Chapter Twenty




Satisfied with the main rotor's rpm, Captain Ockerman released the skid clamps. As the gyroplane jumped off the trailer and into the night sky, he addressed the passenger sitting in the contour chair directly behind him. "We're out of here, Pedro," he said through the helmet comm.
"'Oh, baby.'' Hylander groaned at the rapid ascent.
Ockerman smiled at the pull a sudden three g's of gravity squashing his backside into the seat. Yeah, yeah, it was good .
In the cargo pouch at the waist of his battlesuit, the FIVE systems engineer carried a tiny memento a single, flattened .44-caliber lead ball.
He had pried the crude projectile from deep inside the first stage of the missile. After penetrating the exterior skin, the bullet had plowed through a nest of control cables and smashed one of the guidance servos, coming to rest harmlessly against the outer housing of the main engine. Fortunately, there were double and triple backups of all critical systems, so even though they'd lost a servo, no serious damage had been done. The control cables were easily and quickly respliced. It had taken more time and effort to fill and smooth out the damage to the exterior panels, which had the potential for causing dangerous air friction and fatal drag at escape velocities.
The whole repair process, from start to finish, had wasted just forty minutes. With the missile now safely transferred by crane onto its gantry, only two technicians were required to monitor the remaining diagnostics, which were all automated. The colonel, in his infinite mercy, had decided to let his systems engineer, his biologist and his geologist all take a little recess, while he completed the prelaunch work with Bennett, the lieutenant who'd driven the missile across from Earth. In another four hours, they'd have the missile fully prepped and in countdown mode. Liftoff was scheduled to take place a little after dawn the following day.
Because they couldn't risk another attack and perhaps some more serious damage to the launch vehicle, once the repairs were finished Gabhart had given Ockerman, Hylander and Connors the green light to hunt down and eliminate the potential threat.
It was an assignment that warmed the cockles of Ockerman's heart.
He took the airship up to three hundred feet and banked a turn for the canyon mouth; once there, he swung 180 degrees and hovered. The anonymous village spread out below him was tinted in various unnatural shades of green, blue, orange and yellow, depending on the relative intensity of radiant heat.
"There goes Connors," Hylander said. "Man, is he honking!"
Ockerman's infrared sensor displayed a yellow Captain Connors driving a green ATV out of town at high speed. Like Ockerman, Connors ran without lights, relying on his battlesuit's simulations to find his way through the dark.
After adjusting the parameters of his visor's infrared scan, Ockerman cranked up the magnification to ten power and zoomed in on the ground. The gyroplane's forward-looking sensor could detect temperature differentials on the soil surface of less than one-one hundredth of a degree. Variations that slight were meaningless without a computer search for specific patterns of difference, patterns that could be expected to be left behind when six people were running for their lives.
Finding their footprints was almost too easy.
Even after more than half an hour, there was enough of an elevated heat signature for the system to isolate them. Ockerman located one set of tracks and followed it until it joined three others. At the base of the cliff, the four sets of prints were joined by another two.
"Connors," he said through the helmet-to-helmet comm link, "I have all of our targets heading up the south side of the ridge, about half a mile from the canyon entrance."
"Got any direct visual on them?" Connors asked. "If so, you'd better feed it to me."
Ockerman magnified his view field even further, holding the gyroplane steady as he scanned a greenish-blue landscape of craggy pinnacles. After a minute or so he said, "Pedro, I got nothing. What about you?"
"I can't see them," Hylander said, "but I can see the chute they climbed to reach the summit."
"Yeah, I mark that, too. Are you getting the video feed, Connors?"
"Roger that. I'll drive around to the other side of the ridge and cut off their retreat. From the map sim, it's going to take me a while, though. Maybe fifteen minutes, depending on the terrain I have to cross."
"No worries," Ockerman said. "In the meantime, we'll try to locate them and give you their exact bearings. I'll wait until you're in position before I make my first run." With that, Ockerman signed off.
The systems engineer tensed his lower back and his right biceps simultaneously. The gyroplane responded with a gut-wrenching, five-g loop.
Taken completely by surprise, his passenger could only moan.
As much as Ockerman enjoyed developing the complex artificial intelligences used in military weaponry, he liked the no-limits, hands-on stuff even better.
