J.B. wasn"t the only one to notice this.
"I"ll take left," Tammy yelled, moving in the opposite direction to the Armorer, and showing her natural talents as a warrior. Like J.B., she had observed the doors, and had also caught sight of the wiry man in the fedora leveling his Uzi and peeling away from the main body of the caravan.
Galvanized into action by the two shouts of command, the Gate Amazons split into three with a natural grace that made the body of warriors seem like a flowing river spilling around a rock. Fanning out into three streams, they then spread farther apart to make themselves a harder target to hit.
Mildred and Dean followed J.B. to the right, while Krysty and Jak moved off to follow Tammy, their direction dictated by their proximity to each shout.
Doc, however, didn"t move forward. His mind was racing. He recalled only too clearly some of the dangers Ryan"s warriors had discussed in their short briefing. As Doc had been some way back in the caravan, having been in the process of moving up from his previous traveling position on the armory wag, he had seen the beginning of the firefight with a perspective denied those at the front.
Why? The single thought raced through his mind. Why would the Illuminated Ones" sec force, on home territory, not utilize the advantage of the upper levels in the building, allowing them a clean sweep of the concrete area? Unless their forces, which weren"t infinite at any rate, were to be split in some way. Split, perhaps, because the exits that had been used to access the wrecks and block the road were to be used again to mount an attack from the rear, as his companions had considered a possibility.
More than a possibility. Just the briefest of glances told Doc that the Gate warriors were focused on the front, and even the men leading the wags, armed as they were, hadn"t yet considered to glance behind them.
"By the Three Kennedys, this could be appalling!" Doc muttered to himself, turning on his heel and racing back through the dispersing Gate Amazons.
Seeing Doc rush toward them, Jon and Petor both felt confusion. They hadn"t known Doc long, but although they considered him quite mad, they would never have thought of him as a coward.
Doc saw their faces, and yelled, "No-behind! Look behind."
There were two groups of wags at the rear of the caravan. The first consisted of the camp materials and the armory, and was still standing in the roadway they had just traveled. The second housed the children of the tribe and the food supplies. These had already been moved into what little cover was supplied by the buildings facing the open area. Both groups of wags were manned by the men of the tribe, carrying rifles and machine blasters. None of them looked particularly at ease with the blasters, and none of them seemed too pleased at Doc"s garbed words.
Petor spun on the top of the armory wag and caught just the briefest glimpse of a gray uniform as it flitted from the cover of one doorway to another.
"f.u.c.k, he"s right. They"ve got behind us!" the young man yelled as a breathless Doc caught up with the armory wag.
"Secret exit...how moved old wags...should realized sooner..." Doc gasped, trying to climb up and join them on the armory wag.
"Don"t worry, you thought of it soon enough," Jon said, helping Doc to mount the side of the wag. "Sooner than us stupidworks b.a.s.t.a.r.ds would have." He turned his attention to the other men of the tribe and snapped out the order, "Watch all the sides. Try and save ammo, but shoot the f.u.c.kers as soon as you get a chance."
He spoke not a moment too soon, for as his last words rang out on the air, a beam from a laser blast scored the air past his shoulder, plucking at the thin material of his shirt and making it smolder.
"f.u.c.k!" he exclaimed, dropping from his upright position onto one knee.
Beside him, Petor took careful but swift aim with his Lee Enfield .303 and snapped off a shot that shattered the visor of the purple-clad Illuminated One sec man who had stepped out to take the shot. Soundlessly, any cry m.u.f.fled by his helmet, the sec man crumpled, dropping his blaster.
"Thanks," Jon said simply.
Petor smiled grimly. "Good thing we did that target practice behind Margia"s back."
Meanwhile, back at the front line, things were beginning to heat up.
The Gate had spread as the doors began to open, expecting at the very least for a wag to come from the large double doors. However, instead of the armored and fortified front line they expected, they were greeted by a procession of sec men on foot, charging from the open doors with their laser blasters raised.
"Hot pipe, they must be triple-stupe muties," Dean breathed, leveling his Browning and picking off the first man out with a shot that penetrated the chest cavity with little problem.
AT THE FIRST LEVEL beneath the subbas.e.m.e.nt of the building, and the uppermost level of the redoubt, Simon Rack was seated in front of a bank of monitors next to Al Jorgensen. Rack had been selected to monitor the attack through the series of cameras planted around the building to record any movement in the vicinity. There were more cameras within these few hundred yards than in the rest of the deserted compound, and the monitors were banked together instead of separately in order for one operative to a.s.sist the head of sec in building an overall picture. Rack had been chosen because-despite his efforts to lay low- he was good at his job.
