by James Axler
The grass tickled Krysty’s nose as she lay on the red sandstone caprock rim of a low mesa with her nose stuck in the clump. She was watching the rail line that lay below. She’d been following it for two days now. Rather, she was watching the now-dirt road that ran alongside it.
Four vehicles rolled east, two open scout wags and two pickups filled with sec men and their longblasters. In the passenger seat of the lead dune buggy rode the youthful captain who had overseen the massacre, metal breastplate gleaming, face shining like a young god’s.
Krysty’s muscles and belly squirmed with the desire to sight down one of the M-16 longblasters she had relieved the deserters of, draw bead on that fine young head, end that brief but oh-so-destructive life with a spinning needle-nosed bullet. She forced herself to lie still. The range was two hundred yards at least, not an easy shot. The M-16 was capable of accuracy over surprisingly long ranges, but this one had only iron sights, and its light bullets were susceptible to the treacherous desert wind over distance. And Krysty wasn’t the marksman Ryan had been, to say the least.
Even if she had known beyond doubt her bullet would trephine that dark-haired skull, let air and sunlight in and life out, she wouldn’t have taken the shot. Yes, the captain had to die. She had to kill him, or at least be the cause of his death even if her finger didn’t pull the trigger or her hand plunge the blade.
But he was just one among many. A significant one; but a mere one. To claim his life would risk throwing her life away with her friends still unrescued and the bilk of her blood-debt unpaid. She wouldn’t do that.
So she watched them drive out of sight, unmolested. Intuition told her they were heading back to the massacre site, to the rim above Ryan’s unmarked resting place a mile toward the center of the earth. Why they might be bound there she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter, and speculation was no part of her nature in any event. She let all thought of whys and wherefores slip from her mind.
She did keep awareness of the fact that patrols from the rail wag were out and about, with at least one all but certain to be heading back along this road at any time. There were also the coldhearts the two deserters had been looking to join. She rose up from her hiding place, moved a little ways around the end of the mesa, then began to pick her way downslope where a finger of red stone would hide her from view from the road.
She had plenty of food, mostly jerky and MREs, and water. She’d be okay for a few more days. After that, if she hadn’t accomplished her mission…
No. There could be only her quest. Worry, fear, anticipation—these could only weaken the resolve she needed to keep her weary legs driving her relentlessly on.
Forcing all conscious thought from her mind, forcing herself to concentrate solely on her footing and awareness of her surroundings, Krysty picked her way down the slope toward the desert floor.
Chapter Nine
“Still nothing?” the General asked. His voice was calm and level.
That could be deceiving, Hubertus knew. The General was normally a rational sort, but he had a temper, to say the least. And no one with any major share of his marbles intact enjoyed bearing bad news to a baron.
Especially when the bad news was that one had failed in a task entrusted by one’s baron.
“No sign of the woman at the place where the civilian convoy was detained. The patrol has spent the last day searching outward in a widening spiral. The only thing of any note that Captain Helton has reported—”
A nice touch, that, Hubertus thought. Emphasizing that if there were any blame to be spewed about for the failure to fulfill the General’s whim for the red-haired woman, his very own fair-haired boy Captain Marc Helton stood squarely to catch much of it. Which, of course, was why he insured the boy was put in charge of the expedition.
“—was the discovery en route to the site of the bodies of the two men who vanished a week ago. They seem to have deserted, as we surmised. They had been shot and looted and left behind the ruins of a gas station. A concentration of crows and vultures drew the scouts’ attention to their corpses.”
The General nodded. “Jackson and Price. A disappointment. They came from good families, those boys. I expected more of them. Not as good as Marc’s family, of course, but plenty good for enlisted men. Not your usual delinquents who turn into coldhearts. Mark my words, Hubertus. There’s nothing more important than family. That’s what shapes a man’s character, gives it content.”
Good thing the General didn’t know his family, the intel chief thought. Although, given the nature of the task Hubertus performed for the chief, he realized, that might not be strictly so.
“Captain Helton speculates the coldheart horde caught them and killed them.” He hesitated. “I fear that is almost certainly the fate that has befallen the Wroth woman as well. I must state as my considered opinion that she’s dead.”
The General sat in silence, scratching his chin. Hubertus stood braced and tried not to quake. A drop of sweat tickled his thin neck on is way down into his Nehru collar. He wasn’t a coward, but he knew the danger he was in.
“Bring them in,” the General said.
“Your Excellency?”
The General waved an emphatic hand. “Bring them back. Call in the patrol.”
“Without the woman, sir?”
“They don’t have her, do they? What kind of cockamamie question—Oh.”
He nodded abruptly. “I see. You’re afraid I’m disappointed. More to the point, you’re afraid I’ll blame you.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “Listen here, old man. When I was a child there was a man in our ville who had an old television and DVD player, and slaves to ride fixed-bicycle generators to power ‘em. He used to charge people to watch his vid collection. That was where he got the money for the slaves.
