Claudette didn't look around, preferring to keep her eyes firmly fixed on the sec men, but Ayesha could feel— almost see—her look of disbelief.

 

 "Girl, tell me that you're shitting me," she said quietly.

 

 "I'm telling you straight, sister," Ayesha reassured her. "There's going to be an ambush on the two convoys by a group that has as much reason to hate my father and the scum Hutter as much as we have. And they're armed and ready for a firefight. We're safe as long as we keep these assholes quiet."

 

 "How the fuck—?"

 

 "It doesn't matter now," Ayesha interrupted. "The only thing that matters is that we keep this wag rolling, and no one gets any notion that anything is wrong until we reach the meeting point. And then it'll be too late."

 

 "It's risky," Claudette commented.

 

 "So's anything," Ayesha returned. "What else can we do? If we break ranks and try to get this wag to run for it, they outnumber us in wags and firepower. All we can do is sit tight and wait."

 

 "Okay, if that's the way it's got to be, then that's the way it will be." Claudette shrugged. "I just hope we can carry it off, babe."

 

  

 

 Chapter Sixteen

 

  

 

 It stood impassive and still under the burning heat of the rad-blasted sun, the sky a haze that shimmered above its topmost reaches. Formed of two groupings of rock that stood upright in the middle of the desert, with no other outcrops within sight, it was noble and awesome in its apparent ability to stand alone and unbowed against the elements.

 

 The reddish-brown rocks were jagged and uneven, rising and falling in a series of peaks and troughs that seemed to mirror one another, with a channel in the middle that was surprisingly clear of rock falls. The fact that it stood alone meant that the elements had been equally harsh to each side of the outcrop, hence the similarity between the breaks and erosions along the top of the standing stones.

 

 For that was what the two sides of jagged rock resembled. With their equal measures of wear and erosion, they looked uncannily as though they had been formed of individual stones that had been moved slowly and arduously across the empty desert by men, and then assembled into this pattern for a reason that could only be guessed. But once the men had vanished, the stones had become rocks, the very elements causing them to spread out and web together.

 

 At each end of the outcrop there was a narrow channel, wide enough for two wags to fit side by side. This widened to about three times that width as the center of the small valley was reached. It was enough space for the trade to take place with both sides having room to move, but not enough to try any kind of maneuver. The rock on each side seemed too sheer for anyone to hide out or be strategically placed by one side seeking to gain advantage over the other. And the outcrop, standing solitary and magnificent as it did, fell almost exactly equidistant from the villes of Summerfield and Charity, meaning that neither side had to lose face by traveling a longer distance than the other to make the trade. A small thing in many ways, it was a matter of vital importance to both barons if they were to keep their prestige both in their own minds, and in the minds of their people.

 

 The interior of the valley was smooth on this fine morning, the earth now dry and baked as the sun drew the moisture from it that had fallen during the chem storm. There was little sign of the churning mud pools and ridges that had been whipped up in the desert around the outcrop. The shape and position of the rocks had acted as a shield against the stronger winds, losing another layer of shale and rock on the outside as the chem-laden rain had lashed against it, but reducing the turmoil within to a minimum. Dean had been right in his assumption that the enclosed valley would throw up clouds of dust. The baking earth was nowhere near cracking, but already the layer of top-soil was so powdery and dry that any disturbance was likely to shake it loose and raise clouds of dust. But it was a fairly smooth and unpitted surface that would allow for a maximum of driving maneuverability.

 

 As the only area for miles around with some kind of shade or moisture retained in the shadowy areas of the rocks, it harbored not only the small amounts of hardy plant life that could be seen in the surrounding area, but also acted as home to a small colony of insects, reptiles and mammals that were descended from meerkats and gophers, mutated into a scrawny yet defiant species that could scavenge and survive on very little, driven by instinct to defeat the odds and carry on.

 

 But not today. As if some instinct for danger had told them as much, the scant wildlife that lived off the outcrop had dived for cover, retreating into their burrows and seeking security within the recesses of the rocks.

 

 It was always quiet in and around the area, but this morning, as the sun hit the middle of the sky and the middle of the day, it became quieter still. There was a stillness and silence around the rocks that spoke of chilling and imminent death.

 

 The silence was broken by a distant buzz, which grew in volume, deepened in tone, until it became a rumble. If any of the creatures that were now safely in hiding had cared to look, it would have seen a moving cloud of dust coming toward the rocks, with the outlines of a group of wags just about visible within the flying layers of dust and soil.

 

 The Hellbenders were nearing their goal. In the leading wag, Ryan and Krysty could see the distant speck on the horizon begin to grow and take shape as they got closer. Within a few minutes, they could see that the tall, thin outcrop formed a valley, with a narrow channel both in and out of the enclosed space.

 

 "That's it?" Ryan questioned, although all he really needed was confirmation.

 

 "That's it," Correll affirmed. He was driving the wag one-handed, his sinewy wrist strong enough to control the wag's steering over the rough ground, his knuckles white around the wheel. His other hand was caressing the box that was still cradled on his lap.

 

 "You want to tell us what that's all about?" Krysty asked in a gentle voice. She had noticed that Correll had been staring down at the box more and more as they approached the rendezvous point, muttering under his breath in an intense manner, even though it was too quiet for her to work out exactly what he was saying. All she knew was that every time she looked at him, her sentient mane began to curl around her neck in a manner that even the thought of the impending firefight couldn't affect. She had the notion that Correll was being driven by an inner fire and flame that he would need to vent in order for them to understand why this firefight was taking place, and in order to make him more coherent during the battle ahead. Because of Doc, she had seen what madness could do, and the thought of that from someone directing a firefight wasn't something she wished to consider. The followed him loyally and to the letter. If he was to stay on the track of sanity, then it was best to probe this matter now.

 

 "You know the basic story," Correll replied, his eyes darting from the track ahead to the box on his lap.

 

 "Yeah, mebbe, but there's more to it than what you've told us so far, right?" she continued gently.

 

 "Mebbe." Correll was silent for a second, but Krysty didn't respond. She wanted to let him tell the story in his own time. The Hellbenders in the wag stayed silent, not knowing quite how to react. Ryan, for his part, kept his own counsel. He figured that Krysty knew what she was doing, and that she would draw the secret of the box from Correll when the gaunt man was ready. He didn't have to wait long, for in the empty silence, Correll chose to begin his story.

 

 "Thing is, friends, I told you something of what happened, but not all of it. Because there are some things that are hard to speak of, even when you want to explain. Some things that seem to stick in your throat, and no matter how hard you try to force them out, they just won't come. And they gather within you, festering like a poison in an infected wound, until there comes a time when you just cannot keep it in any longer. You have to force it out, break the skin and bleed the wound so that the pure blood can start to run free once more, and the healthiness can return to the wound. And that's what I'm trying to do now. That's what this is—for all of us except you and your friends—to our different levels. We all have those wounds. I figure that mine are worse than anyone else's, but then that's because they're mine. Any one of us on this convoy could say the same thing.

 

 "But if you knew why, if you understood the depths of degradation and despair, the very bottom of the pit that I feel that I've been staring up from for so long, this is my chance to clean the slate, to climb up the sides of that pit and get out where the air is fresh and sweet again. And if I buy the farm in the attempt? Well, what have I done but buy a way out of this misery and my own hell? Oblivion cannot be any more painful than what has been before."

 

 He stopped, almost as though exhausted by the outburst, and Ryan cast his eye over Krysty. Her hair clung to her neck and shoulders in long tendrils, and his suspicion was confirmed. The man was raving, and on the verge of losing all control. If he did, then where would they stand when the firefight began?

 

 The one-eyed man had rarely felt less in control of a situation than he did at this minute. His people were spread out over three wags in a convoy bound for a full-scale firefight with two other convoys, and at the helm was a madman. There had to be some way of pulling this together, if only he could communicate with J.B., Mildred and Doc, with Jak and Dean…and Danny, whose warnings were proving only too prophetic.

 

 Before he had a chance to formulate any kind of plan, Correll had begun once more.

 

 "See, I was head of sec in Charity, and I was real diligent. I did my job properly, not from any great sense of loyalty or duty, but just because that's the way I'm made— I couldn't do it any other way, it just wouldn't feel right. And I was real careful. My people were good, because I made damn sure they were. I wouldn't have any screwing around that could reflect badly on me, or put anyone in danger of Jourgensen's wrath,' cause he was a mean bastard, and I just wanted to keep him happy and do the job. If any of my people got in the shit, he'd have their tits or balls in a vise. He was an evil asshole, and still is. But I didn't know just how fucking evil until he thought I'd done him wrong.

 

 "See, there was a breach of sec when we were overseeing a trading convoy that passed through. The trader tried to rip off Jourgensen by selling him some shit rat poison instead of jolt, and it's only because Jourgensen's personal drug taster took some and died puking out his own intestines that we knew it was shit. Hell, looking back, I wish it had been Jourgensen himself who tried it, greedy asshole that he is. But no, he couldn't even oblige us on that.

 

 "I had the trader chased, but he slipped past the sec patrol pursuing him. Jourgensen was in a shit bad mood because he'd lost jack and face, and couldn't even get high to make up for it. So he had the patrol chilled and called me before him.

 

 "I'd never fucked up before—I'd have long since been chilled if that was the case, but even this time I knew that I hadn't fucked up. Jourgensen left it nearly a day before trying the merchandise. If the shithead had any sense at all, he would have had his taster try it before handing over the jack. So it was too late for my men to pick up the trail and catch the prick who did it. Not their fault, not mine.

 

 "But after they'd been chilled, I was told what a useless piece of shit I was, and how I was probably behind the plot to kill him. The crazy paranoid bastard had turned the whole thing into a conspiracy against him. And I was the one whose ass he wanted. Only he wasn't just going to chill me. Oh no, he was going to make me suffer first.

 

 "I was beaten senseless—but well, I've got to give them that. It was my own men who did it, but I can't blame them. They were acting under orders, and you don't go against Baron Al. They beat me until I was in so much pain that I couldn't even think. Everything seemed to come to me from a long way away, as though in some kind of bad dream. But I wasn't allowed to lose consciousness, not at any point. They knew exactly the nerve points to jolt me back if I started to fall.

 

 "I knew I was bound to be chilled, but I didn't give a fuck by then. Let it happen, release me from the pain. But he went too far—just that touch of fuckwit sadism that's sealed his fate. See, he wasn't content with it just being me. He had to bring Becky into it."

 

 "Who was Becky?" Krysty asked as Correll lapsed once more into silence.

 

 "She was my woman. Mebbe the only thing—person— I ever really cared about. I never liked people that much. That's why I was so good at my job—I could do it without getting involved, without caring. But Becky was different. She was the only thing I would have died for. Only that bastard Jourgensen didn't give me the chance.

 

 "While I was lying there, sec men over me, too fucked up with pain to move, he had her brought in. They stripped her, and then he fucked her in front of me. And he had the others do it, too. That was bad enough for her, she was crying like I'd never heard, looking at me like she didn't know whether to feel bad for herself or for me, despite how much she was hurting. That chilled part of me more than any physical pain could.

 

 "And then he got out the branding irons. He used them on the horses we have, to mark them as his own. Just aJ mark beaten out of metal. He fired them up, and he did it himself. He branded each tit, then both cheeks on her ass. He made a line of them on her belly, and each time she screamed with the pain, and passed out, they'd bring her around with cold water and he'd start again. They spread her legs, and he branded her between the legs, burning the flesh and hair so that— Oh God, I can still smell it."

 

 Correll was silent again for a few seconds. Ryan and Krysty left him alone, waiting for him to be ready to begin again as he stroked the box on his lap.

 

 "And then it got to the point where she was near death, and he still wanted more. I swear the sick fuck had forgotten I was there by then, and he just wanted to please himself.

 

 "They took her out into the yard at the back of his palace, and there was a stake hammered into the ground. Kindling had been piled around it, and they tied her to the stake, bundling the kindling around her feet and legs. Two of them held me up while I was made to watch. Becky was in no kind of state to fight against them—anyway, she was just one woman and there were so many of them. They tied her against the stake, then Jourgensen went up to her and fired up the kindling. That was when she started to scream. Yeah, she'd made noises before, but all the fight had been knocked out of her. But this was different. She was wide awake, totally conscious now, and knew she was going to buy the farm. And do it in a way that— Fuck it, I can't think of a worse way to go. The flames licked up her legs, and I swear I could see the flesh blistering as the heat got under her skin. The smell was horrible—sweet and strong, like roasting fat. I could see the flames traveling up her naked body, touching her and making her burn. I swear to anything that you can call a god that I could see her intestines roasting and burning away, I could see her bones start to show as the flesh and fat burned off them.

 

 "I don't think she died until her guts spilled out and burned away. It must…"

 

 He stopped, and paused for a few moments before continuing.

