded, in backpacks. The fat woman who had questioned the Armorer about the blaster to test his knowledge spared a second to wink at him before speaking to Harvey.

  "If you want us to set these up on this side and that—" she gestured to the far side of the valley. "—then you need to give us help. We'll each need someone to help set and mount these bastards, and to first get us over that wire. Awkward with this," she finished, tapping the heavy blaster.

  Harvey agreed and detailed Ant and Dee to assist. The heavy sec men were agreeable, and adjusted their wrist chrons so that they would be able to synchronize the beginning of the attack.

  "That's how long we've got now, people," Harvey noted as the four people went forth to set up their posts. "Time to get our shit together. We know we can whip their asses—we just need to get it right."

  The sec chief divided his forces, detailing parties to fan out and cover all along the bowed ridge of the valley, ending with two parties to take either side of the only road out.

  "The plan is simple. We go in when the covering fire has started. That'll be over our heads, and will cease when we get into Samtvogel itself. We want the nuke, and we want Sunchild. We also want to find Cyclops Jr. dead or alive. We take him back no matter what—agreed?"

  The last was directed at Ryan. Harvey was eying him carefully as he spoke the word, searching for the slightest sign of reaction. Ryan remained stony-faced, controlling the emotions that ran through him, knowing that the sec chief was looking for the slightest sign of weakness. Ryan was sure that Dean wasn't in the valley, but he was still his son, and the thought of him chilled like the children they had recovered previously made him shudder inside.

  But not outwardly. Harvey turned away, dissatisfied by the lack of reaction. He continued. "When we've secured that objective, we trash the place. Completely. For once and for all we rid ourselves of the mutie scum—no offense, Whitey—and drive them out. If possible, we chill them all. Every last shitter."

  "Are you certain about that?" Alien asked, his voice strong and firm in the night. "We have never, in Raw, acted in such a manner—"

  "Baron, you want them to escalate, get more and more trouble? If so, then fine. But you put me in charge of sec, and I say we ice the fuckers once and for all."

  The baron demurred. "Very well."

  Ryan felt J.B.'s hand on his arm and his breath in his ear.

  "What's the idea, Ryan? The longer we stay around, the more of us stand to buy the farm…or is that the idea?"

  "Mebbe. And mebbe not just Alien. Triple red, J.B. That coldheart may just decide to chill us at the same time."

  The one-eyed warrior felt, rather than saw, the assent from the Armorer as he melted into the crowd to spread the word to Mildred, Jak and Doc. Krysty had been close enough to hear.

  "Okay, let's get to it," Harvey commanded.

  The flame-haired woman lightly kissed Ryan on the cheek. It was a cover for her to whisper, "Be careful. Dean's not here, and we've got to get back to find him."

  THE RPKS WERE set up on each side, the drum-mounted ammo in place. On their respective side, Ant and Dee both secured the tripods, and left the two Armorers seated, with the blasters at the requisite angle. The two dreadlocked sec men then both moved away as one after the final check, readying their shotguns and checking their wrist chrons.

  Around them, stretching in a thin line around the lip of the valley, the war party readied their own weapons.

  On opposite sides of the valley, the dreadlocked sec men checked their wrist chrons. As one, they turned to the Armorers seated behind the RPKs. "Now!"

  The firing began in short, controlled bursts, the twin machine blasters rending the air with tracer fire and peals of noise, louder for the quiet that had preceded it. As J.B. had pointed out when questioned earlier on the blasters, they were capable of 660 rounds per minute, but to fire at such a pace would heat up the barrel to such a degree that it would ignite the ammo left in the drum and set the blaster on a rapid and uncontrollable fire.

  So each Armorer kept her firing to short bursts, rattling off fifty or sixty rounds before pausing and counting to ten. Then another fifty or sixty. The barrels of the RPKs were soon red-hot, but not the white-hot that would ignite the drum. The pauses were enough to keep the barrel just beneath that crucial temperature.

  The tripods were raised at an angle that would keep the fire going over the heads of the war party as it descended the steep slopes that formed three sides of the valley of Samtvogel. The majority of the ammo would land toward the center of the ville, where the majority of the men were clustered. The outlying areas were where the women and the children were sequestered in their tents and shacks. Some of the shells cannoned into the faded and peeling stucco of the ranch houses, chipping off plaster that raised choking dust in the smoky light.

