Chapter Two

Trader craned his head up into the access tube of one of the rooftop machine-gun blisters he was having installed on his mobile command post, also known as War Wag One. “Get your butt down out of there, J.B.,” he growled around the unlit stub of a black cheroot he clenched in a corner of his mouth. “Let me have a look-see at what you’ve done.”

Reluctantly John Barrymore Dix, Trader’s chief weapon smith, stepped down the metal ladder that connected the newly welded turret to the main deck. J.B. pushed his steel-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose, leaving a glistening smear of black grease on its tip. “Not ready to test fire,” he said.

“All the same, I want to see how it’s coming,” Trader said. He smoothed back his hair, then climbed into the blister’s access tube. The short, cylindrical passage was a tight fit for a man as powerfully built as he was. However, once he got his head and shoulders inside the blister, it was much roomier.

The ongoing design problem, and the subject of much discussion, if not debate, between Trader and his armorer had been how to give the twin MG posts maximum fields of fire and still protect the gunners from incoming bullets. Per Trader’s instructions, J.B. had lengthened the arc of the six-inch-high firing slit until it now exposed close to three hundred degrees of potential killzone. He had fashioned the blister’s exterior hull out of double-thickness, tempered armor plate, which would withstand standard armor-piercing slugs, gren blasts, light cannon shells—everything but rounds jacketed with spent uranium, which Trader knew were about as rare in Deathlands as a virgin bride.

The blister’s armament was a 75-round, drum-fed RPK light machine gun. J.B. had cut down its bipod legs and ball-bearing-mounted them on a well-greased track that ran around the inside of the blister’s shell.

On paper, the RPKs maximum rate of automatic fire was 660 rounds per minute. But in the real world, the MG couldn’t be operated for any length of time at more than eighty shots a minute because of the heat buildup. There was no way to change a superheated barrel under combat conditions and thereby counter the cook-off effect, which caused chambered rounds to ignite and made the weapon fire full-auto even when the trigger wasn’t pressed.

In the blister application that Trader had in mind, the low sustainable rate of fire was actually a good thing. Because the turret was ninety-five percent enclosed, ventilation inside it was dicey, at best. With a higher cyclic rate, the gunner would need an oxygen mask to keep from suffocating on the accumulated gun smoke. And because of the smoke, half the time he wouldn’t be able to see what the hell he was shooting at.

Trader snuggled into the RPKs buttstock and swept the point of aim from extreme right to extreme left, and back. He was pleased with the way the addition of ball bearings had smoothed out the tracking. His fire zone went from directly in front of the MCP, all along one flank, to the rear. On the other side of the wag, this turret’s twin did the same thing, only in mirror image. Coupled with the assault-rifle firing slots along the port and starboard hulls, the 20mm cannons stationed up front and the rocket pods to the rear, War Wag One could produce a rolling, 360-degree circle of death.

He edged up on his toes and, untucking the RPKs butt plate from his shoulder, raised its pistol grip, tipping the weapon’s barrel as far down as the setup would permit it to go. When the buttstock grazed the blister’s rooftop ventilation holes, he swept the light MG through its arc of fire.

J.B. stuck his head up from below. When he saw what Trader was doing, he frowned and said, “That’s one of the bugs I’m still working on.”

“The way you’ve got this set up,” Trader said, “the gunner can’t hit anything closer than twenty-five feet from the side of the wag. That won’t do. Needs to be at least fifteen feet, but ten would be even better.”

“I’m going to move the bipod joint back toward the magazine some more,” the Armorer told him. “That way I can shift the MG forward and get the barrel farther out of the firing slit. Another three or four inches should change the down angle enough to do the job.”

Trader grunted in agreement, then followed J.B. down the ladder, back to the main deck. As he used a rag to wipe the gun grease from his hands, he said, “How’s the self-destruct system coming?”

“Got the whole convoy mined, just like you wanted,” J.B. told him. “There are C-4 blow packs inside the ammo magazines of the war wags and wrapped around the fuel tanks of the transports. On the war wags, I rigged an external cutoff switch. It’s concealed under a casing on the chassis in the front of the retractable cat tracks. On the transports, the external switch is hidden alongside the undercarriage skid plates. The cutoff switch disarms the booby traps and gives us safe access to the wags door locks.”

