Desolation Crossing (5 page)

R YAN EYED HIM. The man was trying hard. Maybe a little too hard. So this other convoy hadn’t made it? Ryan wondered if that was connected to the new refrigeration units they had acquired, and the loss of the sec men in a firefight with another convoy. Seemed too much of a coincidence. Still, if he made it seem as if they trusted the trader, then the man seemed too stupe to notice that they were holding out. The woman—Ryan looked at her, her face impassive and inscrutable all the while—was another matter.

“Figure you leave us no choice,” Ryan said in his best ingenuous tone, “but even so, we’d be stupe if we said yes without knowing what kind of ordnance you had.”

“Best you’ll find,” Eula interjected in flat tones. “Better
than J. B. Dix will have seen for many a year.” There was a note in her tone that suggested this should mean something to him; if so, it was too obtuse, and the Armorer was left with nothing more than a vague sense of unease as her eyes bored into him.

“You bet it is,” the trader said quickly in a placating manner. “Hell, it’d be impolite to ask you aboard without showing you. Stand down,” he added, holding his ear, obviously directing this into the headset, “we’re coming back. Everything is cool.”

The trader turned, beckoning them to follow. Eula stood back, still cradling the 7.62 mm blaster that looked too large for her. Her impassive face still gave nothing away. She was no threat at present—the manner in which Krysty’s sentient hair flowed free only reinforced this impression—but she would still need to be watched.

The friends paused. The idea of having her, with that blaster, at their backs was not something that anyone would consider ideal. Subtly, Ryan indicated they should go with it. Jak caught Ryan’s eye, and as they fell in behind the trader, the albino teen adopted the unusual position of taking up the rear of the party. Many places in his patched camou jacket concealed his leaf-bladed throwing knives. Reputation may have told how quick the albino youth could be, but experience was the only way to really know the swiftness with which he could move. As he passed Eula, he knew he could move quicker than she could should the need arise.

As they traveled the short distance between their original position and the armored wag, they were able to see more clearly the extent of the convoy. There were four
other wags. Two of them were large trailers, closed in on all sides. These were obviously the old refrigeration units. The cabs attached to them had been reinforced with mesh where any glass was visible, armor plating covering the remainder. The old paintwork along the sides of both cabs and wags was pitted and scarred where it was still visible. Camou had been painted over most of the rest. There were also a number of scores and scorch marks that made the friends wonder once more about how they had been “acquired.”

These wags had only blasterports in the cabs. Although they would be hard to damage in themselves, their length and lack of slits made them vulnerable to blind-spot attack. That was probably why they sat in the middle of the convoy, flanked by two wags that carried the rest of the cargo. These were armored, with blasterports and slits. They had been converted, and both Ryan and J.B. could only admire the work that had gone into them. They looked to be solid vehicles, but they weren’t big. If the cabs on the refrigerated wags could hold two people, these only held three or four, tops. Maximum of twelve crew.

The armored wag out front was more impressive. Again, it wasn’t just the size, although it was a heavy-duty predark military wag, dark and heavy in color, albeit a little chipped and faded by combat. It was squat, with tires at front and a caterpillar track at the rear. It had bubble-mounted machine blasters, ob slits, shielded surveillance tech and two large mounted cannon. It could do some serious damage to anything that dared to go up against it.

“How much of the tech in that still work?” J.B. asked.

Eula answered. “Most of the surveillance tech, some of
the weapons systems. Much of it was fixable, but it’s a little erratic.”

J.B. looked over his shoulder. “You don’t find that a problem?” he questioned, remembering how Trader had stripped much of the comp work out of War Wag One, preferring total reliability at the expense of some tech.

She shrugged. “It hasn’t failed yet.”

“But what about the tech that needed satellite shit? That can’t be working,” he added.

“I said some, not all,” she snapped, taking it as though it was personal criticism.

By this time they had reached the armored wag, and the trader was running a loving hand over it.

“Hasn’t seen me wrong yet,” he said quietly. “This is it, guys. The convoy. Used to be two motorbikes, but they got wasted in our little, uh, contretemps,” he said, trying to brush past the matter.

“What?” Jak asked.

“An old word, dear boy, not English. I believe he is referring to the firefight he mentioned earlier,” Doc said softly.

“Should fuckin’ say so,” Jak murmured.

“How many people you carry?” Ryan asked. He had noted a look of anger flash across the trader’s face, and he wanted to move things on.

“This takes five people. A full complement of sec, drivers, workers comes to seventeen on a trip.”

“Yeah, and how many you carrying now?” Ryan pressed.

The trader grimaced. “That’s the thing. We lost eight in the firefight.”

