The Omega Cage

by Steve Perry

  "Five more minutes," Scanner said. "That's all I need."

  Juete watched Scanner work by the light of the lantern.

  The building was dark again. The man moved at a frantic pace, twisting wires together, pushing circuit boards haphazardly into place, pounding with his hands on the delicate-looking gadgets.

  "Is there any way we can keep them from seeing us?" Dain asked.

  "I don't have time to rig anything to rascal their heat gear," Scanner said.

  "I do," Raze said.

  Dain turned to look at her. She held up something, and a small flame flared.

  Juete said, "What good will that do?"

  Raze grabbed one of the cans of generator fuel. "Just watch." She grinned, then turned and ran toward the exit.

  "Dain? What is she doing?"

  "She's going to set the camp on fire," he replied. "They won't spot human warmth in the middle of an infemo."

  "Good idea," Scanner said, not looking away from his work.

  "What?"

  "Uh, that's affirmative, Warden. We've got a fire about three klicks ahead, right at where the mining camp is supposed to be. Big one. The whole sky is lit up."

  Stark looked at Karnaaj. "What the hell is going on?" he said, more to himself than to the other man.

  But Karnaaj answered. "I think our quarry is trying to pull something. Confound our sensors, most likely."

  Stark said, "Then they are there! I want them alive, do you hear? Any of them turn up dead, whoever's responsible will pay with his ass!"

  "Copy, Warden."

  Maro silently urged Scanner to more speed. Come on, come on!

  Outside, the light from the fires Raze had set turned the night into flickering orange bright enough to see the entire camp. The smell of burning plastic assailed his nostrils, a sharp and bitter tang, and the sound of the flames was a dull, windy sound, shot through with crackles.

  "That's the best I'm going to be able to do," Scanner said, leaning back. "If I had another twenty minutes—"

  The hum of aircycles overrode the sounds of the fire.

  "No time," Maro said. "We've got to move, now!"

  "Where is Raze?" Juete said.

  "We'll find her. Get into the cart."

  The aircycles' sound grew louder.

  Scanner pushed the ignition button. The cart's engine rumbled, but failed to start.

  "Come on, Scanner—!"

  The engine whined, rumbled, caught—then died. Scanner punched the starter again. The engine rumbled into life, stronger this time. Scanner engaged the drive. The cart roiled toward the exit.

  "Ah, Warden, the whole camp is on fire. We've spotted one of them. The bodybuilder."

  "Alive," Stark said. "Take her alive!"

  Scanner drove the cart into the bright firelight, turned sharply to avoid an obstacle and nearly threw Juete out by doing so. She grabbed at the side. Dain caught her arm and pulled her back into her seat.

  "Where is Raze?" Juete was in a panic.

  "There!" Scanner said.

  The woman was fifty meters to the left, running. Behind her, three men pursued. Juete heard the cough of a spetsdod. Raze dodged, dived and rolled up, and kept going.

  "Scanner!"

  "I'm going, I'm going!"

  He turned the cart toward the back-lit figures and throttled up. The cart jerked forward in a dusty haze as the tires tore up the dry ground.

  Raze vanished behind an earthmover. The men chasing her skidded to a halt.

  "Raze!" Juete yelled. "Over here!"

  One of the men heard the yell. He turned, saw the cart bearing down on him, and raised the hand with the spetsdod on it. Something clinked against the windshield of the cart. Scanner ducked and Dain tried to pull Juete down in her seat. She resisted. "Raze!"

  As if in answer, the big woman suddenly loomed behind the man with the spetsdod. She grabbed his head and twisted. Juete thought she heard the man's spine crack.

  The other two men turned to see Raze. She lowered her head and barreled into them. All three went down.

  Raze came up from the tangle of bodies. Juete saw her stomp down on one of them, hard. He screamed.

  "HOLD IT!" came an amplified voice.

  Juete saw a hovercraft above them. A bright spotlight arced out and threw its glare over Raze.

  Raze sprinted out of the light, too fast for it to follow. Juete saw her outlined momentarily against a burning building.