“Inside all the wags, we have two separate detonation systems. One that arms the boobies for explosion five minutes after the triggers are tripped, which lets intruders get inside and make themselves, at home. The second self-destruct system operates on a preset time cycle. The switch inside the wag has to be manually reset before the time runs out. That way, if the wag is unmanned for longer than, say four hours, or if the switch isn’t reset, ka-boom!”

“Good work,” Trader said. He had designed the whole self-destruct system in his head, then explained it to J.B., whose job it was to make it so. Trader had to do things by word of mouth, as he’d never bothered to learn how to read and write.

Of all the improvements to his convoy of assault and transport vehicles, it might seem that the mining of the vehicles would be the most difficult for his wag crews to swallow. It was one thing to be sitting on a war wag’s ammo magazines or in a transport loaded with cans of .308 Military Ball; it was another to be riding on armed booby traps, day in and day out for months. But if there had been any grumbling among the troops, it had been done in private, out of Trader’s earshot. While they sometimes found it hard to take his obsession with security and countermeasures, the crew couldn’t deny that attention to detail was one of the things that made him the very best at what he did. Trader rarely bothered to explain the reasons for the specific changes he ordered. If you ran with Trader, you trusted him with your life; if you didn’t trust him, you packed up your belongings and beat feet.

In the case of the boobies, the crew didn’t need an explanation. Their purpose was obvious: to dissuade potential ambushers. Trader’s long term goal was to make his wags virtually untouchable; the self-destruct systems were a step in that direction. Even if road pirates or double-crossing barons chilled every person in his convoy, a feat that would cost the opposing side dearly in lives, the boobies would make sure they’d get no profit from a hijacking; their only reward would be more death. Trader knew that when word of his mining the fleet of wags got out, it wouldn’t stop all comers—some of the mutated crazies loose in his world didn’t care a rad-blast about dying—but it would stop a goodly number of the smartest ones. Plus, there was always the satisfaction of getting some payback for a chilled wag crew.

Trader started up the long, narrow corridor that led to the driver’s compartment. The MCP had been changed a lot since he and Marsh Folsom had first found it so long ago. He could still recall the shock and wonder when they stumbled onto the collapsed cavern. They had been on the run, looking for a place to hide from a big pack of cannies who were out for their blood. Marsh, who had a nose for such things, had seen the telltale cleft in the slumped-out forest slope. A bit of rapid digging on their part had uncovered the entrance to a concrete-lined tunnel, and beyond it, stretching back into the hillside was a vast blast-and radiation-proof cavern packed with all types of vehicles.

At that glorious moment, Marsh had cried “Golconda!” And he was right. In a world of pedestrians and pack animals, this indeed was a treasure mine. The first treasure they looked upon was the MCP. Engineered to control complex field operations for battalions of light armor and infantry, it had been a huge mother.

But it was even bigger now.

Trader had been refining his land flagship from day one. Much of the original onboard equipment was useless because of missing technical documentation; without it, comp-systems taken for granted a hundred years before were unfathomable mysteries. Trader had ripped out all the comps to make room for more vital gear.

War Wag One had also come equipped with electrically fired, Gatling-type multibarrel cannons fore and aft. They sucked huge amounts of dry-cell power, their batteries and drive units took up valuable space and their complicated electrical systems were vulnerable to breakdown. Experience had taught Trader that simpler was better.

So he’d had the Gatlings pulled. In the front of the wag, he’d dropped in a pair of EX-29 cannons, which could be mechanically fired at a rate of 250 to 550 rounds per minute and accepted either API or HEI ammo. Another plus, the EX-29s could be repaired on the road, in the small, mobile machine shop that J.B. had put together. The twin 20mm cannons were mounted on either side of the MCP’s bow, in fixed, nonswiveling positions, and were fired from a single button on the driver console. That eliminated the need to haul around another 180 pounds of gunner and meant War Wag One could carry that much more weight in ammo instead.