 

 "Anyway, that asshole Al decided to save me for the next day. And that was his mistake. They left me alone, figuring that I couldn't move far enough and fast enough to be a danger. Wrong. I had enough willpower to get the hell out. I was head of sec, y'see. I knew where the wags were, how to hotwire one, when the sec patrols were due and who was on them. But first I had to do something. I went back to the fire and gathered together what was left of Becky. I took her with me and got the hell out. I didn't know where I was going, and I thought I was on my way to buy the farm…but on my own terms.

 

 "But it didn't work out that way, did it? Fate will always decide. And it decided for me. It took me up that mountain to meet the end, but instead I found that old tech base. It was fate that then brought the others to me."

 

 He looked down at the box.

 

 "And it's fate that has finally brought us here, my love. Fate that has decreed we have a chance to be revenged. And if I buy the farm and join you, then so be it."

 

  

 

 Chapter Seventeen

 

  

 

 As the wags approached the outcrop, Correll picked up the radio transmitter in front of him and patched in to the other wags in the convoy, ordering them into the positions they had seen sketched on the map back at the redoubt. His voice was firm and clear, with no indication of the emotional catharsis he had been through just a few minutes before. Ryan and Krysty sat in the wag and observed in silence. There was no way they could communicate their concerns to each other, let alone to their comrades in the other wags. All they could do was sit tight and wait for that opening to occur.

 

 "No sign of the trade convoys yet," Correll commented as he drove the leading wag through the gap in the outcrop and into what would soon be the arena for the final battle.

 

 "Making good time, then," Ryan replied, keeping his voice level. Yet there was something about it that made Cy turn sharply, even if Correll didn't notice.

 

 "What else?" the sec man asked.

 

 Ryan shrugged. "Nothing. The desert was pretty bad in places, so much mud, dust and quicksand. Could have delayed us."

 

 "Could have delayed them, too," Cy answered. He seemed to be reassured in some way, but there was a faint querulousness to his tone that suggested he still felt something wasn't quite right. He just couldn't define what that may be.

 

 "If they've actually set off," Krysty pointed out. "We have no way of knowing this for sure."

 

 "They will have," Correll said with a cast-iron certainty in his tone. "They've got no choice. It's this or a long, hard chill for both of them."

 

 He drove his wag to the center of the dust bowl that was in front of the outcrop, then veered to the left, taking the wide load through a gap that was so narrow it almost scraped the paint from the side of the wag. As he took this path, the second wag, driven by J.B., went a little farther on and then took a right fork, finding its shelter behind another gap in the rock wall. Two wags followed each lead, and then the wags positioned themselves near the gaps, hidden from view but with an easy access to each end of the outcrop.

 

 "That's their big mistake, Jourgensen and Hutter," Correll remarked to Ryan, although it seemed almost as though he were talking to himself. "They haven't done their research properly. They'll have their sec look out for something at each end, but they don't know about these channels. They won't know that we're hidden, waiting to circle around and take them out."

 

 And it was true. Ryan looked out of the side window on the wag door. The gap in the outcrop was barely wide enough to pilot a wag through, but if taken with care it could be achieved. They were approximately halfway along the length of the arena, with the rock channel twisting in front of them and leading out at an oblique angle to the main track the trade wags would be taking. From the approach, that exit was well hidden, and it would be easy for the Hellbenders' wags to slip out and circle around to close off the entrances. In the heat of a firefight, these would be the only other avenues of escape, and Correll had plans to seal them off.

 

 He picked up the handset and called J.B.

 

 "You got the packages?"

 

 "Yeah," J.B. replied simply.

 

 Correll nodded to himself, satisfied with what was about to take place. "Okay, you and Jenny get them delivered. You got the remotes?"

 

 "Yeah, and tested," J.B. answered. "The signals are fine, just got to prime 'em."

 

 "Okay." Correll paused for a second, and Krysty felt a cold shiver run through her as she caught the gleam in his eyes. It was the culmination of his plans, and he was relishing every moment. "Let's do it," he said simply.

 

 At this signal, the assembled Hellbenders sprang into action. J.B. and Jenny left their wag to plant plas-ex charges at the mouth of the rock channels, which they would detonate with remote detonators. J.B. jogged back to the entrance to the channel and began to climb the rocks, searching for handholds and testing them before supporting his weight and hauling himself up to a point where the rock had a deep crevice. He took the charge from a bag slung over his shoulder and punched in the code that would make it respond to the detonator he had in his pocket. The lights on the digital display of the small detonating device flashed the code back at him, then settled into one small, red, blinking light that affirmed the readiness of the device. This achieved, he secured its place in the crevice and scrambled back down.

 

 While he did this, Jenny had sprinted across the length of the arena toward the opposite channel opening, and had started to climb, searching for hand- and footholds as she went. With a speed that wasn't surprising given her lithe build, she scaled the wall of the channel, finding a ledge on which to place her charge. It wasn't a crevice in the manner of the hiding place J.B. had found, so she had to secure the plas-ex in place with adhesive tape, hoping that this and the natural texture of the plas-ex would be enough to keep it in place until the charge was detonated. In truth, it was likely that even if the charge became dislodged and fell to the foot of the opening, it would still rip out enough rock to cause a fall and block the channel. She punched in the sec code as J.B. had done, checked that the single red light was flashing and then quickly descended, sprinting across the arena to return to her wag.

 

 Meanwhile, the other preparations were taking place. Although the desert floor outside the outcrop was too disturbed by the chem storm, and too pitted and scarred to show any giveaway wag tracks, inside the arena itself the surface of the earth was relatively smooth and undisturbed, so any recent wag tracks would be all too visible. To this end, Correll had ordered that, on their arrival and secretion, some of his people would leave their wags and, using brushes they had brought with them from the redoubt, would clear the surface of any telltale wag tracks.

 

 It was a risk. If the surface had been muddy and the weight of the wags had caused the tracks to be sunk into the earth beyond a certain depth, it would have proved difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate their traces. However, Correll had figured that the desert surface would have dried out and returned to its sunbaked hardness by the time their convoy had arrived, leaving just the disturbed top layer of sandy soil to be raked over by the brushes.

 

 He was right. Led and directed by Rudi, ten of the Hellbenders set to with speed and alacrity to scour the surface of the arena, their ears bent toward the sound of distant wags and the rumble of heavy duty wheels that would signal the imminent arrival of their quarry. The ten Hellbenders worked hard, and in a surprisingly short time had completed their task, working from the center out toward the sides of the arena, brushing and raking themselves clear back to the channel openings on each side, enabling them to return to their wags without leaving a sign of their passing.

 

 Correll used the radio to confirm that each Hellbender had returned to his or her post.

 

 "What now?" Krysty asked him.

 

 The gaunt man fixed her with a stare that had the lust of battle mixed with a strange glow of almost infinite contentment.

 

 "We wait," he said simply.

 

 "THERE IT IS, baron. I hope you're ready for this," Elias Tulk said softly as he piloted the leading wag toward the outcrop, which became larger with each passing minute, the narrow entrance framed by forbidding rocks that reached to the chem-clouded sky. Tulk added, after looking up at the sky, "Yeah, I really hope you are ready, 'cause it looks like it's headed for a sandstorm to me."

 

 Tad Hutter gave Tulk a sideways glance that could have chilled him on the spot. "You being funny, boy?"

 

 "Call it that if you want," Tulk answered, "but you just take a look up at that sky and tell me I'm wrong."

 

 Hutter looked up at the sky through the windshield of the wag, and could immediately see that the chem clouds had returned to the previously hazy but clear atmosphere. They were scudding across the bloated red orb of the sun, and indicated that there were conflicting air pressures and zephyrs in among them.

 

 "Fuck it, that's all we need," he murmured, annoyed both at the approaching storm and at the fact that Tulk had been proved right. If there was one thing of which Hutter was certain, it was that Tulk wouldn't live long when they returned to Summerfield.

 

 "I figure that we're in for a sandstorm with it," Tulk continued, making a point of ignoring his baron's hostility. "With those kind of winds blowing up there, all it's gonna take is for one little sidewinder to come down and touch base, and it's gonna be a whole lot of fun. Let's hope we don't get it at the rendezvous, eh?" And he allowed himself a small grin at this.

 

 They continued in silence, the outcrop looming larger. Tulk slowed his wag, wanting to take a good look at the approaching rendezvous point. It would seem that they were the first to arrive, as the shape of the arena within the outcrop allowed him to see virtually all angles—certainly enough angles to show any wags that were attempting to hide within. The arena was clear, and the far entrance was empty. He didn't know about the channels to the side of the arena, and a flutter of fear crossed his stomach. What if the Hellbenders hadn't showed? How the hell would he cope with a pissed-off Hutter after the trade? He didn't mind dying in a firefight or hand-to-hand combat, as long as Hutter bought the farm. But if he had to go back to Summerfield, he knew that his chilling would be painful and drawn out after the way he had treated the baron.

 

 Mebbe Correll knew something he didn't, and everything was okay. He could only hope so. He spoke again, trying to keep the sudden wave of fear from his voice.

 

 "Looks like we're the first here," he said simply.

 

 Hutter grunted. "Take it to the entrance and then stop. We'll wait there—that way they can't encircle us."

 

 "Okay," Tulk replied simply. It seemed to him that Hutter had momentarily forgotten their little conflict in his anxiety at making the trade. Which was okay…for now.

 

 Tulk drove to the mouth of the arena and stopped the wag. Hutter shifted in his seat. "Come on, boy, we've got some orders to hand out," he muttered as he left the wag.

 

 Tulk joined him, leaving the other sec men in the lead wag on lookout for the approach of the Charity convoy, which would be plainly visible through the opposing gap in the rocks.

 

 Hutter moved back down the wags, ordering his men to keep alert. His basic plan was that they would begin to move into the outcrop at the same pace as the Charity convoy, beginning when Jourgensen's men hit the far entrance, so that both convoys could keep equal pace and distance.

 

 "We don't move to hand anything over until I've spoke to Jourgensen. Then we unload our wags and place the goods in the center, between the two leading wags, while they lead the women out. When they're both in the center, then we swap and retreat, keeping our blasters on them."

 

 "What do we do if this storm blows up?" Tulk asked.

 

 Hutter gave him another chilling look. "We hope it doesn't," he replied.

 

 INSIDE THE WAG containing the women who were the trade for Summerfield, Claudette kept her Uzi trained on the driver and shotgun sec, while Ayesha watched the women.

 

 "How near are we?" Ayesha said shortly.

 

 "How the fuck should I know?" the driver replied testily. "I can't see squat for all the dust in front of me. I'm just following the wag in front."

 

 "Won't your daddy use the radio when we get near?" Claudette asked with a sneer.

 

 "Don't give me shit with the attitude," Ayesha snapped. "You think if I had any feelings left for that cock sucking son of a gaudy whore I'd be doing this? No, I'd be going forth like the dutiful daughter and getting screwed by every man in Summerfield."

 

 "Okay, I get it," Claudette replied reluctantly, "so I'll say it again without the sarcasm. Won't Baron Al have orders to give over the radio when we get near?"

 

 "I'd guess so," Ayesha replied thoughtfully. "Is that what he's told you?" she directed toward the driver.

 

 The two sec men stayed silent for a moment, considering whether they should answer, before the man riding shotgun said reluctantly, "He told us that we'd get a call from him when we were within ten minutes' drive. That way we'd be prepared when we get there."

 

 "And you know what 'there' looks like?" Ayesha pressed.

 

 "Yeah," the sec man replied without elaborating.

 

  Claudette spared a glance at Ayesha; it was a glance filled with surprise: "You're shitting me," she whispered. "He never told you what was going to happen?"

 

 Ayesha turned on Claudette angrily. "In case it's escaped your notice, I'm a piece of meat just like you, babe. I didn't get fuck all of a say in what happened to me, and I'm damn sure that under the circumstances there was no way my lovely father was going to tell me anything that was going on. You understand that now?"

 

 "Yeah, I think I do," Claudette said quietly,

 

 "Good, well, let's just get it together here, because we really need to get some kind of a plan together. You," she snapped at the sec man who was riding shotgun, and who had been turned uncomfortably toward them for some time, frightened to move in case he got blown to pieces, "what happens when we get to the rendezvous?"

 

 "You get exchanged for the seed crops and the food supplies," the man replied simply.

 

 Ayesha sighed heavily. "Don't be a stupe, or else I'll just get Claudette to blow you away, okay? I mean tell me exactly what happens, and mebbe you'll get out of here in one piece."

 

 The sec man paused for a second, unsure as to whether he should say anything.

 

 "Okay, I'll tell you. The plan is that we rendezvous at a bunch of rocks that form an enclosure, kinda like the field where we primed the wags. That means that we're covered on all sides, and there's only us and the guys from Summerfield in the middle, with no way of anyone sneaking around from the sides, 'cause there's only one exit at each end. So when we're there, we wait for them and then we get ourselves into the middle of the space, and we make the trade. If all goes well, and we get to do it, then you get led out in those shackles—" he inclined his head to the chains and cuffs that were spread on the floor of the wag "—and then we exchange you. They load you up, we load up the trade and we both back out slowly, keeping an eye on each other."

