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  “They’re here!” J.B. snarled, turning to see a sparkling white cloud flowing around the corner, the interior filled with beautiful fairy lights.

  “Move!” Ryan shouted, vaulting over the gunwale.

  Stomping on the gas, Krysty threw the LARC into gear just as Doc yanked the safety pin on his implo gren, and the mil sphere knocked from his grip to go wild and hit the wall—only to bounce right back into the departing LARC. Moving with adrenaline-fueled speed, Mildred snatched the charge and whipped it backward, uncaring of where it landed as long as it was far from the vehicle.

  Still accelerating, Krysty rammed the LARC into the opening between the blast door and the wall, becoming momentarily stuck when there came a brilliant flash from behind, closely followed by a reverse hurricane. Anything loose in the LARC was sucked away by the implosion, the companions nearly losing their seats from the sheer force of the wind, with J.B. grabbing onto his fedora with both hands.

  Continuing to pour on the power, Krysty forced the LARC ever forward, the Navy transport advancing in screeching protest until the last curve of the hull squeezed past the blast door.

  In a surge of speed, the LARC rocketed outside, nearly crashing into the side of a rocky tunnel before the woman regained control and headed pell-mell into the darkening gloom. Beyond the slice of illumination coming from of the redoubt there was Stygian blackness.

  As the artificial wind eased, Ryan staggered into the pilothouse and took the navigator seat to start flipping switches. Running lights appeared along the gunwale, then a GPS unit came alive on the control board, but finally he found the headlights. Set at cockeyed angles, the halogen beams were pointed at the ceiling and the floor of the tunnel, but they threw back enough light for the two companions to see that this wasn’t a predark tunnel built for vehicles. It was some sort of a circular tube, the smooth walls shiny with tiny flecks of a reflective material. Built to carry enough supplies for a platoon of U.S. Marines, plus the Marines, the wide LARC just barely fit into the tube, the tires cantered oddly on the curved bottom while the stubby radio antenna constantly scraped along the arched ceiling.

  “This is a lava tube!” Doc gasped in horror. “We’re inside a bedamned volcano!”

  “Watch out for steam vents!” Mildred shouted from the distant rear of the transport. “They’ll cook us alive!”

  Busy working the controls, Ryan didn’t respond, but Krysty half turned her head to nod in understanding. Now that her vision was growing accustomed to the gloom, she could see that there were numerous other tunnels shooting off at crazy angles. It was taking her constant attention to keep the LARC from crashing into one or lurching off into the unknown. Krysty didn’t know much about volcanoes, but what the woman had heard was that the main lava tube was usually the largest. Usually. With luck, this one would empty somewhere on dry land instead of ending at a river of molten rock, or worse, a mile under sea. If either of those was the case, the companions would have to drive backward and try another tube, then another and another, until they reached the outside world or ran out of fuel and were forced to return to the redoubt for one last confrontation with the Cerberus clouds.

  Releasing the steering wheel for a moment, Krysty grabbed Ryan by the shoulder and squeezed hard. He replied in kind, the man and woman speaking volumes to each other without ever saying a word.

  Behind the LARC, the blast door was slowly closing, the ceiling lights narrowing quickly into a mere sliver. Then the light went murky for a moment, before the nukeproof door closed with a muffled boom.

  “Cloud, six o’clock!” Jak yelled through cupped hands to the people in the pilothouse.

  Turning, Ryan squinted his good eye, but there was only darkness behind them.

  Rummaging in his munitions bag, J.B. unearthed a road flare and scraped it alive, the bright red magnesium flame hissing loudly. Tossing it over the end of the LARC, the man saw it hit and nearly go out, but then the flame sputtered alive, the red light clearly silhouetting the Cerberus cloud as it flowed over the flare and back into the darkness.

  “How long do you think it will chase us?” Krysty asked, trying not to notice how low the gas gauge was. The ten gallons Doc had poured in were almost gone, and stopping to refuel was clearly out of the question.

  “Fireblast, I don’t know,” Ryan replied truthfully, glancing over a shoulder. “But I once had a sec hunter droid follow me for close to a hundred miles before I got away.”

