Outlanders 11 armageddon.., p.5
Outlanders 11 Armageddon Axis, page 5
"We've got an infratrace hit!" he crowed jubilantly. "Body heat and motion signature!"
Howse, the pilot, shouted up through the hatch, "Coordinates!"
Staring at the numerals flickering on the upper right corner of the screen, Maddock called out, "Six-niner-six, fifty-four meters. Target is moving fast."
Howse wrenched on the wheel, and the tank shifted direction smoothly, the lift fans whirring and sighing. Beck, at the port-side machine-gun emplacement, tightened his hands on the firing studs. Across from him, Duncan did the same. Neither one said anything.
Maddock envied the studied ease of the two men, but he suspected they were just as strung-out and nervous as he was. He was the newest member of the security force, recruited from the ranks of freshly badged Magistrates in Cobaltville. He still wasn't certain if this assignment was superior to walking patrol in the Tartarus Pits.
At least there he knew what to expect, understood the kind of people he would be dealing with. Slaggers mainly, since that sector of Cobaltville was a melting pot of cheap labor, petty criminals and outlanders. The Archuleta Mesa duty was like nothing he expected or even imagined pulling when he entered the Mag academy.
The high level of technology in use in the installation came as more than a surprise; it was profoundly shocking. Machines, wags and devices of all types far outstripped anything in Cobaltville. And if he thought some of the residents of the Tartarus were strange, the permanent personnel in the subterranean complex made the Pitters seem mundane in comparison.
None of the security force dealt with the slightly built, delicate-featured people directly. They were kept segregated, although each of the four sec squads had a designated intermediary who conveyed their orders. As far as Maddock had been able to determine, all of the squads comprised only five men.
The people, if that's what they were, spooked Maddock, made his skin crawl and his short hair tingle on his scalp. He had only caught glimpses of them from time to time, and they struck him as more than human but at the same time somehow other than human, too. All shared similar characteristics—besides slender, almost childish builds, they had large domed heads, huge slanting eyes and faces that seemed all brow ridges and cheekbones. He had seen a couple of them walking around with plastic tube-shaped holsters strapped to their thighs.
Shortly after arriving at the mesa, he'd asked Howse if the people were a breed of mutie. Since the man also hailed from Cobaltville, he figured he'd share his curiosity, especially since the small, bigheaded people didn't fit any of the descriptions of stickies, scalies, swampies or scabbies he had ever heard of.
"The desert is full of the bones of stupes like you who started asking questions about this place," Maddock was told.
Maddock immediately ceased further inquiries, but try as he might, he couldn't smother his curiosity. Right at the moment, his curiosity burned at a fever pitch, threatening to consume his training. He struggled to keep from yelling a series of questions at everyone around him.
Every night, from dusk till dawn for the past month, he and the tank crew had patrolled the perimeter, to the edge of the shock field and back. This night they had been ordered to stand down and confine themselves to barracks. His companions did not seem surprised, and Maddock received the distinct and uneasy impression something was going on they weren't meant to see. The rest of the sec crew accepted the change in procedure with resigned equanimity. Maddock pretended to do so, as well.
Then, barely half an hour ago he had felt the concussion of an explosion, the power failed for a few minutes and then came the screaming of the high-alert siren. Within moments of the siren, the hovertank rolled from a camouflaged entrance and out into the desert night. The orders were simple—locate and apprehend intruders, terminate if necessary.
Maddock saw the flames staining the sky but he knew better than to ask his comrades about their source. The notion of intruders agitated him far more than a mysterious fire.
"I see something!" Duncan swung the machine gun around on its oiled swivel mount.
Maddock looked up from the screen, eyes scanning the desert. He saw nothing but shadow-splotched sand and ocotillo scrub. Then he caught a fleeting glimpse of a shape, little more than a flitting blur, white against the murk only twenty yards away.
Duncan squeezed the double triggers of the MG-73. The heavy weapon roared with a sound like a hailstorm confined inside of a steel drum. Orange flashes stabbed the gloom, and cartridge cases spewed from the ejector port in a smoking rain.
