by James Axler
Thorpe considered the choices. “So what do we do?”
Mace gave Thorpe a disappointed look. “The reactors are everything. Imagine your locks with ’lectricity and steam. Imagine old Luc Toulalan without the reactors and without a son. We’ll build a year to two, consolidate our confederacy, and meanwhile let the old bastard grieve himself into his grave. When the French start fighting over the barony, we make our play. Right now, we get on our bikes and we burn for the Winnipeg.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lake Winnipeg
Ryan rolled the rig toward the ice. It had taken them an hour to find a flat spot where the semi could mount the frozen lake. The truck bed with its heavy, tarped and tied-down payload rocked dangerously as he drove in low gear over the rocky scrap of beach. The snow-chains bit as Ryan eased onto the lake surface in low gear, and suddenly he was on the smoothest road he’d ever traveled on. Despite the cold, Six stood in the gunner’s hatch and scanned southward with his binoculars in the morning light. The Northern Lights reflected off the frozen lake and turned it pink. Ryan turned south, but he stayed close to the shoreline where he knew the icepack was solid all the way to the bottom.
The weight of their predark cargo made him nervous. Ryan upshifted and slowly pressed his accelerator pedal. The rig’s manual said the maximum recommended speed with chains was 45 mph. Ryan kept the big rig crunching along at 35 mph. The weather was clear, too clear for his liking. The needle of the semi’s aneroid barometer just kept falling. Some very big weather was heading their way, and soon.
Six stayed topside as lookout as they rumbled along. Mace’s coldhearts were burning alcohol, and alcohol burned clean. His mob of sec riders wouldn’t send up much smoke nor were they going to raise much dust in the winter-bound countryside, but he had scores of men mounted and there would be no way to conceal the sound of his engines. Six’s fist thumped the top of the cab in answer to Ryan’s thought. “Here they come!”
Ryan looked past Six’s tree-trunk legs to the shore. He spied bikers through the trees. They paralleled the semi on the road that girded the lake. A great deal of what had once been lakefront property was now overgrown, and the bikers were clearly scouting for a route to get Mace’s wags out onto the ice. They whooped as they spotted the semi and waved their blasters around their heads. Ryan shifted gears, pushed the pedal down and the accelerator needle climbed to 45 mph.
Four motorcycles crashed through the underbrush and jumped a berm to mount the ice, their riders intent on winning their silver coin from Mace. One spun out and slid fifty feet across the ice. The other three roared up behind the big rig. They whooped as Six slid down the hatch and surged forward to assault the cab. The whooping stopped as Six kicked open his door, hung out by one hand, spun his guide gun around on its lever and shot the lead biker out of the saddle. The other two jinked left to avoid the big man’s longblaster.
“Wheel,” Ryan said. He hit cruise control as Six swung back in and grabbed the wheel. The one-eyed man threw open his door with a SIG in hand. He double tapped one rider into cartwheeling oblivion. His accomplice shot away Ryan’s side mirror. The Deathlands warrior shot away his face with three quick rounds, and the biker slid away leaving a red trail across the ice. Ryan slid back behind the wheel.
“They come!” Six shouted.
Mace and his coldhearts spilled onto Lake Winnipeg down an old concrete boat ramp ahead of them. Ryan swerved the semi out toward the middle of the lake. Few shots cracked out and none hit the semi. Mace wanted the reactors, and he needed the semi to haul them away. Ryan stepped on the accelerator. Several snow chains shrieked and snapped away from his tires. Mace and his men came on. The semi was like an elephant beset by a pack of lions. Bikers came in whirling grapnels on ropes and chains. Men perched perilously on the hoods, roofs and in the trunks of Mace’s offroad wags in boarding parties.
“Now?” Six asked.
Ryan nodded. “Now.”
Six stood in the gunner’s hatch and yanked the ropes tied to the top. Two fifty-liter bladders of precious Diefenbunker diesel suddenly found themselves devoid of their chalks and tipped off the back of the truck bed. They burst like balloons and stained the ice black. Bikers spun out and dropped their bikes. Wags slewed out of control and the boarding men crouching on the hoods tumbled onto the unforgiving ice at 50 mph.
