Outlanders 23 far empire, p.1
Outlanders 23 Far Empire, page 1
Prologue
Imperial Guard Corporal McCloy raised the visor of his helmet and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. He adjusted a knurled knob on the binoculars to compensate for the fast-fading light. The glaring yellow orb of the sun had already dropped halfway below the horizon, while the other half was draped by a thick stratum of fleecy clouds.
Squinting through the eyepieces, McCloy slowly swept the ruby-coated lenses of the binoculars from left to right. The image enhancers presented a sharp image of the undulating plain. There was nothing to see but a vast expanse of coarse-grained, red-hued sand. He saw small depressions and prints made by snakes, thorny devils, dingoes, lizards and goannas, but nothing else. He bit back a curse, all too aware of his superior officer standing beside him.
"I swear I saw something moving out there, sir." McCloy lowered the binoculars and gave Lieutenant Yan a deferential smile.
Yan didn't return it. He was nearly half a head shorter than McCloy, and his features, masked by the smoke-tinted visor of his black helmet, were Asiatic. Although the two men were very different in height and build, they both wore high black boots, ebony leggings and tailored tunics of a satiny fabric. Emblazoned on the left sleeve was a red, thick-walled pyramid enclosing three elongated but reversed triangles. Small disks topped each one, lending them a resemblance to round-hilted daggers. Both men had slender SIG-AMT autorifles slung over their shoulders.
"Don't get nervous," Yan said flatly. "There's nothing out there but vermin. And they don't come close because of the construction."
McCloy didn't need reminding. From deep within the triangular slash of the cave opening behind him, he heard the clank of metal, the whining buzz of power tools and the steady pounding of hammers. Faintly, he could also hear the obscenities uttered by a garrison of soldiers forced to act as a construction crew.
Above Yan and McCloy a massive dome of rust-red rock shouldered the sky. The formation was gargantuan, almost as mind-staggeringly immense as the Xian pyramid in China, which had been the corporal's post for three months. For the past two weeks McCloy's station had been at the base of the monolith of stone no huge that he could see only a small portion of its vast proportions.
He still didn't know why he and twenty other men had been reassigned from Xian to the Australian outback, the ass end of nowhere, but he assumed it was the will of the woman known as the Imperial Mother.
McCloy had glimpsed her only a time or two within the labyrinth of caves and tunnels, as she inspected the work being done. She was the kind of woman he noticed—tall, very shapely and always poised. Her hair was very dark, her glance direct and appraising, like a commander viewing a new recruit for the first time.
But McCloy wasn't part of her staff. She was always in the company of a pair of Baronial Guardsmen, whom overdeveloped physiques were accentuated by the neat white uniform jackets they invariably wore. McCloy had heard of the Baronial Guardsmen, but never before seen one, much less two.
He was fresh to the forces of the imperator, a recent transplant from the barony of Thulia's Magistrate Division. His low scores at the academy had left him with two miserable alternatives - a clerk, or permanent sentry duty, marching around in the heavy polycarbonate black armor. Since he detested paperwork marginally more than the armor, he chose the sentry duty.
Fortunately, he had pulled guard duty only once in Thuliaville before he was ordered to trade in the hated black body armor for the much more comfortable black uniform of the Imperator.
Feeling uncomfortable in the company of Lieutenant Yan, McCloy put the binoculars to his eyes again. He had seen a flicker of motion out there in the sand, behind the tangled thickets. The only movement he ever glimpsed during his previous tours of guard duty had been high in the sky, bat-winged creatures soaring and circling at the onset of dusk. One of his fellow troopers had identified them as flying foxes, but he hadn't sounded certain. Not that it mattered, since they never flapped close enough for McCloy to get a good look at them. He had on occasion received the uncomfortable but distinct impression the winged creatures were spying on them even though there was very little to see of their camp.
A handful of supply tents and the skeleton of a watchtower comprised the garrison's perimeter. A scattering of boulders and jagged outcroppings led up to the cave mouth. McCloy wasn't an imaginative man, but he was all too aware of the encampment's isolation, set into the horizon-reaching plains of desolation.
"I told you there's nothing to see out there," Yan said, an edge to his voice.
