Kitabı oxu: «Desert Kings»

Desert Kings

Deathlands_®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Epilogue

Chapter One

Ryan opened his eye and discovered that the jump was over. He was sprawled on the cold floor of a mat-trans chamber, the electronic mists slowly fading. His SIG-Sauer pistol was digging into his hip and his leather eye patch was askew. Son of a bitch, what a nightmare he’d endured this time, the Deathlands warrior thought sluggishly, reality slowly returning like waves rushing toward shore. The dream about the Mutie Wars had been startlingly vivid.

Suddenly a severe pain hit Ryan and he grabbed his head in both hands until the throbbing subsided.

The jump-mares he suffered seemed to be getting worse. Mildred had told him time and again that it was a natural side effect of using the mat-trans units, instantly traveling from one redoubt to another, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles apart. But nobody knew for sure. All of the whitecoats who had built the mat-trans units were long dead, and nobody had ever found an operating manual. Mildred had had a CD with codes, but that was long gone.

Personally, Ryan didn’t care much about the pain. Jumping hurt, and that was simply the price they paid for being able to move freely around Deathlands. As Trader often said, pain was life. Only the dead felt nothing.

Weakly, the man rose onto his arms and rolled over to rest against the armaglass wall. The material was deliciously cool through his jacket, and he gratefully pulled in lungfuls of air until his mind began to clear. He checked his weapons: a Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action longblaster, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer hand-blaster and a curved panga.

Adjusting his eye patch, Ryan looked around the chamber at the five people sprawled on the floor. They were panting hard and drenched in sweat. The shock of instantaneous travel through the predark machinery was always painful to the companions, but obviously this jump had been particularly bad for everybody.

A low moan sounded from a redheaded woman. Krysty Wroth lifted her face and wiped away a string of drool with the back of her hand.

“Hi, lover,” Krysty whispered hoarsely. The woman wore a shaggy black fur coat and green military fatigues. A gunbelt encircled her trim waist, supporting a holstered S&W .38 revolver, along with a couple of ammo pouches. A canvas backpack lay on the floor near her blue cowboy boots, the silver tips glistening in the harsh fluorescent light.

“Hey, yourself,” Ryan replied, smiling back. “Triple bitch of a jump, eh?”

“Been through worse,” Krysty said softly, then broke into a ragged cough. Once, they had jumped into a flooded redoubt full of rotting corpses. The stench was so overpowering that Krysty was still amazed that anyone had the presence of mind to hit the Last Destination button so they could jump out of there.

At the grim memory, she experimentally sniffed. The air of the redoubt smelled flat and artificial, without any trace of other living creatures. Good. Several times they had jumped somewhere only to find the walls had been breached and there were coldhearts or muties inside the redoubt. But this one smelled clean and empty.

“Here, drink this,” a stocky black woman said, proffering a battered canteen.

“Any chance it’s water?” Krysty asked hopefully, taking the container.

“Nope, a new batch of jump juice,” Mildred Wyeth replied, brushing a pair of beaded plaits from her face. The woman was dressed in a flannel work shirt and heavy denim pants tucked into U.S. Army boots. A Czech-made ZKR target pistol jutted from her gunbelt, and there was a worn canvas bag hanging at her side bearing the faded letters M*A*S*H.

Back in the twentieth century, Dr. Mildred Wyeth had been a physician who specialized in cryogenics research. On a crisp December day she had entered the hospital for what was deemed routine surgery. But there had been complications and she’d ended up in a cryogenic freezing unit, and slept through the nuclear holocaust. A hundred years later she was awakened by Ryan and the others to find a strange new world of radioactive ruins, acid rain storms, mutants and cannibals.

One of the physician’s projects was to try to perfect some sort of tonic that would ease the agony some of the companions endured following a jump. Sometimes the companions arrived at a redoubt racked with pain, vomiting their last meal, totally helpless for several minutes. In the Deathlands, that was a good way to get chilled. So far, none of her concoctions had helped much, but she always had hope for the next batch. These days, hope was all anybody had.

“Jump juice,” Krysty said without enthusiasm. Then she sighed and took a sip. She paused to swallow, then drank some more. “Gaia, this tastes like coffee!”

“It is, mostly,” Mildred replied, sitting upright. “U.S. Army-issue coffee mixed with sugar, honey, srag root and a few other things. I figured maybe a stimulant was needed more than a relaxant.”

“P-pass that over h-here,” J. B. Dix muttered, reaching out a hand. “Cold coffee sounds mighty good to m-me.” The wiry man was dressed in neutral-colored clothing, Army boots and a brown leather jacket that had seen better days. A 9 mm Uzi machine pistol hung off his left shoulder, a S&W M-4000 shotgun was across his back and his backpack bulged with odds and ends. Their old mentor, Trader, had nicknamed him “The Armorer” long ago, and the title fit perfectly. There wasn’t a weapon in existence that John Barrymore Dix couldn’t fire in his sleep or repair in the dark.

Krysty handed him the container and he took a swallow. He paused as if half expecting his stomach to rebel at the brew, but slowly he began to smile.

“Dark night, this is your best mix yet, Millie!” J.B. exclaimed in delight. “I think we have a winner here!”

“Pity I can’t make more.” Mildred sighed.

Pulling out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket, J.B. placed them on his face. “Why not?” he asked curiously. Already he was feeling better, the vertigo of the jump fading.

“About half of this is three-hundred-year-old Napoleon brandy,” she stated. “I doubt we’ll ever find another bottle of it again.”

“Shine is shine.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t. Trust me on this one, John.”

He grinned. “Always have before, Millie.” Reaching out to pat her hand in consolation, J.B. shared a private moment with the physician before passing the canteen to the next companion.

Brushing the snow-colored hair from his face, Jak Lauren took a long drink, some of the juice running down his chin. Lowering the canteen, the youth shook all over like a dog coming out of the rain. “Best batch yet!”

A true albino, Jak had been born in the swamps of Louisiana. The young hunter was dressed in loose camou clothing. Odd bits of razors, glass and feathers had been sewn into his jacket, making it camou for the new world. When hiding among the ruins of predark cities, Jak could all but disappear among the wreckage. And it would be painful if anyone grabbed him by his jacket. A massive .357 Magnum Colt Python hand-blaster rested on his right hip and countless leaf-bladed throwing knives were secreted upon his person. A knife was sheathed on his belt, and the handle of a small knife peeked from the top of his left boot.

