Desert Kings

by James Axler

  “Doesn’t matter if we run or stay to fight,” Doc rumbled darkly. “In just a few moments, we shall be in plain sight.”

  “Which leaves us only one choice,” Ryan declared grimly, pulling a butane lighter from his coat pocket.

  THE SOUND OF ENGINES filled the air, constantly punctuated by random blasterfire as the four predark war wags rolled along the edge of the cliff. Oddly, the dust cloud located where the outlanders had been was thicker than ever, the grayish white of the salty sand rapidly becoming an impenetrable brown.

  “I don’t like this,” Delphi muttered, squinting at the thickening clouds. “Full stop!”

  “And hit the headlights,” Cotton added grimly, looking suspiciously through the windshield. Between the airborne salt and smoke it was impossible to see a thing in the night. Visibility was less than twenty paces.

  “Sure thing, Chief,” Jeffery said, braking the lead war wag to a full stop and pulling out a switch on the dashboard.

  Instantly, four sets of brilliant beams stabbed out into the thickening fumes. There were only vague shapes shifting in the dark cloud, then flames rose high, adding a bright halo of illumination that silhouetted what remained of the big Mack rig and wooden flatbed.

  “Holy nuking hell, their wag is on fire!” Jeffery shouted in delight. “No chance of the bastards getting away now!”

  “Mutie shit, it’s a trick!” Cotton growled, grabbing the mike from the ceiling. “All wags, triple red! This is an ambush! Repeat, this is a—”

  But that was as far as the woman got before the LAV 25 to their left violently detonated, a staggering fireball expanding from within in a titanic roar. Broken pieces of the armored chassis and bloody chunks of flesh slammed into the other three wags, denting one and smashing the front windshield of another.

  As the wag was buffeted by the concussion, Delphi suddenly realized what had happened. Ryan and the others couldn’t run, or hide, so they’d set their own wag on fire to create a protective smoke screen in order to ambush the convoy. The plan was audacious, almost insane, but it had worked, and in a single instant the cyborg had lost a quarter of his fighting forces.

  Enjoy your victory, Ryan. It’s your last, Delphi railed silently.

  “Open fire!” he bellowed into his hand, the words bizarrely echoing throughout the three remaining predark wags.

  It took only a heartbeat for the gunners to unlimber their blasters, and soon crisscrossing streams of 20 mm shells were randomly hammering the murky ground, throwing more dirt and salt into the air, making it even more difficult to see. Jeffery cut loose with the flame-thrower, the hissing column of fire licking across the landscape in hellish fury.

  Suddenly the burning wooden wag lurched into motion and charged forward to ram into a LAV 25. The front grille of the Mack crumbled from the impact, the lightweight metal and chrome doing no damage to the heavy steel-alloy armor of the predark war machine. But the big diesel engine surged with power, the burning tires dug into the loose soil and the Mack began forcing the LAV sideways, heading directly for the cliff.

  “Ace the driver!” Delphi screamed, pulling out his crystal wand and pointing it at the flame-enshrouded cab. But there was nobody in sight behind the wheel. Bastards had to have rigged it somehow, the cyborg guessed, tightening the grip on his weapons. Jammed a stick on the gas pedal and lashed down the steering wheel. Not a bad trick, but surely the LAV could easily escape such a crude trap!

  Black smoke gushing from the louvered exhaust ports, the LAV lurched into action, trying to angle away from the ragged cliff. But the smashed chassis of the Mack was tangled on the armor frame of the LAV, and the battling machines began to curve into the dense cloud and out of sight.

  “Harrison, shoot the outlander wag with your cannon!” Delphi yelled into his glowing hand. “Blast yourself free!”

  “No need, chief!” the trooper shouted over the sound of grinding gear. “I can get us free!”

  “That was an order!” Cotton bellowed, hunched over as if charging into a fight. “Use the fragging cannon!”

  “Not going to waste brass for a lousy…Nuking hell!”

  As Delphi switched his eyes to the ultraviolet spectrum, the cloud dramatically thinned and he clearly saw the struggling LAV and Mack truck go over the edge.

  “Harrison, talk to me!” Cotton demanded, fearing the worst. “Harry!” But there was only silence.

  “It’s too late,” Delphi said simply, his words almost a whisper.