“We watched all these videos from before the war—I guess I’m stupid, that goes with saying, doesn’t it?—and the ones I liked best were the ones with lots of action. Blasters firing, explosions with bodies flying everywhere. Big surprise, right? But one thing always puzzled me. The villain in these old vids was always chilling his own henchmen. Sometimes just for the sheer spite of it. I know now it was to show the audience just what a bastard bad guy he was. But what I couldn’t figure was why anybody would work for someone like that. Why didn’t his goons run off the second they were out of his sight?”
If Hubertus were the boss in question, it would be because he’d hunt them down and chill them in various horrible protracted ways, and their families, too. But he kept his peace.
“Now, you know I’ve got no patience with incompetence, Hubertus, and a lot less with disloyalty. I know you think I’ve turned into a big old mush melon because I’m not letting you torture our star new recruits. But I’ve never been one to shrink from a good drumhead court-martial, nor standing the guilty up against a wall immediately afterward. And you know that for a fact.
“But hell, I know. Finding this redheaded she-devil was a pipe dream. It was never that important in the first place, nothing at all in comparison to grabbing the brass ring. You know what I’m talking about, Hubertus!”
The intel chief nodded. He knew.
“The track repairs are done. We’re ready to roll. And I could have every soul aboard this train out searching until the sun burned out without turning up a missing party, even if she didn’t jump in the Ditch or wind up playing R&R for about a hundred plaguer coldhearts. It goes without saying anything that could be done, you and Marc have done. I try never to blame a body for not doing the impossible. Dead or fled, we can’t screw around with her any longer. Radio Helton and tell him to haul ass back here. We’ll roll the moment his wags are secured.”
“And the laborers, sir?” They weren’t actually any of Hubertus’s responsibility. But he felt he had to say something to keep from betraying how relieved he was.
The General frowned in momentary thought. “We’ll leave them the water that’s in the tower we built for the compound and some MREs.�
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“You’re letting them go?”
“Yeah.” The General had already turned away and had picked up a sheaf of hand-written reports.
“As Your Excellency wishes,” Hubertus said.
WIND WHISTLED, veered and boomed. Head down, the ball cap she had taken off Matt crammed down on her own red hair, a pair of sunglasses she had taken from his pocket shading her eyes, Krysty clambered up another slope furred in gray bunch grass and dotted with low brush. The mad desert wind lashed her with grit and sticky bits of dried vegetation. To her left and below ran the rail line, and the road that paralleled it. The sun was high in the sky, but still short of the zenith. Despite the wind the morning was hot, although nothing to what it would be in a matter of weeks at this time of day.
She resented the cost in time and energy of keeping as much as possible to the high ground. The wisdom of it, however, had been reinforced an hour or so before when the patrol she had seen go out a couple of days earlier returned at speed. She had seen the wink of sunlight off the captain’s burnished steel breastplate as the wags passed a quarter mile away. Intuition told her MAGOG was preparing to move on, that repairs on the track neared completion if they weren’t finished already.
Inside she was whipsawed, now ablaze with the nearness of her quarry, now chilled through the guts with the dread that it would escape. Nearing the point of psychic thermal shock, the best she could do was to drive herself without rest, drinking on the move from her rapidly dwindling store of canteens and water bottles, and hope she made good enough time. To try to move along the track or road, exposed, would be begging to be caught—to fail.
Worse even than having MAGOG slip away was the prospect that she would die in a ditch like a dog, without liberating her friends or taking her revenge.
A few feet from the top, a loose rock slipped beneath her foot. Her ankle torqued dangerously. Only barely did she manage to avoid spraining.
Even so, the weight of her pack and the deserters’ two longblasters strapped to it drove her face-first into the sand. She reared up her head, shook it and spit out dry dirt. Crying out in frustration, she pushed herself up on all fours.
Whether it was a rustle of sound, all but undetectable beneath the wind, or movement in her peripheral vision, she didn’t know. Some sensation made her turn her head and look left.
It saved her vision and her sight.
Fluid struck her glasses like water from a squirt gun. She recoiled. Milky liquid half obscured both lenses of polarized glass. Then, some dripped onto her right cheek. It clung and burned like fire.
She screamed and rolled. One hand knocked the glasses from her face, the other grabbed up a palmful of sand, trying to scrub the burning fluid from her violated skin.
She was up on her knees and one arm. Her jade green eyes tracked frantically over the scrub to find the source of the attack.
It stood beneath a low chamisa fifteen feet away—a scorpion at least six inches long, its carapace yellow with branching black markings. Its pincers clacked before its nervously working mandibles. Its tail was raised over its back, aimed at Krysty like a blaster.
As she looked, the tail darted forward. Possibly pumped-out by the motion, a stream of greenish-blue liquid squirted toward her eyes. With strength born of terror she reared upright on her knees. The venom passed where her face had been half a heartbeat before and struck at the base of a clump of grama grass. It made a sizzling sound and a stomach-clenching reek. Silvery strands of the bunch grass blackened and shriveled from the poison.
There were neurotoxins in that hellbrew as well as acid or a fast-acting enzyme. Krysty felt her cheek twitching where the tiny poison drop had landed, and she was having trouble focusing that eye.
With a heave of her shoulders she shucked her pack. She threw herself to the side. Whether the creature had sprayed again she didn’t know.