The thickset, jowl-heavy man by his side was in his late fifties, and had been head of sec for the past fifteen years. During that time, apart from a few skirmishes with stickies and one brush with a trading convoy that skirted the outer reaches of their territory, there had been no hostile activity or combat. Jorgensen hadn"t raised a blaster in anger for more than twenty-five years, and although he did the simulations, read the manuals and kept his people up to scratch in target practice, he was only too well aware that the lack of actual combat experience was telling.
Simon cast a glance at the man beside him. Al sat forward in his chair, hands gripping the armrests, posture stiff and rigid. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and his forehead was slick with moisture. The headset that crossed his cropped scalp was loose with the slippery state of his skin, and the mouthpiece quivered over his lips, parted slightly in disbelief as he watched the monitor in front of him.
The Gate had been taken by surprise by the speed at which the sec force had spilled out of the doors. At least, that had been Al"s hope. Despite the beating his people had taken on the plain, he had put that down to the greater numbers of the Amazon women, and had gambled that a roughly equal number of his own force spilling out the front would be a greater match.
Looking at it from his point of view, the facts were simple. He had an equal number meeting the Gate head-on, and a skeleton force attacking from the rear. His forces were armed with blasters that were far superior to anything that the Gate might carry. In terms of numbers and arms, his force should be able to counteract and eliminate the intruders with ease, especially as it had been so easy to fool them into following the path he wanted.
But now, watching the firefight unfold on the screens in front of him, while his attention directed every now and again to a particular screen where something was occurring by a word from the impa.s.sive Simon Rack, Al felt the world begin to cave in on him. A flurry of crackling voices rang in his ears, tinny and distorted through the rad interference and the size of the headphones. And all asked the same thing...what do we do?
Simon looked at Al. The older sec chief seemed almost frozen in...not fear, exactly, but a kind of indecision.
Oh, great, Simon thought, that was just what they needed.
OUT ON THE CONCRETE expanse that had become a battleground, crowded with bodies, blood and the sound of sizzling laser blasts punctuated by the staccato bursts of blasterfire, things were rapidly moving forward.
The sec forces who had moved out into the open had found that they had as little cover once they were in the open as the Gate warriors they were supposed to chill. They spread out as much as possible, but were already on the defensive, having lost the element of surprise as soon as the doors had finished opening and the first of their number had spilled out. The biggest problem had been with the single doors. Those sec soldiers behind the initial charge had been unable to lay down the covering fire they had hoped, for the simple reason that the narrow width of the door hadn"t afforded them the angle necessary to fire without actually cutting through their own people. That had allowed the Gate a free shot at those emerging sec men as they leveled their laser blasters to fire.
The air was filled with the piercing screams and cries of the Gate warriors as they either flattened to the concrete or raised their blasters on the run and let off the opening volley of shots. The cries served a dual purpose. Part of the self-trancing process by which the women psyched themselves up for battle and moved into a berserker mode; they also struck terror into any opponents by their sheer primal savagery.
Ryan, on the concrete with the Steyr snug in his shoulder, picking off sec men, noticed that there was a male note in among the screams. Jak, caught in his bond with Gloria and the closeness with the Amazons that he had developed while training with them, was also screaming as he moved across the concrete, snapping off shots from his Colt Python as he moved. Gloria was beside him, her eyes cold and hard, glittering with the dark fire of battle as she used her Vortak to pick off her targets, sinuously moving to avoid the erratic beams of laser fire that emanated from those Illuminated Ones who were still able to fire.
Even those brave sec men were handicapped by yet another problem not foreseen by Jorgensen. The blasters were erratic in combat when away from the confines of a target shoot. And so the sec men who were able to put up a fight found themselves let down by blasters that either jammed and cut out, or shot laser fire that moved erratically away from their aim.
At the fringes of the fan formed by the Gate, things were also happening. To the left of the main thrust, Tammy had led her phalanx of warriors until they had covered the entirety of the building"s length and spread around one of the diagonal sides. Those women who had achieved that were then able to use the oblique angle of the side of the building to shelter themselves from the emerging Illuminated Ones and pick their shots at them. The auburn-curled Gate warrior- no longer a girl but now a full-blooded Amazon-led her troops with a series of blood curdling shrieks as she circled the area in front of the doors, taking her time to pick her shots and standing upright and unafraid, her berserker instinct now to the fore. The adrenaline coursed through her veins, and if she was capable of rational thought at that moment, then she truly believed that she was invulnerable.
