Outlanders 23 far empire, p.3
Outlanders 23 Far Empire, page 3
The terrain on either side of the road was bleak and dark, as if it had been exposed to open flames. The few trees they saw were leached of all color, a monochromatic shade of gray. It was like looking at the world through a set of night-vision goggles. Although the sun overhead was bright, the countryside was various shades of gray. Dead brush crunched under the tires, falling apart like sculptures made of ash. Powdery sand and ash floated up in the wake of the truck's passage, coating Mare's throat so thickly that she nearly succumbed to a coughing fit. Drinking deeply from a canteen, she washed out her mouth. She had seen rad-blasted landscapes like this before, hellzones where invisible poisons had leached all life away.
As Mare absently clocked the miles on the odometer, a queasiness, then a cold nausea crawled into the pit of her stomach. At first she assumed it was due to motion sickness, but when a lump seemed to form in her throat and made breathing difficult, she realized with a distant astonishment the sensation of sickness was actually guilt.
She tried to ignore it, to push it into a dark corner of her mind, but she found herself glancing through the rear window of the cab at the bodies huddled on the floor of the bed. She told herself that the people were just commodities, simply statistics. Life in the Outlands was never easy, and it was bound to grind up some folks. Morality had nothing to do with it. It was a matter of survival.
Mare had no choice but to be hard-hearted, since the baronies hired their own traders, who in turn controlled the supply rotors and made a profit that was plowed back into getting more vehicles onto the supply routes. Now the various traders were organizing, forming a consortium, and independent operations like hers were in danger of becoming extinct, just like the stickies. She couldn't afford to feel sentiment over statistics.
But the trouble was that these people weren't just a group of statistics. They had faces, they had voices, they had names. They hadn't crossed her path; she had gone out of her way to cross theirs.
As the miles rolled by and the sun climbed to its noonday apex, Mare's sense of foreboding grew, until it was one baby step below a full-fledged anxiety attack. When Squint commented, "Getting' closer," the sound of his reedy voice made her jump.
Levitz cast him a quizzical glance. "Why do you say that?"
With a dry chuckle, Squint pointed through the dirty windshield. "Look up. About eleven o'clock." Mare and Levitz leaned forward, gazing in the direction of the small man's index finger. For a moment, Mare saw nothing but a deep-blue sky, with only the wispy suggestions of clouds. Then she glimpsed a tiny fleck of jet black against the vast tapestry of azure. She managed to bite back a curse, but she wasn't quite able to suppress a groan. Levitz saw it, too. "Oh, shit," he husked out. Both he and Mare instantly identified the waspish configuration of a Deathbird. The black choppers were the primary form of air transportation to make a comeback after the nukecaust, and they were the sole property of the Magistrate Divisions. Levitz instinctively lessened the pressure of his foot on the wag's accelerator.
"What the hell is a Deathbird doing out here?" he demanded in angry bight. "We must be four or five hundred miles from Snakefish!"
Mare turned her head to apprise Squint with a slit-eyed stare. "Mags have a base out here, don't they? They're the people buyers, ain't they?"
Squint raised a pair of conciliatory hands, but didn't make eye contact with her. "All I know is that there's a base out in Groom Lake. I don't know who operates it, but they got Mags runnin' security for it." Mare bared her teeth and clutched the man around his wattled throat. "If Mags are out here, then so are the fuckin' barons!"
"Mebbe we can just turn around afore we're spotted.” Levitz blurted.
Mare continued to glare at Squint while she thought over the wheelman's suggestion.
Squint's lips writhed, either in a grin or grimace. "Too late for that. They know we’re here." He sounded almost happy about it.
Mare's heart skipped a beat and then began to thud frantically. She released the scrawny man and glanced out the windshield again. Although she knew the Deathbird was a predark helicopter, the distant sight of it awakened in her a superstitious dread, rekindling old folk tales told around campfires, about sky monsters, giant bats that haunted the ruins of nuke- scorched cities. The notion of cannibals bartering for her wares now seemed almost quaint.
The Deathbird rotated in the air, banked, then accessed straight toward them. It circled, hovering for a long moment. Mare could barely hear the droning chop of the blades over the rattle and roar of the wag's engine. She figured the crew of the Bird was examining her cargo in the vehicle's bed.
