by James Axler
The slaves who couldn't work, who were too rad sick or who had been injured from glass falls lay curled up in the dimples. Some of them were undoubtedly already dead. Nearby, healthier slaves roasted their fresh-caught midmorning snacks over the propane burners. Bruised purple from so much kicking and bouncing, the stickie heads lay scattered around the camp.
Ryan and J.B. stayed together as they crossed the open ground, making a beeline for the ore trucks.
The other troopers didn't seem to notice them.
Ryan saw Doc and Dean working their way along the other side of the sledges lined up for unloading. They were spreading the word to the waiting slaves: throw glass, not axes.
The trooper beside the first cart in line waved his gauntlet at Ryan. He pointed at his battlesuit collar, indicating the throat mike. Ryan and J.B. kept on walking toward him.
The guard repeated the gesture.
Whatever Doc was going to do, he for nuke's sake had to do it soon, Ryan thought.
The first chunk of glass arced over from the rear of the line of sledges. With a puff of twinkling dust, it hit the trooper in the helmet. The hunk of nukeglass was big enough and it was thrown hard enough to knock him sideways a step. The missile left a whitish mark on the black armor.
Ryan and J.B. fell into a trot.
The trooper before them recovered, only to be caught in a rain of glass chunks. Many of the chunks missed their target and shattered on the ground, but the others, the ones that were thrown true, pounded the shoulders and chest of his battlesuit and slammed into his helmet.
"Stop!" he commanded the slaves, his amplifier at top volume.
There was an edge of panic in his voice.
That he was clearly in trouble only encouraged his attackers. Realizing that they could actually hurt their oppressors this way, the slaves grabbed pieces of glass from their sledges and began pelting every trooper within range. They barraged the pair at the head of the sledge line and the guard by the water tank. The trooper standing beside the ore truck retreated with his weapon raised to the front bumper as the slaves stopped throwing hunks of glass into the wag's bed and started throwing them at him.
As Ryan and J.B. came up on the side of the ore truck, they saw the trooper by the bumper take a triple hit in the helmet, which sent him toppling over backward.
From behind them came the amplified cry, "Fire!"
The air was split by a dozen whistling shrieks.
By then, Ryan was already scrambling over the top of the ore track's cargo box. He got a glimpse of battlesuited troopers massing on the edge of the compound, unleashing a cat's cradle of green, crisscrossing beams. The guards fired a warning volley over the slaves' heads.
A moment after Ryan dropped below the rim of the box, J.B. clunked down beside him. The walls of enclosure were ten feet high on the outside. Nuke rabble filled ninety percent of the interior volume. Ryan and J.B. were riding high, so they had to flatten out and keep their heads down.
When the firing and the shouting stopped, it only took a few more minutes for the slaves to fill the wag. They tossed hunks of ore over the sides and down upon the stowaways. Ryan and J.B. lay there and took it.
The wag driver didn't look into the cargo box to see how full it was. He didn't have to. From the ground, the trooper could see the heaping mound of glass above the edge.
When he had a full load, the driver got in, started the engine and turned the ore track around. The wag's seven-foot-diameter wheels bumped over the dimples in the glass as if they were nothing. As soon as the wag was away from the camp, Ryan and J.B. climbed out from under the blocks of glass and took off their helmets.
The air tasted sweet and the wind cooled them off. The sway and pitch of the track on the road caused the box's razor-sharp contents to shift, forcing them to scramble to more secure ground near the cab.
"Beats walking, huh?" J.B. said.
"Yeah," Ryan replied automatically. His mind was elsewhere. He was counting the ways the whole thing could collapse. They had no weapons. Their battlesuits didn't work. They were heading into the enemy stronghold. And they were up to their eyeballs in highly radioactive ore. He stopped counting and thought about Krysty, who could already be dead. He thought about Dean, too, who was going to be dead if he didn't pull this off.
"I'm going to be damned glad to get off this fucking sea of glass," J.B. said. "I don't mind dying, you know that, but I don't want to die out here. I don't want my spirit roaming this nuked-out shithole forever."
Ryan understood what he meant. Dying here would be like dying on another planet. Or on the moon.
"We left friends behind," Ryan said.
"I'm not forgetting that. I sure as hell don't want them to die out here, either. What are we going to do when we get to Slake City?"
"What we always do," Ryan said. "Make it up as we go along."
Chapter Twenty-One
After Ryan and J.B. left Ground Zero, everything was fine for a few minutes. The camp appeared to have settled down. The slaves had resumed their dismal labor. It was as if the glass throwing demonstration— and the guards' display of force—had never happened.
Mildred and Jak bided their time just inside the mine's entrance, holding their captured weapons well out of sight while they kept track of the troopers' movements.
About ten minutes had passed when all the guards seemed to stiffen. Mildred and Jak noticed the nearly simultaneous reaction, and arrived at the same conclusion: a new set of orders had come through their battlesuit com links.
The troopers looked at one another, then at their prisoners. Then one of them shouted to the slaves on the flatland, "Everybody up! That means everybody! You're all going down in the mines. Everybody is going to work! If you don't get up, you will be sliced and diced."