On the right-hand side, the Gate women led into battle by J.B. were faring as well, if a little differently in approach. The Armorer led from the front, teeth ground tight together in concentration as he leveled the Uzi, switched to continuous fire and let fly with a stream of lead at the emerging sec forces. Regardless of the ammo that was wasted in the process, he sprayed along the front of the building so that some slugs flew harmlessly into the stonework, ricocheting off and throwing out small slivers of sharpened stone and little clouds of dust. It was worth these wasted slugs for the time it saved him in aiming, firing small controlled bursts, then switching direction to aim and fire at the other doorway. The fractions of seconds saved in each sweep may have wasted ammo, but made it easier for J.B. to keep momentum in his attack, and prevent as many as possible of the sec force from emerging.
Some were chilled. They fell as they reached beyond the doorways-not enough to block them, but enough to make it harder for the next soldier out to negotiate the exit with ease while raising and aiming their laser blasters. Often it was easier for the man to stay back in the safety of the doorway and attempt to take a blast with the laser from inside, even though it narrowed the area of fire, even though it was still a clearer shot than if a fellow soldier had been in front, as some of the chilled sec men had found to their cost when they had blocked their own covering fire.
J.B."s firing pattern had prevented a swarm of the sec force from emerging out of the doorways to his side, and enabled the Amazons to gain good positions for firing at their enemy.
Jon and Petor were hunched down on the armory wag, their tender years and the reality that they were men in an Amazon tribe belied by the fact that they were both calmly and a.s.suredly issuing battle orders to the other men cl.u.s.tered around the two groups of wags.
Those men who were guarding the children of the tribe had formed a small arrowhead formation around their wags, and were firing in a regular pattern at any sec forces they could see. The other men, who were in the cl.u.s.ter of wags that included the armory wag with Jon, Petor and Doc, were taking shelter behind their wags as they were in a more exposed position, and were also picking off shots at any uniform that heaved into view.
"Doc, take three men and track back to the end of the road, just behind the last line of Gate," Jon said over his shoulder. "Mebbe these sneaky f.u.c.kers will try and get some sec behind the wall and between us and the warriors."
"In which case we"ll have our backs exposed," Petor added.
"Gentlemen-for you are no longer boys-I tip my hat to you. Or at least, I would if I was at present in possession of such an article," Doc murmured. "A splendid idea..."
With which, Doc slid down the back of the wag, reloading the LeMat percussion pistol as he went. He beckoned three of the Gate men to him.
"Gentlemen, we have the hordes pinned down to the front, but mayhap they will try to inveigle their way to our rear, between ourselves and the main battle, thus creating not only a bridgehead for themselves but a very sticky situation for ourselves."
One of the men, a swarthy, squat man with a beard and deep brown eyes, looked puzzled. "Cut to the chase, Doc, and tell us what the f.u.c.k we"re supposed to be doing."
"Of course, of course," Doc replied, his wandering mind suddenly sharpening as the necessity for speed in such a situation suddenly hit him. "Forgive the foolish ramblings of a man old before his time. You two-" he indicated the two who hadn"t spoken "-take that side and make sure that none of the Illuminated Ones try to get at our rear from around the sides.
"As for you," he said to the swarthy man who had questioned him, "you come with me and we"ll take the other side." Doc indicated each side he spoke of with a flourish of his silver lion"s-head cane. "Now, get to it, and swiftly, for there may not be much time," he snapped.
As the two parties went their separate ways, the Illuminated Ones to the front of the wags attempted another surge forward. It was doomed to failure...
Jorgensen"s tactic had been simple and could have been ruthlessly effective. A small group of sec men would come up through the hidden exits into the compound and converge on the point where the men and wags of the Gate tribe were waiting for the Amazons to finish battle. Their attention would be focused in the opposite direction to the surprise attacking force, and it would be simple for the Illuminated Ones to blast the menfolk and take cover from any retaliatory fire by taking shelter in the doorways along the sidewalk.
The flaw in that being that Jorgensen hadn"t accounted for the Gate menfolk having an idea that the attack was about to take place and opening up as soon as his people were in view. Then, the shelter in the doorways became the only place where they could avoid an instant chill, and what should have been protection became a prison where the only escape was to move out into the arms of a chilling.
Beneath ground level, observing this on the banks of monitors, and acutely aware of the sidelong glances coming his way from Simon, Al stammered the order for a small group of sec to detach from the rear of the action and circle around on each side, coming up between the main battle and the rear of the wags.
