by James Axler
“There’s a baron up here named Henning. Mace Henning. He’s bad news. They say his ville hardly produces anything anymore except sec men. Just about lives off tribute. He turned his eye on Val-d’Or a few years back. He’s sent probes, scouts and last year a raiding party, but they keep running into Six and losing their hair.”
“What’s with the coins?”
“They’re old money, jack to you guys, Canadian, predark. The goldy looking one is a loonie, ’cause of the bird on the back. It’s our old dollar. They say you kill ten of Mace’s enemies, or his enemy’s people—man, woman, child, mutie, it doesn’t matter—you get to wear one. The two-color one is a toonie, the old two dollar coin. You get one of them if you kill twenty.”
Doc eyed the necklace glinting dully in the dirt unhappily. “So, a three-dollar man.”
Six’s head snapped around. “Oui, Doc. A three-dollar man.” Six reached into his sheepskins and pulled out a thick leather wallet. He upended it, and over a dozen necklaces loaded with denominations fell to the ground. Some had up to four or five coins on them. “Across old Ontario, beware of a man who jingles, and should you meet a man with a silver coin? Unless you are with me, I suggest you run.”
“Henning—” Toulalan stared at the coin necklace “—he is far from his territory.”
“Yes, well?” Six spit in disgust as he snatched up the jingling pendants and shoved them back into his wallet. He left the scalp where it lay. “So are we.”
“I don’t see how he can be following us. I—”
“I told you he would find out! I told you he would use the opportunity to attack us or attack Val-d’Or! Now we know! He’s after us! It was foolish! Foolish to mount this expedition during the raiding season! Filling your father’s head with dreams! Going on a wild-goose chase when—”
“The Diefenbunkers are no wild-goose chase! They are real! You know what we seek, Six!”
“I know a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush! And we have a golden bird in our hand, Yoann! Our Val-d’Or!” Six sighed heavily. “We never should have left it.”
“Henning and a few picked men! Their ranks swollen with motorcycle coldhearts!” Toulalan scoffed. “A rabble—”
“The rabble nearly took us two days ago!”
Doc spoke quietly but his voice carried. “They are not coldhearts. They are dragoons.”
Everyone around the circle cocked their heads at Doc.
Doc continued. “These men are not simple motorcycle raiders like we have seen in the Deathlands. They are dragoons.”
Six rolled his eyes.
Ryan hoped Doc wasn’t going to go into some lecture about some general no one had ever heard of from a war no one remembered.
Toulalan gave Doc a tolerant look. “What is this…dragoon?”
Doc forged on. “Men who ride to battle like cavalry, using their mounts for speed, but then dismounting to fight on foot like infantry.”
Ryan nodded. Everyone once in blue moon Doc made some sense. “Doc’s right, bike raiders are easy if you don’t break and run. They depend on terror. They ride into a ville and everyone scatters. A good man with a longblaster can shoot them out of the saddle before they ever get close enough to do anything from the back of their bike. Mace’s men have some tactical sense.”
Six began walking in circles and waving his arms in a remarkable imitation of Mildred. “So what do you suggest we do! I have only two motorcycles left! I can’t fight them at their own game!”
“LAV them?” J.B. suggested.
Six did his looming routine over the little Armorer. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. But it is big, and loud, and we could never sneak it past Mace’s pickets. Even if we managed it, they would scatter before the LAV in all directions, only to regroup later.”
Toulalan threw up his hands. “And what do you suggest, Six?”
“We turn back. We achieved the Borden Diefenbunker. We can try for another next year.”
“And then we have to fight them? All the way back to Val-d’Or?”
Six got that sudden dry, sarcastic look on his face. “We can fight them all the way to Manitoba, and then all the way back if you prefer.”
“He will tire.”
“Mace Henning never tires. He hates you, he hates your father! He hates me and he wants our ville! He wants it all. From the Lakes to the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Val-d’Or is the key to his dreams of empire!”
