by James Axler
One of the relief drivers was at the controls, and the Trader passed the word for Hun to come and take over. If there was trouble, it was only simple common sense to have your best person at the wheel.
She pushed past Ryan without a word. That was one of the reasons why Hunaker had survived on the war wags as long as she had. Her personal life never imposed on work.
Ryan glanced through the front scope and saw what the lookout had reported—an oily pillar of black smoke winding into the pale pink sky.
He wondered if it was an accident, then dismissed the notion.
The engine revved and gears clattered as Hun prepared War Wag One for full battle speed. Otis had taken over the radio intercom and was talking to War Wag Two on the lip mike.
The lumbering armored juggernaut climbed to the top of the ridge, and Hun eased down on the brakes with a hissing of laboring hydraulics.
Simultaneously the lookout yelled down, "Convoy of wags under attack. One's on fire. No, there's another one burning!"
"Report properly, you triple-stupe bastard!" the Trader shouted angrily.
"Five wags, two fired. Caught by roadblock of stones. Looks like a war band of twenty or thirty around them. Hand blasters. No…just saw what looked like a bazooka or a gren-launcher. Missed target. Not seen us yet."
"Red, red, red," the Trader repeated.
This wasn't a passing frontier incident. Gren-launchers fell into the category of "serious" and meant that an organized group faced them.
At a word from Ryan, Hun applied the brakes and brought War Wag One to a gentle halt. Otis passed the command to the following war wag.
J.B. had taken over the lookout's turret spot. Ryan had one of the scopes while the Trader leaned on Hun's shoulder and stared out the armaglass front shield.
The three men together would appraise the situation and decide what action the war wags should best take. But the final decision always rested in the hands of the Trader.
With higher ground behind them, the two vehicles still hadn't been spotted by anyone in the fight below. So all of their options remained open to them.
"Heavy blasters," J.B. suggested. "We run down on them, and we can probably scare them off. But it could mean losses."
Ryan agreed. "Have to try and take out the guy with the gren-launcher first. One lucky shot from that and we could be in some deep rad-dust."
The Trader nodded slowly. "Likely that convoy's heading west for better lands, and they run into those blood-eyed sons of bitches. Plenty of losses already. Two wags burning. Longer we sit here the more they're gonna lose."
"Got to drive through this way anyway," Ryan added.
"Yeah, Ryan. Why not? Quartermaster?"
Otis looked around. "Yo."
"Tell Two we're going in. Independent command and firing. Chill as many as they can."
The stocky black began to relay the message to the wag behind them.
"Ready people. Gunners! Open fire as soon as your blaster'll bear. Hun, go in fast, then slow it down. Don't want to get locked in with those burning wags there."
War Wag One, sealed tight for action, jerked forward and began to gather speed down the straight stretch of old highway.
During the few minutes before the shooting began, Ryan hung on to a stanchion and thought about dying.
Any man or woman who said they went into a fire-fight feeling calm and under control was lying. The mouth began to feel dry and the palms of the hands started to feel moist.
Nobody wanted to get chilled, but there were times when it looked as if the only option was to go out as best you could. Pretty up and walking good, like someone once said.
Ryan still woke up shaking in the long hours of early morning, when the heart beats slowest and the sick are nearest to death, thinking about a snow-veiled gulch up north. The ground was frozen so hard that your boot heels rang out on the packed earth.
It hadn't been that long since he'd run from home, and he was still a callow kid.
Now, in the confines of War Wag One, he remembered the cross-trees gallows and the feel of the rough hemp against the skin of his throat, the knot lumped under his right ear.
His breath had come fast, hanging in the air in front of his face like wind spray. He'd been surrounded by a ring of blazing torches and the smell of the burning pitch, faces muffled in scarves and hoods, with only the eyes showing.
The trouble had been about the ownership of a horse. A pinto pony, Ryan recalled. An argument had ended with the other man on his back in the dirt, flakes of snow settling on his staring eyes.
