by James Axler
Ryan had another gren in his left hand. He threw it over the heads of the two mortally wounded sec men as they fell, toward the flame-flowers unfolding toward him from the man behind the pop-up turret root. He ducked back as needlelike 5.56 mm bullets glanced off the metal doorframe and howled past, spinning like tiny circular saws.
He dropped the mag from the CAR and stuffed in the spare he’d scavvied. The gren cracked off. Screams sounded. He drew his SIG-Sauer with his left hand and whirled around the door.
No one stood in the passageway. Crossing his arms, he lunged through into the next carriage. As he passed the doorway, he squeezed each trigger once.
The shot coughed from the extended barrel of his SIG-Sauer, ricocheted off the steel bulkhead and fortunately missed him. The CAR’s bullet hit a waiting sec man in the belly. Hearing the grunt of pain even as the noise of that shot echoed around him, he squeezed off a quick 3-round burst.
Blood sprayed the left side of his face.
A wounded man raised himself on the elbow of the arm that was trying to hold in his guts, aimed an M-9 Beretta at Ryan with the other. The one-eyed man thrust out his left hand and fired twice. A miss bounced screaming off the wall, then an eye exploded in a splash of aqueous humor. The man’s head slammed against the bulkhead, leaving a red smear, then slumped.
He heard sounds from the other side of the turret root. Purposeful sounds, not the agony-maddened thrashings of a wounded man. Moving slowly, as quietly as possible, he slung the CAR, went to the gleaming steel cylinder and flattened his back against it. As he did so, he drew a gren from his pocket and prepped it. Then he leaned sideways and backhanded the gren, banking it off the bulkhead now to his right to the cylinder’s far side.
At the same moment, a gren came rolling along the runner by his left boot.
He faced away from it and dived forward. The bomb cracked off at once. Had he tried to kick it back it would have torn his foot off. His gren went off, too.
The blast propagated up and out in an inverse cone, the direct force missing him. Tiny fragments of blast-shattered wire zinged through the air. Some bounced off the wall now behind him and struck him. As small as they were, they didn’t hold momentum long; most were absorbed by the tail of his long heavy coat. A few stung the backs of his calves through his faded jeans.
Things were still clattering and creaking when he jumped to his feet. His right hand ripped his panga from its scabbard as he dashed clockwise around the turret root. He struck down to his right as he passed it.
His unseen opponent had displayed the same presence of mind and quick reflexes he had in diving beneath the destructive fan of Ryan’s gren. He was a hair slower on the rise. The heavy panga struck him on the crown of the skull and split it open.
No sec men remained functional on this upper deck. One sat with his back against the bulkhead watching the blood pulsing out of the stub of his arm, which had been severed at midbiceps, as if he didn’t find it particularly interesting.
It was working, Ryan thought. He wasn’t exactly thinking his clearest. He was seasoned enough to recognize the fact.
All he really knew was that he had to find Krysty again, even if only to die in each other’s arms. To do that he had to get to the train’s head as quickly as possible. That was where he would find Krysty. Or people who knew where she was. And then he’d tear all the parts off or out of whoever he had to to find her.
But it would be triple stupe to wade straight through the heaviest opposition. Individually the train sec men he’d encountered so far hadn’t shown him that much, except maybe for the blaster whose brainpan he’d let air into with his big panga. But in the bad old real world, he knew, it took one lucky bullet or unlucky ricochet and it didn’t matter a spent casing how good you were. You were staring at the ceiling without seeing it.
He wiped the brains off the panga on the back of the dead man’s camou blouse. He sheathed the machete and doubled back toward the rear of the carriage. Time to get off this level.
DOWNSTAIRS WAS BARRACKS. He blew in with the CAR-4 ready in one hand and a gren in the other. But the rows of bunks down either side of the passageway were empty.
Something somewhat like a plan hit him.
He began ripping OD blankets off the bunks, throwing them in heaps on the deck. He tore loose sheets and strewed them everywhere. For good measure he dumped a few thin mattresses. Then he pulled a scavvied butane lighter from his pocket and started setting everything on fire.