She hit, rolled and came up into a crouch. She couldn’t see the mutie arthropod anymore. It was no comfort—the opposite, in fact. She didn’t want the jointed horror lurking in ambush, or sniping her from cover.
She drew her handblaster. The solid weight of the revolver reassured her, even if she wasn’t sure how much use a blaster would be.
A waving of tall tufts of grass in a manner contrary to the wind alerted her. She had the snubby pointed and was pulling through the long trigger action when the yellow-and-black creature scuttled into view. Its tail was cocking back for a shot of its own.
She fired three times, trying her best to aim using the notched backstrap and low front sight. Her second bullet neatly clipped the bulbous black stinger off the scorpion’s tail.
It ran at her, claws clacking. She jumped up. The heel of her right boot flashed down right in the midst of the churn of segmented legs. Gasping in fury, pain and terror, she stomped the loathsome thing into the earth. Then she carefully dragged her heel through some sand drifted at the bottom of a bush to try to scour off the poison and keep it from eating through her boot.
Wheezing like an asthmatic, she staggered to her pack. Her right eye was watering so severely she could see nothing from that side but a blur. Given time, she might be able to find appropriate herbs to make a poultice and counteract the workings of the toxin. But time was a luxury she didn’t have. She would have to rely upon the minute quantity of the poison she had been exposed to, and her own mutie powers of accelerated healing. And if she lost sight in that eye, well, it hadn’t slowed down her beloved Ryan.
She knelt, hauled up the pack, pulled the straps over her shoulders, then struggled to her feet. The pack felt like lead, her legs like sandbags. Bent, she stumbled to the top of the hill.
There it was. A mile away, gleaming like a river yanked out straight in the sun.
MAGOG.
And then she saw that it was moving.
“No,” she breathed. But, yes, the giant silver serpent was in motion, scarcely perceptible, but increasing as she watched in shocked horror. Without smoke or sound audible at this distance, it was pulling out toward the east and the Continental Divide.
She stood and watched as if held in some kind of suspended animation. When the train had almost passed the hill on which she stood transfixed, it was as if someone had thrown a switch and suddenly restored power to her systems. She began to run down the hill, heedless of the way her overloaded legs jarred the sockets of her hips at every step, heedless of obstacles, heedless of the need to remain unseen. She was empty of everything except the blind desperate need not to let her quarry escape.
She was too late. As if there were anything she could do to stop the fusion-powered behemoth, once it built up speed.
Stumbling, reeling, vision blacking around the edges, her lungs feeling as if they were being ripped in two each time she breathed, she reached the bottom of the hill. The last wag of the train was already over a quarter-mile distant and receding at a good clip.
Somehow she crossed the road and hauled herself up the steep embankment without even being aware of effort. She stood square between the endless narrow steel bands only to see the last of MAGOG disappear around the hip of a low distant mesa.
The wind was a wild howl now. A tumbleweed fetched up against her leg and clung like an amorous poodle. She let slip her pack again and went to her knees.
Stretched herself full length across the ties and sobbed in frustration.
Chapter Ten
On board MAGOG no one was paying particular attention to where the train had been, either the troops in the terminal blaster car or the techs in the General’s command center just back of the front engine. Had a fresh horde of coldhearts swarmed onto the tracks behind them, somebody probably would have noticed. But a lone woman climbing onto the tracks a couple of hundred yards back attracted no one’s attention. Even a tall, beautiful woman with red hair that moved of its own accord.
Of course, the hair was wound up under a ball cap and details like that were invisible at that distance anyway.
So not even the great
man himself, who was in the command center gazing raptly at the tracks in front of his mighty rolling fortress, happened to observe that the woman he’d been hunting for was standing right out in the open, getting smaller and smaller with increasing distance.
Twenty-four hours later, MAGOG’s massively parallel processors automatically deleted those particular digitized images captured by the rear-mounted video cameras from RAID storage to save space. And no one was the wiser.
THE FORMER SLAVE-LABORERS milling around their tented compound looked like refugees whose war had fled them, rather than the other way around. Marching down the road, fueled solely by her own indomitable will, Krysty was conscious enough to be amazed that they had been left alive.
She was still more amazed to see a handful of wags parked in a neat little pen of their own off the main compound, including the ones stolen from the travelers’ caravan.
People raced toward the red-haired woman as she strode up to the barbed wire. As they saw the look in her eye and the very resolute way she moved, they stopped, then faded away from her. The fact she had a pair of longblasters slung in an X across her back might have had something to do with it.
A burly black-bearded man in overalls came out the open gate. “Krysty? Krysty Wroth?”
It was one of the travelers from the caravan. She couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. It didn’t seem important somehow.
“We thought you was dead,” he said.
“Not yet.”
He pulled his head back on his thick neck and blinked his brown eyes at that. He didn’t seem to quite know what to say.
“Where are they going?” she demanded.
“What?”
She grabbed him by the straps of his overalls. “The train! Where’s it headed?”
He shook his head. “I dunno. They didn’t say.”
“They didn’t even tell us why they left us here alive,” said a thin woman Krysty didn’t remember seeing before. She turned her head aside and spit in the dust. “Not that we’ll stay that way long once the food and water they left runs out.”