Desolation Crossing

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Both Raven and Ramona laughed at that, the former so hard that she almost fell from the bunk, cursing as she caught herself in time.

“You have got to be shittin’ me, Doc, baby,” Ramona wheezed between gasps of laughter. “Think if he dared to pull it out near that one she’d damn near whip it off with her knife. Mebbe not right off, just leave him something as a reminder of what a bad boy he’d been.”

“Something about her that is real scary, though,” Raven said quietly. “Tell you, Doc, me and her over there have been together in this convoy for some time now, and we get on okay. Hellfire, everyone in here gets on okay with one another, really. That’s what Armand likes. A happy crew does good work, he says. What the sneaky fuck means is that a happy crew ain’t gonna slit his throat and run off with his jack. Anyway up, Eula comes in, and things ain’t quite the same anymore. She don’t talk none.”

“I would suppose that would make you distrust her, as you all seem to be a little on the garrulous side,” Doc murmured.

“Honey, I dunno what that word means, but it ain’t nice, I can tell,” Ramona said. “Ain’t true, either, if it means what I think. ’Cause you ain’t met Reese. She don’t say more than five words a year, and mostly that’s to tell you to fuck off.”

“Reese?”

“Big muscle fucker, traveling with the sister.” Ramona sniffed. “Lucky her…No, Reese is okay, just a little quiet. And scary. But openly. Unlike our gal Eula. She’s too damn quiet in the wrong way. It’s like she’s always brooding on something. Something to hide. She looks at you like you’re shit on her shoes, like she’s got some little list in her head where she’s adding up the good and bad.” She snapped her fingers. “I know what it’s like—it’s like when Armand adds up the jack and stock he’s got and that’s he’s got rid of, see if it balances. That’s what she’s doing. She got something on her back that’s weighing her down, and some fucker’s gonna get it big when she finds out who it is.”

Doc was concerned by that. “And you think it may be my friend?”

“We dunno, do we?” Raven muttered sleepily from the bunk. “But she sure as shit seems to know him. Even if he don’t know her. Think he does and he’s not letting on to you, Doc? No offence, like, but are you sure?”

“I have known John Barrymore for some time now,” Doc said stiffly, “and in times of emergency, the man has always been straight.” His tone then softened as he bit his lip. “No, if he does know anything about her, he is truly unaware of it. It may be a mistake on her part. There was certainly no mistaking the bemusement on his face. Our good Armorer cannot hide certain things. He is controlled, and can mask emotion in combat. But he can be caught on the quick, and this was such a time. Tell me, ladies, what do you know of this Eula?”

“’Bout as much as you, hon,” Ramona answered. “She says she comes from the east, and sure we picked her up there. But she don’t say where, or how she learned so much about blasters and shit. Don’t say much about nothing. Tell you, don’t think even Armand knows much about her. Tell you something else, though—he thinks she’s powerful medicine, and he trusts her judgment.”

“And you do not?” Doc asked, sensing that in her tone.

Ramona gave a guttural laugh. “Hon, I’d trust that bitch even less than I could throw her scrawny ass.”

Raven stirred on her bunk. “See, thing is, we ain’t really got no secrets from each other, any of us. Can’t do if you travel like we do, and for as long as we have. Secrets you’d like to have sometimes, sure, but it don’t work that way. That’s part of being a team, right? Sooner or later it comes out, or you walk. Now, you take Eula. That bitch is so tight it even pains her to piss. But no matter how hard she wants to keep it in, sooner or later it’s gonna come out. And she ain’t the type to walk if even the wildest guess comes close. And that’s what we’re kinda afraid of, right, Ramona?”

“Damn straight,” the driver replied with an emphatic nod.

Doc kept his own counsel for once. He suspected Eula’s secret was inextricably tied to the Armorer. And two taciturn people in the same wag would be oppressive to the point where the pressure would blow.

The only questions were when and how.

THE ARMORED WAG at the front of convoy was the only one to have a clear path ahead of it. Those in its wake were forever driving into a cloud of dust.

