by James Axler
He nodded and left through the forward door.
“How you feelin’, Doc?” J.B. asked.
“If I apprehend your question properly, John Barrymore—sane. Quite sane. This mountain breeze quite clears the head. It smells like freedom.”
“Right answer. Jak, hand that piece to Mildred. You gals hold tight here. Jak and Doc, come with me.”
LEO SAT at a worktable in the shop compartment. He was eating stew from a steel tray and reading a book on twentieth-century blasters.
The door slid open. Leo scowled. No one had better dare intrude upon his inner sanctum like this. Not even—
“Dix?”
The bulky chief armorer rose, then, holding his hands up. It was indeed his assistant who had entered—behind a leveled Benelli 12-gauge. The unlikeliest pair of human beings Leo had ever set his bulging blue eyes upon followed him: a tall, gaunt old man with lank graying hair, wearing a stand-up collar and a frock coat, and an albino kid with ruby eyes.
“What’s the joke, Dix?” Leo demanded. “’Cause I’ll let you know in advance I ain’t laughing.”
“The joke is,” J.B. said, holding down on the blaster tech as Doc and Jak moved purposefully past him, “that you’re gonna live. Provided you don’t go making any false moves.”
BECAUSE THE LINE TWISTED through the mountains, and even more because it was hard to pick up line breaks at night even with the headlight and low-light TV, MAGOG hadn’t picked up her usual speed. She wasn’t going that much faster than a fast run.
So J.B. told himself as he put the sole of his boot against the baggy rump of Leo’s coveralls and pushed him out the door of the interrogation chamber.
“See?” he said. “Nothing to it. Who’s next?”
They had recovered their belongings—especially their blasters—from the armory car. They had also toted along a few extra items J.B. thought might come in handy. He’d had to impose a crushingly strict discipline on himself, because he was just like the proverbial kid in a candy shop. He had made himself load them up with self-heats Leo kept stashed away so he could eat when he felt like it without interacting with other members of the human race. Primarily, anyway.
“J.B., have you flat lost your mind?” Mildred demanded.
Krysty shot her a sudden grin and leaped into the darkness.
“Where one so fair leads, I can but follow!” Doc declared. And did, trailing a cry of, “By the Three Kennedys!”
Jak was next, as silent as a white shadow.
Mildred stood staring at J.B. with giant eyes. “Ladies first,” he told her with a grin.
“John, don’t you dare not follow.” And she was gone.
“Dark night,” J.B. said to the dark night. He shook his head. “The things a poor boy got to do.”
He jumped.
Hit.
Bounced.
Rolled.
TO EVERYBODY’S SURPRISE they all survived with only bruises and contusions that wouldn’t leave any lasting marks to speak of. Even Leo, who’d been ejected with his wrists bound behind him.
When J.B. hurried forward to set him free, Leo was sitting beside the tracks staring after the train. To the smaller man’s surprise, the look the erstwhile chief armorer turned on him was calm.
“I oughta hate your treacherous ass, Dix,” he said. “It’s like you just hauled me outta Paradise.”
“Tell me about it,” J.B. said with genuine feeling.
Leo nodded. “That’s one reason I don’t hate you. I know it chafes your bung as much as mine to leave that behind. Or be left behind by it, as the case may be.”
With his former assistant’s help he hauled his considerable bulk aloft. “The other thing is, I was starting to get the feeling everything was heading south in a hurry. Just didn’t feel right.”
He shook his head. “Buncha damn military assholes on that train, anyhow. Never did like ‘em a damn.”
J.B. had salvaged the Browning A-5 that Leo especially loved. It was returned to the big bearded man with a pocketful of shells, on condition he not load the weapon until he was at least a mile clear of the others. He agreed glumly and stumped off back along the tracks toward Taos, muttering to himself.
J.B. watched the bearlike shadow slowly dissolve into the darkness, then he turned to and walked back to the others.
They were clustered around Krysty, peering at something she held in her hand. Curiously, he walked up and stood on tiptoe to peer over her shoulder.