The lynch mob hadn't taken long to reach its decision about who was guilty. The stranger kid with one eye was as good a victim as a person could look for.
It had been a woman who'd saved Ryan, bustling to the hanging tree, calling out that the boy was innocent. She'd seen it all. They couldn't top a young lad who'd been provoked into the deadly fight.
She'd persuaded them, and she'd taken Ryan back to her widow's shack and kept him there for a couple of weeks until the anger faded away from the ville. And she'd gotten him to pay a price for his life, in her bed, every night.
Now, only about ten years later, Ryan couldn't remember a single thing about her.
The sharp pinging of a slug against the armored steel of the war wag jerked him back to the present.
"Hold fire," came J.B.'s voice over the intercom. "Not until my word." The Armorer judged range with a calm expert's eye.
The shell of War Wag One was now beginning to ring as lead beat a savage tattoo outside. But inside, everything was still calm and controlled.
Ryan watched the approach of the raiding band through the scope, counting heads and trying to make out the level of their weaponry. It was a surprise to see how many of the attacking band had high-powered rifles. He spotted a distinctive Colt Sporter II, and a couple of conventional Whitworth sporting rifles.
Now they could hear the sounds of the blasters. There was a burst of venomous chatter that splattered along the starboard side of the war wag.
"Beretta SC 70, short assault rifle," J.B. said. "These guys have got them some serious power out there."
"Close enough?" the Trader called.
The wag continued to crawl forward in a lower gear. Ryan could see that the group of men—he couldn't make any women—were moving back into a rough perimeter, keeping up a steady fire at the new enemy. The two ordinary wags were still blazing fiercely. There was only sporadic defensive shooting from the other high sides.
"Go," J.B. said.
From Ryan's point of view, the firefight wasn't particularly satisfying. His function during this kind of action was simply to be available, and to be ready to lead any countercharge. In this case, it was quickly obvious that the raiders weren't going to hang around and become drawn into an exchange with the overwhelming power of the two war wags. They were already beginning to withdraw in an orderly manner toward the line of bluffs and buttes a half mile or so to the east. Ryan could see, by switching the scope to high-mag, that the land was seamed with a maze of narrow draws and arroyos. It wasn't the terrain to pursue on foot an enemy who knew the land.
War Wag One was filled with the racket of chattering blasters. The machine guns mounted on the roof and on the starboard side all opened up. Their targets had concentrated on that flank, and the gunners on the port pods were left with nothing to shoot at.
J.B. kept up a terse, running commentary to make sure everyone was informed. Only the Trader, Ryan and some of the gunners were in positions to see for themselves how the firefight was going.
"Couple trying a charge from one of the wags. Stupid. Yeah, both down. Some good eyes out there. Still pulling back. Nice. Good shooting whoever that was. Bowled him like a rabbit."
The Trader ordered Hun to bring the wag to a total stop, about three hundred yards from the small convoy. Gradually the firing died away on both sides, only an occasional bullet ringing off the steel flanks of War Wag One.
"Stop firing,
" J.B. called. "They're all way gone. Taken their gren-launcher with them. Don't think any're staying behind."
He was right. When the Trader finally gave the command to move down the slope, there was no sign of any of the attackers—except for seven corpses, lying where they'd fallen.
Ryan wiped sweat from his forehead and buttoned the flap over the Ruger. It wasn't going to get fired that day.
Ryan's responsibilities as war captain for the Trader didn't include having to hang around and socialize with a group of double-stupe settlers who were lucky not to have all been slaughtered. His responsibilities did include taking out a working party to search the corpses for any clues of where they'd come from, who their leader might be, how many of them there were and what kind of blasters they toted. He was also responsible for collecting any weapons they might have been carrying for J.B.'s expert assessment.
He also had to post a circle of sentries, particularly over toward the line of dusty orange cliffs where the raiding party had vanished.
Ryan was briefly conscious of a tall woman glancing in his direction with eyes of the most piercing green he'd ever seen. And there was a slender girl beside her who he assumed was her daughter. What had the bearded old man told the Trader her name was? Chrissy? Krysty?