McCloy swiftly lowered the binoculars, worried that Yan misinterpreted his actions as a covert form of insubordination.
Yan pointed to the watchtower and the outline of a man standing within the enclosed platform. "If there was, don't you think Lydecker would've reported it?"
"Yes, sir," McCloy replied. "I just thought—I mean, people lived here at one time."
"Why do you say that, Corporal?"
McCloy jerked his head back toward the cave. "There were paintings and things on the walls."
Yan snorted derisively. "Those were made thousands of years ago."
"Yes, sir," McCloy said again.
The wind suddenly lifted, and dust rose thick about the perimeter. It swirled and billowed. McCloy hastily lowered the visor of his helmet, then stiffened in surprise when he heard the distant wailing note. For a few seconds he assumed the sound was caused by the wind, singing over the sand.
But the dust began to settle, shifting like streamers of filthy lace, and the wailing sound continued. Yan and McCloy jerked, both men unable to stifle wordless outcries of shock.
A long line of dark, slender figures stood inside the perimeter. All of them were naked to the waist, wearing only headed loincloths and feathered headbands. White strips of paint decorated their broad-nosed, heavy-jawed faces. Some were bearded, others clean shaved. Their eyes were lost in the shadows cast by their jutting brows. All of them carried oval shields made of cured animal hide, stretched tight over wooden frameworks and long-shafted lances. McCloy stood motionless, held fast by the savage pageantry arrayed before him.
"What the hell?" Yan snarled out the words. "Why didn't Lydecker—?"
His words clogged in his throat when he noticed that the silhouette of the guard in the watchtower was different. A spear transfixed his torso, pinning him to the wall of the platform like a butterfly to a board.
Without waiting for an order, McCloy snatched the trans-comm unit from his belt and depressed the red button, the "chicken switch" on its molded plastic surface. From deep within the cave, an alarm time began to hoot.
For a long moment it was all confusion as men shouted curses, dropped tools to grab sunspots and pounded out side passages. Before the first man reached the mouth of the cave, the dark men swept across the plain like a wave. They didn't shout or scream or voice war cries. They simply rushed forward, shoulder to shoulder, moving in unison, as if each one were a three-dimensional reflection of the other.
Lances arced overhead, sticking quivering in the loose sand mere yards from where McCloy and Yan stood. The two hastily stepped back, unslinging and shouldering their AMTs. They squeezed the triggers, and the staccato jackhammering of full-auto fire drowned out the alarm. Spent shell casings fell in a tinkling rain at their feet. Against the swiftly moving targets, Yan and McCloy could only lay down their fire ahead of the onrushing line, hoping that they judged close enough so the savages would run into the hailstorm of lead.
The range closed with alarming speed. The dark men leading the charge clutched at themselves and staggered, but the attackers behind them kept coming, pushing them headlong. They fell, dashed against the bulwarks of stone leading up to the cavern mouth. A volley of spears clattered against the cave mouth. Yan fell back, a hand clamped over a wooden shaft protruding from his right thigh. Even running full tilt and in the fading light, the savages' aim was excellent. A group of black-uniformed imperial soldiers raced out of the cave, firing as they came. The blended autofire gave rise to a deafening, prolonged drum roll. Their fire was disorganized and too rapid, but it had some effect—a few of the warriors toppled and fell, but the main body wasn't stopped. A trooper went down at McCloy's feet, writhing around the spear lodged in his guts. At that instant, McCoy would have traded all of his possessions—which were few and of poor quality—for even a partial suit of the despised Mag armor.
Another imperial soldier went down, snatching at a spear embedded in his breastbone. McCloy caught a glimpse of the warrior who had hurled the lance spinning, clutching at himself as the bullets clawed open his chest, sending fragments of clavicle and rib bones spinning off in all directions, propelled by crimson sprays.
The rain of spears stopped. Then, as quickly as they struck, the savages vanished, seeming to be swallowed by the encroaching shadows cast by the giant monolith of rock. In the stunned silence that followed, the moans of the wounded were frighteningly loud. "Who the fuck are they?" a man demanded in between gasps.
His question wasn't answered.
