Breakthrough

by James Axler

  When she activated the wag's weapons pods, which were located on either side of the roof, two joysticks popped out of dashboard in front of her. As her gauntleted hands closed on the no-slip grips, a ring and crosshair sight appeared in the center of her helmet visor. Her targets, human shaped figures in lime green, scattered to either side as the wag continued to rumble up the slope. Dredda flipped off the grip safeties with her thumbs.

  Each of the joysticks operated its own cannon pod. As she moved her hands apart, the lone crosshair ring blurred, divided and became two. She simultaneously tracked a pair of men running in opposite directions. One was scrambling out of a foxhole hacked in the asphalt on her left; the other high-kicked to the right as he abandoned a sandbagged, burned out hulk of a vehicle. When the computer target locks engaged, the sprinting figures turned red, and she jiggled the firing buttons.

  Green lances of light stabbed through both runners. Neither completed another step.

  Foxhole Man fell in four pieces, sliced cleanly through the chest and both arms above the elbow by a single burst of pure energy. His transected parts landed in a jumbled heap. The other man took the laser slash at waist height. The emerald light separated his torso from everything below his hips. It was a grievous mortal wound, but not immediately so. Though the man had been chopped in half, there was no blood—the laser sliced and cauterized at the same time. Rearing up from the pavement with undamaged arms, he seemed to recognize the severed legs under his chin as his own. His mouth opened wide in a scream that Dredda couldn't hear. Frantically clawing, he tried to drag himself away.

  He was all in red.

  The target lock had him.

  She tapped the right firing button again and sawed him neatly lengthwise, from the top of his head to his torso stomp. The smoking halves of him flopped apart, like a cleaver-struck apple.

  All around, the gunners in the other wags were likewise selecting individual running targets and chopping them to pieces. Dredda's visor compensated for the interlacing, intense bursts of light. In the real world, those flashes of green were blinding. They cooked the very air, as they cooked human flesh and bone. The attack was intended to produce maximum terror, and it was having the desired effect. Instead of holding their ground, the Shadow Worlders were already starting to fall back, allowing themselves to be herded toward the main building.

  Her body in perfect sync with the wag's fire control system, Dredda unleashed a furious two-handed attack. Tickling the firing buttons, she struck red targets not with one pulse, but with twenty, sectioning the human forms in as many pieces. To her, it seemed as if the running figures were moving in slow motion. To the troopers in the jump seats behind her, it was just the opposite. Everything was free spooling at triple speed, and the pulses of laser cannon weren't pulses at all, but sustained blasts. They watched sprinting targets in a 360-degree radius of their wag disintegrate like blades of grass before a grass trimmer. Maybe four highly trained troopers manning the vehicle's weapons pods could have had the same effect. Four men at the peak of their prime. Maybe.

  As the wags roared up the grade, Dredda called off the slaughter. Because the lives of the opposition had value, the idea was to kill as few as possible, but to do it in a way that demoralized and absolutely terrified the survivors. That part of the mission was accomplished. The enemy was in full scale retreat. She and the other gunners began firing over the heads of the withdrawing forces, driving them across the parking lot and into the main complex.

  As the wags closed on the three-story building's entrance, the squadron of gyroplanes swept in and like huge black hornets hovered above the roof. They sent intermittent beams of emerald green light spearing down through its walls and into the forces now trapped inside.

  Mero stopped the wag in front of the complex's double doorway, beneath the big crumbling marquee. Thick black smoke was already starting to coil out of the upper story windows.

  Dredda unfastened herself from the wag umbilical and released her seat harness. She felt an incredible elation as she pushed out of her chair. Triumph was far too weak a word to describe the sensation. This, she thought, had to have been what it was like for Cortez and his men. Armed with advanced technology, facing a primitive and ignorant populace, with a world of uncountable treasure that lay waiting at their feet. And they didn't even have to bend and scoop it up themselves. That's what subject peoples were all about.

