Doc stood near the pack of war dogs, waiting out of sight of the compound with the rest of the force for Besup to give the signal to attack.
From over the ridge came the booms and flashes of the pipe bombs detonating and the shrill screams of shrap and those caught in its spray, sounds that set the huge animals to leaping, snarling, snapping, struggling against their restraints. With extreme difficulty their handlers kept them from joining the fray.
Madness, Doc thought as he looked around him.
The grinning whitefaces.
The century-old weaponry.
The dogs of war.
The horrendous migration to a hostile, alien battlefield.
This was absolute madness.
The Oxford-trained part of his mind rejected what he knew was about to unfold as unspeakable. But his uneducable lizard brain, like the brains of the ravening canines, had registered the scent of blood in the air, the scent of blood and the sounds of pain, and that had triggered his memory and an avalanche of instinctive drives.
If war and battle were to some men like a drug, then close-quarters combat was the drug of all drugs. To be
lost in the frenzy, in the fury, was to forget everything else, to realize the transcendence of slaughter.
And I am not immune to its call, Doc thought, staring at the fingers of his own right hand, which trembled with excitement.
He drew out his sword and let the cane-scabbard fall to the ground. Shifting the long blade to his left hand, he pulled the LeMat from its hand-tooled, Mexican holster.
At the front of the formation, near the backside of the ridge, Besup let out a shrill war cry. And everyone and everything broke into a dead run.
Caught up in the whooping, shouting mob, Doc rushed through the gap in the ridge that had been cut for the road, onto the down tilting glass plate of Ground Zero, into the glare of blinding lights. And chaos.
The warriors sprinting before him immediately fanned out, to make themselves more difficult targets. Those leading the formation opened fire with longblasters, shooting from the hip as they ran. The raucous clatter of one-sided, massed blasterfire filled the shallow bowl.
Who or what they were shooting at, Doc couldn’t immediately see. He kept running though, as fast as he could, both to keep up with those ahead of him and to keep from being trampled by those coming from behind. He held the LeMat in his right fist, and in his left, the sword raised point-first toward the night sky.
Under other circumstances, against other adversaries, with his assortment of nineteenth century weapons, Doc might have felt as useful as a vestigial tail. But
against EM-shielded battle armor, his Civil War-era black-powder pistol and tempered Toledo steel was no less ineffective than the late twentieth century rifles of the Bannock-Shoshone.
Doc held his fire, saving the LeMat’s lead balls for targets he knew they could damage—the turncoats.
Over the bobbing tops of heads, in the gaps between the whitefaces’ backs, Doc saw a quartet of battlesuited she-hes barreling out of the row of gleaming black huts on the left, and more of the cockroaches popped out of the mine entrance, on the far side of the sleeping pits, directly ahead.
The turncoats guarding the slaves stood their ground and returned fire at the attackers.
Bullets whined through the throng, and in front of Doc, whitefaces here and there dropped to the glass, struck multiple times in midstride, their misted blood hanging pink in the air, clinging to his face and hair as he hurtled through it.
Two hundred yards of all-out sprint under fire brought Besup’s force to the edge of the pitted area where the slaves took their rest. Those too paralyzed by fear to flee the onslaught were caught in a withering, conventional cross fire. Any hope of their turning on their masters and using superior numbers to overwhelm them was baseless.
The rising stench of gore and plundered bowels, and the sense that their release was near set the pack of war dogs to howling. Half-dragging their handlers along, they snapped their jaws at the air.
From beside the black huts, emerald-green beams sliced into the formation’s flank. Even as more whitefaces
began to fall, legless, headless, the ground rocked under Doc’s boots and the left side of his face was struck by a blast of heat that made him flinch. Pipe-bomb explosions, one after another, lifted the four she-hes off their feet and hurled them into the air like black puppets. Evidently, although their EM shields could turn away multiple, small projectiles, they were no match for such a powerful force. They couldn’t keep boots on the ground.
The she-hes scrambled to their feet, only to be blown off them again. And again. And again. They were tossed through the flash and smoke, and sent sprawling onto the glass.
The merciless barrage of Burning Man’s pipe bombs, momentarily at least, took the she-hes and their tribarrels out of the battle and drove them inexorably toward the mine entrance.
Besup led his warriors into the ranks of huddled slaves, many of them badly wounded or dead. The initial wave of whitefaces swept past a trio of cook pots.
