Desert Kings Read online

  “John Barrymore, do we have any grens?” Doc barked, turning to face the door across the chamber.

  “Got better than that,” the Armorer replied, pulling a squat mil sphere into view from his munitions bag. “I’ve got an implo gren! Been saving it for an emergency.”

  “Well, this is it, sir!” An implo gren was a predark marvel that didn’t explode outward, but instead created a gravitational field that pulled everything nearby inward to compact into a small, hard sphere. A single implo gren could reduce a U.S. Army tank down to the size of clenched fist. Nothing could survive that. Not even a cyborg.

  “All right, if he is here, then let’s finish this now!” Ryan declared roughly, sliding the Steyr off his shoulder. “We’re gonna recce the entire redoubt, from the fusion reactors in the basement to the garage on top. And if we find Delphi, then we pin him down with blasterfire long enough to get clear and let J.B. use the implo gren.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Mildred agreed, pulling out the Czech ZKR. Back in her own time, killing a person was the worst crime imaginable and carried the most stringent punishments possible. At first Mildred had found it difficult to reconcile taking a life with her oath as a doctor. But “kill or be killed” was the mantra of a new America.

  “How much space needed for gren?” Jak asked.

  “We need at least thirty yards,” Krysty replied, her animated hair flexing and turning in response to her heightened emotional state.

  “I…My friends, while I truly appreciate these sentiments, honor forces me to remind you that we do not have to stay,” Doc noted hesitantly in his stentorian voice. “We can simply leave and jump to another redoubt. With luck, Delphi will never find us again.”

  “Or nightcreep next week!” Jak shot back scornfully, drawing his Colt Python. “Not run. Ace now!”

  “I agree,” Krysty stated forcibly. “We should stay.”

  “But still, madam—”

  “Dark night, if we rabbit now, we could find ourselves ambushed after every damn jump,” J.B. added, using his free hand to adjust his fedora. “We arrive weak and sick, then in rushes Delphi.” He vehemently shook his head. “I don’t want to get chilled on my knees puking. That’s a bastard-poor way to buy the farm.”

  “There is no good way to die, John,” Mildred countered, patting his arm. She had seen death a thousand times before and Thomas Hobbes had been right—it was always ugly and brutish. “But I’d rather face it on my feet with a gun in my hand. Next time, we may not have an implo gren.”

  “Fucking A,” Jak added emphatically.

  “Has anybody considered the possibility that Delphi isn’t even here?” Mildred added. “Or that he hasn’t attacked yet because of the spare parts?”

  “Too valuable to risk, eh?” Ryan said thoughtfully, rubbing his unshaved chin. It was an interesting idea, and opened a host of possibilities. Unfortunately there were far too many possibilities and not enough hard answers.

  “Krysty, can you sense anything?” he asked hopefully.

  “No…not really,” the woman said hesitantly, trying to concentrate harder. Sometimes she could feel the presence of danger long before it arrived—hidden coldhearts, sleeping muties, even acid rain. Her talent had saved their lives more than once. It was also not very reliable, waxing and waning.

  Closing her eyes, the woman tried to focus on the cyborg, but stopped after a few minutes. It was useless. The redoubt was full of automatic devices that kept the place spotlessly clean and scrubbed the air. How could she pinpoint just one more machine? Ruefully, Krysty glanced at the piles of boxes. Besides, exactly how much of Delphi was still norm anymore, and how much had been replaced with plastic and steel?

  “Well?” Ryan prompted.

  “Sorry, lover,” Krysty answered regretfully. “But I’m still too weak from the jump.”

  Ryan grunted at that. Fair enough. It had been a long shot at best. “Okay, we do this the hard way,” he stated. “Doc, you can stay here to guard the boxes if you want, but we’re going hunting.”

  “Then consider me Ajax of Troy!” Doc rumbled, standing a little taller. “I shall not fall on my sword!”

  Jak raised a snowy eyebrow.

  “I shall not fail.”

  “Ah.”

  Then Doc’s voice took on a more gentle aspect. “And thank you, my friends,” he said, looking around at them. “I…Thank you.”