  A dozen men scrambled from the settling craft, which kept moving, dropping more troops in a human line that stretched past the fleeing Raze. She turned, running directly away from where the cart was.

  Scanner turned the small vehicle to follow Raze, but there were troops and guards between them.

  "Run them down!" Juete yelled.

  Some of the men turned and began to fire at the cart. They weren't using spetsdods, but pulse weapons. Bright beams seared the already fiery night, hard sounds and high energy dazzling to the ears and eyes.

  Raze was trapped, her back to a melting plastic building.

  "They want her alive!" Scanner said.

  Raze looked up and saw the cart. She waved it away. "Go!" she yelled. "Go!" Then she smiled, a vulpine expression, all teeth. One of the men facing her raised a spetsdod and aimed it at her.

  "Fuck you!" Raze yelled.

  She turned and ran into the wall of the burning building. Her body left a dark spot for a single heartbeat before the oozing plastic filled it in.

  "Shear off!" Dain yelled.

  The cart turned, skidding and throwing up a cloud of fine dust. Another pulse beam sizzled overhead, too high by a meter.

  "They want us alive, too," Dain said. "Get us the hell out of here, Scanner!"

  To their right, one of the burning buildings collapsed with a loud crash and a shower of burning plastic drops that rained down like shooting stars. Somebody behind them screamed. In the acrid smoke and conflagration, the pursuers must have lost track of them. Scanner drove the cart into the cool darkness past the perimeter of the flaming camp. He did not slow until they reached the forest.

  Juete looked back at the camp as Scanner picked his way around the trees. Her tears flowed. "Good-bye, Raze," she said.

  She glanced at Dain. In the faint gleam of the cart's instrument lighting, she could see that he was crying, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Stark stood at the door of his storage shed, staring at the palm lock. Dawn was coming, but the new day did not matter. Everything had gone to hell. Six more of his men were dead; three apparently killed by the dead bodybuilder, three more by the collapse of some building during the fire at the camp. It was small consolation, but eight of Karnaaj's men were also dead. The hovercraft in which they had been riding had been blown out of the air by the explosion of a fuel tank in a mining machine. Whatever chance he had of saving his career was gone. When the Confed finished with him, he'd be lucky to escape prison himself. The Confed did not like failure in its officers.

  He reached up and palmed the lock. The sliding door, unused for years in the miasmatic tropical weather, squeaked and stuck halfway along its track. He grabbed the plastic panel and shoved it the rest of the way, then brushed his hand over the light plate. The overhead fluoros cast their hard glare down, filling the room.

  Stark stared at the Juggernaut.

  At first glance, it resembled a standard exoskeleton loader. The unit stood four meters tall, vaguely anthropomorphic in shape—two legs and two arms, with a torso big enough to contain a large man or mue comfortably. But the hands were not hydraulic clips, like a workmech's. The three pairs of "fingers" had been adapted for combat. One finger on the right hand contained the muzzle of a pulse weapon; one on the left had a flamethrower; the other pair of fingers could be used to pinch through plate durasteel or to pick up an egg equally well. Rocket launchers on both shoulders each held five heat-sensitive thermodrill Rodent missiles that could track more than fifty degrees from line-of-flight, once fired. The main bod
y armor was five-centimeter-thick stacked molecular plasticast and could stop anything up to a 50 MM AP shell. GE repellors and bounce beamers gave the thing the mobility of a small jet to altitudes just below orbital. The control electronics and sensors were state of the art. It was a major piece of war machinery, and it had cost him the equivalent of a small fortune to come by it. The man who had "lost" it was dead, and nobody knew it was here but Stark. It was his final trump, and the time had come to play it. He would use the Juggernaut to find and kill all of the prisoners except Juete, and then he would use it to get them both to a ship and off-planet.

  After that—well, he would have to play it as it came. He stripped his orthoskins away and punched in a code on the lock control of the exoframe. The machine hummed to life, and the hinged hatch swung smoothly open. A climatesuit lay neatly folded in the bodysleeve compartment inside. Stark donned the suit and triggered it into operation. He felt a cool pulse as the circulating fluids adjusted to the air and his body temperature. He pulled the hood over his head and tabbed it into place.