“You lost half your people, and you don’t think that was a little careless?” Mildred questioned, unable to contain herself.

“Two went at the back. The bike riders are always the first to cop it,” the trader mused, seeming to ponder her question deeply. “We did salvage the bikes, though,” he added with some pride. “As for the other six…We had a direct hit on one wag that took out three people, two straight away and one after a day. The wags are good and strong, but it was the concussion of the blast that did it for them. Stupe thing is that they were chilled by their own weapons going off in the wag. Pathetic. Two sec bought the farm trying to protect the refrigerators. You can see those bastards are blind, and they had to get out of the cabs. I think we learned something from that. And they did. Just a shame it was too late.”

He paused, seemingly lost in thought.

“And the last one?” Doc prompted. “So far you have mentioned only five casualties.”

The trader shook his head, pensive. “Penn. Best quartermaster I’ve ever had. Just a little too protective of his post, that was all. He saw a group of coldhearts from the other convoy trying to bust into one of the wags and saw red. He was traveling with us, and was out of there before anyone had a chance to stop him. He was shouting at them to stop, firing off without aiming, and they just picked him off. One shot. Bang. Took the poor stupe bastard’s head off. Swear his body kept running for a yard before he went down.”

If Ryan hadn’t believed a word the man had said before this, then now he certainly had no faith. The story was crap.
Just like the rest of it. No one who served time on a convoy would be so stupe. Just as no one who had served time would get chilled by their own weapons when their wag got hit. Why were they drawn when they were inside, and unnecessary?

Whatever had really happened, it hadn’t been what the trader wanted them to believe.

For so many reasons, it seemed like a triple stupe thing to do, but for so many other reasons, it was their only option. Ryan found himself saying, “Okay, we’ll join you. But if we’re gonna work together, what do we call you?”

A number of things sprung to mind, but the trader’s answer was, “LaGuerre. Armand LaGuerre.” He stuck out his hand. “But you can call me ‘boss.’ No, only kidding,” he added hurriedly, on seeing the stony looks that elicited.

Saying nothing more, Ryan took his hand, then looked at his people with an expression that communicated his own reservations were as deep as theirs.

At least they had transport out of here.

Chapter Four

Say what you like about LaGuerre, Mildred mused, he’s not as big a fool as you’d take him for. He didn’t survive as a trader by being stupid, and if—as they suspected—the firefight that had deprived him of nearly half his crew had less to do with being attacked than with being the attacker, then he wasn’t the complete idiot he seemed. No, it seemed to her that he had a certain cunning, a certain base instinct that could kick in and override the tendency to let his mouth run away with him. A garrulous yet cunning fool. It was a combination that was volatile, and could only end one way.

The question was, when?

In the meantime, he had been smart enough to keep the friends apart. He had something he wanted from them, and he had found a way to get it without allowing them the space and time to confer, to make plans of their own and put them into action. Did he realize that they didn’t trust him? Or did he just assume that no one trusted him, and in their turn were to be trusted themselves?

Ultimately, she figured that it didn’t matter. The result was the same, no matter what you may surmise. The friends had been divided among the wags of the convoy, and the salvaged bikes had been put to use. It made sense
from a sec point of view to use a newly recruited group of proved fighters in such a manner. Hell, she would have done it that way herself. But there was something…Maybe it was just that she didn’t trust LaGuerre. No, screw that, there really was something about the man that suggested he knew this was a good move for him as much as for the convoy. Keep them apart, and they couldn’t conspire.

So it was that Ryan and Jak rode the motorbikes at the back of the convoy—the leader and the most dangerous and quick of the fighters. A coincidence? She didn’t think so. It made sense for the two of them to ride at the rear of the convoy as they were the best suited to combat and the demands of instant response from such a position. But still, it seemed too convenient.

Krysty and herself were now riding shotgun in the refrigerated wags. Doc rode the wag at the rear of the convoy. One of LaGuerre’s men had been shifted from the armored wag to the one directly behind. The purpose of that had been to allow J.B. to ride the armored, lead wag, which was suspicious in itself. At least, it seemed so to Mildred. If they had replaced sec at the rear of the convoy, and in all the other wags, then why not put J.B. in the wag directly behind the armored leader? That would have been consistent. The action that LaGuerre had taken was anything but.

Mildred couldn’t help wondering if this last course of action was due to LaGuerre, or at the prompting of Eula. For now J.B. was in the wag with her, which would give her plenty of time to…Well, to what? What was her link to John; in what way were they connected? Mildred knew
John well enough. When he had said that he had no idea who the young woman was, or why she knew so much about him, Mildred had believed him.