“Hey, over here,” Ryan said, reaching out.

Turning, the teen relayed the partially filled container. Ryan took a couple of swigs, then handed the canteen to a tall silver-haired man slumped against the wall. Wordlessly accepting it, Doc Tanner drained the container before giving it back to Mildred.

“Th-thank you, my dear Ryan,” Doc whispered. “That was needed m-much more than I could p-possibly express.”

Tall and slim, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was dressed as if from another age in a frilly white shirt and a long frock coat. An ebony walking stick lay across his lap, the silver lion’s head peeking out between his strong fingers. A mammoth LeMat percussion pistol was holstered at his side, along with several pouches containing black powder and wadding for the Civil War blaster.

“Well, jumps always hit you and Jak hardest,” Mildred said, screwing the cap back on the canteen. “Probably from all the…” She paused awkwardly.

“Indeed, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely.

Although only in his late thirties, Doc appeared to be in his sixties from an unexpected side effect of being trawled through time. The whitecoats of the twentieth century had performed experiments on Doc for years, trying to solve the mystery of why he was the only time traveler to survive the experience. Exasperated by Doc’s many escape attempts, the whitecoats had hurled him forward in time. Realizing a mistake had been made by doing that, agents of Operation Chronos still hunted for the man. One notable agent was Delphi. Part man, part machine, and all devil, Delphi had laid a devious trap for Ryan, knowing full well that Doc would be traveling with the man. The trick had nearly worked, but Doc escaped at the last moment, leaving Delphi buried alive in a collapsed tunnel. The rest of the companions believed that Delphi had bought the farm, but until Doc saw the cyborg’s lifeless body, he would never stop waiting for the demented monster to return.

“All right, let’s see where we are,” Ryan said, levering himself off the floor. The companions assumed their usual positions and drew their weapons as the one-eyed man walked to the chamber’s door and pressed the lever. The door opened onto an antechamber.

Each mat-trans unit had its own unique color, possibly to identify the location to travelers. But that was just a guess. Nobody knew for sure why the armaglass was a different color, or where all of the military personnel disappeared to after the nuke war. Or where they took the megatons of supplies previously stored inside the underground bunkers. The redoubts contained a thousand mysteries, the color codes being only one of them.

However, one constant in every redoubt was that the antechamber was usually small and always empty, except perhaps for a small table or chair, and was devoid of dust, a sterile void. But this room was large and stuffed to the ceiling with wooden boxes. There had to have been a hundred of them filling the room, each one absolutely identical to the other, aside from a black serial number stenciled on the side.

“What is all of this stuff?” J.B. demanded curtly.

“Dunno. Those aren’t predark mil numbers on the sides,” Ryan said slowly.

“It almost looks like somebody did a run,” Krysty stated. Her long red hair moved as if stirred by secret winds that only she could feel. “They jumped into the redoubt, tossed out the boxes from the mat-trans unit, then jumped out again.”

“A raiding party?” Doc muttered. “That could very well be, madam. As I recall, we did something similar ourselves once.”

“Yeah, chill Silas,” Jak growled, clicking back the hammer on his Colt Python. Dr. Silas Jamaisuous had been one of the predark inventors of the mat-trans unit and crazier than a shithouse mutie. “Think might be someone’s private cache?”

“Perhaps,” Mildred said slowly. “But look there!”

Squinting slightly, Ryan followed the woman’s finger and saw a crushed flower protruding from the stacks of boxes. A Deathlands daisy. The leaves were still green and the blossom was only starting to wilt.

“That’s fresh,” Krysty declared, raising her S&W .38 revolver. “Can’t be more than a day old, mebbe two at the most.”

“Which means that somebody has very recently been inside the redoubt,” Ryan growled, holstering the SIG-Sauer and sliding his Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder. He worked the bolt. “All right, triple-red, people. Doc and Jak, Krysty and Mildred, stay inside the mat-trans unit so that nobody else can jump in here with us. J.B., check for traps. I’ll stand guard.”

With practiced ease, everybody did as they were told without comment.

Warily going to the nearest stack of crates, J.B. tilted back his battered fedora and carefully examined the boxes without touching anything. There were no trip wires that he could see, pressure switches or anything else dangerous in sight. But that didn’t mean the stack was safe.

“Well?” Ryan demanded, the deadly Steyr balanced in both hands.

“Tell you in a sec,” the Armorer replied, pulling out a small compass and waving it over the piles of containers. If there was any kind of a proximity sensor hidden among the boxes then the compass needle would flicker slightly from the magnetic field. However, the needle remained unresponsive and steady.

“Okay, we’re in the clear,” J.B. announced, tucking the compass away.

Casting an uneasy glance toward the exit door of the antechamber, Ryan went to the nearest pile of boxes. Choosing one, he briefly inspected it before drawing his panga and using the blade as a lever to force open the lid. The nails squealed in protest, and out puffed excelsior stuffing. Placing aside the lid, Ryan removed a fistful of the soft material and froze motionless.

Lying nestled in the stuffing was a severed human hand.

Chapter Two

Suspecting a trap, Ryan nudged the grisly object with his panga and it shifted, exposing two more hands underneath. All of them were identical, down to the pattern of the hair on the back of the hand and a scar near the thumb.

“What?” Jak muttered, craning his neck for a better look.

“Don’t touch them!” Mildred warned, scowling at the hands in frank disgust. “Don’t get anywhere near those things!”

“Saw hands before.” Jak snorted in wry amusement, then frowned as he noticed the silvery wiring dangling from the wrists.

“Robotic hands,” Ryan growled, stabbing one with the panga. A drop of clear oily fluid leaked out and was quickly absorbed by the excelsior. “Only seen those once before.”

“Most assuredly, sir, and I was there!” Doc whispered hoarsely, his face contorting into a feral snarl. Angrily, the man slapped the box and it fell to the floor, a dozen of the hands tumbling into view. Each was absolutely identical to the other.

Slowly approaching, the rest of the companions gathered around the stacks of boxes, staring in astonishment.

Prying off the lid of another box, Ryan saw that it was full of white foam peanuts. The foam would dissolve in gasoline, turning it into a crude form of napalm that would stick to almost anything. That doubled the chilling power of a firebomb. Vaguely, Ryan remembered Mildred saying how the foam would last forever and never rot away, and before the Nuke War it had been as common as dirt. But these days it was more rare than an honest baron. Everything made of the stuff had been consumed during the endless fighting after skydark. Molotov cocktails were very deadly weapons, and easier to make than a blaster.

