by James Axler
This broke the spell that had the rest of the mutants paralyzed. They panicked. Some of them turned and ran back into the bowels of the massif; the rest charged straight for her. Once again freed, the specters formed a mad cyclone overhead, then joyously began chasing down fresh victims.
Auriel turned to Dr. Huth for help and found him gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Ryan saw Doc cocking his ancient blaster in Besup’s face, he realized what had to have happened. Before he could take two more strides, the weapon discharged almost straight down, flame and black powder smoke enveloping the warrior’s head. Besup’s legs gave one violent kick and then he was still.
Doc looked up as Ryan bore down on him, his long face contorted by anguish. Besup lay in two parts on the nukeglass; the massive wounds were still steaming. Wounds that should have killed, but hadn’t.
A mercy shot. No doubt about it.
How long could a man live with an injury like that? Ryan thought as he ran past. For a warrior, any time was too long.
A terrific explosion from behind and to his left staggered him in midstep and he nearly fell face-first, flat out onto the glass. Breaking his fall with an outthrust hand, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the tower come down. Pushing up at once, he outran the wave of water that swept forth, hissing over the massif and flooding the sleeping pits.
Ahead of him, the front of the whiteface assault was starting to falter. Some of the warriors had slowed, others had stopped altogether. They were staring back at the fallen tower and the field littered with their dead. But most of all, they were looking back for Besup. The black hole of the mine entrance loomed before them—a meat-grinder maw. Without hesitation, without backup, their war dogs raced through it. Ryan knew that someone had to step in and lead the warriors or the attack was going to fail. They had to keep charging the entrance; they had to take it before the she-hes regrouped.
The companions were only seconds behind him. He figured they would catch up with him inside.
Ryan sprinted through the whitefaces, shouting for them to follow. He was running too hard to put up effective covering fire with the SIG. And he didn’t slow down until he neared the opening. As he ducked under the overhang, he saw four bodies in gleaming black armor, all of them facedown on the ground, and clearly not about to get up anytime soon, if ever. Farther down the shaft he heard people screaming and the dogs snarling and baying. He brought up his SIG-Sauer and advanced. The surviving whitefaces, about twenty of them, entered behind him.
Over the sights of the blaster, down a long, dimly lit straightaway, he saw packed bodies. Seventy or eighty people jammed the corridor. Dirty-faced, skeletal, clad in rags. They were mine slaves. The war dogs tore into them, pulling victims down at random, cutting a path of mayhem through their ranks.
At first Ryan didn’t understand what the slaves were doing there, why they hadn’t made a break for freedom.
Then the reason became all too clear.
They were being held at laser-point.
Crisscrossing emerald-green beams lanced from the darkness on the far side of the crowd, deeper in the mine. The beams sliced through the packed bodies like they were made of nothing. Slaves, living and dead, hit the floor. War dogs, sliced and diced, hit the floor. Ryan felt a blast of impossible heat on his face, and the wall over his head began to melt. Blasterfire clattered, and slugs smacked into the bubbling ooze.
Again, the conventional-shooting turncoats were using the laser beams as targeting tools.
“Bombs!” he shouted, firing back over the throng of prostrated bodies with his blasterpistol. He couldn’t make out the detail of the enemy position, but they appeared to be firing from behind a floor-to-ceiling obstacle that jutted into the passage.
The whiteface behind him produced a sputtering explosive and offered it to him. Ryan switched the SIG to his weak hand, grabbed the length of pipe and chucked it hard and high down the shaft. Hard and high enough to clear the mass of bodies that covered the ground.
There was a brilliant flash; a simultaneous explosion rocked the tunnel.
The laser barrage stopped, but only for a few seconds. Through the clouds of dust and smoke, the green beams flash-cooked the air. The suspended particles exploded in showers of sparks.
Ryan called back for another bomb, but before it could be lit, they were slammed by a concussion wave from the entrance behind them.
