Thunder Road

by James Axler

  “First off, you can see that Robear carries a crossbow, which has not just ordinary bolts, but an array of bolts tipped with poisons and explosives. Some of them also carry sonic charges that can cause ripples in solid objects and lead to molecular breakdown, without any initial impact explosion. Which can be useful for stealth. As for myself, I’ve noticed you looking at this—” he held the white plastic blaster up for them to see “—and yep, it is pretty odd. Far as we know, this and the two others we carry were prototypes that were never mass produced before skydark. It’s basically a rifle, but instead of firing cartridges it fires small pulse-bursts of energy. It’s kinda like a laser, but in concentrated form. This mutha can cut through metal like it was ice.

  “Over there, you can see we have a couple of portable lasers.” He indicated the boxes and attached lances that lay outside Cedric and the chestnut-haired woman’s yacht. “Cedric and Gwen are the experts with those. They’re good enough, but as I’m sure Ced would tell you at length, given the chance, the power units need a lot of recharging, and getting the juice ain’t always easy.

  “We have personal transmitters and receivers, both locational and for communication. We, too, have spare stuff. I’m sure that we can share—it may be good for at least one of the parasails to have a spare themselves, in the event of serious trouble.” He moved his head slightly. His eyes were still invisible, but his glance was obviously directed at Bryanna, who nodded almost imperceptibly. He turned back, then continued.

  “You can see that we carry an array of firearms. Rifles, pistols and some SMGs. I gather that your man there is the expert,” he said, indicating J.B., “so he’ll be able to assess their effectiveness better than me. Right?”

  The Armorer stepped forward and cast a knowing eye over the gathered ordnance. The rifles were a mixture of Lee Enfields, Sharps and H&K sports models. He even noticed a lightweight weapon that had originally been designed for women—he recalled once seeing an H&K vid catalog on an old comp that called it “one for the ladies,” emphasizing its femininity. It was still Heckler & Koch, and for all its supposed femininity could blast the balls off a fly at a hundred yards.

  The handblasters were the usual suspects: remade Colt Pythons and long-barreled pistols, Walthers and Lugers. Smith & Wesson snubby handmades that proliferated in the Deathlands. All with a fair supply of reloads.

  He noted a couple of AK-47s, along with Uzis and MP-5s. There were also some antitank gren launchers, a couple of mortars and two SMGs that he couldn’t recognize. His questioning glance brought another grin, this time from the guy in the T-shirt.

  “Uh, yeah. While back I found a lathe, some equipment and I cannibalized a few spares we had to see if it was possible to manufacture new blasters with what we got. They’re okay, but not reliable. Bry says only I should use ’em, so if they fuck up it’s only the stupe who built them that gets chilled. Which is fair enough.”

  But they were decent blasters under the circumstances, and J.B. was suitably impressed.

  The black man moved on to a selection of canisters, some of which were predark, and some of which had the hallmarks of being manufactured from plastics and poly-carbons in more recent times.

  “These are our pride and joy, though,” he said with a catch in his voice. “I dunno what you know about how our people—if you can mass us all together—came about, but the short version is that some of our ancestors were radicals who were against the predark governments and were working against them. This stuff is nerve gas. It causes paralysis, fits and hallucinations, as well as alterations in perception that leave the enemy incapacitated. And that, my friends, is what we bring to this party.”

  “You seem a lot happier about this than you were a little while back,” Mildred said. “Care to share why?”

  “Why do you care?” he countered.

  “Because if I’m going to put my life in trust to some stranger, I’d like to know why I should have that trust. And you people weren’t too keen before blondie gave the nod,” Mildred replied, indicating Bryanna. She was provocative, but with purpose.

  The black man grinned. His eyes were forever hidden behind the goggles, but there was no mistaking the sincerity in his voice.

