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.