The black chopper made a low, slow pass, flying alongside the truck, pacing it. Even through the smoke-hued foreport, Mare saw a dark figure making an unmistakable gesture that they should continue down the road.
Levitz licked his pale, dry lips. "What should I do?"
"Keep going." Squint retorted sharply. "Ain't no chance in hell of outrunnin' `em."
Mare cuffed the man on the side of his head. "I give the orders here, pissant!"
Levitz turned his terrified, wide eyes toward her. “Then give some, for God's sake!"
Mare looked past him at the Deathbird pacing them like a hungry vulture. Painted a matte, non-reflective black, the chopper's sleek, streamlined contours were interrupted by only the two ventral stub wings. Each wing carried a pod of missiles. The perforated barrel of the forward-mounted chain gun in its swivel turret winked dully in the sunlight.
She sighed heavily. "Squint's right. We can't outrun them. Let's keep going."
Levitz nodded grimly and said nothing more. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white, looking almost as if the skin would split. The road inclined slightly to the top of a knoll. Ahead of them loomed the jagged battlements of the rugged Timpahute mountain range. Mineral deposits glittered with the reflected radiance of the sun. The jagged peaks, much eroded by the ages, resembled the fangs of an unbelievably huge, fossilized predator. The wag followed the chopper along the road, down a narrow pass twisting between ridges of barren rock. At the bottom of the pass, in a vast bowl of desolation, the sere basin of Groom Lake was spread out. It was basically flatland, with no sign of desert scrub to relieve the monotony of the dry, sunken lake bed. There was nothing resembling a lake, not even a few puddles. The basin was sunk well below the foothills of the mountain range.
Far in the distance, on the other side of the lake bed, a scattered collection of structures rose from the ground. They reminded Mare of the broken-off stumps of teeth. There looked to be at least a mile's worth of ruins. The line of structures was completely dwarfed by a building so tremendous in size, it was easily seen without the aid of the binoculars. She estimated it was more than three-quarters of a mile long and a quarter-mile wide, and at the very least a hundred feet tall. Two dark bug shapes hovered above it, and she guessed they were two more Deathbirds. A few yards beyond the mouth of the pass, a pair of small concrete-block cupolas bracketed the road. Protruding from rectangular ports were the long barrels of big, multibored automatic weapons. Mae figured they were miniguns, capable of firing 5.56 mm ammo at the rate of 6000 rounds per minute. If her wag was caught in a cross fire between the two blasters, it would be reduced to scrap metal in less than half a minute. She saw no movements from within the ports and wondered if the minigun emplacements were remote controlled.
Past the blockhouses, pyramid-shaped "dragon's teeth" obstacles made of reinforced concrete lined both sides of the path. Weighing a thousand pounds each and five feet tall, they were designed to break the tracks or wheels of any assault vehicle trying to cross them.
Levitz braked the wag and put the gears into neutral. "Now what?" he asked hoarsely.
Mare looked past the obstacles toward the ruins and saw a vehicle cutting a swath across the tableland. She knew what it was and set her teeth on another groan. A Sandcat churned its way over the lake bed, twin plumes of grit curving up from the clattering metal tracks. The controlled roar of the 750- horsepower engine was easily audible, even though the Cat was nearly half a mile away.
A pair of flat, retractable tracks supported the Sandcat's low-slung, blunt-lined chassis. An armored topside gun turret concealed a pair of USMG-73 heavy machine guns. The wag's armor was composed of a ceramic-armaglass bond, shielded against both intense and ambient radiation--or at least that's what Mare had been told by her father. He had also told her that only Magistrates traveled in Sandcats, just as Deathbirds only carried Magistrates.
The Sandcat clanked to a halt between the pair of blockhouses, and its gull-wing doors popped open. Two men climbed out, both of them wearing the Magistrate-issue black, polycarbonate body armor. A small, disk-shaped badge of office was emblazoned on the left pectoral. It depicted a crimson, stylized, balanced scales of justice, superimposed over a nine-spoked wheel, which symbolized the Magistrate oath to keep the wheels of justice turning in the nine baronies.
The helmets were also of black polycarbonate, conforming to the shape of the men's heads and exposing only a portion of mouth and chin. The red-tinted visor was slightly concave. The design of the Magistrate armor was for more than functional, practical reasons. The two men were symbols of awe, of fear. They looked strong, fierce, implacable and not altogether human.