But as Doc approached that same position, he caught sight of three men cowering behind the large boiling caldrons. Evidence of what was stewing in the pots lay scattered all around. Piles of bloody long bones, skulls, discarded clothing, piles of entrails and half-dismembered, skinned-out, human carcasses. The three hiding in back of the pots were bloody-faced and bloody-handed; it wasn’t their blood.
As soon as the death camp butchers and chefs realized they’d been spotted, they sprang forth and charged at Doc brandishing a meat cleaver and stir paddles, respectively. The old man stopped and, bracing himself
from behind with a sword-point dug into the glass, raised the LeMat. He blew them off their feet, one by one, with single balls to center mass.
Amid the caustic gouts of smoke and glittering sparks of burning powder, the cooks crashed onto their backs.
Then the dogs, with a great scrabbling of claws on glass, raced past him, jostling and buffeting him as they went. The animals held back their bloodlust until they shot past the front of the whiteface charge, and then on cue, they attacked everyone in their path. Slaves, turncoats, she-hes, they were all the enemy.
And the enemy had to be torn into as small pieces as was possible.
In a frenzy, running thirty yards ahead of their masters, they launched themselves at the back of a retreating she-he. With their sheer weight, and coming at the prey from every conceivable angle, they negated the effect of the EM shield. Either that, Doc reasoned, or at a critical moment its power supply failed.
Again, it became less a question of deflecting incoming ordnance and more about keeping armored boot soles planted on the ground. Bowled over and onto her back, the cockroach had the jaws of hundred-pound dogs firmly attached to feet, legs, arms, hands and helmet. Shaking and twisting their heads, the animals tried to get purchase on the slick, segmented armor with the points of their fangs, to crack or penetrate it. They pulled in all directions at once, using their back legs, fighting one another. The she-he could get no traction, couldn’t regain her feet. In the battlesuit, flat on her back, she
was skidded around on the nukeglass like an overturned turtle.
Three fellow cockroaches rushed to her aid, firing their laser rifles from the hip as they bolted from the mine entrance. They weren’t worried about hitting their downed comrade. The laser beams couldn’t penetrate the battlesuit’s EM shield.
For everyone and everything else, the sweep of their claw-footed, triple-muzzles created a whipsaw of destruction. To avoid it, Doc threw himself belly down on the glass. Before him, the very air burst into throbbing, green flame.
Six of the war dogs literally fell to pieces, their severed limbs and torsos dropping to the glass. Squealing, the dogs that still could—the half dogs—crawled away on their forelegs, the stumps of their bisected hindquarters smoking. The surviving animals scattered from their intended prey, clearing a path for the rescuing she-hes. When the dogs’ weight came off her, the fallen cockroach jumped to her feet, joined the others, and they began a hasty retreat toward the mine.
If the leading edge of the warriors hadn’t been so close to the four she-hes, Doc knew that Burning Man could have put his pipe bombs to good use. As it was, he had to hold fire or annihilate his own soldiers. As the she-hes backed away, they took full advantage of the situation.
The bloodlessly severed parts of men hit the ground, mixing with the severed parts of their dogs. Limbs. Torsos. Heads. Grievous wounds steaming in the cold night air.
As Doc pushed up from the massif, not ten yards away
Besup was caught by intersecting, vibrating lines of emerald green. The beams passed right through his body, like his flesh and bone was no more substantial than smoke, and without uttering a sound, he collapsed.
When both his knees impacted the ground, the result of the laser strike, the angled cut from the right side of his neck down to his right hip became evident. That part of his body simply slid off the rest of him and flopped down onto the glass. One look told Doc that Besup had lost the arm, his collarbone, ribs, one lung, probably a kidney, half his intestines and most of the right hip joint.
The wound should have been immediately fatal, but cruelly it wasn’t because the laser weapon cauterized what it cut away.
Besup remained upright on his knees only for a few seconds. Before Doc could reach him, he collapsed onto his good side on the glass. He lay there, violently shivering, his eyes bugging out of his head, tears streaming down the side of his painted face, but he still had the power of speech.
And the power of will.
He called out to his brother whitefaces, shouting over the raging blasterfire and the clustered explosions, his voice cracking from the intensity of his pain as he screamed, “Chill me! Chill me now!”
But his brethren did nothing.
Those that had seen him fall were too shocked to move, too horrified by his wounds to act. Or they were caught up in following the dog pack, so they didn’t even realize what had happened to their leader.
