Doomsday Warrior 01 (38 page)

The drone, veering sharply downward had detected their presence. The robot rocketplane emitted white thick smoke as it accelerated in their direction, its built-in scanners already transmitting information a thousand miles back. It was a big one, a ramjet model, equipped for long, long journeys, sweeping back and forth across America, searching for clandestine activities. And this time it had hit pay dirt. It soared in closer, gyros coming into play, setting the spydrone into a slow roll to keep it stable at its slowing speed as its cameras tried to focus on the “unusual presence” below. Somewhere in Pavlov City or New Lenin or Denver, some bored console watcher was growing excited. He had found something. He would get a medal.

The Freefighters drew their Liberators, put them on full auto and sprayed the craft as it circled above them a hundred feet away, trying to get a clear picture in the gathering darkness of the targets. But bullets wouldn’t stop it—it was nearly two inches thick, alumnatungsten alloy. Even the exploding .9mm shells of the Liberators just dented it, making little pockmarks around the surface of the craft.

Detroit reached for two grenades from the crisscrossed bandoliers that covered his broad black chest, preparing to make a throw. Rockson put a hand over one of Detroit’s throwing hands and motioned for him to put them back.

“It’s not worth a try,” Rock said, lowering his Liberator to scream at Detroit through the din of the rifle fire and the drone’s loud engine. The Reds, in building the drones so defensively, with two-inch armoring, had had to put tremendous engines into them which burned up liquid and solid fuel by the ton. But then Soviet technology frequently preferred brawn over brain in such matters—and then had to strip the rest of the world to fuel its dinosaur-sized creations.

“You might hit one of us,” Rock said, and Detroit lowered his arms. With the Freefighters spread out over several feet, firing from atop their ’brids, frag from the grenade could easily wound someone. Besides, the goddamn drone had probably already sent back its pictures.

Archer dismounted calmly from his horse, not really noticed by the Freefighters as they continued to fire. He took out a short arrow from his quiver, with some sort of small explosive device glued to the front and a spiral-shaped feather on the tail. Moving carefully, he placed the arrow in the groove of his crossbow and pulled a lever that caught behind the bow’s thick wire and stretched it back. The metal bow creaked and locked back in place. Archer lay down on his back as the Red drone flew slowly lower, circling in a five hundred-foot orbit around the Expeditionary Force. He rested the crossbow atop his high knees and got the orbit of the screaming drone in his sights. He let it go around twice, pretending to fire and counting as he estimated the arrow’s time to striking. On the third orbit, he pulled the trigger. The metal shaft shot out of the steel crossbow like a bolt of blue lightning. It shot toward an emptiness in the sky that was suddenly filled by the ten foot long, forty-five hundred pound spydrone. The arrow hit the unmanned craft at the very tip, where its guidance antenna and laser navigational transmitter and receptor were located. The explosive device on the arrow, made by Archer himself by pouring powder from twenty .50mm machine-gun shells into a small, metal Band-Aid canister, was designed to create explosive power rather than shrapnel. It did its job. The arrow nearly tore through the entire cone, embedding itself deeply in the guts of the craft. As the explosive pack hit the outer armor it went off with a loud boom, startling the Freefighters below who hadn’t realized what Archer was up to.

The drone seemed to hesitate for a second as if surprised, then it lurched wildly, its control mechanisms shattered by the blast. It spun end over end, completely out of control, and fell to the ground some twelve feet from Lang, who dove madly from his rearing animal, hitting the ground with his shoulder. The drone exploded on contact with the earth, its liquid fuel tank igniting into a wall of brilliant flame. Five Freefighters were blown from their steeds, crashing down onto the cooling earth. Lang scrambled away like a fish out of water as the pool of flaming hell spread rapidly out in all directions for twenty-five feet. Lang’s hybrid screamed in mortal agony as the burning liquid oxygen mixture consumed it. The smell of burnt hair and meat filled the air.

