The Omega Cage (20 page)

Maro could understand why desert cultures had so many different words to describe sand; otherwise, every sentence about the terrain would be so adjective-laden as to collapse under its own weight. There was the hard-packed sand of the flat sections, ridged by the wind into waterlike ripples; powdery drifts like dry snow; cakelike crusts atop ridges that left gaping holes under each footstep, and half a dozen other variations, none of which seemed very much like any of the others.

At this point, as the sun began to lighten the sky, Maro had seen enough of different kinds of sand to last him a lifetime.

"We should be getting close," Scanner said.

Maro nodded. "Good. Why don't we take a break here, and I'll climb that dune and see what I can see."

The dune loomed just ahead, rising a good thirty meters above the desert floor.

Nobody argued, and nobody volunteered to go along. Maro gave a tight grin that hurt his dried skin. They were tired, as was he, but nobody was complaining, either.

A wind was rising, swirling the more powdery sand around like dust. The others walked to the base of the dune where the wind was less, and collapsed on the cool and soft drift. Maro circled toward the end of the dune; experience had taught them that trying to climb up the drifted sides took too much energy.

Sinking hip-deep made for slow movement. Where the dune tapered down, the crustier cap material allowed for somewhat better footing if one moved slowly and carefully.

It took about fifteen minutes of step-crunch, step-crunch, to reach the peak. The breeze was harder here, tugging at his clothes, and the fine sand formed a stone wind that abraded and stung where it touched bare skin.

Scanner had been right. To the east, the seemingly endless drifts and dunes came to an abrupt end. There were trees and rocks there, perhaps five kilometers away.

Just beyond that, Maro thought he could see the line of rocks known as the Girdle. Somewhere on that hard strip was their destination.

He turned and looked down at the others. They were below and to his left. Going down would be easier; gravity could do the work, and it didn't matter if he sank somewhat. He started to step off the harder surface of the dune for the descent when he heard the sound.

In the distance, there came the whine of a small engine.

Maro searched the skies. The sunlight was not up to full strength, but he made out a dot skimming well above the tallest dunes, moving toward him. It was hard to say for sure, but it looked like a single-person cycle.

In another minute it would be right on top of them.

Stark moved as if an amphetaminic coursed through his system, flogging each nerve, whispering insistently for action, movement, speed! He walked the wall, the Zonn metal slick beneath his boots, and stared off into the distance. It was almost as if he might somehow
will
the escapees to return by being there, act like some sort of biological magnet, drawing them to himself.

Foolish thought, of course. He knew he should remain calm, should wait for his people to locate their quarry, should avoid doing anything rash. But those thoughts came from the mind, borne of his intellect; his gut, which churned up emotions much more primal, called for him to
do
something, and do it now!

It had always been so with him, and he wondered at times if other people had the same war ongoing inside. The age-old battle between the neocortex, secure in its military background, counselling caution, procedure and patience; and, opposing, the hindbrain, the reptilian remnant, shouting without subtlety about fight-or-flight and self-preservation.

Usually, the intellect won out; usually, but not always. Sometimes jungle reaction
was
the proper response; sometimes doing something,
anything
, turned out to be better than doing nothing. And there was no way to know, of course, when a man should turn loose the hormonal hounds and let them run and bay.

Therein lay the problem. More and more, he was feeling that it was time to move, to put himself into the field, even though he was not sure of the wisdom of it.

Stark stared at the cleared patch between the wall and the bush. Something darted out of the trees, a lizardlike creature. It thought better of its action, turned and ran back to cover.

He understood exactly what the thing must have felt.

A sign. He needed a sign of some kind. Before, he had always gotten some form of indicator, a pointer that made the decision more justifiable, whether yea or nay. It might only be a rationalization, but when it happened, he knew it for what it was.

So. Give it another day or two. If nothing happened, he would know that he was doing the right thing. If the cosmic finger touched him, however, that would be something else again.