The force was so great that it knocked him unconscious—instant blackout—and sent his limp form flying down the tunnel. When he came to, it was pitch-dark. He was laying on top of something warm, soft and wet, and his legs were pinned by a heavy weight. The familiar shape of the Steyr lay under his arm; the SIG was lost. He had no recollection of how he got there. The dust was so thick that it choked him.
Some of the lights along the ceiling came back on, but weaker because of the dust. And flickering.
When Ryan looked down, he realized the something warm and soft was also something freshly dead, something human, but the weight of the nukeglass block on his legs kept him pinned. It took a few minutes for him to shake off the disorientation and mental confusion of the concussion.
Though his ears were ringing, he could hear the sounds of moaning all around him. As the dust slowly cleared, the moaning turned to screaming. All around him he saw slaves crushed by blocks of the fallen ceiling, impaled by shafts of nukeglass. Others were trapped as he was, or wounded by flying shards.
The incoming fire had ceased.
Carefully, he began shifting the weight of his lower body, inching his legs to the side so the downward pressure of the slab fell upon the body beneath him. When the corpse was taking most of the weight, he pulled himself forward, hand over hand, until he was free. The SIG lay on top of the rubble a few feet away. He picked it up and checked the action. The weapon seemed undamaged.
When he turned and looked at the entrance, his stomach tightened. All he saw was a solid wall. The explosion had completely blocked the tunnel with massive boulders. And probably for fifty or sixty feet.
There was no way out.
Ryan caught movement under the rubble. He helped one of the whitefaces to his feet. Then the two of them started turning over rocks, looking for more survivors. They found four warriors alive—the rest were lost under the boulder fall. One of the four died in front of their eyes. Once the pressure of the blocks that pinned him was released, he bled out from dozens of deep cuts.
“What are we going to do, now?” the first man he’d rescued asked him.
“We fight,” Ryan said. “We still have a couple of satchels of pipe bombs left, and we have ammo. We push them as deep down the shaft as we can, then we seal them in.”
“What happens to us, afterward?” another of the warriors said. “We’re still trapped in here.”
“If we live that long,” Ryan told him, “we’ll work it out. Keep some pipe bombs ready.”
He waved the warriors onward. They didn’t stop to help the wounded. There were too many them, and most were too far gone. They stepped over them, moving along the tunnel wall.
Beyond the bodies, Ryan split up his diminished force, and they approached the passage’s obstacle from two sides. Up close, it was clearly a blaster position, and built of laser-cut blocks of nukeglass that were stacked, fitted and remelted together. It had firing ports and a single, narrow entrance and exit. The pipe bomb he had thrown had blown the front off the emplacement. It had also blown away the light directly overhead.
They cautiously probed the interior. On the ground lay a jumble of bodies, two of them in cockroach suits.
When nothing moved, Ryan holstered his SIG and grabbed one of the she-hes by the boot. A whiteface helped him drag the body out into the light.
Ryan kneeled and looked at the visor, the inside of which was painted solid crimson. He couldn’t see the enemy’s face for the wash of blood. Then he thought he saw something move behind the curtain of red. Like a shudder passing through it. Nothing els
e moved—arms, legs, nothing—so he figured it was either a muscle firing, postmortem, or he had imagined it.
“Dead?” the warrior asked, giving the side of the helmet a kick.
“Yeah, dead,” Ryan said.
The other she-he was likewise permanently out of commission—face plate awash in gore.
“I want to see the bastards’ faces,” one of the warriors said. “Let’s take the helmets off.”
“Hell with that,” another whiteface said. He picked up a ten-pound hunk of nukeglass and smashed it down against the visor. The EM shield deflected the rock off the target with such force that it flew out of his hand.
“You didn’t even scratch it,” the first man said.
“We’ve got no time for this,” Ryan said. “Take my word for it, they look just like you and me.”
The mournful baying of the few dogs who had gotten past the blaster emplacement drifted up from deeper in the mine. There were human screams as well.
“Come on,” Ryan told the warriors, “we have work to do.”