  As he scrambled down the side of the valley, Ryan could see that the muties gathered in the center of the ville were thrown into confusion by the sudden attack. Some of them gathered around Sunchild in an attempt to shield him, but the mutie leader roared and directed them away. Some of them disappeared into one of the ranch houses, and Ryan guessed that w
as where they kept their small armory. They had already proved themselves next to useless in a firefight, but nonetheless it could prove a problem in close quarters, where a stray blast could go anywhere.

  As he reached the bottom of the incline, he was pulled up short by the figure of a mutie looming up at him out of the semidarkness. There were fewer fires at the edges of the ville, and longer and deeper pools of shadow. This was the danger zone, as the invaders were still descending and could be caught easily as they reached the valley floor.

  The one-eyed warrior was ready for this. Although the SIG-Sauer was in his hand, he couldn't rely on finding much time and space to reload, so was unwilling to waste ammo. As his combat boots thudded on the dirt floor, his hand snaked down his thigh and withdrew the panga.

  The mutie was screaming wordlessly, a high note of fear mixed in with the savagery. As the misshapen creature approached, Ryan could see that it was a woman, the pendulous and wrinkled breasts riding free of the stained and patched dyed robes that she wore. She had only half a face, the majority of her lower jaw and one side of her cheek being a mass of scar tissue and weals. She was virtually bald, and her toothless mouth was open in the scream, strings of drool running between her lips.

  Her eyes were lit by hate, fear and a light of pure insanity. She was brandishing a large, scythe-shaped blade that had a small wooden handle. The blade, even in the poor light, seemed to be stained and pitted with something that was probably blood.

  Ryan had no intention of letting his own blood be added to that which had dried on the blade. He held the panga in front of him, across his body, waiting for the optimum moment.

  The mutie approached him in an open stance. She was shuffling rather than running, which slowed her enough for him to relax into the move rather than hurry it, for she was holding the blade above her head, ready to bring it down in a sweep.

  This left the right-hand side of her body completely exposed to attack, the line down her arm and ribs undefended from any blow that may be struck.

  Ryan stepped forward, ducking under the blow as her arm fell uselessly past his shoulder, the scything blade hacking at empty air. At the same time, he brought his own blade across and up, so that he sliced beneath the ribs, carving open the soft flesh and spilling the mutie's intestines into the dirt with a slooshing sound and a rise of steam as the warm flesh and blood hit the cold night air. The blade continued its upward thrust, carving into vital organs before being withdrawn as Ryan stepped back.

  The mutie woman stood for a moment, a bewildered light in her eyes. Then the light died, and she tumbled forward onto the ground at Ryan's feet.

  JAKE, THE HUGE, bearlike sec man, roared loudly and had a blood lust in his eyes. Like the berserkers of Viking legend, he had almost tranced himself into a state where he had no feelings or emotions, no sense of morality or justice, nor even any sense of his own being beyond being a killing machine.

  Which was exactly what Harvey wanted from him. The sec chief had seen Jake in this state before, and had spent no little part of the journey persuading the sec man that he should adopt this persona for the raid. The bearlike, grizzled fighter had taken little persuading, and had spent the few minutes at the top of the valley, waiting for the signal of covering fire, to put himself into that state where he saw only fresh meat for the chilling.

  And now he was in full cry, a deep-throated roar escaping him, barely registering the sweeping knives and rough-hewed blades of the muties as they attempted to stop him. He had discarded his Heckler & Koch blaster in favor of two long samurai-type swords, the strangely shaped blades arcing through the air before him in a complex pattern, sweeping and crossing in a way that prevented the mutie Sunchildren from getting too close. There were a few random stabs that penetrated his defenses, and the jagged edges of blades had cut and marked him, streams of blood ribboning down his chest and back. He seemed not to register them, except that it spurred him to greater savagery.

  The flashing blades cut through soft mutie flesh, hacked at jagged bone, with barely a pause.

  "DARK NIGHT! Could have sent that big bastard in on his own," J.B. muttered.

  "Be fair. You don't want him to have all the fun, do you?" Downey replied, snapping off another round from the Sharps, scoring cleanly through the forehead of a passing mutie. The mutie staggered on for a few steps, not seeming to realize she was dead, before crumpling into a heap.

  "Fun?" the Armorer grunted, rattling off another short blast from the Uzi into a group of muties emerging from one of the ranch houses. He and Downey had both gravitated toward covering the ranch houses, the two of them assuming that any blasters the Sunchildren had would best be stopped as soon as they came out of what passed for an armory, rather than let loose as a random factor into the firefight—except that it was much more of a night chill than a firefight. J.B. had descended the eastern slope of the valley almost on his butt, sliding down through a cloud of dust and feeling the rough earth tearing at his fatigues. It didn't matter if he ripped some skin on the way down. If he was going to use the M-4000 to maximum effect, then it was necessary to arrive as quickly as possible.