Duncan hadn't established either proper range or target acquisition. The wild volley chewed into the desert floor, kicking up sand in high fountains. Maddock returned his gaze to the red pulsing dot that represented Duncan's target. The range decreased with every passing microsecond, but it still moved.
Thick liquid a deeper shade of red than the dot sprayed across the screen. The steady drumming of the MG-73 ceased almost at the same time. Maddock whirled, a profanity-seasoned demand on his lips. It died there.
The first thing he saw was Duncan's lower leg lying on the combat deck, severed at the knee, still clothed in coverall and the foot still booted. The second thing he saw was Duncan himself, sagging down behind the gun emplacement, clutching at the stump of his left leg, squeezing it to keep the femoral artery from squirting any more blood. His eyes bugged out, his mouth worked, but he was too overwhelmed by shock and pain even to scream.
On the raised housing encircling the deck, Maddock noticed a gaping hole punched through the metal, surrounded by a shiny ring of alloy. Beck, squatting behind his own MG-73 on the opposite side of the vehicle, hadn't seen a thing.
Maddock finally found his voice. He meant to yell Beck's name, to attract his attention to their downed comrade. Instead he shrieked, "Fuck!"
That drew Beck's attention. He took a step toward Duncan just as the hovertank shuddered brutally. Pulverized grit blew out between and beneath its skirts in a cloud. The lift fans keened and the tank lurched. It tipped to one side for an instant as a cursing Howse frantically fed more power to the stabilizers, trying to coax the other blades to compensate. Maddock gripped the frame of the sensor screen to keep from plummeting headfirst into the pilot's module.
Beck blurted in wordless surprise as he toppled backward, the backs of his thighs striking the lip of the housing. Maddock thrust out a hand toward him, but with arms windmilling, the gunner pitched off the combat deck.
The tank righted itself with a violent, spine- compressing jolt, hurling Duncan across the deck, leaving a scarlet stream in his rolling wake. He fell into Maddock, piling him up against the bulkhead. The rear of his skull hit the superstructure holding the cannon very hard. Howse shouted a steady stream of expletives.
Maddock wasn't thinking; he only reacted. When he managed to disentangle himself from Duncan and achieve a half-standing position, he saw a black- gloved hand gripping the rim of the deck housing.
Scrambling forward, he slapped his hand around Beck's wrist, heaving and pulling the gunner back aboard. It wasn't until the ebony-clad, masked figure stood on the deck that Maddock realized it wasn't Beck.
"Much obliged," Kane said a shaved sliver of a second before he sprayed a fluid directly into Mad- dock's face.
As THE TROOPER WENT into convulsions, Kane slammed a shoulder into him He fell down amid a wild spasm of arms and legs, smearing blood all over the deck. The other gunner was obviously dead, bled almost white. The .50-caliber AP round from the Barrett had easily penetrated the housing and ripped off the trooper's leg like a man tearing a drumstick from a baked chicken.
Toeing aside the bullet-amputated leg, Kane moved to the hatch leading to the pilot's compartment. The man seated before the control panel still struggled with the wheel, trying to stabilize the hovertank. The pilot wore a headset, and Kane assumed he was in radio contact with the Deathbird crew. He cast a swift glance behind him. The flight lights of the chopper shone like pinpoints in the sky, its search beam still probing the ground like a questing finger. As yet, the aircraft wasn't coming to investigate the problems of the ground vehicle.
The stuttering whine of the fans smoothed and the tank came to a halt, rising and falling gently, the deck swaying underfoot.
"Papa Bird, we've got a malfunction here," the driver declared.
Kane shoved his upper body into the module, jamming the bore of his Sin Eater against the side of the driver's neck. Quietly he said, "Advise them to stand by."
The pilot wasn't as rigidly self-controlled as Rhine the sentry, but he came close. After a handful of seconds spent gaping at the masked apparition, the man said into the microphone. "Papa Bird, stand by."
He looked at Kane intently and asked, "What did you use, a gren?"
"Concussion type. Damage is minimal Don't bother thanking me for my restraint."