Mare's heart spasmed painfully within her rib cage, and she felt her bowels loosen. She had never seen a Magistrate before and more importantly, she had undertaken a great deal of effort never to be seen by them. Big Ma had warned her many times that to earn a swift death, known in Outland vernacular as a "Mag's mercy," all she had to do was come to their attention.
The pair of black-armored men stared at the thick steadily, expressionlessly. Neither one of them made a move to unleather his Sin Eater from his forearm holster.
"I think you'd better go talk to them, Mare." Levitz said.
Dabbing at the film of cold sweat beading on her upper lip, Mare nodded, then carefully opened the door of the cab. She stepped out and walked slowly to the front of the truck, moving as deliberately as if she were treading on eggshells. She made certain to hold her hands well away from her body. The Death bird hovered over the lake bed, a few yards behind the Sandcat. The rotor wash sent dust devils spinning and whirling like miniature cyclones. The bore of the chain gun seemed to fix on her like a balloon, cyclopean eye.
The taller of the pair of Magistrates stepped around one of the pyramid-shaped obstacles. "Tell your driver to kill the engine."
His loud, aggressive voice punched Mare's eardrums and she flinched. She turned toward the cab and drew her finger across her throat. Levitz obligingly keyed off the truck's engine.
"You've brought us merchandise." The Mag wasn't asking a question; he was making a statement. For an instant, Mare wondered how he knew, then she realized the Deathbird's crew had radioed in a description of the wag's contents. She nodded, doing her best to keep her face a blank mask.
"Answer me when I speak to you, you Outland slag-jacker!" the Magistrate snarled.
"Y-yes sir," Mare stammered. "We have merchandise. Found 'em this morning and brought 'em here straightaway." Her words nearly tumbled over one another in their haste to leave her mouth.
A cold, stitched-on grin creased the armored man's face. "Tell your crew to throw out their blasters and climb down."
Mae turned her head and shouted, "Throw down your guns, then come out!"
Far in the distance, she saw a pair of tiny specks, looking like newborn tadpoles swimming through a clear azure pool. She paid them no attention at first, but as she began to face the Mags again, she absently noted how the specks appeared to grow larger between one eye blink and another. She thought again of the legendary sky monsters, but knew the black helicopter was far more dangerous than any creature out of folklore.
Her crew complied with the order, and a flurry of weapons flew over the sides of the truck's bed and clattered noisily against the ground. The men followed their weapons, taking up position in a ragged line at the rear of the wag. The silent Magistrate moved forward, extending his right arm toward them. Mare caught only a blurred fragment of motion, then the man's Sin Eater slapped solidly into his open hand.
Mare had heard about the Sin Eaters, of course. The big-bored handblasters were part of the Magistrate mystique, the official side arms that were as much of a badge of office as the ones they wore on their chests. Stripped down to skeletal frames, the Sin Eaters were barely fourteen inches long. The extended magazines held twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo. There was no trigger guard, no fripperies, not a wasted inch of design. The Sin Eaters looked exactly like what they were supposed to be—the most wickedly efficient blasters ever made.
"Hands behind your heads!" the Mag barked. Their faces pale with fright, Mare's crew did as commanded. Her temples throbbed with tension. At any instant she expected both Magistrates to let loose with a full-auto salvo, kill them all where they stood and appropriate her wag and cargo. Her only consolation was that Squint would die, too, but it was a small comfort, under the circumstances. At the far edge of audibility, she heard a faint, keening whine. She wondered briefly if, in her terror, she was unconsciously making the noise.
Then she saw the two Magistrates glancing around in wonder, and tilting their heads back, mouths gaping open in astonishment. Mare started to look up, too, but at that moment the real sky monsters struck.
Chapter 3
Grant saw the other two Deathbirds making a high and wide circling pattern over the giant hangar - or rather, the heads-up display in his faceplate registered their radar signatures.
"Two more players on the field," he said, his lion-like growl of a voice echoing within his helmet. "I'm figuring they're about three minutes away at top speed," Kane's voice responded crisply in his ear. "Once they see us, anyway."