It wasn’t much of a fire. He seriously doubted it was going to do any damage to the armored wag’s structure. But there was a lot of it, and it made a lot of smoke.
Fire was hard to ignore.
He decided to share some with the next carriage forward. It proved to be an infirmary. Several green smocked assistants looked up from unknowable chores with faces that were just big ovals of fearful surprise.
He waved the wadded-up flaming blanket he clutched in his left hand. “Fire! Fire!” he shouted. He had to struggle not to cough from the smoke pouring from the makeshift torch. “Everybody off the train! Fire!”
The med techies just stared at him. Steel hard and on a mission as he was, he wasn’t quite up to slaughtering helpless healers unless they really pushed him to it. He wanted to trigger off a burst from the CAR-4 to get them headed in the right direction, but this car was armored, too. It would be triple stupe of him to chill himself with his own ricochet.
“What’s the matter with you people?” he shouted. “The train’s on fire!”
They still just gaped. He hurled the smoldering blanket at the nearest tech. She sidestepped.
Two things happened at once. A slight, small woman in a white jacket emerged from a little cubicle office at the left front of the compartment, and a sec man came rushing in the far door with an M-16 longblaster held at port-arms.
Ryan pushed the CAR out to arm’s length and lit up the newcomer. The sec man screamed, dropped his black longblaster and held up his arms in a futile attempt to ward off the bullets that were tearing through his belly and chest. It just cost him holes in his arms.
The CAR ran dry. In the sudden echoing silence, the riddled sec man sank down the door with the light going out of his eyes as the blood drained from his body.
The healers began to scream and stampeded away from Ryan. One of them seized the woman in white, who stood blinking with an expression more of sadness than terror, by the arm and dragged her out of the carriage past the body. The other two healers yanked open a door to the outside and in blind panic hurled themselves right off the train.
Alarms started going off. About fucking time, Ryan thought.
Forty-five seconds later a gaggle of sec men thundered into the med wag waving longblasters. Finding the door still open and no one in the car, they charged ahead. Someone shouted “Fire!” and they all crowded toward the burning barracks car, coughing and stumbling and grabbing fire extinguishers from brackets on the wall.
A moment later Ryan stepped back into the open doorway to the outside. He had been clinging to the door itself like a baby opossum, with his panga in his teeth. Everybody was looking in the other direction. He sheathed the panga again, drew his handblaster and raced for the front of the giant rail wag.
THE GENERAL WAS STILL eating in his personal car when the alarms went off. His intel chief and Marc Helton, with his arm in a sling, were in the compartment with him.
“Now what?” the General demanded. “Hubertus, is it too much to ask for a man to be allowed to finish his breakfast in peace?”
The intel chief stepped to the intercom and spoke quickly to the command center. “Sensors report smoke in the infirmary car and the barracks carriage behind it. There are also confused reports about an intruder driving a motorcycle onto the train.” He sniffed. “Those latter sound far-fetched to me. It’s probably time to check the liquor stores and see if there’s been another break-in.”
“I’ll check on it, General,” the captain said, heading toward
the rear of the car.
“That’s my boy, Marc,” the General called after him. “Always good to go.”
Helton slid open the door and stepped into the sheltered gangway between cars.
As he let the door slide shut behind him, the door in front of him opened and a man stepped into the gently rocking passage.
Chapter Thirty-One
The man was a tall, wild, desperate figure. His face was lean and scarred beneath a half-mask of blood and a black eyepatch. His black shaggy hair reeked of smoke. A single eye blazed like a blue beacon from the relatively clean side of his face.
He raised a strange-looking handblaster to within an inch of the tip of Helton’s nose and pulled the trigger.
Click.
“FIREBLAST,” RYAN SAID without heat. Even though the fire he set had cleared a lot of obstacles out of his way, it hadn’t been an easy journey. And he’d taken it at a dead run—no time to count rounds.