They leapfrogged one another, alternating cover and advance, until they reached the tunnel’s dogleg right, then Ryan signaled for a pause. When he peered low around the corner, he saw slaves and ore carts. They were packed along the sides of the tunnel; the center of the shaft was clear. The slaves were doing all the screaming. They were fighting to cram themselves into the vertical crevices that lined the passage, side shafts in the mine—this to escape the pair of dogs that were doing their damnedest to pull them out and tear them into pieces.
On the far side of the slaves and their attackers was another blaster emplacement. It was identical to the first: floor-to-ceiling glass blocks that stuck out into and narrowed the corridor, funneling the traffic into a tight, easily controllable kill zone. The distance to the hardened site was about 120 feet. Ryan couldn’t see movement behind the blasterports, couldn’t tell if it was occupied.
There was only one way to find out.
He waved two of the whitefaces to the opposite side of the shaft, both of them ready to throw pipe bombs. Then he and the other two warriors broke from cover and started zigzagging down the tunnel, moving from ore cart to crevice to ore cart, bypassing the slaves and the dogs.
There was no incoming.
When they reached the emplacement, the reason became obvious. It was manned by three more downed cockroaches. Permanently downed.
“Let’s have a look,” Ryan said. They pulled all the bodies out. The visors were coated red, from the inside.
“We didn’t do this,” one of the whitefaces said. “So, what’s killing them?”
“What killed them?” a whiteface repeated.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ryan replied.
“Do you think they’re all dead?”
“Have we won?”
“They could be hiding in the side shafts,” one of the warriors said.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Ryan said. “We need to recce the entire mine. First thing, though, go retrieve those damned dogs, harness them up, whatever you need to do to get them under control. We’ll take them with us to sniff out trouble.”
When the four whitefaces returned holding the panting, bloody-faced dogs tethered with short lengths of rope, they weren’t alone. About forty of the slaves were right behind them. They had come to look at the dead she-hes.
A shirtless man, about six foot three in height, with an enormous tattooed blue dragon wrapped over his shoulder and back, and a little woman with short red hair seemed to be their leaders.
“They really are dead?” the man said. “Just like that?”
“Seems too quick, too easy,” the woman said, “after the living hell they put us through.”
The man with the tattoo extended a hand to Ryan, the fingers and palm roughened by countless scabbed glass cuts and said, “My name is Ronbo. Ronbo Myles. And this is my friend, Ti.”
The diminutive woman looked up at him and nodded.
“I’m…” Ryan began.
“Cawdor, One-Eyed Cawdor, I know,” Ronbo said. “I’ve heard stories about you.”
“We both have,” Ti said.
“Never thought you were flesh-and-blood real,” Ronbo told him.
“We’ve got to find all the cockroaches and the turncoats, and make triple-sure they’re dead,” Ryan said. “There’s only the five of us to do the job. Could use some help sweeping the shafts. You folks willing to take the risk?”
“You betcha,” Ronbo said. “Just keep those wild dogs off our butts.” Then he turned to the other miners and shouted, “Search the bodies of the slave masters. Pick up any weapons you can find. We’re going cockroach hunting!”
This announcement was met with raised fists and pickaxes, and cries for vengeance.
For a couple of frantic minutes the slaves foraged more axes and shovels, and a few tribarrels and turncoat AKs. Ti had picked up one of the Kalashnikovs, and as Ryan watched, she quickly checked the chamber for a live round. Finding none, with the ease that only comes from practice, she dropped the 30-shot magazine, looked at the round-counter and then slapped it back in place. With a flick of the wrist, she worked the actuator, chambering the first cartridge.
The tattooed man appeared to have some familiarity with the tribarrel—not hands-on experience, but from watching the she-hes saw his fellow slaves in two. Ronbo armed the short, stout, black weapon system.
“Everyone with a blaster come up front with me,” Ryan said to the crowd. “Everyone else, don’t bunch up behind us. Spread out.”