Even as Al spoke, Simon stared at the monitors in disbelief. He had seen Doc and the swarthy man leave the rear of the wags and make their way toward the junction where the sec force would attack. Checking another monitor, he could see that another two men from the wags were conducting a similar maneuver in the opposite direction.
"Er, Al..." Rack said quietly, tapping the sec chief on the arm with an index finger and using the same finger to point at the two monitors. "Al, are you certain about that? Maybe you didn"t..." He let his words dangle, unfinished, in the air.
"s.h.i.t," Al muttered, seeing all too clearly that he was sending his people to their chilling.
While he watched, the front line of the attack rounded the corner of a building and entered a hail of fire from the Gate forces, the two men with rifles repeating fire from their Sharps and Lee Enfield .303 to cut down three men before the others following fell back, yelling into their microphones a cacophony of garbled confusion that came in red static through Al"s headset.
On the other side, Doc loosed a charge of shot that ripped into the chest of the first person to confront him, the woman"s uniform shredding like her flesh and the splintered bone beneath as she was thrown backward into the man behind. That saved him, as the ball shot was next, flying harmlessly over his head to shatter the visor and helmet of the third warrior in line, whose microphone cut off with a violent crackle as he gurgled a voiceless scream.
Simon leaned across and gripped Al by the arm. "We"re getting slaughtered out there. Let them come to us here, where we can really f.u.c.k them over." Casting a glance back at the monitors and the carnage outside, he wasn"t sure if he really believed that, but he had to say something to jolt Jorgensen from his frozen and disbelieving stupor. Even as he looked, the Illuminated One who had been saved from Doc"s second shot by the falling body of the chilled soldier in front of him had managed to scramble to his feet, only to be taken out by a blast from the blaster carried by the swarthy man beside Doc.
Jorgensen shook his head, unable to believe that his tactics had gone so wrong. "This is a f.u.c.kin" nightmare," he whispered before craning forward over the monitors and yelling into the mouthpiece of his headset, trying to cut across all the noise from his confused, wounded and dying sec force.
"All units, all units, listen! Fall back. Just get the f.u.c.k out and regroup at base. Fall back now."
"THEY"RE FALLING back, John," Mildred yelled over the shrieks of the Amazons and the roar of blasters. She was standing in a combat shooting stance near the Armorer, both hands steadying her Czech-made ZKR as she took careful aim at the exposed Illuminated Ones.
"Yeah, but it may be a blind," J.B. shouted back over the chattering sound of his Uzi. "I reckon we should keep firing until the last of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have disappeared."
"I"ll second that," Dean yelled, training his Browning Hi-Power on an open door, "but I reckon Mildred"s right."
It soon became apparent that Mildred was correct, and the firing from the Amazons and Ryan"s people soon slowed to nothing as it became apparent that the Illuminated Ones had withdrawn into the building.
Keeping their blasters ready, the Gate gathered in the center of the forum to hear their queen.
"Looks like we win this round," she said, "but if we"re going to follow them in there, well, they"ve got the drop on us, then."
"A suggestion," Ryan put in. "Mebbe we establish a bulkhead just inside the building, secure it so that we aren"t in the open but we"ve also gained ground. Then mebbe we can get an idea of the layout before we go any farther."
Gloria nodded. "Good. Tammy, get the wags out here, see how the men have fared."
Then, turning as the auburn-haired warrior set off for the trailing caravan, the queen turned to her sister. "Get their blasters, Marg. Detail some to help. Then we gather the chilled."
Jak and Dean helped Margia and two of the Amazons to gather the blasters. There were twenty-three dead Illuminated Ones around the five exits, and all the blasters had been left behind. In contrast, there were only three chilled Gate warriors.
Tammy arrived with the wags. Jon and Petor had, at her behest, gathered the blasters from the chilled Illuminated Ones that the menfolk had accounted for, giving the tribe another twelve laser blasters.
"Add those to what we"ve already got and we"ve d.a.m.n near got enough for every one of us," Margia enthused. "I say we hand them out when we set up inside."
J.B. and Mildred exchanged worried glances. Gloria caught sight of it, and without having to ask knew why they were worried.
"Let"s just get ourselves sorted first, Marg," the queen stated simply. "We can worry about their blasters later. s.h.i.t, we haven"t done too badly with what we"ve already got." And she turned to supervise the disposal of the dead Gate warriors, leaving Margia to fume to herself.
Jak and Tammy scouted through the front of the building, reporting that the lower level was now empty although the ways into the redoubt were obvious. The only conclusion could be that the Illuminated Ones would defend their base from the lower level, trying to lure the Gate into a rash attack that would entrap them. There was also a large lobby in the center of the floor from which a series of corridors ran. While that provided many avenues of possible attack, by its very openness it also gave them a chance to secure their base from all angles.