  As Dredda moved to the rear, the male troopers stood at attention on either side of the cargo bay. For the first time, they had seen what their officers could do inside a battlesuit. She studied each of their faces in turn. Some had sober, distant expressions. Others wore frozen grins. There was fear in all their eyes. The fear of her. Of her kind. Their weakness irritated her, and she had to stifle the urge to smack them to their knees. If Dredda could have arranged it, she would have only brought sisters to the new reality, bat there hadn't been time to complete the necessary transformations.

  After the troopers peeled back the netting from the weaponry, she picked up a tribarreled laser rifle, checked its power pack, and then stepped onto the wag's rear platform. As the back door lowered, she was the first to charge out, followed by Mero.

  Automatic weapons fire chattered and muzzles flashed at them from the building's lower story windows. Deflected by their battlesuits' EM pulses, the sudden downpour of bullets veered wide, sparking off the already pitted concrete of the sidewalk.

  Dredda ducked under the overhang of the marquee, but not before she took a second to look up at it. Incredibly, its century-old black plastic lettering was still mostly intact. It said Mount Des ret C sino Resort. Fri./S t Only. Direct f om Sparks, NV—Tony, Orlando, and Don.

  Chapter Five

  A severed human head tumbled down the grand staircase, bounced over the banister and landed at the feet of Baron Charlie Doyal. Wide with surprise, the dead eyes stared up at him. Its neck stump was a clean, band saw slice and absolutely bloodless. The throat's shock contracted tendons had been fused with the spinal column, which meant the jaws would remain clenched like that, the teeth bared, until the flesh rotted from the bone.

  Baron Doyal made no attempt to kick aside the hideous thing.

  The ground floor lobby of the Mount Deseret Casino Resort was a scrap heap of similar horrors.

  And worse—some of the scraps could still crawl.

  The air inside the building vibrated with earsplitting whistles, the piercing tones accompanied pencil thin beams of emerald light that slashed through the vaulted ceiling, three stories above, angling down, drawing lines of crackling flame along the faded, red-patterned velvet wallpaper. The light beams were unstoppable. They cleaved everything they touched: metal, concrete and, of course, humanity.

  Yelling at the tops of their lungs, the baron's mutilated bodyguards dragged themselves back from the edge of the flashing buzz saw, clawing their way over the bright, razor sharp fragments of the casino's dropped and shattered twenty foot wide crystal chandelier.

  Doyal couldn't hear their cries over his own. A passing flicker of the green light had turned the little and ring fingers of his left hand into greasy, scorched stubs. He hadn't lost a single drop of blood, but the hand had gone rigid. It had puffed up, purple to the wrist, the surviving fingers as stiff and fat as little sausages. Excruciating pain throbbed all the way to his shoulder socket.

  His weapon of choice, an autoloading 10-gauge shotgun with a sawed ff barrel and buttstock and a pistolgrip forestock, dangled in his good right hand, its magazine emptied. The Ithaca Magnum Roadblocker could blow a hole in a man big enough to stick an arm through, but in this battle its high-brass, double-aught buckshot loads had proved worthless, as had torrents of .223-, .308- and .45-caliber centerfire slags.

  The attackers seemed immune to all alloys of lead. Only ten minutes had passed since the lookouts stationed on the lowest slopes of Mount Deseret, directly above the casino, had sounded an alarm. They had spotted a low dust cloud coming from the north, across the
arid waste at the northernmost end of Skull Valley. The rolling wall of beige dirt had looked like the front edge of an approaching wind storm, but the sky was cloudless and the air was perfectly still. As the cloud rapidly closed on them, Doyal had put the compound on full alert. His sec men ran to take up their positions inside the wire fenced perimeter, at machine gun nests and mortar emplacements. When the cloud was within twenty yards of the main gate, it had suddenly lifted and dispersed, exposing eight on rushing wags. Wags the likes of which none of them had ever seen. The gleaming black vehicles each had six enormous, churning, lug-treaded wheels. They had no windows or ob slits; except for what looked like rotating weapon pods on the roofs and sides, their outer surfaces were perfectly smooth. The heavy wags rammed, flattened and rolled over the hurricane fence as if it were nothing.