Ryan stepped on the gas. His needle climbed to 55 mph. More of his snow chains popped like shrapnel and the wheel felt greasy, slick and disconnected beneath Ryan’s hand as his traction on the ice became tenuous at best. He was in the middle of the lake, and he had more than a thousand yards of distance to work with before he slid into an unforgiving shoreline. On the other hand the semi was loaded to tolerance, and beneath the ice thirty-six yards of black winter water waited to swallow all comers.
The horde of riders and wags had reassembled after swerving around the oil slick, and they came on to close and board the big rig. Ryan was out of countermeasures. It was time to get down to fighting. He clicked his com. “Now, J.B.”
The Armorer had set charges in the cleats that held the tarp down over the semi’s cargo and rigged them with Diefenbunker Omega remote detonators. The charges snapped and the wind tore the tarp away. Mace’s mixed force of coldhearts and pirates swerved and braked in alarm. The semi wasn’t carrying four cartridge nuclear reactors on its truck bed.
It was carrying a Canadian Land Forces LAV III.
The enemy swarm broke into desperate evasive action. The turret traversed under J.B.’s steady hand. Motorcycles at this range were hard to track. Mace’s offroad wags less so. J.B. went wag hunting. High-explosive incendiary rounds sent wags spinning out and burning across the ice. They slammed into bikers, and flesh was ground between flaming steel and unyielding ice.
It ended a little too quickly for Ryan’s liking.
The Bushmaster 25 mm cannon clacked open on empty and J.B.’s voice came across the link. “I’m out.”
Ryan stepped on the gas. They were out of cannon shells, and the autoblaster on top of the LAV and the coax had been dismounted. So had the machine blaster on top of the semi. If Mace hadn’t taken the bait, the convoy would need every machine blaster that was to be had to defend itself with the LAV gone. But Mace had taken the bait, and he was in a fine rage.
“He’s empty!” Mace bellowed. “Take him down!”
The bike-riding coldhearts swarmed around the big rig and fired their blasters into Ryan’s tires. They were predark run-flats, but lethal doses of lead shattered the snow chains and chewed the rubber composite right off the wheel. Mace’s coldhearts didn’t care about saving the semi anymore, and they sent torrents of lead into the cab. The convoy had stripped the chicken armor off two of the sec wags and lined the semi’s cab and the doors with it. Nevertheless the fusillade shattered all the windows, and some of the bullets sparked and whined as they ricocheted around the cab. Other coldhearts poured fire into the engine cowling. The semi began to make a disturbing clanking sound as lead began to fill her mighty steel heart.
Six crouched below the level of the window, and Ryan was slumped so low in his seat he was driving by keeping the floating compass ball on the dash aimed due south. A stray bullet stripped the compass away in a spatter of plastic.
“Now?” Six suggested.
Ryan grimaced as he gripped the wheel and held the accelerator down. “Wait for it.”
J.B.’s voice came across the radio. “Now?”
“Wait for it, J.B.,” Ryan said.
The semi’s engine screamed. The tachometer spiked into the red line as the dying engine revved out of control. “They’re on the truck bed,” J.B. said. “They’re pounding on my hull. Some are working their way toward the cab.”
“Now?” Six suggested a little more urgently.
Something inside the semi’s engine broke
away and the tachometer and the speedometer needles fell. Ryan spoke into the link over the solid roar of blasterfire. “Now, J.B.”
Inside the LAV J.B. pumped his detonator box a second time. The bullet-size charges of C-4 he had put in the buckles of the cargo straps snapped and popped like a string of firecrackers. The straps flew away. Some of the men holding on to them flew away, as well. The LAV bounced and rocked dangerously on its road wheels free of restraints.
“LAV is free,” J.B reported. He punched his ignition and the LAV’s diesel rumbled into life. “LAV is hot.”
“Hunk! Tamara!” Ryan ordered.
The commander and driver’s hatch on the LAV slammed open. Hunk and Tamara popped up and popped caps into the coldhearts and pirates still crowding the truck bed. The semi was slowing by the second. Letting it come to a stop was suicide.
J.B.’s voice grim. “Now or never!”