"They can't make those dying people get up," Mildred said. "The poor bastards can't walk, let alone work."
A group of troopers formed a ragged line and started advancing across the compound, driving the slaves who could move toward the mines. When they came upon those who couldn't move, those curled up in the dimples, they opened fire, point blank. The shrieks of their energy weapons mingled with the screams of the dying.
The sick and the injured who weren't comatose or paralyzed used the last of their strength to drag themselves out of the dimples and crawl toward the mine.
"This is too much," Mildred said, dropping the trigger-block safety of her pulse rifle. "I'm not going to stand here and watch this without doing something about it."
Jak shook his head. But Mildred wasn't looking at him. She was already swinging up her tribarrel. As Jak started to speak, a naked man dashed out of the mine and rushed past him in a pale blur. It was the trooper they had turned over to the slaves. He had gotten free somehow. Battered, bleeding, with boot prints on his backside, he ran across the compound. He ran waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs.
Mildred swung her sights down on him. Her finger tightened on the trigger, but she held up. It was too late to stop the man. The cat was already out of the bag. And he was unarmed.
Jak fried him. He tapped the trigger of his laser rifle, firing a green beam as straight as a bowstring. The energy pulse cut the running man's spinal cord, flash-cooked his heart and made the front of his chest open up like the petals of a gory flower. The unstoppable bolt of light continued on, whistling as it slammed into the side of a sledge. The metal glowed red for an instant, then faded back to its original rust-brown color.
"One less," the albino said by way of explanation.
There was no time to discuss the matter.
The troopers by the ore truck and the water tank were returning fire. Those who had been slaughtering the helpless joined their victims, taking cover in the closest dimples.
Mildred snugged the tribarrel's butt against her shoulder and pinned the trigger. There was no recoil to the weapon. The rifle hummed softly against her cheek, fingers and arm. She painted a line of green light that sparked and sm
oked across the legs of the water tower. Across and through, missing the trooper stationed there by a good three feet. The tower groaned as it began to tip forward, then it came crashing down on the astonished man.
The battlesuit did him no good. Like the cave ceiling at Moonboy ville, the tank was too heavy for the EM shield to deflect. It flattened both the trooper and his armor. Water sloshed out through the tank's ruptured seams, pouring in a wild torrent over the glass.
"Look out!" Jak said, grabbing Mildred by the shoulder and giving her a hard shove. Laser beams from around the compound pinpointed their position. If he hadn't pushed her, they would have trisected her head.
"Run!" he told her.
Mildred darted from the mine entrance, angling for the closest solid cover. She ducked behind the line of loaded sledges, where other slaves kept low and out of the line of fire. As Jak joined her, energy pulses from four or five weapons skimmed the tops of the carts, passing within a few inches of them.
The companions didn't even get the chance to suck in a full breath before a beam slashed at them from the opposite, completely exposed direction, from over near the propane burners. Jak spun toward the source and touched off another pulse from a half crouch.
With a resounding wham, the propane tanks exploded, sending a ball of orange-and-yellow flame billowing into the air. The explosion lifted the shooter off his feet. He flew, arms spread wide, a black silhouette landing in a crumpled heap thirty feet from the cooking area.
Despite the impact, the trooper remained conscious. He knew he was in an exposed position. He tried to get up at once, pushing with his hands, raising his chest off the glass. Led by Doc and Dean, the slaves hiding behind the sledges, in the dimples and at the mine entrances mustered their courage and lobbed chunks of glass on him. Fist-sized hunks and bigger hammered his helmet and shoulders, driving him back to the ground.
Laser beams shrieked across compound, and the stoning ceased.
A group of guards firing from one of the mine entrances had Jak and Mildred's position zeroed in. The concentrated energy of their weapons turned the sledge the companions were hiding behind into a glowing coal on skids. Unable to stand the raging heat, Mildred and Jak advanced to the next sledge in line.
Green beams clipped the front of the cart's skis, sending showers of fat sparks skittering over the glass.
"We're pinned down," Mildred said. "It's coming from one of the dimples. Next to the klieg light."
Jak poked his head up and immediately jerked it back down. "Two," he said, "shooting over lip of hole."
The air was torn by quavering squeals. The guards at the mine entrance had shifted their aim to the side of the new cart. After a few seconds, it, too, began to glow like an ember.
"We can't move any farther," Mildred said, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. "We've got to shut those guys down. Jesus, the ore in the cart is starting to melt!"
"Keep others busy," Jak said. "I'll take mine."
Mildred poked her weapon's muzzle around the front of the cart and sent beams into the centers of the helmets of the shooters hiding in the dimple. Her laser pulses struck the EM shields a foot or so in front of the guards' eyes and veered off to the right, cutting shallow trenches in the glass. Because of the intense energy flare caused by the deflection, the troopers couldn't acquire fresh targets.
Jak meanwhile had scooted between the pair of sledges. The heat waves coming off the carts made the mine entrance shimmer and dance in his tribarrel's open sights. He didn't aim for the four troopers crouched just inside the entrance's overhang. Instead, he aimed at the overhang itself. Aimed and fired, flattening the trigger. Jak swept the front edge of the tunnel roof with laser light. Like dirty green candle wax, the glass turned to liquid and poured down on the troopers.
