Chapter Twenty-Four

Doc Tanner was no more prepared for the thunderous avalanche of rock than Baron Zeal or Vernel. It came at their wag from both sides at once, with a deafening roar. Caught between the competing torrents of stone, the war wag was savaged left and right by violent, twisting shocks. Its helpless passengers were hurled about the cabin, shaken like pebbles in a tin can.

And the dust.

It swept in through the open air vents, through the blasterports and ob slits, a choking, swirling mass so thick that after a few seconds it blocked out the red interior lights. No one saw the lights fade out. There was no way a person could keep his eyes open in the stinging maelstrom of grit.

Doc choked through the long tail of his shirt, which he used to cover his nose and mouth, certain he was going to suffocate.

Then the driver fumbled for and found a switch on the dash panel. The wag’s fans came on, blowing the dust out the exhaust vents.

Slowly the air became breathable again, and the red interior lights glimmered in the thinning haze.

“Inbreds be coming right sharpish now,” Vernel gasped. His snake tattoos were masked with a dusting of yellow powder, as were his eyelids, ears and the top of his shaved head. As was everything else in the driver’s compartment.

Zeal jerked down the intercom mike and shouted into it. “Chill them! Chill all the fuckers!” As he did so, the shoulders of his fur robe gave off great puffs of trapped dust.

Doc, despite the fact that he was in the selfsame predicament as the baron, took great pleasure in seeing the man so thoroughly discomfited. Not only fearful, but panicked.

The driver didn’t share Doc’s delight as he quickly became the agitated baron’s number one target. “Move this thing!” Zeal ordered.

To the red-haired man’s credit, he tried.

Engine bellowing, gears grinding, he shifted the transmission forward, then into reverse. But there were big rocks ahead. A wall of them jammed up against the backside of War Wag One, and similarly, there was a wall behind, jammed up against the front end of the wag to the rear. The driver had nowhere to go, even with the Cat tracks lowered, their steel plates churning metamorphic rock to flour. And when he advanced a few inches it allowed the rocks to settle in more firmly behind him, which meant that when he tried to go in reverse, or forward, again, he couldn’t budge the vehicle at all.

Anticipating that some extra incentive might be necessary, Zeal had ripped off his right high heel, and held it like a hammer by the outsole and throat. As he reared his arm back to strike the driver in the back of the head with the wickedly pointed heel, a horrendous volume of autofire pounded them, the hailstorm to end all.

Zeal, as well as Doc, had to clap his palms over his ears to dull the pain.

It wasn’t just a display, Doc realized at once. It was a distraction, something to occupy those inside the wag while the savages closed in for the kill. He wondered if they would remember him from so many weeks ago, if they would show him the same respect and deference. If they didn’t recognize him, he had no proof of who he was or where he’d been, had no proof that he was, in fact, the favored one of the Mist. Would they drag him out with the others, line him up against the cliff wall and machine-gun him to death? Doc didn’t know, but from recent experience he was fairly certain that he couldn’t count on the kindness of strangers.

After a bit, there was a lull in the shooting, perhaps so the machine gunners could reload or let their barrels cool down. The baron was immediately back on the wag-to-wag intercom. “Trader!” he shouted into the mike. “Trader, damn you! Answer me!”

TRADER FLINCHED at the shrill racket blaring at him from the intercom speaker. The mike was hanging just overhead, but he didn’t reach for it. What was the point? Even though he had Zeal right where he wanted him, even though he was in a position to wring even more concessions from the man, what good were they? The bastard would never honor them, anyway.

For a sharp businessman like Trader, it was a sad state of affairs.

“I take it you want out of here before our friends outside start jumping up and down on the roof?” he said to Shabazz.

His beard, hair and clothing covered in dust, the other trader nodded.

“Then, hang on to something,” Trader told him as he revved the engines. “I’ll show you what this beauty can do.”

Shifting into reverse with the Cat tracks, he rammed into the rocks behind to allow the stones in front to slip down from in front of the barrels of the EX-29 cannons. When he was sure they had dropped below the level of the muzzles, he started yelling at the top of his lungs. Hearing him, Sam and J.B. joined in. Then Trader reached for the red button with his thumb.

Shabazz, seeing this, clamped his hands over his ears and started yelling, too.

The flurry of 20 mm HE rounds exploded at extreme close range, shattering the boulders heaped in front of them.

The yelling was to equalize the pressure in their heads, otherwise they might have been deafened by the concussions.

When the cordite smoke and rock dust had cleared, Trader had a little more room to work. All he was trying to do was to free up the wedge-shaped, ramming front bumper, and get the wheels angled up the incline of the boulder field. He figured that the Cat tracks would push the nose up and over the obstacles.

Ahead of them, the great ditch that had almost swallowed up the MCP was now mostly filled in with fallen boulders. Accelerating, Trader crashed into them, driving them apart with the front bumper. After rearing back and ramming several more times, the way was clear enough for him to proceed.

Trader ran the engines to redline, then popped the clutch. The Cat tracks snarled on the loose stones, the rear of War Wag One fishtailing as the steel-clad belts fought to get a grip. The huge vehicle lurched forward, then it was past the rockfall. The smaller trap lay across the road directly in front of them. Trader hit the ditches fast. There was a hard bump as the front wheels dropped, then Cat tracks dug in behind, pushing the wag onward, driving the wheels up and over the ditch’s lip.

He slowed after a hundred feet or so of rapid climb and pulled down the rearviewing periscope. Behind them, the clansmen on the cliff edges on both sides of the road were rolling individual boulders down onto the three smaller wags as their drivers maneuvered forward and back, trying to wedge their way clear of the rockfall. He could also see the machine-gun positions, raining fire down on his vehicles from the lip of the cliff. He knew he had to take care of their attackers before he could do anything about Shabazz and Zeal. It was either that or the bastards would have his war wags.