Tipping the container, Ryan spilled the peanuts to reveal a set of four internal organs. They were made of a shiny brown plastic edged with an assortment of clear tubes and more silvery wires.

“Those are livers,” Mildred stated. “My God, if this means what I think it does…”

Nervously, the woman adjusted the med kit hanging over her shoulder. Or rather, what she called her medical bag. She had found the empty canvas bag a while back and slowly filled it with what meager medical supplies she could gather: a plastic bottle of boiled cloth, leather strips to use as a tourniquet, a razor-sharp thin-bladed knife found in an art gallery, a few herbs and moss she knew helped ease itching and minor infections, some plastic-wrapped tampons reserved strictly for deep bullet wounds, a plastic bottle of alcohol, some plastic fishing line for sutures, a curved upholstery needle and one small tin of aspirin. Not much, but it was a start.

Hurriedly opening another box, Krysty dumped a couple of plastic human hearts on the floor. At the impact, they started to beat, but soon stopped. The companions began to rip through the crates and boxes, finding more hands, limbs, lungs, kidneys, something that looked like gills of all things, and several flexible armor plates that none of them could recognize as part of a human body. Then a face clattered to the littered floor, landing upside down.

Using his ebony stick, Doc flipped it over and inhaled sharply. Although stiff and lifeless, the face was painfully familiar to the man, the smooth features so lifelike that he half expected the disembodied face to blink open its eyes and start to talk. Jak kicked foam peanuts over the face until the grotesque visage was once more out of sight.

For a couple of minutes nobody spoke and there was only the muted hum of the sterilized air flowing from the disguised wall vents.

“So, he’s back,” Doc said woodenly, the words sounding strangely flat and emotionless. “The foul cyborg has returned!”

For a moment the universe reeled and Doc was back in the underground tunnel fighting the hated manchine, the only illumination coming from the muzzle-flame of his booming LeMat and a sizzling laser beam fired by Delphi. Then the explosive charges detonated and the ceiling started to fall, as the river began to rise over their heads….

With an effort of will, Doc returned to the reality of the present. If Delphi had been here, then he might walk through the access door of the antechamber at any second! Drawing the LeMat, he pulled back the heavy hammer of the single-action blaster.

“John Barrymore, do we have any grens?” Doc barked, turning to face the door across the chamber.

“Got better than that,” the Armorer replied, pulling a squat mil sphere into view from his munitions bag. “I’ve got an implo gren! Been saving it for an emergency.”

“Well, this is it, sir!” An implo gren was a predark marvel that didn’t explode outward, but instead created a gravitational field that pulled everything nearby inward to compact into a small, hard sphere. A single implo gren could reduce a U.S. Army tank down to the size of clenched fist. Nothing could survive that. Not even a cyborg.

“All right, if he is here, then let’s finish this now!” Ryan declared roughly, sliding the Steyr off his shoulder. “We’re gonna recce the entire redoubt, from the fusion reactors in the basement to the garage on top. And if we find Delphi, then we pin him down with blasterfire long enough to get clear and let J.B. use the implo gren.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Mildred agreed, pulling out the Czech ZKR. Back in her own time, killing a person was the worst crime imaginable and carried the most stringent punishments possible. At first Mildred had found it difficult to reconcile taking a life with her oath as a doctor. But “kill or be killed” was the mantra of a new America.

“How much space needed for gren?” Jak asked.

“We need at least thirty yards,” Krysty replied, her animated hair flexing and turning in response to her heightened emotional state.

“I…My friends, while I truly appreciate these sentiments, honor forces me to remind you that we do not have to stay,” Doc noted hesitantly in his stentorian voice. “We can simply leave and jump to another redoubt. With luck, Delphi will never find us again.”

“Or nightcreep next week!” Jak shot back scornfully, drawing his Colt Python. “Not run. Ace now!”

“I agree,” Krysty stated forcibly. “We should stay.”

“But still, madam—”

“Dark night, if we rabbit now, we could find ourselves ambushed after every damn jump,” J.B. added, using his free hand to adjust his fedora. “We arrive weak and sick, then in rushes Delphi.” He vehemently shook his head. “I don’t want to get chilled on my knees puking. That’s a bastard-poor way to buy the farm.”

“There is no good way to die, John,” Mildred countered, patting his arm. She had seen death a thousand times before and Thomas Hobbes had been right—it was always ugly and brutish. “But I’d rather face it on my feet with a gun in my hand. Next time, we may not have an implo gren.”

“Fucking A,” Jak added emphatically.

“Has anybody considered the possibility that Delphi isn’t even here?” Mildred added. “Or that he hasn’t attacked yet because of the spare parts?”

“Too valuable to risk, eh?” Ryan said thoughtfully, rubbing his unshaved chin. It was an interesting idea, and opened a host of possibilities. Unfortunately there were far too many possibilities and not enough hard answers.

“Krysty, can you sense anything?” he asked hopefully.

“No…not really,” the woman said hesitantly, trying to concentrate harder. Sometimes she could feel the presence of danger long before it arrived—hidden coldhearts, sleeping muties, even acid rain. Her talent had saved their lives more than once. It was also not very reliable, waxing and waning.

Closing her eyes, the woman tried to focus on the cyborg, but stopped after a few minutes. It was useless. The redoubt was full of automatic devices that kept the place spotlessly clean and scrubbed the air. How could she pinpoint just one more machine? Ruefully, Krysty glanced at the piles of boxes. Besides, exactly how much of Delphi was still norm anymore, and how much had been replaced with plastic and steel?

“Well?” Ryan prompted.

“Sorry, lover,” Krysty answered regretfully. “But I’m still too weak from the jump.”

Ryan grunted at that. Fair enough. It had been a long shot at best. “Okay, we do this the hard way,” he stated. “Doc, you can stay here to guard the boxes if you want, but we’re going hunting.”

“Then consider me Ajax of Troy!” Doc rumbled, standing a little taller. “I shall not fall on my sword!”

Jak raised a snowy eyebrow.

“I shall not fail.”

“Ah.”

Then Doc’s voice took on a more gentle aspect. “And thank you, my friends,” he said, looking around at them. “I…Thank you.”

