Pony Soldiers Read online

  Pony Soldiers

  Deathlands

  Book VI

  James Axler

  First edition May 1988

  ISBN 0-373-62506-

  Copyright © 1988 by Worldwide Library

  Philippine copyright 1988

  Australian copyright 1988

  Content

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Quote

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  A lone mutie rushed toward them, lashing out with the jagged blade of his knife.

  Jak spun like a dervish, trying to dodge the attack, but the creature had the advantage of surprise. The crude knife slashed upward, and Ryan, a little to one side, saw blood spurt from the boy's arm.

  Krysty stood by the open door of the gateway, and the mutie's eyes were drawn to the dazzling crimson of her hair. It dived toward the girl, but she was too quick, sidestepping neatly. The creature, shrieking its hatred, stumbled on the threshold and fell onto the glowing metal plates of the chamber.

  "You're dead," Ryan snarled, starting forward with his panga raised.

  "No!" Doc shouted, grabbing Ryan by the back of his coat and dragging him out of the entrance. "It's set on chron."

  The lights danced faster and faster, strobing. The walls were vibrating steadily, and more than one of the six wondered if they were in any danger.

  The scream that erupted from the gateway chamber was a tearing cry of anguish, so piercing that it felt as if it were scraping the inside of their skulls. The shriek bubbled for a moment, became louder and harsher. Until it suddenly… stopped.

  The chron jump was a killer.

  Dedication

  This is for Dave Thomas, who is both my best and my oldest friend. A whole quarter century and it doesn't seem a day too much. This is with my hope that he eventually finds the pot of gold at rainbow's end.

  Quote

  The frontier is always with us, just a little beyond tomorrow's dawn.

  —J. K. Lobkowitz 1824-

  Prologue

  THE LAND WAS A SHIMMERING bronze oven. The noonday sun sailed through a clear sky, etching shad­ows across the desert, edges as sharp as a razor cut. A lone hawk circled on a thermal, eyes searching the barren wastes below for any sign of life. It had seen the clumsy movements of men an hour ago, but they were of no interest. Now the bird's attention focused on a flicker of movement near the base of one of the giant saguaros that sentineled the red-gold earth.

  It was a diminutive Gila monster, barely six inches long. The coral-and-black patterns dappled its stubby body as it moved slowly, legs splayed, head raised as it watched for any potential enemy.

  The man beside the cactus flapped a hand at the creature, which hissed angrily and spit venomously in his direction. When the hand was again raised men­acingly the lizard scuttled down a narrow arroyo to­ward the east, its tail snaking a peculiar pattern in the dust.

  The man hawked, gobbing a ball of orange spittle to his left. He was partly in the shadow of the cactus, but the sun was scorching through his thin cotton breeches. He shuffled his feet in the soft leather moc­casins. His thick black hair was greased and tied back in a bandanna of patterned cloth. His face was broad and flat, the eyes brown slits that stared out across the floor of the canyon toward the winding trail a hundred yards off. He wore a loose shirt in pale blue cotton, tucked into a wide leather belt. A hunting knife in a sheath of tanned deerskin was on the left hip. The middle finger of the right hand was missing, and the finger next to it carried a heavy ring of hand-tooled silver, which held a chunk of raw turquoise in a rough claw setting.

  The man sighed, rolling his head around to ease the neck muscles. He'd been waiting for nearly three hours, ready for someone to come riding along the trail. Just to his right there was a long sliver of petri­fied wood, its heart rich with purple and red shards of rock. The bones of Yietso, the great giant of the leg­ends of the Navaho. At the thought of the old enemy the man tried to spit again, but the heat had dried his mouth.

  Nobody had seen any Navaho in the canyons for more years than the fingers on ten hands. This land belonged to "the people." He was eighteen years old and fiercely proud of his warrior heritage, proud of being a fighting man of the Mescalero Apaches.