When none of the nearby warriors rushed forward to
do the right and the proper thing, Doc cocked back the LeMat’s hammer and said, “May God have mercy….”
Then he shot Besup in the forehead, point-blank.
With bullets skipping off the glass around him, Jak dropped to a knee beside Washaskie, turning sideways to the incoming, making himself as small a target as possible. The fallen warrior choked and sputtered blood from deep in his throat. It ran in crimson rivulets down his white-painted cheeks. He was drowning in his own gore, his body trembling with the final, frantic spasms of life.
The albino teen raised his Colt Python and returned fire on the water tower. The enemy perched there was no longer taking careful aim, but instead, spraying blasterfire, trying desperately to turn back the assault.
The hundred yards to the water tower was well beyond the accurate range of Jak’s handblaster. And he couldn’t even adjust for the trajectory because he couldn’t see where his rounds were landing. Smoke from the pipe-bomb explosions drifted between him and his target, intermittently obscuring it from view. However, none of that stopped him from emptying his weapon at the enemy. Even a near miss could make the shooter hesitate and cease fire.
But the shooter didn’t seem to notice the six .357 rounds Jak sent barreling his way. As Burning Man and the whitefaces advanced on the row of black huts, the hail of fire from the tower continued unabated.
Jak swung open the cylinder and dumped the smoking empties onto the glass, then reloaded.
As he snapped the cylinder closed and once again took aim, the incoming blasterfire stopped. Over the Python’s sights he got a glimpse of a dark shadow tumbling from the platform. He watched the body take a hard landing on the ground beneath. It lay in a heap and didn’t move.
Somebody had nailed the turncoat bastard good.
Whoever had made the shot, it had come far too late to help Washaskie. The whitefaced warrior had stopped breathing. His bloodshot eyes stared fixedly up at the night sky. Jak was fumbling amid the blood, trying to find a pulse in the man’s neck when a shock wave slammed his back with numbing force.
Squinting into the swirling blast of hot wind and flying debris, he saw that two of the cockroach huts had been hit. They looked like broken black eggshells. Shattered arcs of plasteel fluttered down through the smoke, back to earth—and that wasn’t all that fluttered down. The she-hes who had managed to bail out of the huts before the explosion had been lifted into the air by it. Tribarrels cartwheeling out of their grasp, they crashed onto their shiny black backs, their momentum sending them skidding across the nukeglass. When they stopped sliding, they were slow getting up, as if they had been stunned by the concussion or the impact with the ground, despite the high-tech armor.
So much for cockroach invincibility, Jak thought. Then he flinched as multiple explosions ripped into one of the surviving huts.
A she-he, late to the party, was trying to exit the hut
when the pipe bombs detonated. The blasts hurled the cockroach in a reverse somersault, and heels over head it disappeared into the smoke and the hut’s wreckage.
Burning Man turned his ruined face to the sky and let out a blood-curdling yell. Then he pulled the protective goggles down over his eyes, and with a whoosh ignited the nozzle of his flamethrower.
When the baron broke ranks and charged the hut, Jak abandoned the warrior dead on the glass and ran after him.
But not too closely.
The pistol-grip nozzle of the igniter dribbled fuel, and left a trail of flaming puddles behind.
As Jak and Burning Man neared the dome, something stirred amid the boiling smoke. A figure in black rose to full height and stumbled over the ruptured wall with tribarrel laser rifle in hand.
The baron was fifty feet away. Still running full-tilt, he let fly with the flamethrower.
Not a weapon of precision, to be sure.
A plume of fire roared from the nozzle, shot a good forty feet and fell, splattering upon the she-he and the surrounding wreckage. Caught in a flaming waterfall, the cockroach swung up the laser rifle. A beam of brilliant green light blazed from the triple muzzles, but missed the target, cutting a bubbling, jagged gash in the nukeglass two yards to the baron’s right.
Burning Man didn’t let up for a second. The nozzle’s trigger pinned, he continued the assault, following his target as it tried to juke clear of raining hell.
Unable to escape, a fireball on two legs, the cockroach dropped the tribarrel, staggered and collapsed.
Even after the she-he fell to the glass, flapping arms and flopping from side to side, the baron continued to roast it. The smoke that poured off the burning fuel was black and caustic.
Burning Man stood over the thrashing form, pouring on the flame, his disfigured face alight in its dancing glow.