Zarir, the silent driver of the armored wag was, however, even more diligent than those who followed him. He was gripped by a paranoia that riders would come out of nowhere and attempt to outrun him. Maybe they wouldn’t even bother with that. Maybe they would just ram into him, hoping they could deflect him from the smoothest of courses, running the wag into a crevice, a ditch, or even a trap. He was a good driver. No, he was the best. But there was always someone out to take that away from you. Well, he’d decided they wouldn’t take that away from him. No. So he stayed tight-lipped, grim and silent as he concentrated on the road ahead with an intensity that made his head pound and ache. That was okay. A snort of something strong when they stopped cleared his head and kept alert for the next stretch. Sure, he hadn’t slept for eight days, but at the end of the run Armand would let him sleep for a week, maybe even more if he needed. Armand was good to him.

Armand LaGuerre didn’t give a shit. As long as Zarir drove fast and true, that was good. As long he stayed silent, it was even better. The rest of the trade crew were garrulous, and there was a time when LaGuerre welcomed that. Hell, even looked for it. And he was still cool with it as long as it was kept to the other wags. But since he’d taken Eula on board, he wanted some silence in his wag. The girl was quiet, and didn’t react well to noise, conversation or questions. Especially the latter. So the chance to get rid of Cody, a talkative bastard at the best of times, into the next wag had been more than welcome. At the girl’s request, the man Dix had replaced Cody instead of riding shotgun in the second wag. LaGuerre was confused by that. Okay, so Eula had really wanted to take the newbies aboard—in truth it had been more her idea to stop for them than his—and she was adamant that she wanted Dix to travel with them. But Cody was a tech man, not a sec fighter. Second wag was safest, but even so…

LaGuerre did not argue with Eula. He hadn’t argued with her since the moment she had joined them. She had found them a little over eighteen months earlier, searching him out in a ville called Evermore, on the eastern fringes of the central badlands. He was in a gaudy house, busy enjoying himself with three gaudies, two of whom were putting on a show while the third made use of the pleasure he was showing at their performance. She had walked in as if she owned the place, asking him if he was LaGuerre and where he was headed.

Most times, if someone did that to him, he would have blown the person’s head off. But there was something about this one—the way she completely ignored the surroundings, not from embarrassment but because she was too focused to notice. There was a kind of calm menace about her. When he asked her why him, she had replied that he was a trader, he was about to leave and she needed to get away quickly.

His first thought was that she had pissed off Baron Chandler, head of Evermore, and taking her on would lead to a firefight with the baron’s sec. She had to have sensed that because she was quick to tell him that her problem was with another ville. She had already traveled a hundred klicks, but she knew she was being followed, and she needed the cover of a convoy to hide her tracks.

It would have sounded bullshit, and dangerous at that, if he’d heard it from anyone else. But from her it was different. It was the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, the serious hardware that was draped around her in a way that wasn’t usual for anyone, let alone a young woman who looked barely old enough to handle a blaster.

Like all good traders, LaGuerre had a nose for a good deal. He may not have been the best trader, but he was better than a lot. She had that air of a rare stash about her. She was something a bit special, and could lead him to a higher level. It got his sense of greed tingling. So he agreed to take her on.

There was one other thing, too. It was on a much baser level, but all things were as one to Armand LaGuerre. It was the way she had looked at his dick when the gaudy slut took it out of her mouth.

He hadn’t had Eula’s pussy. Not yet. But it was only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, he just sat and watched. Watched the two of them sit, stand, walk around the interior of the wag, and say nothing to each other even though the very air around them crackled with tension. Eula had been insistent that Dix travel with them, and for his part the skinny guy with the glasses and hat had seemed pleased by that. LaGuerre couldn’t make him out. When he said that he didn’t know her, he seemed to be on the level. Yet the way he kept looking at her from the corner of his eye; the way the few words he said were guarded, almost to the point of being cryptic; the body language as he stiffened and pulled back every time she got close. All of that suggested that he had suspicions of where they may have met.