  His gun lay beside him, cocked so that the flat click wouldn't betray him to an enemy. It was a stolen ri­fle, a battered Sharps .50-caliber buffalo gun, its butt patterned with hammered brass tacks in the shapes of the moon and stars.

  The name of the young Indian was Hears Little Sees Far, references to his deafness, caused by a misfired cartridge in that same gun, and his keen eyesight.

  There was a small piece of jerky in the pouch at his belt, and he absently chewed at a strip of it. By lying still he was conserving his bodily fluids, holding off from needing water. His pony was tethered in a box canyon three miles east, and there was a metal can­teen tied to the blanket. It was covered in canvas and stamped with the letters U.S. and the number 7 on its side.

  A half hour drifted soundlessly by. The hawk gave up watching the skittering lizard, fearing the close­ness of the hiding man. It angled its wings and sailed off southward, across the serrated land. There might be better pickings in the steep-sided valley where the river ran, even at the height of the New Mexico sum­mer.

  Hears Little Sees Far kept his breathing steady, conserving his energy. The word around the wickiups of his tribe was that a lone man drove his wagon along this trail once every seven days. The white man car­ried liquor on his wagon. Sometimes he would even have a white woman with him. The Mescalero youth had never had a white woman before, and his loins surged at the thought. His hand crept out and ca­ressed the narrow trigger of the old buffalo rifle at his side.

  "It will be good," he muttered to himself.

  HE SAW THE DUST CLOUD rising in sinuous curves through the hot, windless air of the afternoon, a pale gray spiral moving toward him. As good as his sight was, the young man couldn't yet make out what was at the center of the cloud.

  The dust soared higher, and he could make out a pair of ponderous oxen drawing a white-topped wagon. It was the one.

  Moving with an infinite caution, the Apache drew the Sharps to him and cradled his face against the warm metal, squinting one-eyed along the sights. He drew a careful bead on the nearer of the pair of oxen, his finger settling on the trigger.

  Something struck him. A smashing blow in the center of his spine, a hand's span above the leather belt. It jerked his whole body, the gun dropping from his nerveless fingers. His head was thrown back in shock, eyes staring blindly into the screaming light of the sun. His legs kicked uncontrollably, and he felt wa
rmth around his thighs where he'd fouled himself. Vaguely, in the far-off distance, the young warrior's ears caught the rumble of a shot being fired, the sound echoing off the cliffs on the farther side of the wide valley.

  "Good shot, trooper," said the tall, lean man on the ridge behind the dying Indian.

  "Thank you, General," the soldier replied, rising from his crouched position, the smoking Springfield .45 carbine in his gloved right hand. It was the reli­able 1873 model.

  "Looks like his back's broke. Best go and finish the bastard off."

  "Yes, sir." The trooper saluted and walked lei­surely down the slope, drawing the Colt Navy from his belt. The rest of the troop sat on their horses, waiting quietly. All were dressed in the dusty blue uniforms of the Seventh Cavalry.

  Their leader brushed at the orange dirt on his yel­low-striped breeches with the back of his hand. He was a little above average height and as skinny as a lath. Everything about him was thin and tight: narrow eyes, slitted against the New Mexico sun; lips drawn like a line of ink. He had an oddly yellow complexion for a man who spent so much time out of doors, and the corner of his mouth was turned down and seamed with old scar tissue, as though from a vicious blow. No­body ever asked him how he got the injury. Under the hat there was a cascade of tumbling yellow hair, as gold as Kansas wheat. A brass-hiked saber hung at the officer's left hip, the tip of the scabbard scraping the earth.

  The afternoon was disturbed a second time as the trooper stooped by the twitching Mescalero and put the muzzle of his well-used pistol just behind the right ear, taking care not to get grease on the gun. He squeezed the trigger and stepped smartly away from the fountain of blood and brains that spurted from the Indian's skull.

  "That's 'nother good Indian, General," called the grizzled sergeant, leaning from the high McClellan army saddle and spitting out a stream of tobacco juice.

