by James Axler
The tracks had been deceptive. The wag was wide, but the blaster mounted on it wasn’t the kind of cannon he had expected. It was smaller, and seemed dwarfed by the width of the flatbed. It didn’t, in fact, look like it could do much harm at all.
But it wouldn’t be on something that wide and heavy-duty without a reason. Why?
He stood immobile, waiting. In an echo of what Jak was just discovering, he came to the same conclusion about the redoubt’s purpose—hidden on the document Crabbe possessed, but that kind of duplicity figured—and also to the possibility of the machine having a motion detector.
He was four-square to the sec door, facing the strange wag. For what seemed an eternity but was probably only a heartbeat he waited—then it began. A dull throbbing low in his gut, a slow pulse that he couldn’t hear so much as feel, and sensations of nausea and a spinning head.
He snorted, tried to shake his head to clear it, feeling like he was going to pass out. The tiny blaster mounted on the flatbed started to glow green at the tip. The metal frame and the caterpillar tracks on which it was mounted seemed to shimmer in front of his eyes, though the walls and floor around stayed still.
That was it—vibration and sonics. Doc had once said something about the whitecoats having such weapons, and there had been suggestions of this from the technomads who had come to their aid in the past.
The nozzle was pointed right at him. He knew he had to get the hell out of the way, and quick. But it seemed that the vibration was deep in his bones now, making the gristle and tendon between the joints seize up and refuse to obey the commands of his nervous system. Muscles seemed to shake and vibrate as if he’d been in a fight followed by an all-night run across rocky terrain. His ribs felt as if they were being pried apart. The sound from the tiny blaster was now so immense that it blotted out the sirens. There was nothing except the low, slow oscillation from the flatbed. It wasn’t so much that he could hear as it that it enveloped him, forming a barrier against all other sound, growing greater with each wave, like an ocean crashing on the shore, moving in and taking over as the tide washed over the rocks. He was the rock, and he was about to be obliterated.
But he was in front of the sec door; the barrier that barred his way. Maybe…
He was as good as chilled unless he moved now. There was only the one chance. Eye screwed tight in concentration, his breath rasping in protesting lungs as the oscillation seemed to be interfering with his natural rhythms, slowing them to its own pace, Ryan focused all the strength he could muster into one last, sudden and violent act. If he couldn’t make his protesting body act counter to the obscenely slow pulse, then he’d board the last train west. He thought of Krysty, J.B., Mildred and Doc; of Jak, on the other side of the door. He thought of all they had been through and all they would continue to go through together…if he could just do this one thing.
Maybe it was these thoughts and emotions that spurred him on. Maybe it was nothing more than the desire to survive, to carry on. It didn’t matter, ultimately. All that mattered was that when the moment came, he was able to throw himself to one side. At least, that was his intent. His musculature was suffering heavily from the sonic interference, and his leap to the side was in truth nothing more than a collapse and crawl toward the far wall.
But it was enough. The pulse grew so intense that, even out of the direct line, it made him vomit as his stomach was turned inside out. He felt as though his eardrums were being ruptured by rusty blades.
If he could have looked around, other than sightlessly at the floor, he would have seen the black metal sheeting of the sec door wobble, seem to melt, and then implode with a roar that drowned the sirens that, as the pulse suddenly ceased, momentarily returned to his ears.
JAK’S SPEED WAS increasing as he leaped from spot to spot, just ahead of the laser from the snakelike machine, partly because increasing his speed was the only way to avoid getting himself fried. It was also partly because he had some idea of a plan. The machine was made to move like a reptile, but it wasn’t flesh and blood. It was metal and machinery. As such, it was jointed. And he had been watching, seeing how it moved, and was sure that he knew where the joints were on the sinuous body. There was a section where, he was almost certain from his rudimentary knowledge of mechanics, the metal heart had to be contained. All he had to do was to get in a position to strike, and he knew that he could drive his knives into the belly of the beast and blow out its circuits.
He was making a wider arc with each jump. Soon he would have the speed and range to run up the wall and somersault in the air. The machine would find it hard to bend its head section back on itself. If he was quick enough, he could beat the arc it would take and get in underneath its range, landing exactly where he needed to thrust his own metal into the heart of the creature, an alien metal that could slay the mechanical dragon.
He was fast enough now and one step away from using the wall as a springboard. Yet all the while he was aware of a deep throbbing pulse that resounded down his spine. It was as he turned, pivoted and thrust off the wall with one foot that he could see the sec door behind the snake machine. It looked as though it was melting from the middle outward, turning to liquid that pulsed in time with the vibration down his spine. The very center was now beginning to glow.
Jak’s instinct for danger kicked in, and he blew out the idea of tackling the snake machine. It was right in line with the glowing center of the door, and there was no way he was going to get caught up in anything that might erupt. He sailed through the air, underneath the arc of the creature’s head as it tried to fry him with its laser. All it succeeded in doing was to send up a shower of sparks as it cut into the straggling tail of its own body. Its balance disturbed, it toppled as it tried to turn, the laser scoring across the ceiling and bringing down a shower of debris. It was falling backward as the sec door exploded in a shower of molten metal, splashing out the center over the snake, while more solid fragments shaken loose by the sonic wave were flung down the corridor, their sharp edges and high velocity driving them into and through the mechanical snake, severing portions of the body and rendering it into a useless heap of junk on the corridor floor.