As he spoke, he scanned the interior of the module and spotted the Intratec 9 autoblaster clipped below the instrument panel, within easy reach of the pilot. Still holding the barrel of his Sin Eater against the man's neck, Kane stretched out a hand and removed the gun.
"What's your name?" Kane asked.
"Howse."
"Howse, keep this thing grounded until I say otherwise."
Hearing the scuff of feet behind him, Kane backed out of the module carefully, still aiming his blaster down into the hatch. Grant pulled himself up onto the deck and took the Barrett rifle Domi handed up to him, then helped her and Brigid aboard.
Grant nudged the body of the one-legged gunner with a boot. The man didn't move. "I meant to hit him in the hip. Hydrostatic shock would've stopped his heart and dropped him dead. He wouldn't have bled to death."
"He still just as dead," Domi said bluntly, her Stealth cloak folded over one arm.
Kane saw a crimson scratch marring the pearly hue of her rounded chin. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah. A couple of rounds came close, though."
Kane nodded, not outwardly expressing his relief. The plan to divert the hovertank's crew had been primarily Domi's. Stripping off the Stealth cloak in order to be detected by the vehicle's infrared imagers while Grant used the Barrett to take out the gunners and Kane crept up with the gren had been a big risk—so big Brigid had strenuously objected to it.
Kane returned his attention to Howse. The illuminated instrument panel cast a greenish glow over his features, giving him the appearance of a drowned corpse. "Start rolling or floating or whatever. Call the Bird and report a minor problem that won't affect the patrol."
Howse complied with both commands, and though alert for hidden messages in the man's words to the chopper, Kane detected no hint of deception.
As the hovertank began gliding forward again, Kane said, "Only one of your crew is halfway functional. Young guy."
Howse sighed. "That's Maddock. He has the luck of the cherry. Guess it's no mystery who you are."
"It isn't?" Kane's voice held a slight mocking edge.
"No. I'm from Cobaltville." Howse said nothing more, as if his statement explained everything.
Wryly, Kane reflected that it probably did. He, Grant and most likely Brigid had achieved near legendary status in the vine network—half traitors, half insurrectionist monsters, a blend of ghost and outlaw.
"Thing is," Howse continued conversationally, "officially you're dead."
"Is that so?" Kane's tone was deliberately uninterested.
Grant's voice drew his attention away from Howse. "What about these bastards?"
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Domi and Brigid standing over the trooper he had dosed with the nerve disrupter. He showed signs of reviving. Grant stood next to the dead man.
Kane crossed the deck and helped Grant pick up the gunner's body and heave it overboard. The man's leg followed.
The young trooper Howse had identified as Maddock lifted his head and stared around. His eyes showed his terror, and he tried to thrash into a sitting position.
"We have no intention of killing you," Brigid said.
Maddock reacted to her soothing voice even though it was muffled by her hood. He swallowed several times before asking, "What happened to Beck?"
"Worry about yourself," Grant growled in his best menacing tone, holding the sniper rifle in a suggestive way.
Kane returned to the hatch and gave Howse directions. "Keep your speed steady and don't do anything out of the ordinary."
The driver nodded and inquired, "If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing here?"
"It's done already. Now we're leaving."
"You won't get away with it."
"If you know who I am, you know that's not true." Kane prodded the man's back with his Sin Eater. "Shut up and drive."
Howse did both, but far from being comforted by the man's show of compliance, Kane's pointman's instincts began raising an alarm. After the devastation they had visited on the installation, the manpower in the field seemed inadequate to execute a thorough search for the saboteurs. The rational, tactical part of his mind coolly informed him that the destruction of the Aurora had been so extensive that substantial losses of personnel and materiel had been achieved.
The Deathbird was already airborne and the hover- tank was the best that could be mustered.
His feral wolf s mind snarled in suspicion. The wolf sensed something gravely amiss. Kane tried to combine the two aspects of his mind, attempting to imagine the nature of a possible trap, but he drew a blank. He put a muzzle on the wolf and turned to Brigid and Grant.
