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“If anything moves, anything at all, take no chances,” Ryan ordered gruffly. “Just spend the brass and save your ass.”
The others nodded their agreement. The companions did not have an official leader, but they usually followed the lead of the big one-eyed man, as he was right nine times out of ten.
In the feeble yellow beam, they could see that this was another garage. Bigger, but not much different than the other one—tools on the Peg-Board, more chains, another grease pit. From the size of the equipment and tools, this garage was clearly designed to handle military wags, 4x4 trucks, armored personnel carriers and such. But that was not what riveted their attention. There were more sec hunter droids. Dozens upon dozens of them.
The army of machines was scattered across the floor, extending far beyond the feeble glow of the flashlight. Loose wires and burned circuit boards lay everywhere, the piles of smashed wreckage reaching over a yard high in some spots, the bent and twisted metal reflecting the yellow beam like a golden treasure. Dried puddles of hydraulic fluid dotted the graveyard, as if the machines had been savaged by wolves. But the droids were not alone.
Still defiantly standing over the field of destruction were a couple of robotic spiders. At the sight, Ryan almost instinctively fired, then realized it wasn’t necessary. The flickering butane light had simply given them the momentary illusion of life. These droids would never harm anybody ever again.
Most of the spiders were reduced to only three or four legs, instead of the usual eight, and every one had its guts ripped out, the computerized workings dangling loosely like metallic intestines. Even the dreaded belly-mounted lasers drooped impotently, the slim barrels bent or hammered flat.
The companions had encountered the spiders before and aside from a single belly-mounted weapon, the machines had no other offensive capabilities. They were one-hit wonders, as Mildred liked to say—unlike the sec hunter droids, which seemed to be made out of weapons.
“Droids fighting droids,” Ryan muttered uneasily, testing the words as if they were rotting floorboards to see if they would hold his weight. “Must have been a nukestorm of a fight.” The warrior tried to reconstruct the battle in his mind. There seemed to have been pockets of resistance, as if the machines were holding positions to guard something, or somebody, in their midst.
“Looks like draw,” Jak snorted, easing down the hammer of his Colt. There was nothing dangerous here anymore. Only ghosts of the past.
“Most assuredly, my young friend, a genuine Pyrrhic victory,” Doc agreed, holstering the LeMat. “Although I would theorize that our earlier, ahem, guest, was in fact the sole survivor of this internecine conflict.”
“And it broke through the wall to attack us the moment it heard voices,” J.B. said slowly, using the shotgun to tilt back his fedora. “Yeah, that makes sense, in a droid sort of way.”
Mildred shook her head in disbelief, her beaded plaits clacking. “It stayed on guard, alone, in a black room, for a hundred years.”
“Just droid,” Jak replied, dismissing the matter.
“Wonder what they were fighting over,” Ryan said cagily. “Could be something useful.” The companions were low on food, almost out of water and on foot. Almost anything would be helpful at this point. The only thing in their favor was that the group did have plenty of ammo for once. But that was dwindling fast.
“Probably just wanted control of the base,” J.B. said with a shrug. “Who can figure out the logic of a droid?”
“Actually, I think the answer is over there,” Krysty said in a deceptively soft voice. She was looking into the far darkness, her long red hair flexing wildly.
Swinging the flashlight in that direction, Mildred revealed a cluster of Hummers parked in a protective circle around something really big that was covered with a sheet of canvas. The Hummers were carrying M-60 machine guns, and were literally torn to pieces from laser fire. Two of them had obviously caught fire and burned to the floor. Even worse, the white bones of human skeletons were strewed about the wags, many of them missing arms or heads. Rusty longblasters gleamed dully in the pale light, and spent brass was everywhere. These had clearly not been innocent bystanders, but participants in the battle. A few pieces of their aged uniforms were visible among the burned boots, torn body armor and cracked helmets. The troopers seemed to be from every branch of the armed services: army, navy, air force and marines. Only their patent leather belts seemed completely unaffected by the long passage of time.
“A pickup squad,” Doc said, resting a hand on the silver lion’s head of his ebony walking stick. “Forced recruits taken from whoever was handy when the convoy was formed.”
