by Rachel Aukes
The glow of dawn had given way to beams of sunlight, which meant that they’d almost escaped the tunnel before it collapsed. Almost.
He swiveled his seat around to access the back seat. His cutter was a standard setup: two bucket seats in front, a bench seat that folded into a bed, and a small enclosed cargo bed in back. Joe lived out of Monster on assignments lasting longer than a day, which—being a bounty hunter—was nearly all of them.
He kneeled on the back seat and opened the door to the cargo space. Much of it had been crushed, including the toolbox. If he’d been transporting a fugitive in the cage back there, they would’ve been killed in the collapse. He ignored the damage and grabbed a crowbar fastened below the door.
Back in the front seat, he rechecked Kit’s vitals and found his blood pressure to be weak but steady. Making up his mind, Joe grabbed the blaster off the floor and holstered it. Holding the crowbar in one hand, he climbed out of the open window and onto the pile of rocks. The rubble shifted under his feet, and he moved cautiously forward until the debris nearly reached the roof of the tunnel. The good news was that the entire tunnel hadn’t collapsed, only most of it. That lowered the risk of more rocks coming down on his head while he cleared a path, but the risk was still there, and higher than Joe liked.
Behind Monster, the cave-in filled the tunnel. The hunters who’d followed them had fared far worse than Joe and Kit. Exoshields offered protection, but couldn’t save anyone from an entire mountain coming down on them.
He focused on the area where the most sunlight peeked through, shifting smaller rocks by hand and levering larger stones out of the way with his crowbar. When the roof of the tunnel didn’t come down on him, he continued clearing debris until he reached a boulder too heavy to move.
Joe set the crowbar aside and pulled out his blaster. “Here goes nothing.” He fired into the boulder. It took several seconds of steady fire before the laser bored through the boulder. The heat expanded the rock, and it blew apart, crumbling a section of the tunnel wall. Tumbling rocks knocked him off balance, and he slid down the rockpile. His foot got caught between rocks, and the pressure on his ankle made him grunt.
He rummaged around for the crowbar. Finding it, he dug at the debris as quickly as he could to yank his foot free from the vise squeezing his ankle. His exoshield helped to prevent breaks or sprains, but he’d still have a deep bruise.
Foot free, Joe went back to clearing a path. He was glad his suit was climate-controlled, or he would’ve overheated digging in the stifling one-hundred-degree-plus heat. He yanked a sizable rock away and found himself blinded by sunlight. His helmet adjusted, and he peered out at a vista of endless rocky flatlands, and a cutter parked twenty feet away. The driver leaned on the front of the vehicle, his blaster leveled at Joe.
The hunter, wearing an exoshield covered in chipped green paint and with a chest plate that read T-REX, lowered the blaster. “That you, Josey?”
Joe relaxed. “Yeah, Rex. It’s me.” He kicked out some more debris and crawled through to the outside. He’d half-expected the Iron Guild to be waiting for him, but he supposed no one would realize Joe and Kit were there if none of their pursuers had managed to fire an emergency beacon before they were smashed. He slid down the rubble and joined Rex “T-Rex” Orlov, who had worked as a bounty hunter, along with Joe, in the Haft Agency until Cat and a corrupt MRC administrator by the name of Gabriel Sloan burned it all down and killed every hunter who wouldn’t join the Iron Guild… Well, they’d tried to kill everyone. That Havoc and T-Rex were still alive ticked off a lot of folks.
“You got here fast,” Joe said.
“I was in the area, doing a little shopping,” Rex replied, holstering his blaster.
Joe was curious about what Rex might be shopping for. Knowing Rex, it was one of two things: weapons or women.
“What are you doing way out here? That geo-locator showed you in the middle of a mountain. Finding you was like trying to find a flea on a dog’s ass,” Rex said.
“Kit and I paid a visit to the Iron Guild to get his sword and shield back. Well, we got his sword back, at least. But he’s hurt bad. We need to get him to a body shop, the sooner, the better.”
