by James Axler
They looked… Well, like a cross between humans and squirrels and something called an Ewok, which he’d seen in an old vid.
“Rest, human,” said the one without the lighter. “You’re feverish.”
“Who—what are you?” he croaked. To his ears, his words were harder to understand than theirs; they came out in such a tormented croak.
“Ow! My thumb!” Light Sleeper exclaimed. He yanked the singed digit back from the hot friction wheel. Darkness reclaimed the cave.
The second voice said, quite distinctly, “We are the Little Ones.”
Blackness claimed Ryan once more.
AFTER HE HAD DISMISSED his new conversational partner’s associates to get squared away in their new quarters and assignments, the General shooed Helton and the other guards out of his office. When he was alone, he pressed a button hidden on the underside of the writing surface of his rolltop desk. A moment later a figure descended the spiral staircase from the overhead pass-through and battle deck.
A splendid touch, that, the General thought for the thousandth time. He hoisted his brandy goblet to the long-dead designers for so well combining space-efficiency and elegance.
The man who stepped off the brass-railed stair wore black knee-high boots, whipcord riding pants of a color somewhere between the olive drab worn by many of MAGOG’s crew and gray, and a stiff tunic, just off-white, with a high square collar that suggested either a man of the cloth or an ancient Nehru jacket. The General, who loved little better than reading about powerful men of previous eras, had learned all about Nehru from the reference works stored in the database of MAGOG’s unbelievably capacious living steel. Along with being stiff, the tunic had a bulky look to it, as if it concealed body armor. The General knew better.
That pleased him, too. He liked having things on people. Especially his own subordinates, and most particularly when they were as capable and unscrupulous as his head of intelligence.
The new arrival was small and spare, almost desiccated. The skin stretched over his narrow skull was oddly colorless, although more like a sun-bleached version of his jodhpurs than the albino captive who’d just been hustled off, snarling and struggling, with his wrists still secured behind him by nylon restraints. Except for thin arched eyebrows that might have been drawn on, his head was as bald as the globe of the pre-War Earth on its polished-brass stand in the corner of the General’s sitting room-cum-office. The only discordant touch in this ensemble of shades of gray was the black Mad Dog eyeglasses he wore. He never showed himself without them.
The General saluted him with his goblet. “Ave, Hubertus! Hail and good morning.”
Hubertus smiled thinly. The gesture appeared to hurt his narrow lips, as though they were cracked.
“So, do you think it’s them?”
“Let me see,” Hubertus said in a siccant voice. He raised a black-gloved hand and began to tick off points on the fingertips. “A short, middle-aged man, deadly in combat and a master gunsmith, who wears a fedora, a leather jacket and wire-rimmed spectacles. A long-haired albino youth. A sturdy black woman and a tall, erudite derelict whose mind had a tendency to wander great distances. A tall man with long, curly black hair and an eyepatch, who habitually carries a sniper’s rifle. Finally, a tall woman of remarkable statuesque beauty who, if reports can be believed, has brilliant red hair that moves of its own accord, like Medusa’s serpents.”
He lowered his hands and shook his head. “I wish I had reviewed young Captain Helton’s report of yesterday’s raid earlier.” “Don’t beat on yourself,” the General said. “It was just another strong-back sweep. We do ‘em all the time. Who knew anybody unusual would be lurking among a gaggle of sorry-ass travelers?”
“Just so. But it is my business to know, and it embarrasses me when I do not. I detest surprises. Counting the one-eyed man who attempted to resist our men and fell into the Big Ditch after having been shot, we have accounted for five of the six individuals who are most commonly and consistently reported as turning up, totally at random, in locations from north to the south.”
“Except the woman.”
“Except the woman. Unless there exists another band of five individuals precisely fitting descriptions repeated dozens of times—and even the names they gave us match up well with our information—then either the woman has left the party or she managed to elude Helton’s men. Given that she figures prominently in practically all reports we have collected, she is an accomplished survivor. My wild-ass guess is that they simply missed her.”
“Nobody’s ever managed to bag the one-eyed man before.”
Hubertus gave a curious one-shoulder shrug. “The trail ends for all of us, General, sooner or later. Few if any of the opponents Ryan Cawdor and friends have encountered in their past can have been as well-trained and equipped as our soldiers.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Hubertus. If a third of the stories are true, he was the toughest nut of the whole conspicuously hard-shelled bunch. I’d feel better if we at least had a body.” He sipped. “Ah, well. Like you say, everybody’s string plays out sometime. Yesterday must not have been a good day for him.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Well, thank you, Hubertus. This is good news overall. Damned good news indeed.”
The intel chief continued to stand stiffly, even for him. The General cocked a heavy eyebrow at him. “You still have something on your mind, S-2?”
“Sir, there’s one thing I’m having trouble understanding.”
The General raised both eyebrows. “That I find difficult to believe. Go ahead, Hubertus. I’m dying to hear.”
“I fail to see why Your Excellency posted the new captive to billets as if they were common recruits, rather than remanding them to me for a thorough interrogation.”