“What think is?” Jak asked suspiciously.
“In a predark convoy? Could be anything,” Mildred replied with a sigh. “Top-secret documents, high-ranking politicians, all sorts of useless things.”
“Or it could be a convoy of supplies for the Ohio redoubt,” Krysty said in subdued excitement. “Thousands of MRE food packs, tons of live brass, med kits…”
“Boot polish, toothpaste, laundry detergent,” Mildred continued unabated. “Uniform insignia, letterhead stationery…”
“Only one way to find out,” Krysty countered.
“Agreed. Watch for traps,” Ryan said, kicking the dome of a sec hunter droid out of the way with his combat boot as he headed for the vehicles. From long experience, he knew that some folks died hard, clutching a primed gren in their hand in a desperate hope of taking out their killers. Death kept their fingers on the arming lever, but a careless boot could knock that loose and chill the lot of them faster than a live droid.
Staying sharp, the companions watched the shadows for any suspicious movements. Unfortunately the blue flame of the butane lighters made everything seem alive in motion.
Reaching into his jacket, Jak pulled out his only flare. Thumping the end on a raised knee, the top sputtered and a sizzling dagger of flame formed, the brilliant white light banishing most of the gloom. Holding the flare high to avoid the reeking clouds of bitter smoke, Jak took the lead with Ryan and J.B. on his flanks.
Moving easily through the assorted destruction, the companions watched where they stepped, wary of the jagged metal sticking up from the wreckage like thorny brambles. Now they could see that some of the spiders had been equipped with needlers, the bodies of the sec hunter droids riddled to pieces from the superfast 1 mm fléchettes. They found the weapon cut in two by a buzzsaw, the spinning blade buried deep in the sleek machine. Pity. Sometimes those were found in working condition.
“How’s the arm?” J.B. asked, glancing at Mildred.
“Just a flesh wound, nothing serious,” the physician replied, hefting the ZKR. “When we get the chance, I’ll bandage it. I can still shoot just fine.”
“Sure, sure.” The wiry man heard the words, but looked at her hard to see if they were true. Noticing his concern, Mildred gave a game smile and bumped him with a hip. J.B. smiled in return, and they walked alongside each other until reaching the Hummers.
The military wags were wrecks, tires flat, windshields shattered, the chassis deeply scored by the lasers, the engines hammered into crumpled wads of metal.
Sidling past the aced transports, Ryan used the barrel of the Steyr to carefully lift the canvas sheet to take a gander underneath. At first he scowled, then grabbed the material and hauled it down in a single motion.
A cloud of dust rose from the canvas, obscuring whatever it had covered, but the salt breeze from the other garage thinned that out quickly, and the companions found themselves looking at a titanic wag of a type they had never seen before.
More than twenty feet long, and about half that wide, the colossal machine was clearly a transport of some kind, with eight tires that stood an easy six feet high. The angular chassis was composed of a smooth armor painted a dull tan, and the symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps was painted on the side. Large windows ringed the passenger section, each one equipped with a blasterport. Strangest of all, there were large hydraulic lifters set on each side attached to a sort of hinged fork; each of the tines was a foot wide and ended in sharp tips.
“Holy mackerel, that’s one of those urban combat vehicles!” Mildred gasped in astonishment, reaching out to touch the machine as if it were about to vanish in a cloud of fairy dust. “I saw a TV report on them just before I went in for my surgery!”
The others knew the rest of that story. The predark physician had gone under the knife for a simple operation, but there had been serious complications, and the attending physicians had had no choice but to cryogenically freeze Mildred in a desperate attempt to save her life. A hundred years later, Ryan and the companions freed Mildred from her icy prison, and she had been with them ever since. Her illness was mysteriously in remission, but she lived in growing fear that one day it would return to finish the job started so very long ago.
“I’d heard that the UCV program was only in the testing phase,” Mildred continued, walking around the massive wag. On the side was a brass plaque that read, Mark II. “This must be the next model!”
“Looks like tank, without gun,” Jak said, neither impressed nor disappointed.
“That’s pretty damn close.” Mildred smiled. “Looks like these things could literally drive through a brick building without slowing down. Aside from not having a cannon, this is a tank, it even has the same size motors, Allision transmission, everything!”