  “No choice then, eh, lover?”

  “None that I can think of,” the man stated grimly, and put two fingers into his mouth to loudly whistle.

  In the rear of the transport, the rest of the companions looked up at the man, and he pointed at Mildred. The woman tilted her head in a silent question, and Ryan drew a thumb across his throat. Swallowing hard, Mildred nodded.

  “My dear doctor, you cannot be serious!” Doc cried aghast. “We are inside a lava tube. The use of an implo gren here could easily trigger a full-scale eruption.”

  “Which will certainly chill that damn cloud!” Mildred growled, removing the tape and wrapping a finger around the arming pin. “They’re tough, but not indestructible!”

  “Well, if I am to die in a volcanic eruption, then at least stop the wag for a moment so that I may carve three notches into the wall first!”

  Recognizing the literary reference, the physician almost smiled. The man might be crazy, but he had certainly guts to spare, and then some, she’d give him that much.

  “Give me some light, John!” Mildred shouted, leaning over the stern. The wind was ruffling her hair, and the rushing walls were only a couple of feet away. The running lights shone brightly to the sides, but there was only darkness behind. The cloud might be only inches away from her face, and she would have no way of knowing.

  Scraping another road flare into life, J.B. held it out as far as he could. For a fleeting moment, there was a twinkling cloud dimly visible just outside the radiant nimbus of the sputtering flare, then it was gone, pulling back to merge into the shadows once more.

  Utterly furious, Mildred cursed at the sight. The cloud was deliberately staying out of sight to hinder any further attacks. Perhaps it understood that three other clouds had been aced, neutralized, whatever the correct word was, she had no idea, and it was being cautious. Perhaps it didn’t comprehend the concept of death and was acting purely on instinct, or digital programming loaded into the matrix of its vaporous memory.

  The technical details didn’t matter. The result was that the cloud was staying just out of sight, as if trying to make the companions waste their small supply of implo grens. The only way to counter that move was to do the one thing an artificial construct couldn’t do: gamble everything on a single throw of the dice.

  “Hit the deck!” Mildred yelled, yanking out the arming pin.

  As the three men dived for cover, Mildred held tightly on to the ticking gren, slowly counting to six before releasing the sphere, and then throwing herself to the floor.

  Exactly two seconds later, there came a musical chime and a terrible illumination filled the tube, overwhelming the running lights until it seemed that it had winked out. There came an inhuman noise of pain and surprise, then a ferocious wind buffeted the LARC, the incredible vacuum caused by the gravitational vortex ripping away loose pieces of the hull. Contained inside the lava tube, the implosion was magnified a hundred times, steadily increasing in force until the racing machine actually began to slow, the tires slipping on the smooth tube and threatening to lose their grip.

  The military diesel sputtered and coughed, almost failing from the inability to draw in any air and maintain internal combustion. Then Ryan went flying from the pilothouse to slam against the floor. His head hit the wood with a crack, and he went limp, rolling along the floor toward the rear gunwale. Moving fast, Doc and Jak grabbed their friend, then J.B. and Mildred held on to them, the four companions struggling to stay inside the fleeing LARC against the buffeting wind currents.

 
For one long moment it seemed that they might fail, their tired hands weakening rapidly from the awful strain, then the vacuum dissipated, stopping just as quickly as it had been created. Set free once more, the LARC surged forward, the big diesel roaring with renewed power. Then the engine faltered and died away, the LARC coasting through the lava tube from sheer inertia.

  “We just ran out of gas!” Krysty shouted in weary relief, taking both hands off the wheel to flex her aching fingers. Then the woman paused, her hair flexing wildly.

  Over the soft crunching of the Navy tires, she could distinctly hear a low rumble that seemed to be coming from every direction. Steadily, the noise increased in volume and power, until the rock walls began to visibly shake, loose dust sprinkling down from the ceiling, and there came a strong whiff of raw sulfur.