  An instant after the fence came down, an even more astonishing thing happened. A half dozen, shiny black flying machines swept low around the base of the mountain, clustered in tight attack formation.

  Flying machines hadn't been seen in that part of Deathlands since skydark.

  Understandably, Baron Doyal was caught unprepared. He had fortified and stocked the casino compound to hold off a ground siege of many months. But this was no siege. This was a rout.

  When concentrated machine gun, small arms and mortar fire had no effect on the oncoming vehicles and aircraft, when the beams of light began to slice and drop sec men with uncanny accuracy, the only course left was a full retreat. Doyal and his troops scrambled to the cover of the casino building. Which, as it turned out, was no cover at all. As he squinted through the swirling smoke and dust, Doyal dimly saw two legged black monsters marching through the entrance. Tall, with big, round heads, and limbs and torsos segmented like insects, they advanced in a straight line, ignoring the flurries of bullets that zinged at them. Their longblasters returned fire with narrow beams of whistling emerald light,

  Unable to defend themselves, the baron's sec men were surrendering en masse, throwing aside their useless weapons and themselves belly down on the rubble.

  "We can't stay here!" Doyal's second in command shouted at him.

  The baron turned toward the man crouched on his right. Capo Waslick's right eye was nearly swollen shut, his cheek grossly bloated and as shiny as a balloon. The ear on that side of his face had vanished, replaced by an angry scorch.

  "We've got to get out now!" Waslick said, and shoved him so hard that he dropped the shotgun.

  Moving on rubbery knees, the baron hurried over the unspeakable carnage of the lobby, past the mingled pieces of the living and the dead, through an archway that led toward the kitchens at the rear of the building.

  The escape tunnel was hidden behind a massive floor to ceiling pantry shelf. Its secret door was balanced to open at a touch, even when the shelf was loaded with goods. The underground corridor beyond had been built in the predark days, by the casino's original, Native American owners.

  Eleven thousand foot Mount Deseret had shielded this small corner of the Skull Valley Indian Reservation from the brunt of the three-warhead airburst that had turned Salt Lake City into a hardened glob of thermoglass and the Great Salt Lake into a cloud of superheated vapor, which had flash-cooked every living thing between the predark cities of Ogden and Provo.

  The native peoples of the Skull Valley reservation had vanished in the same blinding instant as the Great Salt Lake. Their shapes were still visible on a few of the exposed boulders, permanently burned into the rock by an initial energy pulse brighter than ten thousand suns. The only artifacts of their culture that had survived doomsday were the concrete pads scattered over the valley floor, pads that had once underlayed shoddy, government provided housing and, of course, the Mount Deseret Casino Resort.

  When the tremendous weight of water was suddenly lifted from the lake basin to the north, it set violent geologic forces in motion. For decades afterward, strong earthquakes shook the area. The shifting of plates of subsurface rock caused pure springs to bubble up from the slopes of Mount Deseret. The Slake City side of the mountain remained barren, its soil poisoned by radiation, but the more protected Skull Valley side soon supported lush stands of trees and wide meadows.

  Sixty years after skydark, the first resettlers moved into the resort complex. Before long, a small community had grown up around the sweetwater stream formed by the confluence of nukecaust-created springs. With uncontaminated water and land at their disposal, the settlers began cultivating crops for profit. They used remnants of Highways 80 and 15 to build their trade routes.

  Charlie Doyal was neither farmer nor merchant. His talents lay in his unique "people skills." He had moved into Skull Valley at the head of a band of heavily armed, no-mercy blackhearts. With brutality and intimidation, he had quickly turned the disorganized squatters into his agricultural slaves and crowned himself baron. After taking over the outlets for beans and corn that the farmers had established, Doyal changed the nature of the business. Instead of selling com for food, he boiled it down for its sugar, which he used to distill a highly alcoholic beverage. In Deathlands, where any escape from the hardship and terror of daily life was greatly prized, his joy juice was a high demand, high profit item.