 

 "You're not just handing over the wag?" Ayesha asked, a sudden wave of nausea riding up her throat.

 

 "Hell, no," the sec man replied, "you think we'd hand over something as good as this? Anyway, they might think that it's booby-trapped. We'd suspect it of them, right?"

 

 "Oh, shit," Ayesha said softly.

 

 "What do you mean, 'oh shit' ?" Claudette asked. Ayesha looked at her. "I thought they'd just swap wags. I told the others that we'd hold this wag and stop these bastards blasting them as long as they left us alone. But what the fuck are we going to do if we have to leave the wag? Especially if we have to wear those stupe things," she added, indicating the shackles.

 

 "Okay, girl, don't panic about it," Claudette said, a look crossing her face that showed she was deep in thought. A thought that was interrupted by Anita, who still—after all this time—hadn't stopped crying.

 

 "I told you that it was useless. We're all just meat, and we're going to be used by those vile bastards."

 

 "Will you shut the fuck up, you irritating bitch?" Claudette snapped, taking a step back and swinging the barrel of the Uzi so that it caught the heavy blonde full across the face, leaving her mouth a smear of blood and saliva, stunning her so much that she couldn't even squeal or cry anymore. Before the sec man had a chance to move, the iron-faced young woman had the blaster trained back on him.

 

 "We're going to have to go through with it at least part of the way," Ayesha said softly. "No matter what the plan was, we're going to have to go out there with these shackles on."

 

 "We can't do that," Claudette answered. "If we even make an effort to do that, then we're in the shit. We can't step out of here holding blasters, and these mothers will have to have some to make it look convincing, otherwise we bring the whole of the sec down on us."

 

 "There has to be a way around this," Ayesha said, picking up the shackles and looking at them. On a close inspection, she could see that the cuffs could be left unlocked and uncoupled without it appearing too obvious. She looked at the other women. "Are you with us or against us?" she asked.

 

 The majority of them agreed, glad of any opportunity to try to escape. Those who were initially unwilling reluctantly agreed when they saw they were outvoted. Even Anita grudgingly agreed between spitting out mouthfuls of blood and sobbing.

 

 "Okay, here's what we do," Ayesha said. "We take the blasters and conceal them, leaving these assholes with one empty blaster that they can wave around. We go out with the shackles undone, and when it all goes down we head back for the wag and secure it. That sound good?"

 

 "It sounds risky," Claudette stated, "but it's better than anything I've come up with, so it'll have to do."

 

 "Ya know, babe, I don't think we're in any position to worry about it," Ayesha said. "We'll just have to roll with it."

 

 Claudette shrugged, and was just about to comment when the voice of Baron Al crackled over the radio. "The rendezvous point is in sight. The Summerfield convoy is there, and it looks like we've got a dust storm brewing."

 

  

 

 Chapter Eighteen

 

  

 

 Correll looked up and sniffed the air. He was standing beside his wag, and had been there ever since the distant rumble of an approaching convoy had been detected. The rumble had gotten nearer and finally ground to a halt, the wag engines just ticking over as the Summerfield convoy stood inert at the entrance to the arena, waiting for the rival convoy to arrive. From the opposite direction, a different pitch of noise signaled the approach of the Charity convoy.

 

 Ryan joined Correll and looked up at the skies.

 

 "Storm," he said simply.

 

 Correll nodded assent. "That'll be good. We may be determined, but we are outnumbered. Mebbe the confusion will even the odds for us."

 

 Ryan agreed. "We know who we're attacking. They won't be sure what the hell is going on."

 

 Correll allowed himself the ghost of a smile, which seemed oddly out of place on his gaunt countenance, and for one second gave the one-eyed man an insight into the man Correll may once have been.

 

 But before it could go any further, Catherine came running up to Correll.

 

 "Papa Joe, they're all in place. Should I send the lookouts up?"

 

 Correll's face once again became grim and set as he nodded before turning and mounting the wag once more. Ryan, left standing, followed the small blonde as she ran back to the wag in which she had traveled. It was the one in which Dean, Jak, Doc and Danny had also journeyed. That meant that only J.B. and Mildred would be attacking from the other side, and be that much more isolated from their companions. But J.B. was more than just Ryan's trusted lieutenant. The two men had spent so long fighting together that in many ways they thought as one, as well as fought as one.

 

 Ryan wondered who would be the lookout on that side of the divide. This side he figured was obvious.

 

 Catherine reached her wag and climbed aboard, looking across to Jak. "Let's go," she said to him as she took the radio handset from Lonnie and rapped the one word— "Search"—before ceasing transmission.

 

 The albino hunter rose from his seat with an effortless grace and took a portable handset from the blonde, who turned to him and said, "You know when?"

 

 Jak assented. "At point exchange—most vulnerable."

 

 "Right." She nodded. "Good luck."

 

 Jak left the wag without another word, pausing only to clasp Dean's hand. The next time they saw each other, the firefight would well and truly commence.

 

 Outside, in the narrow channel they were using as a hiding place, there was little space between the walls of rock and the sides of the wags, and Jak skipped down between them, away from Ryan as he stood watching. The albino hunter was searching for a good place to begin his climb. He found it just past the rear wag, where there was a small split in one of the rocks that gave him a good hand- and toehold. Hoisting himself up, Jak began to scale the rock, which rose for forty feet and was almost sheer.

 

 The sandstone was soft and inclined to crumble, so the ascent was slower than the youth would have liked, each hold having to be tested for weight before he placed himself at its mercy. The quality of the rock was of concern to him. When he reached the summit of the rock, and was observing the trade-off below, he had to be careful that no stray gravel, rocks or pebbles be dislodged and alert the enemy below of his presence.

 

 But he would worry about that when he reached the peak. Right now he was faced with the problem of the ascent, for the rock veered out slightly. He arched his back a few degrees to make the handhold, feeling the pull of the earth below. The extra effort made him break into a sweat, and the muscles in his arms and across his shoulders tensed and cramped at the extra strain. He was fortunate that the foothold was solid and deep, so that he could plant his combat boot firmly and take the strain in his calf and thighs.

 

 One deep breath, one pull of his upper torso and it was done. He was over the worst and up to the summit.

 

 The surface on top of the rock was uneven and jagged, and Jak was faced with the problem of trying to find a niche from which he could observe the happenings below without being himself easily spotted.

 

 The rock was about four feet in thickness, more than enough for him to walk and climb comfortably along its length. He kept low, trying to adhere to a winding path along irregular dips in the top of the rock.

 

 After a couple of yards, he found what he was looking for. The rock had a hollow carved out by erosion that formed a small observation post, the rock in front of the hollow enabling him to keep out of view, but also providing—via a split down the middle of the face—a window through which he could see the arena below. Jak settled himself into the hollow and looked through the gap, defining his field of vision. It was a wide area, and obscured only the very far ends of the arena.

 

 He settled onto his haunches, beginning the wait, wondering who his opposite number may be, and how he or she was faring.

 

 ON THE FAR SIDE of the arena, in the opposite channel, the word from Catherine had come over the radio in J.B.'s wag. The Armorer turned to Jenny, who had previously indicated her willingness to tackle the task of lookout.

 

 "Ready?" he asked.

 

 The woman shrugged. "As I'll ever be," she replied before taking a handheld radio from Mildred and leaving the wag.

 

 Like Jak, she had to scan the sheer rock wall for a suitable place to begin her climb, and like the albino she was soon aware of the less than reliable nature of the rocks. She tested each hold thoroughly and hauled herself up the rock face. When she was about thirty feet up, she encountered a similar problem to Jak inasmuch as the rock seemed to curve out and over her. Unlike Jak, she didn't keep climbing, but paused for a second, casting a shrewd eye along the rock wall. If she could climb sideways for a few feet, there was a flatter part of the rock that would be easier to ascend, so she shuffled sideways, reaching out for holds until she was able to get past the outward curve and once more go upward for the last ten feet or so of the rockface.

 

 When she reached the top, she turned and looked down along the length of the channel, and noticed something that Jak had missed during his ascent—the inward curve of the rock continued all the way along the length of the tunnel, suggesting that it acted as a tunnel for any storm forces that may hit the outcrop, the actual channel being caused by wind and sand erosion. She looked up to the gathering storm above and hoped that they would be able to leave the channel before the storm began to hit hard.

 

 Like Jak, she was able to pick her way along the irregular pathway cut into the top of the rock and find herself a place to hide and observe.

 

 Now they had only to wait for the trade-off to begin.

 

 The lead wag from Charity stood at the entrance to the arena. Directly opposed was the lead wag from Summerfield. Both had their engines ticking over, both were waiting for the other to move first.

 

 "Come on," Jenny whispered to herself as she watched them from her secured position. She looked up at the sky, and hoped they would move soon.

 

 IN THE SUMMERFIELD WAG, Baron Tad Hutter was feeling much the same. So, too, was Elias Tulk, but for different reasons.

 

 Hutter glanced up at the gathering sky and frowned. "That asshole Jourgensen better start moving soon, or else this storm is gonna make things impossible."

 

 "Mebbe he's waiting for you to make the first move," Tulk said. "Mebbe you should, 'cause it sure looks as though he isn't gonna."

 

 "Shit, I don't wanna give him any ground at all, but…" He indicated to Tulk to put the wag into gear and begin to edge into the arena.

 

 ON THE FAR SIDE, Baron Al Jourgensen watched as the lead wag from the Summerfield convoy started to move into the arena.

 

 "Okay, let's do it," he said simply, indicating for his own driver to begin.

 

 The two convoys began to move slowly toward the center of the arena, each moving at a crawl to try to keep pace with the other, neither side willing to reach the middle before the other. The problem being, where was the middle of the arena? The lead wags in both convoys, stop-starting in a stuttering procession, reached a point where they were about thirty yards apart when Hutter signaled to Tulk to stop. As his wag shuddered to a halt, so Jourgensen signaled his driver to stop.

 

 The two convoys now sat, facing each other, only thirty yards apart. They were both far enough into the arena for the rear wag in each train to be well within the boundaries of the openings in the outcrop. There was plenty of space behind each wag for the Hellbenders to pen them in before beginning their attack.

 

 From their promontory positions, Jak and Jenny watched the wags proceed with mixed feelings. Jak was immobile, his red eyes fixed on the two trains, waiting patiently. Jenny, on the other hand, was less than patient, shifting uncomfortably on her perch and dividing her attention between the convoys and the sky. She was careful not to disturb or dislodge any of the rocks that surrounded the small perch she had made for herself, but nonetheless found it difficult to remain motionless. She felt itchy for action of some kind as the minutes ticked by and no one moved in any of the wags.

 

 But that didn't mean that nothing was happening.

 

 "GET THE WOMEN shackled and get them out in the open." Baron Al's voice crackled over the radio.

 

 "This is it, then," Claudette said to Ayesha.

 

 The baron's daughter nodded. "Let's get this done, then."

 

 "You'll never get away with it, you do know that, don't you?" said the sec man who had been riding shotgun. "Even if this attack from your so-called allies happens, chances are that you'll all still buy the farm. Is that really what you want?" he added, directing this away from Ayesha and Claudette and toward the other women, who had picked the shackles from the floor and were starting to put them on without closing the mechanism—even the bloodstained Anita, who had tried to clean herself up with water from the wag's supply rather than appear conspicuous. "Go through with it, keep your heads down, and all you'll get is shafted by the men of Summerfield until you make them some babies. Is that so bad?"

 

 Ayesha shrugged. "Don't you get it yet, stupe? We don't want that. We don't want to be told what to do. We want to have lives where we aren't pieces of shit to be used and abused, and frankly we'd rather get chilled than go through with it. Your way we die a long slow death for sure. But we stick this out and fight, then mebbe we've got a chance of getting away. And that chance is worth more than you could ever give."

 

 "That's a lot of words to prepare to buy the farm," he said quietly.

 

 "Which is something you would have done a long time ago if not for the fact that we need you to lead us out, so as not to look suspicious," Claudette said harshly as she unloaded the Uzi. She tossed the empty blaster to him, and he caught it before it hit him full in the face. "You can take this, but remember that I've got a handblaster, and I can draw it real quick if I have to. Understand me?"

 

 He nodded. "There should be two sec men with you. Otherwise Baron Al'll know something's wrong straight away. Davey should have been the other one," he added, with an indication of his head to where the chilled sec man was still slumped.

 

 "How inconsiderate of me to end his miserable fucking life, then," Ayesha replied sarcastically. "The driver'll just have to take his place. Will my lovely father spot that? I think not." She explained, before the sec man had a chance to answer, "Because you all look alike to him. You're just the scum that do his dirty work. So get your fat ass over here," she said to the driver, signaling him to climb over the seats and join them in the rear of the wag.

 

 "Why?" he asked, puzzled.