LaGuerre would love to know that. She had never enlarged on her initial statement to him. A ville about a hundred klicks from Evermore, going east. That could have been any number of villes. Part of the area to the east was fucked—completely uninhabited. Okay, scratch that. Maybe there were a few settlements in the contaminated area, but they weren’t anywhere he or any other trader particularly cared to go. That still left a number of small villes ruled by desperado barons. Not many traders cared to go there, either. Not much jack, not much to barter. So he didn’t know squat about any of them. If she was telling him the truth—bitch was too self-contained and sure of herself to do anything else—then it had to have been one of those.

He’d moved on quickly, and hadn’t been back that way in the year and a half since she’d joined, so there hadn’t been the chance to check out her story. But he knew one thing—the only trader to really make use of those areas had been Trader himself. The man was legend. He’d got richer than anyone, had more of a stash than anyone, done more business than anyone because he’d worked harder. Yeah, and where had it got him? Sometimes you just had to kick back a little and enjoy the fruits of your labors. LaGuerre realized he was wandering. The point of his train of thought was…Hell, what was it again? Yeah, that was it. If this guy Dix had ridden with Trader, along with the one-eyed guy, then he had to have been to some of those villes in the east. Probably the one that Eula came from, the one where she had gotten into some trouble and had to run.

So maybe Dix knew her secret. And, given that she had wanted to search those guys out, and was interested more in him than in any of the others, maybe she knew his.

That would explain why she was even quieter than usual, and he was like a mutie cat on a sun-fried wag roof.

WHILE THIS HAD BEEN going through LaGuerre’s head, Eula had been guiding J.B. through the armory and associated tech held by the convoy. She had explained to him in few words the condition of the armory when she had joined, and the steps she had taken to both improve the quality of what was there, and to add to the inventory, making them stronger. Each blaster she detailed at length, telling him things he already knew, but seeming to tell him these things for a reason.

For the life of him, J.B. could not work out what the code behind her words may be. She was demonstrating her knowledge to impress him. But why? Why would she want to impress a man she claimed to know, but who had no recollection of her?

J.B. was not a man for subterfuge. He could stay impassive when needed—indeed, there were those who would argue that it was a natural state for both himself and Jak—but an outright lie was something he found hard, even in extreme danger. Why bother? If people didn’t like the truth, then fuck ’em. Equally, he didn’t respond well to situations where people were evasive, trying to tempt you into playing their games. Life was shit, hard and way too short for games. Especially games like that.

He had tried to keep his distance from her. Tried to rack his memory and remember her. Tried to even guess what the connection could be. But there was nothing except a nagging feeling of danger deep in his gut. And a growing curiosity over the fact that she had chosen the vocation of armorer. She was impressing this upon him, as though it would somehow open the floodgates of memory.

Well, if that was what she had hoped, then it was a bad call—not even a trickle.

She was in the middle of showing him the comm tech that she had managed to get up and running after they salvaged it from some ruined ex-military wags—carefully avoiding an explanation of how they had come to be wrecked, he noted—when J.B. decided that he could take no more.

“You’re good,” he said simply, stopping her in midflow, “and I want to know where you learned all this. ’Specially so young. Took me years on the road with Trader to amass the kind of knowledge you’ve got. Had some before I joined, but it was only hitting the road and finding shit that helped it build. But you must have grown up with someone who knew this stuff.”

“I did,” she said simply.

LaGuerre’s ears pricked. Ask her more, Dix, he thought.

“So who taught you?” J.B. pushed.

Eula shook her head. “In time, John Barrymore. In time. I don’t give anything away for free. I want from you, in return.”

“What?”

“That’ll have to wait. You need to do some thinking. Think about this, John Barrymore—remember a place called Hollowstar?”

J.B.’s face stayed impassive, but his mind jolted.

Yeah. He remembered Hollowstar….

Chapter Five

The Past

It took a month—no more—for J.B. to settle in to Trader’s way of life, to stop being the new kid, and to start being just J.B. Such was his skill and knowledge, given room to grow by the ordnance that Trader’s people collected on the way, that he became more than “that new guy the armorer,” but became known as the Armorer, just as Trader was Trader. They were the definitive article—their positions used as names, spoken as though there were none other than they fit to carry such a name.