So who was she? What did she want? And how would that affect J.B. and the companions?

Whatever the outcome, it was impossible to do anything while they were separated. Come to that, it was proving impossible to get anything in the way of sense out of her current companion. Reese, the driver of the refrigerated wag, was a large woman. Probably 250 pounds of her was crammed behind the wheel of the big rig. Not an ounce of it fat. Her knees looked cramped, even in the space of the cab, as she was over six feet tall. She was dark and heavyset, with crude tattoos on her upper arms and multiple piercings in her upper lip, brow and ears. Hell, she probably had her nipples pierced, but Mildred wasn’t about to ask.

That piercing in her upper lip should have gone through both, sealing her mouth shut. Might as well, for all that Mildred had gotten out of her. When they had first been introduced, and Mildred had clambered up into the cab, Reese had shown her the weapons bay under the dash area and explained tersely that her duty was to keep her eyes open and her trigger finger ready. That was all. Anything to do with the rig itself she was to leave to Reese. The woman made that clear with a propriatorial tone that left nothing to doubt.

And since then, silence. Mildred had tried to ask a few questions—nothing too deep, just general conversation about the convoy and the way in which they usually traveled; would there be rest stops, and when did they generally occur? This last was the kind of question any newcomer to convoy sec would ask, leaving aside Mildred’s real
reason of wanting to know when she would be able to communicate with the others.

“Not anyone’s business. Happens when it happens.”

Reese wasn’t hostile. Just so taciturn as to make John seem like that old buzzard Tanner, Mildred thought. Reese kept her eyes firmly fixed on the wag ahead, and on the road ahead of that. Anything else she seemed to view as an irritating distraction.

Mildred noted that the cab was fitted with comm tech, and was in touch with all wags on the convoy. Not that you would know it so far, as it seemed that radio contact was kept to a minimum.

She wondered if the bikes were also fitted with this tech.

R YAN AND J AK RODE the edges of the road, trying to avoid the backwash of dust and dirt as much as possible. A five-wag convoy kicked up a hell of a cloud in a land like this, and it would have choked them to kick in too close to the end of the line. They had masks and goggles, but even these only cut down, rather than eliminated, the problem. Most important was their breathing and their sight. Without those, they would have been chilled either by suffocation, by riding too fast into the back of a wag in front, or by riding themselves into the treacherous blacktop.

The other problem, once you’d solved the simple matter of staying alive, was to do your job. If you couldn’t see jackshit, then how could you expect to see any incoming? In this territory, where wild riders skirted the ribbon in favor of the dense-packed dirt off-road, you had to keep your vision as clear as possible for a 360-degree sweep. So you didn’t just hang in behind—you kept out of the dust
cloud that hung over and around the convoy, and you veered off in complex figures that would enable you to double back, get a look behind, and get back into line without hitting a pothole, a crevice, or each other.

Both Jak and Ryan wore headsets that would keep them in touch with the armored wag on point. Trouble was, it was so bastard noisy on the bikes, with the roar of their engines, the rush of the air, and the noise of the five heavy wags, that each man had little hope of hearing any message that may come his way.

They carried on their maneuvers, kept up their guard, each isolated in his own bubble of dust and noise. The only way they’d know if the convoy stopped was by overshooting it.

K RYSTY HAD THE OPPOSITE trouble to Mildred. While Reese was the strong, silent type, the driver of Krysty’s wag was an emaciated old man called Ray. Short, skinny and anywhere between the age of forty and eighty for all that his wrinkled skin could tell her, he was stronger than he looked. It seemed as if she could blow on the old man and knock him down, yet he handled the heavy steering with an ease that was shown in the way he ignored the road and looked squarely at the red-haired woman, speaking in a long stream of consciousness that hardly allowed her the chance to ask him anything. He was obviously relishing the chance to speak to someone again, as the twinkling brown eyes beneath the battered baseball cap betrayed.

If only what he was saying had any real value…

“You come from the east, babe? I used to spend a lot of time in the east. That was back before I joined this crew, mind you. I always say that you can’t beat a real friendly
team, and I’ll be frank with you, this ain’t a real friendly team. Not that they’re bad people, mind you. Not at all. I’ll say that for them. Really loyal to Armand. And he does treat us well in return, you have to give him that. But I miss the days when I’d be driving and I was with people who didn’t mind a chat. You ever hear that old word, babe? It means a talk. A talk about nothing. Least ways, a talk about stuff that most people don’t think is really important. See, I use to love being in the east ’cause there were a lot of villes there that still had some of the old tech working in some way. That’s what I will say for Armand, he gets that old tech working. Real good for me as I can have old music and stuff. I love all that. You don’t get that out here so much. The old tech that still works like that, I mean. See, that was good about being back east. Old movies. Gee, it was a different life back then, wasn’t it? But what am I saying, you might not have seen any of that stuff. Ah, you don’t know what you’ve missed. All those old songs. I loved it when they had tech that could still play all that old stuff. I’ve got this real good memory for that sort of thing, and I like to sing while I’m driving. It kinda helps to speed the road along a little, and gives me something to think about…” He began to sing in a cracked tenor.