 

 "Oh, a triple stupe, as well, eh?" Ayesha snapped. "You know as well as I do that the two guards wouldn't both get out of the front of the wag. Everyone else in the convoy will expect one man from the rear, with the women, and one from the front, where he was riding shotgun. You're replacing the boy from the rear is all. Now fucking move!" she yelled, gesturing with her knife.

 

 The driver clambered over the seat and slid into the rear of the wag, passing near to Claudette, who gave him a warning kick—hard—to dissuade him from any idea he may have of trying to attack her. But he was just a driver, and had figured that this would be the easiest ride in the convoy. He was now pissed off and frightened. If any of the things Ayesha had said about the Hellbenders were true, there was little chance of him getting back to Charity in one piece. But every moment he could stay alive was still of the utmost importance to him, and so he complied with her request.

 

 Ayesha gave him an empty blaster and joined Claudette in appearing to secure herself in the shackles. But she still had the knife in the palm of her hand; Claudette had a handblaster up the sleeve of her shirt, and some of the other women had the liberated blasters concealed about their bodies.

 

 "Do it now," Ayesha snapped.

 

 The sec man in the front of the wag slid out of his seat, opening the door of the wag and jumping out, running around to the back and opening up the rear of the wag. Gesturing with the empty Uzi, he beckoned for the apparently shackled women to get out of the wag. This they did, with Ayesha in the lead and Claudette somewhere in the middle, looking behind her all the way to keep an eye on the driver who was acting as second sec guard. When they were all clear of the back door, the rear guard closed the door to hide the chilled body within from the eyes of the sec wag behind them.

 

 "Keep it hard," Ayesha whispered to the other women, aware of the eyes from all the sec wags that were now trained on them. There was an immense pressure on them to appear "normal" as they were seemingly led to their exchange.

 

 "Same goes for you assholes, too," Claudette added to the sec guards in an undertone.

 

 From the wags in front and behind, sec guards had appeared, climbing onto the roofs of their wags, and training their blasters on the opposing convoy. They didn't look down at the procession of women as they passed.

 

 OVER IN THE OPPOSITE convoy, Hutter watched the women as they started to walk along the side of the convoy. He was almost visibly salivating as he caught sight of Ayesha. Tulk, seated beside him, could almost read his mind, and felt physically sick for a moment, until he considered the fate that was about to befall his baron.

 

 "Ready the men," Hutter ordered, and Tulk gladly swung out of his seat and away from his loathed leader. He opened his door and jumped down from his wag, signaling to the other wags as he did so. Without the radio communications enjoyed by Jourgensen, Hutter had to rely on something as basic as one man sending out a signal. But at that moment, having witnessed the expression on the baron's face, Tulk was glad of that.

 

 At his signal, the sec men from Summerfield took their places on the wags, some keeping watch on their opposing number, others mounting guard over the primitive flamethrowers erected over the seed crops and supplies.

 

 FROM HIS POSITION on high, Jak watched the women being apparently led from the wag, and wondered what was going on. They were supposed to be in the wag that had brought them, and to secure it. He waited to see if Jenny would make a signal at this, suspecting that the Hellbenders wouldn't care about a promise made to Ayesha in return for her help. When no signal to attack came, he wasn't surprised.

 

 Jak's dilemma now was what to do. Should he make the signal himself and precipitate the attack, or should he wait to see what Jenny would do before acting? He had a suspicion that she would leave it until the Summerfield sec were unloading their side of the trade, thus leaving everyone out in the open and much more vulnerable to attack and, much as he regretted what appeared to be selling Ayesha down the river, the hunter in him said that this course of action made much more sense.

 

 And yet he was wrong in part. Jenny had only had part of her attention on the movement below; the movement above was more immediately disturbing. The clouds had started to move violently, and the wisps of breeze were snaking down to begin stirring the dust around her.

 

 The change in air pressure made Jak look up, and he cursed softly to himself.

 

 DOWN ON THE ARENA FLOOR, Claudette looked up as she felt breeze stir her plaits, and then down at the whirling eddies of dust that started to move around her feet. Her eyes met Ayesha's.

 

 "They better fuckin' hurry," she murmured.

 

 As the first load of seed crops were unloaded and the women readied themselves for the approach of the Summerfield sec, the dust began to rise from the floor of the arena to swirl around their lower legs.

 

 "Shit!" cursed Jourgensen and Hutter, almost simultaneously.

 

 Again almost simultaneously, Jenny and Jak yelled into their handsets, "Go!" before beginning a rapid descent to the wags below.

 

  

 

 Chapter Nineteen

 

  

 

 The wind began to howl through the jagged gaps at the top of the rocks and swept through the entrances at each end of the arena, conflicting currents meeting in the center and lifting great whirling eddies of dust and grit that stung the eyes and coruscated the skin. The noise from the beginning storm was enough to drown out the sound of the wags hidden in the channels at each side as they gunned their engines into life and began to roll through the narrow rock tunnels to circle out of the exits, turn and make their initial attack.

 

 J.B. waited until Jenny had slid down the rock and into the wag, breathless and already covered in a thin film of dust from the atmosphere outside.

 

 "You okay?" Mildred asked her as the woman settled in her seat and coughed violently.

 

 Jenny nodded. "Yeah, just about. That's a wicked dust storm blowing up out there, and I figure the worst of it may just blow through these holes, so we should get out as soon as possible."

 

 "Get this thing going, John," Mildred affirmed.

 

 "Already there," J.B. muttered through clenched teeth as he moved the wag forward.

 

 It was going to be a delicate balance between speed and getting out of the channel in one piece. Already the storm had increased in intensity to such a degree that the sand and grit that had been churned up was hitting the windshield of the wag with a loud, clattering rain that threatened to pit the toughened sec glass that had been fitted on the preDark vehicle. But that wasn't what worried J.B. The problem was that the rain was so dark and consistent that he couldn't see where he was going. Funneled into the channel from the outside, the wind, sand and grit were forming a visibility barrier that was preventing him from really putting his foot down on the accelerator and getting the hell out of the tunnel. If he took the narrow passage too fast, he was running the risk of driving the wag straight into the rock and not only damaging the wag itself and risking vulnerability in the firefight to come, but also jamming the vehicle across the channel and blocking the wags behind from making progress.

 

 Sweat stood out on his forehead as he concentrated on keeping the vehicle straight, trying to define the darker shapes of the rock walls through the opaque mist of dust. He ground his teeth, keeping a foot poised on the brake to apply it the second it was necessary, while keeping pressure constant on the accelerator.

 

 "Chill, John," Mildred muttered, "you're doing fine." But even as she said it she was aware, as was the Armorer, that the Hellbenders in the wag were impatient, their body language telling of the tension waiting to be unleashed.

 

 PERHAPS THEY WOULD have been less so if they had realized that Correll was encountering exactly the same problem trying to negotiate his way out of the opposing tunnel.

 

 The gaunt man had already started moving his wag before Jak was down and into the wag driven by Lonnie.

 

 "What's hurry?" Jak said phlegmatically as he regained his seat.

 

 "I guess Papa Joe wants to get out of there before that storm gets too much," Lonnie replied as he, too, set his wag in motion.

 

 "All very well, but we can't risk too much speed in these conditions, not if we want to get out in one piece," Danny pointed out.

 

 "You saying you don't want to fight? After all this time, and when you finally get the chance?" Catherine posed aggressively. The small blonde was hyped up and agitated, moving on her seat in such a manner as to suggest that Danny would be the first to be chilled if he said a word out of place.

 

 For Dean and Jak, this attitude just brought home the problems the companions faced if they hoped to get out of this alive.

 

 Doc, however, had a few words that he hoped would calm the feisty blonde until the right time for action.

 

 "My dear girl, we all want to come out of this little contretemps without being chilled. And we want a chance to actually face the enemy. All young Danny was doing was pointing out the folly of more haste, less speed. It was not a reflection on his, or indeed our, courage."

 

 Catherine looked at Doc, suddenly still in her seat. She carried with her a puzzled expression that told the others she had no idea what he was talking about, but at least it had opened the tap on her pent-up aggression, her confusion dissipating it.

 

 Dean tried not to smile. A second later, even this was forgotten.

 

 "Shit!" Lonnie yelled. "Rockfall!"

 

 He dipped and swerved the heavy wag as the boulders started to fall from above. The howling gale had dislodged more than just shale and loose gravel. Larger rocks and stones from the top of the rock wall had begun to tumble into the narrow channel, clattering onto the roofs and hoods of the wags, hitting the ground in front of them and causing the drivers to take evasive action.

 

 "Let us hope it leaves us enough space to negotiate this obstacle course and get out of here," Doc muttered.

 

 Lonnie swung the wheel to try to dodge the obstacles, ignoring the loud bangs and crashes on the roof, hoping that they wouldn't hit the windshield and shatter it.

 

 "Great, we'll be fucked before we even get out of here," Catherine murmured with disdain.

 

 "Have some faith in our pilot," Doc returned.

 

 "Thanks," Lonnie gritted, "but I'm not that sure that I have that much faith in the bastard storm."

 

 IN THE LEAD WAG, Correll was also cursing the sudden rockfalls.

 

 "Fate could not do this to us—not when we have come so far, my love," he yelled, addressing the box that still sat on his lap as he drove.

 

 He swerved his wag in and out of the falling rocks— those that he could see through the sudden dust storm that whipped against the windshield, obscuring his view of the track ahead.

 

 Ryan looked over at Krysty, whose hair was clinging to her scalp and neck as if it were trying to envelop her, the tendrils of Titian red curled around her pale flesh.

 

 "Hang on," the one-eyed man muttered through clenched teeth. "We get through this, the rest of it is going to be easy."

 

 She spared him a smile. "Or easier, at any rate," she murmured.

 

 "Nuking hell, but the fates are on our side after all!" Correll exclaimed with a triumphant shout. "We're out."

 

 Looking through the windshield, Ryan could see that the violence of the storm appeared to have abated a little, as there was now sky and light visible through the particles of dust, dirt and rock that swirled in the air. They were clear of the tunnel, and Ryan braced himself as Correll put his foot down and took the wag out into the empty desert with a sudden burst of speed before swinging the wheel with an incredible force, turning the wag at a tight angle so that it almost lifted onto two wheels. He felt the force of the turn fling them all across the wag, heard the screech of the wag's brakes as it complained in its very structure about the gravity-defying feats that were demanded of it.

 

 "Fireblast! I hope the other drivers are as good as you— otherwise we'll lose wags like this," he shouted at Correll.

 

 The gaunt man turned his head for a second and gave a ghoulish grin: "They can do it—I just hope J.B. is up to it."

 

 THE ARMORER WAS ASKING himself the same thing at almost the same moment. There hadn't been the rockfalls to contend with in their channel, the upper level of the rock being a little more secure, But the storm had clouds of the dust and dirt whipped up and flung them against the windshield, blinding J.B. He kept his speed up and steady, but knew that the exit to this channel was narrow—much more so than the exit that Correll and the drivers on the other side of the outcrop would have to contend with. He squinted and cursed to himself as he tried to see where the channel narrowed and the exit gap occurred.

 

 "Dark night, I can think of better ways to start an assault," he gritted.

 

 "If you get us through this in one piece, I wouldn't give a shit if you sat back and let the rest of us get on with it," Jenny said, '"cause you sure as hell would have done more than enough."

 

 "I might hold you to that—-if I get us through," J.B. muttered, swinging the wheel as a looming dark shape, coming up suddenly out of the rain of dust, proclaimed that he had sighted one wall of the channel.

 

 He stomped on the brake to skid the vehicle to the left, catching sight of the other wall, and the slightly lighter gap between that proclaimed he had found the exit gap. Cursing softly, unwilling even to waste energy or concentration on talking aloud, J.B. headed straight for the light, and put his foot down, ignoring the dust that rattled against the windshield.

 

 "Sweet mother, you've done it!" Mildred exclaimed as the wag came out of the channel and into the lighter air of the desert. It was suddenly easier to see, and J.B. was able to get his bearings.

 

 The Armorer knew that there was little time to waste. The sound of wags roaring out of the enclosed channels and into the desert at either end of the outcrop would be enough to make the two trade convoys aware of an attack, and every second lost in turning and heading back into the arena to take up battle would be a second that the two sets of sec could prepare a defense. Every second counted, and no time could be wasted on turning the wags.

 

 So J.B. leaned heavily on the wheel and executed exactly the same kind of torturous metal-bending turn that Correll was executing at that same moment. His wag complained heavily, the wheels seeming slow in their ability to respond to his efforts at the wheel.

 

 "Turn us over now and I'll never forgive you, John," Mildred murmured to herself as the wag tilted alarmingly, throwing them across the interior.

 

 "Trust me," the Armorer replied, almost to himself, as the wag righted itself and was facing the right direction— heading straight back into the arena. Through the lighter desert rain, he could see that the wags in front of him were still facing the wrong way to meet an attack, and the sec men still out of position, facing toward him but with the air of those frozen in sudden surprise.

