by James Axler
“So how did you know him?” she asked. “The Trader, I mean.”
“We rode with the Trader for years,” Ryan said, indicating J.B. at the end of the table. “But we got caught in an ambush one day and the convoy was blown to hell. Sort of parted company after that.” Which was all a hell of a big lie, but as close as the man would come to describing the chain of events that led to the discovery of the redoubts.
Just then, the rig shook slightly as the diesel engines kicked on for a moment to charge the batteries.
Kate could see nothing in the big man’s scarred face, but she had a gut feeling he was holding some info back. She had encountered a lot of rumors in her search for the Trader, and the name of Ryan appeared often in the later years, but always as a staunch ally. Then she turned to study the wiry man with glasses and the hat. Yeah, so that had to be J.B. These were the men who stood by the Trader’s side in that bad day in Mocsin and then into the Darks. Sounded like her search was over at last.
“And he’s dead,” Kate said as a question.
Pushing away his empty bowl, J.B. wiped his face on a cloth. “Don’t know for sure,” the Armorer replied honestly. “Last time we saw him, he and a friend were making a stand between a rock and a hard place. There was nothing we could do to help. They could have fought clear, but we just don’t know.”
“Did you know the first Trader?” Dean asked. “The real one?”
“We’re all real traders,” the woman said with a bitter laugh. “Just some more than others, is all.
“And, yes,” she continued. “I met the man just once. When he came riding into my ville blowing lead in every direction. His sec men shouted his name as if it were a war chant. Aced every sec man there. Cleaned the place out.”
Ryan scowled deeply at that. The Trader looting a ville? Bullshit.
“Then he set all of the slaves free,” Kate went on, one hand stealing over to rub the scars on her wrist. “Left us all of the blasters, and even gave us some supplies and books, then went away. Took nothing but water, and we had plenty of that, so it was nothing to us.”
“He did that a lot,” Ryan said, leaning back in the bench. “The man had a bad itch about scratching slavers.”
“Me, too,” Kate said. After her release from the chains, the girl had fought hard to keep from going back into them as a gaudy slut in a brothel. But after a person had been to hell, no amount of whippings and beatings could make him or her go back. Soon she stole a blaster, then a horse and wagon and left on her own.
That was the beginning of her life as a trader. First acting as armed escort for pilgrims wanting to reach new lands, then exchanging goods for services, then goods for better goods. But always on the trail of the Trader to join with the man and work on freeing more slaves. A blaster and three live rounds bought her some info that proved to be all lies, but when she returned, a hot knife got her back the weapon and the truth.
Over the years, pieces of the puzzle fell into place and then she found it, one of the Trader’s hidden depots where he cached supplies and fuel. There were a lot of blasters, grens, machine guns, all sorts of mil iron, and even a working wag that was now one of the small cargo vans of her armored convoy. But at the time it looked like a juggernaut from ancient legends. As unstoppable as a stampede and larger than the sky.
Now her wags sported a laser and dozens of missiles. Kate had a crew of fifty and three hidden caches of her own spread across the burning landscape. But still it wasn’t enough to ever feel as safe as she had that day when the big man with an easy grin fired his blaster and blew open the locks on her chains, giving her the double-edged gift of freedom.
“So these are the outlanders,” a newcomer said from the corridor. The scrawny man had wild hair, thinning at the top even though he seemed no more than thirty or so. His teeth were a disaster, badly crooked, and his left foot was obviously deformed, little more than a twisted lump at the end of his leg.
“Everything okay?” Kate demanded, all business once more.
“Sure, sure,” Eric said, limping into the room. “I have the radar on full, and our belly armor is live with current. Nobody’s getting in, or out, without our knowing. And we’re not going anywhere until this storm subsides, so I decided to meet our guests.”
“They ain’t guests,” Fat Pete stated firmly. “We cut a deal, and we’re sticking to our side. That’s all.”
“Fair enough,” Eric said. “Still never hurts to check and see if they got a tech in the group.”