  “Look, lady, I don’t particularly care about you or your redhead friend. But I guess Bry’s right in siding with you because I figure One-eye’s argument is a good one. Those coldhearts that have her have done a lot of damage, and it’s only a matter of time before they come for us. So why not head them off at the pass? Besides, I always did like a fight.”

  “Sounds good enough to me,” Ryan said. He looked around at the massed ordnance. The shit that Bryanna’s group had was going to be useful, but its erratic nature gave him a problem. Rounda had basic equipment but a good attitude. Corwen’s people weren’t born fighters, but they had some useful variant tech, and their aerial ability gave them another dimension in terms of tactics.

  Ryan looked at all of them in turn. His gaze settled longest on the ice queen. He needed her fully on side, as her people were the best equipped, and also the most likely to break ranks if she said so. As his eye blazed into hers, it was as though she could read his thoughts. She gave the briefest of nods.

  “Your call, One-eye,” she said. “The reputation of Ryan Cawdor and his people in combat precedes you. We’ll go along with your plans…as long as they make sense.”

  “Good enough for me.” Ryan looked across to Jak and Robear. “Anything?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Like valley of chilled out there,” Jak muttered.

  “You know, Ryan, it strikes me as strange,” Doc said in a considered tone. “Whilst it is true that we have been doing this as quickly as possible, there has still been plenty of time for them to come after us. In such a circumstance, I have little doubt that you would have taken such a course of action. Now why, I wonder, have they not done this?”

  Ryan looked to the skies above the dune, as if expecting an aerial attack to materialize from nowhere. What was the strategy from inside the redoubt? If they were in no hurry, then what the fireblasted hell did they have to throw at this motley crew? He turned back to the old man, meeting his gaze levelly.

  “You know, Doc, that’s been bothering me, too.”

  KRYSTY WAS ALMOST struck dumb. All she could do was curse softly under her breath. She knew the ordnance that her friends carried. She had an idea of what the technomad she had glimpsed on that fracture image may carry. She knew that there was no way it could match up to this. Come to that, she knew that there was no way that anything in the length and breadth of the Deathlands could match up to this. Howard had the capacity within this base to wipe out anything that approached civilization in the lands above, which, in her more cynical moments, she may have considered no bad thing.

  But then she remembered the damage he had caused using only the smallest fraction of the tech he had. And suddenly she wasn’t so cynical anymore. He had to be stopped, and she had to work out a way to do it before he could wipe out her friends and those who had answered their call for assistance.

  All this raced through her mind while she tried to take in what she could see. Her jaw had to have dropped, making her look like a slack, drooling stupe. Certainly, something made Howard smile indulgently when he turned to her and saw the expression on her face.

  “It is impressive, isn’t it?” he said with a strange mix of pride and bashfulness. “It’s quite some legacy to be left with, I’ll admit. And a lot for us to live up to, if we are to use it properly, and for the greater good. Come, I’ll show you what we have at our disposal.”

  He took her hand and guided her into the room. The comps and monitors were lined around three walls of the room. In the center of the floor were two padded leather chairs on a runner that ran in a half-circle, making it possible for those seated to swivel around the room and take in all the monitors and comps. This was more than just an armory inventory room: it was a battle station.

  “
Come, sit down,” he said in a voice tinged with pride. Krysty allowed herself to be led into the room and to one of the chairs. She sat, trying to take it all in. She knew it was important that she remember every detail, and yet the scale was so vast, her mind so fogged by the thought of what the ordnance could do, that it was hard to focus.

  So it was perhaps fortunate, if sickly ironic, that Howard was keen to impress her by reiterating what each comp controlled as he guided her around the room.

  The mines and the spycams she was already aware of. She knew that there were SMG nests and heavier blasters lined around the entrance to the old ranch house. That would be difficult enough to surmount without prior knowledge. But there was more, much more: nerve gas, tear gas, chemical agents, as well as rockets, ground-to-air missiles, both nuclear and nonnuclear. The nukes weren’t armed, but that was what the workers were for, as he blithely reminded her. There were also wags in the bays that were equipped as miniversions of the base itself, each carrying a small quantity of the whole.