 

 "I always do, John," Mildred added, checking her Czech manufactured ZKR target pistol. A handblaster wouldn't be useful in the first attack, as they would be using the machine blasters mounted in the side of the wag to attack, but at some point, she had the feeling, it may just descend to hand-to-hand combat, in which case she wanted to be ready.

 

 At least, far more in readiness than either of the convoys they would be attacking.

 

 "SHIT! GRAB THE GIRLS and let's get under cover," Baron Tad Hutter yelled at his sec men as the storm started to blow up. He jumped down from the wag and ran toward the seemingly shackled girls until he was halted by a voice that sounded loud and strong above the howl of the wind.

 

 "Just hold your ass still right there unless you want to have it blown off!"

 

 Unwilling as he was to appear to heed such terms in his position as baron, Hutter's instinct for self preservation made him pull up sharply. He looked up to see Baron Al Jourgensen standing at the door of his own wag, a Sharps rifle in his hands, raised and trained on Hutter.

 

 "Don't be a stupe," Hutter snapped. "Look at the storm. We need to get this done with as soon as possible!"

 

 "Then tell your sec men to hurry up with the unloading," Jourgensen snapped back.

 

 "Be reasonable."

 

 "Be reasonable nothing—you fulfill your side of the bargain, and we'll fulfill ours as soon as you've got everything unloaded."

 

 "But—"

 

 The catch on the Sharps clicked, audible to Hutter even above the howl of the storm.

 

 "Don't argue, Tad. You're not in any position to start handing out orders, okay?"

 

 Hutter held his hands aloft. "Okay, Al, you've got all the cards right now, but we'll see." He turned slowly so that he faced his men. "You heard the man, start—"

 

 He was cut short in bemusement by the sight that met him. It would appear to him that his men had, in fact, given up the unloading altogether, as they seemed to be facing completely in the opposite direction to the central exchange point.

 

 It was then, as he looked at them, that he became aware of an undertone to the storm that had been bothering him for a few minutes without him being able to put a name to what it was. There was a growling sound that had nothing to do with the rush of wind and debris through the arena formed by the outcrop. It was the sound of wag engines being pushed to the limit. And as he looked past his immobile and stunned sec force, he could see three wags turning tightly and coming toward his men, headed directly for the entrance to the outcrop. Furious, he turned back to scream at Jourgensen.

 

 "You bastard! You've set us up!"

 

 But the words died on his lips. He could see beyond Baron Al that a similar situation was occurring at the rear of the Charity convoy. Jourgensen's eyes met those of Hutter across the dust storm wastes, each ready to accuse the other but stopped dead by the bewilderment on the other's face.

 

 "You?" Jourgensen yelled.

 

 Hutter shook his head. "Ambush," he screamed. "Get back, for fuck's sake, get into defensive positions," he yelled at his men as he turned and headed back to the lead wag on the Summerfield convoy.

 

 Jourgensen, too, had decided that the best course of action was to ignore his opposing baron and concentrate on the menace that was now threatening. There would be time enough for Summerfield after this was sorted out. He slipped back into his wag, and picked up the handset, yelling, "Defensive now—watch the rear, turn the wags."

 

 In the confusion, seed crops and supplies were left scattered across the center of the arena as the sec men headed back to the safety of their wags and the machine blasters and mounted flamethrowers, which would now prove to be of use in a way that Hutter couldn't have predicted.

 

 Which actions also left the women, seemingly shackled together and guarded by two sec men, standing in the middle of the arena, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.

 

 Which wasn't quite the case.

 

 Ayesha and Claudette had both recognized the sound of the wags beneath the storm, and had been looking out for them. Now that the only sec man paying them any attention were those with empty blasters, it was the time to act.

 

 "Okay, let's try and head back to the wag," Ayesha screamed above the noise of the storm.

 

 "Good move," Claudette yelled back, her plaits whipping around her head in the howling storm. "At least we can get a defensive position better there than out here in the open."

 

 "What about the sec men?" one of the women asked. "Won't they think it's suspicious if we go back to the wag?"

 

 "Not if these stupes take us back," Claudette replied, indicating the two sec men who had been acting as their unwilling cover.

 

 "You've got to be joking," the sec man with the empty Uzi said with venom, throwing his useless blaster down to the desert floor and turning to run. "Baron!" he yelled, but was cut short by a burst of blasterfire from Claudette, who figured that all pretense was now blown and that they had been forced into the open. Before he had the chance to advance more than a few yards, the words were chilled on his lips as blood flooded into his lungs and bubbled up his throat from the immense internal injuries he received as a result of Claudette's Uzi slugs hitting home.

 

 The sec driver turned to Ayesha, all his nerves now, ironically, quelled by a terror greater than any he had ever known before.

 

 "You bitch, this is all your doing," he yelled, flinging himself toward her.

 

 The girl stepped back, slipping off her shackles and bringing the knife up so that it was blade upward in her palm. As he lunged, she stepped calmly to one side and slashed at him, catching him across the side of his face. As he stumbled and fell, his hand came up to his face, leaving his ribs open at the side. She slashed under the rib cage, the razor-honed blade cutting through his clothes and scoring through flesh, fat and muscle. He howled in pain and doubled up on the floor of the arena, no longer an immediate threat.

 

 "Drop the shackles and run like hell," Claudette yelled, hanging back to marshal the women along to the wag while Ayesha dealt with the driver. When the girl joined her, Claudette looked around to see that Anita was the only one of the women who hadn't run directly to the wag. In the confusion, no shots had been fired on them, and frankly it was unlikely that it had even been noticed that they were unshackled—until Anita had chosen to draw attention to this.

 

 The blowsy blonde was hammering on the window of Baron Al's wag, screaming at him to let her in and save her, and she would do anything for him, and she wasn't to blame, it was his good-for-nothing daughter who had sold them down the river to something called the Hellbenders.

 

 In a torrent of words that emerged as an almost incoherent jumble, the blonde had managed to spill the whole plot to Baron Al in a pathetic attempt to save her skin. The irony being that, in among the noise and confusion, and the fact that the window of his wag was firmly wound to shut out the dust, all the baron could see was a red-eyed, swollen-faced woman screaming at him. He looked at her in complete incomprehension.

 

 "Bitch," Claudette muttered, "I've been wanting to do this for hours." She raised her blaster.

 

 It was quick, but far from painless. She put two slugs into the woman's knees, and Anita crashed to the ground with an ear piercing yell of agony. The next two shots were into her shoulders, making it impossible for her to do anything but lie there, immobile, wailing in pain and confusion.

 

 Claudette and Ayesha made their way hurriedly back to the wag, Claudette pausing briefly to put a slug into Anita's guts, blood spreading across the blonde's dirty white blouse, her face contorted in pain.

 

 Her death was quickened by a final slug that was put through her open, mewling mouth, blowing her head apart. Claudette then stopped to spare the astounded baron a wink before making her way back to the safety of the wag.

 

 As she bounded in and slammed the doors, she said breathlessly, "I hope you can drive one of these things, girl, 'cause I sure as shit can't."

 

  

 

 Chapter Twenty

 

  

 

 "Man the guns!" Correll yelled. "We've got them chilled and buried—they can't get out!" He whooped joyously as he brought the wag out of its dangerous skid-cum-turn, and the two airborne wheels hit the desert floor with a bone-jarring thud. He slammed the wag into the highest gear and ground his foot into the metal floor, hunching over the wheel as much as the metal box on his lap would allow him.

 

 Ryan, Krysty and the other Hellbenders in the lead wag slid from their seats, balance still a little uncertain from the erratic passage of the wag, and positioned themselves behind the machine blasters that were mounted inside the wag, with the barrels protruding through engineered holes in the sides. Because these had been made and mounted before skydark, they were the latest in military sec tech from before the nukecaust, and had cameras and infrared mounts that relayed a view of the outside world, and the target area, to whoever was seated at the end of the mount.

 

 Ryan settled his good orb against the sight, adjusting to the slight variation in quality between the image on the small eye screen and the reality around him. The age of the equipment was beginning to tell, even though Correll's people had maintained all the wags as best they could, and the image that settled on his retina was slightly flat and two-dimensional, with a faded quality that wouldn't help anyone to differentiate between wags and clouds of dust in the chaos outside. The broken digital image pixilated the outside world into little more than a series of shadows. But those shadows were enough.

 

 "We're closing," Correll yelled. "Get ready to blast the bastards!"

 

 Ryan shifted forward in his seat, his eye jammed up against the sight, the stock of the blaster hard against the cords of muscle on his shoulder. The rear wag of the Charity convoy came into view, and he was aware of moving shadows along the roof. Above the roar of the wag engine, a chatter of blasterfire could just about be discerned, and there was the high pitched scream of tortured metal as the shells from the Charity sec men's blasters hit the outside of the armored wag and ricocheted off. Before he had the chance to squeeze the trigger and pick off some of the shadows, Correll had piloted the wag past at speed, and they were headed for the lead. It was obvious that Correll wanted the lead wag and the life of Baron Al Jourgensen, the man he had referred to as "Red, the son of a gaudy whore." Behind them, he heard the throatier roar of a machine blaster from the next wag, as it attempted to take out the wag that had fired on them.

 

 Beside Ryan, Krysty squeezed off a few shots to test her machine blaster, aiming at shadows that moved across the top of a wag they passed. The heavy-caliber slugs tore into the shadows, leaving red tracers in their wake, some of the shadows disappearing into the sandstorm around as the red lines ripped through them, throwing them off the wag.

 

 "Lead wag coming up," Correll yelled over his shoulder without glancing behind him, making sure that the personnel of his wag were aware of his priority.

 

 BEHIND HIS CONVOY LEADER , Lonnie pushed his wag to the max, keeping hard on Correll as they roared through the narrow gap that formed the entrance to the arena. It was narrow, and filled with the swirling dust thrown up by the storm, but it was nothing compared to the channel they had just left. In the wake left by the leading wag, Lonnie charted a course into the arena with ease.

 

 "Heads up, we're about to hit it," he rapped out sharply as the crew behind him took up positions.

 

 This wag was also a preDark military vehicle, but hadn't been designed as an armored wag in the same way as the one piloted by the Hellbenders' leader. This was an armored personnel carrier in which the Hellbenders had cut holes large enough for heavy-duty blasters to be placed. The work would have taken a long time, as the armoring of the wag was strong, but then the group had been waiting for a long time, and this was the reward for their patience. The holes were small, but large enough for the barrel of a blaster and also for the sight to gain some view of the area around the barrel. It was a small circumference, but with wags in front and behind, the important thing was to focus on what you could see, and leave the rest to your compatriots.

 

 It was none too secure to try to sight carefully, as seats in the wag hadn't been made with the idea of tryin to fire from the sides. They were made purely for transport, and so were facing the wrong way, and at the wrong angles for the crew with the blasters to sit and sight their targets comfortably. Instead, Jak, Dean and Catherine were lined up down one side of the vehicle, balancing and trying to compensate for the erratic motion of the wag as it rode roughshod over the even rougher terrain. The blasters down this side of the vehicle were all AK-47s, the Kalashnikovs grouped together as part of the overall plan to allow for a smoother transition of ammo when needed. In the same way, the far side of the wag, where Danny, Doc and the other crew stood idle, waiting for the wag to turn on the return run before they sighted and began their assault, were all equipped with Heckler & Kochs, the pool of ammo for these blasters being grouped on their side.

 

 In this sense, the planning had been superb; however, there had been no way that anyone could have allowed for the sandstorm that was now raging outside. The clouds of dust raised by the motion of the wags would have made things difficult enough, but the roughly hacked holes for the blaster barrels and sights, although tight as they could have been made, still allowed a little room for the howling wind outside to drive sand through the gaps and into the interior of the wag. It wasn't much, but for those who stood by the blasters, trying to get a sight on the enemy, it was enough.

 

 "Hot pipe! This'll take my eyeball out before I have a chance to pick off anyone out there," Dean shouted as he took his eye away from the sight to try to clear it of the stinging grit that was misting his vision.

 

 "Aim for dark, fire quick, then clean eyes," Jak snapped, ignoring the stinging in his own fiery red eyes in order to pull cleanly on the trigger of the AK-47 and take out some of the sec firing at them, slamming a couple of slugs into the side of a wag, whose armoring and protection was minimal, for good measure.

 

 "White boy's right," Catherine said between shots of her own. "Ignore the pain. It's much more satisfying to see those bastards go down," she added with a grin as one of her shots took out a sec man, his head splitting like a ripe melon, visible even through the dust storm. The blood and brain from his exploding skull was absorbed into the swirling dust around as his body slumped, the impact of the slug absorbed almost totally above neck level—where there was nothing now left to indicate he had ever had a head.

 

 The grin on the blonde's face turned to a grimace of pain as a flurry of shots from the opposing sec ripped along the side of the wag. The vast majority of the shells ricocheted harmlessly off the wag's armor, but Catherine had drawn the short straw when it came to luck, and was about to become the first casualty among the Hellbenders.

