Moonfeast (20 page)

The rest of the companions cut loose with their weapons, and the laser cut a hole through the belly of Krysty’s horse. It reared with a scream, throwing the woman to the ground. There came the tense hum of a microwave beamer and Jak’s animal literally exploded, sending the youth flying backward to land with a splash in a shallow pond.

As the Steyr was now pinned under the animal, Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer and looked around for the enemy. He found them in an instant. Three big spider droids were moving through the field of weeds, the tufted top of the waving plants just brushing the belly-mounted weapons of the machines.

Firing a fast six times, Ryan hammered the weapon
of the lead droid. He knew that it was a laser from bitter experience. He hit it every time, but the 9 mm rounds couldn’t penetrate the armored housing of the weapon. Locking onto him, the droid fired again, the energy beam slamming into the headless horse, setting its body on fire.

Incredibly the third droid hissed as its belly-mounted needler swung into operation. The tops of the weeds jumped into the air from the supersonic passage of the 1 mm steel slivers. But then the ancient weapon jammed and the needler broke free from its anchor. Pivoting randomly, the weapon cut off two of the legs of its own droid. The machine staggered from the loss, and the needler stitched a line of holes across the droid with the beamer. Smoke began pouring from the riddled spider, and the beamer pulsed in return.

“Droid!” Jak shouted unnecessarily, triggering a long burst from the M-16 rapidfire. The stream of perfectly imbalanced 5.56 mm rounds smacked into the side of the lead spider, denting the dome and cracking an eye. Then the clip ran empty. With no more reloads, Jak cast away the useless blaster to draw his .357 Magnum Colt Python.

Caught in the middle of an open field, with only some weeds and their dead horses as cover, Krysty saw the dire state of the situation, in spite of the decrepit nature of the droids. They were all streaked with rust, and two of them had cobwebs dangling off their armored hulls.

Making a fast decision, the woman primed her implo gren and threw. The deadly sphere landed in the middle of the droids, and they instantly lurched away just before
it detonated. The bright flash masked what happened at first, but as the glare faded there was a reverse hurricane of tufts speeding into the implosion. Plants were uprooted, frogs, newts, beetles and a coney were sucked into the reverse quantum event, then it stopped and fresh pollen filled the air, dancing in the sunlight like a summer snowstorm.

Then, rising from their prone position on the soggy ground, the three droids advanced once more. However, their belly weapons were now thickly coated with sticky mud. The laser on one pulsed, the energy ray burning the filthy lens sparkling clean. The microwave beamer hummed, boiling the front aperture clear, but the needler jammed, then exploded, the blast ripping open the bottom of the droid. Trailing loose wiring and optical cables like intestines, the machine marched onward, seemingly unaware that it was now unarmed.

Sloshing out of the puddle, a furious Doc cursed at the sight of the black powder trickling out of the LeMat, and drew the Webley to fire twice at the droids. However, that was when the man realized that he was sinking into the sticky mud a lot faster than expected. By the Three Kennedys, this wasn’t mud, Doc realized, but quicksand!

Yanking out his ebony sword stick, Doc jammed it into the muddy grass, trying to find some solid ground. As the stick encountered resistance, Doc rammed it in deeper and held on tight with both hands so that he wouldn’t sink any deeper. However, for the rest of this fight he was neutralized, and a sitting duck for any of the droids.

Just then a sputtering nicker caught his attention and
Doc beamed in delight as his horse walked over to the edge of the pool and lowered her head, the reins sliding off the pommel to dangle only inches away. Risking everything, Doc released the stick and strained to reach the leather straps, his fingertips just brushing them. Then the horse shifted position and the reins were tight in his grip.

Wrapping the straps several times around his forearms, Doc did what was necessary to loosen the sucking sludge around himself, and emptied his bladder. Immediately the grip of the muddy quicksand eased.

“Now, girl, giddy up,” Doc whispered, shaking the reins while watching the droids continue the attack on his friends.

The horse started to back away and the reins tightened around his arms, the leather straps cutting into his skin. Bracing himself for what was coming, Doc flexed his muscles and hoped his arms wouldn’t come out of their sockets as the horse began to haul him out of the sticky muck. The pain grew as his circulation was cut off, and his hands turned purple, but the man rode through the agony, concentrating on trying to slide out of the quicksand. Don’t swim, that only makes you sink, Doc cautioned himself silently. Nice and easy, there’s the ticket…

Grimly holding on for dear life, Doc felt his hands going numb and the leather straps began to slide through his swollen fingers. Then a pale hand came out of the grass and Krysty grabbed his hands, holding the reins in place.

