by James Axler
So Ryan took the hardest route to anything. There were always things to learn from that route. Although sometimes you could regret such ideas—such as now, when you were jogging across open ground toward an area where someone in concealment could pick you off as easily as shooting crows.
But this was a fortunate day for Ryan Cawdor, as he reached his destination with nothing in the way of danger. Squinting down the single pipeline to the well, he could see no sign of any activity or habitation. So anything that was going on would be within the knot of pipes that now stood to his left.
The one-eyed warrior didn't hesitate before plunging into the morass of metalwork, taking it in with a single glance. Although there was a complex maze, there was little room within for maneuver, and so it would be difficult for any enemy to conceal himself. But there was still that chance.
Ryan soon found the conditions as troublesome as Doc and Krysty had on their own recces. The reflected heat and the dust made his head pound, forcing him to concentrate even harder…which, in turn, made his head begin to ache even more. But he grimly set his jaw, ignoring the sting of salt sweat that ran into his one clear blue eye, and trickled beneath the patch, tracing the line of his scar and settling in the empty socket.
It was because he could be so focused that he heard the slightest of movements to the left of him, about ten yards ahead. A snuffle of breath, a shuffle of foot…it was enough for him to seek a cover position.
In the maze of twisted pipes, there was little to be found, but he had just turned a corner, and a quick step back took him to the cusp of the turn, allowing him a slight angle in which to seek cover.
"I got you," he yelled, "get into view with your blaster butt first and I won't rip you to shit."
"Big words when I've got the cover," returned a voice with a slight lilting brogue to it. It then said something in a language that Ryan couldn't understand. He had a feeling that it was something Krysty and Mildred had spoken about after their mat-trans jump to what remained of the United Kingdom. A language called .Gaelic. But it was impossible to think—
This had run through the one-eyed man's head in the space of a few moments, during which time he had taken that step into cover and flicked the safety on the SIG-Sauer so that it was ready to fire. At the same time, his free hand snaked to the panga strapped to his thigh, the finely honed blade glinting even in this dull tight when he slipped it free.
"Show yourself," Ryan yelled.
"Show myself and get chilled by some bastard that wants our jack bonuses? You think I'm as thick as you say we all are?"
Ryan's brow furrowed at the man's words. What the hell was he talking about? "You mean you're not here to wreck the pipeline?" he asked.
The hidden man laughed. "You think I'm going to fall for that? Go 'Oh no, of course not,' step out and get myself blown to hell? Mister, I knew that the fire downtown was caused by you people, and when everyone else went like a herd across the plain I was damned if I was going to let that happen again. That's why I'm waiting for you."
"I think you've got the wrong man, friend, but there's no way you'll believe that unless I make a gesture. If I throw down my blaster—"
"You'll have another behind your back," the hidden man retorted. "You think I'm some kind of simpleminded stickie or something?"
With which he decided to stop talking and start firing. Stepping out from his cover, he fired two rapid shots from a blaster that looked like a small but powerful handblaster—maybe a Smith & Wesson remake. But Ryan didn't intend to investigate too closely. Right now it didn't matter what the blaster was, only that it could rip holes on him and buy the farm.
The one-eyed man slammed himself up against the pipes on the angle of the turn, sideways on so that he made a smaller target. The ricochets from the two shells cannoned around him, but he ignored them, steeling himself. If they hit him, there was nothing he could do about that, as there was no point giving into his reactions there. Instead, he focused his entire attention on the man who was now standing out in the open.
Stupe. He was an open target, his fury and desire to chill Ryan making him forget the most basic ideas of keeping cover. That was always assuming that he had ever known them in the first place.
It would have been good to have just wounded him, perhaps keep him alive so that they could question him about what had been going on. It was highly unlikely that he had anything to do with the sabotage, especially as his avowed aim had been the same as that for which Ryan and his companions had been hired. But that was immaterial. Right now he was an enemy, a danger, and like a mad dog on the loose. There was only one thing to do with him.
The one-eyed man raised his blaster and leveled it, aiming at the man's head. While the stupe stood in full view, trying to sight the partially concealed Ryan for another shot, the one-eyed warrior squeezed the trigger, loosing a 9 mm shell from the P-226, the blast muffled through the built-in baffle silencer.
There was a sudden silence, the muffled blast fading quickly and leaving no ricochet as the bullet hit home. The man stood for a moment, an expression of surprise crossing his face and then fixing there as life drained from him, freezing his features. The entry hole was small, but the exit wound at the back of his head was larger, part of the skull detaching and splattering on the earth behind, blood and brain bringing a small measure of moisture to the dry soil.
The blaster dropped from nerveless fingers, followed shortly after by the crumbling figure of the blaster's owner, now a lifeless husk.
Ryan bolstered his SIG-Sauer and sheathed the panga before stepping out of the scant cover and taking the few strides covering the short distance between him and the corpse. One thing for sure—the man was no fighter, as he had left himself open to attack and had missed a man in little cover from a short range.