There was no sophisticated optical targeting system for the driver. He had a TLAR—That Looks About Right-sight etched into the ob slit in front of him. The barrels were laid so as to cross-fire at seventy-five yards. The driver simply steered the pneumatically shock-mounted cannons on target and punched the red button on the dash. Trader had never intended them to be precise weapons; they were often fired when the MCP was rolling and under attack. And in that situation, the idea was to spread confusion and terror among the attackers, or to blast a path through a hijacker barricade. The high-ex or antipersonnel rounds always scattered enemies in a hurry. If the driver wanted to nail another wag, all he or she had to do was stop and crank the TLAR on the target.

Though the EX-29s had proved themselves many times, Trader was always on the lookout for something better. It was his habit to change things every so often, trying this or that, discarding ideas when the results didn’t satisfy him. Over the years, he had worked hard to make sure no other wag in Deathlands was the MCP’s equal in size, speed, mobility and firepower.

As Trader approached the half-open bulkhead door, he heard sounds of a loud argument in progress. The shouting stopped the second he stepped over the threshold into the driver’s compartment. Two of the three men inside were standing practically nose to nose; both bore the long-healed marks of near-mortal combat.

The tall, muscular, dark-haired young man had only one eye, the right one, and it was startlingly blue. His left eyebrow, which was partially concealed by a black patch that masked the empty socket, was split by a wicked blade scar that trailed off down his cheek like a waxy teardrop. Though Ryan had ridden with Trader for more than a year now, how he had come to lose his eye still remained a mystery. Unless pasts interfered with on-the-job performance, they meant nothing to Trader; he was more interested in the here and now, in what a man or woman could do for him today. Ryan was quite simply the most skilled hand-to-hand fighter Trader had ever seen: impetuous, daring, capable of blinding speed, both of hand and foot, and battlewise way beyond his twenty-odd years.

The man who faced Ryan in the driver’s compartment was only an inch or two shorter, but he was ten years older, his grizzled, prematurely gray hair shaved to a stubble, his bulging, bare biceps encircled with matching tattoos: twisted bands of thorns dripping drops of bright blood. He called himself Poet, and it was by that name that Trader had known him for the past five years. As far as Trader could tell, the man wrote no verse, read no verse and never had; his name referred to his ability on the battlefield: precise, ingenious, artfully devastating. Trader had been present when Poet had received his disfiguring wound. During a prolonged altercation over the price of a shipment of canned goods, a heavy-caliber longblaster slug had clipped him in the left forearm, leaving behind a large, angry lump of scar near the elbow, and an arm that he couldn’t completely straighten.

Poet was Trader’s strategic expert, a war captain seasoned in many campaigns and skirmishes. He had the kind of analytical mind that could see all the options and present them for Trader to pick from. Ryan had a similar ability, but was much less conservative in his suggestions and much more impatient with indirect methods. Poet had learned the hard way, by losing comrades in battle, that skirting a fight could sometimes be the best option. Ryan never wanted to back down. Both men were arrogant and competitive. The friction between them had been ongoing since the day Ryan arrived, and it had gotten much worse as the one-eyed man had quickly risen to the rank of war lieutenant. Normally Trader liked to encourage competition between crew members because he figured he got more out of them that way. In this case, however, he could see that things were close to getting out of control.

Trader’s strict no-fist, no-knife fight policy was all that had kept Ryan and Poet from coming to blows. To disobey that order meant you were out on your butt, no explanations. Trader had laid down the rule because good people were hard to find and sometimes impossible to replace. He knew a fight between his top two advisers would probably end with the loss of them both. Ryan was almost impossible to turn off, once he got his blood up.

Abe, the thin mustached guy standing beside the two much larger men, seemed uncustomarily frazzled and glum.

“What’s going on here?” Trader asked.

“Minor disagreement,” Poet said.

“Major disagreement over something minor,” Ryan corrected him.

Trader glanced at Abe, who just shook his head. “Well, the disagreement is over,” he told the two men. “Ryan, go check on the loading of the ammo crates.”

“Gladly,” he said, turning immediately for the bulkhead door.

“Poet, give J.B. a hand in the starboard turret.”

The older man hesitated a second, giving his adversary time to make a clean exit.

After they had both left the compartment, Trader said, “Abe, what the fuck’s going on?”

“Trouble,” the gunner replied. “Some of the crew don’t want no part of Virtue Lake. Want to give the place a wide berth. Others want to close the deal way outside of town, someplace secure.”

“And?”