  Piercing screams came from the ceiling speaker of the control room, closely followed by a deafening series of metallic crunches, shattering glass, indescribable banging, clanging, then a watery splash and silence.

  Stunned beyond words, Delphi could only stare at the empty section of cliff. It was incredible! Ryan and his people had taken out two of his armored personnel carriers in only a few minutes! How was that possible? Just for a second, the cyborg tasted fear, then he shrugged off the useless emotion.

  If I want to live, think fast, and move faster, Delphi rationalized. This was it, chilling time. No more finesse or clever plans. Just bare-knuckle bloodletting. Get clear of the smoke, establish a new firebase, lay down suppression fire, bracket the targets, then kill them all.

  “Wags, retreat at full speed!” Delphi commanded into his hand. “Don’t turn around, just move!”

  “Get the fuck out of this cloud, people,” Cotton roared into the mike, “or we’re shit in a can!”

  Working the controls, Jeffery didn’t even bother to reply as he threw the transmission into Reverse and tromped on the gas pedal. With a low rumble, the LAV’s engine engaged and the mil wag started moving swiftly away from the murky cliff. But it traveled only a few yards before something bounced off the windshield, then exploded, hard shrapnel peppering the armored hull. A thin crack appeared in the predark plastic and bitter smoke began to seep into the control room.

  Grabbing Cotton, Delphi hauled the sec woman to the floor as two more grens hit the windshield and violently detonated. The resilient mil plastic shattered into a million jagged pieces as it blew into the vehicle, cutting Jeffery into shreds, his death cry lost in the sound of the razor-sharp debris ricocheting off the interior walls, gunracks and seats.

  The shards were still falling as Dephi and Cotton crawled along the short passage out of the control room and to the rear cargo area. There were four other troopers standing near the exit hatch with longblasters in their hands, unsure of what to do.

  Still in gear, the LAV continued to roll along backward, without direction. Every bounce shook the damaged transport, and loose items rolled around the corrugated floor to get dangerously underfoot. Strapped into position, the side gunners hung limply in their chairs, red blood dribbling from their tattered clothing, pointed pieces of windshield sparkling from the countless small cuts covering their gory bodies.

  “Grab whatever you can, boys,” Cotton ordered, taking a mixed bag of ammo and grens from a peg on the wall. “These nuke-suckers really screwed the mutie when they tangled with us!” There was a trickle of warmth on her cheek, but the sec woman stoically ignored the minor wound as she loaded a clip of tracer brass into a BAR.

  Wordlessly, the men nodded and started to fill their pockets with brass and grens.

  “Stay low, and only shoot when you clearly see the outlanders,” Delphi commanded. “I don’t want any of my people aced by friendly fire.” Actually, he didn’t give a damn if they died. He just did not want them getting in the way when he went after Ryan and Tanner. When this was over, he’d chill everybody.

  As Cotton and the other troopers got ready, Delphi yanked a panel off the wall, exposing a series of glowing buttons. “Ready?” he asked.

  Taking a deep breath, Cotton worked an arming bolt. “Rock and roll, chief.”

  Pressing the buttons in order, there was a series of dull thuds from the corrugated floor, and a section slid aside to reveal sandy ground streaming past the opening. Without a pause, the cyborg dropped through to
hit the dirt and go flat. A moment later, Cotton dropped from the LAV, followed by the others in tight formation. Salty dust filled the air, and it was hard to see clearly, but a moment later, the shadow of the LAV 25 was gone and they were clearly bathed in the bright halogen headlights.

  Frantically, Delphi and Cotton dived to the side, but the others moved too slow and blasterfire tore three of them apart before they could get out of the lethal illumination.

  Triggering their Browning Automatic Rifles in tri-bursts, the troopers hammered the swirling cloud with heavy rounds. But there was no answering cry of pain to announce a hit.

  Listening hard for any sound of the hated outlanders, Delphi watched the LAV 25 veer off randomly to slam into a dune. The rear hoisted upward and the wheels left the ground. Stuck in place, the machine continued to run, the front wheels starting to dig down into the crystalline soil, throwing more salt and sand into the air.