This dog loved to hunt.
Under a three-quarter moon, with the airship's sensory enhancements, its complement of lethal weaponry, its speed and maneuverability, there was no doubt about it. He was Shadow World's ultimate predator.
If the opportunity came his way, he had no intention of sharing the action with Connors.
"Ockerman, you're killing me back here," Hylander complained after he found his voice.
"Toughen up, Pedro. This is the AirCav."
"If you make me puke inside my suit"
"What a fucking Grandma!"
"Let's just find the bastards and get the job done."
"Yeah, but with style." Ockerman gave his body a little twitch. The assault gyro juked upward as if about to pull another balls-to-the-wall, overhead 360. Ockerman didn't complete the maneuver; he didn't have to. The juke was enough to wring another highly satisfying groan out of Hylander.
The mission they were on was twofoldto preemptively stop the Shadow people from making another hit on the missile, and to recover as many live subjects as possible for Hylander's tissue studies. Part of the biologist's mission was to evaluate the health danger the indigenous population presented to migrants from Earth. FIVE's CEOs were concerned that the natives could be carrying infectious diseases that newcomers had no defenses against. It was conceivable that in order to make Shadow World safe for colonization, military units were going to have to isolate the existing human population in internment camps, or simply exterminate them.
Either way, it was a job for the AirCav, Ockerman thought.
In the back of the systems engineer's mind, he knew that no matter how Hylander preferred his test subjects, it was up to the man in the command seat whether the prey got captured or killed. Colonel Gab-hart and Hylander could monitor what he was doing in the air, even see what he was seeing through his visor, but they couldn't remote-pilot the ship, or keep him from using its laser cannons, if the mood struck,
Ockerman's mood at that moment was for a wipe-out.
A total fucking wipeout.
Hanging at summit height, he turned on the airship's laser-guided microphones, which provided pinpoint audio surveillance. Within a narrow field of search, he scanned for the rattle of gear, for footfalls, for coughs. As he listened, he realized that he was holding his breath, even though that wasn't necessary.
"Hey, Ockerman!" Colonel Gabhart said through the comm link, "I hope you're not contracting wood on us up there. Your blood pressure is flying higher than you are. You'd better start breathing through your nose, or you're going to blow an artery."
"Roger, that, Colonel."
Ockerman shut down the air-to-ground comm link, let out a howl and turned another five-g aerial somersault. After that, he had to briefly shut off his link with Hylander as well. The yelling hurt his ears.
It had been a long time since Ockerman had flown in an actual combat situation, and the action he'd seen had been very limited. Most of the fighting in the Consumer Rebellion had taken place inside the megalopolises, street to street, building to building. Assault gyros couldn't operate at their full potential in the enclosed, high-density, ultraurban environment. Shadow World, on the other hand, was made to order for them. It had wide-open spaces. No flight ceiling. No ground-to-air missiles.
A bell tone sounded in his helmet, indicating the computer had completed its search pattern without scoring a hit. He opened the comm link to his passenger; Hylander had settled into a sullen silence. Ockerman shifted the gyro's position to take in a new section of ridge. The onboard computer did the rest of the work, precisely aiming the laser mike within the assigned grid.
The sensor picked up a brief clatter of sliding rock.
Ockerman zoomed in with the infrared on the identified area. Everything was greenish blue. There were no halos of yellow behind the outcrops, outlines of humans in hiding. No sign of animals, either. He decided it had been a natural event, caused by the erosion of the bedrock.
The bell tone chimed. Search pattern complete.
Ockerman turned the airship another ten degrees of arc and resumed the scan. Almost at once, the laser mike picked up a human voice at a decibel level that was no more than a whisper.
The voice gasped, "Oh, shit."
"Famous last words," Ockerman said.

J.B. FELT AS IF HE WERE staring down a mutie mountain lion or grizz as one hundred yards away, a black specter hovered against the backdrop of stars. Even at that distance, its propeller blades were going whup-whup-whup inside his chest.
If he could see the plane, he knew it could see him.
A machine like that had to have a whole lot of technology that could search out people. Since blas-terfire seemed to have no effect on the craft, there was no point in wasting it.