“Why no blaster?” the teen asked quizzically.
“Money, probably,” Mildred said.
“Those windows some sort of Plexiglas?” Ryan queried.
“Lexan plastic, tough as cast iron, and it looks like the blasterports are arranged so that you can actually see what you’re shooting at, unlike a LAV-25, T-80 or Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”
“So there was no need to expose yourself to enemy blasters to fight back,” J.B. said, stroking his jaw. “Pretty sweet. Those blades in front for stabbing folks or carrying supplies like a forklift?”
“Oh no, the program said they were for digging up buried land mines. And see the bottom? The armor is shaped to deflect the force of the blast outward, instead of taking it flat. Even the tires could take a 40 mm gren without going flat.”
“Madam, please,” Doc said skeptically. “Are we also to believe that it can fly to the moon on gossamer wings?”
“No, honestly,” Mildred continued. “This thing has got so much reinforced armor, packed on top of armor, that most of the wag is engine and fuel tanks. It only holds a crew of eight.”
“Eight?” Krysty asked, craning her neck to try to see inside. But the windows were a good six feet off the floor. “This thing should hold thirty troopers easy.”
“Nope, only eight. See for yourself!” Reaching out, Mildred tried a door handle, but it was locked solid. Damn!
“Let me try,” J.B. said, passing Doc the flare and pulling out some tools. A few minutes later the Armorer had to admit defeat. None of the armored doors could be picked or forced open. The military vehicles did not have mechanical locks, but alphanumeric keypads hidden under sliding steel plates, very similar to the ones the companions used to gain entry into a redoubt. There were millions of possible combinations, and it would take them years to try every one and any attempt to rig a short circuit or to hack the lock would probably trip a self-defense charge and weld the doors closed forever. On a whim, he tried the access code to enter a redoubt, but nothing happened.
“Forget it. This baby is sealed tighter than a crab’s ass at a bean-eating contest,” J.B. reported, tucking away his equipment.
“Pity,” Doc said. “It would have been nice to ride to the next redoubt in comfort.”
“Really think still function?” Jak asked incredulously. The companions sometimes found working predark vehicles stored inside a redoubt, but those were sealed deep underground, far from the rads, acid rain and thieving coldhearts.
“Probably not,” Ryan started, but then changed his mind. The canvas sheet that had been covering the vehicle was filled with holes from blasterfire, needlers and the laser weapons of the droids. Yet the wag didn’t have a scratch, and shone as if freshly polished. Could it be self-repairing like a redoubt? Fireblast, what a find that would be!
“Then again, it never hurts to do a recce,” Ryan said, shouldering the Steyr. Going over to the nearest Hummer, the Deathlands warrior climbed on top of the tilted wreck and found that he was now high enough to see directly into the urban combat vehicle.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered, scowling.
“Trouble?” Jak asked, a pale hand going to his blaster.
“Come see for yourself!”
In short order, the others soon joined the big man on top of the aced Hummer. The flare threw strange shadows inside the UCV, but they could still see that there were no bodies or skeletons inside the vehicle, no mounds of supplies or crates of weapons. However, lying nestled between the back row of jumpseats were three large white containers, the exposed control panels twinkling with colored lights, alive with power.
“Cryo units,” Mildred whispered, clutching her med kit. So this was what the droids had battled over, ownership of the cryogenic units! They had to contain people from her own time, fellow scientists, or even the technicians who had helped build the redoubts!
“John, we must get inside and rescue them!” she said excitedly.
“Don’t see why, they’re sure not in any danger,” J.B. stated callously, adjusting his glasses. “However, I can clearly see U.S. Army backpacks tucked under the front seats, and those always contain MRE packs, spare ammo, medical supplies, lots of good stuff.”
“Food…” Jak said, putting a wealth of emotion into the single word.
“Not to mention the fact that we have some serious mutie territory between us and the next redoubt,” Ryan added, feeling his own stomach rumble at the notion of eating. “Sure be nice to have some steel around us for a change.”
“Indubitably, sir!” Doc said, inhaling as if to say more when the flare sputtered and died.
