There was no question of taking any of them prisoner. Not under the circumstances. Not when the success of the mission depended on keeping the baron’s approach to Ground Zero a secret. They all had to die.
A knife thrown by a scout on Jak’s right speared one of the remaining men from behind as he bent over, trying to scoop up an assault rifle. The blade penetrated the base of his skull by a good three inches, and the impact sent him flying forward, arms and belly over the lip of the cut-down barrel, headfirst into the fire. Already dead on his feet, he just hung there over the coals and burned.
Unwilling to test his arm on a moving target, a second scout dashed forward. He caught a sentry from behind and locked an arm around his chest. With a quick crossways stroke of his blade, he slashed the front of the man’s throat from ear to ear. As the sentry turned and tumbled away, falling to his knees, blood sheeted down from his neck and onto his chest.
In the meantime, the last of the sleepers made a desperate low dive around the base of the fire can, using it for cover so he could reach the M-60. Snatching hold of the machine gun’s buttstock, he lifted and pivoted the weapon to turn it on his attackers. As he did so, his bared teeth glistened in the firelight.
Jak had already switched his blade to his strong hand. His arm whipped forward in a blur and the steel star swished through the air, arcing ever so slightly as it closed on the target. With a solid
thwock
of impact, it struck the lower half of the man’s face. The blade crashed through his front teeth, shattered them top and bottom, sliced through his tongue and slammed into the back of his throat.
As the sentry let go of the machine gun’s stock, frantically trying to spit out teeth and metal, blood squirting from between his lips, a fixed blade knife caught him in the side of the neck, just below the jawline in front of his ear.
Before he could recover and maybe put up a fight, Besup and a second whiteface grabbed him by the arms and legs and in a single coordinated heave, pitched him headfirst off the edge of the roof.
Three seconds later, a muffled splat came from below.
The scouts moved quickly among the fallen, recovering their blades, cutting throats to make sure the sentries were all dead. As they were doing that, a dense, sickeningly sweet smoke began pouring out of the fire can and spreading across the rooftop. Jak reached over, pulled the dead man out of the fire and let him drop to the ground.
Besup picked the M-60 off the deck and hefted it in his hands, testing its weight and balance. “Nice blaster,” he said. “Full-auto. Heavy caliber. Way too good a trophy to leave behind.” He slung the weapon across the top of his shoulders, like a yoke. To the scouts he said, “Get those ammo belt cans. We need them, too.”
Jak and the scouts then backtracked their route out of the tower, avoiding the cluster of jump-up laser mines, this time with open eyes and the help of torches lit from the fire. After they climbed from the rat hole tunnel, when the stars were once again overhead, they extinguished and tossed away the torches. Giving the base of the building a wide berth, they closed their eyes and headed across the nukeglass toward the road.
The ancestors were again with them as they began to recce the last mile to Ground Zero. They were about halfway there, when Jak noticed a low, grinding roar. And the closer they got to the site, the louder the background noise became.
As they rounded a turn, he saw light through his closed eyelids. When he opened his eyes, ahead of them was a bowl of radiance blazed against the backdrop of the night sky. It was created by the rows of klieg lights that illuminated the slave camp. A low ridge of overturned slabs and rubble, a ridge that curved off into the distance in both directions, blocked their direct view of the site. Twinkling clouds of dust rose up through the glow, cast off by the rumbling nuke ore processor. When they peered over the ridge, Ground Zero was almost exactly as Jak remembered it—the mine entrance was located in a broad, shallow depression in the massif.
Having determined that the road was clear of hazard
right up to the perimeter of the camp, they silently withdrew, retreating down the road to await the arrival of Burning Man’s main force.
Jak, Besup and the other scouts took shelter out of sight behind a jagged, hundred-foot-tall, glass pinnacle. They hunkered down in the darkness, eyes tightly shut, surrounded by nukeday ghosts whose wails no one else could hear.
Carrying heavy packs and moving over the difficult terrain, it took Ryan and the others more than four hours to cover the eight miles to their target. It was well past midnight when they caught up to the war dogs, the other whitefaces and the advance scouts.