Kneeling in front of the corpse, Ryan checked for any other weapons, or any plas-ex or grens. There was nothing that could suggest that this man was a saboteur. He moved away from the chilled body and checked the area where the man had been hiding. Again, there was no sign of anything that could remotely have been used to damage the pipeline. Adding this to what the man had said, Ryan could only assume that he had been taken for a saboteur himself.
He was still checking the area when Krysty and Doc arrived. He explained to them what had occurred, and was in the middle of this explanation when the others arrived. He filled them in briefly, and after he had finished, Mildred spoke.
"The Molly Maguires," she said simply.
"Which means?" J.B. asked, scratching his head beneath his fedora.
"It was something I remember from history lessons—the Gaelic Ryan mentioned triggered off a memory. It dates back to the end of the nineteenth, turn of the twentieth century. A group of migrant workers, from Ireland originally. Only I think it was coal rather than oil…maybe near Kansas. Anyway, they formed themselves into a secret society called the Molly Maguires, and set to a campaign of sabotage where they were working. It was designed to win them better working conditions, better pay. Maybe that's what's happening here. We should ask Baron Silas if he ups the jack bonuses every time there's trouble and the work falls behind schedule."
"Ask me now," the baron drawled as he and his sec man came up to where the companions were gathered. "I see you got one of the bastards," he added, pushing through and prodding the chilled corpse with the toe of his boot. "From the look of him, I'd say he was one of Silveen's people, from Mandrake. They dress that way," he added, remarking on the vest and open undershirt the man wore, along with his heavily patched denims, thick leather belt and heavy boots. "So they're behind it, eh?"
"Don't jump to any conclusions," Mildred answered. "You heard what I was saying, right? Well, the Maguires used sabotage to up their pay and conditions, and maybe an equivalent group is doing this to up their bonuses. But maybe it's really just an interville fight that's spilled over onto your well. Just because the Maguires were Irish, and this man spoke Gaelic so I assume that Mandrake has a heavy
Irish-descended population… Well, just because of that it doesn't mean to say that the Mandrake people are behind the sabotage. After all, Ryan found no evidence."
"Mildred's right," the one-eyed man added. "This man had no plas-ex or grens on him, and there's none hereabouts. And from what he said to me, he thought I was the one who was going to plant them. So I reckon this poor stupe was trying to stop any sabotage, but wouldn't calm down enough to listen to me. It's not going to be that simple."
Baron Silas Hunter fixed Ryan with a steely glare. "It better be some easy, or else you may find that you don't get your easy passage out. Remember why I hired you." He turned on his heel and stormed off toward the wag, followed by his sec guard.
"Touchy, is he not?" Doc remarked quietly.
"Guess you'd be if you had a whole heap of barons on your back and a big project like this that was screwing up on you," Dean replied.
"That is a fair point," Doc agreed before turning to face the camp, where the oily plumes of black smoke had decreased in intensity. "It looks as though whatever happened back there is under control, so perhaps our friendly baron may wish to show us the forces he expects us to marshal."
"You mean people he want us sec?" Jak questioned, then shook his head sadly when Doc assented, "Breath you waste on words chill me," the albino remarked.
"C'mon, let's go," Ryan said, leading them back to where the baron's wag was waiting, leaving the chilled corpse behind to be dealt with by another sec party, when the workers returned to their posts.
Baron Silas was waiting behind the wheel of the wag, the engine ticking over, staring impassively ahead. The sec man sat next to him, as blank a cipher as any living being could be. The companions climbed into the back of the wag, and Ryan leaned around the side of the wag again to talk to the baron.
"Looks like the trouble in the camp has died down, but now seems as good a time as any to see what was going on. So how about you take us there? And one more thing," he added as the baron put the wag into gear. "Getting pissed at us is no answer to your problem. We can't do jackshit until we've actually looked the area over and got to see the people in their own shit. Don't get heavy on us, because that isn't going to help anyone."
The baron's cold eyes met Ryan's ice-blue orb. He said nothing for a second, as though assessing the one-eyed man once more, then grunted. "Okay, but I need results bad."
"Fair enough. You'll get them, but it doesn't mean to say you'll like them," Ryan commented as he swung himself back into the rear of the wag and the vehicle lurched into motion.
The wag careered across the harsh desert surface, raising clouds of dust in its wake as it followed a track beaten into the earth by the constant tramping back and forth of the workforce. As they neared the camp, the companions could see the workers coming toward them in ragged lines, policed by a group of sec outriders who were mounted on unruly, flea-bitten horses that they could barely control.
"Horses?" Mildred yelled.
"I guess they save on fuel for the sec men and Baron Silas," J.B. said, "and until he gets that well and refinery running, every drop of fuel is like burning jack. Especially if he's into the other barons for a lot of that jack."
Dean laughed. "Hot pipe! If those are the best horses they can get, then we really are gonna be up to our necks in horse shit."
Ryan said nothing. He was too busy watching the faces of the workers as they went by. A mix of different peoples, even in procession they had segregated themselves into groups that bespoke of their villes. From the state of some it was obvious that whatever had caused the fire in the camp had been precursor to a fight. There were abrasions and contusions on many of the workers' faces and exposed arms that showed a pitched battle had taken place. And from the small size of the sec force, it was also clear that the number of people involved had been hard to control.