In the wan glow of Mildred’s old flashlight, the companions dug out some spare candles and got them working. Outside, the storm continued to rage, but the sounds were softened and less threatening this deep in the base.
“Okay, any ideas on how to get inside the wag?” Ryan asked pointedly, tucking away his butane lighter.
“Well,” Krysty said slowly, her hair flexing thoughtfully. “Mebbe we can use the droids to get inside.”
“They busted to drek!” Jak stated. “How use?”
The redhead smiled and started walking. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Chapter Three
Weakly, the dull red sun shone down upon the frozen landscape of western Pennsylvania, the tainted light reflecting off the blanket of snow covering the ground to almost blinding levels.
Tall mountains rose in the far distance, the jagged peaks lost in listless clouds of toxic chems and radioactive isotopes. Softly, a low breeze whispered across the arctic landscape, rustling the needles of the pine trees and kicking up some flakes that swirled around the U.S. Navy battleship lying on its side on top of the mesa. Icicles hung off the long barrels of the cannons, the decks thickly coated with frost, and bird nests festooned what little rigging remained. Inside the bridge, several corpses lay in a pile jammed against one corner of the sideways room; nearly every bone visible was cracked into a jigsaw puzzle. The complex bank of controls was dark and lifeless, only the gauges for the nuclear power plant buried in the hold still registered any activity. The massive navy powerplant was still dutifully generating electricity for a crew, machines and engines no longer in working condition.
Caught in an offshore nuclear blast, the crew had perished instantly as the huge vessel was sent hurtling through the sky to finally crash into the western woods, leaving the vessel lying in a crude patch of bedrock.
A low rumble shook the forest, disturbing the serene tranquility like a stone dropped into a lake. The sleeping birds were roused, conies popped their heads into view, elk raised their antlers high, and something stirred in one of the lifeboats of the great ship. A human eye was pressed to a hole in the canvas covering the sideways boat, and it glared with hostile intent.
Just then, throwing out a wide contrail of black smoke and loose snow, a convoy of armored war wags thundered over the horizon.
The flanking vehicles were modified Mack trucks, the bodies made of overlapping sheets of iron, steel, aluminum, tin, whatever could be scavenged in the ruins of Deathlands. A dozen blasters jutted from blasterports, and each vehicle was topped with a pneumatic catapult, a brace of .308 machine guns and edged with coils of barbed wire. They were war wags, death machines, armed escorts.
However, they looked like toys compared to the massive lead vehicle. It was longer than an express train engine, and equipped with a dozen oversize tires, the burnished metal hubcaps edged with razor-sharp spikes to keep people and muties away from the vulnerable rubber. The angular chassis was smooth steel, scored, scraped and dented from countless fights, but never penetrated.
The sides of the rolling fortress bristled with the long vented barrels of .50-caliber machine guns, along with the stubby barrels of 40 mm grenade launchers. The curved roof of the military wag was studded with rows of spikes, and festooned with multiple coils of concertina wire. At the front was a fat cylinder of unknown function, the end capped with an insulated lid held in place by hydraulic lifters. At the rear of the machine was the more conventional metal box of a U.S. Army rocket launcher, the honeycomb of tubes full of deadly warbirds, the louvered rear vents deeply scorched by chemical fire. Claymore mines ringed the entire chassis, along with halogen spotlights and loudspeakers.
A sturdy cage of welded iron bars covered the front of the Herculean wag like the barbican of a medieval castle, the gridwork edged with more concertina wire. Behind the protective barrier was a wide sheet of Plexiglas. There were several deep gouges in the window, along with a score of small-caliber bullets and arrowheads deeply embedded into the resilient material like flies in amber. Behind the windshield, the interior lights were turned off, effectively making the window a one-way mirror. The Plexiglas reflected the moonlit snow and trees, and it was impossible to see who, or what, was in control of the horribly beweaponed behemoth.
On top of each vehicle was a flexible pole crested with the white flag of peace adorned with a large letter S with two vertical lines running through it, the universal symbol of a trader. Although, nobody knew the origin of the ancient symbol these days.