And more and more, he was beginning to hope for that sign…

Juete heard Dain yelling, but at first the sound was so garbled by the wind that she couldn't understand what he was trying to say. Then, next to her, Scanner said "Oh,
shit
!" about the same time that she caught part of what Dain was saying.

"—aircycle! Dig in! Get out of sight!"

Raze was already stripping off her shirt and wrapping it around her head. Her flat breasts rippled with muscle as she turned and began to burrow into the base of the dune.

"Get flat!" Scanner ordered. "Cover your nose and mouth, breath slow and evenly! Stay down until he passes!"

Juete felt the still-cool sand cascade over her as Scanner shoveled with his hands, burying her. Even under the cupped bowl of her hands the sand trickled into her face, and she sneezed. Around her she could feel the sand vibrating as the others covered themselves. After a moment, things got still.

She kept her eyes squeezed tightly closed, and the sand pressed against her ears.

It was hard to breathe, but the layer over her head was shallow, and her hands kept enough of a pocket for some air. Not enough for long, she realized. Not enough air would filter through the sand, whether shallow or not.

She was not afraid. Being alone had frightened her to the point of mindless terror, but claustrophobia had never been one of her fears. The others were all around her; she could feel somebody's leg twitching slightly near her left foot. It was oddly comforting.

She heard the approach of the aircycle. The drone was muted, but loud enough to penetrate her cover. The thing passed overhead, off to one side. Good! But then the fading drone returned. He must be circling back. It grew louder. She felt it through the sand—strange that sand would carry vibrations so well—and then there was an abrupt cut off to it.

It was getting harder to breathe. The air she had trapped was hot and growing foul. She was trying to sip at it, taking small and even breaths, but the urge to sit up and inhale deeply was growing. It couldn't have been more than a minute since Scanner had covered her, but it felt like a lot longer.

Somebody walked toward her. She felt the steps. They seemed impossibly loud, as if a giant were slogging across the desert, about to step on her. Then they stopped, very near. What was he doing? Not that it mattered; in another ten or fifteen seconds, she was going to have to have air, no matter who was out there, even if it were Stark himself. There was no way to get around it. Her lungs were crying for oxygen now, and if something didn't happen soon—

Somebody screamed, a primal, guttural yell, the call of a killing predator about to take prey.

Juete sat up. The thin layer of sand oozed away from her. She shook her head to clear her ears, and opened her eyes at the same instant.

A guard stood not two meters away, a heavy pulse pistol in his hands. His attention was elsewhere, however; he was staring upward, a look of astonishment on his face, his body frozen. She saw him flick a glance in her direction, but immediately he jerked his gaze back toward the dune.

Juete twisted to see what the guard saw. Dain bounded down the side of the dune, screaming and waving his arms. Sand showered from his steps, but he was ten meters away and moving slowly for all his efforts and noise.
He must have
buried himself under the dune
, she thought.

The guard's momentary paralysis wore off; he whipped the pulse pistol up and fired. His aim was off. Juete heard the hard thrum of the weapon, saw the sand splash and glassify under the bolt a meter to Dain's left. Dain kept coming. The guard corrected his aim, prepared to fire again—

And all around her, the sand erupted. The guard started, surprised by this new threat. He swung the gun around.

Chameleon was closer, but Sandoz got there first. He slammed one elbow into the guard's temple. Before the man could fall, the assassin struck again, the fingers of the same hand and arm extended into an open-handed ridge that smashed the opposite temple. The man's head snapped to one side as if struck by a club, and he fell bonelessly to the sand. The pulse pistol flew from his hand and landed next to Juete. The tip of the barrel smoked as the sand touched it.

Dain slid the last meter down the face of the dune. He moved to the fallen guard.

Raze had her hand on the man's neck, feeling for a pulse.

"Nobody home here anymore," she said, leaning back.

Chameleon laughed nervously. "Nice work," he said to Sandoz.

"Thanks," Sandoz replied, almost absently.