Slapping the man on the back in reply, Ryan started for the control room with the others close behind, but Mildred stopped them.

“Wait a second,” she said, a sly grin forming. “Leaving is actually not a bad idea.”

“Really, madam!” Doc said askance.

Mildred snorted. “Not us, ya old coot. The boxes.”

Ryan paused. He had considered smashing all of the parts, but that would take hours, and it was still possible that the cyborg might be able to use some of the bits. But he couldn’t do drek if they were gone.

“Good thinking, Millie!” J.B. said, grinning wide. “Come on, let’s scatter his shit across the world! Remember what Trader said—denying an enemy necessary supplies is halfway to winning any fight.”

“The other half is blowing out his brains,” Ryan added. “All right, I’ll stay here and watch the exit through the control room. The rest of you get moving!”

As the others headed for the boxes, Ryan leveled his longblaster at the door leading into the redoubt. At the first sign of movement he would open fire. But even if Delphi was standing on the other side, he felt sure the cyborg wouldn’t attack them straight on. The nuking coward liked to strike from behind, to lay traps or to hire mercies to do his fighting. Doc had almost aced the bastard all by himself, and this time the nuke-sucker would face all of the companions. The old man wasn’t a blood relative, but some families were forged from friends in the heat of battle.

Blood brothers, Mildred called them. Ryan liked the term. It said a lot in a few words. Blood brothers. None of the companions were related, but there was no doubt they were a family. And kin helped kin.

Forming a ragged line, the other companions started passing the boxes along and stacking them in the mat-trans unit. When it was full, Krysty tapped random buttons on the control panel, left the gateway and closed the door, triggering a jump. A few ticks later, a white mist rose from the floor and ceiling, and the complex machinery performed its function. A series of ethereal lights danced within the swirling cloud, then the sparkles diminished and the mist slowly dissipated to show the unit was empty again.

“Dark night, look how many boxes are left!” J.B. stated, studying the remaining pile. “Must be enough parts here to build a dozen copies of the bastard. Just how bad did you shoot up his ass, Doc?”

“As much as possible,” the old man replied with a note of pride in his voice. “However, I have noted that there were no spare brains among this grotesque array of medical effluvia. These must be simply spare parts for the next time he is damaged.”

“Which means he’s not making an army of himself,” Krysty said, hoisting another box. The lower they got in the pile, the heavier each box became and the parts got larger.

“Quite so, dear lady.”

“Good,” Jak snarled, taking the container. “One enough.”

Accepting the box, Mildred added, “More than enough.”

“Agreed, madam.”

“If these important, then where guards?” Jak asked suspiciously, continuing the process. A lid shifted, revealing a pair of lungs. Fighting down a shiver, the teenager tossed the container into the gateway. For some reason, the body parts reminded him of the cannies they’d come across back in Louisiana.

“We’re hardly out in the open,” Krysty replied. “This is the center of a nukeproof redoubt. No place safer in the world.”

In reply, the teen only grunted and kept up the pace. The mat-trans unit was filled a second time, and then a third, before the antechamber was empty.

“Done and done.” J.B. sighed in relief, removing his fedora and smoothing down his hair. “Good luck to him finding those again!”

“Mildred, any idea what those thick plates were?” Krysty asked, dusting off her hands. “I’ve never seen anything like those before.”

“No idea whatsoever,” Mildred replied. “Maybe body armor, or something to do with his weapons systems, possibly even the force field generator or a communications device…it could be anything really.”

“Including his hologram generator,” Doc snarled in a manner that startled his companions. The dastardly cyborg had once almost lured him into a deathtrap by creating a three-dimensional image of his dear wife, Emily. How the soulless manchine ever got a recording of her was something that still rankled his troubled thoughts.

Ryan kept a careful watch on the door that separated the antechamber from the control room while the others caught their breath. They needed to be razor sharp before daring to leave the antechamber.

When they were ready, Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer and opened the door. There came a series of muffled bangs as the mechanical locks disengaged, then the portal silently swung aside on well-oiled hinges.

With the Steyr leading the way, Ryan stepped into the control room of the redoubt. A row of comps lined one wall, the monitors endlessly scrolling with binary codes. Twinkling lights danced across the console, a few of the switches moving to new positions all by themselves. But there was nobody in sight.

Taking a position near the door to the corridor, Ryan stood guard and J.B. punched in the code, then eased into the hallway as the door snicked open, Uzi at the ready. He disappeared from sight for a moment, then stuck his head back into the control room.

“All clear,” J.B. reported. “Nothing in sight, but the usual doors.”

Gathering in the corridor, the companions waited, listening for sounds of movement. When satisfied, they advanced on triple-red, opening each door and checking every room. Normally, these were offices for the base personnel. But in this redoubt each room was piled haphazardly with mil supplies: one room full of combat boots, another stacked high with dark green fatigues, the next with bedrolls and after that backpacks.

“What did you say about an army?” Krysty asked sarcastically, pushing open a door with the barrel of her wheel gun. Inside were lumpy canvas bags containing compact tents. “There’s enough stuff here to equip an entire ville of sec men!”

“Just no weps yet,” Ryan corrected, checking inside a closet. He wanted to stop and loot the place, as he needed a new pair of boots bad. But first and foremost, they had to know if there was anybody else in the redoubt.

When the companions finished the level, they ignored the elevator and used the concrete stairs to proceed straight down to the bottom level. There was little to search there as the entire level was filled with a silently working fusion reactor located behind thick lead walls. Some of the controls on the master control panel were blinking in the red, but they had found other redoubts doing the exact same thing, and the machines were still working smoothly years later. Whatever the flashing lights meant, it had nothing to do with malfunctioning equipment.

Now with their backs clear, Ryan led the way up into the redoubt, going from floor to floor, checking every room for any sign of the dreaded cyborg. But aside from the cornucopia of clothing and bedrolls on the fifth level, the rest of the redoubt was empty of anything useful. There wasn’t a scrap of paper in the wastebaskets or even a roll of toilet paper in the crappers. It seemed as if the redoubt had been effectively emptied long before Delphi started hauling in fresh equipment. Of course that left the big question of where was he getting the supplies?

In the kitchen, the companions found all of the refrigerators softly humming, clean and ready to be used, but totally devoid of anything edible. The rows of ovens worked normally, and the faucets delivered clean water. But that was all. There wasn’t even salt and pepper in the table shakers or napkins in the steel holders.