The one-eyed man already knew that their task was to be difficult. This was brought home even harder when the wag entered the camp, and he could see the almost visible dividing lines between the different peoples. It was visible from the way the huts and tents were constructed, from the ways that the children, running ragged, played and stuck to lines that were so clearly demarcated that they could almost have been drawn, and from the appearance and dress of the womenfolk tending to the camp.
They all had one thing in common, though: the hostile glares with which they greeted the wag as it passed.
This was going to be harder than Ryan had thought.
Chapter Twelve
Baron Silas took the opportunity to give Ryan and the companions a tour around the camp. With the workers on their way back to the refinery and well, and the fire and interville fight quelled, it was the right moment to show them what they would provide sec for with the minimum of interference.
The fire that had emptied the work site was in the part of the camp that housed the migrant workers from Water Valley. As they entered this quarter, the companions noted that the dwelling switched from the blanket, material and wooden pole constructions of the Running Water people into the much harder lines of huts constructed from scrap wood and sheets of corrugated iron, the wood gouged deep with running joints for the metal to slide into, securing it against the vagaries of the weather.
"Those Crow's people," Jak said to Dean, pointing out the Running Water women, who were dark-skinned with dark hair, and dark-eyed children at their feet.
"Yeah," the younger Cawdor replied, "and I'd guess they get less trouble with the elements than these guys—" he indicated the run of huts "—but they must be near to each other, their villes, because they seem to at least tolerate each other."
"Which makes one wonder," Doc added thoughtfully, "who started the fire…"
They had taken a circuitous route through the camp in order to get to that point, taking a counterclockwise path that had led them from the remnants of the fire at first, taking in the other areas, before landing them back to their point of origin.
A couple of sec men, their horses tied to a post supporting one of the Running Water dwellings and attracting the attention of children from both Running Water and Water Valley, were helping the womenfolk from both villes to clear the scorched debris of the fire.
As they dismounted from the wag, it was easy to see why the folks of Water Valley and Running Water stuck together. Whereas the vast majority of the camp was Caucasian, albeit from different areas and with different tribal and predark origins, the two villes whose homes were water based were of a different stock. The Running Water people were, as the companions had guessed from what both Baron Silas and the Crow had told them, a Native American people, which made them stand out. And the Water Valley dwellers displayed a much wider mix than anything they had seen in the camp. The women and children who were clustered around the huts showed Native American, black and Hispanic blood among them, the children having a glorious array of skin tone and features that made them a truly eclectic tribe.
Mildred looked at them, taking in the multiplicity of human types, and turned to J.B. "John, this is the sort of thing they could still only dream about before skydark. When I was young, my daddy used to tell me that one day the people of the earth would be one. Shit, he didn't think it'd take a holocaust to do it." And for a moment she stopped being Dr. Mildred Wyeth and became once more the little girl at her daddy's knee, listening to him tell her tales of the marches with another Dr.—Martin Luther King. Then she looked at the remnants of the fire, and her heart burned with a fire of anger. "One thing, John," she continued, "if that's why this is happening, and it's not the oil well, then some bastard's going to pay."
"Dark night, keep calm," the Armorer replied softly. "I don't know why it's gotten to you—how can I? But I do know we're gonna need to keep frosty or get chilled." Mildred looked at him. "I know you're right, but it might be a little hard." Baron Silas and Ryan walked from the wag over to the site of the fire, where the sec men were kicking over the ashes to kill any last smoldering sparks.
They def
erred to the baron as he reached them, and he said, "What happened?"
"Hard to say for sure," replied the taller man, who had a finely honed musculature and a long gray beard. Ryan reckoned him to be past fifty, but still a match for any fighter. And from the way the stockier, younger sec man let him answer, he obviously had some kind of authority. The sec man continued. "Trouble is, as always, they waited till a patrol was past these parts before firing up. Asked a few questions, but answers are garbled. Sounds like kids—too old to be around the women, but not yet old enough to work on the well. Guess they got bored, listen to their fathers talk shit about each other, and decided to have a little fun and make a little trouble. Lord alone knows we ain't likely to catch them—not from the descriptions. Could be anyone, from almost any ville, though some do stand out," he added with a glance at the women and children around.
"You don't think it was intended to cause a diversion and bring the workers back?" Ryan asked.
The sec man sized up the one-eyed man before answering, and his reply was slow and considered. "Figure it could be to do with fucking up the well, eh? Mebbe I'd agree if there'd been any damage at the well, which I guess there hasn't 'cause you're here not there, Baron," he added to Baron Silas. "And mebbe I'd agree more if it'd been at night. But this ain't right for that. There were too many people about to see who fired it up, and it's too early in the day—even if you could pull everyone off-site, there's still the chance of being seen." He shook his head firmly. "No, this is villes hating each other, but it ain't the well."
Ryan nodded. "Okay, sounds good," he said simply. Everything the sec man had told him made sense, and the one-eyed man needed to let him know that he would trust his judgment. If this sec man was in charge of camp sec, then it was important Ryan establish friendly relations.