  Slapping the man on the back in reply, Ryan started for the control room with the others close behind, but Mildred stopped them.

  “Wait a second,” she said, a sly grin forming. “Leaving is actually not a bad idea.”

  “Really, madam!” Doc said askance.

  Mildred snorted. “Not us, ya old coot. The boxes.”

  Ryan paused. He had considered smashing all of the parts, but that would take hours, and it was still possible that the cyborg might be able to use some of the bits. But he couldn’t do drek if they were gone.

  “Good thinking, Millie!” J.B. said, grinning wide. “Come on, let’s scatter his shit across the world! Remember what Trader said—denying an enemy necessary supplies is halfway to winning any fight.”

  “The other half is blowing out his brains,” Ryan added. “All right, I’ll stay here and watch the exit through the control room. The rest of you get moving!”

  As the others headed for the boxes, Ryan leveled his longblaster at the door leading into the redoubt. At the first sign of movement he would open fire. But even if Delphi was standing on the other side, he felt sure the cyborg wouldn’t attack them straight on. The nuking coward liked to strike from behind, to lay traps or to hire mercies to do his fighting. Doc had almost aced the bastard all by himself, and this time the nuke-sucker would face all of the companions. The old man wasn’t a blood relative, but some families were forged from friends in the heat of battle.

  Blood brothers, Mildred called them. Ryan liked the term. It said a lot in a few words. Blood brothers. None of the companions were related, but there was no doubt they were a family. And kin helped kin.

  Forming a ragged line, the other companions started passing the boxes along and stacking them in the mat-trans unit. When it was full, Krysty tapped random buttons on the control panel, left the gateway and closed the door, triggering a jump. A few ticks later, a white mist rose from the floor and ceiling, and the complex machinery performed its function. A series of ethereal lights danced within the swirling cloud, then the sparkles diminished and the mist slowly dissipated to show the unit was empty again.

  “Dark night, look how many boxes are left!” J.B. stated, studying the remaining pile. “Must be enough parts here to build a dozen copies of the bastard. Just how bad did you shoot up his ass, Doc?”

  “As much as possible,” the old man replied with a note of pride in his voice. “However, I have noted that there were no spare brains among this grotesque array of medical effluvia. These must be simply spare parts for the next time he is damaged.”

  “Which means he’s not making an army of himself,” Krysty said, hoisting another box. The lower they got in the pile, the heavier each box became and the parts got larger.

  “Quite so, dear lady.”

  “Good,” Jak snarled, taking the container. “One enough.”

  Accepting the box, Mildred added, “More than enough.”

  “Agreed, madam.”

  “If these important, then where guards?” Jak asked suspiciously, continuing the process. A lid shifted, revealing a pair of lungs. Fighting down a shiver, the teenager tossed the container into the gateway. For some reason, the body parts reminded him of the cannies they’d come across back in Louisiana.

  “We’re hardly out in the open,” Krysty replied. “This is the center of a nukeproof redoubt. No place safer in the world.”

  In reply, the teen only grunted and kept up the pace. The mat-trans unit was filled a second time, and then a third, before the antechamber was empty.

  “Done and done.” J.B. sighed in relief,
removing his fedora and smoothing down his hair. “Good luck to him finding those again!”

  “Mildred, any idea what those thick plates were?” Krysty asked, dusting off her hands. “I’ve never seen anything like those before.”

  “No idea whatsoever,” Mildred replied. “Maybe body armor, or something to do with his weapons systems, possibly even the force field generator or a communications device…it could be anything really.”

  “Including his hologram generator,” Doc snarled in a manner that startled his companions. The dastardly cyborg had once almost lured him into a deathtrap by creating a three-dimensional image of his dear wife, Emily. How the soulless manchine ever got a recording of her was something that still rankled his troubled thoughts.

  Ryan kept a careful watch on the door that separated the antechamber from the control room while the others caught their breath. They needed to be razor sharp before daring to leave the antechamber.