  Those were just the conventional weapons. He took a childlike delight in pointing out to her the weapons with which she may not be familiar.

  The land surrounding the ranch was also run through with cables that snaked around insulated towers, enabling him to set up earth tremors on a small scale in localized areas, once again enabling him to incapacitate the approaching enemy. In such circumstances, picking them off would be like a turkey shoot.

  Short of a direct nuclear strike from above, there was no chance that the approaching force—such as it as—would be able to break through to the interior of the base. In truth, there was little chance they would get more than a few hundred yards without being wiped out. Come to that, the base seemed so well insulated against the nukecaust that she doubted even a direct strike—even supposing such a thing had been possible—would have had much of an effect.

  She did not know about the sonic weapons and the strange tech that the nomads possessed; not in detail. If she dragged her memory, she may recall their resources. But that didn’t matter. Their weapons would only be of use against an enemy force, which they expected to encounter. They had no idea that only one man stood against them. But one man with a remote force against which they had little defense.

  It would be a massacre. She had to think, and fast. So far, she had failed to come up with an idea of how she could trick him into initiating the self-destruct mechanism, which was probably just as well, in one sense. Now that she knew the extent of what the base carried, she knew that its destruction would probably lead to a major land upheaval and nuke fallout for some distance around. There was little point in stopping her friends being chilled by the base defenses only for them to be fried by nuke shit or crushed and buried in a quake. And if she was going to buy the farm—as she’d half suspected she might to ensure their safety—she sure didn’t want it to be for nothing.

  She needed to get out of this room, to not have these horrors right in her face, looming up over her and blocking her capacity for logical and inventive thought…and Gaia knew that she had to be inventive if she was going to get out of this one.

  “Are you all right, Storm Girl? You look, I don’t know…” Howard was looking at her with a mix of peevishness and concern. She hadn’t reacted to his display of tech in quite the way he would have wanted. She was supposed to swoon like an old-time heroine, falling into his arms. Like most boys of his mental age, he equated big things with the size of his dick. She knew that, she had seen it time and time again.

  She turned to him and smiled, trying to block the horror out of her mind and get through the next few minutes.

  “It’s all a bit much, Thunder Rider. A gal can only take so much at any one time. It’s like you in here—so big, so strong…” She reached out to him, stroking his arm. He looked down at her hand and seemed unsure of himself. His own hand went to hers, lightly brushing on her fingers. She could feel a tremble in his touch.

  Good, you coldheart bastard, I’ll distract you for as long as it takes, and whatever it takes. As long as you don’t put any of this ordnance into action before I have a chance to make a plan….

  “Thunder Rider,” she said, “I’ve been thinking…Those people out there—they’re not really the enemy and not really allies. They don’t know where they are with us, or what to do. And I know—” she put her fingers to his lips when he seemed about to speak “—that they won’t let us talk to them reasonably. But what I mean is this—while they’re out of range, they’re no threat. Sid and Hammill will monitor them and tell us when they come within range, and what their actions are. But until then, we have time…”

  He was naive, innocent in many ways, but he was still a man, and she was counting on that.

  “I suppose…I don’t know,” he said haltingly. She could see it in his eyes. It was what he wanted, but he knew little of other people apart from the woman who had been both sister and aunt. He didn’t know what to do. If she played this right, she could buy valuable time.

  Picking her words carefully, she said, “I think you know what I mean, Thunder Rider. It’s time. There is time.”

  He tried to speak, but no words came out. Instead he nodded.

  “Very well, then. Let me go take a shower. You instruct Sid and Hammill to alert you only in the direst of circumstances, and you go and wait for me in your quarters. I won’t be long…” With which she rose from her seat, planting the lightest of kisses on his lips, brushing him. She could feel his body tense.