Rock ran over to Lang who kept just ahead of the advancing wall of fire. He was almost free. The flames surged ahead and caught his pants leg. It burst into flame, quickly covering the whole lower part of his body. Rock grabbed a blanket from Berger’s hybrid’s saddlebag and threw it on top of the screaming Lang, pulling him back from the sea of twisting flames, as the drone exploded again, sending out a shower of white-hot shrapnel into the air. Rock dove to the ground on top of Lang, continuing to smother the flames on him with the blanket. He quickly extinguished them and dragged Lang, who seemed to have fallen unconscious, back to safety some hundred feet from the bonfire created by the crashing spycraft. The other Freefighters dusted themselves off and rose from the dirt. No one else had been severely injured. Blood was streaming from McCaughlin’s forehead from falling on a rock. Lang’s screaming hybrid mercifully stopped its death cries as the flames consumed it completely, eating away the layers of thick hide and chewing on the bones of the creature, blackening them with its fiery teeth.

The Freefighters gathered together around Lang as the drone continued to burn, like a torch in the now-dark night, sending up a glowing funnel of sparks and bursts of intense heat.

“He all right?” Detroit asked, looking with concern at Lang who lay sprawled out on his back on the hard ground. Archer came over and looked downcast. His shot, which had seemed so remarkable just moments before, suddenly seemed like a mistake. His face was white, as if he had done the damage to Lang himself.

“Relax,” Rock said, looking up and seeing the frozen expression on the bear of a man. “You did the right thing. It was an accident. Anyway, he’s going to live.” Rock cut open the pants leg with his bowie knife and ripped it apart, revealing the entire leg. It had been burnt worst on the upper thigh, where the liquid oxygen had actually made contact with his clothing. The skin wasn’t blackened but was bright red and blistered badly. Huge, white bubbles covered Lang’s leg as the limb began swelling from the damage. Lang moaned and tried to raise his head. Then he grimaced as the pain hit into him like a knife.

“Damn, that hurts!” he said, looking up at Rock.

“You’re going to be all right, kid. Just relax. Breathe deep and keep your energy going. The worst thing you could do now is go into shock. Then your body really would be in danger. You’ve got to keep calm, keep control. Feel the pain but don’t let it numb you.” Rock stared down, his purple and blue eyes piercing into Lang’s, trying to make him understand.

“I got you, Rock,” Lang said, letting his body untense slightly. The pain was unbearable, yet he was bearing it. He let his mind go down to his stomach and breathed deeply. He would live. His leg would heal. The pain was just a meditation.

Slade quickly opened the medikit and cleaned the edges of the burn. He rubbed the plastisalve mixed with the antibio cream over the upper leg. Lang gritted his teeth from time to time, but seemed to be dealing with it much better after Rock’s words. Slade sprayed the sealant over the burn then pulled out a disposable hypo with twenty grains of morphine. He injected the painkiller into the artery on the back of the leg and stood up.

“Should be good as new in a few days. Infection is the main problem now. But if anything can keep it away it’s these.” He held up the medicines that had been created by Dr. Shecter’s staff, and packed them carefully away.

Lang rose to his feet, the ripped pants leg whipping slightly in the night wind. “Feels about a million times better,” he said, his eyes a little blurred from the morphine.

“I can give you another shot or two of this stuff,” Slade said. “But after that you’re on your own. The stuff’s incredibly addicting.”

“Can he ride?” Rockson asked.

“He should be able to. He’ll just have to keep the wound from rubbing against anything. Should be raised up. If you could rig up some sort of contraption,” Slade suggested. Rock quickly gave commands for a rigging to be built using tent poles and rope and they hooked up a kind of raised sling device which kept Lang’s right leg in the air. He was twisted around in his saddle backwards, but using a frame from a backpack they managed to rig up a metal and canvas backrest. The entire structure looked somewhat odd, but it functioned. The Freefighters headed out slowly, single file, Green holding tightly onto the reins of Lang’s new ’brid, which plodded along lazily behind him. Lang was looking backwards. Through his pain and drug-hazed eyes he saw the charred remains of what had been his hybrid. Shackles! He had had the ’brid nearly three years. It would be missed. The flames of the burning fuel still sprouted orange and blue fingers but had burned down to a much lower intensity. The heat and the smell of charred horseflesh headed up, up to the stars twinkling madly in the clear black night, a million billion crystal clear eyes, looking down on the desert, on the planet, on the death that was occurring everywhere.