The General, normally a man of fanatical persistence, had long ago given up trying to break his intel chief from calling him “Your Excellency.” Mebbe he hadn’t tried quite as hard as he might have.
“The only explanation for their cropping up all over the continent and no doubt beyond—sometimes, our correlation of reports indicates, being spotted in one location mere hours after having been reliably observed a thousand miles away—the only possible explanation is that they possess the secret of the matter-transfer network.”
“Mebbe so, mebbe so. Probably, I guess. But I’m after bigger fish, Hubertus. Much bigger.”
“The Great Redoubt,” Hubertus said tersely. His expression suggested someone had recently tracked fresh dogshit on the luxuriant rug.
“Of course! That’s key, Hubertus. Absolutely key.”
He tipped his head to one side and regarded his intel chief quizzically. “You still think I’m chasing will-o’-the-wisps, don’t you?”
“Certainly, Your Excellency has solid reasons for postulating the existence of this ‘Great Redoubt,’ so-called.”
“‘Postulating?’ Postulating? My ass. It’s in the damned records, Hubertus. In the database files in black-and-white.”
“So are approximately eleven thousand pages of documents pertaining to Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.”
“But the Great Redoubt exists. The old guys knew the war was coming. They set up their Continuity of Government program far in advance. We could deduce the existence of the Great Redoubt from what we know of their thoughts and actions even if they didn’t explicitly talk about it in the records!”
“Your Excellency is no doubt correct.”
“Then wipe that skeptical smirk off your face. Look, the redoubt is real. It’s key to everything. Don’t you see? If—strike that, when—we find the Great Redoubt, we’ll get the mat-trans system too. Where else would complete documentation on such a system be stored? Where else would its control center be? Mark my words, Hubertus. I am going to find the Great Redoubt, and find it soon. I’m already close enough to smell it. And when I do, you—we—will have your damned mat-trans as well!”
“As you say, sir. That being the case, why not let me probe
for what they know?”
“Because, if they are who you believe they are, I don’t think torture will break them. Not even your special brand of torture. Like I say, they’re hard-core. Even the women. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they all knew the secret of willed self-death.”
Hubertus made a skeptical noise, somewhere in the depths of his tunic.
The General leaned forward in his chair, making emphatic motions with his large hard hands as if to break down his intel chief’s resistance with karate chops. “Look. We’re the good guys here. We’re working to bring an end to the anarchy. Restore peace and prosperity. Reclaim the Deathlands for life. These are intelligent people, exceptional people—hell, they’ve shown that, even if by some chance they aren’t who we think they are. If we give them half a chance, they’ll probably come around to us on their own. And even a torture fan like you has to admit that freely given assistance, not to mention information, is a damned sight more reliable than the coerced kind.”
“Perhaps,” the intel chief said tartly.
The General sighed. “You’re a tough nut yourself, Hubertus. I suppose I like it that way. A damned yes-man would make a sorry excuse for a chief intelligence officer. All right, then. They’re human.” If he noticed a slight additional stiffening on Hubertus’s part he gave no sign. “They’re not chilled titanium. If we just give them a little time, decent food and decent treatment—not coddling them, mind, just the same as what the rest of our heroic men and women get—they’re going to soften. Let their guards down. Let something slip. If we can just get them to relax, eventually we’ll learn whatever we need to know.”
“I suppose anything is possible, General.”
“Betcher ass. And finally, if they don’t come across, we can always torture them,” the General said. And laughed explosively at the look on Hubertus’s pinched face.
As his master’s mirth subsided, the intel chief turned to go. When he reached the stairs the General said his name. He turned back.
“Your Excellency?”
“Bring her to me.”
“Sir?”
“The missing link. The one unaccounted for. Krysty Wroth, of the mobile hair and radiant beauty. Find her, Hubertus. Bring her to me.”
“It shall be done.”
Chapter Eight
Walking down the passageway through the rail wag car, J.B. studied the thick back of Banner’s neck. The hair was cropped short there as everywhere on his head, petering out completely before it reached his collar. Just below the last of the hair, offset a bit to the right of the spine, was the red bump of an insect bite, possibly from an early-season deerfly. Staring at that neck, J.B. thought about wrapping his hands around that neck and squeezing.
The presence of the two sec men marching right behind him insured that such thoughts would remain in the realm of pleasant dreams.
That, and his friends. Their encounter with the General had been brief, but had conveyed the impression he was just a straightforward, no bullshit kind of guy. And J.B. didn’t buy that for a minute.
Because without saying it, or a word that could be taken as menacing or even cross, the General had made it very clear that the prisoners—recruits, as they were to be regarded from here—were all very much hostage to one another’s good behavior.
And that was fine. If he was far from free, he was at least out of the slave compound and out of any kind of shackles. Three squares a day and a dry, warm and reasonably safe place to bunk looked like a pretty good deal at this point. He could hack it for a while.
The General had to die. That went without saying; you didn’t ice the best friend J. B. Dix ever had in his whole life and just go on picking and grinning and sitting in the sun. It was just a matter of time.
But there was no reason it shouldn’t be the easiest possible time.