 

 Two slugs from the sec men squeezed through the gap around the barrel and sight of the AK-47, and if she hadn't turned to reply to Jak's comments, they may have just wounded her in the upper arm or missed altogether. But that fraction that she moved to speak, pushing her head away from and higher than the sight on her blaster put her in direct line for the shots that had squeezed through.

 

 The first one caught her on the cheekbone, freezing the grimace for an awful second as it ripped the flesh away from her face, exposing the bone and teeth of the jaw, before the bone seemed to splinter and powder in front of them. It seemed as though everything were happening in slow motion as her head jerked upward slightly, the second slug hitting home at her temple, ripping flesh and hair from her head. Her green eyes seemed for one fraction of a second to register the most intense pain and surprise, pleading for a reason why this had happened by such a fluke, before the light went from the eyes, followed by the viscous fluid of the eyeball itself as it exploded under the pressure of the blow.

 

 Just as her shot had made the opposing sec man's head explode like a melon, so the two shots that had squeezed through the gap in the armoring reduced her head to pulp in a matter of a second or two and extinguished the life of the belligerent and feisty blonde.

 

 "Oh, for fuck's sake," Lonnie said, looking over his shoulder as her body was thrown across the wag and landed in Danny's lap, making the youngster puke. "When Rudi finds out, he'll go shit mad—he'll probably take 'em out on his own. And don't stop firing just because of that," he added as Jak and Dean returned their attention to their blasters and started to loose shots once more at the trade convoy.

 

 One thing was certain, though—the sudden, freakish and unexpected chilling of one of their own people had brought home to everyone in the wag that they were outnumbered at least two-to-one by those on the outside of the Hellbenders' caravan, and that every life lost, especially in such a stupe manner, was more of a blow to them than to the men of either Charity or Summerfield.

 

 "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you can't drive one of these?" Claudette yelled at Ayesha. "Didn't your daddy ever give you a wag as a present, like your brothers?"

 

 Inside the wag that had carried the women into the arena, the noise from outside was drowned by the argument within. With the chilled body of the sec man still in the corner, and now bereft of both sec shotgun and driver, as well as the traitorous Anita, the women were huddled in the rear while Ayesha and Claudette stood face-to-face.

 

 "Of course he didn't, you stupe," Ayesha yelled back. "I'm a girl, not a boy. Shit, you worked at the palace, or so you say—you know what he was like. Girls are for fucking, and boys get the toys."

 

 A look clouded across Claudette's face suddenly, as though the argument was suddenly forgotten.

 

 "Yeah, you're right," she said quietly. "My ma always said that Red was like that."

 

 Ayesha's anger suddenly dissipated as she heard her father referred to in that manner. There were few people left alive who referred to Baron Al Jourgensen as "Red"—she had no knowledge of this being one of the ways in which Danny and the rest of the Hellbenders knew the baron from Correll's ranting—and a cold shiver ran down her spine as she suddenly realized something.

 

 "Your mother?"

 

 Claudette nodded briefly. "Yeah, she ended up slit from pussy to throat in a gaudy house by some drunk asshole, but before that she'd been one of his regular sluts before he got bored. That's how come I'm here. And she told me how he got the name of Red, and how come people don't use it anymore unless they want to die."

 

 "Red like the blood of the women when he finished them," Ayesha said in a small voice. "That what happened to your mother?"

 

 Claudette shrugged. "Mebbe. If not him, then some wiseass who was working for him or wanted to be him and knew who my ma was. She always said there were only so many sluts, and every man gets around to them sooner or later. Don't think she meant to kill them, though."

 

 "So you're my sister," Ayesha said quietly.

 

 "Yeah, me and mebbe half the women under twenty in this wag." Claudette laughed harshly. "Don't get stupe on me about it—it still don't change the fact that you can't drive this stupe wag. Can anyone here?" she asked in a louder voice, addressing the rest of the women. There was a general agreement that Ayesha was right—women in Charity weren't given the power to do these things, and none of them had any driving experience.

 

 "Boy, that's us well and truly fucked," Claudette said, rubbing her face, "more than if we'd let those assholes from Summerfield get their paws on us."

 

 "Mebbe not," Ayesha said, her face determined and set as she went past Claudette and climbed over and into the front of the wag, ignoring the blasterfire that was erupting all around and could easily come through the windshield, toughened glass though it was. "Come and ride shotgun—you've got just about the only blaster we've got," she added to her newly discovered sister.

 

 "What the rad-pocked, scum-sucking, sticky-fucking hell are you doing, girl?" Claudette spit out as she slipped over the seat and joined Ayesha.

 

 "Look, I might not know exactly how to drive one of these things right, but I must know something. I've sat next to sec men driving, to my brothers, to my asshole father. I've seen these stupe things being driven all my life. It can't be that hard to work it out."

 

 "Hell of a time to start learning," Claudette said with a smile.

 

 Ayesha laughed. "Never better, babe."

 

 J.B. WAS FAR from happy. He could see that Correll's strategy was already falling to pieces, and he and Mildred were a long way from where they wanted to be—at the side of Ryan and the rest of their companions. The only way to get out of this—if there was any way at all—was to be back-to-back with people they could trust. At least that way they had a chance, with people they knew they could rely upon.

 

 Not like here. Not like now.

 

 The Armorer straightened his wag and headed toward the gap between the rocks that formed the entrance to the arena.

 

 Ahead of him he could see the Summerfield convoy from the rear, getting nearer as he closed on them. The front of the convoy was lost in the swirl of the dust storm, but he could see sec men chasing back to their wags, and those who were already mounted turn around, blasters at the ready. He could also see the sec men who were standing guard on the top of the supply wags, with the homemade flamethrowers. They bore little resemblance to anything else the Armorer had ever seen, but he recognized the danger with an unerring instinct.

 

 "Get into position and hold on," he yelled, "this is going to be a little tricky."

 

 J.B. rarely overstated anything, and this was one of those occasions—for, almost as he spoke, the sec man on the flamethrower nearest the approaching wag swung the contraption toward the oncoming Hellbenders' vehicle and attempted to open up with a jet of flame.

 

 "Dark night," the Armorer cursed softly at the sight that confronted him as the sec man opened up the pressure on the flamethrower and attempted to ignite it. The rickety and ramshackle weapon spluttered twice as the sec man attempted to ignite the flame and then exploded on top of the wag, throwing up a ball of flame and a dense cloud of oily smoke that made it even harder to see in the arena as the wag beneath also went up, a dullwhump , resounding around the rock walls as the sides of the vehicle flew outward—just as J.B. piloted his wag into range.

 

 The Armorer threw the wheel of his vehicle, swinging it as far to the left of the arena as he dared, hoping that the majority of the debris would avoid damaging their wag. The vehicle shook as lumps of metal thudded into it, driving it toward the rock and making him swing the wheel back to try to compensate.

 

 "Sweet Lord, will you look at that," Mildred whispered as the sec men on the exploding wag were thrown into the air and across the arena, one of them thudding against the wag with a force equal to that of some of the metal debris. Their clothes and skin were covered in the flaming fuel that was used to power the flamethrower, and they described arcs of flame in the air, cutting through the dust and poor light to show where they landed.

 

 "Heads up—more ahead," J.B. yelled, mindful that the explosion may yet have distracted his crew from the wags ahead.

 

 It was a good point. The sec men on the two wags in front of the one that had exploded had thrown themselves onto the roof of each of their wags, and were now scrambling to their feet with only one idea in mind—to meet the oncoming assault head-on.

 

 J.B. righted the course of his wag, and the Hellbenders and Mildred armed the blasters, ready to start firing as soon as the flame and smoke cleared and they could get a sighting.

 

 Unfortunately for them, the next Summerfield wag in line was able to fire first. The flamethrower crew was raised just above the smoke that was still pouring from the ruined wag, and so was able to sight the Hellbenders' wag first. Swinging around the flamethrower, and not even thinking about the fact that one before had exploded, the sec man in charge of the contraption fired it up and ignited the flame.

 

 A great yellow-and-red gout of flame roared from the barrel of the flamethrower, scorching the side of J.B.'s wag and heating up the interior so that the blasters on the inside became almost too hot to touch.

 

 "Shit!" Jenny yelled as the rapidly heating metal burned the palms of her hands, "what the fuck are they doing?"

 

 "Take him out, Millie," J.B. yelled.

 

 Mildred acted quickly, yet seemingly with little fuss. She slipped her arms out of her jacket and used the sleeves to pad and insulate her hands against the heat. She moved the floor-mounted blaster until the sight caught the top of the wag, and kept her head just a fraction away from the blaster sight, so that she could feel the heat drying out her eyeball and scorching her eyebrow, yet it didn't actually touch or burn her skin.

 

 Mildred had always been a crack shot. A short burst of fire from the drum-mounted machine blaster shattered the fuel tank for the flamethrower and also ripped a line of holes through the flesh of the sec man standing by it, throwing him backward off the roof of the wag as the fuel ignited and shot a line of fire along the feed line of the flamethrower, exploding it from its mounting on the roof of the wag.

 

 But it wasn't just the flamethrowers that were causing problems. Although they were the most immediate danger, there were sec men both in the wags and also climbing onto the roofs of the wags armed with Uzis, Heckler & Kochs, and also AK-47s. They were starting to fire, not just at the wag driven by J.B., but also at all the Hellbenders' wags that followed the Armorer. Heavy-duty blasterfire thudded into the armored and reinforced sides of the wags as the Hellbenders used their mounted blasters to return the fire.

 

 It was here that they had the advantage. There may be less of them in terms of wags and manpower, but they knew from their recce and spy reports that the wags from each ville weren't entirely armored. The wag stock of each ville was low, and the very nature of some of the trade to be exchanged would make the use of an armored wag impossible for a quick turnaround. So it was that the Hellbenders could, in theory, take advantage of surprise to cut down wag and man numbers if they hit hard and fast.

 

 It was then that both Baron Al Jourgensen and Baron Tad Hutter changed their own agendas and made the entire matter a whole lot more complicated.

 

  

 

 Chapter Twenty-One

 

  

 

 "Tulk! What the fuck is going on?" Hutter raged.

 

 Elias Tulk spared himself a small smile as he sat at the wheel of the static wag. "I don't know, Baron. We appear to be under attack of some kind." He giggled. His mind was filled with thoughts of revenge, and in part he no longer cared if Hutter guessed the part he played.

 

 Hutter fixed his sec chief with a long hard stare, for a moment forgetting the battle that was raging outside. "This is something to do with you, you son of a gaudy slut," he hissed, "and I'll find out when we get back home."

 

 "If…" Tulk interjected.

 

 Hutter said nothing for a moment that seemed to stretch to forever. The inside of the wag was like a calm eye of the storm that—both in terms of nature and of a firefight—swirled and raged around them.

 

 "We will get back," he said finally, and in a menacingly quiet tone. "And what's more, we'll take the women with us. Screw the rest of this. We're going to grab them and get the fuck out of here."

 

 "How am I going to relay orders to the rest of the crew, then?" Tulk pointed out the carnage outside.

 

 Hutter looked behind him at the two sec men who were manning the wag with himself and Tulk. They had their attention seemingly fixed on the outside, flinching at the slugs that hit the armor plating and toughened glass, starring it, but the baron knew that they had been listening intently to the discussion in the front of the wag.

 

 "There's four of us. In case it escaped your notice, those sluts don't have any sec with them, and Baron Al and his boys are occupied with the assholes attacking them from the other direction. We just break ranks here, ram into the middle of the convoy, scattering everyone in their surprise, grab the girls and get the fuck out."

 

 Tulk grinned wryly. "And that's a plan?"

 

 Hutter was serious. "Got anything better to do, Elias?"

 

 BARON Al "Red" Jourgensen was seeing the color of his nickname—which hadn't been used by anyone except Correll in many a year, both in terms of his temper, and in the blood that was flowing into the earth outside as both sides counted casualties against the sudden assault group.

 

 "What the motherfucking hell is going down here?" he demanded of no one in particular. "That shithead Hutter thinks he can sell us down the river like this?"

 

 "Don't think it's him, Baron," replied the sec man who had been driving the leading wag. "He's getting the attack as much as we are."

 

 Jourgensen shot a look over his shoulder at the men who were manning the blasters behind him. They were rattling off bursts of machine blasterfire at the Hellbenders' wags as they passed, but were trying to conserve ammo and shoot on sight, their visibility impaired by the storm and the dust raised by the circling wags.

 

 "How we doing?" he snapped.

 

 One of the sec men took his eye away from the blaster sight for a moment to answer. "Can't see a thing out there, Baron. I dunno if we're hitting anything or even what it is we're aiming at half the time."

 

 Baron Al nodded. "Right. We need those crops, so we're gonna take 'em." He picked up the handset of the radio. "Listen up," he yelled, "all wags head to the opposite camp and try to take the trade. Then get out as fast as you can."

 

 "You think anyone actually heard that?" his driver said as slugs from the Hellbenders' blasters whined and ricocheted off the armored wag.