  When they were ready, Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer and opened the door. There came a series of muffled bangs as the mechanical locks disengaged, then the portal silently swung aside on well-oiled hinges.

  With the Steyr leading the way, Ryan stepped into the control room of the redoubt. A row of comps lined one wall, the monitors endlessly scrolling with binary codes. Twinkling lights danced across the console, a few of the switches moving to new positions all by themselves. But there was nobody in sight.

  Taking a position near the door to the corridor, Ryan stood guard and J.B. punched in the code, then eased into the hallway as the door snicked open, Uzi at the ready. He disappeared from sight for a moment, then stuck his head back into the control room.

  “All clear,” J.B. reported. “Nothing in sight, but the usual doors.”

  Gathering in the corridor, the companions waited, listening for sounds of movement. When satisfied, they advanced on triple-red, opening each door and checking every room. Normally, these were offices for the base personnel. But in this redoubt each room was piled haphazardly with mil supplies: one room full of combat boots, another stacked high with dark green fatigues, the next with bedrolls and after that backpacks.

  “What did you say about an army?” Krysty asked sarcastically, pushing open a door with the barrel of her wheel gun. Inside were lumpy canvas bags containing compact tents. “There’s enough stuff here to equip an entire ville of sec men!”

  “Just no weps yet,” Ryan corrected, checking inside a closet. He wanted to stop and loot the place, as he needed a new pair of boots bad. But first and foremost, they had to know if there was anybody else in the redoubt.

  When the companions finished the level, they ignored the elevator and used the concrete stairs to proceed straight down to the bottom level. There was little to search there as the entire level was filled with a silently working fusion reactor located behind thick lead walls. Some of the controls on the master control panel were blinking in the red, but they had found other redoubts doing the exact same thing, and the machines were still working smoothly years later. Whatever the flashing lights meant, it had nothing to do with malfunctioning equipment.

  Now with their backs clear, Ryan led the way up into the redoubt, going from floor to floor, checking every room for any sign of the dreaded cyborg. But aside from the cornucopia of clothing and bedrolls on the fifth level, the rest of the redoubt was empty of anything useful. There wasn’t a scrap of paper in the wastebaskets or even a roll of toilet paper in the crappers. It seemed as if the redoubt had been effectively emptied long before Delphi started hauling in fresh equipment. Of course that left the big question of where was he getting the supplies?

  In the kitchen, the companions found all of the refrigerators softly humming, clean and ready to be used, but totally devoid of anything edible. The rows of ovens worked normally, and the faucets delivered clean water. But that was all. There wasn’t even salt and pepper in the table shakers or napkins in the steel holders.

  “Okay, time for the armory,” Ryan decided, shifting the pack on his back. His stomach was grumbling slightly, and the thought of the self-heats they had found the previous week made his mouth water, even though the food was usually tasteless. But this was not the time or the place for chow. Soon enough they would know if the base was empty, and then they could break out some food.

  The others judiciously agreed and proceeded with extreme care, with J.B. checking for traps all along the way. They stopped a couple of times to listen to strange noises, creaking and a soft pattering from overhead, but there was nothing in sight and they proceeded, if a bit more slowly.

  Reaching the next level, Ryan found the lock on the stairwell door was partially melted, a small, clean hole penetrating completely through the thick metal. Obviously the cyborg had been there. Must have used that damn laser Doc had told them about, the one-eyed man thought. Tentatively, he touched the metal with a fingertip and found it smooth and cool. But that meant nothing. The steel would have been room temperature after only a few hours.

  Crouching to peer through the hole, Ryan saw only the usual corridor on the other side, a long, straight hall that led past the elevator bank and ended at a massive armored door. The armory. When the base was fully staffed, the corridor would be a death trap, with no place to hide or take cover from snipers. Now it was just a passageway, although once before they had gotten trapped inside a cage that dropped down from the ceiling.

  Gently, Ryan pushed at the door with the barrel of his longblaster. As it swung open there came a soft exhalation of warm air, closely followed by a strange hum and a series of soft pattering again. But this time he heard it clearly. It almost sounded like rain. Had a pipe busted? Or mebbe a sink was overflowing on the top level.

