by Mark Ellis
Ahead of them appeared a collection of improvised shelters made of rotting wood, cloth and canvas. A cluster of a dozen or so raggedy people stood around the structures. When they saw the Sandcat coming, they shuffled this way and that, fanning out to make room for its passage. Domi downshifted, easing off on the accelerator as they passed by. Kane looked at them, and they looked at him. The hairs at the nape of his neck tingled.
He’d seen more than his fair share of Dregs, but even so, he was repulsed by the disfigured faces. The rad count wasn’t even midpoint orange, but generations of exposure had thoroughly tainted the people’s gene pool. Blood and pus and serum dripped from clusters of boils all over their bodies, their afflicted faces were grotesque parodies of a human being’s.
As the vehicle rolled past, he noticed that a few of them reacted to his Mag armour, and they called out words in thick, beseeching tones.
“What do they want?” Kane asked. “Food, medicine?”
“No,” said Domi. “They see a sec man. They want sec man to kill them.” She bared her teeth briefly in a mirthless grin. “They want Mag’s mercy.”
Half to himself, Kane muttered, “What possible use did Reeth have for them?”
He didn’t expect an answer, but Domi provided one. “They expendable. They as good as dead,” she said. “Fewer born every year. Fewer live long enough to have children.”
Anger burned redly in her eyes. “Heard term once. ‘Planned extinction.’ Thanks to fucking Mags. Thanks to fucking barons.”
Domi stopped talking as she upshifted, pressed on the gas pedal and swung the Sandcat down into a dry streambed that twisted and turned among low hills. Everyone was jounced, bounced, tossed and thoroughly pummelled. It occurred to Kane that if the Mags didn’t kill them, the escape route might. During the Nukeday, the bombs had not only completely re-sculpted the Pacific coast, but triggered fierce earthquakes that shook thousands of square miles with cataclysmic shocks and tremors.
The vehicle’s suspension creaked and groaned so loudly, Kane was actually glad he still wore his helmet. The polystyrene foam lining helped to mute the sounds. The narrow streambed swerved around rock formations, and Grant swore as the vehicle yawed and tossed him against Brigid. Pebbles rattled noisily beneath the rolling treads and chassis.
The path swung up out of the dry arroyo with a lazy serpentine motion, and Domi steered the wag along a narrow trail overlooking a wide, shallow gully. Shouldering the sky in the near distance were the ancient eroded crags surrounding Mesa Verde canyon. Kane started to turn to tell the others in the back, and then static hissed thinly in his ear. Ice coursed through his veins.
A faint crackly voice said “Track…”
Kane tilted his head to the right, trying to focus on the voices filtering through his comm link.
“West by northwest...track...get...fix on...”
Pollard’s voice. Kane checked his chron. The Deathbirds were nearly half an hour behind schedule.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“THE BIRDS ARE just now coming into comm range,” Kane warned. “We’ve got a three-mile lead.”
Grant didn’t conceal his anger. “Three miles or three hundred, what the hell difference does it make? Once they’ve fixed our position, they’ll catch us in no time flat.”
Domi said cheerfully, “Mebbe so, but I can make it hard for them.” She yanked the wheel sharply to the right, down into the gully.
The Sandcat nosed up beside the rambling wall of a depression, so close that the far edges of the right tread assembly sheared off rock knobs and projections. Domi narrowly missed colliding with a jutting finger of stone, but she kept rolling the machine beneath overhanging stone shelves, and Kane understood her strategy, even though it was doomed to fail.
Hugging the sides of the gully and keeping under the rock overhangs might temporarily hide them from aerial eyes, but the tactic wouldn’t conceal the engine-heat signature from the infrared scanners on the Deathbirds.
Kane didn’t tell her that. He kept listening to the comm-link transmissions. The hash of static faded with every passing second. A check of his chron and a simple calculation told him that the helicopters would be within visual range very shortly, probably within a minute.
“Point Bird to Bird Two, registering an infratrace. Do you copy?” Pollard’s voice sounded flat, almost bored.