Above the rise in the ribbon-straight road, Ryan could see the ominous glow of Ground Zero, the broad dimple in the center of the massif, which was only a quarter mile away. And he could hear the ore processor’s roar sawing in the distance.
Jak hurried over to them out of the dark.
“Any trouble?” Ryan asked him.
The albino youth shook his head, no hesitation. “Piece cake. Road to mine clear.”
Ryan craned his neck back and looked up at the night sky.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” said a voice behind him.
Ryan turned. The dim light was kind to Burning Man’s face. In half shadow, the baron looked almost unmelted. Even if he couldn’t quite make out the man’s features, Ryan could feel the waves of intensity and excitement he was radiating. On the verge of a desperate battle, Burning Man was way-pumped.
Maybe too pumped.
J.B. gave Ryan a gentle nudge with his elbow. He, too, immediately sensed the problem and its scope. Who was going to ride herd on a superjuiced baron, when the baron was in charge of the op?
“It’ll be at least three or four hours before it starts to get light,” Burning Man continued. “Come along with me. We need to do a recce of the site, get all our ducks in a row.”
Ryan and J.B. fell in line behind the baron, Jak and Besup. They left the road and moved in a low crouch, angling toward the landscape’s prominent feature: the irregular rise that was the backside of the broad but relatively shallow sinkhole’s rim. The baron stayed on-point, leading them toward the dome of light, through the maze of shattered blocks and uptilted, fragile plates.
When they reached the barrier and paused, Burning Man reverted to his previous role in life, as a whitecoat.
“This ridge is as old as nukeday,” the former geologist told them. “It was created by the backwash of molten, but rapidly cooling thermoglass. After the initial tidal surge reached its outer limit, that wave rebounded to the center. When it surged forward again, it had less momentum and had already begun to stiffen. The second wave solidified into this ring of ridge, which has since fractured and deteriorated.”
The baron then carefully took hold of the glass and inched himself upward. Ryan and the others followed suit, peering over the ridge top and down onto Ground Zero.
Burning Man pointed to the left. “The living quarters for the she-hes, and maybe their labs, are in those black
domes,” he said. “We’ve got to figure at least some of them are occupied this time of night.”
Beyond the domes, Ryan saw the nuke ore processor. From its hopper a column of glass dust rose like thick smoke into the glare of the klieg lights. Its roar was much louder, and it was constant. A gridwork of massive storage batteries was lined up on the ground, the batteries connected to one another and the processor by thick cables.
As they watched from concealment, slaves pushed a steady flow of carts from the mine entrance to the hopper, and back. There were no cockroaches in sight, but a quartet of men with whips and blasters urged the workers onward.
“Turncoats,” Ryan said in disgust.
“Sellout, backstabbing fuckers,” J.B. agreed.
“They’re really driving those slaves hard,” the baron said. “The she-hes’ power supply must be dangerously low, or else they’re building up their resources to get ready to make another reality jump.”
“If they’re in a big hurry, they don’t have the slaves all working at once,” Ryan said, indicating the dark forms huddled in the pits in front of the mine entrance.
“Resting them in shifts, probably around the clock,” Burning Man said. “Squeeze more out of them that way.”
“Another couple of sellouts, over by the mine entrance,” J.B. said. “See the guys standing on either side of the opening, arms folded, not working. If I’m not mistaken, they both got long blasters on shoulder slings.”
“There could be a whole lot more turncoats on the
site,” Ryan said. “Down the mine shaft, mebbe in the huts.”
“They’re not our immediate concern,” Burning Man said. “Before we deal with them, that gyroplane’s got to be put out of commission.”
The sleek black aircraft sat unattended on a makeshift landing pad behind the row of domes.
“If we can’t keep that thing grounded,” the baron continued, “we don’t stand a chance in hell. Once it’s airborne and it’s got its EM shield up, it can do whatever it wants to us, whenever it wants. There’ll be no escape. With its infrared sensors, cannons and pilot-guided missiles, it can hunt us down. I’m talking to the last man, even in the pitch-dark. Once it’s up in the air, we won’t be able to make a dent in it with bullets, and we won’t be able to hit it with pipe bombs. I’m going to take a dozen warriors and half the explosives, and decommission it, opening salvo.”
