Drifter (23 page)

Lando braked for a pile of debris, took a turn down a side street, and accelerated away.

The pilot finished her report. Tawson forced himself to remain calm as he looked at the twisted image of himself reflected in her visor. All right. The fugitives had unearthed a scooter somewhere and broken through the oxy vamp cordon. Bad, but not disastrous. That's what backup plans were for.

Tawson turned towards the rest of the pilots. He was proud of how calm he sounded. "Okay… round one goes to the rimmers. But scooter or no scooter, they will still have to come here. Let's get down to street level and provide them with a warm reception."

Lando's heart beat like a triphammer. They were close, very close, and would encounter the corpos any minute now.

There! In the doorway up ahead, a space-suited figure with a blast rifle aimed in his direction.

Lando fired a missile just as a beam of pure energy sliced past his head. The world grew darker as his visor polarized.

The corpos disappeared in a flash of white light. More figures appeared farther down the street. Lando pushed the red button again and swore when nothing happened. A red light blinked on and off on the control panel.

"Damn!" Out of missiles.

A matrix of crisscrossing energy beams converged around him and started to close in. There were five corpos, and their lack of infantry training showed in the way that they grouped together, all firing in Lando's direction.

The smuggler gritted his teeth and headed straight for them. Blue light slashed by his side, scorched his armor, and cut a groove along Wendy's left thigh.

Lando fired the reverse thrusters, saw it was too late, and closed his eyes.

The scooter hit the wall about fifty feet in front of the corpos but didn't crash.

The planet's light gravity, combined with the vehicle's antigrav units and forward momentum, sent it skittering up along a vertical wall. Lando looked, felt the scooter start to fall, and fired the forward thrusters in response. The scooter angled down towards the street.

Wendy saw a corpo fall, saw one of them bring a hand blaster up, and saw it burp blue light. The beam hit the side of the scooter an inch away from her left knee and burned its way out the other side.

Her response was unplanned, but lethal nonetheless. She squeezed the trigger.

Tawson saw his beam hit the scooter, saw it pass all the way through, and was busy congratulating himself when the sudden vacuum turned his body inside out.

Lando felt the controls go dead in his hands as Tawson's energy beam sliced through the fuel lines. The scooter's nose hit duracrete, bounced off, and was pushed upwards by the still-functioning antigrav units. The vehicle wobbled left and right and found its equilibrium. Momentum carried it forward.

Lando fired the reverse thrusters. Nothing. There was a pile of junk up ahead. "Wendy! Jump! I can't control it."

Wendy understood immediately. There wasn't enough oxygen for a fire, but fuel was streaming out the holes in the vehicle's side and spraying across her legs. She wasn't tall enough to simply stand up and let the scooter run out from under her, so she did the next best thing. She jumped straight upwards.

That strategy worked. Wendy jumped higher than expected and fell slowly. She landed standing up.

Lando did what Wendy couldn't, and stood up, allowing the scooter to run out from under him.

The vehicle hit the pile of rubble a few feet later, bounced off, and wobbled away.

Lando spun around, his blast rifle searching for targets, but found none. With Tawson down, and things going badly, the remaining corpos had faded into the rubble. These weren't the easy pickings that they'd been promised, and besides, a bonus doesn't mean a helluva lot when you're sucking vacuum instead of air.

Lando backed away, and Wendy did likewise, until part of a collapsed building provided them with cover.

Things went easily after that. They jogged a couple of blocks, arrived in the small red-light district adjacent to the spaceport, and saw the sign "Lucky Lou Enterprises, Ship Storage, Maintenance, and Repair."

A couple of pressure-suited locals stared as they approached but made no attempt to interfere.

The lock opened to Lando's touch and he breathed a sigh of relief as the outer door cycled closed.

They were in space a scant four hours after that, accelerating towards a nav beacon, preparing for a hyperspace jump.

It was a moment that might've been celebrated, that might've brought them closer together, but it didn't happen. Both sat slumped in their seats, staring at the stars, seeing them in completely different ways.

15

Lars Schmidt was extremely tired, so tired that his vision had started to blur, and he had trouble with even the simplest tasks. He'd been driving south for a long time now, probably days, but it felt like weeks.

It had been fairly easy going at first. Across the pan, down through a series of valleys, and out onto a vast arid plain. Flat, almost featureless country, but easy to drive through.

Schmidt called his truck "Honey," as in "come on, Honey, you can make it," and she had literally hummed across the plain with only one of her three drive axles engaged, and a huge plume of dust to mark her passing. Those were the good days, when he'd been fresh, and the driving had been easy.

But that was a long time ago, before the badlands, and before the endless hell that followed. Schmidt peered out through the half arc of dust-free windshield, fighting the wheel, gritting his teeth as Honey waddled her way up and out of another gully. The hundredth? The thousandth? The millionth? There was no way to tell.

Schmidt's mind had a tendency to wander, he knew that, but it seemed strange to take one section of a nearly lifeless planet and call it "the badlands." After all, the rest of the planet was nearly as "bad," and might've been classified as badlands somewhere else.

As a geologist he knew the truth, that the badlands were nothing more than a region of small hills and deep gullies formed through erosion.

Every now and then thunderstorms swept over the area and dumped two or three inches of rain onto the land all at once. The rain ran down off the hillsides, collected in the gullies,

and gushed through the canyons in the form of flash floods. Tons and tons of dirt were washed away in the process. The result was a tortured hell of ups and downs.