Ryan watched the two men argue. Yoann Toulalan was a man with a dream. Vincent Six was a sec man who wanted to be back home defending his ville. He saw both men’s point, but both men were missing the bigger picture. “You’re thinking defensively. Best defense is a good offense.”
“Oh?” Six tried to give Ryan the looming routine and failed. He went back to sneering. “Please, I beg of you, show me your offense.”
“This Mace. How far away’s his ville?”
Toulalan’s eyes narrowed. “He has a small confederation of villes that he rules, and still more that pay him tribute to avoid war.” He shrugged. “Nonetheless the nearest is nearly three hundred kilometers northeast of our current position.”
“So where is he getting his fuel?”
“Uh…” Toulalan grappled with the new question. “He trades for it.”
Ryan gave the heir to Val-d’Or a dry look of his own. “You’re the head of a ville or a settlement that stills its own fuel. Are you going to open your gates to Mace Henning at company strength, armed and in the saddle?”
It was Six who answered. “No.”
“You figure he’s been taking the time to conquer every settlement on the way while he’s been following you?” Ryan continued.
“No,” Six reiterated. “We have been wearing Mace Henning and his men, like buckskins, for days now.”
“And?” Ryan nodded encouragingly. “So?”
Six gave one of his rare, metal-filled smiles. “And so Mace Henning has a tanker.”
Ryan glanced at the scalp in the dirt. “I smelled his fuel when I burned his bike. You’re burning Diefenbunker diesel. He’s burning alcohol. Takes a long time to distill enough to fill a tanker wag. He’s like you. Out of his range, with the good weather fading fast. Take his fuel supply, and he has to burn for home, and hope he makes it before he has a bunch of cold, hungry sec men on foot in unfriendly territory.”
Toulalan calculated. “Or it could spur him to total desperation, and one last all-out attack.”
“Yeah, and if that happens,” Ryan countered, “this time you got a LAV with J.B. in the turret.”
Toulalan nodded. He was well aware J.B. had saved his bacon. “So what do you propose?”
“Mace’s coldhearts, the bikes, the 4x4s can run off-road, shadowing you from the bushes and hills. But with a tanker full of fuel there’s only one way. Mace’s tanker is paralleling you, the best it can, on smaller, backcountry routes.”
“Mmm.” Toulalan nodded. “And?”
“And so I go take that tanker.”
Mildred’s eyes went wide. “So you’re just going to go off alone, sneak past a bunch of postapocalyptic Hells Angels and steal a fuel tanker?” She pointed a condemning finger at Ryan. “You know? I’ve seen this movie.”
Ryan looked at Mildred with sudden interest. “It was in a vid?”
“Yeah, a pretty good one, actually. It was called The Road W—”
“Did it work?”
“Um, well, yeah…it did.”
Ryan nodded. “I’m not going to steal the tanker. I’m just going blow it up, and I won’t be going alone. Six is coming with me.”
Six gave Ryan a look, but he didn’t say no.
Toulalan wasn’t happy. “You would leave the convoy without its best sec man! Your friend
s without their leader!”
Ryan walked over to Toulalan and pulled a looming routine of his own. The one-eyed man duly noted Six didn’t get in the way. The scalp on the ground had whetted the big man’s appetite to put some hurt on his opponents, and apparently he liked the way the outlander rolled. Ryan’s blue eye bored into Toulalan. “I’m going to leave J.B. in charge of the convoy. Jak in charge of the perimeter. Then me and Six are going to nightcreep on Mace Henning, open their main fuel vein and bleed them dry of every last drop of spare fuel. Meantime you burn for the Trans-Canada. We’ll catch up. Do you have a better idea?”
To his credit, Toulalan didn’t flinch under Ryan’s tombstone gaze. “What if I said I did? And it didn’t involve sending our two best men on a suicide mission?”
“I’d be curious,” Ryan admitted.
“Let me ask you a question.”
Ryan’s eye narrowed but he kept his tone neutral. “Shoot.”
“Are Baron Henning’s coldhearts amphibious?”