“You and those damn machines.”
“Saved our ass at Hellsgate.”
“This is Eric, our chief tech,” Kate said, with a head bob. “He runs the comp that runs the show.”
“Mutie shit,” Jak said rudely, removing his sunglasses and folding them to tuck them away into a shirt pocket. “All comps aced.” The teenager knew that was only true on the surface. In the underground redoubts, the bases were run by huge banks of comps that operated fusion generators and the mat-trans system.
“Comps are real as a kick in the belly, friend,” Eric said amiably. “Quite a lot of comps still function okay. Oh, not if they were left running since skydark, then the last program is now burned into the system forever and is now the only thing they can do. But if not turned on, they’re okay.”
“If you need any help, just let me know,” Mildred offered, passing her bowl to Matilda. “I know something about computers.”
Eric arched an eyebrow at that word. The healer spoke old tech? “Convince me,” he said.
Mildred thought about all the jargon she had learned in med school, but most of that was system specific. Something general would do. “Cold is better than hot,” she said. “They go slower when they overheat. If you got comps here, then you also have some serious air conditioners to compensate for the heat of the desert.”
Erik stared at the woman in disbelief.
“Probably looted some software from an auto-body shop to monitor your engines,” the physician went on, taking a logical guess. “So what do you have on the start-up screen, clouds or an apple?”
“By God, you are a hacker,” Erik said softly. “Wanna see the nest?”
Nest. That was as good a term for every tangle of computer wires the woman had ever encountered.
“Sure,” she said, standing. “I can probably teach you how to defrag the hard drive. You would have to shut down for a while, but afterward it might double the processing speed.”
“Double?” Kate said in sudden interest.
“And we’d be without the radar and such for how long?” Fat Pete growled, uncrossing his arms. “This could just be a trick to get us to weak our defenses for an attack.”
Thoughtfully, Kate rubbed her jaw. “Or nuking save us in the next firefight.” They could try that back at the depot, where they were safe from attack and far, far away from this battle zone.
“Hell, we could do it right now,” she relented. “There’s nothing Gaza can do in this hellstorm. We’re safe for a while from any more of his rockets. In fact—”
Whatever she was going to say was cut off by a peal of thunder, the ground shaking under the war wag in a minor earthquake. Then it happened again, and again, steady and continuous as if a giant were striding across the world.
“It’s me,” Kate said into her hand comm. “What the hell is going on outside?”
“We don’t know!” Jake replied over the crackling speaker. “There’s a whole lot of explosions on the cliff, and the ground is starting to break about…there it goes!”
As he spoke, the war wag lurched into motion, wheeling backward with the diesels roaring with restrained power.
“Okay, we’re clear,” Jake said, panting. “Christ, that was close. A whole section of the cliff just broke loose and dropped into the city, but we’re clear now.”
Ryan scowled darkly at that and exchanged looks with the other companions. He didn’t know how or why, but he knew it was Gaza.
“All stations report!�
� Kate snapped, and listened to the familiar voices announcing the status of the department of the war wag, and then the other wags. Only the second cargo van didn’t respond.
“Duncan, have you got a visual on Little Sue?” the Trader demanded into the hand comm. “Duncan, can you read me?”
“It’s gone,” the man said, his voice sounding like something from the grave. “It’s just vanished in a fireball. She’s gone, blown to bits.”
“Missile hit?” Kate demanded.
“Impossible. Radar showed clear.”
“Must have been a lightning strike,” Eric said hopefully.
“Six more chilled,” Fat Pete said woodenly, his face a waxy pallor. “Sue, Jimmy, that new guy, Bones…”
Just then the pounding started once more, moving along the cliff, passing them by in powerful waves that rattled everything in the galley.
“Lightning strike, my ass. That’s cannon fire,” Ryan said, standing. “Better sound the alert, I think we’re under attack!”
“We?” Kate shot back, a hand resting on her boxy rapid-fire.