  Over the years, Doyal also perfected his own version of jolt. He started by cultivating opium poppies, then traded the black-tar heroin he manufactured for a stockpile of predark pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals—the makings of crystal methedrine. His jolt recipe was a super addictive combination of narcotic and stimulant, with a little Mindburst mushroom thrown in for its hallucinatory effects. The rad-mutated fungus was one of the few living things that thrived inside the thermoglass monolith. The success of this product had earned Doyal the nickname of "Baron Jolt."

  To service and expand his operation, he maintained a fleet of gas and diesel powered vehicles, which weren't cheap to maintain. The distribution of the goods and collection of the profits required a standing army of sec men. Minutes ago, it was one of the largest and most far reaching enterprises in Deathlands. Now it was history.

  In the feeble, flickering torchlight of the concrete tunnel, Baron Doyal ran for his life. He ran past seeping walls lined with barrels and crates, his suddenly useless cache of arms, ammunition, joy juice and jolt. Capo Waslick was right behind him. At the mountain end of the corridor, a steel ladder led up through a vertical tunnel hacked into the rock. It was a long climb in darkness to the sealed hatch at the top of the shaft. Doyal turned the small locking wheel, shoved the hatch open and scrambled out into the bright sunshine, followed by his second in command.

  Five hundred feet below their position, the black flying machines hovered above the casino, spitting shrieking bolts of green light. The aircraft had twin rotors, a large one on top of the fuselage, and a slightly smaller one spinning perpendicular to it, at the tail.

  Waslick nudged the baron, pointing out the two sec men slinking along the back side of one of the outbuildings. Both carried fully extended, olive-green rocket launchers. Reaching the building's corner, they shouldered the LAWs, stepped out and fired upward at nearly point blank range. The pair of rockets got within ten feet of their stationary targets, then abruptly veered off, corkscrewing away, and exploding harmlessly out in the green and pink poppy fields of Skull Valley.

  One of the gyroplanes immediately broke off its attack on the casino, banked in a tight circle and swooped down. The unsuccessful rocketeers dumped the spent LAW tubes and took to their heels, back the way they'd come.

  They didn't get far.

  As the flying machine swept over them, a black net dropped from its belly, scooping them up, then dragging them along the ground. Meanwhile, another of the gyroplanes stopped firing and abruptly climbed, heading straight for the baron and his second in command.

  "They've seen us!" Waslick cried. There was no cover among the low boulders. Doyal turned and dashed up the narrow mountain trail. Before he'd climbed seventy feet, a dark shadow passed over him, followed by a gust of wind a
nd a fall of stinging mist. When Doyal looked up, he saw the glittering spray jetting from a nozzle at the rear of the aircraft. As he ran on, he covered his nose and mouth with his good hand and tried not to breathe. It didn't make any difference. After a few steps, he became tanglefooted. Then his legs gave way beneath him and he hit the ground, hard. He lay there fully conscious, heart thudding in panic, but unable to move his arms or legs, or raise his head. The flying machine returned, its propwash whipping his back as it slowly descended. A mechanical claw reached down and caught Doyal by the ankle. It jerked him up and deposited him in the waiting net. Moments later, both he and Capo Waslick were unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the casino parking lot.

  It took twenty minutes for Doyal to recover the full use of his limbs. By that time, all of the surviving sec men and agri-slaves had been rounded up, either by gyroplane or ground forces, and deposited in the parking lot. Close to one hundred captives sat cross legged on the ground. Most of them kept their eyes downcast, afraid to look at the inhuman black figures that surrounded them. Though Doyal was afraid, too, more afraid than he had ever been in his life, he had to see—and understand—what had brought down his hard won enterprise.

  Almost all of the attackers were over six feet tall. Their outer covering, which he had first taken for a mutie insect shell, on closer inspection looked more like some kind of synthetic full body armor. The black material was segmented to allow free movement of arms, legs and torso; the hands were protected by gauntlets made of the same stuff, the feet by overlapping plates. The smoke colored, wraparound visors on the fronts of their helmets concealed their faces from view. There was no way to tell whether they were norm or mutie. Their massive looking longblasters were a bullpup design, with a single claw toothed flash hider over the muzzles of the three barrels. The weapons either weren't heavy, or these creatures were superstrong.