  "Yeah. Kill one cub don't mean you got all the family. Day's coming when we need to burn out the nest."

  "Wanna bring up the dune wag for the body?" the trooper shouted.

  "No, leave him be. Let him rot."

  "Want me to radio Cutter on the ox cart? Let him know what went down?"

  The blond officer nodded, then turned on his heel and stalked toward the rest of the detachment of soldiers. He paused from habit, checking that the Stec-kin 9 mm automatic pistol with the laser nightsight was snugly in its holster. The quartz wrist chron, showed seven minutes and eleven seconds before three o'clock. It had been a worthwhile hunt and kill.

  The puckered lips parted in something near to a smile, but the smile never got within a country mile of the cold, slitted eyes.

  Chapter One

  NOT FAR FROM THE Mohawk River in what had been called, nearly a century back, New York State, the summer sky was clear, but the tops of mountains still held pockets of tired snow in the shadowed high val­leys. Chem clouds in virulent shades of purple and crimson were gathering far to the north, showing the signs of grim storms to come. Low on the horizon the six friends had glimpsed the fiery starburst of a hunk of prenuke hardware finally finding its way home through the polluted upper levels of Earth's atmo­sphere.

  It was close to six months since the friends had last stood on the high plateau, which had been scraped from the side of the hill by an earthslide. The redoubt behind them had been one of those built in the late 1990s in isolated and secret places.

  The leader of the group, a rangy man in his mid-thirties, stood on the edge of the drop, staring down at the ropes of dark blue plaited plaslon that had en­abled them to make the dangerous climb. The re­doubt had been untouched since the day the world caught fire in January 2001, protected by its inacces­sibility. When they'd first reached the place, it had looked as though they might never get off the mountain. But they'd made it and traveled to Virginia and done there what they'd set out to do. Now, after some bizarre adventures, they'd returned to the redoubt.

  "Looks like someone's been up here, J.B.," Ryan said. "Marks of feet hereabouts."

  "Wouldn't have gotten inside unless they knew the entry code."

  The second speaker was J.B. Dix, the armorer of the group, a short, terse man who wore a battered fe­dora hat and wire-rimmed glasses. The brown shirt and gray pants were stained and worn, as were the high combat boots. There was a mini-Uzi slung across his shoulders on a webbing strap and a Steyr AUG 5.6 mm pistol on his right hip.

  "Doors seem shut tight, Ryan," said the third member of the party. She was a tall girl with startlingly green eyes and even more startling red hair, red like spilled arterial blood, not like warm copper. She was only an inch short of six feet with a leanly beau­tiful body. She wore khaki overalls, torn across the shoulder and stained with what could have been dried blood. Her boots were dark blue leather, with stacked Western heels. They were ornamented with silver, spread-wing falcons, and the toes were chiseled points of silver metal. Her name was Krysty Wroth, and she was in her mid-twenties. Krysty was the part-mutie lover of the group's unchallenged leader, Ryan Caw­dor.

  Wearing the same type of clothes as J. B. Dix, Cawdor stood a couple of inches over six feet, weigh­ing a muscular two hundred pounds. He had a mass of dark, curling hair that coiled to his nape. The most striking feature of the harsh face was the black eye patch that covered the left socket. The right side of his face was disfigured by a jagged scar that sliced from the corner of his eye to below the angle of his mouth.

  The wind tugged at the long fur-trimmed gray coat that he wore over his pants and shirt. On his left hip was an eighteen-inch-long steel panga, which was bal­anced on the right side by a handblaster, a 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol—twenty-five and a half ounces of efficient chilling machine. Ryan gripped a Heckler & Koch G-12 automatic rifle in his right hand, and car­ried a couple of spare fifty-shot mags in his coat pockets.

  "We better take care when we get inside," he said. "Could be trouble. And before we get to the gateway and the mat-trans chamber we'll stock up on bullets, get some self-heats and ring-pulls of food and water. Fresh backpacks. They'll come in handy."