“Okay, time for the armory,” Ryan decided, shifting the pack on his back. His stomach was grumbling slightly, and the thought of the self-heats they had found the previous week made his mouth water, even though the food was usually tasteless. But this was not the time or the place for chow. Soon enough they would know if the base was empty, and then they could break out some food.

The others judiciously agreed and proceeded with extreme care, with J.B. checking for traps all along the way. They stopped a couple of times to listen to strange noises, creaking and a soft pattering from overhead, but there was nothing in sight and they proceeded, if a bit more slowly.

Reaching the next level, Ryan found the lock on the stairwell door was partially melted, a small, clean hole penetrating completely through the thick metal. Obviously the cyborg had been there. Must have used that damn laser Doc had told them about, the one-eyed man thought. Tentatively, he touched the metal with a fingertip and found it smooth and cool. But that meant nothing. The steel would have been room temperature after only a few hours.

Crouching to peer through the hole, Ryan saw only the usual corridor on the other side, a long, straight hall that led past the elevator bank and ended at a massive armored door. The armory. When the base was fully staffed, the corridor would be a death trap, with no place to hide or take cover from snipers. Now it was just a passageway, although once before they had gotten trapped inside a cage that dropped down from the ceiling.

Gently, Ryan pushed at the door with the barrel of his longblaster. As it swung open there came a soft exhalation of warm air, closely followed by a strange hum and a series of soft pattering again. But this time he heard it clearly. It almost sounded like rain. Had a pipe busted? Or mebbe a sink was overflowing on the top level.

Taking the lead, Ryan proceeded down the corridor, with the rest of the companions fanned out behind him so as to not offer a group target. They reached the door without incident.

Going to the keypad on the wall, Krysty tapped in the 3-2-5 access code. Nothing happened.

She repeated the code, and this time the lock disengaged. The door slid aside, revealing a bare floor covered with scratch marks. The companions discovered that the room was completely empty. Sadly, this was the condition that they found most redoubts: stripped to the walls, every blaster, lightbulb and fork gone, removed by the predark soldiers after skydark and taken—well, somewhere else. They had no idea where.

“Okay, let’s do a standard hunt,” Ryan said, removing his finger from the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. “Check under the racks for anything dropped, and be sure to look in the garbage cans.”

Peering around a corner, J.B. called out, “I don’t think that’s necessary this time!”

Joining the man, the rest of the companions paused in puzzlement. The area past the corner was as vacant as the front of the armory—except for a long row of wooden coffins on the cold floor.

“Is this the abode of vampires?” Doc muttered uneasily.

“Far from East Coast,” Jak said, referring to the ville the companions had visited once. The locals called themselves the People, and lived off human blood. They weren’t exactly the vampires of legend that Mildred had shown them in the vids, but close enough.

“Ten…fifteen…twenty…thirty of them,” Krysty said, her hand tightening on her S&W revolver. Her thumb brushed against the smooth steel where a hammer would have been located for most other blasters. But the Model 640 had an internal hammer, making it perfect for firing from inside a coat pocket.

“Odd place for a mortuary,” Mildred stated.

“Mebbe they aren’t for deaders,” Ryan answered.

“What else would you put in a coffin?”

“Let’s find out,” J.B. suggested. Going to the first coffin, the Armorer knelt to check for traps, then pulled out a knife and wiggled the steel blade into the thin crack between the side and the lid. Pressing downward, he got some play, and moved to the other side to try again. This time the nails squealed in protest, then the lid came loose and crashed to the floor, the noise preternaturally loud in the cavernous room.

“Are…are those what I think they are?” Mildred whispered, looking inside.

“Son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered, holstering his blaster. Filling the coffin were AK-47 assault rifles, Kalashnikov rapid-fires. The blue-steel barrels gleamed with oil, and the wooden stock shone with polish. He lifted one of the predark blasters, testing the weight in a knowledgeable hand.

“Seem brand-new,” Jak said suspiciously, taking another weapon. He worked the bolt and raised the AK-47 so that the overhead fluorescent lights could shine down the barrel.

“Clean!” the teenager announced, releasing the bolt so that it snapped back into position. “All need ammo, and good to go.”

Already at the next coffin, Jak got the lid off and chuckled at the sight of all the curved magazines for the weapons. Inspecting one, he naturally found it empty. The brass in an autoloader was pushed upward by a spring. Leave the weapon loaded for too long and the spring got weak and the blaster jammed in the middle of a fight. It was the price a person paid for having a rapid-fire that required constantly loading and unloading the ammo clips.

The third coffin was full of loose 7.62 mm brass for the rapid-fires. The next couple contained more clips, then more Kalashnikovs, more ammo and, finally, grens. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Just simple HE charges, no thermite or Willie Peter. White phosphorous, as Mildred called it. But still, it was more grens than the companions had ever seen before except for the Alaskan redoubt.

The last coffin contained assorted survival supplies, folding knives, canteens, Aqua-Pure tabs and the like. A baron’s ransom in irreplaceable tech.

Judiciously, J.B. and Ryan chose a couple of the grens and disassembled them on the spot. But there were no traps, no gimmicks. The explosive mil charges were fully functional, the small wads of C-4 moist and soft. Then the two men went back and used their knives to remove the lead for some of the cartridges and poured out the powder. They half expected it to be sand or sawdust. But the silvery dust looked normal, and when Ryan touched it with the flame of a butane lighter the propellant flared brightly and yielded no smoke.

“Smokeless gunpowder.” J.B. chuckled in delight. Most of the blasters they found stored in the redoubts were loaded with cordite. Greasy stuff that gave off almost no smoke but smelled like a mutie’s fart. This stuff gave off no smoke at all, none, and there was no smell. The Armorer knew how to make black powder and how to convert that into gunpowder. Fulminating guncotton, nitro, plas, those were no prob. Easy pie. But this stuff was a kind of predark chem far beyond his capabilities.

Sitting cross-legged on the cold floor, Jak began to insert live brass into an empty clip. When it was full, he placed it aside and started on another. Doc joined him at the task and they began stacking the loaded magazines.

The rest of the companions stood guard, keeping a close watch on the open door.

“Must be about a hundred of the rapid-fires,” Krysty said slowly, biting a lip. “And mebbe a million rounds.”