In the palm of her hand she held a heart-shaped locket. A tiny red light glowed at its top.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER the armory car blew up in a brilliant white flash.
The explosion cut the wag in two. The front coupling immediately snapped free of the carriage ahead, as it was designed to do.
The next fifteen cars followed the shattered wag off the tracks and down a fifteen-yard slope, into a little stream rushing to hurl itself into the mighty Grandee gorge.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“We do not involve ourselves in the affairs of the outside world,” the tech-nomad woman declared flatly. She called herself Rounda, in apparent ironic acknowledgment if not outright celebration of her shape. Though she was fat, it appeared to be the hard fat more often seen in men.
Flames jumped head-high from brushwood piled in a clearing masked by a low ridge from direct sight of the tracks. Krysty wasn’t too worried about discovery by MAGOG’s crew. J.B. had set his bomb to go off when the train was miles beyond where the friends had made good their escape. With no way of knowing exactly when the fugitives had baled—and plenty on their hands to keep them busy—it was vanishingly unlikely the General’s makeshift army would mount a search back along the rail line. And less still an effective one.
And even if they did, Krysty thought, it might just force the arrogant bastards to face reality.
She stood next to the fire where every one of the twenty or so people gathered in the clearing could plainly see her. Her hair flowed out around her head in a sort of halation, like flame itself. Despite the protracted abuse she’d been subjected to short hours before, she felt as if charged with electricity. As if the energy of the living Earth was flowing up through the black soil and soft short grass and the soles of her feet.
A male tech-nomad, taller and narrower than Rounda and with thinning gray hair, tried to soften his comrade’s blunt words. “The one you call Paul, and whom we knew as David or Mark among other names, appears to have done both you and us a disservice,” he said gently. “We are sorry to disappoint you.”
“Speak for yourself, Cedric,” a younger man said. He was one of the few tech-nomads to show a weapon, a crossbow slung across his back that seemed primarily made of neither wood nor metal. What exactly it was crafted from was unclear in the wavering light.
“Paul knew what he was doing,” Krysty declared. “He was one of you, wasn’t he?”
Cedric frowned thoughtfully. “There are ways in which he is. He tends to walk his own path.”
“Like the rest of us don’t,” scoffed another young male from outside the bonfire’s light-circle.
“We have our traditions,” Rounda snapped. “The Rail Ghost ignores them when he sees fit—as this ill-conceived gathering shows.”
The young man in the shadows emitted a sound that was half-laugh, half-snort.
“You people got your ways,” J.B. said, “like everybody. This General does, too. Guess which set he plans to make everybody follow?”
“We don’t help Mundanes,” Rounda stated.
“But you do help yourselves, don’t you?” Krysty said. “J.B.’s right. The General is set on conquering the whole continent. He thinks he’s about to get his hands on the means to do so. What do you think is going to happen to this secretive free-roving lifestyle you’re all so protective of?”
The tech-nomads made scoffing sounds. “Others have tried to bring us to heel before, Krysty,” Cedric said, not unkindly. “But our history is long.”
“Cou
ld be it’s about to have run its course,” the Armorer said.
“Has anybody with the General’s means tried before?” Krysty challenged, her hair waving. “There’s nothing in the world to compare to that monster rail wag of his. Paul told me that, and I believe him.”
She swept them with a fierce gaze. “And you do, too,” she said in a voice so quiet the others had to lean toward her to hear.
“What do you mean by that?” Rounda demanded.
“You follow it, don’t you? You keep close track of where it travels and what it does. That’s why you’ve kept turning up so conveniently since MAGOG first smashed its way into our lives. The Rail Ghost wasn’t the only one chasing after the train.”
“Don’t push your nose where it doesn’t belong,” the bowman said. His name was Robear. “Mundanes who pry too deeply into the tech-nomad world tend to vanish from their own. Without a trace.”
Jak had been sitting on the grass with his knees up and his arms around them. Now he leaped to his feet, eyes blazing, hand on the hilt of the shortsword-sized Bowie. “Big talk cheap,” he snarled. “Threaten Krysty, fight Jak.”