  He took a deep breath. Once he climbed into the Juggernaut and slid his feet and hands into the extensors, his motions would be duplicated as exactly as the suit could manage. In a training test he had seen once, a skilled operator had squatted and picked up a tenth-stad coin from a smooth floor with the grippers, flipped it into the air and point-blasted it with the pulse gun as it fell. In personal combat, a man in a Juggernaut was almost invincible— save against another so armored. He was radar-ghosted, laser-reflective and had a cruising range of five thousand kilometers at speeds up to three hundred klicks an hour. Once he got inside and left, nobody was going to be bringing him back. Not even Karnaaj and all his men.

  Stark took a deep breath and climbed up into the armored womb of the Juggernaut.

  Dawn found them running smoothly to the north, skirting the desert, hidden in the trees. Juete had dozed off, and Maro leaned forward to talk to Scanner over the sound of the wind. Scanner had used the GE gear several times, and it seemed to be working, though he kept saying he didn't trust it to last.

  "How long?" Maro asked.

  "Couple more hours. We should find the end of the desert, if my maps are right. It's scrub land past that, not as much cover as the forest, but better than being a bug on the sand."

  "Can we make to the port, Scanner?"

  "Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe. No way to tell."

  "If we get past the scrub, then what?"

  "We go north until we hit the volcanic plain. Still a lot of activity there, a lot of heat and electrical flux, so even the satellites probably couldn't pick us up unless they just happen to footprint us directly. Which isn't very likely."

  "I wonder how Sandoz and Chameleon are doing."

  "I hope they're burning in some fanatic's hell," Scanner said bitterly.

  "They were just trying to stay alive. We all were."

  "Yeah, but we weren't trying to do it at their expense. Maybe the guards will follow them instead of us."

  "Nice thought."

  "Yeah."

  They rolled on, using the GE gear over the rougher spots, bouncing on the tires otherwise. Juete slept.

  Stark walked into the fence surrounding Stores, not bothering with the gate. The electricity played over his outer shell harmlessly, and the wire tore like thread as he stepped through it. Automatic alarms sounded, loud in his amplified hearing. He turned the gain down on the suit's hearing. He grinned, in spite of his situation. This thing was powerful. Maybe he would not be as adept in it as was a trained operator, since he had only managed to practice with it surreptitiously a few times in the years since he'd acquired it, but still he felt unstoppable, and for the first time in days, his sense of helplessness fled. Let somebody try to stand in his way.

  Nobody did. He saw startled guards, but none of them were so stupid as to fire at this monster.

  He flipped the control for the GE and the bouncers. The chambers warmed and the repellors gave out a throaty growl, almost like a big cat's purr. He hit the thrust button and the Juggernaut leaped into the air.

  His radio came to life with hails, but he ignored it. Some alert guard managed to trigger the manual wall lasers, and thin fingers of red stabbed at him, but missed by a dozen meters. He was tempted to fire a rocket at the guard's tower, or tickle the place with pulses, but decided against it. Some of the guards were good soldiers; no point in causing them any more grief than they were going to run into already.

  He turned the Juggernaut away from the prison, climbed several thousand meters straight up and ordered the suit's computer to pilot him to the mining camp. He soared away, deadlier than the largest dragonbat that ever flew Omega's skies, at a speed no living creature could hope to match.

  The fuckers who broke out of his prison and ruined his life were going to be sorry they were ever born.

  Juete was jolted awake as she leaned against Dain's muscular shoulder. She had been dreaming, but whatever the dream had been was gone.

  "Where are we?" she asked.

  "About a hundred kilometers north of the mining camp. They haven't spotted us yet, apparently. A cycle flew by half an hour ago, but it didn't slow."

  She nodded. The reality of their situation was worse than any nightmare she could have had.

  The radio came to life.

  "This is Stark. Has anybody seen anything?"

  Scanner slowed the cart slightly as he listened to the dialog.

  "Copy, Warden. One of our teams found a broken-down cart about thirty kilometers south of the camp."