The companions stood guard with some of the Gate warriors while the others conducted a simplified version of the cremation ceremony, something that had obviously evolved over the years for a situation such as this. Dousing the chilled corpses in gasoline and oil, they were fired with flares that Margia told Petor to fetch from the armory wag. The magnesium flares were obviously rarely used for their original purpose, and had been stored especially for such an unorthodox use.
When the ceremony was concluded, Gloria turned to the rest of the tribe.
"Let"s get ourselves settled into the building. Secure camp in the middle of if and then we"ll start to plan our next move. Right, friend Ryan?"
The one-eyed warrior nodded. "Sounds good to me."
Chapter Fifteen.
"Set up and take up defensive positions. We wait here and plan. Needs must, sweeties..."
Gloria"s voice rang out over the general hubbub as the Gate caravan entered the double doors, easing the wags through the large gap in the front of the building. Once they got inside the empty stone circle that formed the centerpiece of the lobby, their voices, footsteps and the ringing of the mules" hooves on the marble floor echoed up into the high cavern of the ceiling.
"Look for any cameras that you can see," Ryan said to his people, who were cl.u.s.tered around him in order to be able to communicate easily with one another. "Take out anything that could be an old tech surveillance device with a handblaster. And spread that among the Gate so that we don"t cause panic when we shoot."
"That"s if they can hear us above this d.a.m.n noise," Mildred added wryly.
"Or the blasters," J.B. finished, almost to himself.
The companions spread out among the Gate, telling those warriors they pa.s.sed what they were doing. Jak was the one to tell Gloria, as he pa.s.sed her. She smiled and agreed with Ryan"s decision before devoting herself to the task of organizing her people.
As he went about his task, Doc mused on the size of the building as a whole. The area in which they were making a temporary base was approximately a hundred yards square, with an elevation of something like 150 feet. Once upon a time, in the days before skydark when it had been a working military-or, at least, paramilitary-base, the hall in which they were now encamping would have contained functional office furniture and be used as a reception and meeting room, coming as it did at the junction of many corridors. Doc suspected that this would be the largest part of the web of offices, rooms and corridors that ran the length and breadth of the building.
If his suspicions were correct, then this would be the largest single room in the building. Instead of a large central point from which the spokes of corridors and smaller offices and rooms ran off like the interweaving strands of a spiderweb, this would be like the fixed point from which the corridors radiated out and along and up, like the fine lines on the petal of a flower would radiate from a point near the stamen. This was the stamen. Why not? Anyone attacking from outside-particularly if it was an aerial attack- would a.s.sume that the largest point, and point of control, would be central. Thus deceived, it would put their attack off kilter and enable those inside the building to defend from a stronger position.
All of which made alarm bells ring deep in the recesses of Doc"s mind. There was something about this design that was familiar to him. He had seen it somewhere. And somewhere recently. Through the labyrinthine corridors and avenues of his mind, he searched for where this sighting had been. So much so that he very nearly missed one of the hidden cameras, about twenty feet up and hidden behind a dust and begrimed pillar that had once been adorned but was now starkly desolate. It was this starkness that allowed the camera to show where once it would have been hidden.
Doc raised the LeMat and fired, the heavy metal smashing the deep-set lens of the camera and twisting the metal casing, raining shards of loosened gla.s.s into the arena below. It crashed harmlessly to one side of the armory tent, watched by Jon and Petor.
"Nice shooting, Doc," Petor remarked, "but try to look where you"re landing it, yeah?"
"My apologies, dear boy. I was temporarily distracted," Doc replied with a grin, one that spread farther as he suddenly recalled, memory spurred, where he had seen a similar interior building design.
Around the large central hall, which was beginning to sound less empty as the Gate filled it and built their base camp with defenses that deadened the sound of the empty stone and baffled them against echo and attack, the air rang with solitary s.p.a.ced shots, as Ryan"s people took out the sec cameras. Mildred relished the task, leveling the Czech-made ZKR at regular intervals, lining up along the barrel sight and picking a spot dead center to the small, opaque lens of each camera. Shutting out the noise and bustle around her as she stood deathly still, her plaits loose around her shoulders and her feet rock solid on the floor, she was almost back at the last Olympics before the nukecaust, competing in another time, another place. It was only a temporary escape, but it helped her to focus herself. It created within her an oasis of peace. It also enabled her to take out her targets with ease.