The young tech-nomad spun to face him. The Armorer stepped between them, arms outstretched. “Hold on, now. Let’s everybody leave the safety on for now. If we really want to go blasting somebody, we both got plenty enemies just a few miles down that steel road, as I don’t reckon anybody’ll deny.”
As he spoke he raised his open palms, each to the level of the respective would-be combatant’s eyes. The wise Armorer knew that as long as predators, especially hotblood young male ones, kept gazes locked on each other tensions would soar. Break that lethal lock of forward-mounted eyes—hunters’ eyes—you might just break the spasm before hammers dropped and blood flowed.
So it happened. Robear and Jak each took a step back and then, as if to the same signal, crossed their arms and turned stony faces to the fire.
“That’s better,” J.B. said, dropping his arms. He stayed interposed.
“If what you say is true,” Rounda said to Krysty, “so what?”
“First, it shows that no matter what you say to outsiders, you’re all too well aware of the threat the General poses to your way of life. So you must know it’s about to go up, far up. You know of the Great Redoubt, don’t you.”
Rounda dropped her eyes. “We have heard of it. Legends.”
“You know better than that. The General knows more. He knows where to find it. It’s where he’s taking MAGOG, just as soon as he repairs the damage we did getting away. And when he gets his hands on what’s inside—Tell me, you who worship your freedom and technology—what happens then?”
An uncomfortable stillness had settled upon the tech-nomads. “He will be supreme,” Cedric said quietly.
“So will you simply give up and go extinct? Or will you stand up to be smashed down by MAGOG backed by all the might that brought about the big war?”
“But our traditions—” Rounda began.
The young man who had dissented before stepped into the light. He was tall and stiletto thin. To go with his inhumanly fine features he had green hair and pointed ears. For all her intuition Krysty couldn’t tell whether he was an actual mutie, or whether it was a dye job and makeup.
“Blow this,” he said. “Let’s not delude ourselves. We all pay lip service to the traditions, but it’s not as if we don’t break them where and whenever it’s convenient. And even if we fool ourselves, Krysty, don’t let us fool you. We’re bound together by shared culture, sure, and bonds of kinship and friendship, too, some of us. But we’re not any kind of monolithic.”
It was his turn to glare around the circle. “And I for one have no intention of allowing this madman—whom everyone here knows sure as nuke death is every bit as much our enemy as these people’s—to make himself omnipotent and then come hunting us down like rabbits. We’re people of technology. That’s our link and life. But if that means more to us than just another superstition handed down from before skydark, then it imposes on us a cultural obligation to at least make an effort to think rationally. Not slam our minds shut like the bigoted mud-ignorant Mundanes we’re all so proud of despising.”
He looked to Krysty. “You have a plan to stop the General getting his claws on the Great Redoubt?” He grinned wickedly. “You might say I’m all ears.”
No one dissented. “All right,” she said, nodding. “First, understand I’m not asking you for any major interference in what you call my world. I don’t ask for you to involve yourselves directly at all. All I ask for is transportation, which I hope and believe you can provide. And maybe a little extra muscle power.”
“Say we provide these things,” Rounda said, now sullen rather than confrontational, “how do you plan to stop the General becoming all-powerful.”
“I’m going to kill him,” Krysty said. “Him and his giant armored train.”
BLACK SHREDS OF CLOUD fled overhead against the stars. Between them and the ground, Krysty and her companions moved at a more sedate pace.
Flying! she thought, and had to fight hard to keep from bursting forth with exuberant laughter. As if sensing her mood, Corwin—the green-haired tech-nomad youth—looked back over his shoulder and grinned before returning his attention to piloting the bizarre and wonderful craft.
Three of them hummed quietly, five hundred feet above the pine-furred flanks of the mountains, with snow-clad peaks looming yet above them. Though each differed from the others in details of appearance, all of them were flyweight constructions of open tubular frames enclosing two seats, with a little internal-combustion engine that powered a fanlike blade at the rear. For lift each was slung by guys beneath a ribbed arch of synthetic fabric—parasails, the tech-nomads called them. They were strange shadows, ingenious wisps, worthy aerial cousins to the Yawl.