“Cook them in their shells,” the baron told Jak out of the functional side of his mouth, never taking his eyes off the target. “Turns out the battlesuit’s EM shield doesn’t stop the penetration of sustained high temperatures. Something we learned the hard way on my Earth trying to put down the Consumer Rebellion.”
In a matter of seconds the heat of the burning fuel had melted the surface of the glass. And the supine she-he sank full length into the murky gray puddle that had been created. When the baron finally shut off the spray of pressurized gasoline, the pool of fire burned itself out, and molten glass quickly rehardened around the suit of armor, and its unmoving and apparently dead occupant.
Burning Man waved Jak and the other pipe bombers onward, after the retreating she-hes, toward the water tower.
The clatter of blasterfire from behind made the albino teen glance over his right shoulder. Besup’s force had already covered half the distance to the mine, weapons blazing.
The turncoats at the mine entrance returned fire.
Caught in the middle were the slaves. The ones who panicked and left the relative protection of the sleeping pits were blown off their feet in short order, struck by
bullets coming from both directions. Their bodies and blood littered the glass.
Jak didn’t hear the signal for the release of the war dogs, but suddenly they were on the loose, racing through and past the mob of running whitefaces as if they were standing still. In a blur of snapping jaws and twisting bodies, they tore into slaves and turncoats alike.
And the sleeping pits were no protection from their fangs.
A huge animal held a man pinned to the glass on his back. While the unlucky bastard kicked and thrashed, the dog buried its maw in the front of his neck, shaking its head, its back muscles rippling.
The head popped up with a mouthful of throat and Adam’s apple—a bloody rag sprouting long white stems of tendon clenched between its jaws. Then with a toss of that same bony head, the animal repositioned the awful gobbet in its maw and gulped it down.
Faces, necks, chests dripping with gore—and still unsated—the dogs attacked everything that wasn’t whitefaced, everything that breathed. A handful of them, working in a pack, pulled down a she-he. Even though some of the dogs fell to the lasers of the cockroach’s rescuers, it didn’t break the spell that held them. The surviving dogs and their packmates circled around and attacked from different angles, hounding the she-hes in retreat.
Chill-crazed devils.
They weren’t the only ones.
“Hit ’em, hit ’em!” Burning Man shouted at his warriors, pointing with his flamethrower nozzle at the quar
tet of rapidly backstepping cockroaches. “Blow ’em all to hell!”
The warriors looked at him in disbelief.
“Quick, before they’re out of range!”
When they didn’t move at once to obey the command, the baron thrust a hand deep into Jak’s backpack, searching for a pipe bomb of his own to chuck. The albino youth twisted in the pack’s straps, and with his left hand caught and held the NOMEX-gauntleted forearm. For a split second, in the middle of the battle’s mayhem, it was a standoff, strength against main strength.
White Wolf wouldn’t yield.
“Too close,” Jak snarled up at him, his ruby-red eyes unblinking as he wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the free end of the capped length of pipe. “Blow to shit Besup, warriors and companions.”
Burning Man jerked his hand free, leaving the bomb in Jak’s grasp, but the fury in the mobile half of his face remained.
The baron turned his wrath on another target.
“Take down the fucking tower!” he shouted, waving his men after him with his flamethrower’s dripping nozzle. “Do it, now!”
To get in throwing distance of the tower they had to run another twenty yards under fire from the mine entrance. When a warrior who had sprinted ahead of Burning Man buckled and dropped in a heap, the baron paused long enough to bend down and snatch the loaded backpack from his shoulders.
The spray of bullets took a heavy toll on the teams of lighters and throwers. By the time they were in range
of the target, half the men had been lost, left sprawled behind on the glass.
One lighter with glowing cheroot did the job for three throwers.
Jak shoved the fuse end of his bomb down at the grinning whiteface. Three arms, three bombs. The kneeling warrior held the fuses together, and when the tip of his cheroot had them all sputtering, Jak and the others turned and heaved.
The pipe bombs landed short and skittered on the glass, rolling between the legs of the structure. A second passed, and then tremendous, nearly simultaneous explosions lit up and rocked the underside of the holding tank.
Two of its three legs were blown off. The third held for a moment more, the latticework of steel screaming as it slowly bent under a weight it wasn’t designed to bear. The tower began to topple over, falling faster and faster. When the huge tank crashed to earth on its side, the top burst open. Its contents swooshed over the glass in a three-foot-high wave, washing the whitefaces, dogs and slaves closest to it off their feet.
By the time the rush of water reached the far side of the sleeping pits, it was stained pink with blood.