Rex didn’t move. “Hold on. You went after Cat, and you didn’t call me?” His indignation came through loud and clear; Joe didn’t need to see his expression through his helmet.
“Sorry. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.” It wasn’t, but that tidbit would hurt Rex’s feelings, and Joe didn’t want to tick off Kit’s and his only ride out of the Salt Flats. “I’ll tell you about it on the way. Grab a stretcher. We need to get Kit out of there.”
Rex pointed at the tunnel. “Wait. You want me to climb into that deathtrap?”
Joe started toward the rockslide. “Yeah.”
“You’re going to owe me big for this.”
Joe sighed. “Believe me, I know.”
Chapter Five
Sheriff Val Vane sat in her office, going over the latest numbers. Roderick Sloan’s army was growing, and she was racking her brain at how best to react. She’d long since been aware the Sloan brothers were up to something, but since the older brother was killed, the younger Sloan had dropped all pretense at modesty and seemed to be bragging to the world about having his own army.
Local MRC administrators always had a half-dozen soldiers—called murcs, just like everyone else who worked for the MRC—for protection, and to maintain control over the local population, but Roderick Sloan, Clearwater’s MRC administrator, now had over two hundred troops garrisoned on his farm a few miles out of town.
The Midlands, the zone in which Clearwater sat, had been losing administrators at a rapid rate lately. A few had died under mysterious circumstances over the past three years, and Val had no doubt the Sloans were involved since they’d conveniently reallocated the soldiers to their municipalities following the deaths, leaving the other towns unprotected. She supposed MRC Central allowed Sloan’s brazenness because they were too overwhelmed by the day-to-day operations of a new government that had no idea how to support a hundred thousand people spread out over three thousand square miles. In fact, President Darville never seemed bothered by any details as long as people weren’t openly raising arms against the new government authority.
No one was any happier with the corrupt MRC in charge than they’d been under the oppressive Zenith State; if anything, people struggled more than ever to make ends meet in the desolate wastelands. Zenith had at least been a centralized, organized government, ensuring food and supplies were distributed to the farthest edges of the wastelands. The MRC had been a mishmash of rebel groups before the Revolution fifteen years ago. After winning the war and ousting Zenith, they’d realized the wastelands still needed some kind of government, but rather than continue what Zenith had done well—and learn from Zenith’s failures—they’d recreated the wheel, but replaced a functioning one with one that had no chance of working.
The MRC had opted for semi-autonomous local administration rather than a strong centralized government. That could’ve worked well if the local administrators had been honest, decent people.
Most weren’t.
The problem with positions of power was that they attracted power-hungry people, people who sacrificed their scruples for power. The Sloan brothers epitomized the corrupt government regent. They kept raising local taxes while continuously abusing the citizens in their towns. Val had stood idly by after the Revolution, watching administrators hurt rather than help those under their purview, but after her brother was murdered for trying to arrest a gang for robbing families across the countryside, she could no longer stand by. When she’d learned that the gang was under Roderick Sloan’s employ, she’d abandoned the tiny farmstead she’d spent her life savings to purchase and gone to Clearwater to set things right.
When she’d arrived, she’d learned things were even worse than she’d realized. The Sloan brothers were forcing people into slavery through terribly unfair inden
ture contracts. She took up her brother’s mantle as town sheriff the following day, hell-bent on putting the Sloans in the ground.
But she’d quickly learned that being a sheriff came with challenges of its own. A private individual could become a vigilante, but if a sheriff was to do so, the public’s fragile trust in the law would be lost. And so she’d had to be careful. Unknown to the public, let alone Roderick, she’d helped several disavowed hunters kill Gabriel Sloan, the MRC administrator of Cavil, the largest town in the Midlands. She’d been present when he was killed, though, she had been careful to make sure no one could place her there. That wasn’t to say Roderick didn’t suspect her. He’d sent an assassin after her once already, and it was only a matter of time before he sent another.