“Closer to two million as I figure it,” Mildred said, scrunching her face. “Spare body parts downstairs and enough blasters here for an army. What is the son of a bitch planning?”

“Could be trade goods,” J.B. theorized, running a hand along the satiny finish of a Kalashnikov. He took a clip from the pile and gently inserted it into the receiver, then worked the bolt to chamber a round. “A man could buy a whole ville with just a couple of these.”

“Or take over a dozen,” Ryan added grimly.

“Baron Delphi?”

“Why not? Last time he gave M-16 assault rifles to the people he hired to kill us and capture Doc. Mebbe now he plans to carve out an empire…” Ryan didn’t finish the thought, but he could see that everybody else was also reaching the same conclusion. After creating his kingdom, the cyborg would come after Doc and the rest of them again. Only this time, instead of facing four coldhearts, the companions could be facing a bastard army. A real army, hundreds of sec men armed with rapid-fires. They had tangled with something similar in Shiloh, but back then the companions did a nightcreep and used the element of surprise. That would not be the case this time.

“What puzzles me is the use of these coffins,” Doc said, placing aside another full clip. “It is most unlikely that these funeral containers were all that he could obtain to transport the blasters. It seems more likely that—”

“Fireblast, he must have been smuggling them out of someplace,” Ryan said, completing the old man’s thought, rubbing his chin. The last time, the cyborg seemed to have unlimited supplies. But now he was smuggling weapons? The only logical reason why he’d be doing that: the bastard cyborg had more enemies than just the companions.

“All right, everybody grab a spare blaster and some grens,” Ryan announced, taking a loaded AK-47 and sliding the strap over a shoulder. “I want to check out the last few levels of this redoubt, then go outside and find out where we are.”

“And then what?” Mildred asked, filling her pockets with spare ammo clips. “Should we send all of this stuff on another one-way trip to nowhere like the last batch?”

But before the Deathlands warrior could respond, the soft pattering sound came again, closer this time and from directly above them. As the companions looked curiously upward, the ceiling shimmered like a heat mirage in the desert and a dark figure came into view. Eight metal legs extended from a globular body with red crystal eyes on the front and a stubby little weapon of some kind mounted on the side.

“Droid!” Ryan cursed, diving to the side as he cut loose with a long burst from the Kalashnikov.

The stuttering stream of AP rounds hammered the machine, doing scant damage. Then the scuttling droid fired back, a sizzling energy beam from the tiny weapon hitting Ryan directly in the chest.

Chapter Three

A soft, dry wind blew over the weedy landscape, carrying the faint smell of salt. High in the sky above Nevada, dark purple clouds rumbled ominously and sheet lightning flashed brightly, momentarily parting the roiling cover to expose a fiery orange sky.

Lumbering out of the bushes, the monster slid down the steep clay bank and landed with a splash in the shallow river. Standing ten feet tall, the colossal griz bear studied the rushing water. The river was quite shallow in that area of the forest, no more than a few feet deep. Huge boulders jutted from the churning surface, the spray creating a shimmering rainbow above the flow. Wiggling through the rocky shallows were big silvery trout, golden salmon and huge schools of bright-orange sunfish resembling underwater fire. In the deeper parts black-hued catfish wiggled along the bottom eating everything they encountered without prejudice. They smelled odd, and the bear consumed them only when there was nothing else available.

In the warm summer months, the griz would travel downstream to the cliffs where there were freshwater crabs, huge blue things that tasted wonderful, the snapping pinchers easily avoided. Other forest predators savored the delicious rock-dwellers, but none of them dared to challenge the powerful griz. Wolves, cougars, even the giant bull moose avoided the monstrous killer. The griz was the largest creature in the entire mountain forest, and the unchallenged master of the entire valley.

There came a flash of gold in the rushing water and the bear lashed out a massive paw. The surface of the river smacked loudly, and a wiggling salmon bounced into the misty air. Quickly bending forward, the griz snapped powerful jaws shut on the flapping fish, the skull bones audibly cracking.

Contentedly sitting in the cold water, the bear used both paws to rip the huge salmon apart, happily gnawing on the tasty internal organs. Pale blood splattered the thick fur of the beast as it contentedly consumed all of the dying fish, then afterward it daintily washed the warm gore off its paws and lazily rose to head back for the bank.

However, as it neared the grass, the animal paused at the sound of rustling leaves and instantly growled menacingly, its haunches rising slightly in preparation for a jump. Then its nose caught a strange smell in the air. Galvanized in raw terror, all thoughts of fighting vanished. The griz turned tail to charge for the deeper water in the middle of the river.

But it barely traveled a yard when a humanoid figure jumped out of the treetop and landed squarely on the back of the forest killer. The griz bear snarled in fury as the hooting stickie slapped it with both hands, the deadly suckers adhering to the fur and flesh. With a jerk, the hands were raised, crimson gobbets of flesh ripping free from the startled bear. Violently shuddering, the wounded animal roared in agony and rolled over. But the stickie stayed in place and again plunged the sucker-covered hands deeper into the ghastly openings, pulling out more flesh with one hand and pieces of beating organs with the other.

Agony exploded inside the griz as blood sprayed into the air from the ruptured arteries. As the mutie consumed the still-living flesh, the griz mindlessly turned to run away, careening off a partially submerged tree and then slamming directly into a boulder. Broken fangs and blood erupted from the brutal impact, and the bear jerked back for a split instant, only to charge forward again, trying to reach the deep waters downstream. But its great strength was fading fast and every step was blinding agony, the sounds of eating from the thing riding on top stealing what little reason the animal possessed. It weakly tried to rub the stickie off by hitting a boulder, then the desperate animal rolled over again, keeping its attacker under the water for as long as possible before surfacing. But it was to no avail. Blood dripped off the big bear, the river running red.

Slowing noticeably, the bear could feel no pain anymore and somehow knew the end was near. Summoning its last bits of strength, the griz rose on its hind legs to bellow a challenge at the world, then it collapsed into the running water with a tremendous splash and lay still, its great lungs laboring to draw ragged breaths. Sight faded to darkness and a terrible cold filled the beast as its thoughts became confused and muddled.

Steadfastly continuing to eat, the happy stickie barely noticed when the whimpering bear finally stopped moving and collapsed dead in the cold water. When it reached the still-warm fish in the belly, the mutie hooted in delight at the unexpected prize.