When they reached what J.B. judged to be roughly the midpoint of the train they came to a car with a locked steel door. Banner punched a three-digit code into the pad beside it, being sure to shield it with his body. J.B. made a show of looking elsewhere and taking off his glasses and polishing them. Of course he was watching like a hawk, but the sergeant was too careful. He yanked open the door.
“Who the fuck is it?” a sawtoothed voice demanded.
“Banner,” the sec man growled. J.B. grinned. Banner wasn’t a man who was used to being talked to like that. It was fun to be around when he had to take it.
“Got a new assistant for you, Leo,” Banner said.
J.B. stood on tiptoe and craned, trying to see around the sergeant, who was taller than he was as well as wider. His pulse was already racing. The air that had puffed out when the door opened carried the unmistakable peppery tang of blaster oil.
“I hope he’s not as dead from the neck up as that last sorry sack of shit you brought me,” Leo said. “I’ve heard about people blowing their own heads off cleaning blasters. Never saw anybody triple stupe enough to actually do it before.”
“Naw. This one’s a real expert.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s an ex-spurt. Of Daddy’s jizz. Even if the better part of you did run down your daddy’s hind leg, Banner.”
Banner made a noise deep in the barrel of his chest and stepped aside. Past him, J.B. saw a man a little bit taller than the sergeant but considerably heavier. Indeed, he looked like a couple hundredweight of potatoes poured into a pair of greasy coveralls. He had graying ginger hair that stuck out in random clumps like bunch grass from all around a face that looked like a collection of fists. The pores on the big red tuber of his nose looked like the holes in a hornet’s nest. He was cleaning his hands on a red rag.
“In,” Banner said to J.B.
The Armorer brushed imaginary dust off the leather sleeves of his jacket and strolled past Banner without glancing at the man.
Leo jerked up his multiple chins in a peremptory gesture. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Banner.”
“You two enjoy your dream date,” the sergeant said. He backed out and shut the door with what J.B. thought was unnecessary force.
He looked around. He was in a well-lit and well-equipped armorer’s shop.
It looked like heaven to him.
“Name’s Dix,” he said, “J. B. Dix.”
From somewhere Leo whipped out a silvery handblaster and aimed it at J.B.’s forehead.
“Show me the secret of the M-9,” he growled, “or I put some hair on the wall!”
MILDRED WAS INTRODUCED to Singh, the thin, harried dark woman who was MAGOG’s chief medic, in the antechamber of what she was by now not surprised to discover was a small but immaculate and well-appointed surgery, all gleaming stainless steel.
“You’re actually a doctor?” Singh asked, skeptical over her pulled-down mask. People these days were extraordinarily disease-resistant by Mildred’s standards, but when it came to cutting open human bodies, only a fool took chances. “How is that possible?”
“I’m a healer,” Mildred said cagily. “I was trained by a knowledgeable old man.”
Singh nodded. “I guess I’m lucky to have you. After the raid, I need all the hands I can get.”
Looking past the woman to where a group of people in pale green scrubs were prepping a patient, Mildred was startled to recognize an erstwhile member of the travelers’ caravan on the steel table. “You’re treating the laborers?”
Singh’s expression hardened. “They’re human beings, aren’t they?”
Mildred was doubly startled; it was a reaction more out of her own time than this. “I watched them gun down two dozen men, women and children, just because they weren’t fit to work on the track.”
The medic nodded grimly. Then, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one was in earshot, she leaned her head close to Mildred’s and whispered, “Don’t expect anything that happens on this train to make any kind of sense. That way you might keep some semblance of sanity.”
“EASE UP THERE, friend,” J.B. said. “I ain’t got en
ough hair to have you going and doing that.”
Leo’s blue eyes were watery but determined behind the lenses of his safety glasses. He said nothing. The blaster didn’t waver by a thousandth of an inch.
“Your M-9 Beretta,” J.B. went on, “called the Model 92 for the civilian market—that’s an S there, with the slide mounted safety, and I’m rad-blasted if I know why they thought that was an improvement over mounting it on the frame—had one peculiar vulnerability.”
Almost casually he reached up and laid a hand over the top of the blaster. His index finger punched the magazine release, spitting the magazine onto the floor. His thumb pressed the takedown-lever release on the right side of the frame, just in front of the trigger guard. His third finger pushed down the takedown lever itself. The three motions flowed one into the other with precise practiced speed.
Then he pulled the slide assembly, with barrel and recoil spring, forward right off the weapon, leaving Leo holding nothing but the frame.
“Which happened to be that you could take one apart while it was pointed at you. If you knew what you were doing.” He tried not to sound smug.
Leo turned up his free hand and opened it. J.B. dropped the blaster parts into it. The chief armorer worked the muscles of his face. It looked like a giant trying to crack his own knuckles one-handed.
“You’ll do for now, you smug son of a bitch,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll prob’ly kill you in the morning.”
THE WIND STIRRED dry silver-gray tufts of buffalo grass. Though winter was near its end and the days were warm, the brief but furious spring rains hadn’t brought the first hints of green to the land. Which were about all the green this land ever got.