  Chapter Six

  Carrying the smell of the open sea, a cool wind blew over the busy people on the mountain plateau. Coated lightly with a yellow dust, the men and women working there greatly appreciated the brief relief from the awful stink of the sulfur pit, and momentarily paused to breathe in the fresh air and refill their lungs.

  Stripped to their waists, the muscular torsos of the men gleamed with sweat, the big men swinging their sledgehammers and matlocks at a steady pace, the tools falling in unison. Sitting on a water barrel, a young girl was beating a tempo on a rabbit skin drum to help them keep pace. Rhythm was the key to efficiency in such an endeavor, rhythm and sheer muscle.

  Older people, both men and women, pushed along homemade wheelbarrows, with shovels strapped to their backs like a sec man did a longblaster. Their wrinkled faces were caked with the precious yellow dust, sweat cutting ravines through the sulfur to stain their clothing golden. Rags served in lieu of gloves, and some of them were barefoot. However, nobody was wearing chains, leashes or tethers, and most of the men were wearing dark blue uniforms, and heavily armed with blasters. Even the little drummer girl carried a brace of knives, and a homemade bolo, small rocks lashed together with leather thongs to create a particularly deadly weapon for chilling small game, such as coneys or cave bats.

  When the debris on the ground got deep enough, they would scoop it up and fill the wheelbarrow, then push it over to the ville guard to be inspected. Some loads were accepted and piled in boxes filling the back of a battered wag, while others were rejected as too impure. Those would be dumped unceremoniously over the side of a tall cliff overlooking the beautiful azure Cific Ocean. The orange-and-black toxic clouds overhead were reflected in the gentle waves, making the waters seem dark and ominous. However, the salty Cific teemed with life; there were fish of every description, most of the creatures good eating, and only a few of them mutie enough to chase a norm onto dry ground. There were no other islands in sight for a thousand miles, only the vast and empty ocean.

  Standing guard over the precious cargo of dust was the ville baron and his wife, both carrying rapidfires and watching the nearby rock for any suspicious movements. The plateau was the secret source of sulfur for Sealton ville. It was a vital ingredient for making black powder, which was the only thing that kept away the Thunder Kings and the coldheart army run by that Captain Carlton.

  Oddly, there were no clouds directly over the people working in the sulfur pit of the rocky plateau, and a clear bright sun shone down upon them. Removing his hat to beat some of the yellow dust off the brim, Baron Carson Jones appreciated the fact that there was always clear sky above Clemente Island, and attributed it to the heat rising from the mouth of the Cannon, the largest of the Twelve Volcanoes in the Cesium Mountains. Smoke moved away from fire, any feeb could see that in a campfire with their own eyes. Obviously, clouds were just a kind of smoke, and they kept far away from the nuking heat of the bubbling lava boiling inside the mouth of fire mountain.

  Baron Carson Jones was huge, easily the tallest person on the entire island, and covered with enough curly black hair for him to get a lot of jokes as a small child about being a griz bear. Then the teenager learned how to break bones, and the jokes stopped. There was a jagged scar on his forearm from the explosion that had aced both of his parents and made the young man into a baron, and a tattered paperback book was tucked into a specially designed pouch on his gunbelt, with another tucked into the pocket of his fringed vest.

  “How about a song, boys?” the baron shouted, fanning himself with the hat. “I know one about a bow-legged gaudy slut whose titties tasted like sugar beer!”

  A ragged laugh erupted from the workers.

  “That old clunker!” Lady Veronica Jones countered, resting the stock of her blaster on a well-curved hip. “How about the one about the sec man who had a very special gift in his pants for the ladies, one for every day of the week, and two for the holidays!”

  There came more laughter, mostly from the women this time.

  Taking that as her cue to stop drumming, the girl laid aside her sticks and began to relay a leather bag full of spring water to the workers. As per regulations, everybody took a sip to first slosh the dust out of their mouths, and then spit, before drinking.

  In stark contrast to her burly husband, Lady Veronica was a stately beauty with curly black hair that reached to her trim waist. Her eyes were almond-shaped, giving her an almost catlike appearance. Nobody on the island was faster than the lady with either blaster or blade. She was a chilling machine, as beautiful as lightning and every bit as deadly.