The answering voice was young, but very crisp and professional. Probably Zack. “Acknowledged, Point Bird. Reading the same trace. Vector six-six-zero-niner. Adjusting course and altitude.”
There was more comm chatter, mainly about craft altitude and terrain features. Kane kept listening, kept gazing out of the windshield. It would be close, uncomfortably close, but it was very possible they would reach the mouth of Mesa Verde before a visual fix was acquired. With a prolonged, nerve-stinging screech, the roof of the Sandcat shaved an eighth of an inch from the underside of a rock overhang.
Ahead of them, the gully wall bulged outward several feet, and Domi was forced to swerve to prevent a collision. They were out in the open again, and a few seconds later, Pollard’s triumphant tones crowed into Kane’s ear. “A fix! Got ’em in sight, Bird Two. Just like the wall sentry said, an old all-terrain Cat, looks like a roamer junk-bucket.”
“Coordinates,” came Zack’s unruffled response.
“Twelve-two-niner-twelve. Copy?”
“Copy, Point Bird. Lock and load.”
Covering his helmet transceiver with a finger, Kane said to Domi, “Give me your blaster.”
Domi pulled the mini-Uzi from beneath her thigh and handed it to him without so much as a questioning look. Grant demanded, “What are you going to do?”
Kane kept his finger over the transceiver so the voice-activated carrier frequency wouldn’t be picked up by the crew of the Deathbirds. “Somebody has to make a recon. I’m the only one in armour, so I guess I’m elected.”
Anxiety glinted in Brigid’s emerald eyes. “What if they see you?”
“They’ve already spotted the Sandcat, so they know I’m on board.”
Reaching up over his head, he undid the latches on the roof hatch. To Domi, he said, “Try to keep this beast steady.”
“No promises.”
The mini-Uzi felt strange in Kane’s hand, almost like a toy. He kept his Sin Eater leathered as he pushed the square of metal up and over, and then he cautiously stood up in the seat. The fresh air was a relief after the stifling atmosphere inside. Above the banks of the gully, the sky stretched in an endless vista of clear, clean azure, not a cloud anywhere. The noon sun shone so bright, his eyes stung despite the tinted visor.
He scanned the sky in every direction, having a hard time keeping his balance as the Sandcat bumped and jumped along its course. Over the clanking and rattling of the diesel engine and the treads came another sound. It was a faint swishing whisper for a handful of seconds, followed by a violent downdraft that scoured the unprotected part of his face with an abrasive combination of sand and gravel. His visor was temporarily clouded by the wind-borne debris, and he cleared it with a swipe of his left hand.
A Deathbird had made a low altitude, high-speed pass, diving out of the sun so rapidly and unexpectedly he didn’t see it until the black craft completed its flyover. In his ear, Pollard said jovially, “Kane, me old cock of the walk. Good to see you. I guess Grant and your personal piece of history are with you.”
“You’re late, Polly,” Kane replied, swivelling his head to watch the Deathbird perform a figure eight from east to west. From the east, a dark speck chopped its way through the sea of limitless blue.
“Better than never. Besides, it couldn’t be helped. Took Salvo a little while to come around and issue orders. He said you might come back here.”
“He give any reason?”
“Guess he figures jolt-brains don’t need reasons.”
“T
hat what he told you?” Kane asked mildly.
“Among many other things. A jolt-walker is the least of it.”
“What were his orders?”
“Oh, the usual, you know.” Pollard sounded cheery. “Kill your ass, flash-blast you and everybody with you to cinders. Garden-variety stuff.”
The chopper described a wide, high circle above the gully. The second Deathbird fast approached its position.
“Hey, Kane?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember what you said to me just last night? You said, ’We’re both heeled, right?’ Remember?”
“I remember. It was right after I called you an overstuffed dipshit. But I was just teasing about being heeled.”
“Good. So am I.”
Rotors spinning, both Deathbirds dived from the sky, zooming in from the rear. Automatic fire spit from the mini-guns in the chin turrets. Twin streams of .50-caliber slugs slashed long trenches on the gully floor, dirt gouting up in high fountains. Kane loosed a short burst with the mini-Uzi just as the choppers ascended, correcting for the decreasing range. One of the bullets twisted the struts of a landing skid out of shape.