A PRB 424 mortar launcher was rushed up and loaded with a 60 mm, high-ex round. A trooper shouted, "Here they come again!"
McCloy looked out past the boulders and saw the dark mass of warriors gathering once more, at the same place they had begun their first charge.
Yan yelled with wild anger and fear, "Mortar, fire! Hit 'em hard!"
The mortar launcher goosed thunder and smoke, but the projectile passed over the heads of the warriors, bursting behind them with no
As another round was loaded, the SIG-AMT rifles in the hands of the soldiers roared in a stuttering rhythm, tracer rounds cutting threads of phosphorescence through the twilight. The mortar spit another shell, and this time it landed in the center of the warriors. Dark bodies flew up, out and apart amid a mushroom of yellow flame.
The near naked, spear-wielding savages came on with fanatical courage, still fighting with a silence that was more unnerving than blood-curdling shrieks. Their bullet-slashed bodies dropped atop their dead or crippled brothers, but more appeared to clamber over the red shambles of maimed flesh and broken bone. The mortar launcher belched more rounds, just as fast as the soldiers could load them. Shell after shell detonated, until the smoke and dust boiled high and the explosions rolled like a thunderstorm. McCloy, all but blinded, kept the trigger of his SIG-AMT depressed until the bolt snapped open on the empty chamber.
As more soldiers fired their weapons dry, a man began shouting, "Cease fire, cease fire!"
After a few seconds, the soldiers obeyed, but one trooper kept snapping his empty autorifle until Mc-Cloy took it away from him. Yan, limping because of his spear-pierced leg, shambled around in apparent shock, but when a soldier offered to pull out the lance, Yan shoved him away with a curse.
The men reloaded hastily, peering into billows of eye-stinging, astringent vapor. As it thinned, all of the troopers looked for moving targets. When they saw none, they looked on the ground for casualties. They expected to see an open-air slaughterhouse, the perimeter littered with corpses and the wounded. They saw nothing, not even a spattering of blood, but the mortar rounds had destroyed the supply tents and knocked the watchtower off its support stilts. For a long, stretched-out tick of time, nobody spoke or so much as moved.
Then Yan snarled, "This can't be! We killed dozens of those bastards! This is fucking crazy!" He started to say more, but he coughed rackingly, pink foam flecking his lips.
Trembling, keeping his jaws clamped tight so his teeth wouldn't chatter, McCloy slid up his dust-filmed visor and lifted the binoculars to his face. He squinted through the eyepieces, making adjustments so he could see through the shifting clouds of grit and gathering twilight.
Focusing on a point beyond the perimeter, he looked for signs of the warriors' retreat, of marks in the sand where they had dragged away their dead and wounded. He saw nothing, then a dark shape suddenly arose, as if disgorged from the shadows. For a shaved sliver of an instant he thought he glimpsed one of the bat creatures flapping over the figure's head. McCloy's heart spasmed painfully in his chest, and his breath seemed to seize in his lungs. The man stood as motionless as a statue. Around his hips was a loincloth bearing a complex design of intertwining curves and arcs. He saw those clearly, far more clearly than anything else about the figure.
The man's otherwise naked body was painted with alternating strips of bright yellow and red on his chest, midriff and arms. McCloy couldn't see his face. For some reason, the electronics of the binoculars refused to bring it into focus. Before he could stop himself, he blurted, "Oh, my God."
Yan's voice growled, "What is it now?"
"That man out there, sir."
After a moment, Yan said in disgust, "There's nobody out there. Not anymore."
McCloy didn't bother to dispute or correct him. He continued to gaze at the shadowy figure. The man slowly raised his right arm. Gripped within his hand and attached to his wrist by a leather thong was a sharpened length of bone about two feet long. It was inscribed with symbols identical to those decorating the man's body.
The bone pointed directly at McCloy, then slid to the right, where Yan stood beside him, then to the left and back to the right, as if the man were using it to count the number of soldiers assembled at the mouth of the cave.
McCloy shivered violently and lowered the binoculars. He turned to Lieutenant Yan. "You don't see him?"