Honey roared, all three drive axles engaged, as she dragged herself up and out of the gully and onto the top of a low hill. Schmidt stepped on the brakes, checked his scanners for danger, and killed both the engines. The temp indicators were bright red. Honey needed a rest and so did he.

He opened the door and climbed down from the truck. Dust puffed up and away from his boots. Right at that moment the sun came out from behind a cloud and bathed the land in gold.

The geologist turned and looked out over the equatorial zone. It would be worse, much worse than the badlands, but he felt refreshed nonetheless. He was close now, maybe ten or fifteen miles from the cave, and only hours from some much needed sleep.

The E-zone was flatter than the badlands, but broken just the same, and covered with thousands upon thousands of overlapping impact craters.

Some of the craters were relatively new. They had crisp, clean edges, and were nearly untouched by the effects of wind and rain. The ground around them glittered with countless pieces of out-flung metal speckled with rust.

Other craters were ancient things, depressions left by meteors that had struck hundreds, or even thousands of years in the past. They were little more than dimples now, softened by erosion, and filled with water or soil.

Schmidt looked up and squinted into the sun. Angel's halo, or ring, was almost directly overhead, but too thin to see. Each year it dumped around 250 million tons worth of debris into the atmosphere.

That meant that something on the order of 850 tons of metal hit each square mile of the equatorial zone each day. Enough to turn the surface into a hell of jagged points and razor-sharp edges. Chunks of iron lay everywhere, some blackened by heat, others rusted with age, and the most recent so shiny that they glittered with reflected light.

Schmidt had done the math during previous trips into the zone. Once a century or so, each square mile would be hit by something the size of a ground car, traveling at twice the speed of sound, and exploding on impact. When that happened, pieces of red-hot rock shrapnel would be hurled in every direction.

And on the average day, each square mile would be hit by two or three basketball-sized chunks of metal, about twenty-five hundred golf-ball-sized pieces of debris, and something like two hundred and fifty thousand metal peas.

That meant the chances of being hit by something the size of a pea were pretty good. Say, once every ten days or so.

Schmidt's hand went to the right side of his head. A meteor had hit his protective helmet during his most recent trip into the E-zone and laid him out cold.

He caught a glint of light out of the corner of his eye. Too high to be metal on the ground. It was there and then gone. The weasel was still with him. Not satisfied with its satellite surveillance, Mega-Metals had sent a robotic spy to keep an eye on him. An eye that would have to be blinded in the very near future.

The geologist smiled grimly, climbed into the cab, and started the engines. He'd drive for two hours, three at the most, then stage his little act. It would be a pleasure to find the little bastard and kill it.

The power-assisted steering wheel jumped and jerked in Schmidt's hands as he guided Honey out of the badlands and into the E-zone.

Progress was slow, but faster than the first few times that he'd entered the area and started the long slow process of creating a computerized map. Now it was a matter of following that map via the transparent heads-up display that hovered in front of the windshield.

Schmidt grinned. It seemed silly somehow, this business of using science to destroy science, of canceling out more than three thousand years of achievement. Yet, for all the good that scientific knowledge had made possible, it had produced unspeakable evil as well.

Schmidt remembered what it looked like to see hell bombs march across the land, to see entire cities turned to radioactive glass, to kill and kill without end.

Schmidt saw Janice next to him, the section leader's chevrons gleaming on the side of her helmet, her head just starting to turn towards him when the bullet hit.

The image had haunted him for years. The head turning, the eyes alight with intelligence, the lips parted to speak. What would she have said? That she was tired? That war sucks? He'd never know.

The bullet had not been aimed. It was a random thing, one of thousands pumped like water from a metal hose, spraying the land with death.

The bullet hit Janice between the eyes, shattered her skull, and churned its way through her brain. In just a few seconds, the lethal chunk of metal had nullified a lifetime of accumulated knowledge, erased a quirky sense of humor, and killed the only person that he loved.

It was then that Schmidt had done what they'd trained him to do, had bathed himself in blood, and been rewarded with the empire's highest honor.

"Damn them, damn them, damn them!"

All of a sudden Schmidt realized that he'd been screaming. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, Honey was still on course, and the E-zone was all around him.

Schmidt bit his lower lip and drove. Janice, and the three hundred and fifty-two ghosts of D Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines drove with him.

It was nearly dark by the time Schmidt pulled into the center of an ancient crater and killed Honey's engines. He was struck by the almost total silence. No birds, no insects, no barking dogs. Just silence.

There were meteors though, and most fell silently, streaks of light that quickly disappeared. But there were larger chunks too, about one every minute or so, which left trails of green and orange across the sky. They reminded Schmidt of the Empire Day fireworks he'd watched as a boy.

He caught a glint of reflected light over to the right. Good. His friend the weasel was getting careless. Settling in like a bird on its nest. Conserving precious energy.

Schmidt took his time, setting up the folding table out where it could be seen, fixing dinner and eating it while the sun set over the horizon. Then, following the same pattern he'd used each night so far, the scientist entered the truck.

His bunk beckoned, but he ignored it and went straight for the tool box.

For one brief moment Schmidt wished that he'd given in and brought the assault weapon or blast rifle along with him. He saw the hand sledge and picked it up.

The hammer felt heavy in his hand. It was something his nomadic ancestors would have understood. A simple shaft with a hunk of metal mounted on the end. The hammer could build as well as destroy. And what blast rifle could lay claim to that? To having driven a nail? To having built a house?

Yes, Schmidt decided, the hammer would be better than the weapons he'd left behind. Much better.