"Yeah, Krysty," he said, and promptly forgot the name.
Chapter Thirteen
THE TWO WOMEN STOOD on either side of the bed, looking down at the unconscious figure of Ryan Cawdor,
Mildred Wyeth glanced across at the flame-haired woman, wishing she could offer her some sort of solace in her desperate misery.
"How long have you known him, Krysty?" she asked. "When did you first meet him?"
Krysty shook her head. The bright curls seemed dulled, pressing in tight around her face. "I'm not sure."
"Not sure?"
"No. Part of me thinks I met Ryan first up in Mocsin, when he sprang me from that iron-hearted bastard, Strasser."
"But…"
Krysty sighed. "You know I've got the power… of seeing. Learned it from Mother Sonja, back in Harmony. I mean that things aren't always that clear to me. Past and present. The lines sometimes get kind of blurred."
"So how's that affect when you met Ryan? You saying you might have met him before? In some kind of previous existence?"
Krysty managed a wan smile. "Not really that, Mildred. More that I have this heart-feel that I may have known Ryan before. I don't know. Maybe our paths crossed once."
They stood together and looked down. Ryan was in a deep coma, his heart beating slowly, his breathing so shallow that it was difficult to make out any movement of his chest.
"Will he make it, Mildred?" Krysty asked.
The black woman didn't answer. She watched Ryan's face, seeing how the right eyeball was flicking to and fro against the trembling lid as though he were dreaming.
Chapter Fourteen
BY THE TIME Ryan returned to the war wags, the situation had been resolved.
The travelers had collected and buried their dead and rescued what they could from their burned transport. The women had vanished inside, while the men went about their business.
There was no more information about the band that had attacked them. The men had come out of the desert and disappeared in the same way. They'd been particularly well armed and disciplined, and Ryan had found, once he led out the party from War Wag One, that they'd also taken their dead and wounded with them.
The old man with the white hair wasn't able to offer any real help.
"One thing, I noticed," he said.
"What?" the Trader asked.
"Man leading the chillers."
"What about him?" J.B. pressed. The Armorer had already spoken to Ryan about the way the raiders had been so cleverly organized. They'd not wasted time on trying to fight off the more powerful war wags, just held them up a little so they could make their orderly withdrawal into the hills.
"Well…" He glanced sideways at Ryan, licking his lips.
"Come on, man," the Trader prompted.
"He lacked an eye."
"Which one?" Ryan asked. "The same one as me? Which?"
"Same one. I could see him very clearly. Apart from that there was nothing to note about any of the gang."
"You'd better get moving, mister, in case they got wags and try and circle around and hit you again. Plenty of daylight left."
The white hair blew across the old man's face as the northerly wind gusted. He brushed it back from his eyes. "Very well. Our thanks again, Trader, to you and all your people. Had you not come along… then things might have gone badly."
Ryan shook his head. "Get farther and live longer if you don't talk soft shit. They wouldn't have maybe gone badly. You'd have been chilled. All of you. Everything stolen worth stealing. Women raped. Children too. All chilled. Not 'things might have gone badly.' Understand?"
He spit in the dirt and walked away to where Hun had War Wag One ticking over.
Behind him there was a cold silence. The old man mumbled something about getting back on the highway for Harmony. A cursory shake of the hand with Trader and J. B. Dix, and then the two groups parted company.
They went on a few miles under a condition red, before the Trader relaxed it to yellow. It was close to evening before they dropped eventually to green.
The Trader, Ryan and J.B. sat together around one of the small cooking fires, each with his bowl of stew and a hunk of bread.
"You spoke harsh against the man," Trader said.
"Yeah," Ryan replied through a mouthful of the thick stew.
"Why?"
"Had it coming."
"No." The Trader shook his head. "Not true. Old man had lost friends and kin. You spoke harsh against him."
