Chapter Nineteen




In the glare of the trailer's overhead lights, the taller of the two female mercies hunkered down cross-legged on the floor and, right under Ryan's nose, started to fieldstrip her weapon. He couldn't help but notice the pair of tattoos on her pale wiry forearms. The one on her left arm said Buy or Die! 2034th MLAB. The one on her right, though it wasn't easy to read, said FIVE Forever. Her skin was blurred with furrows of waxy scar tissue; it looked to Ryan as if she had tried to scrape off the green, red and purple design with a serrated knife.
The mercie reached to the rear of the stock and dropped the wide, curving magazine into the palm of her hand. When she set it to one side on the floor, Ryan got a better look at its top. He saw nothing familiar there. No stacked rounds visible. Just a trio of silver stubs sticking up out of an upraised ring, which made him wonder if the thing wasn't a mag, after all.
She detached the entire trigger assembly by pulling a pair of small pins on either side of the pistol grip. After putting this encased unit aside, with a hard half twist she unscrewed the tribarrel and fore-stock, which also came away as a single unit. The removal of two more pins on the receiver below what appeared to be the fire control indicators allowed her to take off the protective housing that sat atop the buttstock.
Inside were many mysteries.
The female mercie lifted out a foot-long, flat-black cylindrical container that necked down at the end where it joined the barrels. It was connected to and rested upon a nest of thick, insulated cables. When this unit was out of the receiver, and hanging off to one side, it exposed a clear glass or crystalline block that had fibrous material laced all through it. After detaching the block from the interior of the receiver, she set it in her lap and with clips and wires hooked it up to a palm-sized LCD readout. Satisfied by what she saw, she wiped the ends of the crystal with a swab dipped in a tiny vial of some kind of solvent. She was careful not to touch the areas after she'd cleaned them.
Then the mercie snapped the weapon back together even more quickly than she'd stripped it. Her precise, seemingly automatic movements told Ryan she could have repeated the procedure blindfolded.
Damm noted Ryan's interest in the procedure and said, "Nothing like that on your world, huh?"
"Just the ones Nara and her friends brought with them," Ryan said.
"I guess the nuke war sort of put a crimp in your R and D," Damm said. "Don't suppose you could have gotten much farther than the neodymium-glass laser, which is probably fifty generations removed from what we've got now." The merc leader took the rifle from the woman, detached the magazine, and, to Ryan's surprise, handed the weapon over to him.
It was amazingly light and warm to the touch. No more than three pounds without the magazine, he guessed. He shouldered it and found the fit, cheek to stock, very comfortable. The balance was even better; triple deadly, in fact. Slightly nose heavy, and quick on the point, which was just how Ryan liked his blasters.
He looked down the adjustable leaf rear and bladed ramp front sights. There were no dovetail grooves for a scope mount, which surprised him. He turned the rifle over and found a jeweled nub on the underside of the flash-hider. It faced the same direction as the muzzle. The back side of the little diamond's housing ended in a thin tube that ran along the join of tribarrels, and disappeared into the front end of the buttstock. To Ryan, it looked like part of a laser-targeting device of some kind.
Up close he could tell the dark-blue barrels weren't made of steel, but of some densely layered, polymer fabric set in clear resin. He could see its weave when the light hit the surface just right. He guessed it provided better heat dissipation and longer wear than steel.
"What you've got there is state of the art," Damm said. He pointed at the lump of scar tissue on his chin. "A near miss from a rifle just like that one gave me this beauty mark. Another couple of inches and it would have taken off my head."
"Why two triggers and three barrels?" Ryan asked.
"Front trigger is for single shots," Damm told him, "the back one is for bursts and sustained fire controlled by those selector switches on the side of the receiver."
Ryan checked out the switches. One of them pointed to the white letter S . It could also point to the red letter F. He figured it had to be the safety. The other switch determined the pulse length.
"The tribarrel configuration focuses individual laser beams a few micromillis apart on the target," Damm went on. "Get a kind of harmonic chain-saw effect that way. Big-time atomic disruption, which magnifies the temperatures at the point of impact, and the beams' cutting power by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. You've got to make sure of your background when you touch off one of these. The pulses can travel a long, long way before their energy's used up."