The Deathbirds swooped overhead, and he dropped down, back into his seat. A spray of bullets banged loudly on the Sandcat’s hull. The choppers roared past, a bare ten feet above the roof of the wag. Domi instinctively ducked as the rotor wash drove a strong puff of grit-laden air down into the wag. Hugging the steering wheel, she threw him a frightened, questioning glance.
“Keep going,” he ordered.
He popped back up through the hatch, transferring the mini-Uzi to his left hand and filling his right with the Sin Eater. The choppers climbed several hundred feet and hovered, hanging in the sky, their foreports facing each other, listing slightly from side to side. Kane heard nothing more over the comm link. Pollard had probably blocked the frequency and was communicating with Zack with hand signals.
Kane had known Pollard for years and had never really liked him. He was a simple, brutal, uncompromising man. In Pollard’s mind, he made the ideal Magistrate, and more than once he had evinced jealousy of Kane and Grant’s reputations. Therefore, he figured Pollard wouldn’t want to end this too quickly. He would make another pass or two with the machine gun, and if that had no effect, he would deploy the rockets. He was no doubt relying on Zack to follow his lead.
The Deathbirds slowly revolved in the sky, then dropped. Kane bent his knees so only his head, shoulders and arms were out of the hatch. The Birds descended quickly, and one leaped ahead of the other. Zack and his gunner were too anxious, too excited. His chopper’s rate and angle of descent was a bit too sharp, his airspeed a bit too high. Pollard’s craft fell behind.
Zack’s gunner opened fire before the proper range and trajectory were established. The stream of bullets flayed rock and soil, but none came within twenty yards of the onrushing Sandcat.
Kane fixed the foreport of the Deathbird in the sights of both of his blasters, held his breath and pressed the triggers. The two streams of subsonic rounds ripped across the gully at 375 meters per second. Spent shell casings fell down the hatchway, bounced across the hull. Over his helmet comm link, he heard a garbled, screaming voice.
The Deathbird met the double streams of steel-jacketed lead halfway. A series of starred holes appeared in the curving port, and the craft lurched as Zack tried to bank. A few bullets from the chin turret skimmed the Sandcat’s hull, gouging shiny smears in the armour. Kane felt their impacts, but he didn’t relax his fingers on the triggers. The chopper heeled to starboard and struggled to rise out of range of the blaster fire.
The whirling blades sliced into the bank of the gully, digging out pounds of rock and dirt in dust-filled eruptions. Sparks showered as steel struck stone, and the main rotors snapped with a painfully high-pitched, musical chime.
In a lurching sideslip, the Deathbird flung itself away from the bank, and its blades pinwheeled across the gully, chopping into and embedding in the soil. The main rotor assembly continued to spin with broken, jagged stems. The craft cannonaded port first against the gully floor.
A roaring ball of red-yellow flame mushroomed up from the ruptured fuel tank. Kane recoiled as the wall of hot air, pushed forward by the thundering explosion, slapped his face.
“Oops,” he said mildly.
The Deathbird piloted by Pollard veered away, banking sharply, climbing above the cloud of black smoke and the column of fire. His enraged voice crashed over Kane’s comm link “Another pair of Mags for you! You traitor! They’re the last ones! You hear? The last ones!”
The Deathbird dropped straight down, catching itself only a few feet above the gully, as if its plummet had been checked by an invisible string. It plunged forward in a roaring rush. A rocket burst from the port stub wing and soared, flaming, directly toward the Sandcat. It skidded past its right side and exploded a dozen yards ahead. Metal and rock fragments, smashed into the vehicle’s front armour, and smaller pieces put new cracks in the windshield. A lump of stone bounced off the back of Kane’s helmet, jarring him off his feet. He fell clumsily into his seat. and shouted to Domi, “Evasive!”
