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Bonnie accelerated out across the the paved area that surrounded the perimeter of the Ziggurat. She saw sun-warmed green and yellow pavement all fuzzy with reflected UV. Bonnie thought it was strange how inside the Zig, everything had been torn to shit, and outside it looked like everything was normal. Well, normal except for the giant-ass half-melted ship rammed into the side of the Zig.

There were even cars in the parking lot. She drove over the front end of one for fun and heard complaints and shouts from the rear that she mistook for joyful exclamations. This, she thought, is gonna be fun. She approached the chain link fence that separated the parking area from the field of green, bioengineered Grazzu-B turf they'd cross before they hit the dunes.

“Zero minutes, one second remaining,” MUNI 5-7 said. Alvin just said, “Ah, shit,” because he knew that he was now living on borrowed time.

Hi-5 fired six rounds in a left to right, rapid-fire burst, across the middle of the fence in front of the Thumper APC. The laser in the turret read the metal and sinewy plastic fibers of the fence and transmitted ranging data to the shells that exploded for Bonnie as beautiful, blue-white blossoms of heat and color that grew green and yellow near the edges. She was going fast and the flowers barely had a chance to cool to a pthalo blue before the Thumper burst through the remainder of the fence, leaving heavy tracks in the Grazzu-B engineered turf, the phyto-assassin that smothers all others. It was a jealous and vengeful plant that would tolerate none other than itself. It was an expression of the G.S.A., and Bonnie enjoyed crushing it with the Thumper's giant wheels.

Hi-5 let high-explosive shells fly in the path of the Thumper, clearing out land mines. The explosions sent plumes of Grazzu and dirty root clumps high into the air. The mines threw shrapnel that pecked at the hull of the Thumper.

Hi-5 was targeting through a video display in front of her with simulated depth and a decent compliment of sensors to augment the data from the stereo cameras mounted on the turret. The explosions she drew in a mine-clearing dotted line were bright purple in her thermal display, and the landscape in front of her was shown in a crisp detail thanks to twin radar systems pulsing high-energy and feeding it to the imaging systems five hundred times every second. She hooted, and from the rear troop compartment they watched the lower half of her body leaning slightly left and right with the turret's view as her body reacted unconsciously to the simulated vista in front of her.

Casper could hear everything and see nothing until he noticed a flat, unriveted area with a single button underneath inscribed with a circle and a vertical line that began at the center of the circle and extended outside it a bit. Power. He pushed it and activated the screen set into the forward bulkhead. The dim of the Thumper's rear compartment became brightly lit with the wild explosions, and they cast deep, disorienting shadows all around the interior. He knew the sound of shrapnel against steel now, but it was less scary when you saw the explosion, too. Hi-5 was ripping up the path in front of them with liberal use of ammunition. Casper had no idea how much the Thumper carried, but he guessed it would be enough. The minefield couldn't go on forever. Then they'd see the dogs again.

In the bright, flashing orange and yellow of the rear compartment, Catherine watched Padre Pedro swearing with true vehemence. There weren't enough harnesses, and every time Bonnie drove over something that made the Thumper bounce, he'd pop up and hit the back of his head on a low hanging structural reinforcement. She was enjoying that, and she thought Alvin would too, after what she knew Pedro had done to him in the basement of the POP club. That couldn't have been fun, she was sure, but Alvin wasn't even bothering to watch the show. He just bounced next to the three hundred pound Big Baby Bomb that the Sons of Caine held in place with hands everywhere on its polished metal, egg-shaped casing. He only had minutes left, she noted. Catherine had figured out immediately that if MUNI 5-7 started to spoof the timer on the Big Baby at one second, then Alvin would have no time to escape the blast. He had to stay attached, along with the AI that had hitched a ride in his head. Short ride, she thought.

Bonnie guided the Thumper out of the Ziggurat's Grazzu-B fringe and entered the chromium dunes. Some of the craters looked fresh. She saw plenty of warm yellow, shallow concavities against the orange-yellow sand where exploding mines had exposed darker material that warmed faster in the sun.

Hi-5's fire made a never-ending string of blue and green blossoms in the Thumper's path. There were less secondary explosions than before – less land mines now, Bonnie thought. According to the console in front of her, she'd been averaging a brisk 72 miles per hour since they left. The Big Baby was equal to a little less than a half-megaton nuke. She'd been driving for over a minute. They were probably far enough away to drop the Big Baby and run. She knew they'd be dropping Alvin with it, and that was no fun. Bonnie thought she'd drive just a little farther. Nobody wants to step on a land mine. She made a point to zoom over the top of a small dune as she watched the world exploding in front of her. It felt good.

Bonnie saw the dogs far off on the top of a dune in warm yellow-greenish groups like schools of tropical fish. They looked better in emerald-vision but she couldn't see their eyes yet. They were mad with rabies, and she wondered if they'd charge the APC when Hi-5 stopped blowing up the dunes in front of them.

'AMMUNITION DEPLETED'. The words blinked in front of Hi-5's eyes in the very foreground of the simulated-depth display so the gunner couldn't miss it. For Hi-5, it was like seeing the words 'GAME OVER', and she slammed the display in front of her with her palm. She slid out of the turret control chair and yelled up to Bonnie, “All out of the BOOM BOOM, baby! Drive carefully!” Hi-5 edged around the raised chair and looked back into the passenger compartment. Without the explosions, it looked dull, red-lit, and a little glum. She looked at the faces of the Sons of Caine and decided the lighting wasn't to blame for the glum atmosphere. Casper looked numb, and even Otis was just staring at the floor. The APC slowed. Carlos met her eyes, and even he looked a little melancholic for a man who'd just been there and back again to return to a fat-ass paycheck. As the Thumper came to a rough stop on the upside of a shallow dune, Hi-5 remembered they were dropping someone off with the bomb.

Bonnie dropped herself to the sand on her good leg and limped to the rear of the Thumper, still amped up from the blue action derm and feeling no pain, but not quite as giddy as she was. She knew why. She popped the hatch for the passengers, and as she opened it, the sunlight that reflected off the bleached, toxic sands burned the eyes of everyone inside.

Catherine hopped out first, pulled Padre Pedro out after her and let him fall into the hot sand face-first. She rolled him over a few times with her boot until he was out of the way. Then the Sons of Caine unloaded the Big Baby. Alvin hopped out immediately after, tethered by the five-foot, shrink wrapped ponytail that ran off the back of the neural-interface cap and into the bomb. He didn't look as morose as everybody else. Carlos recognized that look. Resigned to Die. Alvin had been pretty close to it ever since they'd met. Carlos had seen it before, and he thought he might be happy if he never had to see it again. He couldn't figure out if it was better to know what was coming ahead of time and have a chance to make peace with it, or to just blink out without knowing what hit you. Almost nobody gets to decide which it's gonna be. Sometimes you know five years ahead, sometimes a millisecond, and for Alvin Doc Ellis it was a little over ten minutes. He asked Alvin, “So, um how long?” Alvin stared off into the dunes at a pack of wild dogs that were thinking about what a big, tasty piece of meat the Thumper was, and if they could creep up on it and encircle it before it had a chance to bolt.

“What?”

“How long? How far into overtime are we?” Carlos needed to know. A five percent chance of blowing up is a pretty big risk when you're rolling the dice every second.

Alvin fell to the ground backwards, straight as a board. He started shaking again, and the blood began to flow from his nostrils and down his cheeks, over the smears where he'd wiped it off only eighteen minutes ago.