In Denver, the console monitor went dead. The soldier manning the twenty drone transmissions of the Far West Flight Group smashed his hand down on the video monitor. The damn thing was always blinking out. The drone had seen something—what, he couldn’t be sure. He replayed the video transmission from the master recording tape. There—it was at normal altitude. He spotted a thin line of—were they animals? The sun was going down so the video image was very dark, and marred by the high-rad soil. The drone circled closer. There! He saw them suddenly. Men, firing from atop the wild hybrids that roamed the American countryside. Yes, at least three or four. The image suddenly went haywire, spinning around. He saw the sky, then the ground twist by and then . . . it went dead. So it wasn’t the screen. Rebels. And somehow they had shot down the “impenetrable” Heavy Drone Soyuz II. He picked up the phone, keeping an eye on the huge display of screens relaying images from all over the ruined lands of America—deserts, dried-out lake beds, volcanos, cratered regions—the video recording of the destruction the Reds had caused across the American landscape. The recording was transmitted to central records for future viewing.

“Comrade, comrade,” the second lieutenant, video corps, said into the cigarette-burned mouthpiece of the telephone. “I think you’d better notify the commandant. There’s definite rebel activity far deeper than anything we’ve picked up before. The coordinates? Let’s see.” He went through the digital readout that accompanied the video imagery. “Make that Sector K, fifty-five degrees, twelve minutes west, north thirty-six degrees, forty-two minutes. They were moving in a northwesterly direction.”

Thirty-Four

T
he Freefighters moved ahead through the night. Rock had to assume that the images had been transmitted before the drone had been blasted to whatever technological hell machines are sent when they die. Lang, looking bleary-eyed but out of the numbing pain of the first few hours, seemed to be handling his burns well. His strong, young body should be able to fight off infection with the help of Shecter’s potions. The land remained flat—with occasional volcanos popping up like tumors from the ground every thirty or forty miles. The area had been saturated with Red missiles to take out the huge U.S. MX system—a network of highways through three western states, with trucks carrying the missiles, patrolling at least twenty miles apart. The Reds had seen those MX bombs as their biggest threat and had targeted nearly one thousand of their own five megatonners into the five hundred mile square system. Much of the land looked like the dark side of the moon. Nothing grew or lived. Bones sticking up from the now-dried ground were testament to the fate of creatures that wandered into this Godforsaken land.

The sun dragged itself out of the coffin of night with orange hands. The landscape once again lit up, showing its ugliness in full panorama—shades of gray and black. It looked as if someone had held a barbecue using a thousand miles of American soil as the charcoal. Rockson kept them going, twenty degrees further west than before, in case the computers of the Red control center tried to establish a bearing for them. He rode back to see how Lang was doing and the kid was sitting up, eyes bright, talking with Detroit who held onto the kid’s hybrid, the reins wrapped around his saddle horn. He was telling Lang war stories about other battles he and Rockson had fought together.

“Hey, Rock,” Detroit said with a huge smile as the commander of the Expeditionary Force rode up. “Remember that time when we were both taken prisoner and they had us in that basement prison waiting for transportation and—”

“Yeah, Detroit, I remember,” Rock said, raising his eyes skyward. “How could I forget it after hearing you remind me twelve thousand times.” He looked over at Lang. “How you doing?”

“Just bring ’em on, Rock,” Lang said, raising his Liberator from across his stomach. He lay back on the rest they had built, looking quite happy about the whole turn of events. “Like riding in bed,” he continued with a grin. “Used to have dreams about this kind of thing. Just get me a better pillow and a good-looking woman and I’ll live up here.”

Rock grinned back. “Since you’re feeling so good, we’ll keep on going. I want to get as much space between us and that damn drone as possible.”

“Hey, don’t stop on account of me,” Lang said. “Unless you see a diner. I could use a hamburger and a Coke.” Detroit and Lang laughed.

“What the hell you been teaching this boy?” Rock asked Detroit as he turned his hybrid around to head back to the front of the line.

“Just the truth, Rock. Just the truth,” Detroit yelled after him.

Rockson took the lead and fell into pace. But he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was wrong. The sky was a sick indigo. Precognition they might call it. Something about the sky. He searched the indigo, laced with small, green strontium clouds that floated overhead like dead lillies in a swamp. He wanted this mission to succeed. Other missions had been important, but now they were tantalizingly close to the greatest success America had ever had in its postwar fight against the Reds. To fail to bring the knowledge of the Technicians back would be too much.