Splashed by at least a ton of molten glass, the guards dropped, slid, fell to the ground. The liquid cascaded over their helmets, shoulders and weapons. Though their battlesuits protected them from the extreme temperature, they were coated by the molten glass. As the thin layer quickly chilled, it hardened, cementing the segmented plates together. The joints of the suits no longer bent. The arms wouldn't move, the legs wouldn't flex. The troopers turned to statues as they tried to rise.
Jak's sustained burst had evaporated the mine entrance's overhang, forming a semicircular crater on its threshold. The four frozen troopers were no longer protected by the tunnel ceiling. They fell under a hail of hurled pieces of ore.
The two guards in the dimple began picking off the stone throwers one by one.
Mildred rose up to a kneeling position and fired, sweeping her laser beam through the klieg light's tripod legs. She angled the cut so it would fall onto the men in the dimple.
The huge lens crashed into the hole. The weight of the housing pinned the troopers. A blinding arc of discharged power was followed by a cloud of oily black smoke. The arc light continued to flash, and the smoke became a plume. Inside the dimple, fire enveloped the guards.
The surviving troopers were on the move, and they moved with purpose, as a fighting unit.
Jak saw that he and Mildred were about to be flanked. "Follow!" he said, leading Mildred around the end of the sledge line.
With energy pulses whistling at his heels, he dived behind the toppled water tank.
Mildred tried but couldn't follow because of the intensely focused fire. If she'd made for the water tank, the overlapping pulses would have chopped her into a hundred small pieces. She darted instead to the left, rounding the far side of the ore truck. As she made the turn around the back bumper, she got a look at the enemy position.
The remaining troopers had banded together. There were five of them, and they fired from the same spot. They knelt on the flat just back from the crater where the mine entrance used to be, and where their comrades still lay trapped inside their own glass-glazed battlesuits.
"Dammit to hell," Mildred muttered.
By now, the troopers had to have called for help from Slake City, which meant reinforcements were probably on their way. Which meant she and the other companions had run out of luck.
The massed fire from the top of the mine had already accomplished one thing: it had split her and Jak up, which allowed the troopers to concentrate their fire on one or the other position. They started by pouring it onto hers, on the opposite side of the half loaded ore truck.
Everything was okay for a minute or two, then molten glass began seeping out from under the rear gate. It splashed on the ground, cutting deep pits in the surface. Mildred was forced to abandon her position and move to the front of the wag.
Across the compound, she could see Jak, dead white against the rusting steel of the water tank. He was unable to return fire because of the barrage of laser pulses striking the front of the tank. The water remaining inside the toppled cylinder had started to boil. Clouds of white steam rolled up through the splits in the tank's welded seams.
He flashed her a hand signal. Five fingers, counting down.
She nodded back.
They had no choice.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Krysty put her ear to the door of her windowless cell. Outside in the hallway, she heard the sounds of boots running and the rumble of heavy objects being rolled along the floor. She drew her head back. Something was up. Something had changed; she could sense it.
The invaders weren't just rearranging the furniture in their grim hive.
They were mobilizing for something.
An attack on some other nearby barony?
That was inevitable. As was the barony's fall. None of the self-crowned lords of Deathlands could withstand the power of the black army. And the destruction of the existing social order was just the first step in a larger plan. From what Ryan had told her, nothing was sacred to Dredda and her sisters. Everything was subject to interference, to manipulation. After the invaders had conquered and enslaved the human opposition, they would use their science to bleed the resources dry, to di
stort and pervert the existing lifeforms. This same philosophy had led to the destruction of their planet, but they had learned nothing from that experience. Each thoughtless, shortsighted step of theirs by default dictated the next, and the next, and the next. It was as if they were jumping from ice floe to ice floe in a partially frozen river. They deluded themselves into believing that progress was occurring, when actually the icebergs were getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther apart as the current picked up on its way to the thundering falls.
The idea that she would ever participate in the destruction of her own world, that she would become one of their sisters was absurd. That would have meant becoming a nonfemale, of discarding the elements that transferred real power, which she knew was internal, not external, a product of the intimate feminine connection with the future and the past. It was a power that Dredda and the sisters had willingly exchanged for the convenience of a bigger, more intimidating shell. Along with the male outward appearance came an acceptance of the male posture of domination through physical force. Of a right and a duty to become dominant, not just over their own species, but all species.
Krysty knew these men without balls, these women without compassion had to be stopped, and stopped now, before they bred themselves and spread like locusts over Deathlands. She had to find and smash their main comp. She had to locate Ryan's seed and destroy that, too, so they couldn't use his offspring, his genetic blueprint to accomplish their ends.
She tried the doorknob. It barely turned before coming to a hard stop. Krysty closed her eyes and concentrated, summoning the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother. Her need was real and it was pure in intent. She opened herself to receiving what she had asked for, allowing it to enter her body. The power built slowly, rising through the soles of her feet to the center of her being. It filled her like a glowing orb.