The young officer knocked away Ryan’s empty SIG-Sauer with his good forearm and rammed a side-kick straight into Ryan’s sternum. The one-eyed man flew back into the door, which had slid shut behind him.
The uniformed man bullrushed him. Ryan brought up a knee. Panther-quick, his assailant turned his hips and took the knee on the quadriceps. The impact still stopped him, lifted his body of the walkway shifting beneath their boots.
Ryan raised his right arm to shoulder height and slammed the elbow forward into the officer’s face. As the man’s head snapped back, Ryan followed with an overhand left. It was the officer’s turn to reel back against a steel door.
Ryan struck at his head with the butt of the SIG-Sauer. His opponent blocked with his left forearm, tearing free of the sling. At the same time he drove a right uppercut into Ryan’s solar plexus.
Air fled the one-eyed man’s body in a rush. He bent over and was head-butted in the face. Blinking at the sparks that seemed to float in his vision, Ryan staggered back. His adversary lunged at him, trying to jam his left forearm into Ryan’s trachea. Ryan got his chin down in time and grabbed the arm. Pressing him into the door behind him, the officer tried to punch him in the face with his right fist. Ryan caught his wrist with his left hand.
For a moment the men struggled in deadly silence. The officer was as tall as Ryan and had the same build. He was fresher than Ryan and years younger, which made up for some of the disadvantage of his injury—which clearly wasn’t enough to render his left arm useless anyway.
But the officer’s exertions weren’t without cost. The camou cloth at the front of his left shoulder began to darken with a spreading stain.
Ryan quit trying to pull the arm away from his neck. He clamped his hand on the man’s injured left shoulder and began to probe for a wound with a thumb like a steel talon.
He found what he sought, and dug.
The man’s face paled and sweat began to stream from his hairline. “Bastard!” he gritted.
“Bastard back!” Ryan snarled. “Where’s Krysty?”
The amber eyes widened. “Krysty Wroth?”
The door opened behind him. Hands grabbed him. Something cracked hard against the back of his skull, and white flame stabbed through his brain.
The world spun around him.
HE DIDN’T QUITE lose consciousness.
The young officer backed into the next car ahead of them. At least two sec men holding Ryan’s arms behind him frogmarched him forward into what looked like a gaudyhouse parlor with a red carpet and dark-stained paneling on the walls.
A man in a uniform with a chestful of medals sat in a red plush-upholstered chair. Next to him stood a tall, thin, bloodless and hairless specimen.
“And you must be Ryan Cawdor,” said the man in the chair. He had a harsh voice, well suited to the snap of command.
Ryan glared at him. “And you’re the nuke-sucking crazie who calls himself the General. Where’s Krysty?”
The General rose. “Sadly, she’s unable to be with us to witness the resolution of this little melodrama. Marc, Marc, you disappoint me. You told me you killed this man.”
The captain looked up from examining Ryan’s SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppressor. His expression was calm and slightly haughty. He wasn’t a man to lower himself to making excuses.
The General drew a Model 1911 .45 ACP handblaster from a holster at his waist. “So it looks as if I’m going to have set things right myself,” he said.
He aimed the big blaster at the middle of Ryan’s forehead.
AT LAST HE SAW HER, his silver dream, shining in the mountain sun.
His Yawl was shaking herself apart beneath him. Something had gotten loose and begun to clatter but hadn’t made any perceptible difference in his headlong speed. His engine was starting to smoke.
Somebody on the train noticed him as well. A heavy machine gun opened up from the last car. There were tracer rounds mixed in with the regular loads. They threw red fireballs at him that looked to be the size of baseballs, seeming to float lazily toward him, then suddenly rushing by with a thundercrack sound.
The shots were going wide overhead. The gunner didn’t seem to know quite what to do and was spraying the landscape instead of chopping the stream down into his target. Paul hunched lower in his lawn-chair-style seat. He wasn’t afraid for himself, not really. He was now as Krysty had been on her quest preoccupied with the dread he might not reach his objective. It was all that mattered.
“Hold together, baby,” he begged his machine. “Just a little while longer, that’s all I’ll ever ask of you again.”