"Troubles," Scanner said. "If he called for back-up—"

"He didn't have time to com anything," Chameleon said. Then, uncertainly, "You think?"

"Probably not," Dain said. "But even if he doesn't call in, they'll come looking for him."

"Great," Sandoz said. "Fucking great. If I had just gone for the stun we'd have a prisoner who could've sent them off to the goddamned moons looking for us!"

He smacked the heel of his hand against his temple. "Stupid!"

"Well." Raze said, "at least we've got a weapon and a cycle. Maybe we can do some damage before they take us."

"No, wait," Juete found herself saying. "There's a better way."

The others turned to look at her. Dain said, "You have an idea?"

She stood and shook sand out of her hair. "What if he had an accident? If they found him then, they wouldn't connect him to us, would they?"

Scanner and Dain exchanged glances. Scanner said, "He's probably been looking at rocks all over the desert all night. Heat-scan gear on the cycle. I doubt he would have called in each time he landed to dig up a hot boulder."

"So?" That from Chameleon.

Dain looked thoughtful. "So, Juete's right. If something happened to his cycle—maybe he got sand in one of the repellors, like that—and he crashed and fractured his skull, it would be an accident. They'd come looking for him, but they wouldn't be looking for us."

Scanner said. "They don't have vox ID at the prison. I could fuzz the com on the cycle, send in a garbled message, something like, 'My cycle's acting up, I'm gonna try to nurse it back to the flitter.' "

Dain smiled. "You're a genius, you know that?"

"I've always thought so, myself."

"Maybe we could even have this guy—" Raze nodded at the corpse, "—tell them he'd checked the whole desert and it was clear."

"Better not get too complicated," Scanner said. "We don't know how long he's been out here or what he's said before.''

"Right," Dain said. "Let's keep it simple."

Maro watched as Raze and Sandoz loaded the body onto the aircycle. The machine bobbed as it adjusted to the weight. Raze arranged the corpse so that it would stay on, draping it between the protective side rails used for carrying cargo. The message had gone like Scanner had planned. He had used the tool kit under the cycle's seat to make a break in the com circuit. Even if they checked, he said, they'd never notice that it was done on purpose.

"Ready," Raze said.

Sandoz pulled the pulse pistol from his belt and gazed at it fondly before shoving it into the guard's holster. That had been a sore point with him, but if they had kept it, that would surely have raised suspicions. It was unlikely that the guards would believe it had vanished on impact, and even so, a routine sweep with a detector would turn it up if that were the case. Better to let it go with the guard.

Scanner twisted the throttle and gunned the engine. He had rigged it to stay on until the cycle reached the end of its journey—a trip that should last about two kilometers, they figured. At this height, the ground was more or less flat for that far before a series of dunes crossed the flight path. The cycle would plow into one of those at speed, a collision that would surely have killed the man were he not already dead.

"Give my regards to the devil," Sandoz said as he thumbed the aircycle into forward gear. The machine sped off, arrow straight, flying at chest height.

They watched it for a moment before Maro said, "Come on, let's go. We won't be able to see it hit."

The cycle had given them another tool they had not figured on. They couldn't take anything physical, but Scanner had figured out the lock frequency the guards were using for their operation. Without the codes, a com would only receive garbled static; with them, the transceiver they had taken from the downed flitter was now able to receive and decipher the opchan. Maybe they might get enough warning to hide if somebody else came their way.

Almost out of the desert
, Maro thought. Another hour and they would be back in the safety of cover. It could be a lot worse.

They still had a chance.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Alarms blared, and Stark's office com lit with incoming warnings from his guards: there was a force of Confederation Military cruising toward the prison, bleeding all over the operational channels and demanding to speak to the warden. Stark nodded grimly to himself. Karnaaj of the
Soldatutmarkt
had arrived, bearing not gifts, but guns.

Well, Stark
, said the smirking voice inside his head,
if
ever you needed a sign,
here it is
.

Stark sighed and, almost as if he were viewing the movements of some other poor, doomed soul, watched his hand reach for the com.