Ryan looked the blonde hard in the face. “If that’s Gaza, then we’re with you all the way.”
A long moment passed while the savage explosions continued, the rig shaking with increasing force.
“Deal,” the Trader said at last. “This way to the control room.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Got ’em!” Baron Gaza cried as the small vehicle on the monitor violently detonated.
“Confirmed,” the tank replied. “That was a kill.”
“There are more, a larger one. Find it!” Gaza demanded, leaning into the vid screen. On the control board was a vid screen with a view of the cliff. The angle was bad, and he couldn’t see much past the edge, but just that glimpse of the wag was enough. The robotic tank responded instantly to his command and blew it apart with the main cannon.
“Second target has been acquired,” it stated in the flat voice, bringing another van into sight, this one only visible halfway up from the desert ground. It seemed to be moving fast from the rain sheeting off its chassis, but the wag stayed in the exact center of the monitor as if nailed there.
“Ready on your command, sir.”
Gaza bared his teeth in a feral grin. “Kill them,” he whispered.
The turret traversed a small arc, and then the main gun fired, the barrel pulsating with a high-pitched hum. A split second later the black hole appeared in its side and the wag flipped over sideways as if exploding from within. Bodies and wreckage flew into the storm, a tire going over the edge of the cliff and falling from sight.
“Target has been eliminated,” the machine said, patiently waiting for the next command.
The metal voice was getting clearer constantly, as if knocking off the dust of a hundred years of sleep. That made sense to Gaza. If you built a machine this complex, what the hell difference was there between it and a living thing? None that he could see.
“Anything else? Is there a large wag, covered with guns and missiles?”
“Wag?”
“Vehicle, truck—is there any other enemy transports? Any further movement on the cliff?”
There was a brief pause, as vid screen flicked along the visible length of the cliff, large sections hidden behind the preDark buildings. Only a few of them still had fires burning in their guts. The rest were cold and dark, many beginning to crumble from the combination of fresh air, fire damage and the acid rain. The preDark city was dying before his eyes. In a few days this would be only a hole in the ground filled with rubbish and bones.
“Negative. The perimeter is clear. Mil-sat relays inoperative for unknown reason.”
Try the end of the world, tin brain. “Well done,” the baron complimented. “Stay razor.”
There was a long pause. “Razor, sir?”
Fuck! “Stay…sharp and on alert,” Gaza said carefully, feeling a trickle of sweat flow down his face. Damn, he had to be more careful than that.
“Roger, order confirmed, sir. Alert status will be maintained at razor level.”
Unnerved, the baron arched an eyebrow at that but forced himself to say nothing. So it learned, eh? That was both good and bad. He was riding a wild mutie here, but there was no other way out of this hellhole but this behemoth.
Hunched in the gunner’s chair, Kathleen held her eyes closed tight, hands over both ears. She was clearly terrified by the sentient machine. Gaza sneered—well, too fucking bad. There were lots of sluts in the world to replace her, but only one behemoth. Yeah, good name.
“Alert, change of plans,” he decided. “We shall leave the area and begin digging efforts. But shoot anything you see. The…enemy has a lot of missiles and they must be stopped.”
“Confirmed.”
Setting the tank in motion, Gaza was first startled, then delighted at the smoothness of its ride. Somehow the machine adjusted itself to always stay level, even as it rolled over the preDark cars. On the side monitors, the machine was passing dozens of stores ripe for the looting. But that wasn’t pressing at the moment. There was a stash of MRE packs in the tank, enough for him and Kathleen for a few days. After that, he could get all he needed from the Trader. He knew that she had hidden depots across the Deathlands filled with fuel, food, rockets, everything. The tank was powered by some tech thing called a fusion reactor, so didn’t need any fuel, but the rest would come in handy as rewards for his new army of sec men.
As it cleared a squat monolithic structure, the western face of the cliff came into direct view and now the turret swung around and hummed again, a fireball instantly exploding on the rocks.