Six whirled on Toulalan. “No!”
Ryan shrugged. “No?”
“Not him!” Six snarled.
Ryan watched Six stomp away from the meeting in a fine rage. Ryan turned to Toulalan. “Who’s him?”
The trap was set, and Baron Mace Henning was pleased. Six barrels of black powder were set in the groins of the crumbling overpass. It was the only decent path that would take them to the old Route 69, which was the only way for a convoy that big to regain the Trans-Canada. Mace had gotten good information on the convoy’s formation from Jimmy Pickering before he got himself chilled. They would drop the span after the first two wags. Nolan was in a covered firing pit with the Carl Gustaf recoilless. He would put his rocket-propelled grenade into the fighting LAV like he’d done at the bunker, and take out the newcomers. This time the convoy would have no time to circle up. What they would have was a twelve-wag pileup against the rubble. His men would surge in from the bushes on both sides and dismount. They would discharge the home-rolled rockets into any wag trying to pull out of the pile, and then his every last man would assault the convoy.
It was a good plan.
Tag had had a good hand in it. They both accepted they would lose men, but the survivors would earn their change, and Mace would have Toulalan’s knowledge to open the bunkers and his body to use as a hostage against his father. His sister would be leverage against both. The bunkers would open in front of him. Val-d’Or would open in front of him. In the end he would kill Baron Luc Toulalan and his son, Yoann, hard for defying him, but not before he had learned every last scrap of useful information they had. He would let Cyrielle Toulalan live and impregnate her. In any ville Mace conquered, he generally kept one female of breeding age from the baronial line alive and gave her one of his. It helped cement the new line of succession.
The sound of a bike at full throttle interrupted the baron’s dreams of conquests of battle and the flesh. “Look alive, boys!” he bellowed. Mace checked the loads in his old C-1 submachine blaster. He thrust his club under his belt and loosened his long wickedly curved skinning knife in its sheath. It was a risk going in, but Mace had learned long ago that barons who hid in their villes and leaned on their sec men ended up being replaced by their sec men. Mace had been just such a sec man of ambition himself.
Leading from the front was one of the basic tenants of leadership. He was utterly ruthless with his men. He had only one punishment for transgression or failure. Every man knew Mace Henning would crush a skull just as soon as he would hand out a loonie. By the same token each man knew in his bones that Mace Henning doled out neither unless it was deserved, and each man knew in his bones Mace wouldn’t send them anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. His sec men lived off his largess, and they lived large when not on duty.
Mace unlaced the neck of his riding skins. Sec men who were close by nudged one another and began whispering up and down the line as Mace exposed the sun-bright Canadian gold maple leaf coin that lay against his chest. It was the other symbol of his rule. The only other person allowed to wear the golden coin was the son he had left behind in his base ville to rule while he was on the road. Mace readied himself for battle. If he fell, so be it. The favored son he had left behind would never be the man he was, but he was brave, and if he listened to Tag he might live long enough to see grandsons himself. Mace threw back his head and laughed.
Frankly, he was looking forward to this fight.
His men laughed with him. They were salty. They were ready to take Toulalan’s wag convoy once and for all. Their baron was going in with them. Mace’s eyes narrowed as a lone rider came into view. He lifted his field glasses. It was his bastard Red. The younger man’s bike went airborne over every lump and fold in the ground. He was at full throttle and driving out in the open to make time.
This couldn’t be good.
Mace stepped out of his blind. “Tag, Butch, Ledge. Everyone else stay in position.”
Red caught sight of his father and sped over to him, jumping off his bike breathlessly. Mace took his own canteen and tossed it to the scout, who gulped water. Mace let him cut the dust for a few seconds and then growled. “What?”
Red lowered the canteen and gasped as he wiped his mouth.
“They aren’t coming!”
“What do you mean, they aren’t coming?” Mace demanded. “They have to come north on the 69 if they went to hit the Trans-Canada, and to do that they have to come through us.”
“I know, Baron. I know.” Red nodded vigorously. “But they broke north by northwest. They went straight up the 10 and didn’t stop.”