Her plan? Bring Sloan to justice—dead or alive (but preferably dead)—before he killed her.
She heard—and felt—a rumbling in the floor. She pushed to her feet, went to the front door, and peered through the window. With one hand on her blaster, she searched for the cause of the sound, which was growing louder by the second, but there was nothing on the main road that passed through town. A pair of cutters were parked outside the tavern. Otherwise, the road was empty, nothing out of the ordinary. The public buildings, like hers, looked large—they’d been built nearly completely on the surface, unlike most places. After centuries of living underground, living anywhere else held little appeal. The homes around Clearwater were all below ground, with the exception of small domed-shaped entrances on the surface.
She stepped outside and scanned the road in each direction.
Then she saw it.
Dust billowed in the distance. Small black shapes, resembling cockroaches, skittering across the barren land below the dust cloud. Then the shapes became vehicles as they closed the distance to Clearwater. She thought it was a grouping of cutters at first, but the shapes were off. They didn’t have sleek lines like three-wheeled cutters with their reflective, solar array hulls. These were big—each one ten times the size of a cutter—and blocky, and there was at least a dozen, maybe more, headed toward town.
A chill danced across her skin when she connected the incoming convoy with memories. She’d seen those black boxy shapes before, during the Revolution.
Tanks.
Their massive photon cannons could clear a battlefield in minutes. Regular blasters couldn’t penetrate their armor, and their heavy-duty tracks could navigate nearly any terrain. Each tank was emblazoned with MRC in white lettering, and… Her breath caught. These were the same tanks she’d led her squad against during the Revolution, when she’d been a commander in the Zenith Army. They hadn’t fared well. Whoever was fated to face them now would fare no better. Ten years after the Revolution, the Shiprock zone had tried and failed. That was the last time Val remembered tanks being deployed. She’d hoped to never see one of them again because they existed for a single purpose: war.
She ducked back into her office and closed the door; she’d been a soldier before she became a sheriff, and knew prudence was always smarter than standing out in the open when a tank was coming.
Through the window, she counted fifteen tanks rolling down Clearwater’s main road past her office. The tanks were identical: big black boxes, each crowned with a rotating photon cannon. They continued at a slow pace—their top speed. She had no doubt where they were headed: to Roderick Sloan’s farm. The real question was, why?
The final tank slowed and came to a stop. It sat there for a moment before it lurched into reverse, then backed up, moving even more slowly than it managed in forward gear. It backed up until it came to a stop directly outside her building.
The photon cannon atop the tank began to swivel. Val’s eyes went wide. It swung around to point directly at her and stopped. She jumped back. With no time to get to her cutter, she slapped a button on her desk. A circular door built into the floor opened to reveal a spiral staircase leading down. She dove, stumbling down the stairs. She hadn’t reached the bottom when the building above her exploded with an ear-shattering boom. She hit the floor and scrambled to close the door, but the shockwave—and flames and debris—smashed her into the wall.
By the time Val came to, her underground apartment was thick with smoke. Embers burned near the stairs. Her eyes watered. She coughed, groaned at the pain in her neck and head, then forced herself to her feet. Her left shoulder throbbed—she was lucky it wasn’t dislocated. More than that, she was lucky to be alive. She put one hand on the wall and followed it through the small residence, often tripping over debris and furniture left in disarray from the blast.
While the apartment hadn’t burned completely, she couldn’t stay there. It was too risky. Roderick Sloan had just made his second attempt on her life. When he found out she’d survived, he’d try again. Staying dead was her best option. She grabbed a bag and stuffed in anything useful, pausing to cough. Then she climbed a second staircase at the back of the studio and emerged behind the demolished building.
She’d have preferred to wait until dark to move, but no doubt Sloan would be sending murcs to verify she was dead—or finish her off—and she needed Sloan to think she’d been obliterated. She carefully opened the door, blaster at the ready. When no shouts or gunfire greeted her, she crawled out, staying low, and locked the door behind her.