“Sam,” Trader said over his shoulder, “you grab the wheel. J.B. and me are going aft to get on the rockets.”

Shabazz’s crewman pointed his snubnose revolver at Trader’s head as he got up from the driver’s chair.

“Your call, Shabazz,” Trader said, holding up his hands. “But your boys can’t run my weapons systems. I think we’ve seen the proof of that. Now, we can head War Wag One uphill and get away from these guardians for the time being, but we’ve still got to drive back down the same stretch of road to get the hell out of this pass. If you let us, me and J.B. can wipe them out, here and now.”

Shabazz waved his crewman off. “Go with them,” he said to the man. “If they screw up, blast them dead.”

Trader turned to Sam and said, “Keep watch in the rear periscope. When things are lined up, we’ll give you a shout on the intercom.”

Sam goosed the engines and continued slowly up the grade.

Trader and J.B., hobbled by ankle chains, and trailed by Shabazz’s gunman, hurried down the corridor to the rear of the MCP. They had to keep a hand on the wall to keep from being tripped up and falling. Not because of the wag’s speed or the hairpin turns. The other members of Shabazz’s crew had been firing at will out the blasterports. The dimmies hadn’t bothered to put the spent casing bags on the M-16s’ ejector ports. There were empty 5.56 mm hulls rolling all over the place. It was like trying to walk on a floor covered in marbles.

Walking carefully, they headed for the middle of the stern for the ladder leading up into another miniblister. When they arrived, they saw a pair of legs halfway up the rungs. Somebody was inside the blister. Trader and J.B. grabbed the pirate’s ankles and jerked him bodily off the ladder.

The man landed hard on his butt on the deck. He hopped up, at first surprised, then combative.

“Keep your hands off my weapons,” J.B. warned him with a finger in the face.

“The damned things don’t work, anyway,” the man countered.

“Out of the road,” Trader ordered, using a brawny forearm to shove the irate Shabazz crewman to one side. He mounted the ladder as J.B. set to work on a control panel enclosed in a large wallbox. The 2.75-inch HEAP rockets were electrically fired. There was a priming sequence that armed each pod for rocket flight, and enabled the warheads for contact explosion. It amounted to a fail-safe. While J.B. flipped the rows of switches below, Trader stuck his head into the armor-plate blister, which contained the targeting system for the rockets.

This blister was swivel-mounted, and its rotation was driven by an electric motor. Its side-to-side movement coincided with the tracking of the multiple rocket pods on the MCP’s rear roof. The gunner sat on a small folding chair that moved with the blister. A yoke in front of the ob slit controlled the up-and-down angle of the rocket pods. Set in the center of the ob slit was a converted binocular artillery sight, calibrated to the flight of the rockets. It moved with the blister, side to side, and up and down with the yoke.

Trader climbed into the operator’s seat and juked the twin sets of rocket pods up and down, to the limits of their range. The controls felt nice and tight. He was glad to see that everything worked. Apparently nothing had been crushed or damaged by the rockfall. Perhaps because the roof was too high up for the bouncing boulders to have reached. The arming indicator lights on the panel beside the yoke were all dark.

As Sam climbed the grade, Trader watched the terrain through the artillery sights. As they reached a steeper part of the roadway, it brought the cliff edges below, and their attack positions, into the sight picture. Trader thumbed the intercom transmit button overhead. “Hold it, Sam!” he said. “Hold it right there!”

“Still got no juice,” he called down to J.B.

“Now you do.”

When Trader looked in front of him, all the panel lights werelit. Party time. He chewed at his cigar butt as he brought the targeting array around to bracket the cliff-edge machine-gun nests. They had themselves a hardsite, all right, reinforced with rock. He smiled around the cheroot. A bit close to the edge of the cliff, though.

“Fire in the hole,” he said into the intercom as he toggled the switches next to the lights on his panel. Then he flipped back the housing that protected the trigger for the right cluster of rocket pods. He hit the red knob with the ball of his fist.

The MCP shuddered, and Trader caught a blast of withering heat right through the skin of the blister. The birds were away. He tracked their flight through the artillery binoculars. Smoke trails twisted in the sunlight. At impact, they made a string of bright orange flashes all along the undercut shelf of rock. The cliff edge held for a second, then it just slipped away, taking with it machine-gun nests, clansmen and thousands of more tons of rock.

The fresh load of granite crashed to the side of the road, barely missing the third war wag in line. Its cloud of dust swept over all the wags, momentarily obscuring them from view.

The guardians on the opposite cliff realized their vulnerability and started to run back from the cliff verge, trying to make it to the cover of the evergreen trees higher up on the mountainside, which made it a bit more challenging for Trader. He armed, aimed and fired individual rockets from his left pod, which caught the pass defenders in a firestorm of hot shrapnel. Trader left a string of smoking craters along the distant tree line.

He could hear Shabazz’s crew, having witnessed the demonstration, yelling and cheering on the deck below. He had saved their butts, at least for the time being. Through the binoculars, he saw the other wags had finally freed themselves and were starting up the grade to join them.

As Trader climbed down from the blister, Shabazz was there to greet him.

“Nice work, Trader,” he said. “You really put the wood to them inbreds. And now you get your well deserved reward.”

At blasterpoint, Trader, Sam and J.B. were forced up the corridor and into one of War Wag One’s windowless storage lockers. There was just enough room inside for the three of them and their chains.

Shabazz slammed the steel door, plunging them into darkness. Trader heard the lock bolt click shut.

Through the door, a familiar laughing voice said, “Sleep tight, now.”