“On my mark!” Ryan let go the wheel and ghost-rode his wag. Six surged up the shotgun rider’s hatch, and Ryan followed him with a SIG in each hand. Six worked his lever and pumped lead into pirate and coldheart alike. He roared in triumph as his last round smashed Thorpe from the back of the truck bed and toppled him to be ground beneath the wheels of his men, leaving a red smear on the ice.
“Now!” Tamara shouted. Six leaped from the top of the cab to the top deck of the LAV. Tamara snaked down the hatch, and Six vaulted onto the turret top, his huge frame squeezing down the hatch. Hunk waved frantically at Ryan. “C’mon!” Hunk dropped down to leave the hatch clear.
Ryan emptied his Diefenbunker SIGs into the enemies swarming around the semi and leaped for the LAV.
Mace Henning’s war club spun through the air and slammed into Ryan’s chest like a sledgehammer. The one-eyed man’s boots hit the nose of the LAV, but his knees buckled and he fell hard to the truck bed between the cab and the LAV. The semi was a ghost truck hurtling driverless across the frozen lake. Mace Henning scooped up his club and pulled his knife with his other hand. More of his men leaped from their cycles onto the truck. Ryan’s Scout longblaster was slung and he would never live to bring it to bear. He wasn’t going to live to reach the LAV. “Gonna have my way with you, Cyclops,” Mace said, leering. He raised his voice to the dozens of motorcycles surrounding the runaway semi and it rang with hatred. “Bring it down! Bring it down! Bring it down!”
Ryan rose. He left his panga and his knife in their sheaths. He clicked his com in his last act of defiance. “You heard him, J.B. Bring it down.”
Within the LAV, J.B. pumped his detonator box the third and final time. He had put tiny charges in the tarp cleats and the loading strap buckles. The Armorer had put vastly larger, shaped charges beneath the cab and the truck bed, and he had shaped them to blast downward. The charges detonated. The explosions rippled into the ice beneath the truck and shattered it. Ryan felt himself born aloft as a section of truck bed blew upward beneath his feet like a blast plate elevator. The truck continued on beneath him over the cracking ice, and the truck bed suddenly tipped backward and splashed into the expanding ice fissure. Pirates and coldhearts spun out as the ice shattered under their tires and they disappeared beneath the frigid black water. Ryan’s trajectory hit its apex and the section of truck bed fell out beneath him. The truck bed sank into the fissure and pulled the cab back across the crumbling ice and dragged it down into the depths. The LAV was buttoned up and her wheels and aquatic propellers hot. As the semi sank, the LAV bobbed free on the still water.
The cold hit Ryan like a fist to the jaw as he plunged beneath the surface.
Beneath him he saw pirates, coldhearts and motorcycles sinking into the depths. Mace Henning clawed and screamed and blew bubbles below as he went down, down, down into the dark. In a country whose waters were swarming with giant lampreys and lake monsters, he, like many Canadians, considered learning to swim suicidal. But the giant, stiff, loglike lengths of lampreys watched the sinking swarm dully with eyes too stunned by hibernation beneath the ice to do anything about the feast falling into the depths all around them.
Ryan kicked upward as his limbs tried to contract with cold. His body went from burning to numb almost instantly. He broke the surface with an enfeebled dog paddle and knew there would be no going down for the second or third time. Hunk’s voice shouted out a welcome refrain.
“Kagan! Kosha! Quinn! Man in the water! Lamprey! Lamprey! Lamprey!”
The giant, superinsulated canines leaped from the top deck of the LAV into the water. Ryan’s limbs stopped obeying him and he started to sink, but teeth seized his blaster sling, belt and a huge mouthful of his hair to keep his head above the water. Ryan went from numb to a very dangerous feeling of being warm as he was towed toward the floating armored vehicle. J.B., Six, Hunk and Tamara were shouting and waving their arms in encouragement.
Ryan had his last coherent thought before he closed his eyes.
These dogs deserve steak....
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan survived his hypothermia. It was a near thing. It had taken the LAV most of the day to crawl back across the breaking ice and reach shore, and another forty-eight hours at breakneck speed west to reach the Shilo Diefenbunker. Mildred’s medicine had dealt with most of the damage the cold had done to Ryan. Krysty’s red-hot ministrations had brought Ryan back to life. They were snug as superstorm after superstorm racked and supercooled the world above.