Yan's face twisted in pain. McCloy started to speak again, then felt the warm tickle of liquid sliding over his lips and tasted the salty tang of blood. Murmuring wordlessly in surprise, McCloy dabbed at his nose and stared in confusion at the crimson wetness shining on his fingertips.
Yan stared at it, too, and McCloy saw blood flowing from the lieutenant's nostrils, too. "Sir—"
The lieutenant pitched into McCloy's arms as slack-limbed as a corpse. His lips writhed and he croaked, "We're all dead here."
A torrent of blood spilled from his mouth and splashed onto the ground, turning the rust-red sand into deep vermilion sludge. McCloy eased Lieutenant Yan down, chill fingers of terror knotting in his chest, squeezing his heart. He knew without knowing how he knew that Yan's wound hadn't killed him—just as he knew that he and every man in the garrison were dying.
They just hadn't realized it yet.
Chapter 1
Scavenging trips eastward were by and large unprofitable, dangerous and a complete waste of time. Although Mammoth Mare McSween fancied herself a champion salvager, she didn't like to take risks. Most of the old predark villes in her central Nevada territory had been looted of their valuables long, long before, and she rarely considered it worth the effort to pick through them.
What Mare usually looked for were items the manufacturing divisions of the baronies didn't make or didn't widely distribute. However, the southwestern Outlands were pretty well cleaned out, so she and her crew of ten men almost never came across anything worthwhile.
The problem was that most of the places where tradable items might be found were more than likely slap-square in the middle of hellzones, in the center of nuke craters surrounded by acres and acres of radioactive wasteland. Or, like Frisco or Lost Angeles, under several fathoms of the Cific. Mammoth Mare McSween had neither the resources nor the inclination to seek out those possible treasure troves. Therefore, she suffered through one lean time after another.
Looting the abandoned ruins of predark villes was not only an Outland tradition; it was also Mammoth Mare's family business. Her mother, her mother's father and his father before him, had made a career from ferreting out and plundering the secret stockpiles the beforetime government had hidden in anticipation of a nation-wide catastrophe.
After the world burned in nuclear flames, debris settled into the lower atmosphere to very nearly create another ice age. The remnants of humankind had waited until the Earth got a little warmer to venture forth again. Most of the early survivors had been scavengers. They really had no choice. They banded together, found predark wags and recruited men and women strong enough to defend those armored vehicles. They raided villes of the dead where the radiation had finally weakened enough to allow limited access. They traded among the settlements, swapping equipment for supplies, supplies for gas, gas for ammo, and the ammo was used to blast the hell out of whatever muties or competitors stood in the way of their scavenging.
Finding a well-stocked redoubt, one of the many underground military installations seemingly scattered all over the nuke-ravaged face of America, assured a trader of wealth and security, presupposing he or she didn't intersect with the trajectory of a bullet that had their name on it. Most of the redoubts had been found and raided decades ago, but occasionally one hitherto untouched would be located.
Although Mare's mother, Big Ma McSween, had discovered some fine hauls in the past—crates of blasters, ammunition, even clothes—by the time she died after meeting up with a bullet, most of the easy pickings and higher quality items had become as rare as a smiling Magistrate.
In the southwestern Outlands—what used to be New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada—small, impoverished settlements were isolated by hundreds of square miles of barren wasteland. Although they were prey for marauders, Mammoth Mare didn't care to turn her mother's operation into that of a wolf pack. Her reluctance had little to do with morals or ethics. Most of the outlanders who lived in the settlements rarely agreed to give up their possessions without a fight— even if they were possessions they would have had difficulty giving away.
Outlanders, anyone who chose to live outside baronial society or had that fate chosen for them, were a different sort from those bred within the walls of the nine villes. Born into a raw, wild world, they were accustomed to living on the edge of death. Grim necessity had taught them the skills to survive, even thrive, in the postnuke environment. They may have been the great-great-great grandchildren of civilized men and women, but they had no choice but to embrace lives of semi-barbarism. They were tough and vicious, and protected even their low-quality goods with their lives. As far as Mare was concerned, it wasn't worth risking life and limb to raze a settlement to the ground and then find out all they had were some old boots, or maybe some home-forged black- powder firearms.