The man drew himself up to his full height and looked Trader in the eye. “Since you’re asking, nobody’s happy about your trading top-quality predark military blasters and ammo to a stinking pile of nukeshit like Baron Zeal. Figure someday we’ll end up looking down the wrong ends of all them shiny-new bores.”

“What do you figure?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“You want to stay behind, Abe?”

“Didn’t say that,” he protested.

Trader didn’t ask the gunner for names; he didn’t want to know who was doing the grousing. He could guess that Poet was against driving straight into Virtue Lake. He could guess Ryan was for it in a big way. Poet wasn’t a coward, by any means. But because he had seen so many comrades take the last train west, he was cautious. Prudent. He knew that nobody, no matter how skilled in combat, had a charmed life. Because he had ridden for years with many current members of the crew, Poet was concerned for their safety.

Ryan, on the other hand, was relatively new, hadn’t formed any deep friendships, and his only responsibility was to himself. In regard to danger, the younger man went one-eighty to Poet, feeling that everybody in the crew ought to be willing to take the same all-out, crazy-ass risk that he was.

“Pass the word,” Trader said. “Get everybody together outside. I need to tell them all something.”

Abe nodded. “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said, then hurried out the door.

A short time later, Trader climbed up on the roof of the MCP and looked over the troops assembled in the cavern, all of whom stared up at him expectantly. Abe, Poet and Ryan were right in front. Of the seventy or so people present, forty-six had been handpicked by Trader to man the convoy. Drivers. Gunners. Mechanics. This convoy was going to be one of the biggest he’d organized to date. He was taking seven transport wags, each with crews of three, and four war wags, each with crews of five, plus the MCP, which carried ten people.

The rest of the men and women standing around were mostly mechanics and laborers. Their job was to cobble together working wags from the buried predark fleet. Because the vehicles had been stored for more than a century, their drive systems had to be completely disassembled, cleaned, regreased and reassembled before they could be started up. Spare parts and replacement wags for his convoys had never been a problem.

Fuel—that was the problem.

Before the nukecaust, the cavern had had its own gasoline reservoir, meant to supply the entire fleet for decades. But the earthquake that had partially collapsed its roof had also breached the fuel bladder. Most of it had leaked away into the subsoil beneath the cavern long before he and Marsh had discovered the place. As a result, Trader was always looking for new, untapped sources of gasoline, but he hadn’t found any close to the cavern site. He usually ended up dealing with a middleman, like Baron Lundquist Zeal.

Trader raised his arms for quiet, then said, “Anybody that’s got cold feet about this run can stay here. Won’t think the worst of you, and you got my word on that. Of course, if anybody backs out, they’ll miss their share of the profits for the whole circuit.”

There was stone silence.

Abe’s eyes widened, and his jaw dropped.

Trader had been setting up this trip for more than six months, taking orders from villes along the proposed route, and he’d be moving goods looted from stockpiles and goods traded from villes all through the East. He expected to come back after three months with a tidy profit, which was always divided, by shares, among those who took the risk and went along. Anybody staying behind was going to pay a big-time penalty.

“Anybody got any questions,” Trader said, “now’s the time to ask them.”

A few people gave him hard looks; most didn’t look at him at all. They looked at one another, or at the ground.

If there was extra tension in his crew, Trader knew it was largely his fault. He’d been pushing them extra hard to get the convoy prepared for the delivery at Virtue Lake.Prepared , in the case of the madman Lundquist Zeal, meant adding the booby traps and other tricks. The ville was notorious as a den of chillers and thieves. Yet Trader was still willing to do business there because Zeal had agreed to pay top price for the load of new blasters in pure gold, which he had collected in exchange for his gasoline. Gold was good because it was easily portable and everybody wanted it. Many villes had their own local jack, but gold was still a standard. In the case of Virtue Lake and its baron, big risk equaled big profit The risk was why he was taking all four of his operational war wags to defend the convoy.

Trader broke the heavy silence. “Anybody who’s supposed to go that wants out,” he said, “step over by the far wall right now.” While he waited for the first person to move, he gnawed on the soggy stub end of his cheroot.

Nobody moved.

Nobody backed out.

“Well, if that’s it,” he said, “then break time’s over. Let’s get crackin’. I want to be rollin’ in eighteen hours.”