Jak had landed on the far side, hugging the wall and keeping down as much as he possibly could. The violence of the sonic ripple made him feel like vomiting, and his ears felt like they would burst, but he opened his mouth to try to equalize the pressure. Before he had a chance to really register pain and shock, the wave had passed.
Hurriedly, still feeling uncertain on his feet, he straightened. Ryan had come through the hole where the sec door used to be, looking as unsteady as Jak felt, his face set in a grim mask of determination. He mouthed something that Jak couldn’t hear as his ears were still singing with the vibration. He figured he knew what it was, though. Looking back, he could see a flatbed truck on tracks, with a tiny blaster that looked far too small for such a trailer. That had to have been what caused the explosion.
For sure, he didn’t want to stick around to see what else it could do.
As he turned, he could feel the vibrations in the ground as it started to move forward. A quick glance told him how slow it was. It wasn’t made to move on rubble, and that was to their advantage. It also needed time to build up the power necessary for another blast like the last. The nozzle of the tiny blaster was showing a faint green tinge that grew brighter with an encouraging slowness.
Ryan was already ahead of him as Jak turned back to the remains of the mechanical snakelike creature. The head that had risen above him and looked so dangerous was now nothing more than a heap of inert junk—but inert junk with a small and easily concealable weapon in its midst.
Keeping one eye on the rumbling flatbed, Jak leaned over the snake machine and started to detach the laser from its mounting in the end of the mechanism. He hoped that the weapon would have its own power source, and not be wired into the machine.
He got lucky. The head of the machine was obviously designed to carry any number o
f interchangeable weapons. That much was clear from the ease with which he detached his objective. The fact that it had been a laser mounted in the head was simply down to a quirk of fate when skydark hit the unlucky military and whitecoats who had been based here.
Lucky for Jak, though. He could see that the laser had its own small power cell built in as he detached the clipped circuit boards that wired it into the snake. He wanted to try it out and fire on the flatbed. It might serve a dual purpose and knock out the thing that was winding up toward pursuing them. But then he thought again. The power that the tiny blaster had unleashed might be even more destructive if just released by fire. Better that they outrun the bastard thing.
He angled the laser up and fired it into the ceiling. A crackle of power, and then a hail of dust brought down a small section of the ceiling on and around the flatbed as it rumbled slowly but inexorably forward.
Jak turned after Ryan and began running. He figured that the machine at their rear would have trouble following at anything approaching the speed they could run. And if it took time to build power, then even if it could tail them, it was of no real immediate danger.
Still, it wouldn’t be wise to hang around. He sprinted after Ryan, catching the one-eyed man with ease. Ryan was running awkwardly, hunched over to one side. Jak knew that he had added more damage to his ribs, and as he ran he took hold of Ryan, supporting his weight and taking it off the sore side of his body. It was far from graceful but it was effective, and Ryan’s pace picked up even as Jak slowed.
They were still vigilant for any further dangers, but it seemed as though the redoubt had flung at them all it had to offer. Despite the rumbling that grew more distant at their backs, but was still ominous, and the constant blare of the siren in time with the strobe, there was nothing else to bar their passage.
They reached the mat-trans anteroom, the strain of the run making both of them slow despite the desperate urging of their wills.
The unit stood in front of them, and at their back there was the low thrum of vibration as the sonic blaster began to build power. They threw themselves toward the mat-trans: Ryan collapsed on the floor, sprawled across the disks, while Jak slammed the door and hit the LD button. He hadn’t had a chance to check his wrist chron, but he fervently hoped that they hadn’t exceeded their time as the white mist began to rise in small columns.
“Hurry, you bastard,” Ryan hissed to the floor as he felt the low, slow thrum build in intensity. The rumbling of the tracks was audible now as the flatbed truck approached the corridor outside.
The low, sickening fluttering of the sonic wave grew in his gut, making him want to puke, even as the wave of darkness from the mat-trans jump began to sweep over him.
As it did, he looked up to see Jak grinning triumphantly, brandishing the laser.
Fireblast! Let it be in time….
Chapter Sixteen
Heat. That was the overwhelming impression of everyone in the room as the seconds ticked slowly past. Krysty and Mildred were able to look to their wrist chrons with some degree of stealth, but for Doc and J.B. it was a no go. They were being covered by McCready’s men with an eagle eye that grew ever more jumpy as time went on. The companions were exhausted because of the mat-trans jumps and the action they had encountered in the past few hours. The sec men, Crabbe and his mechanic didn’t have that excuse. Nonetheless, they found that their nerves were ground to a fine edge, singing with the tension of waiting.