As it extracted the partially chewed food, the stickie paused at the sound of a low rumble. Usually loud noises were good. Explosions and fire always meant norms were nearby, and they sometimes had prizes worth stealing. But this was different somehow, and it rapidly grew louder. Timidly, the worried stickie looked at the stormy sky, the roiling clouds of black and fiery orange crackling with sheet lightning. There was a kind of rain that fell sometimes, every drop burning worse than the orange-beast that consumed wood. Once it had seen another stickie caught in a downpour of the fire-rain before it could reach a cave. The flesh of the mutie dissolved, exposing the white sticks underneath, then those fell apart, and still the fire-rain continued, destroying animals and plants, until there were only rocks and bad ground. When the rain stopped, the mutie had fled far away, but still it feared the return of the bad water.

Sluggishly, the mutie recalled that the fire-rain had a very specific smell, similar to old bird eggs, and there was no trace of the fire-rain smell. This had to be something else. Some new animal perhaps? Drooling slightly, the stickie hooted in delight. The females were always delighted to get new meat, and would reward him by spreading their legs.

In a splintery crash, the armored war wag plowed through the row of trees, the heavy treads flattening the laurel bushes into pulp. Hooting a challenge, the stickie rose to wave both sucker-covered hands at the strange angular beast, then charged in attack. Jumping high, it sailed toward the rolling thing, but suddenly there came a series of loud bangs, the noises so close together they almost seemed to be one long explosion.

Tremendous pain ripped through the stickie as the heavy-duty combat rounds tore it apart. The mutie fell into the dirty river alongside the cooling corpse of the giant bear, slayer and victim joined together forever in death.

Rolling uncaring over the bodies, the lead APC crushed them in the mud and rocks as three more war wags appeared from the forest. Each of the armored machines was draped with sandbags for additional protection, the windows only tiny slits to prevent an enemy from shooting inside the vehicles. Instead of wheels, they rolled on armored treads, and the vented barrels of rapid-fires jutted from each side like the quills of a porcupine. On the top of the lead wag was a scarred dome, the stubby barrel of a 20 mm Vulcan minigun sweeping the opposite shoreline for any possible dangers. The next wag had a missile pod on top, the firing hatch closed at the moment, and the last two vehicles were armed with the fluted barrels of high-pressure flame-throwers. Blue-tinted smoke blew from the exhaust pipes rising from the roof of the war machines. The metal plating under the patched sandbags was badly scarred in several locations, but there were no breaches in sight.

As indomitable as mountains, the armored wags jounced across the Nelson River, the water sluiced off several layers of old blood, tufts of human hair and several mutie suckers coming loose from behind the ramming prow to wash away.

Sparkling with droplets, the war wags lumbered up the opposite bank, the prows rising high to crash down onto the grassland. The big diesel engines revved in power and the machines increased in speed.

“Smack on target.” Zane Bellany chuckled, sliding shut the steel hatch on the left blasterport and holstering his rapid-fire. It took two tries because of the cramped quarters, but the man finally got the Webley .44 wheel gun back into leather.

As bald as a rock, Bellany sported an enormous head that seemed to merge with his incredibly hairy chest. His clothes were clean, but heavily patched, and crude tattoos were visible on every inch of his exposed skin. A machete hung at his side, tucked in a rattlesnake-skin sheath.

“Waste of ammo.” The driver snorted, feeding the power plant more juice. The gauges on the illuminated dashboard flickered in response. As the wag surged forward, a piece of the aced stickie came loose and fell off the array of welded iron bars covering the windshield.

Unconcerned, Bellany shrugged as he reached for the half-eaten sandwich lying on the dashboard. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking a mouthful and chewing. “We got plenty.”

Concentrating on steering the huge transport, the driver merely grunted in reply. He was a newbie to the convoy and still had trouble getting his head around the idea of having enough ammo. All of his life the man had watched grim people fight to the death with fists, knives and clubs over the ownership of a single live brass. Yet the four wags of the convoy had cases of the stuff.

Upon joining the convoy, the driver had been given, given, a leather gunbelt containing a pristine S&W .357 revolver, the double row of loops across the back holding a total of thirty live brass. Thirty! It was a fortune in brass, but that was nothing compared to the stack of boxes stored in the armory. Grens, rockets, all kinds of predark mil shit. Just fragging incredible. How the chief kept finding the tons of stuff he had no idea.

Along with the blasters, Chief Rogan often unearthed predark meds, crystals that you could dissolve in water and drink to cure the Black Cough, the Blind Shakes, all sorts of triple-bad ills. The meds were worth a thousand times more than any blaster, yet the chief regularly gave them away. At first that seemed like an incredible waste. But whenever they returned to those villes, the convoys were greeted warmly and nobody tried to jack them in the night, sell them rad water, or any of the other feeb tricks some locals used to rip off outlanders.

Finished with the sandwich, Bellany brushed the crumbs off his shirt and reached over a shoulder to grab a roll of paper. Carefully untying the piece of cloth holding it closed, Bellany studied the hand-drawn map, then checked the compass on the dashboard before raising his head to note the landscape outside. After the river was supposed to be a series of foothills, and than a deep valley…right. They were nearly at their goal. Rolling up the map again, he tucked it back into the honeycomb and grabbed a mike from a clip attached to the ceiling.

“Okay, everybody get razor,” Bellany said, the words echoing throughout the long wag. “And somebody wake up the chief. We’re almost there.”

“And sooner than expected,” a familiar voice said from behind.

Turning, Bellany smiled in greeting at the man standing in the doorway. “We didn’t run into any trouble like last time, sir,” he said, hanging up the mike.

“Then what were you shooting at?” Chief “John Rogan” asked, frowning slightly. The man was wearing a mil jumpsuit bleached a dull gray to match his pale combat boots. Two different blasters rode in a wide gunbelt and a short crystal wand was tucked into a shoulder holster. The others had no idea what the thing was, but naturally assumed it was a weapon of some kind.

“Just a stickie,” Bellany said. “Nothing important.”

Damn it, he missed stickies? Curse the bad luck for them to be found when he was out of the control room! “Stickies, eh? Well, as you say, nothing important,” Rogan lied, limping across the cabin.