  Taking the lead, Ryan proceeded down the corridor, with the rest of the companions fanned out behind him so as to not offer a group target. They reached the door without incident.

  Going to the keypad on the wall, Krysty tapped in the 3-2-5 access code. Nothing happened.

  She repeated the code, and this time the lock disengaged. The door slid aside, revealing a bare floor covered with scratch marks. The companions discovered that the room was completely empty. Sadly, this was the condition that they found most redoubts: stripped to the walls, every blaster, lightbulb and fork gone, removed by the predark soldiers after skydark and taken—well, somewhere else. They had no idea where.

  “Okay, let’s do a standard hunt,” Ryan said, removing his finger from the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. “Check under the racks for anything dropped, and be sure to look in the garbage cans.”

  Peering around a corner, J.B. called out, “I don’t think that’s necessary this time!”

  Joining the man, the rest of the companions paused in puzzlement. The area past the corner was as vacant as the front of the armory—except for a long row of wooden coffins on the cold floor.

  “Is this the abode of vampires?” Doc muttered uneasily.

  “Far from East Coast,” Jak said, referring to the ville the companions had visited once. The locals called themselves the People, and lived off human blood. They weren’t exactly the vampires of legend that Mildred had shown them in the vids, but close enough.

  “Ten…fifteen…twenty…thirty of them,” Krysty said, her hand tightening on her S&W revolver. Her thumb brushed against the smooth steel where a hammer would have been located for most other blasters. But the Model 640 had an internal hammer, making it perfect for firing from inside a coat pocket.

  “Odd place for a mortuary,” Mildred stated.

  “Mebbe they aren’t for deaders,” Ryan answered.

  “What else would you put in a coffin?”

  “Let’s find out,” J.B. suggested. Going to the first coffin, the Armorer knelt to check for traps, then pulled out a knife and wiggled the steel blade into the thin crack between the side and the lid. Pressing downward, he got some play, and moved to the other side to try again. This time the nails squealed in protest, then the lid came loose and crashed to the floor, the
noise preternaturally loud in the cavernous room.

  “Are…are those what I think they are?” Mildred whispered, looking inside.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered, holstering his blaster. Filling the coffin were AK-47 assault rifles, Kalashnikov rapid-fires. The blue-steel barrels gleamed with oil, and the wooden stock shone with polish. He lifted one of the predark blasters, testing the weight in a knowledgeable hand.

  “Seem brand-new,” Jak said suspiciously, taking another weapon. He worked the bolt and raised the AK-47 so that the overhead fluorescent lights could shine down the barrel.

  “Clean!” the teenager announced, releasing the bolt so that it snapped back into position. “All need ammo, and good to go.”

  Already at the next coffin, Jak got the lid off and chuckled at the sight of all the curved magazines for the weapons. Inspecting one, he naturally found it empty. The brass in an autoloader was pushed upward by a spring. Leave the weapon loaded for too long and the spring got weak and the blaster jammed in the middle of a fight. It was the price a person paid for having a rapid-fire that required constantly loading and unloading the ammo clips.

  The third coffin was full of loose 7.62 mm brass for the rapid-fires. The next couple contained more clips, then more Kalashnikovs, more ammo and, finally, grens. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Just simple HE charges, no thermite or Willie Peter. White phosphorous, as Mildred called it. But still, it was more grens than the companions had ever seen before except for the Alaskan redoubt.

  The last coffin contained assorted survival supplies, folding knives, canteens, Aqua-Pure tabs and the like. A baron’s ransom in irreplaceable tech.

  Judiciously, J.B. and Ryan chose a couple of the grens and disassembled them on the spot. But there were no traps, no gimmicks. The explosive mil charges were fully functional, the small wads of C-4 moist and soft. Then the two men went back and used their knives to remove the lead for some of the cartridges and poured out the powder. They half expected it to be sand or sawdust. But the silvery dust looked normal, and when Ryan touched it with the flame of a butane lighter the propellant flared brightly and yielded no smoke.