The Shilo Diefenbunker also had a mat-trans unit.
On the seventh day beneath the ground Ryan felt his old strength in his bones and quietly told his people to start packing up. He didn’t want arguments, temptations, tearful goodbyes or festering recriminations. He and his companions were just going to pull a fade. Ryan lurked behind to make sure no one took notice. He walked into the warehouse room with his buffalo robe around his shoulders. Beyond the warehouse, stairs led down to the mat-trans. Six, Cyrielle and their people still had no idea what they represented. Ryan limped up to a cartridge reactor and ran his hand down its smooth steel side. It would have been something to wag the power supply south and present it to his nephew in Front Royal. But even with a LAV to pull it and defend it, it would be a suicide run, and his people had no desire to spend months in the bowels of the Manitoban Diefenbunker waiting for the thaw.
Ryan sensed Six behind him but waited for him to speak.
“So. You leave.”
Ryan turned. “Yeah.”
“I wish you were staying.”
“I know.”
“I wish you would come to Val-d’Or. It is something to see, and I could use you and your people during the fight for the succession.”
“It doesn’t have to come to that.”
Six cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
Ryan looked at Six like he was a feeb. “Simple enough.”
The huge brown eyes narrowed. “And how is that?”
“You become baron. You said the old man loves you. So did Cyrielle, Yoann and others. It makes perfect sense.”
Six gave Ryan a very sad smile. “It is very kind of you to suggest it, but the laws of Val-d’Or are quite specific. To be the baron of Val-d’Or, you must have been born in Val-d’Or. I was a wanderer, a free blaster. Other than that it occurred in Canada, I do not know where I was born, nor do I know who my father was.”
Ryan shrugged again. “Still seems simple enough.”
Six’s brief, uncharacteristic sadness returned to its more usual “storms a-brewin’” countenance. “And just what do you mean by that?”
“Marry the Lady Cyrielle.”
Six’s huge knuckles creaked into fists. For a moment Ryan thought there might be violence. “Fool! I told you! The baron of Val-d’Or must—”
Ryan took a big step forward and shouted the big man down. “Marry Cyrielle, and the baron of Val-d’Or, Luc
Toulalan, declares you regent!”
Six actually backed up a step.
“Until your son, born in Val-d’Or and of the Lady Cyrielle, is old enough to become baron!”
It was the first time Ryan had ever seen Six dumbstruck.
“It isn’t unheard of,” Ryan relented. “You can have the LAV. Consider it a wedding present.”
Six opened his mouth and closed it.
Ryan shrugged. “My advice? You got four reactors. Give a reactor to Mr. Smythe on the Queen as agreed, keep one for yourself and Val-d’Or, give one to Hunk and Manitoulin, and one to Jon Hard-knife and the First Nations. That’d be a good start on Yoann’s dream of a new Canada. Oh, and make Blacktree your head sec man. You’re going to be busy, and you’re going to want someone who scares the shit out of people.”
Six’s fists fell open at his sides. “And you want nothing? You don’t want to winter here? You don’t claim a reactor? You give us the LAV?”
“My people don’t want to stay holed up for months, and wagging a reactor south?” Ryan seized on a Doc-worthy word. “It’s problematic. Our bags are packed and our mags are full. We’re fine.”
“Nothing?” Six protested.
“Something,” Ryan answered.
“Name it.”
Ryan’s voice went cold. “Change your fucking mutie policy. It’s brought you nothing but grief, and me and mine won’t ever come to Val-d’Or until you do.”
“That would grieve me sore, Ryan.” Six nodded slowly. “If I am made regent, it will be done.”
Ryan’s voice stayed hard. “Seriah likes Jak, but she doesn’t want to wander the Deathlands. She wants to go home. She wants to raise her kid and fix wags in Val-d’Or.”
“Anyone who wishes to revenge themselves upon Seriah or her child—” Six pulled himself up to his full height “—will find that road long, hard, fraught with peril, and that it lies through me.”