"Has it occurred to you," he ventured, "how light the security seems?"
Grant nodded. "Yeah. One foot sentry, one Bird, one tank with a crew of four. Pretty low-rent for such a high-maintenance compound."
Brigid tugged impatiently at her face-concealing hood. "There are probably a lot of reasons. Too many secrets to keep, for one thing, and the more people you have here the greater the danger of having them exposed. More than likely there's only a skeleton force garrisoned here."
"Makes sense," Kane admitted. "But what about the hybrids? The place was crawling with them, remember?"
"Very clearly. I also remember we killed an awful lot of them, too. That, combined with the damage we caused to their breeding facility and incubation system, means not many replacements could have been born over the past ten months. And since we don't know the gestation periods, it's possible there are only a handful of them left."
"And," put in Grant, "the hybrids aren't fighters. They're fragile. Without those infrasound weapons of theirs, they weren't any kind of match for us even though they had us outnumbered four to one."
"Keep in mind," Brigid said, "the last thing the warders of this place expected was that we'd ever return, especially overland."
"I figured they wouldn't expect it," replied Kane. "Exactly," she agreed.
Kane nodded. "Yeah, but I still don't feel what we've seen so far is all we're going to get."
After a moment, Grant said heavily, "Me either."
The opinions of the two people quieted Kane's wolf. It stopped snarling, although it growled from time to time.
The hovertank bore them farther and farther away from the great black block of the Archuleta Mesa and the Deathbird, but he still didn't relax. He crouched near the pilot's hatch so he could keep his eye on Howse. The man guided the vehicle smoothly over the desert hardpan, swerving around boulders but always returning to the course Kane had laid out.
Maddock fully recovered from the nerve toxin, and Brigid gave him permission to sit up. He stared in horror at his comrade's blood congealing on the deck and drying on his clothes and hands. Kane guessed he had just received his first taste of true violence, not the structured, almost clinical violence he'd experienced during his Mag training.
Addressing Kane, Brigid said, "I don't see any reason for his presence any longer. We don't need another liability."
Shifting the barrel of his Sin Eater toward Maddock, Kane said sharply, "Stand up."
Stiffly, as if he were ninety years old, Maddock climbed to his feet.
"Pat him down," Kane directed.
Brigid frisked him quickly, running her hands over the multipocketed coverall. Maddock did not react. If he took any pleasure in the masked woman's touch, it did not register on his face.
Stepping away from him, Brigid announced, "He's clean. No comm, no weapons. Not even a jackknife."
Gesturing with his blaster, Kane ordered, "Move to the side."
Maddock obeyed, stepping in the direction the gun barrel indicated. He waited.
"Do you have a superior officer," Kane asked, "somebody you report to other than Howse here?"
Maddock nodded uncertainly "I guess I can find one."
"Give him a message. Tell him the revolution has officially started."
"I don't understand."
"Neither will he. But the message will eventually reach somebody who does understand." He pointed to the desert with his Sin Eater. "Take a flier."
Relief flooded the young man's eyes, but he didn't hesitate. Balancing one foot atop the raised wall around the deck, he kicked himself up and off the tank. Kane stood up and watched the young man fall hard and roll across the ground, raising a cloud of sand in his wake. Once he stopped rolling, Kane waited to see if he stood up, but the tank was traveling at such a rapid clip, Maddock's black-garbed body was quickly lost in the darkness.
Kane turned back to the hatch. "Slow down," he called.
Howse didn't look at him. "The faster we go, the sooner you can get out of here and the sooner I'm rid of you."
"Do as I say. Slow it down."
Sighing in exasperation, Howse shifted his foot over the accelerator, easing the pressure. Then he stamped down on the pedal as hard as he could. The steady drone of the lift fans hit a shrieking high note.
The abrupt surge threw Kane off balance, nearly back-somersaulting him across the combat deck. He heard Grant curse and Domi cry out as they staggered under the sudden increase in velocity.
The increase ended as unexpectedly as it began. The hovertank did not gradually lose its momentum or speed; it just stopped as violently as if it had collided with a brick wall.