  Scanner allowed the vehicle to slow to a halt. Dain said, "Well. It looks as if Sandoz's choice was a bit premature."

  "Give me the coordinates. I am on my way."

  That brought a sudden chill to Juete's neck.

  "Ah, that might be inadvisable, Warden. It seems our men got careless when they were examining the cart. We have two dead on the ground and their weapons are gone. The cycles were coded, so they're still there, but the handguns weren't ID keyed. The escapees are armed."

  "It doesn't matter," Stark's voice came back. "So am I."

  "Go," Dain said to Scanner. "Maybe Sandoz and Chameleon can keep them busy long enough for us to get away."

  Scanner throttled the cart up.

  * * *

  The guards at the small clearing in the woods where the cart had been found looked appropriately surprised and startled to see the Juggernaut settle to earth. The foot pads on the exoframe sank a couple of centimeters into the soft earth, but each had enough surface area to keep the thousand or so kilograms of the machine distributed enough not to cause problems. Some of Karnaaj's men were there, and they backed away. Good, Stark thought. He had no use for those troopers.

  Stark's amplified voice boomed out at the men. "What have you got?"

  The search team leader wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, looking up at Stark's face behind the plasteel plate. "Just like we said, Warden. Two dead, two pulse pistols gone. The tracks lead off that way. They can't be more than ten minutes ahead of us, we figure."

  "Fine. Stay here. I'll get them."

  He could have flown, but he wanted to use the machine to impress the troops. He turned in the direction of the escapees' travel and started to walk.

  The brush hindered the hydraulic muscles of the Juggernaut no more than weeds would a man. Small trees fell under his mechanical feet; larger ones he shoved aside. He was able to move as fast as a running man, despite his great size, taking strides two meters at a step.

  It took him less than ten minutes to catch up to them. He only saw two; Sandoz the assassin and the mue called Chameleon. They heard him coming; the metamorph cut to the left and ran, snapping wild shots from the pulse pistol at the Juggernaut.

  Almost idly. Stark raised his left arm and triggered a blast from his flamethrower. A thin line of fire jetted forth and covered Chameleon with oily flame. There was a scream. The man ran in a small circle and then collapsed into
a bonfire that moved feebly.

  Sandoz snapped his weapon up and began firing. He was good. Five for five hit Stark, starting at the belly of the Juggernaut and walking up to the faceplate. The last shot clouded the clear metal slightly to the left, but did no real damage. Stark aimed his pulse finger at Sandoz, but then decided not to use it. He moved ponderously toward the man, who kept firing until his weapon ran dry.

  Sandoz was fast. He dodged as Stark reached for him. It took five minutes for the warden to run the prisoner down, and it was over that quickly only due to a lucky fluke: Sandoz tripped over a root and sprawled, and Stark caught him before he could scramble to his feet. The Juggernaut's mighty arms lifted the struggling man up so that their faces were level. Stark grinned at him.

  "There's only one escape from the Omega Cage, Sandoz," he said. And squeezed.

  Too fast and too hard—he didn't have the delicacy of touch of a trained operator. Bones cracked and Sandoz's chest collapsed. Blood gouted from the man's mouth and ears and he died instantly.

  Stark dropped the body. Damn. He had wanted him to suffer more.

  Scanner would. And Maro. Especially Maro.

  He sprang into the air, repellors working, and climbed to three hundred meters. He put his sensors into full scan. His miniature holoproj heads-up display showed the troopers where he had left them, along with Chameleon's burning corpse and that of the crushed Sandoz. Several other animal lifeforms registered, but nothing that gave off the signature of a human. So. The others weren't here. They had split up.

  It didn't matter. He would find them. There weren't too many directions in which they could run.

  "Two of the prisoners died while resisting capture," he said. "Come in and pick up the bodies."

  A hundred and seventy-eight kilometers away, Stark's casual message reached the ears of the three remaining escapees. They looked at each other grimly, but no one spoke. The same thought was going through each of their minds: How could Stark take Chameleon and Sandoz— Sandoz!—alone?

  With what was he armed?