Although they were flying low, the two Manta ships had their atmospheric cruising throttles opened three-quarters of the way as they streaked across the sky at five hundred miles per hour. Within seconds, the men aboard the hovering Deathbirds would realize that the strangely shaped dark objects in the sky were aircraft, but neither Kane nor Grant was worried about engaging the Birds—one of the reasons they had flown the TAVs—Trans-atmospheric Vehicles—from Montana to Nevada was to test their air-to-air and air-to-ground combat capabilities.
The craft were little more than wedges with curves, flattened javelin heads equipped with two different kinds of engines—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation rockets—that worked in tandem to enable the craft to fly in a vacuum and in an atmosphere. They called the ships Mantas for a simple reason— the resemblance to seagoing manta rays was more than superficial, particularly when the ribbed, incurving wings were at full extension. The vehicles had fifteen-yard-long fuselages, twenty-yard wingspans with five-yard tails, tipped by spade-shaped rudders. They appeared to be made of a burnished bronze alloy, but in reality the composition of the outer armor most closely resembled armaglass, the plasticized metal created in zero-G conditions and overlaid by a pyro-ceramic hull finish. Intricate geometric designs covered almost the entire hull surface, deeply inscribed into the metal itself. Interlocking swirling glyphs, graceful cup and spiral symbols, even elaborate cuneiform markings decorated the ships from stem to stern.
The cockpits were almost invisible, little more than elongated oval humps in the exact center of the sleek topside fuselages. The hulls were smooth, with barely perceptible seams where the metal plates joined. The craft had no external apparatus at all, no fins, no exhaust ports.
In the pilot's seat of his Manta, Grant more a bronze-colored helmet with an opaque full-face visor. The back of the helmet was attached to the headrest of the chair, and a pair of tubes stretched from the rear to an oxygen tank at the back of the seat. The chair and helmet were of one piece, a self-contained unit.
The interior curve of the helmet's visor swarmed with CGI icons of sensor scopes, range finders and various indicators. Seeming to float in the air between his eyes and the visor, a column of numbers appeared, glowing red against the pale bronze. When he focused on a distant object, the visor magnified it and provided a read-out as to distance and dimension. Now he focused on the Deathbird hovering above the Sandcat at the leading edge of the dry lake bed.
Even though he was intimately familiar with them, the Deathbird attack helicopters were frightening pieces of machinery. They were modified AH-64 Apache attack gunships, and most of the ones in the Magistrate Division fleets had been reengineered and retrofitted dozens of times.
Thirty feet long, fifteen feet high, the maximum speed of the insect-like choppers was 185 miles per hour, hi the hands of an experienced pilot, they could maneuver like hummingbirds, up, down, sideways, backward, all very swiftly and fairly quietly.
"You ready?" Kane asked.
Grant glanced out the cockpit canopy and saw Kane's ship nosing ahead of his. He wasn't surprised, but he was annoyed. Kane was a born and bred point man. During his Mag days, because of his uncanny ability to sniff danger in the offing, he was always chosen to act as the advance scout. Kane claimed that when he took point, he felt electrically alive, sharply attuned to every nuance of his surroundings and what he was doing.
"How about dropping back?" Grant didn't bother to disguise the irritation in his tone.
A somewhat contrite laugh sounded in his ear. "Sorry," Kane said. "Old habits and all that." Grant replied, "Yeah, I know all about your old habits. They've nearly gotten me killed a few times. Let's do this together."
"Hit the Bird at the same time?"
"Why not?"
"Why not indeed," Kane responded in a sardonic drawl. "Let's do it."
Kane's Manta ship tipped up on the starboard wing and banked away, meowing in on the Deathbird from the left. Grant's fingers squeezed the triggers on the control stick just as rockets flamed from the wings of Kane's craft. Grant fired off two mini-Sidewinders. The combined missile barrage hit the Deathbird amidships. To Grant's surprise, the chopper split in two a second before its fuel tank exploded. The craft side-slipped to starboard and plummeted straight down, as if it had been dangling from a string that had been cut. The rotor blades fanned the air sluggishly, even as it plunged toward the ground. Grant pulled back on the stick to avoid colliding with the spray of flaming debris. He and Kane's Manta ships roared by on either side of the thick column of smoke, leaving such a whirlwind in their wakes that plumes of vapor followed them like accusatory fingers.