The room was small. As a control room, it had been designed to hold only three or four people at a time. There were twice that number within its narrow confines. Sure, there was air-conditioning in the room, as the redoubt was in full working order, but even with the best air filter and cold air mechanisms, it was still too many people rammed into too small a space for such a long stretch. As well, the number of jumps had only added to the stifling atmosphere, as each flash of light was accompanied by a correspondingly large release of heat that had nowhere to go other than to be absorbed by the people who were contained within the confines of the room.
The tension of waiting was written large on all of them, albeit for vastly differing reasons. The friends were anxious that Ryan and Jak return, and in one piece. Crabbe was anxious that they return, and this time bearing the disk that he so craved. Sal was just anxious. The mechanic was proud of his work, but he wasn’t a brave man. He knew that the baron was volatile. He also figured that McCready was even more volatile than his supposed boss. And it didn’t take a genius to work out that the sec chief was just itching to send the outlanders on the last train west, maybe even the baron too. It could, from his point of view, chill two rank old birds with the one blast. And where would that leave Sal, then? Now there was a question that the mechanic didn’t want to have answered in any kind of a hurry.
As for the sec chief and his men, beads of sweat dripped into sore and red-rimmed eyes as the sec men maintained their vigilance. Each one of them was aware that their chief was ambitious, and although it wasn’t openly spoken of, they all knew that there would be a time when he would push for power, and it would be politic to be on his side. So they were all determined to do their best for him.
But the heat, the strain of not sleeping and having to stay vigilant when they ached in every fiber, and the knowledge that even unarmed these coldhearts they guarded had a reputation that made them something to be feared…. That lay heavy on them.
That and the fact that their chief was starting to show signs of impatience and a desire to get things moving. The muscles in his jaw twitched as though he was barely restraining muttering to himself, and each of his men was acutely aware of the way in which his eyes flickered between the baron and the captives.
When the mat-trans disgorged its cargo, then things were okay for a while. It was the interminable wait in between that was stretching them so tight that they might just…
Snap?
It was a sudden and disturbing flash of light that made them all jolt. Fingers on trigger guards instinctively tightened in a way that would have tapped bursts of rapid-fire under any other circumstances.
For a moment there was complete silence and no movement in the room. Krysty looked over to where Mildred, J.B. and Doc were seated. She could see that they were trying to keep it from their faces, but each was wondering if Ryan and Jak had made it back in one piece—and perhaps whether they had found some ordnance that could be used against their captors.
Then Crabbe yelled, as though woken from a reverie with a start. At his command, McCready beckoned two of the sec men to go to the mat-trans. With a shock, Krysty realized that less than the stipulated half hour limit had gone by. Did it mean that they had found something they could use, or—infinitely worse—that they had encountered a peril that had forced them to cut short their search? Did it mean that there may only be one person in the mat-trans?
She made to move, but felt the arm of the baron as it moved across her chest, barring her way. She looked at him, and there was coldness in his eyes.
“You stay where you are missy…and you,” he barked, pointing with his free hand at Mildred as she made to move. “Cover the bitch,” he continued. “I ain’t taking no chances with these outlanders.”
Krysty felt the tension in his arm lessen as she moved back, stopped straining forward. But even so, she felt a burning desire to push past the baron as the sec men pulled open the mat-trans door.
Inside it was dark now that the initial flash had faded, and for a moment there was no detectable movement, nor any audible sound. Her heart leaped to her throat as she wondered if there was anyone in there at all. Was it possible that the unit had somehow triggered itself, leaving Ryan and Jak stranded?
And then there was the sound of footfalls, and Ryan and Jak stepped into the light. Both were disheveled and showing obvious contusions. And Ryan was walking awkwardly, suggesting that his ribs were causing him more than a little discomfort. Yet both men were stoic as they emerged into the room, handing over their w
eapons to the sec men before calmly making their way to where the others were seated. Ryan resisted a small grin as he saw how that infuriated McCready, who wanted them to be suffering. Even though his ribs were starting to feel as though a horde of mutie buffalo had been dancing on them, Ryan refused to let any sign of discomfort consciously show. Without a word they seated themselves. Anyone who didn’t know them wouldn’t realize a thing, but to those who did, there were clues. The body language was just a little more relaxed than it might have been, and there was something about the way that Jak looked all of them in the eye by turn, with something that would have been taken by a stranger as a slight nervous muscle twitch. But to those who knew his usually stonelike features, it was more than that.
It was the closest to a wink that the albino youth would ever get.
For each of them, it signaled that there was hope. How or what, they couldn’t tell, but there was no denying that the signal meant that either Jak or Ryan—maybe even both—had somehow managed to find, and conceal a weapon.
They took their place among their companions and said nothing. Ryan grimaced as he seated himself, the pain from his ribs making him catch his breath.
“Well?” Crabbe exploded eventually, unable to contain himself any longer. “What the fuck happened to you out there? You look like shit, so it must have been something spectacular,” he added, taking them in with a raking glance.
“Thanks for that,” Ryan commented wryly, the effect spoiled a little by the stabbing pain that made him wince as he spoke. “You’d never believe me if I told you.”