  Moving away from the shuddering vehicle, Delphi saw the cliff had collapsed completely to form a sort of rough steps leading down to the polluted lake. At least I have an avenue of escape if necessary, the cyborg noted bitterly, flexing his hand. The situation was quickly getting out of his control, and a wise man knew when it was time to go. Not yet. He still had a lot of chilling to do first. But soon.

  Struggling to shove a fresh clip of brass into the open breech of his longblaster, Caruthers flinched and dropped the weapon to grab his throat. Blood was spurting out in pulsating arcs, a leaf-shaped throwing blade buried to the hilt in the side of his neck. As the dying man toppled to the ground, Delphi calculated the angle of trajectory to throw the blade and sent a sizzling ray from the crystal rod in that direction, followed by a burst of fléchettes from the needler. If he hit anybody, there was no way to tell. How had this battle turned so fast against him? The convoy had four armored vehicles to Ryan’s old piece of homemade junk, and yet the outlanders were winning! It was impossible! Intolerable! The cyborg scowled. He should have been traveling with a hundred hunters, instead of leaving them to guard the redoubt. Those would have done the job, easily slaying Tanner and the others.

  Then a fiery flower blossomed in the cloud. Delphi recognized it as the muzzle-flash of a Kalashnikov and instantly raised his force field. The hail of hardball rounds loudly zinged off the immaterial barrier, more coming from another direction in the night, and then still more. He replied with the needler and laser, only realizing at the last second that the bright energy beam was how they were finding him. Reluctantly, he sheathed the rod and flexed his hand to activate the malfunctioning Educator. It hummed to life inside his flesh, and he moved it in a slow arc, blindly trying for a chill. A gren came falling from above to detonate over the cyborg, the hot shrapnel churning the ground around his shield but completely failing to penetrate.

  “Here I am, Tanner!” Delphi shouted. “Come and get me!” But the only reply was another thrown knife, two grens and more blasterfire.

  Murky figures moved toward the trapped wag and the last LAV 25 unleashed a shuttering stream of 20 mm shells to pepper the ground and sloping dune. An anguished cry told of a hit, but Cotton grimaced when she recognized the voice as Mannheim’s. Shitfire, another man lost! The trooper tried to kept mental count of the aced, but it was hard to think. The noise of the furious battle was becoming deafening. Hot lead was flying in every direction. Grens detonated louder than thunder, and the 20 mm blaster constantly burped short bursts into the fray. But then Cotton detected a new sound among the chaos, low and dull, almost mechanical. And it was coming straight toward her.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As Cotton swung up the BAR, she pulled out the sawed-off 12-gauge and started forward grimly. The smoky cloud was starting to thin, and the woman scowled at the unexpected sight of two men on horseback riding toward the fight. For a single moment, Cotton thought they might be coldhearts, but then she saw that their clothing matched and that they were packing rapid-fires. They had to be sec men! But where had they come from? There wasn’t a ville around for a hundred miles! But it didn’t really matter. If they weren’t her men, they had to be chilled. That was a lock.

  Staying low, Cotton tried to get a bead on the newcomers when something metallic came into view trailing after the two big men. Nuking hell, she thought, it was a predark machine of some sort! The large cylindrical body was made of shiny steel, and there were armored treads underneath, rocketing the thing forward almost as fast as a horse could run. Which meant it was a lot quicker than any person on foot. There was a smooth dome on top bristling with antennae, and the thing sported two crazy red eyes that spun around in every direction. Flexing metal arms extended from the sides, each of them tipped with spinning buzz saws.

  “Mother of night, a sec hunter droid!” Delphi gasped, firing the HK needler and the laser at the war machine.

  The sizzling red beam struck the droid and seemed to be absorbed, but the stainless-steel fléchettes bounced off wildly, some of them coming back to impact the cyborg’s shield. In the gloom, a distant figure cried out, his intestines slithering out of a tattered belly like a tangle of oily snakes. Focusing on the fellow, Delphi cursed when he saw it wasn’t Tanner or Ryan.

  Just then, two horseback riders galloped past the cyborg, firing M-16 assault rifles at point-blank range. But the 5.56 mm hardball rounds rebounded harmlessly from his force field, and he shot one of them in the arm with his laser, the other with the needler, before they vanished into the billowing cloud. How bizarre, the cyborg thought. One of them resembled Edward Rogan. But that was impossible. The Rogan brothers had all been chilled and buried long ago. He paused. Or had they? Quickly, the cyborg set the laser to full-power, minimum aperture, and swept the battlefield, trying for a quick chill.