Looking at the blaster, Ryan couldn't help but ask himself why Damm was telling him all this. Because he was bored? Perhaps. Because he felt they were on the same wavelength? Fellow outsiders, freebooters, soldiers for hire? Less likely, but could be. Or was it because it didn't matter a piddling rad-blast what he showed him? Ryan decided that had to be it. With what lay outside the trailer, Damm knew that he wouldn't grab one of the rifles and try to escape. There was nowhere for him to run.
He shouldered the pulse rifle again. It made him think about J.B. and how much he'd love getting his hands on something like this, which made him wonder for the hundredth time if his companions had made it to safety, and if he was ever going to see them again. One thing he was pretty sure ofthey wouldn't be coming over here to rescue him. He had to assume he was on his own. And whenever the opportunity to get away appeared, if it appeared, he had to be prepared to make the most of it. In the meantime, he had to soak up the information he needed to get back to Deathlands. For starters that meant learning how to operate the strange weapon he was holding.
He glanced up at Damm, who smiled at him.
There was nothing sneaky in back of the eyes.
No bastard-evil intentions hidden behind a grinning mask.
Ryan knew he'd probably have to chill the scar-faced mercie, and possibly Nara, too, if he wanted to escape. He didn't have a problem with that, but there was nothing personal in it.
Ryan smiled back. He decided to keep asking questions until the mercie stopped answering them. "How many shots is that mag good for?"
"You mean the power cell," Damm said. "It'll fire continuously, sustained beam, for fifteen minutes without a replacement. That's a lot of single shots and bursts, by the way."
Then the merc held his hand out. The meaning was obvious.
Ryan gave the rifle back to him.
Damm passed it and the power cell back to the woman merc, then he said, "As I understand the early reports, you've got no standing armies worth shit on the other side, no operational aircraft, no laser-proof fortifications. Bombed yourselves back into the Stone Age, more or less."
"More or less."
Damm looked mighty pleased. "Then it should be no sweat for fourteen combat vets and a couple of APCs to take over a nice chunk of your world," he said. He turned to Jurascik and said, "Nothing over here to hold a candle to us. Just like old times, Nara.
What do you say? We could easily make it fifteen vets."
From her seat beside Ryan on the crates, the blonde shrugged.
"At least think about it, Captain. The smart move would be for you to put in with us. You might as well act like you were part of the triple cross all along. It's the only way you're ever going to get a return trip to Shadow World, now. If you think Mitsuki's going to reward you after this, you're kidding yourself. Even if everything works out and they get Mr. Wonderful back, they don't reward screwups. They fry screwups."
"That's already occurred to me, Damm. And I've been meaning to thank you for getting me killed, you greedy fucking asshole."
"Hey, I'm just trying to take care of my own crew," he countered. "It's a safe bet nobody else will. Would you have done it any different if you'd been in my shoes?"
"Yeah, I'd have found a hideout that smelled better," she said. "Under the plastic, there's green shit all over the sides of your van. I've been passing the time watching it grow."
Ryan saw the creeping spread of bacteria on the van's tires, wheel wells, the places where it had splattered up during their passage.
"As long as we can keep it off the engine's air intakes, it doesn't matter," Damm said. "It isn't growing inside the passenger compartment yet."
"What is this Consumer War you're always talking about?" Ryan said.
"Rebellion," Nara said. "We don't dignify the campaign by calling it a war."
"Why's that?"
"The term 'war' implies two sides of roughly comparable strength," Nara said. "Maybe even some kind of code of conduct."
"The trouble started not long after the Globals linked up to form FIVE," Damm told him. "They decided they weren't getting the max return out of their marketing programs, that relying solely on advertising pressure from the tell-yous was a big mistake. So they dropped the Mr. Nice Guy routine. They started setting quotas and telling people exactly what they had to consume, when and how much. Of course, that was back when there were still things to buy, even if it was mostly crap.
"You bought your assigned quota of goods and services, based on a percentage of your annual income, or you got a visit from the Bureau of Resource Allocation's termination squad. Usually the't-squad came in the middle of the night, executed the offender on the spot and, for good measure, took out everyone else in the residence. The purchase quota kept getting pushed higher and higher, until it was around ninety-eight percent of gross income. Essentially all consumer spending is at discretion of FIVE, depending on what surpluses they had and what stuff they want to move. People finally got fed up."
"Everyone was hit hard by the policy," Nara said. "When the revolt started, it had all the makings of a worldwide revolution. Unfortunately for the consumer side, they didn't have battlesuits or pulse rifles. And there was no army to protect their interests. The military had already been privatized for twenty years. The armed forces subsidiaries were wholly owned by the Globals. After a couple of weeks of one-sided slaughter, keeping two percent of what you earned sounded pretty good to just about everybody."