“Is this what we’re firing?” the baron asked, lifting a plastic cube in his hand.
“Confirmed,” the machine responded as the cannon hummed again, and then again.
The baron turned the object about so that it reflected the rainbow lights from the complex control boards. At first he had thought it was sort of paperweight or target marker. The thing was only a greenish cube about the size of his fist. There was no brass, no C-4, not anything that he recognized as dangerous.
“Explain how this works to my civilian wife,” the baron said, pronouncing the old words carefully and glancing at the woman cowering in the chair.
The machine started into a tech talk involving kinetic energy and caloric conversion that was far beyond his understanding of such things. But he slowly got the idea. Yeah, a strong man could hold a bullet in his hand and throw it at you with all of his strength and it wasn’t going to do anything. The bullet wasn’t dangerous; it was the speed of the lead. This thing took those cubes and fired them so nuking fast they hit like bombs.
“How many more in storage?” he demanded, placing the cube aside with some reverence.
“Four hundred nine.” The cannon hummed. “Four hundred eight.”
And the truck in the park was filled with thousands of them. Once he got out of this fucking city, there was nothing and nobody in the world that could stand before this monster war wag.
“Hit the new cliff lower so the rocks pull themselves down,” he directed. “Then hit the fresh fall high to widen the destruction. Gotta have a wide path for a wag…for a tank of this size.”
“Confirmed, sir,” the machine replied, and the cannon shifted its angle, humming and humming as fresh sections of the rocky cliff exploded into pieces, the rubble tumbling into the sinkhole and slowly building a wide sloping ramp that was reaching for the surface and freedom.
The cannon hummed, and whole new sections of the cliff came tumbling down, the pile gradually growing in width as the rainy desert sands began to flow down into the city.
Gaza was pleased it responded so well. Mebbe he was getting good at this tech talk. But he had to stay double razor, keep everything simple and try to talk as if he was preDark. Treat this as his new wife and the world would be his command!
Once he got out of this fucking pit.
IN THE CONTROL ROOM of War Wag One, the group
of people listened to the thick silence coming from the ceiling speaker. Only a second earlier it had been the driver of Cargo Van Three, then there was an explosion and nothing.
“War Wag Two has confirmed,” Jessica said, a radio receiver held to her ear. “Three is gone, blown to pieces.”
“Aced, a dozen of us like muties in a pit,” Blackjack said, frowning at the concept.
Standing in the doorway, Anders said nothing, but his face was a mask of controlled terror. Twice, he started to speak, but decided to remain quiet.
“Yeah, but aced us with what?” Kate demanded angrily, slumping into her chair. “What the nuking hell hit us?”
“It came from the city,” Jake said hesitantly. “Or at least, I think it did. Damn thing moved so fast I couldn’t really track it in flight. Only the afterghost on the screen showed where it had come from.”
“Impossible! Nothing moves that fast,” the Trader snapped. “Check the screen.”
“I did,” he stated firmly. “It’s working fine.”
“Laser?” Dean asked.
“Nothing on the thermal scanners,” Jessica stated. “Cold and clear.”
“Rain hide heat sig,” Jak suggested.
The woman shook her head. “The downpour only makes the air colder and increases a heat sig. This was no rocket.”
“Armbrust rocket fires silent and cold,” J.B. said hesitantly.
“The ear didn’t hear any cannons firing or rockets flying either,” Eric’s voice said from the speakers. The comp tech was back in his air-conditioned blister of tinted plastic, with Mildred standing nearby, the two of them surrounded by a maze of wires and cables.
“Armbrust makes noise flying. No way around that.”
“It’s a coil gun,” Ryan said, rubbing a fist into a palm. “Gotta be. That’s the bastard thing that makes sense. Trader found one a long time ago.”
“Somewhere down there, Gaza found a fucking coil gun, a portable one like a bazooka, or an APC,” Krysty said, then scowled. “Mother Gaia, he was going for spare parts for his busted APC and found an armed one!”