They had one hope of surviving the next few hours, and it was slim, at best. What they needed was hardened shelter, someplace that would stand up to the laser cannons. But finding it in the dismal half-light with the aircraft in pursuit was going to be difficult.
Turning his back to the machine, he spoke softly to the companions, "Retreat. One file. Tight. I'm point."
Assuming they'd already been spotted, there was nothing to be gained by a stealthy exit. J.B. burst from behind the outcrop and charged full tilt, boots thudding across a stretch of open ground. He ducked between the ridge's tall spires and kept on going. At his back he heard the grunts and curses from the others as they fought to keep up. Despite their best effort, they were slow-moving targets, and their escape route was entirely predictable, dictated by the impassable spires of rock.
Over the sounds of their desperate retreat, J.B. could hear and feel the propellers' insistent beat. The aircraft hung behind and above him, watching, waiting, perhaps fine-tuning its elevation and angle to take the perfect chill shot. J.B. expected to die before he reached the top of the chute on the other side of the ridge. No shot came.
He paused for breath at the drop-off. Over his shoulder he saw that the aircraft hadn't advanced. The pilot was toying with them.
On the plain in the distance below, moonlight turned mud lakes silver, and clouds of steam rose into the night sky, carrying with them the smell of hot sulfur. J.B. looked over the edge. Thanks to the dim light, the drop didn't seem so bad. Of course, it didn't matter how it looked. They had to make the jump, anyway.
Suddenly, the sound of the aircraft changed. When the Armorer looked back, it was no longer there. The prop noise faded as the now-invisible ship swung away from them, circling and then crossing the ridge to the west. Once the aircraft cleared the ridge, it arced back in their direction. More head games, J.B. thought. "He's going to nail us when we're in the chute." he told the others. "We've got to hit the ground running."
J.B. screwed his hat as far down on his head as it would go, then hurled himself over the edge. As he flailed his legs to keep his balance, the wind rushed up at his face, ripping at his glasses, screaming past his ears. He hit the ground all right, but not running. As he landed on the soles of his feet, his knees caved in from the force of the impact, and his butt smashed down on the gravel in the chute.
He shook it off as best he could. There was no time to really pull himself together. He had to get out of the way or be crushed by the others jumping after him. As J.B. shoulder-rolled down the slope, he felt the whoosh and heard the grunt Mildred made as she crashed to the ground. Then he was up and running. He couldn't wait to make sure everyone else made it down because that would have blocked the escape route.
After three or four strides, his run became a slide, and his slide was on the verge of becoming another fall. He jammed the buttstock of the M-4000 into the loose rock, using it as a rudder to control his wild descent.
At the bottom of the chute, the grade flattened and J.B. came to a skidding stop. Mildred bumped into him a moment later, followed by Jak, Dean, Krysty and Doc. The experience had turned the old man a whiter shade of pale. Eyes tightly shut, Doc kept shaking his head and mumbling to himself. It was a miracle that no one had broken an ankle.
Barely breathing, they listened, straining to screen out the rumble of volcanic lakes and hissing steam vents. Overhead, now lost in the dark, the rhythmic beating of the aircraft came at them from the south.
"Let's move," J.B. urged.
Because he had no choice, he led them through an obstacle course of boiling hot springs, over ground he knew had to be undermined. They ran on a thin crust of earth that could give way under their combined weight, plunging them to a terrible death by scalding.
"Don't break. Don't break. Don't break," he muttered with every running stride.
They reached and rounded the muddy shore of an infernal lake, and as they raced on, they kicked through a scatter of shattered bones, pelvic girdles, ribs, vertebrae. There were paw prints, as well. Lots of them, jumbled and pressed deep into the muck. The heat along the shore was so intense that the sweat dripping off J.B.'s face, off his chest, and pouring down the middle of his back had no cooling effect. He felt as if his clothes were going to burst into flame.
When he looked up, a black shadow passed across the stars, cutting off all hope of their retreat. J.B. slowed, then stopped. He stood slope-shouldered, his blasters hanging useless in his hands. The companions closed ranks around him, facing the oncoming aircraft. Rumbling caldrons to the rear spit drops of boiling mud on their unprotected backs.
It was the least of their worries.
Silhouetted against the blue-white moon, the aircraft slowly turned its weapons pod toward them.

Deathlands 49 - Shadow World
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