“What about that water tower down there?” Ryan said. “It’s the highest point on the site. Conventional rifle or tribarrel shooting from that platform could command the whole battlefield.”
“You’re right, that’s a potential threat, too,” the baron said. “While we have a go at knocking out the gyro, Ryan, you and your sawed-off friend there can keep any tower snipers pinned down. Use that sweet, scoped, predark longblaster of yours. After the gyro’s taken care of, on the way to the mine, we’ll blow up the water tower, too.”
Burning Man seemed to be settling down. As a result, Ryan’s concern about his ability to plan and execute a successful attack started to fade.
“Besup, you will lead the second wave of the attack, pushing toward the mine entrance,” the baron went on. “But I want you to hold back until after we blow up the gyro, and after the she-hes come out of their huts and move onto the glacier. That’s your signal to attack, and to release the dogs. If we can drive all the she-hes into the mine shaft we can deal with them there. We can demolish the entrance and seal them inside. Or even better, chase ’em way down deep, and
then
blow the shaft. Put a hundred thousand tons of nukeglass between them and the surface. Once we get them down that stinking hole, we’ve got control of their power supply, the batteries, the processor, even their jump zone—which, if you look hard, you can see over there, on the far side of the water tower. That squat black box is the jump generator. No force field around it, either.”
“How can you tell that from here?” Ryan said.
“All the glass dust in the air would reveal the protective dome’s outline, even at this distance,” Burning Man said. “Since the jump zone is unprotected, we can hit that, too. I’m keeping a third wave of attack in reserve, this to sweep in after Besup and the dogs have done their work, and make a final push for the mine entrance.”
“I don’t see how we’re gonna make the she-hes back down,” J.B. said. “I mean, we’ve got surprise and superior numbers on our side, but they’ve got tribarrels and EM-shielded body armor.”
“Believe me, I know how to fight opponents in battlesuit armor,” the baron said. “In my other life, I wrote the book on it. Especially in tight places. My best advice with tribarrels is, don’t get hit in the head.”
“Speaking of that,” Ryan said, “there’re a lot of
bystanders down there. And if what you say about the slaves being worked in shifts is true, there are even more of them in the mine….”
“Nothing I can do about them,” Burning Man said. “The poor luckless bastards got captured at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Once the shooting starts and the pipe bombs start popping off, they either make a break for it across the massif, or they get whipsawed in the cross fire. No way am I going to let them be used as hostages, or as human shields. We can’t give this enemy any advantage and still hope to win.”
As the baron scooted back from the viewpoint, he said, “Besup, you’re taking the fat liar with you. Put the bastard out in front of your force and let him soak up some of that she-he firepower. And Ryan, I want White Wolf with me. Your boy’s got a hell of a throwing arm, and we’re going to need his help taking out the gyro.”
When they returned to the road, under the baron’s direction they divided the ammo and explosives and reloaded their packs. That done, Burning Man began separating his forces into three columns.
“See you on the other side, lover,” Ryan said, quickly taking Krysty in his arms. She kissed him hard and held him crushingly tight for a fraction of a second.
Pulling back and smiling, Krysty said, “On the other side.”
The other companions’ farewells were just as brief and matter-of-fact. A hug, a handshake, a slap on the back. None of them felt the need to dwell on what might happen next. Considering who and what they were going up against, the downsides were all too obvious.
Besup took charge of the dogs and half the main force, about forty-five men, which included Doc.
Eleven warriors and Jak made up the baron’s demolition team. Krysty and Mildred, along with the remainder of the force, prepared to sweep in to complete the rout and form the pursuit down the mine shaft.
After Ryan and J.B. had said their goodbyes and set off across the road toward the glow of Ground Zero, the one-eyed warrior turned to his old friend and asked, “You mind spotting for me this time?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s go find us a hide and something to shoot.”
J
AK STOOD
in the middle of road, hefting twelve inches of pipe bomb in his hand. The crude device was heavy and compact, capped at both ends. He reckoned it would windmill through the air nicely.