As the convoy leader took a seat, Bellany forced himself not to comment on the man’s condition. Pale and thin, Rogan always looked rather sickly, a condition that had tricked a lot of coldhearts into trying to ace the norm for his blasters. But the chief was still here while the others were now residents in the worm hotel. In spite of appearances, Rogan was lightning-fast with a blaster and rarely missed. Privately, Bellany thought it was more than possible that the chief had just a touch of mutie in his blood, but wisely never mentioned the idea out loud. Chief Rogan hated all muties with a violence that bordered on madness.

Limping to the gunner chair, the man who called himself John Rogan awkwardly eased into the seat. Studying the grille covering the front windshield, he buckled on the seat belt usually ignored by all of the other members of his crew. There were some scattered bloodstains on the metal, but no appreciable damage. Good. It had taken him quite a while to steal these four trucks from the Alaska redoubt controlled by Department Coldfire, and getting replacements was totally out of the question. If another operative of Coldfire ever found him, or worse, somebody from TITAN, then the cyborg would be ruthlessly executed on sight.

But the fools cannot kill what they cannot find, Delphi noted sagely.

However, he was still annoyed about missing the stickies, though. The cyborg would have appreciated one last attempt at raising their intelligence. But so far, the only muties that Delphi had directly encountered were flapjacks, runts and those annoying little water rat things. Whatever the hell those were! That doomie called Haviva had warned him about teeth in the dirty water, and she had been right. Teeth in the water. The phrase had stayed in his mind. And the fat little muties had been nothing but teeth in the dirty marshland water. The horrible things aced four of his men before they could escape. Teeth in the water. Delphi was extremely glad the deadly rodents were far behind them now. On the other hand, he wanted to find just one more group of stickies. He still had some faint hopes for his broken children, but it was starting to fade away. They might simply be too stupid to ever train.

“How’s the fuel?” The cyborg sighed in resignation, checking the array of flickering gauges.

“Halfway down,” the driver replied, steering around the ruins of a predark house. The roof and walls had crumbled to the ground long ago, leaving only the brick chimney. But as the war wags rumbled past, the chimney visibly trembled and broke apart, finishing the destruction.

“That’s acceptable,” Delphi commented, watching the house recede into the distance behind the convoy.

For some bizarre reason the random destruction felt ominous, almost as if it was a premonition of doom. The cyborg tried to shake off the dire thoughts. He was a realist. He did not believe in omens and portents. That was merely voodoo nonsense for the illiterate masses. Yet the disturbing feeling would not leave the man-machine hybrid, and he stared at the cloud of dust rising from the wreckage until the natural contour of the land removed it from his sight. For a moment Delphi wondered if this might be the death waiting for him in the ruins that Haviva had foretold. But she had warned him of teeth in the water. There was no water here. Only crumbling brick buildings, blast crater and weeds.

“Sir, is there something wrong? Hey, Chief!”

With a start, Delphi realized that Bellany had been talking to him for a while. “No, just lost in thought over that redhead in the last ville,” the cyborg lied quickly, then made himself chuckle. “By thunder, she was fantastic! Damn near aced me in bed, and that was before she pulled a knife and tried to gut me like a fish!”

“Just a greedy slut.” Bellany snorted in disdain. “And you paid her two live rounds! Must have wanted it all, and she ended up with nothing.”

“Sad, but true,” Delphi said in agreement. Actually he had been forced to slay the whore when he lost control for a second during their sex play and accidentally revealed his true self, the beams of light from his cybernetic eyes shining directly into her horrified face. She’d shrieked in terror and he’d quickly pulled a knife to slash her throat, then cut his own arm to try to cover up the murder. Thankfully, the local sec men believed the innocence of the cyborg, especially when he insisted on having another slut finish what the first one had only started. A normal man denied release would seek completion, so he’d had to do the same. Anything else would have been deemed suspicious.

Annoying, but necessary. In the end it had cost Delphi another live round, but the cyborg had sex with another slut, finally crying out in pretend joy when inside he was seething with impatience to leave. Happily, if this mission was successful, he would never have to do such foul, degrading things again. He finally would have no need for the troopers of this convoy, or these ramshackle old war machines. He would be whole, complete, indomitable!

Struggling to control his breathing, Delphi rubbed his bad leg, remembering the disastrous fight in the underground tunnel.

Soon enough, Tanner, he silently raged. Oh, so very soon, revenge will be mine. Only this time, I’m not going after you. That would be too swift, too easy. This time I’m going to destroy your only reason for staying alive….

“Hey, look!” the driver called, applying the brakes and slowing to a complete stop. “Is that the place, Chief?”

“Looks like it,” Bellany muttered, checking the map. “What do you think, sir?”

Rejoining the conversation, Delphi looked out the window. The wag was parked on top of a hillock, and down below were the sprawling remains of some predark city. Most of the structures had been leveled and remained only as square outlines in the thick carpeting of weeds and scraggly bushes. A hundred cars were parked neatly in grassy fields that had once been a busy city street. Delphi realized that the bronze statue of the town’s founder was nowhere in sight, the mall was now a scum-covered pond. The nuke damage to the town seemed minimal. Sierra Nevada College was a liberal arts college and not on anybody’s ICBM hit list. However, its graphic arts department had a nexus generation IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer used to train students for creating state-of-the-art computer games and special effects in movies. And he wanted it.

“Hmm, I’m not sure,” Delphi muttered, augmenting his vision for telescopic sight. The hundreds of assorted ruins zoomed into view and he studied them carefully.

Several of the college buildings still remained, the thick marble walls covered with moss and dense growths of wild ivy. Nevada had not been hit too hard during the war, but it had been torn to pieces by earthquakes, a volcano and the mindless rioting that soon followed skydark. Add to that the general destruction of the acid rain storms, and suddenly Delphi wasn’t at all sure that he could find the graphic arts lab anymore. It seemed that implacable time was the ultimate destroyer.

As he searched for additional landmarks, the other wags arrived to park in a ragged line alongside the lead wag. The troopers inside the vehicles were talking animatedly, more than a few of them checking over their blasters, obviously preparing for a recce.

Accessing his mental files, the cyborg compared his memory of the university town to the present-day jumble of weeds and broken sidewalks. Overlapping the two images, Delphi saw that too much had shifted over time, and was forced to sneak a peek at his palm. The nanotech monitor embedded into his flesh crackled into view for a moment, then faded away again. The replacement hand was not yet fully interfaced with his internal circuitry, but the brief scan had been enough.