 

 "Dunno." Baron Al shrugged. "But at least we've tried. Now hit the fucking gas!"

 

 Ayesha heard the message from her father on the radio as she tried to hotwire the wag with all the women who were the trade from Charity. The sec driver had taken the ignition key with him, possibly as some kind of private token of his own security, or just from habit. As he was now lying chilled in the center of the arena bloodbath, there was no way that either Ayesha or Claudette was going to risk getting it back again.

 

 Claudette, seated beside the girl, also heard the message. "Lovely man," she muttered. "No mention of us in there."

 

 "Did you expect anything else?" Ayesha said through gritted teeth as she stripped, then joined the wires. "Please work this time, you stupe bastard," she added to the machinery. With a cough and a splutter, the wag's engine came to life. "Shit, I thought that'd never happen," she added with relief, then, "let's get ourselves out of here and wait for the dust to settle."

 

 "In this storm?" Claudette grinned.

 

 Ayesha didn't grace the poor joke with an answer. Instead, she stared ahead of her at the chaos framed by the windshield as she tried to put the wag into gear. With a squeal and grind that was painful, and made all the women inside the wag wince, the wag ground into gear. Swinging on the wheel, Ayesha pulled it out of the convoy.

 

 Straight into the line of the approaching wag.

 

 THE HELLBENDERS, led by Correll, had completed four or five circuits of the convoy, and the firefight was starting to get monotonous. In the wag driven by the gaunt man, Ryan and Krysty exchanged glances that spoke volumes, and both knew that their thoughts were being echoed by Jak, Dean and Doc in the wag behind, and by J.B. and Mildred in the opposing convoy. Any attempt at strategy had gone out of the window, and after the initial gains made by the Hellbenders when they had been able to pick off sec men who hadn't been able to make it back to secured or armored wags, the firefight had degenerated into the assault party driving around and around taking shots at whatever they could see through the storm, while sporadic fire returned at them suggested that the sec men from Charity were now all safely inside wags that offered them some protection from the fire.

 

 It couldn't go on like this. Sooner or later, ammo or fuel would run out, and then it would descend into hand-to-hand combat. Ryan knew that his people were more than capable of holding their own, but they would be outnumbered, and if it came to a situation where blood lust held sway, he knew that they couldn't guarantee that the Hellbenders would recognize them when it came to face-to-face combat in a sandstorm.

 

 Glancing across at Correll, Ryan could see that whatever shreds of sanity and reason had kept the man going for so long had now all been cast to the winds of the storm. The Hellbenders' leader was staring maniacally ahead through the windshield, hunched over the metal box on his lap, stroking it and muttering to it as he piloted the wag in a continuing circle, occasionally whooping as he saw some blasterfire hit home.

 

 "Not good, lover," Krysty whispered to the one-eyed man, noticing the direction of his glance. "I figure he's gone totally. Problem is, how do we get out of this?"

 

 Ryan spared the woman a look. Her hair was coiled tightly to her head and neck, reflecting the way she felt about the conflict and the manner in which it was proceeding rapidly to stalemate.

 

 "Fireblast! There's nothing we can do while we're stuck in here."

 

 It was at this point that fate took a hand.

 

 Ayesha pulled the wag out, stamping on the accelerator to get the vehicle out of its confinement quickly, while the wheel was still at full spin and the tires bit into the swirling earth, turning the wag out of the space it occupied in the stationary convoy. The wags had been stopped and parked up close to one another, and she braced herself as the wing of the wag caught the rear of the wag in front with a squeal and a shower of sparks as metal ground on metal, slowing the progress of the wag with the women, and making Ayesha bite so hard on her lip with concentration that the salty taste of blood flooded her mouth.

 

 The noise of grating, grinding metal was such that it seemed to the occupants of the wag to completely overtake the other sounds from outside, filling the wag with an eardrum-bursting noise that made it hard to think.

 

 And then, suddenly, the wing of the wag had passed beyond the rear of the vehicle it had been pushing against, that vehicle now pushed to one side, the occupants thrown across the interior and abandoning their blasters.

 

 "Shit!" Ayesha cursed as the wag, suddenly released from the restraints of the metal bulk in front of it, shot out across the gap between the convoy and the wall of the rock arena. She stamped on the brake, making the vehicle skid on the uneven and loose surface, the suddenly locked tires searching for purchase on the shifting sands of the desert floor. The wag skidded in a circle, and she righted it in time to be facing the entrance at the rear of the Charity convoy. The only problem with this being that the path to the entrance was blocked by the circling wags of the Hellbenders' convoy, with Correll in the lead, approaching at speed through the dust of the storm and conflict.

 

 "Aw, fuck," Claudette muttered. To get this far, this close to getting away, and then to get chilled by the very people who were supposed to be on your side… The dark-skinned girl watched openmouthed and wide-eyed as the lead wag closed on theirs, seeing through the grime and dust an equally surprised gaunt face as the driver jammed on his brakes and went into a skid, attempting to pilot his wag into the narrow space between the women's wag and the convoy that still stood in the arena.

 

 Ayesha mirrored the actions of Correll, swinging the wheel of her wag and risking crushing the wag against the rock wall.

 

 The two wags swung violently away from each other, like two magnetic poles that repel, but it was too little, too late. The front wings of both wags locked together in a squeal of metal, the opposing forces of each powerful wag engine forcing the metal into ridiculous shapes, pushing at each other so that the steering wheels in each cab failed to respond to the drivers.

 

 Ayesha found herself thrown across the wheel, the hard plastic jarring and bruising her chest and stomach, knocking the air from her and leaving her dazed and confused. She shook her head to try to clear it, and felt the need to violently vomit as a result, a need that was increased when she looked around to ask Claudette how she was, and found the dark-skinned girl staring at her from one lifeless eye, the other impaled with a long sliver of toughened glass from the windshield that had been worked loose from its frame by the twisting, distorting effects of the impact and had driven through her left eye and into the brain, lobotomizing her so that she died blissfully unaware of the pain it had caused her.

 

 Ayesha puked over the dead girl, then heaved and spit out the bile that tasted raw in her mouth. She looked over the back seat. Some of the women were unconscious from the impact, but most were still able to move.

 

 "I dunno," Ayesha muttered, "we'll just have to try and get out of the battlefield and wait for the result."

 

 "Some good you've been," moaned one of the women, picking herself up.

 

 Ayesha boiled inside. She'd tried, as hard as she could, and all she had was this?

 

 "Fuck it, look after yourselves, then," she spit before opening the wag door on her side of the cab and sliding out into the sandstorm.

 

 Outside, the Hellbenders were pouring out of their wags, their circling assault action having been halted by the crash between Correll and Ayesha. The leader of the Hellbenders was one of the first to hit the desert floor, having given orders over the radio for his people to disperse and begin the fight on the outside. Correll grasped a Heckler & Koch in one hand, and in the other he had a long bladed saber that was of tooled steel and had been taken from the redoubt. Coming face-to-face with him, Ayesha stopped dead in her tracks, taken aback by the wild-eyed, gaunt man, and also by the fact that he had a long metal box strapped to his chest. Whatever was in it, it wasn't just being used as armor, and Ayesha practically shrunk beneath his gaze.

 

 Jak, Dean and Danny were out of the second wag quickly, and the bespectacled youth led the way through the crowd of wild-eyed fighters to where the crash had occurred.

 

 Correll was looming over Ayesha through the dust and smoke. She was sure that he would cut her down where she stood, especially as she was the daughter of Baron Al Jourgensen, his sworn foe. In the heat of those eyes, all bargains would be forgotten.

 

 And yet he looked at her with eyes that suddenly cleared from their fires of fury, and just for a second registered an infinite tenderness.

 

 "Poor child," he murmured before brushing past her with a wild yell and heading for the front of the convoy, where Baron Al's wag was just moving off.

 

 "Ayesha!" Danny yelled, coming upon her out of the dust and grasping her. "You're okay!"

 

 "Just," she replied, "and it won't stay that way unless we find some way of getting away from this slaughterhouse."

 

 "This way," Jak said, "find wag."

 

 "Yeah, good idea," Dean agreed. "Where the hell is everyone?"

 

 "I, my dear boy, have finally got here," Doc said, coming up to them, "but of the others…"

 

 Dean and Jak looked around them. It was almost impossible to see in the swirling dust and smoke of the battlefield what was going on. Ryan and Krysty had to be in among it, and from the sounds of blasterfire and close combat, it seemed that mere yards away the sec men from Charity had emerged from their wags to take up hand-to-hand combat with the Hellbenders. They were forced to, as the sudden static nature of the other vehicles had left them with no target large or visible enough to fire at from inside the safety of the wags.

 

 Suddenly, Dean caught sight of Krysty's Titian flame of hair moving freely in the breeze as the woman encountered a sec man from Charity. As she moved nearer, they could see that the sec man had mistaken her for one of the more docile women from the wag, and was trying to trap her with a view to carrying her off. He had a Glock handblaster and a skinning knife, which he used to thrust at her, driving her backward. What he failed to realize was that she was leading him on, goading him into more confident, harder thrusts with the knife, nearly puncturing her skin. And then his confidence got the better of him, and he made his big mistake. He grinned with a leer and thrust the knife to try to rip the shoulder of her coat, to expose her bare flesh. But Krysty stepped under the blow and struck at his vulnerable side, striking below the heart with the heel of her hand. As the jarring blow turned the triumphant leer to a look of astonished agony, she drew back her arm and delivered a straight-fingered blow to his throat that ruptured the tissue within. He began to choke, and as he sank to the ground she raised one leg and delivered a chilling blow with the silvered toe of her boot, striking him at the joint of the jaw, just below the temple. The trauma to the brain finished off whatever life the sec man still had within him.

 

 "Nice to know you haven't lost your touch," the one-eyed warrior commented as he emerged from the dust and smoke, the Steyr in one hand and his panga in the other. "I don't know who's chilling who out there, and I don't think they do, either. My bet is we should get the hell out and regroup on the outside of the rocks, try and see what the hell is actually happening in here."

 

 "We could take one of the wags at the rear," Dean suggested. "They've all gone blood-chill crazy out here, and I figure we should just shoot whoever gets in the way— can't trust any of them not to chill us."

 

 Ryan agreed. "Only problem is, how do we let J.B. and Mildred know what the hell is going on?"

 

 "HOW THE HELL are we supposed to know what's going on here?" the Armorer asked Jenny as the wag spun yet again in the increasingly dense mix of smoke and dust that rose on the arena.

 

 "And how the hell am I supposed to know?" the woman snapped back.

 

 "It's your operation, not ours," Mildred replied with a bite in her tone. "And what was that about abandoning the wags because they've crashed?" she added, referring to the garbled command from Correll that had emerged from the static and confusion of the radio.

 

 "Shit, how do I know? It must be something that happened back there."

 

 "How about making it happen here?" the Armorer suggested, sighting the wag driven by Tulk and bearing Baron Tad Hutter begin to move out into the middle of the arena.

 

 "What?"

 

 "He's moving, and we can't keep going in circles forever," J.B. said sharply. "So brace yourselves."

 

 With which the Armorer put his foot down hard to the floor of the wag and shot toward the moving wag. Tulk had moved forward cautiously, trying to sight the assault convoy as it came around again, and this had given J.B. the slight edge that he needed. As the baron's wag moved outward, J.B. drove straight at it, flinging his wag to one side at the last moment so that it caught the baron's wag with a broadside that made it skid in a circle, the front wing badly dented and bent in so that it trapped the front wheel and prevented it from rotating.

 

 Behind the Armorer, the other Hellbenders' wags skidded to a halt in order to avoid crashing into the leading vehicle, and the doors opened to discharge a crew hellbent on revenge.

 

 "My God, John, you could have given us a little more warning that that," Mildred gasped, the air driven from her by the impact.

 

 "Had to be done," the Armorer replied tersely. "Hutter was trying to get over to the other side."

 

 "Why the hell would he do that?"

 

 "My guess is he wants to grab the women in the confusion—shit, looks like Jourgensen had a similar idea— get the fuck out!" the Armorer yelled as another wag appeared in the center of the arena through the mist and smoke.

 

 J.B. grabbed Mildred and pulled her through the door of the wag, diving for cover and carrying her with him as Jourgensen's wag pulled up too late to avoid a collision with the two wags that had already crashed into the middle of the arena.

 

 "Tell me this isn't going to get worse," Mildred said as she saw Correll charging after the crashed wag, yelling at the top of his lungs.

 

 "Dark night, I could tell you but I'd probably be lying," the Armorer replied. "Come on, let's see if we can get over to the other side. Ryan and Krysty were with Correll, so chances are they're still over there somewhere," he said, raising the M-4000 in order to cut a path through any firefight they may chance on. Mildred had her Czech-made ZKR to hand. It was hardly ideal conditions for a sharp-shooting target blaster such as the ZKR, but any handblaster would be effective in the close conditions.