“Come on, Doc, take a piss!” she softly commanded. “Give it all you got!”

“I…already…did, madam!” he panted, the world taking on a reddish haze and a strange buzzing filling his ears. The strength in his arms was failing and breathing was becoming difficult.

Out in the field, the blasters were firing nonstop, the laser humming steadily in reply. A horse screamed, something exploded, then a droid erupted, broken machinery forming a geyser into the air. But the last droid was still in motion, the laser stabbing out constantly, burning the green plants brown, starting small fires and boiling the puddles.

With no choice, Krysty let go of the man with one hand and dragged around her canteen. Unable to unscrew the cap with just her left hand, she shoved it into the mud, then drew her knife and stabbed holes in the lightweight aluminum. There wasn’t much water inside, but it did help, and Doc advanced a few more inches. Then the man gasped as his boot found purchase under the cloying mud. Root, rock or human skull, Doc didn’t care. It was solid, and that was all that mattered.

In a rude sucking sound, Doc came loose from the quagmire and stumbled onto weeds. His boots and pants were caked with filth, but he was alive and free.

“Thank you…dear lady,” Doc wheezed, dropping to his knees to stay out of sight. His swollen hands were badly bruised, and stiff. Using his blaster at the moment was completely out of the question.

Nodding at the panting man, Krysty rolled aside and came up firing, the .38 rounds of her blaster loudly ricocheting off the rear end of the belly laser, but achieving nothing. There was a ventilation grid there to help
dissipate the tremendous heat generated by the weapon, but her copper-jacketed rounds simply didn’t have the power to achieve penetration.

Just then something came hurtling her way to land in the cool green grass. Krysty blinked at the sight of Doc’s Webley, then scooped it up in both hands, took a stance and fired off all six rounds. By the third time, the grid was smashed into the laser, allowing the remaining big-bore .44 manstoppers of the handblaster full access.

Although built to be bulletproof a hundred years earlier, the military weapon now succumbed to the hammering fury of the booming Webley. Fat blue sparks crackled from within the smashing electronics and smoke poured from the sides. The droid quickly spun, and Ryan stood to empty the SIG-Sauer into the laser, finishing the job. Suddenly the entire droid was covered in crackling electricity, and the companions felt a tingle in the mud through their combat boots. The last two horses reared at the sensation, nickering loudly. Then Jak shoved his .357 Magnum blaster into a red crystal eye and fired twice. The lens shattered and the rounds plowed deep into the electronic brain of the machine, scrambling the primary circuits.

Sagging into the mud, the droid went still, its head tilting sideways before it went completely motionless.

“Frag that drek,” J.B. growled, and fired a burst from the Uzi into the smashed eye, the 9 mm rounds noisily ricocheting inside the machine, smashing more delicate circuit boards, relays and control elements. In only a few
seconds dark smoke began to trickle from the dome, and then a fire started inside the smashed droid.

“It’s dead now for sure,” Mildred stated, rising into view from behind a mossy tree stump.

“Damn well hope so,” Ryan said, pulling out his Navy telescope to check the horizon for any more of the machines. But the forest, glen and grasslands were clear. There was nothing in sight but lush greenery, chilled droids and the aced horses.

Cleaning off her hands with a dry cloth, Mildred went over to examine Ryan, then extracted a plastic straw from her med kit. “Good thing the laser attacked from your left,” she said, gently removing his eyepatch to smear a salve over the blistered skin. “Or else you might have been permanently blind on this side.”

“Losing an eye saved me from going blind?” Ryan said, and in spite of the situation, the Deathlands warrior snorted a laugh. Anybody who claimed that the universe had no bastard sense of humor was clearly out of their mind.

When Mildred was done with the salve, she wrapped his head in strips of clean cloth, and Ryan tucked the leather patch into a pocket.

“You should be fine in a few days,” she said, tucking away her meager supplies. “Just try not to smile for a while.” Just for a moment, the physician remembered giving almost the exact same advice to Doc a week ago. It would seem that smiles were forbidden on Clemente Island.