She swung the wheel from left to right, swerving back and forth. The heavy machine responded sluggishly, wallowing laboriously. He knew it was already too late for such manoeuvres to be effective.
The Sandcat shook with a bone-numbing shock as a missile detonated almost directly beneath it. The rear end jumped some three feet, and slewed around in a one-eighty at thirty miles per hour, all direction and control gone. The right back fender smashed broadside against the gully bank.
Kane braced himself so the sudden jolting stop didn’t fling him into the instrument panel or through the windshield. Before his stunned eardrums recovered from the concussion, he heard the jack-hammer clanging of treads shearing away from the rollers, the entire left track thrashing in a long flapping strip. Sparks showered and metal screamed as the roller rims slashed deep furrows into the rocky ground.
The air inside the vehicle grew stifling hot as the incendiary compounds of the warhead interacted with the armour. Smoke and the cloying smell of metal turning molten filled the cramped interior. Grant coughed, pushing Brigid ahead of him. “We’ve got to bail!”
The driver’s door was jammed shut inside its warped frame. Kane shouldered the passenger door open and dragged Domi across the seats, then helped Grant and Brigid climb out. From the undercarriage and from every seam of the Sandcat boiled a mixture of white, grey and black smoke. Blobs of burning napalm jelly clung to the armour, sending up spirals of flame.
Their backs against the gully wall, the four people crept away from the smoke-spewing Sandcat, all of them craning their necks, scanning the sky. The black chopper was nowhere in sight.
Her voice raspy from inhaling smoke, Brigid asked, “How far are we from this canyon?”
Domi jerked a thumb up over her head. “Up and over that way. We’re there already.”
“So is Pollard,” Kane muttered.
“Maybe he thinks we’re dead,” Grant added, not sounding as though he believed it.
“Salvo ordered him to make sure we were flash-blasted,” Kane replied. “So, he’ll make sure.”
“Hell, at least we’ll be right on course when he burns us down,” Grant said. Though he wasn’t limping, his right leg moved stiffly. “Let’s get on with this.”
Under the cover of the pall of smoke, scaling the side of the gully was fairly easy, the work of only a couple of minutes. But Kane noticed fresh blood seeping through the bandage around Grant’s thigh when he climbed the slope.
Sheer walls rose to nearly a hundred feet on either side, grooved with deep horizontal lines, here and there forming ledges where the softer layers of strata had eroded away.
The canyon floor was less than a hundred feet wide in some places, and it wended off to the right. Boulders and out
croppings were strewn all around, except for an unnaturally flat clearing a score of yards ahead of them. From it protruded the split-open stump of the Vulcan-Phalanx gun housing.
They moved toward it quickly and all of them heard the high-pitched whine from the sky. No one looked up; they just started running for a house-sized rock formation. Domi, loping easily and gracefully, took Grant’s arm to help him along. He shook her loose angrily.
“I don’t need help!”
“Suit self.” Her white legs pumped, and she pulled ahead.
The four of them dived behind the outcropping just as three missiles impacted all around it. The explosions momentarily deafened them. Dust, smoke and chips of stone blew over them.
The Deathbird screamed by overhead, lifting above the canyon rim, already starting to curve around for another strafing pass. They watched as it turned its nose downward and dipped into a sharp dive. Two missiles burst from the port and starboard stub wings.
They managed to scramble around to the other side of the rock formation just as it took a direct hit. The double impact knocked pieces out of it, seemingly heaved it momentarily out of the ground, as though it were about to topple over. Fragments pattered all around them, and the concussion slammed all of them off their feet. They picked themselves up just as the sleek black craft screamed on past.
“Screw this,” mumbled Grant, brushing powdery dust from his coat.
“I concur,” said Brigid. A small spot of blood showed high on her forehead where a sliver of missile casing or stone had nicked her. “I vote we run until we can’t.”
No one argued, and they raced through the canyon, bounding over tumbles of rock, dashing past the remains of the gun tower. Kane brought up the rear. Domi was far ahead, Brigid trailing her by only a few yards. Grant ran in a stiff-legged gait, grimacing with every step.