THE GENERAL’S ARM SWUNG. The big 1911 bucked in his hand.
Captain Marc Helton’s eyes widened and he swayed. He looked down at himself.
There was a small, neat hole in the front of his camou blouse. He touched it with his fingers. The tips came away wet with red. He looked wonderingly at his commander.
“Captain Helton helped your woman and your friends escape last night,” the General said, still pointing the blaster at his protégé. “I made some inquiries and discovered he’d been seen leaving his quarters not long before it had to take place. He’d already been showing signs of lacking the stomach for the real hard work we’re about to begin.”
Ryan had seen men shot or stabbed through the heart before and not go down right away. Still he had to admire the captain’s determination to stay on his feet. Even though it was a lost cause.
“Mercy is weakness in the world we’re forced to live in,” the General said.
Helton dropped to his knees.
“Weakness led, as it will, to betrayal. It hurts me to have to do this to you, Marc. But you can take this last thought with you—I would have done the same if you really were my son.”
The captain slumped down, buttocks on calves, chin on chest. By some chance he was balanced so well that his torso stayed upright even without muscular tension to keep him that way.
“We’ll tell your father you died after heroic single combat,” the General told the corpse. “Which is only the truth, after all.”
Hubertus sneered. He took a step forward, planted his boot in the center of the young captain’s chest and pushed him onto his back.
Holstering his .45, his superior shook his head disapprovingly. “That was gratuitous, Hubertus. There was just no fucking call for that at all.”
He turned to Ryan. “And as for you, Cawdor, you’ll do just fine as a replacement for your woman, when it comes to telling us what we want to know about the mat-trans network. Even if I can’t put you to the same use I was going to put her to. Although it is damned tempting to run you through the preliminaries, just on general principles.”
The intercom spoke. “MAGOG Six, Command Center One. We have a situation, sir.”
THE BLASTERWAG that brought up the rear of the train loomed above Paul like a cliff. He finished tying the little engine’s throttle in the wide-open position and stood up.
The .50-caliber blaster was booming overhead. Paul had long since gotten under the
umbrella of safety below where the big machine gun couldn’t shoot. It didn’t matter much for his Yawl. The little craft was shaking now as if suffering some kind of seizure. Its skinny tires began to bounce on the rails.
There were hand- and footholds welded to the end of the blasterwag. The Yawl raised toward a collision with the car. Paul walked the few steps to the front of the platform, holding his arms out for balance. He braced himself.
The Yawl struck the rear of MAGOG. Paul jumped, caught handholds, swung a dizzy moment above the fast-moving ground, then got his toes into the foothold.
He looked back. His Yawl was bouncing like a bucking Brahma bull. It got transverse to the tracks, flipped, cartwheeled down the embankment, its path angling away from the train.
“Goodbye, baby,” Paul called. “I’m sorry.”
He pressed his cheek against MAGOG. The armor plate was cool.
He couldn’t hold on very long before his arm strength gave out, even though he was shielded from the buffeting wind of the rail wag’s passage.
But he believed he wouldn’t have to.
“NOW, WHAT?” the General demanded irritably.
Apparently there was a voice-actuated pickup for the intercom, because the voice responded, “We’re approaching the Grandee gorge rail bridge, sir.”
The General flicked a glance at his wrist chron. “So? At least we’re here on schedule.”
“There’s someone on the bridge, General.”
“What? Now what?”
Hubertus moved to the table next to the General’s chair, picked up a remote control and pressed a button. A panel slid up on the front bulkhead, revealing a large screen monitor.
It showed a single figure standing perhaps fifty yards out onto the bridge over the sheer-walled canyon. Ryan felt his whole body tingle.
“Increase magnification!” the General barked.
The image grew larger.
It was Krysty.
She had an AT-4 wag-chiller rocket launcher shouldered but not yet aimed at the onrushing train.
“That bitch!” The words seemed nearly to strangle the General. “Full speed ahead! Run her down! It’ll take more than a shoulder-fired rocket to stop my train.”