Ryan put his spoon down. "I get tired of folks like him. They move around the Deathlands, full of wind and piss about a new land, new home and new hopes. Don't even bother to get themselves any serious weaponry. Drive blind into an ambush. We bail them out of the hot spot."
J.B. interrupted him. "Come on, Ryan. Those raiders had a real ace on the line. Gren-launchers and some sophisticated blasters. Most convoys would have dropped the flag for them."
"Yeah, sure. But there's a lot of stiff ones out there now. Could've been we might have taken a lucky shot from a gren. Then there'd have been some serious chilling. It's just that I don't like that kind of stupe out here."
The Trader patted him on the arm in an unusual gesture of affection. "Gotta give the other man his space, Ryan. Right to space. You see the villes out east, don't you?"
"Drop it, Trader. Just drop that kind of talk. You made a point. Now let it lie."
There was a sudden moment of bitter tension between the two men. J.B., sensing it, slowly put his spoon down.
"You want to go find a quiet place to punch each other's lights out? Or do you wanna talk about where that raiding gang came from?"
Ryan smiled. "I'm not much at saying 'sorry.' You're right, J.B. Just something got to me. Maybe seeing the women and children and knowing what they were risking. Sure, let's drop that side of it. Way they was organized I could almost put them as sec-men."
One of the crew came around and pushed some more wood into the fire, making it flare with a bright yellow flame. A starburst of sparks rose in a whirling circle into the black velvet of the sky.
The Trader rubbed at his chin. "Could do with a shave. Hate looking in the mirror and seeing gray hairs sprouting on my chin. Like seeing my father's face looking out at me."
"More stew, Trader?" Ryan asked, glad that the tension had eased and that his own dark mood had lifted along with it.
"Nope. Don't relish food way I used to. Times my guts starts feeling like I swallowed a sewer rat. Claws at me."
"Should see a doc about it," J.B. said.
"If there's one in Towse I might. I guess it'll be interesting to check out their sec-men."
"See if they got a one-eyed man," Ryan said. "Yeah."
"What if they have, Tr
ader?"
"Then, J.B.," the older man said, grinning, "we'll just have to step even more careful." He stood. "And now I'm for sleep."
Despite all of Beulah's best navigation, the two wags were forced to take a circuitous route to get close to Towse ville, eventually making a great circle and coming in from the north.
"Big gorge, hereabouts," she warned, peering at her road atlas by the light of one of the opened ob-slits.
The morning had started with a ferocious shower of cold, driving rain, beating in on the teeth of a blue norther. It had turned the campsite into an instant quagmire, but the big driving wheels of the war wags had got them moving without any serious difficulties.
They'd driven on through drier weather, with the sun eventually emerging from banks of dull, brownish-orange clouds. The highway steamed in front of them, and it was a relief when the Trader ordered all doors and ob-slits thrown wide open.
"Bridge ahead," called Peachy, one of the relief drivers. He was only in his midteens and had joined the group less than a month ago, near the Grandee River. His nickname came from his attempts to grow a macho beard. The pale result resembled nothing more than the fuzz on a fresh young peach.
"Slow it down," ordered Ryan, who was in the command position. The Trader was relaxing in his bunk.
Gears ground noisily, and the young man fought his way to take the edge off the speed. The front of the wag dipped as he used the brakes.
At one time there had obviously been a massive bridge with painted iron railings over what looked from a distance like a deep gorge, the one that Beulah had mentioned earlier.
Through the mag-scope, Ryan could see that there was now a bridge of wood and ropes. Whether it would bear the enormous weight of the armored war wags was uncertain. Through the scope Ryan could also see a small group of men carrying blasters.
He pressed the button on the intercom that linked him to the Trader's tiny cabin.
"Sec-patrol in sight," he reported. "This side of a big bridge."
"How many?"
"Four."
"Stop a quarter mile off. Be right there."
War Wag One halted. Ryan had put the crews on condition yellow. There wasn't any serious threat from the four men, so he held off from red. In hot weather, conditions inside the metal boxes could quickly become intolerable for the crews.