Not that it came easily. Poet knew how good the kid was from the beginning. After all, he was the one who had been sent to look at J.B., assess his skills, then fake the work to test them.

Hunnaker was hostile. She was always hostile to anything new. A loyal and trusted fighter, with a ruthless streak a mile wide, who could always be trusted in times of battle, yet she had a spiky, difficult temperament in her. She was insecure of her position in the convoy, which she prized highly. She measured herself by her standing with Trader, as the convoy was the only family she had, and despite her seeming ability to act and live independently of anyone or anything, there was a little hollow inside of her that craved the familial security of the convoy. Everything revolved around that, and when it changed, then she bristled, and lashed out.

It was a dangerous way to live, especially on a convoy where every day brought the chance for someone to buy the farm, and change was an unspoken constant. Which, perhaps, explained why there were days when all everyone wanted to do—even Trader—was stay the hell out of Hunn’s way.

And she kind of liked it that way. It gave her status in the convoy. Except that J.B. walked in and acted like that was nothing. He didn’t challenge her. That she could take, she could face down, she could do something about. No, he did something far worse—he ignored her. He acted like her moods didn’t happen, like there weren’t days that people edged around her rather than get into a fight. He just didn’t notice.

So she loathed him for some time. It became a subject of discussion among the convoy, and the subject of a book run by Poet on how long until they had a fight, and who would win. Virtually everyone put jack on it—even Trader—and it was a keenly awaited event. Given Hunn’s temperament, and the taciturn and phlegmatic new man, it was only a matter of time, and not much of that.

The fact that it never happened was, as Abe had put it, “jus’ one of the weird shit things happen around here.”

They were up north, where the temperatures drop, and any potential combat had to be undertaken with the added encumbrance of furs and padded clothing. Movement was difficult, threw off timing. Worse, it led to blasters screwing up in the extremes of temperature, which is exactly what happened to Hunn, and how she nearly got herself chilled in the cold.

It was an ambush by a bunch of desperate coldhearts who had been waiting for convoys to raid for too long. They were crazed with cold and hunger, giving them the desperation and madness to take on the convoy in what seemed to be a stupe position. Which was why, maybe, they nearly got away with it. Desperate measures sometimes brought the element of surprise that can turn a firefight. So it was that a steep, rocky pass covered in snow nearly became the graveyard that marked Trader’s passing.

There was no other way through the narrow channel. No signs of life, but still not ideal. If not man, then nature could bite hard. An avalanche could trap or bury them; maybe both. But with no other way through, it was heads down and run for the other side, keeping noise to a minimum. Anything could trigger a rock fall.

Anyone with any sense wouldn’t have started loosing off blaster fire, lobbing grens. But these desperadoes did exactly that. A hole in the track ahead of them from one gren made it impossible to proceed until they could get out and fill in the gap, which was too deep for War Wag One itself to traverse, let alone the other wags in the convoy.

They had to get out and fight, seeking whatever cover they could in the rocks and ice, climbing to where the mad bastard coldhearts were firing on them. The only break they had was that there couldn’t be too many of the opposition, as they weren’t spread along the ridge at the top of the climb.

Hunn was one of the best in situations like this. She was a good fighter, and when she was pissed off she was virtually unstoppable. And she was pissed off right now. She thought it was bad enough being this far up north, where it was cold enough to freeze her tits off; now they were being fired on by a bunch of stupe bastards who might just bury the convoy and not get what they were after. And what was the fuckin’ point of that?

As she climbed, exchanging fire at intervals, she got more and more pissed, the anger building in her until it reached the point where she could see nothing but red mist. She was cold, she was aching because the rocks were battering her through the padding and the furs every time she took evasive action, and she was convinced that she was going to have to walk out of the pass as these stupes were going to bring down the rock walls on the convoy below.

Hunn in a real fighting anger was both a good and bad thing: good because she became a chilling machine, stopping at nothing. Bad for the very same reason. She paid no heed to danger and rushed headlong into it. It made her a spearhead and a liability at the same time. So far she had always been the former, simply because she always came out on top. But one day she would be the latter because she would screw up.