  Incoming lead and steel pounded the shield from several directions, and another rain of grens was augmented by a large homemade pipe bomb. The combined detonation rocked the cyborg, almost making him fall, then inspiration hit, and Delphi reached out with his EM implants to seize control of the droid and turn it against the outlanders. But try as he might, there was no answering signal from the droid. It spun around and charged directly for him, as if locked on to his broadcast.

  Standing his ground, Delphi stabbed out with the laser and needler, the duel weapons savaging the droid, removing an arm and melting an eye. But the machine kept coming, as unstoppable as the rising moon.

  “The metal thing is after the chief!” a trooper bellowed, swinging up his BAR and firing a tri-burst at the machine. “Chill the fucker!” The hail of hot lead hit the chrome dome, doing scant damage. Then the machine saw the man, the twin saw swinging in opposite directions. They heard the horrible sound of steel cutting flesh. The trooper shrieked for a brief moment, then blood sprayed high as he fell to the ground in ragged pieces.

  “Nuke-sucker aced Jimmy!” Cotton yelled. “Light it up!”

  The servo motors of the LAV 25 whined into life as the 20 mm Vulcan swiveled on top of the war wag and then the blaster started vomiting flame. The shells hit the ground near the machine, throwing out gouts of sand. Nimbly, the droid dodged to the side, then grabbed the predark APC in a deadly hug. Sparks flew like fireworks as the spinning blades dug into the steel armor, slowing chewing a path inside the machine. Rounds poured from the blasterports, the muzzle-flames stabbing outward, but the angle was wrong and the BAR longblasters couldn’t get a bead on the attacking droid.

  Withdrawing the blades, the droid wrapped its arms around the barrel of the Vulcan minigun and yanked the rapid-fire free to the sound of screeching metal. The sec man operating the weapon screamed as his hand came away minus fingers, life pumping from the ragged nubbins of flesh. Tossing away the minigun, the droid plunged the buzz saws through the unfortunate man.

  Lurching into action at the ghastly sight, Cotton sprinted back to the LAV trapped against the dune. Clambering inside, she activated the flame-thrower and aimed the blazing column of jellied fuel at the sec hunter droid and fired. Covered in flames, the droi
d reached out to grab the fluted nozzle of the weapon and crush it tight. From inside the wag there came a rattling hiss, then the seals blew and the interior of the wag was flooded with burning chems. Cotton screamed briefly, then the fuel tanks ignited and the wag detonated along with the ample stores of munitions, the double explosion ripping the droid apart, the sparkling debris flying through the cloudy air along with the tattered norm counterparts.

  The rain of destruction fell across the churned ground as a horse ran past Delphi without a rider, and the cyborg knew the two newcomers were now on foot. Fools. Trying to lure them close, the cyborg trained the Educator on a galloping horse. Galvanized as if hit by lightning, the animal went stiff, the muscular body shaking all over. Foam began to drip from its mouth, and its legs buckled as the stallion toppled over to commence jerking irregularly, some long plastic tubes sticking out of the saddle bags breaking apart and spilling out pieces of predark rockets. Turning off the device, Delphi saw the animal go limp as drops of red blood started to bead its hide.

  “Hear that, Tanner?” The cyborg laughed. “You’re next, old man! And then I’ll go back in time to pleasure your wife!”

  But the outrageous lie yielded no results. Either Doc Tanner had not heard the threat, or he didn’t believe it, which was much more likely. A blind fury boiled within the cyborg. Cotton was chilled, the LAVs were destroyed, time to end this now!

  Expanding his force field to the maximum range, Delphi moved relentlessly through the swirling fumes, triggering his weapons at anything that moved, no longer caring if he aced some of his own troops.

  KEEPING THE SLAB OF BROKEN plank in front as a shield, Ryan stayed low and fired the Kalashnikov at the small area of clean air that moved within the swirling, acrid fumes of the burning wag and tires. The damn cyborg never realized that the force field that protected him also made him easy to spot. The plan had been to try to lure Delphi to the cliff and throw him into the lake. Doc had said that his force field stopped working when it got wet. But the cyborg was crafty and was keeping as far away from the crumbling edge as possible.