“Not a problem,” Ryan replied out of the right side of his mouth. “By then, we should be back on the mainland. Hopefully inside a redoubt.”

Gathering their saddlebags from the corpses of the three chilled horses, the companions removed the heavy saddles from the last two horses, then draped the bags across the animals. Tethered to a tree stump, the horses snorted, seemingly at the demotion to a lowly pack mule.

“Slow, but not far till boat,” Jak stated, as if the matter was of little concern. His jacket was caked with mud, the feathers bedraggled to the point where several had fallen off, exposing the razor blades sewn into the collar.

Going to the splayed ruin of a droid, J.B. studied the interior for a moment, before moving onward. There was no way to scav the needler from the wreckage. The weapon had been blown asunder. Unfortunately, so was the microwave beamer. However, the laser was merely smashed, not completely destroyed, and J.B. eagerly knelt on the damp grass to pull out his tools and start disassembling the interior workings of the droid.

“Hot damn!” J.B. cried, swinging aside a service panel. Inside was a bed of gray military foam, the kind used to pack grens, and nestled into the material were rows of spare parts, enough for the droid to repair any conceivable damage to the laser.

“Give me an hour and we’ll have a working laser,” J.B. chuckled, lifting a prism into view, then the smile faded. “Dark night, the bastard focusing lens is cracked.”

“Can’t use?” Jak asked with a frown.

“Yeah, I can make it work,” J.B. answered slowly, turning the optical assembly around. “But it’ll never cycle through the spectrum again, that’s for nuking sure.
We’re down to a single color, and just the basic three—red, blue, yellow.”

“What possible difference could the color of a laser beam make to the target?” Doc asked, using a stick to clean the quicksand off his boots. At the moment the man looked as though he had escaped from a grave, which was frighteningly close to the truth.

“Lasers operate on the absorption of light,” Mildred re plied. “An apple absorbs all of the colors in visible light, except for red. It reflects that and thus we see it as red.”

“So a red laser could not harm a red apple?” Doc asked, clearly surprised.

Mildred shrugged. “Well, eventually enough heat would be transferred to wither the fruit, then it would start to brown, allowing more of the beam to be absorbed and finally the apple would be destroyed.”

“That’s why mil lasers look like rainbows,” Krysty said in startled comprehension. “So that whatever they hit will be aced!”

“Exactly!”

“Blue,” Ryan decided. “Rhino blood is yellow, norm blood is red, but I’ve never aced anything that gushed blue.”

While J.B. got to work, Ryan stood guard over the man as the rest of the companions reloaded their weapons, affected some minor repairs and washed their clothing in one of the larger ponds.

It took longer than a hour, but soon J.B. had the bulky nuke battery removed from the droid armed with the needler, and attached to the rebuilt laser with coaxial
cables recovered from the droid with the microwave beamer. It was a mare’s nest of stolen tech, a hodgepodge held together with duct tape and baling wire. But when J.B. flipped the switch, a deep azure beam of condensed light fiercely lanced from the aperture at the end. The startling beautiful power ray hit a pine tree on the outskirts of the glen, slicing the trunk neatly in two. To the sound of snapping branches, the tree toppled over with a loud crash, disturbing a large flock of spar rows that voiced their outrage at the unprovoked attack as they took wing to the cloudy sky. Softly in the distance, thunder rumbled and lighting flashed.

“Next rhino comes our way is dead meat,” J.B. stated grimly, resting the cumbersome device on a shoulder.

“Then let’s hope that is the worst thing this island has to offer,” Mildred added, slinging the scattergun across her back.

“Always stickies about,” Jak stated, looking around. “They here. Just not find us yet.”

“And let’s hope it stays that way,” Krysty said, thought fully biting a lip. “We’re going to need a litter for that nuke battery. Should be easy enough to make out of some rope and branches.”

“Then let’s head for the trees,” Ryan growled, brushing back his wild crop of hair. “We still have a fair distance to cover before reaching the coast.”

“For the woods are dark, quiet and deep,” Doc said in a singsong voice. “But there are promises to keep, and miles to go before we can sleep.” Nobody disagreed with the man, having heard him
paraphrase the ancient poem before. It was one of his favorites.