  “Your decision, my lord!” a sec man shouted with a chuckle, but then his smile disappeared as there came a dull boom from the ground and a faint vibration was felt by everybody. The loose dust on the ground danced like beans in a fry pan.

  “What the frag was that?” Lady Veronica demanded, twisting her head around to try to catch the dim sound again. But the source of the noise was gone, lost amid the general clatter and cacophony of the excavation.

  “I don’t know, my love,” the baron replied uneasily, watching in the opposite direction.

  As always, his first thought was that this was some sort of a trick from Captain Carlton, but if the mutie-loving freak had discovered the location of the sulfur mine, he would have simply blown it off the face of the island. No sulfur meant no blasters, which meant that Carlton could take over everything with those triple-damn crossbows. Their range was fantastic, and the accuracy of his coldhearts was just short of frightening.

  “My lord, is Cannon gonna blow?” Sec chief “Digger” O’Malley asked, nervously licking dry lips. The matlock in his hands was worn and heavily patched, but it also had several notches in the wooden handle where the man had taken off the heads of stickies with the digging implement. His arms rippled with muscles, and his barrel chest was so huge that it seemed to hint at some mutie blood in his ancestry. But the first, and only, feeb to ever ask that question had quickly become the second notch in the handle.

  “By the lost gods, I hope not,” the baron replied, a hand scratching his hairy chest.

  Holstered under his left arm was a massive predark weapon called a Desert Eagle. It was a nuke-storm of a blaster, the .50-caliber cartridges bigger than his thumb, and the recoil was damn near impossible to control. However, the Desert Eagle was the only known weapon to ever deter a thunder king. Not chill it, of course, nobody believed that was even possible. But the colossal handblaster at least gave the excavation team a fighting chance for life outside the safety of the thick stone walls of Sealton ville.

  Anxiously, the group waited, straining to hear anything else. Minutes passed, and just as they began to relax there came a second explosion from under the ground. This time louder and more powerful. But also strangely hollow, almost as if it was a reverse explosion.

  “Something is happening underground,” Lady Veronica growled, looking down, as if trying to see through the solid rock.

  “My lady, do you…do you think that Carlton might be trying to steal our powder?” an old man asked, tugging at the bandanna tied around his neck. “You know, digging up while we be digging down?” Below the sweaty clo
th was a gnarled scar that completely encircled his neck, the classic scar of the rare survivor of a Thunder King attack.

  “By the coast gods, I have no damn idea,” the baron growled, pulling out the Desert Eagle and dropping the clip to check the load. Then he slammed it back in and worked the slide to chamber a round for immediate use. “But I think that we damn well better find out!”

  “Davis, Johnson, Coulier, McFinny!” Lady Veronica yelled. “Stay with the dust! Keller, Furstenberg, guard the littles! Svenson, Dumas, start rigging the traps around the excavation!”

  “Everybody else with me!” the baron commanded, striding toward the rope ladder leading down the side of the mountain.

  THE CRATER in the lava tube caused by the implo gren was enormous, extending halfway up the curved walls and almost beyond the fluttering light of the dying road flare.

  “Well, there is no way we are getting across this back to the redoubt.” Krysty sighed, her hair flowing around her shoulders.

  “Bust up floorboards in LARC, make bridge,” Jak stated simply, running stiff fingers through his snowy hair. “But not want to go across first.”

  “Indubitably,” Doc said in somber agreement. “I am often foolhardy, but never a fool. Such an endeavor would be tantamount to suicide.”

  “Maybe we can walk across the bottom and simply climb up the other side using a rope,” Mildred said, rummaging in her med kit. “I mean, how deep can it be?”

  Pulling out a survival flashlight, she started pumping the handle to charge the battery. A redoubt in Colorado had yielded the amazing device. It was getting harder to charge the ancient battery every time she used the flashlight, and there were no more spare bulbs. But the device was still infinitely better than a candle, torch or road flare.