  "Don't like self-heats. Taste like warm mud. Not so good."

  They laughed at the vehemence and disgust in the voice. It came from fourteen-year-old Jak Lauren, who'd joined them less than a year ago when they were involved in bloody fighting down in Louisiana. Fully clothed and soaking wet, he weighed in at just over one hundred pounds, but he was the most lethally de­structive hand-to-hand fighter Ryan Cawdor had ever seen. And he'd seen plenty.

  Jak was dressed in denim jeans with a jacket made out of leather and canvas, hand-colored to camou­flage it, in gray, green and brown. Under it he wore a ragged fur vest, with the sleeves hacked out. A massive .357 Magnum pistol with a six-inch barrel stuck out of a crude leather holster on his hip. Concealed on his person were several slim, leaf-bladed throwing knives.

  But your first impression of Jak Lauren didn't in­clude any of that. The first thing you noticed was the mane of pure white hair that floated across the whip­cord shoulders. Then you saw the eyes, glowing deep in the sockets of wind-scoured ivory like angry ru­bies. The contrast with his colorless skin was star­tling. Jak also carried facial scars. One disfigured his narrow nose, and another gouged jaggedly over the left cheek, tugging the corner of the mouth up in a crooked, mocking, perpetual smile.

  The other two members of the party were huddled in the lee of the overhanging rock shelf, by the doors into the complex. One was a tall, staggeringly beauti­ful blond girl, wearing a short crimson skirt and blouse under a gray fur coat. As she shifted her feet tiny silver spurs on the high heels of her red boots tin­kled delicately. Her name was Lori Quint, and she was sixteen years old.

  The man with his arm around her, against the ris­ing wind, was her lover, teacher and protector. He was older. Measure it one way, and he was around 230. Put another way he might only be somewhere around thirty-two years old. He looked to be in his mid-sixties.

  In fact, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born
in South Strafford, Vermont, on February 14, 1868. On June 17, 1891, he'd married Emily Louise Chandler. They'd had two children, Rachel and Jolyon. In November of 1896 Doc Tanner had disap­peared.

  The scientists on Project Cerberus, operating from a redoubt in Virginia, had been carrying out experi­ments in time travel, a process known in the arcane trade as "trawling." They'd tried several times, in­cluding picking up a Supreme Court judge. But what arrived in the chron-trans chamber generally resem­bled several pounds of chopped liver. Their single success was Doc Tanner, who arrived with them, more or less in one piece, in 1998.

  Having been untimely ripped from his own home and life, Doc proved exceedingly uncooperative with the gray-faced men in white lab coats. Though they tried to involve him in their work, he kept insisting on being returned to his family. In fact, he made several illegal attempts to operate the chron-trans himself. In the end he became a guinea pig for a second time.

  This time the transmission took place in December 2000, only a matter of days before the holocaust that destroyed civilization throughout the planet. Doc was plunged forward into a dreadful world, nearly a hundred years on, to a frontier dirt ville called Mocsin, up near the Darks. His mind scrambled, he was taken prisoner by the local baron, Jordan Teague and became the particular toy of the sec chief, the appall­ing Cort Strasser.

  Eventually, after the bloody shambles of a big fire-fight, the old man was rescued by Ryan Cawdor.

  Doc's memory was still erratic, but he was generally becoming more coherent.

  Ryan glanced back at him. In some odd way, Doc seemed to be getting younger. Maybe it was the influ­ence of Lori Quint.

  Tanner was the tallest of the party, topping Ryan by an inch or so, and was skinny built, wearing a stained and faded frock coat over a blue denim shirt. His shrunk shanks slotted into cracked knee boots.

  Doc's face was deeply lined, his were eyes a pale blue and a fringe of long gray hair framed his skull. Despite his age, Doc's teeth were peculiarly excellent. His voice was rich and deep, compelling attention.