Burning Man was making his way down the row of warriors, pairing them up in two-man fire teams. They were all burdened with packs full of explosives; he was burdened with his trademark flamethrower, and wore his NOMEX hood and gauntlets.
As the mutilated man stepped up to him, Jak got a strong whiff of the weapon’s leaking fuel. The baron didn’t seem at all concerned that a random spark might make him the epicenter of a thirty-foot fireball.
“White Wolf,” he said, “you and Washaskie are a team. He’ll light the fuses, you do the tossing.”
Washaskie was one of the four whitefaces Jak had blind-run the road with. Stoutly built with short legs, the perpetual delight on his face hadn’t wavered even while he was slitting a sentry’s throat.
Washaskie accepted the clutch of wooden matches and the hand-twisted cheroot the baron handed him.
After Burning Man finished the pairings and duty assignments, he addressed them all. “When we get within arm range of the gyro,” he said, “I want you to set out your explosives, line ’em up on the glass. As I explained, one of you will light all the fuses, the other will do all the throwing. You’ve got plenty of extra pipe bombs in your packs so don’t worry about the misses. Mistakes don’t matter as long as you manage to get the explosives at least forty or fifty yards downrange. And as a last reminder, make sure you both duck after you chuck. These puppies fling shrap a long way.”
Burning Man then led Jak and the rest of his force overland, circling wide to the west to come upon the gyro and its landing pad from behind. It was a distance of more than a half mile over brutal terrain, but their elevation and the intervening arc of ridge concealed them from the compound’s view. The continual noise from the ore processor covered the cracking and crunching sounds as they broke trail on the massif’s brittle surface.
Right away, Jak tried closing his eyes and “seeing” the landscape with his mind, but this time it didn’t work. The light cast from Ground Zero played on his eyelids and ruined his concentration. Though faint, the wash of reflection off the billowing dust clouds made it possible for he and the warriors to see where they were going with eyes open.
Except for the heavy weight of the pack on his back, Jak found it fairly easy going. That all changed when they reached their destination. Burning Man made them
fan out at intervals of thirty or forty feet before they started over the ridge. Keeping low, careful not to slash his hands on the razor-edged rubble, Jak crested the rise in the crust and looked onto the brilliantly floodlit depression. One hundred fifty yards away, down the gradual slope, near the center of the concavity, was their target—a slender, black airship thirty feet long, one huge, main propeller mounted amidships on the cabin roof, one secondary propeller aft on the fuselage. Twin weapons pods hung like massive testes under the front of the chassis. The pods bristled with cannon barrels and missile tips. The airship had no windows that Jak could see. No doors, either. Its surface was as smooth as polished black stone.
The domes where the she-hes were supposed to be sleeping stood to the left another fifty yards. Between the ridge and their target, the nukeglass was mottled in shades of greenish gray, with harsh glare reflecting off the places where the surface had recently spawled off. Elsewhere, it was marred by cracks, pits, gullys of various widths and depths. To reach their attack position, the warriors had to crawl to it on their bellies, under the bright flare of the kliegs.
Jak’s first thought was, who was watching them? As he advanced, inching along on elbows and knees, scanning the landscape downrange and downslope, the answer came to him.
Nobody.
The she-hes had set up their base eight miles from any sign of life, in the middle of a rad-poisoned hellhole. They had superior weapons and armor. They had the cloak of a moonless night. Complacency had set in.
Either that, or maybe they didn’t have enough personnel to keep a proper watch around the clock.
Spread out across the nukeglass, the warriors descended in pairs from one point of concealment to the next, a zigzag route that followed radiating gullys to shallow pits, and avoided the patches of glare where they could be silhouetted. It was impossible to keep from being cut in the process. The fractures in the surface were like serrated blades that sliced through clothing and skin.
Jak’s knees and elbows were bleeding badly by the time he and Washaskie reached the flat bottom of Ground Zero and Burning Man hand-signaled a halt to their advance. They were about fifty yards from the gyro. Jak figured he could throw a pipe bomb that far with some accuracy, but only from a standing position, where he could really rear back and chuck it.