Through the smoke, she saw people milling around, taking in the scene. She crawled to hide behind the building next to where her office had been. Once there, she sat, sucking in semi-fresh lungfuls of air. She eyed her cutter with longing. The blast had shoved it several feet back, and the driver’s side was blackened, but it looked otherwise undamaged. She’d come back for it when enough time had passed that Sloan’s cronies would assume it was stolen.
Then she turned her back to the destruction and sprinted toward the rocky bluffs surrounding the town. She didn’t stop until she was out of sight in the boulders. She took a long drink of water, and placed a call via her armlet.
The comm connected. “Havoc, I’m calling in that favor you owe me.”
Chapter Six
“Now’s not a good time, Val,” Joe said without taking his eyes off of Kit, who still lay in a coma. Rex was also in the room, though he seemed absorbed by dismantling a knee joint in his exoshield.
“It has to be now. Sloan just blew up my place.” Sheriff Vane sounded grim, even through his armlet.
That got Joe’s attention. “Sloan blew up your place?”
“He has a tank squadron.”
Rex stopped tinkering, and his focus shot to Joe.
“He has a tank squadron?” Joe asked.
“Are you just going to repeat everything I say as a question?”
“It’s just that I haven’t heard about any tanks being deployed in the wastelands since the Shiprock Riots. I thought they’d all been mothballed. Why would Sloan need tanks?”
“Tanks are only ever good for fighting wars. Since there’s no war in the Midlands right now, the only reason to have tanks is to start a war. That’s why I need you to come to Clearwater. It’s time we stop Sloan, once and for all.”
He frowned as he considered Val’s words. He was worried, not because he didn’t believe her, but because he did. Sloan had been amassing an army for the last couple of years. That he now had tanks seemed to verify that Val’s opinion was truly fact. He’d had a chance to kill Sloan a couple of months earlier, but hadn’t taken it. He was beginning to regret that decision.
“I’ll head out within the hour,” he said finally.
“I have to lie low. I’m sharing my geotracker with you so you can come to me. Trust the beacon, even if it seems like it’s taking you to the middle of nowhere. And bring anyone else you can. I have a plan, but we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Val disconnected the call, and Rex held up a hand. “Before you ask, I can’t go. I have to babysit Little Sunshine here since there’s a shortage of hospitals that’ll take in fugitives.” He
nodded in Kit’s direction. Life support machines hummed softly around the unconscious man. “Who knows? If I get lucky, Cat will come looking for him and I can finally put her out of my misery.”
“I think the phrase is, ‘put her out of her misery.’”
Rex shook his head. “Nah. She only brings me misery, so taking her out, puts her out of my misery. Geez, Joe. You need to read more.”
He sighed. “Whatever you say. May luck smile on you. Keep me updated on Kit’s condition.”
“Sure thing. And hopefully, Sleeping Beauty will wake up soon, so we can join you. I’ve never blown up a tank before. It sounds like fun.”
Joe chucked. “Tanks aren’t that easy to blow up.”
Rex cracked his knuckles. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“I like your attitude, but if Sloan has tanks, I’m not sure we can do much good. Val’s either crazy or counting on a miracle if she thinks we stand a chance at stopping Sloan.”
“I’ve found miracles to be in short supply lately,” Rex said.
“That they are. But since you don’t have a miracle handy, I could use your cutter.” He reached for his exoshield, piled next to his chair.
Rex guffawed. “No one drives Beatrice except me. How dare you even ask me that? You know no one takes another man’s cutter. That’d be like letting you sleep with my girl.”
Joe’s brows rose. “Since your girl works at a brothel, I’d say that plenty of others have slept with her.”
“If you knew the talents Layni had in bed, you wouldn’t try to keep her to yourself either.” Rex shook his head. “Cutters are different. Beatrice is different. She’s sensitive. Besides, I’ve seen the way you drive.”
Joe placed a hand over his heart. “You wound me.”
“If I loaned her to you, she’d come back with cracked panels—or worse—she could end up under a mountain.”