  She smiled at him and turned to leave the room, her smile fading, her face setting hard as her back became his only view of her. She remembered to swing her hips as she left, reinforcing the impression she wanted to leave him with. In truth, she’d rather have swallowed her own vomit than kissed him again, but thanked Gaia that men were led by their dicks.

  She didn’t have much time. Quickening her pace as she got farther away from the room, hearing Howard instruct Sid and Hammill and hearing Hammill’s voice in reply, she spoke in an undertone.

  “Sid, can you hear me?”

  “I can.” His voice was also soft, volume regulated and localized to a hidden speaker near her.

  “When I get to my room, have the files left by Jenny ready for me, and get that shower running. I’m going to have to duck under to support my story, and I’m not going to have much time.”

  “Very well,” the soft voice replied. “We will talk more when you get there.”

  Sid faded away and Krysty stepped up her pace. She was still unfamiliar with the layout of the labyrinthine bunker, and she was sure she was going wrong. But no, despite the lack of vocal presence, Sid was still monitoring her closely. She could tell this from the way in which the lights ahead of her dimmed and rose to indicate the correct path.

  By the time she had ascended a level, she was running. Howard would be expecting her to walk, then shower and walk to his quarters. She needed to get wet to cover herself, and run to make up valuable time. It seemed so petty, every second snatched so paltry, yet the solution to her problem was somewhere on that piece of vid. She knew it. She just hoped she would have time to find it.

  She reached her room, ran in, flinging the door shut behind her.

  “Lock it, Sid,” she breathed heavily.

  “But if Howard—”

  “—orders you to open it, then you’ll have to. But that’ll still give me time to cover us. I can tell him I had you lock it because of my feminine modesty, or some kind of crap like that. He’ll fall for it.”

  “How do you know?” Sid asked, worry creeping into his voice.

  Krysty laughed. “He’s a man. And an innocent one, at that. Has it been that long that you can’t remember?”

  There was a pause. Then, “No, I can. You may be right. I hope so.”

  “It’s all we’ve got,” she said, settling herself in front of the monitor. “Run Jenny’s final vid from the beginning, Sid.” Then, as it started to play, “Fast forward it, please. Haven’t got time. Ju
st need to find…” Her voice died away as she studied the rapidly moving image closely.

  Jenny’s image jerked and pixilated occasionally as the digitized image rapidly moved. Sid had guessed that Krysty would need sound cues, so he had not switched over to the usual fast forward for digitized images, which would eliminate all sound. Her voice sounded like a helium balloon, her already fluting voice sounding like the whistling of a bird. Words were sometimes hard to pick out, but there was enough for Krysty to know when the vid was reaching a point where she would need to slow it to normal.

  “Slow it to normal, Sid,” she said quietly. He complied, and she heard the words she knew were in there; the words that gave her the clue she needed.

  “It pains me to say this, for I love him, but without a steadying hand, I fear for what he will do. Only he has the power to actuate the destruction of this place. It’s all genetics, you see. That and the randomness of numbers. Only he can destroy, but the threat can be stayed. I fear that he must be stopped, even at the expense of his life…”

  “STOP THE BASTARD,” she cried exultantly. The monitor went dead. Krysty looked up at the ceiling. She had no idea where the cams were in the room, but somehow she had come to think of Sid as watching over her from above. “That’s it,” she said in a quieter voice. “I think we’ve got him.”

  “We?”

  She smiled. “Listen to me. Jenny said two things on there that I knew were bugging me. First thing, Howard is the only one to be able to override systems, right?”

  “Correct.” Sid’s voice was even, but he couldn’t conceal his puzzlement.

  “He does this because the system responds to his genetic imprint, as you told me. I saw that oval pad on the main desk in the console room. That’s the…I don’t know…genetic keypad, right?”

  “Correct. The key to opening and controlling all systems is through that pad. To actuate the destruction sequence, the command would have to be delivered while the genetic imprint was being read. Not before, or after, but during. This is to ensure that the deliverer of the message is the one in the keypad.”