  Hitting bottom at a run, the Armorer had headed for his self-appointed task: the ranch house armory. There was still confusion as he sprinted through a crowd of mutie Sunchildren, using the Tekna knife to carve a path. The blade was razor sharp, the muties keen to avoid it. He was relying on the element of surprise and the fact that others were following to cover his back on the outer fringes.

  But now he was coming into the main area of light, lamps and fires making the central arena of Samtvogel seem almost in daylight. There was a clutch of muties around the ranch house, blocking his way.

  Without breaking stride, J.B. sheathed the knife, and brought up the M-4000, which he had been cradling in his left arm, so that he grasped it with both hands. He stopped for a moment, planting both feet firmly to take the recoil, and fired the charge of barbed metal flechettes into the packed group of Sunchildren, who were too bewildered by this sudden apparition to move.

  The white-hot metal, shot at enormous velocity and spreading over a wide area as it left the confines of the barrel, bought death and pain to the group, which disintegrated suddenly into a mass of writhing, bloodstained flesh. Some of the muties at the front of the group took the full brunt, their faces and torsos ripped to shreds by the load. Their already chilled remains were flung backward into the group, the force pushing other muties down and saving their lives—at least temporarily. They thus avoided the main load of death, but were still wounded by the storm of flechettes that had spread low and wide.

  The Armorer had wasted not a second in slinging the M-4000 and bringing the Uzi into play, his short bursts directed at mopping up those sections of the heaving mass that still seemed to be alive and dangerous.

  Passing the now chilled pile of mutie flesh, the Armorer established a safe position by a sheet-metal shack, firing a quick blast through the opening to clear the inside of any possible danger. Covering his back, he began to pick off any muties that passed his view, with his attention primarily focused on the ranch house windows and doorway, from which the wood and glass had long since disappeared.

  "Only me," a breathless cry had announced as J.B. had whirled to greet the sounds coming up behind him. "Had the same idea, eh?" the sardonic Downey announced, settling himself in beside J.B. and sweeping the long, iron-gray hair from his sweat-spangled face. Somewhere along the line, his habitual ponytail had come loose, and the strands of hair across his vision were both irritating and dangerous.

  J.B. could smell the powder and heat from the discharged Sharps, and knew that the sec man had been busy at his task, and that he, too, had the foresight to target the ranch house.

  "Better to chill them as they emerge, not let the bastards get those blasters all over the show." The sec man grinned in answer to J.B.'s unasked question.

  And now they were picking off passing muties and had a group holed up in the ranch house, loosi
ng blaster shots that whined high and wide past the sec men.

  There were also shots from inside the ranch house itself.

  "Think we could leave them to chill themselves like that?" Downey questioned. "Guess I'm getting cramp around here."

  "Could risk a gren," J.B. answered. Squinting through his spectacles, the Armorer took a hand from his Uzi to push his fedora back on his head and scratch idly at his forehead. "Doesn't seem to be too many of ours around this point, and the house looks strong enough to contain the blast. Problem is, what if they've got a stock of grens in there themselves?"

  "Good call," Downey replied thoughtfully, realizing why the Armorer hadn't risked a gren before. He looked around. There was no localized righting. The ville was small, but large enough for there to be none of the war party within a radius of about fifty yards. "Wouldn't they have blown themselves up by now, if they had any?" he asked.

  J.B. pursed his lips and blew. "Odds are," he said simply, reaching into one of the pockets stuffed with ammo and grens that littered his jacket. He produced a gren, pulled the pin and rose to a standing position. A seemingly lazy swing of the arm, along with a perfect eye for distance, saw the gren arc in the air and land through one of the windows.

  "Down," J.B. commanded, pushing Downey to the rear of the shack.

  The explosion was muffled, only the open doorway and windows allowing the force to escape. The structure of the building seemed to blow out, almost to the point of crumbling, before returning to normal. The sound of the ammo supplies firing off filled the immediate area, and then died.

  The building was darkened and still, all the more obvious in the light and confusion surrounding.

  "Guess that's seen to that," Downey remarked. "Let's go and get that mother nuke, my friend."

  J.B. grunted his assent, and they left the shelter of the tin shack to enter the fray.

  KRYSTY FOUND herself alongside Rankine and Bodie. The rangy sec man was striding through the mayhem with ease, firing off shots from his .303 Lee Enfield and then swinging the stock to club Sunchildren out of his path.