Krysty was beginning to get a headache.

DOC WAS GETTING along just fine. He was in the wag at the rear of the convoy. If he looked out of the ob slit at the back of the wag he could just about see Ryan and Jak as they weaved in and out of the dust.

“I did not know that young Jak was such an accomplished rider,” he said to himself, “though I would imagine
he’s a wow on one of those—dammit, what were they called…Ah! Skateboards. Yes.”

When he turned back to face the interior of the wag, he took in both the view and the warm fug of people forced to live close together. Too close. There were two other inhabitants, one of whom was currently trying to sleep. Her name was Raven, and when he had expressed surprise at her being a redhead, and not jet-black, she had looked at him as though he were insane. Doc, of course, was used to this, and let it slip over him. As of yet, he did not know from whence she had derived that charming name, but no doubt he would elicit this information sooner or later. When her temper improved.

“She’s not normally like this,” said the other inhabitant of the wag, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “It’s just that we’re not really letting her sleep. Tarran, the guy you replaced, he was real quiet. Never used to talk to me much at all, which was a pain in the ass as it gets real lonely and dull on some of these drives. We used to have an old tech disk player, and I’d play some old tunes from before skydark. She used to moan about that, too, so I gave it to Ray in the end. You’d like Ray. Not just ’cause he’s old, like you. But ’cause he never shuts up. Talks kinda odd, like you.”

“Yeah, like you don’t,” Raven moaned from the bunk. “You don’t get me talking nonstop when you’re trying to sleep.”

“No, you had other things on your mind…” The driver spun to face Doc briefly, so that she could lock eyes, convince him of her veracity, before turning back to the road. Her name was Ramona, and she was dark where Raven was pale. “I tell you what, Doc, her moaning used to wake me up. Sometimes she’d let Tarran play with her pussy
while she was driving. Damn near could have driven us off the road. Worse, the bitch used to let him drive sometimes, swapping while the wag was still in motion, and suck his dick while he was driving. Damn unsafe.”

“You wouldn’t have said that, you saw the size of his dick.” Raven giggled, her anger subsiding. “No way something that small could have caused any accidents.”

Doc was beginning to get used to the girls. They obviously liked to bicker. Perhaps it passed the long hours on the road. They had both slept, and changed shift, in the time that Doc had been in the wag. And both had questioned him on the connection between Eula and J.B. Both being equally disappointed when he had been unable to offer even the slightest of theories.

“Both begin with an R,” he said by way of nothing. “That’s interesting. Does LaGuerre do that on purpose, I wonder? In the same way that most of his convoy crew are women?”

“Ya know, I take it back,” Ramona replied. “Doc, you’re way crazier than Ray. ‘Begin with an R,’” she said, imitating his tones badly. “What kind of a question is that? You wanna know something about Armand, baby, then you just ask outright.”

“Very perceptive, I must say,” Doc said, amused. “But nonetheless, it was a genuine question. Is it something to do with the way his mind works that he places in the same wags operatives who have identical initials?”

“Man, how many ways and how many words can you use in that question?”

“Whoa—okay, keep talking, this is sending me to sleep all right,” Raven added.

Their words may have been harsh, but their tone was not, and Doc pressed the matter.

“It’s all to do with psychology, madam. Are you familiar with that term?”

“Not as familiar as I hope to be with you, you old hunk o’man, you, sweet talking me like that,” Ramona mocked. “Si-wha’? Listen up, the only reason we’re both on this wag is because we’ve been with Armand the longest, and this is the wag with the jack. He trusts us.”

Doc eyed the interior of the wag once more. There was one seat up front, for the driver. Another at the rear, for the sec man, which he occupied. The bunk on which Raven lay was along one wall, with a makeshift kitchen area—no more than a hotplate and a small icebox—at the foot. A small comm unit and some tech reception equipment was on the wall opposite. An old safe with a combination lock was beside it. The rest of the space in the narrow wag, apart from an even more narrow channel they all used to negotiate the interior, was taken up with the stock that could not have been fitted into the front wag.

“It’s a combination safe,” Doc noted. “You may not know the combination.”