 

 Baron Al climbed from the wreck of his wag, still stunned by the impact of the crash, to come face-to-face with Tad Hutter, who had clambered from the wreckage of his own wag, leaving Tulk long chilled and impaled on the remains of the steering column, the dark metal protruding out of his back where the impact had driven it through his chest after the steering wheel had sheered off. He had died with the certain knowledge that his hated baron couldn't get out of the conflict alive.

 

 "Jourgensen, what the fuck are you playing at?" Hutter yelled, leveling his blaster.

 

 Baron Al looked at him with surprise, as though he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing or hearing.

 

 "Me?" he said blandly.

 

 "Asshole," Hutter muttered as he raised the blaster.

 

 "No! Leave him—he's mine!" came a yell from behind Jourgensen that made both barons look around in surprise.

 

 Correll was charging across the open space, oblivious of the carnage around and the blaster shots that strayed across his path. He had his saber raised, and was upon the startled Jourgensen before he had a chance to move.

 

 "We've waited so long for this, you pox-riddled bastard, but at last you'll pay," he screamed, long strings of saliva hanging from his jaws as he set to the baron with a vengeance, the saber chopping through Jourgensen's flesh and bone, scoring nerves and gouging out muscle so that great gouts of blood flooded from his body. Jourgensen, still not fully alert and now aware only of his own defenselessness, realized too late what was happening to him, and went down under the frenzied attack.

 

 Hutter raised his blaster to chill the mad dog and also to put Jourgensen out of his misery, but his sole attempt at charity for the baron of Charity was stopped by two streams of blasterfire that came his way from Jenny's and Rudi's Uzis. They'd heard their leader cry out and wanted him to achieve his revenge without interruption.

 

 But in their single-minded desire, they had neglected to watch their backs, and so found themselves open to blasterfire from those few sec men who had decided that they should keep a watch on their baron.

 

 Jenny and Rudi weren't the only ones to leave themselves open in this manner. Correll was now in a world of his own, the chaos and carnage around him meaning nothing, failing to register in his addled brain. For Joseph Correll, the Hellbenders and the whole assault and ambush on the trade convoy between Summerfield and Charity was as of naught. The only thing that mattered was that Baron Al "Red" Jourgensen was now beneath his blade, the chilled corpse of the baron nothing more than a mess of offal as the saber hacked him into ever smaller pieces. Correll raised his head to the skies, clouded as they were with smoke, sand and the smell of destruction, and laughed long and loud. He looked over to where some of Jourgensen's sec men had emerged from the mists.

 

 He knew what was to happen, but it no longer mattered. There was nothing now left for him to live for. His raison d'entre was fulfilled. He turned to the sec men and raised the saber aloft triumphantly, laughing wildly and welcoming the hail of blasterfire that ripped into him. The metal box on his chest gave way under the hail of fire as it ripped into his exposed head and limbs, the stress on the primitive welding making it give way beneath the onslaught.

 

 Correll stayed on his feet—kept partly upright by the force of the bullets ripping into him—long enough for the box to fall open, and its contents to finally be revealed.

 

 The charred and semimummified remains of Correll's wife tumbled from the box and fell on the mutilated remains of her tormentor…followed closely by Correll's lifeless corpse.

 

 The real battle was over. Now it was just a question of who would get out alive.

 

  

 

 Chapter Twenty-Two

 

  

 

 Dean, Jak and Danny backtracked through the sandstorm and smoke, each with his blaster at the ready, in search of a wag that could be used to get them out of the arena. Doc followed, bringing Ayesha with him. But the one-eyed man held back.

 

 "What is it, lover?" Krysty asked him.

 

 "J.B. and Millie," Ryan replied simply. "We need to find them. They won't know where we are."

 

 "They might if they saw Correll," Krysty replied. "They knew he was in our wag, and they'd probably guess which direction to take."

 

 "That's a lot of mebbes," Ryan said grimly. "I've got to try and find them."

 

 "In this? We could wander forever and still not find them," Krysty told him.

 

 "We?" Ryan queried, then grinned when he saw the expression on her face. "Okay, let's do it."

 

 While Ryan and Krysty set off to try to find J.B. and Mildred, the other five in the group were making their way toward the rear of the convoy in search of a wag they could use.

 

 "Shit, I'll be glad when we can get the hell out of here," Danny whispered to Dean.

 

 Jak heard him and grinned with a vulpine relish. "No one get in our way," he said simply, a leaf-bladed knife appearing in his hand. "Get close, chill quick and quiet— no one guess where we are."

 

 "You don't know how much I hope so," Danny murmured fervently.

 

 The party of five had been lucky so far. The main hand-to-hand was taking part toward the middle of the desert floor, where the Hellbenders had rushed to take on the sec men as they emerged from their wags. So getting back as far as the rear of the convoy was a matter of keeping eyes and ears open and staying close to the wall. Jak, Dean and Doc knew their respective strengths and fighting skills, but Ayesha and Danny were still unknown quantities, so they didn't want to risk conflict unless it was absolutely necessary.

 

 The last wag in the Charity convoy was nothing more than a personnel carrier, closed in with welded sheet metal and a few slots cut in the side for blasters to be pushed through. The slots were empty, and there were four people engaged in hand-to-hand combat around the vehicle, with as many corpses between them. Forced up close by the poor visibility, these three men and one woman were fighting full-on, handblasters trying to get into a position where they could get a clear shot.

 

 Jak looked at Dean. "You take those two," he murmured, indicating a woman and man—one of whom Dean recognized as a Hellbender—up close to the wag. "And I take them," he added, indicating two men who were careering across the desert floor, locked in a deadly embrace, the only outcome of which could be one of them buying the farm.

 

 Both of them would, if Jak had anything to do with it. Before his words had even died on the air, the albino hunter had slipped across the desert floor, through a cloud of dust and was up behind the grappling men. Even in the dull light, the leaf-bladed knife was an arc of gleaming steel as it cut through the air and then through flesh and artery. Jak had timed his movements precisely, so that the edge of the knife sliced the carotid artery of the man whose back was to him, catching him as he turned.

 

 The knife caught the second man on the downstroke, as he stared at Jak in wide-eyed, openmouthed surprise. It was his last expression, as the knife swathed patterns in the dust and sliced open his throat, his life draining from his eyes as blood drained from his open throat.

 

 The entire chilling had taken only a few seconds, in which time Dean had slipped through the smoke and approached the other fighting couple. He had the Hi-Power in his hand, and although it was risky to fire, in case the blaster noise attracted other combatants who may be near, two well-placed slugs should see the job done. The two combatants were so engrossed in their own personal struggle that they didn't notice the younger Cawdor approach them stealthily. Dean loosed two shots at less than three yards. Both were aimed for the head of each fighter, and in less than a second both struck home. The two combatants hit the desert floor unaware of how they had been chilled.

 

 Jak turned and beckoned Doc, Danny and Ayesha forward. As they joined the pair, Jak and Dean were checking that the wag was empty. There was a corpse in the front, which Jak pulled out and discarded on the desert floor.

 

 Dean turned with a puzzled expression. "Where have Krysty and Dad got to?"

 

 THE ONE-EYED MAN and the red-haired beauty were, in fact, making their way toward the center of the arena in search of J.B. and Mildred. Given the degree of cover afforded by the sandstorm and the smoke that filled the area, it was easy to avoid hand-to-hand combat as long as you kept a sharp lookout for any warring factions. Ryan and Krysty found it easy to dodge around the skirmishes, and kept a sharp view for J.B. and Mildred.

 

 The Armorer and Mildred were following much the same pattern. They had figured that Ryan and Krysty were likely to be in the direction that Correll had emerged from, so they were battling their way through the sand and smoke to try to locate their comrades, dodging the skirmishes that were taking place. The fighting was now localized, of necessity because of the conditions, and it was relatively easy to skip through the troubled patches and conserve ammo.

 

 Nonetheless, when the two couples nearly ran into each other coming out of a bank of swirling sand, all four had their blasters raised lest trouble was in the offing.

 

 "Dark night, thought we'd never find you," J.B. said laconically.

 

 "Yeah. What took you so long?" Ryan replied with a wry smile, born of the harsh conditions, then added quickly, "the others are back this way securing a wag. Let's go."

 

 The four companions made their way back across the battlefield, sticking to the outer edge of the arena to make quicker progress and avoid conflict. By the time they arrived at the wag, Jak had gotten the machine going, and the engine was ticking over.

 

 "John Barrymore, my dear doctor," Doc enthused, "we had some doubt over whether we would see you again."

 

 "It'll take more than this for you to be rid of me, you old buzzard," Mildred replied as the four piled into the wag.

 

 "Go, Jak," Ryan snapped as he closed the doors. The albino hunter wasted no time. Putting the wag into reverse, he roared back toward the entrance to the arena and away from the other wags in the convoy. In the dismal light of the storm, he was unwilling to risk reversing the wag all the way through the entrance and perhaps crashing it, so he put the vehicle into a skid and turned it so that he could hit the entrance head-on and get out of the war zone.

 

 As they broke through the almost solid wall of sand that was swirling at the entrance, where the storm was being forced through the restricted gap, the air suddenly became clearer, vision less impaired.

 

 "Where you want me to stop?" Jak asked.

 

 "I don't," Ryan replied.

 

 "But I thought—" Krysty began, before Ryan interrupted her.

 

 "Yeah, we were gonna regroup and evaluate, but that's all changed. That coldheart hell in there is just gonna sort itself out in its own time. We need to head back to the redoubt, see what happens then."

 

 "Then I drive," Jak said simply, increasing his speed as they pulled away from the arena of chilling and headed back for the Hellbenders' deserted base.

 

 The redoubt was eerily quiet when they reached base. They parked the wag, showered wearily and prepared food and drink in a subdued manner, hardly speaking. It was only when they were seated in the now all too empty meeting room that Ayesha spoke.

 

 "Do you think any of the others will get back?"

 

 Ryan shook his head. "I doubt it. They were ready to fight to the chilling, like their leader. Correll was that fanatical, and he instilled that into all of them. Even if a few of them survive the slaughterhouse, I doubt if they'll have the strength left to get back, even if they get any of the wags going."

 

 "But we owe it to them to wait," Krysty added.

 

 They left it for two days, using the time to rest and recuperate. Ryan and J.B. scoured the redoubt for any armory materials that had been left behind, of which there were few; Mildred and Krysty had better luck with the med lab supplies; while Doc and Jak squabbled good naturedly over the self-heat and food and drink supplies.

 

 Dean, meanwhile, joined Danny and Ayesha in starting to explore the old tech that was in the redoubt. From the few things the young men had been able to teach each other, Ayesha was able to add a little from what she had picked up watching her father. It didn't take any of them much further on, and Dean soon lost heart about being able to crack the secrets of the CD-ROM in their possession, but it was a step in the right direction.

 

 Dean also noticed something developing between Danny and Ayesha that made what happened a few days later completely unsurprising.

 

 As they ate, Ryan said, "I figure it's pretty clear that no one's coming back. And I also figure our chance of getting any of that old tech is pretty much gone, as well. There isn't enough here for all of us to survive, so I reckon we get a good night's rest, get it together in the morning, then jump through the mat-trans."

 

 "That should be interesting to see," Danny remarked, Dean having made him familiar with the machine.

 

 "That suggests you're not coming with us," the one-eyed man said.

 

 Danny shook his head, then looked at Ayesha. "No, there's a lot here for us to find out, then mebbe we'll try a jump and see what happens, or mebbe just go back to Charity and see if we can get at the rest of the old tech. But, seeing as you'll be gone and there'll be food and water to spare, mebbe we'll just stay here for a while, out of harm's way," he finished.

 

 "Shame. I'll kinda miss you," Dean said simply.

 

 Ayesha looked at the companions. "I guess we'll miss you, too. But this is something we need to do for ourselves."

 

 "Parting is such sweet sorrow. You know, that's a phrase I recall from somewhere, but it eludes me somewhat," Doc said as he took Ayesha's hand and kissed it. "No matter—the origin is unimportant when the sentiment remains constant."

 

 "You are one weird old guy, but I do like you," Ayesha replied with a soft smile.

 

 The companions were gathered in the mat-trans unit to enter the chamber and jump, ready for whatever fate may throw at them next. They turned and entered the chamber, having made their goodbyes. Dean was the last to enter, and as he did he stopped and turned to Danny.

 

 "Remember, as soon as the mechanism locks then the comp starts charting the course. Never been able to stand outside and see it, but if you watch, it may teach you something. And mebbe one day we'll cross and you'll be able to tell me," he said.

 

 "Bet on it," Danny said with a tinge of regret in his voice.

 

 Dean's last view of Danny and Ayesha was as he closed the door. He could tell that they were already poring over the comp console, watching intently for the mechanism to grid into action.

 

 Dean seated himself, with some regret, on the chamber floor and watched as the white, curling mist began to rise from the circular disks inset into the chamber's floor and ceiling, and he and his companions stood poised on the verge of another leap into the unknown.