“North by northwest—” Mace pulled out his map and shook his head in disbelief. “They’re heading up the Bruce.”
Tag tapped a finger on the Bruce Peninsula. “Then we have him.”
“Yeah, but why? Why is he paintin’ himself into a corner? Yoann’s smarter than that. Even if he isn’t, Vinny is.”
“The First Nations have a trading post.” Tag’s finger moved up the finger of land that split Georgian Bay from Lake Huron. “Here, at the tip, at Tobermory.”
“What good is that going to do him? That’s land end.”
“Trading camp,” Tag reminded him. “High summer, neutral ground.”
“What’s he going to do, winter there?” Mace scoffed. “They’ve got no facilities for a convoy like his. His wags will freeze up and be useless come the thaw. He isn’t running scared. He’s won our last two dust-ups.”
“Only two explanations then,” Tag agreed. “He’s either laying some kind of trap we can’t figure or he doesn’t see the Bruce as a dead end.”
“There ain’t boats on the Lakes that can carry his convoy. Only the biggest barges can carry a wag, and he’s got a semi and armor. He’d need every barge on the Lakes, and if he’d lined them up we’d know it.”
Tag gave his baron a sidelong glance. “There’s one.”
Mace stopped short. “He hasn’t been on Huron in years. Not since the Soo Lock Pirates broke the shipping treaty. Swore he’d never come back.”
Tag shook his head unhappily beneath the hood of his robe. “Toulalan got inside the bunkers. He’s got the kind of wealth that can buy almost anything. Once he’s on the water, we can’t track him. We don’t know where his next destination is yet, and he can make landfall anywhere. He’s going to get one hell of a jump on us.”
“Can we get ahead of him? Drop the same ambush we got here?”
Tag looked up at the sun and calculated. “He’s got a jump on us. We’d have to leave now. Go overland and ride hard as we can. We’d have to leave the wags behind, and we’d be far from resupply and most importantly, refueling. We’d be on fumes, and even then there’s no guarantee we’d make it in time.”
“You been to Tobermory, right?”
“Yea
rs ago.”
“How are the roads?” Mace asked.
“That’s to our advantage. The only decent route up the Bruce is the 6, and from what I hear it isn’t in good shape. The Tobermory trading camp is on the tip of the Bruce. Almost everyone who goes there goes over the water.”
“We’re only fifteen klicks from the water ourselves. We get a boat, a good-size one. Red’s been on the water. So have you. Butch and Ledge lived around here most their lives. Red will lead it, but you tell him what to do. You put a strong party on it, sail hard for the point and drop into Tobermory camp a good day before Yoann and his convoy, and be ready for him before he embarks.”
Tag stared at his baron long and hard. “Red, Butch, Ledge. Take a walk.”
Mace nodded and the three men went back to their positions in the bushes by the road. Tag took a deep breath. One didn’t contradict Baron Mace Henning lightly, and never in public.
“Mace, no one raids fishing villages except mutie bands or the most desperate idiots. Half of the provinces live on smoked fish come the winter. You’ll set a real dangerous precedent.” Tag’s voice grew cold and urgent. “No one, and I mean no one, raids a trading camp. That’s holy ground. Word gets out Mace Henning makes war in the trading camps, and we’ll be banished. Worse, we’ll be at war with the First Nations, and we’ll be in a permanent state of war with every ville on the Lakes. You attack shipping, then you’re a pirate, as well, and the trifecta will be complete.”
Mace Henning seemed remarkably unconcerned. “What’s a trifecta?”
“It means you’ll be pounding down the last three nails in your coffin, Mace—one, two, three.”
The baron laughed. He shook his head at Tag’s concern. “Tag, you’re going to trade for that boat, generously, as a matter of fact. You’re going to pay the captain to get you to Tobermory as fast as he can, and pay him handsomely. You’re going to treat him like a prince.”
“And Tobermory?”
“You’re just going there to do some business, like everybody else.”