"Losses to the consumer side in that time period were twenty-eight million," Damm said. "And it was actually probably triple that because no one ever counted the people walled up in their neighborhoods and left to starve. Our side lost a few hundred thousand, mostly due to accidents unrelated to combat, and to friendly fire" again, he pointed to his chin "which also gave me this puppy."
"Some factions at FIVE wanted to keep the war rolling for another month or two," Nara said, "to try to make a real dent in the population, but the foot soldiers got sick of the killing and put down their weapons."
"In return for our services," Damm said, "and in exchange for our battlesuits, we received two weeks' worth of MREs, a new set of fatigues, one pair of resoled boots and this handsome campaign ribbon." He flicked the dirty bit of multicolored silk pinned to the strap of his battle harness. "Then we were told to go below Level 100 and stay there. Until something nasty and dangerous like this needed doing. Something the Globals didn't want to get back-splashed on them."
Ryan shifted his seat on the hard crate. Sweat was sticking his fatigues to the backs of his thighs. There wasn't much room to move in the trailer, not with seven people, all their gear, and a parked van. And Nara was right about the ungodly stink inside their plastic envelope. The aroma of unwashed human bodies mixed with ammonia and fuel fumes. Uncomfortable. Cramped. Overcrowded. The trailer was like the mercies' world in miniature. Ryan could sympathize with their desire to get out.
Then, over the continuous noise of the air pump, there was a soft thunk high on the trailer wall.
Damm didn't have to tell everyone to shut up. Someone quickly turned off the air pump.
Another thunk, this time on the other side of the box.
Damm's crew moved as if they had rehearsed the drill a thousand times. Without a word, they stripped the plastic sheeting from the van, picked up their weapons and, pushing Ryan and Nara ahead of them, climbed through the vehicle's rear doors. Damm remained outside for a few seconds, bent over the plastic crates along the wall, then he climbed into the van.
The mercie leader paused beside Nara and showed her the two detonators he had in his hand.
"Can I assume you're with us now?" Damm asked.
"No choice," the blonde replied. "It's 'Buy or Die' time."
Damm gave her one of the detonators. "Hit it on the count of five, after mine goes," he told her. As he moved forward to the driver's seat, he said, "Everybody batten down. This ride could get a tad rough."
He hit the high beams, then the ignition button. As the van's engine roared to life, Damm dropped it into gear, stomped the gas pedal flat and pressed the detonator.
With a blinding flash and rocking boom, the trailer's rear doors blew off their hinges. The van shot forward, lurching through the fireball and down the ramp.
As they hit the ground, Ryan got a glimpse of the APCs ringing them. For an awful instant he thought they were going to take crossing lanes of fire, but Damm was too fast. Before the APCs could shoot, he squirted the van, engine howling, through their perimeter.
Beside Ryan, Nara stopped counting under her breath and pressed the detonator with both thumbs.
A fraction of a second later they were slammed from behind by a concussion so awesome that it made Ryan lose consciousness. The moment of relative peace was short-lived. He was jarred awake again as the blast-lifted rear end of the van crashed back to the ground and the impact drove his stomach into his throat.
Ahead of them, sheared by the power of the blast, uncountable tons of hanging slime dropped from the ceiling. Damm swerved around the newly made hills of wet slunk and ground his way through the intervening valleys. All four wheels spinning, the van threw up a rooster tail of green bacterial slime that splattered over the back windows. Behind them, the enemy APCs vanished in darkness.
Even so, Damm didn't back off on the speed. He drove like a maniac, forcing the van on an erratic, yawing, churning course around and over the obstacles. Though they had escaped the death trap, there were no cheers from the mercies.
Ryan thought this was strange. Then all became clear.
A green lance as thick as a man's body slashed past the right side of the van. If the light was blinding, the heat was worse. In a fraction of an instant, it blistered and bubbled the armored window glass. It turned the van's metal wall to liquid. One of the mercies sitting ahead of Ryan let out a shrill scream, and kept on screaming.
Ryan looked over the seat back and saw the guy was stuck to the wall. His shoulder had been leaning against it; his flesh and bone had melted along withand intothe glass and steel.
Before the pursuit could fire again, Damm cut the wheel hard over and sent the van in a wild, sideways skid.

Deathlands 49 - Shadow World
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