Corwin and two of his kindred were ferrying Krysty, J.B. and Doc to a place Paul had told her of. Once the three friends were dropped off, the odd craft would fly back for Mildred and Jak, and to shuttle in the handful of nomads who had volunteered to assist them. There was hard work to do and scarce hours of darkness to do it before the day—and soon thereafter MAGOG—arrived.
Their route was quite short. The flight should take no more than twenty minutes, Corwin assured her, cutting a chord across a loop of many miles in the track MAGOG had to travel. A good thing, too, she realized. Even the fires of her lust for revenge could only sustain her so long before the mountain wind chilled her through.
She understood, now, part of the doomie premonition that had come upon her at the tech-nomad camp back on the Plains: the sensation, more than a vision, of herself in flight.
She understood the rest of that presentiment, too, and even how to make it come true.
The only question remaining—and it was a coldheart, a stone chiller—was whether she could pull it off.
But now she was flying! She let herself laugh out loud for joy, and her pilot joined his laughter to hers.
And so they fled through the night, toward their rendezvous with destiny, and a thousand tons of fire, steel and malice.
IN THE CURDLED-MILK light that flowed across the land before the sun’s first bright arc appeared above the mountains, the Rail Ghost stirred. He climbed out of the bedroll laid beside his beloved Yawl—stood, stretched, yawned. He walked outside to pee.
As he stepped out the door of what once long ago had been a gas station, a strong hand seized him, whirled him back up against the rough peeling stucco of the wall. A strong arm pinned him with a bar across the throat.
“My gawd,” he gasped, “it’s One Eye Chills himself!”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Honored, sir,” the Rail Ghost gasped as a pinprick of intolerable brightness above a mountain to the east announced the sun’s arrival. “But I thought you were dead.”
“I got better,” Ryan said.
“You can let me down, you know,” Paul said. “I ain’t no fighter. Besides, I’m on your side.”
<
br /> Ryan put away the SIG-Sauer he’d been holding to his captive’s head and eased back away from him. “I know.”
“You do?” Paul eyed him suspiciously, rubbing his throat. “How do you know that? And how’d you know how to find me, anyway? How’d you even know to look for me?”
“I had a dream.”
Paul waited for the explanation. But that was all the one-eyed man would say. The morning breeze blew a curly lock of jet-black hair across his rugged face.
“Well, then. Ryan Cawdor, what can I do ya for?”
“Where can I find Krysty?”
“Didn’t your dream tell you that?”
“It didn’t go quite that far.”
BURNING WITH THE FEVER to get back underway on the final quest for the Great Redoubt—not to mention his rage at being cheated out of a ravishing if unwilling mate—the General ordered the rear engine to simply bull the cars aft of the break off the track into the stream. A dozen barons’ ransoms in tools, weapons, supplies, even good salvageable metal, all to be abandoned without a backward glance. Only the fusion-powered engine itself was too valuable to lose.
The interrogation wag, and the cell car, had been close behind the armory carriage and been wrecked in the initial derailment. The General ordered Hubertus not to waste time sending men to investigate. There were no clues to be found beyond a few pools of congealed blood anyway, as it happened.
Hubertus’s suspicions had come to rest firmly on the sloped shoulders of the missing Leo. “He was secretive as a mole, that one,” the intel chief said to the General in the command center, where the great man himself was waving off yet another attempt by a steward to serve him scrambled eggs from a chafing dish. “He had a bad attitude. No respect for authority at all. Small wonder that Dix was able to suborn him.”
“If that’s what happened.”
“Of course it’s what happened. What else could have happened? It’s obvious. Somehow the traitor smuggled arms to our captives in the cells. They used them to murder poor Sergeant Banner and my men. Our chief armorer planted a bomb in his own workshop—his own shop, which I remind you he let hardly anyone else so much as set a toe inside—to cover their escape. It was all that simple.”