One of the warriors took point with a leashed war dog and they began their descent. The dog sniffed at the side passages that had been laser-cut into the massif, first one side of the tunnel, then the other. When it found nothing of interest, they continued along the passage.
Farther down, they came upon a cell that looked like a makeshift whitecoat laboratory. Ryan’s quick glance revealed no signs of life. The cluttered space contained an assortment of electronic gear, whose function he couldn’t begin to guess. All the gear seemed to be powered up and running. He did recognize the computer vidscreen, and the remote view it offered of Ground Zero and what had been the mine entrance. As the camera panned across the landscape, he saw his companions—Krysty, J.B., Doc and Jak—all alive, apparently uninjured. Behind them, the battlefield was decorated with corpses.
“Nothing here,” Ronbo said.
They moved on, down the corridor, until they reached the third turn, a bend in the road Ryan didn’t remember from years ago. And when he rounded the corner, he realized that the straight hallway had become a spiral, angling downward.
Immediately, the scout dog started whimpering in excitement, pulling on the lead, trying to break free.
“Caught a scent,” Ti said.
The dog suddenly became more agitated, snarling and snapping its jaws and rearing up on its back legs.
“Let it go,” Ryan told the warrior.
When he released the lead, the animal shot away, vanishing around the next turn.
Shortly thereafter they heard the now-familiar sounds of canine attack, the growling, the grunting—the shrill cries of a captured prey.
Ryan hoped it wasn’t another unlucky slave.
When they rounded the bend, weapons up, he saw the dog had a young stickie pinned to the ground, jaws buried in its face. The pale sucker hands had already pulled off clumps of its fur and bleeding divots of its flesh, but the dog would not relent. Flexing the powerful muscles of its neck and back, it shook its head and ripped off half the mutie’s face, from eye socket to chin, then sank its fangs into the unprotected throat. Big dog, little mutie—it was over in a blink, with one more whipcrack of the head, like killing a rat.
Then the dog was off on the hunt again before anybody could grab it.
They circled around the spiral, a complete 360 in space. As they did, Ryan noted freshly opened cracks in the walls. Cracks wide enough and tall enough for a small person to slip
through.
Somewhere not far below them, the loose dog snarled, then yelped in pain. Faintly at first, but rapidly growing louder came the muffled sounds of bare feet slapping against the nukeglass.
The tramp of lots of feet, coming up fast.
“Shit!” Ryan cried, swinging up his blaster. “Get clear firing lanes!”
There was hardly time to do anything of the sort. A mass of stickies raced around the bend, filling the corridor wall-to-wall with their bodies. Leaping and waving spindly arms, they charged right into the muzzles of the waiting blasters.
Ryan, Ti and the warriors opened fire in the tight space, chopping down some but not nearly all of the muties. There were too many, they were too fast, and they were already too close for blasterwork. The muties who weren’t struck down by the initial salvo didn’t respond with the maniacal attack typical of their species; instead they brushed past and dashed around easy victims, and kept on running. Ryan and the others turned and reaimed their weapons, but had to hold fire because the stickies plowed headlong into the press of miners who were bringing up the rear.
At that moment Ryan realized that bloodlust wasn’t driving the stickies. This was panic. Blind panic.
Even though the miners bludgeoned with shovels and pickaxes, and Ronbo applied the butt of his tribarrel, the muties didn’t attack them. They threw themselves at the shoulder-to-shoulder slaves blocking their escape from the spiral, and in a desperate frenzy actually tried to climb over them.
Ryan could see nothing close behind, nothing pursuing them up the passageway. What were they running from? he asked himself. And why were they pissing themselves to get away?
One of the stickies stopped by the packed slaves reversed course and charged right at him. As it ran its mouth opened wide and it let out a piercing screech of agony. For the first time he got a good look at the thing’s belly. It was huge. About to give birth. To quintuplets, at least.
It was also very obviously male, which was a considerable puzzlement.
It didn’t seem to notice or care about the four blasters aimed at its head. Before Ryan, Ti and the four warriors could fire, the stickie exploded.