At the sight, a scream of rage came from the lifeboat, and the insane hermit living there scrambled from his filthy nest of human scalps to scamper like a monkey across the vertical deck to reach a depth-charge catapult. He checked the homemade charges—made from the massive stock of fulminating guncotton in the ship’s armory—then hastily spun a small wheel, setting into motion a complex series of gears, and the catapult began to smoothly rotate.
“Mine! All mine!” he screamed, his eyes wild, the unkempt lengths of greasy hair matted in his own filth. “Nobody can cross Thunder Valley! Nobody!”
The crazy wrinklie was dressed in a bearskin, held closed with toggles of carved bones, and around his throat was a grotesque necklace of dried ears: norm, animal and mutie.
Checking the angle and direction through a built-in telescope, the cackling hermit tracked the approaching trio of vehicles invading his private domain.
“Just a little bit more, fools…” he whispered in excitement. “Come on, just a little more…yes!”
Yanking in the lanyard, he fired the catapult. With a dull thud, the device sent a depth charge arching high into the crisp moonlight, and then down it hurtled straight to the convoy of wags.
Instantly, the vehicles became covered with stuttering flames as dozens of rapidfires cut loose, filling the air with hot lead. Then the M-60 started to chug, and the Fifties spoke in short burst.
Riddled to pieces, the depth charge exploded in midair, the blast shaking the entire valley and knocking snow off the pine trees.
“No!” the hermit screamed, clawing gouges in both cheeks with his ragged fingernails. “No, this ain’t happen! Ain’t!”
Going to the catapult, he quickly reset the machine and fired again, but the results were the same, and by now the convoy was dangerously close to the dead battleship, the headlights starting to catch details of the hull and deck.
Once more a depth charge flew, and this time it was destroyed so close to the battleship that the hot wind of the explosion buffeted the hermit and shrapnel tinkled on the metal deck.
Shrieking insanely, the hermit abandoned the launcher and raced to another lifeboat, one that he rarely entered. Ripping aside the protective canvas sheet, he unearthed a bulky Vulcan minigun, the deadly tribarrel rapidfire covered with animal hides as protection from the evening chill. Throwing switches and pressing buttons, he fed the machine power, and the triple-barrels swung up smoothly, responding to fingertip pressure. The hermit then climbed into the sideways seat he had carved from human bones, and engaged the last belt of 40 mm shells into the superblaster.
“Gonna get aced now!” he screamed, flecks of white foam dotting his chapped lips. “Thunder Valley belongs to me! Do you hear that? It’s mine, mine-mine-mine!”
“Yes…” The word floated up from the loudspeakers of the lead war wag, rolling across the snowy fields like the moan of a ghost. “We finally do hear you, and now know exactly where you are.” There was a pause. “Goodbye.”
A scintillating ray of starkly unimaginable power lanced out from the top of the lead war wag. It hit the frosty deck, instantly vaporizing the snow and ice to the sound of a million windows cracking. The steel warped, buckled and then exploded into steaming plasma, throwing out white-hot gobbets of molten steel.
The entire battleship groaned from the uneven heat expansion. The hermit screamed in terror as the laser moved along the vessel, igniting the ancient rigging, setting fire to the lifeboats, detonating the depth charges before it swept across him, the massive stores of 40 mm shells all cooking off at once.
The predark ship bucked like a wounded animal, pieces of wreckage forming a geyser over the shaking trees. Something inside the ship ignited and secondary explosions began hammering the craft from within, tearing off chunks of deck and stairwells in wild profusion. Streamers of flame lanced out in every direction, then the main ammunition stores detonated and the battleship vanished in a silent explosion of white light.
Seconds later, hearing returned to the men and women in the convoy and the concussion arrived, brutally rattling the vehicles. Blasters fired indiscriminately, dishes broke in the galley, a toilet surged, windows cracked and a man cried out as a swinging door slammed him in the face. Loose ammo spilled dangerously across the trembling floorboards, a spray of electrical sparks erupted from a bank of comps, the radar screen winked out, a missile launched from the aft pod all by itself.
“Haul ass!” a man commanded into a hand mike, his voice repeating in every vehicle. “Get the frag out of here!”
