The Omega Cage (25 page)

The computer's mechanical voice said, "Define parameters of
likely
."

"Routes that would be the safest for a small guerrilla force seeking to escape detection from air, land and spysat search."

"Capabilities of land vehicle?"

"Three-person surface quadcycle with supplementary low-altitude repellors."

The air in front of Stark's faceplate lit with the heads-up display. Holographic maps shimmered in the air. The three images each had a different route of travel marked by a glowing blue line. The maps were numbered, with one being the most likely path and three being the least.

The line on the first map led across the gigantic lava fields to the north.

Of course. All the piezoelectrical static associated with volcanic activity and rock movement would play hell with sensor gear. It might be dangerous on the surface, but the only way they'd be spotted would be by direct visual, which gave them a big advantage.

As much as he hated them, Stark had to give them credit. So far, the escapees had moved very cleverly.

Not cleverly enough, however. They hadn't known about his Juggernaut. He had figured out which way they went, he was sure of it. They'd make the smart move. Only this time, he wouldn't be a step behind.

He checked his position. He was on the southern arm of his spiral, unfortunately, and it would take more than an hour to reach the plain. By then, it would be dark. But that didn't matter. He would put the Juggernaut down and rest. In the morning, he would have plenty of daylight in which to find them. It was only a matter of when.

He gave the computer the coordinates, turned, and roared across the twilight skies.

Juete's buttocks were sore from the hard seat in the cart, and she rubbed them as they stepped from the vehicle. Dain had been driving for the last two hours, and the dark had finally forced them to stop. They did not want to use the lights; besides, they were exhausted.

Scanner pulled the heat tabs on three cans, and the scent of the warming food wafted to her. It might be bland by the Cage's standards, but nothing had ever smelled quite so good to Juete.

"How far have we come?" Dain said.

Scanner took a bite of what looked to be a reddish bean paste, swallowed and said, "About two hundred and fifty kilometers."

Dain offered a canteen to Juete. She took it and drank. "Not too good," he said.

Scanner shrugged. "Best we can do, considering the terrain. Thirty klicks an hour means we can make it to the port by dark tomorrow. If…"

"If what?" Juete said.

"If the repellors hold up."

"You think they won't?" Dain asked.

Scanner swallowed another mouthful of bean paste. He pointed at the canteen, and Juete passed it to him. He drank. "I don't know. They ran hot for the last couple of hours. We can drop to the ground, but given the topography, we'd be lucky to do ten klicks an hour."

Juete leaned back against the relatively smooth chunk of black stone. She was exhausted; so much had happened in the last few days. She hoped they would make it, hoped they would be able to escape from Omega, but if they didn't, if they were tracked down, she knew she was not going to return to the Cage and Stark's perverted sense of love. She would die first. And somehow, that did not seem as terrible as it once had been. The albino Exotics had a highly-supported sense of self-preservation—another legacy from their creators. One did not wish to lose such a valuable possession through suicide, after all. But there came a time when death was preferable to life, perhaps. Or, at least, a time when the quality of life might not be worth the struggle. Suicide, no. But fighting to preserve her freedom and others', even to death, yes.

That had been Raze's decision, after all. She could do no less.

Next to her, Dain slipped his arm over her shoulders, as if suddenly sensing her mood. She snuggled closer to him, looked at his face, then glanced over at Scanner. Dain would not mind, she knew, if she invited Scanner to huddle with them. It was the three of them against the world, after all, and what comfort they could take together, they should.

But before she could speak. Scanner said, "I'm going to sit in the cart for a while." He stood, stretched, and walked the ten meters to the cart.

Juete glanced at Dain.

He said softly, "He's going to link to the cart's computer. It isn't much, but he gets something from it."

She nodded. She could understand that.

After a while, without speaking further, she fell asleep against Dain.

Maro gently moved away from Juete, easing her head down onto the jacket he'd found at the camp. She slept hard, not stirring.

He climbed the boulderlike rock behind them. It was easy enough, the moons'

light was bright, the sky clear. It was maybe twenty meters to the top, a soft incline, and from the pinnacle he could see kilometers in any direction.

Here and there, reddish-orange glows lit the sky. And twice in five minutes, bright discharges like lightning flared whitely. Such an eerie landscape, like something out of a prehistory holovid. He almost expected to see dinosaurs stalking across the hardened lava, or a herd of curl noses lumbering past. Below him, Juete slept, while Scanner communed with his electronic spirits. Maro felt very much alone on this alien plain. So far away from anywhere he ever thought he would be. He thought about the others who had trusted him to lead them to freedom. Four dead— five, counting Fish, who had never even managed to climb the walls. Sandoz, Chameleon, Berque and Raze. Raze most of all he was sorry about.

The sadness welled in him, filling his chest and throat, and it almost overcame him. No. Not tonight. Later, maybe, if they lived, later he would have time to mourn properly. For now, he needed to concentrate on staying alive. Otherwise there would be no one to pay respect to the others.

He climbed back down the rock and stretched out next to Juete. It was cold and hard, but sleep finally came.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Stark awoke, and for a moment did not know where he was. He felt panic close in until he remembered. The Juggernaut lay on its back, and the seat padding made it as comfortable as any other field cot he'd ever slept in, albeit somewhat limiting insofar as motion.

He touched a control and the repellors hummed as they lifted the suit to a standing position. He clicked the exit controls, waited until the hydraulics opened the clamshell doors and climbed out.

He looked about the landscape, bleak and desolate as a moon. He stretched, relieved himself, and jogged around a bit. The morning sun was only beginning to show over the horizon. He reentered the Juggernaut, sat in the control seat, and fastened the unit tight again. The water from the mouth tube was cold and clean, and the nutrient paste was warm, if somewhat tasteless. It was sustaining, however, and that was all he needed. He reconnected the penile catheter and powered up the flight mode. Even the computer could not say exactly how the fugitives would cover the ground, since detailed maps were not available, but that was unimportant. He would head northwest, zig-zagging. It would take a little longer to cover a fifteen-klick-wide swath, but in the end. he would catch them.

The Juggernaut lifted amid a spray of volcanic rock dust, a giant raptor on the prowl.

Juete had almost gotten used to the rhythm of the cart's swaying flight as it dodged rocks too high to hop. Scanner was driving again, and for a time, the plain was flat enough for nearly top speed. An hour after they started the ground ridged again, becoming more convoluted. She wondered how it had come to be formed that way. Were there some underlying rocks which had become encysted? Or did the cooling lava pile up on itself? It was not important that she know, but it did make her curious.

Next to her, Dain stared across the plain, not speaking. He seemed far away this morning, lost in his own thoughts.

In the middle of a particularly rough stretch of ground, Scanner stopped. "Got to rest the GE," he said. "It's overheating."

Juete looked around. The surface reminded her of a stormy ocean she'd once sailed over on another world; it was as if someone had frozen the wind-driven waves into stone. There were peaks and troughs and a thousand different shapes surrounding them.

They had passed several more fumaroles, pits that exuded hot and stinking gases or bubbled with molten rock and mud. And yet, even among the solid rock and killing heat, she had seen plants. They were mostly small, stunted blobs of gray-green, some kind of lichen or moss anchored to the rocks at odd angles, usually in shaded spots. Even in the midst of such desolation, there was life. Some kind of a lesson there, wasn't there? The sun beat down, but it was cooler than the desert when they were away from the fumaroles. Juete wore a flat-brimmed hat Dain had found at the camp, and slathered herself every few minutes with sunblock. Even so, she felt her skin burning where it was exposed to the light.

After half an hour, Scanner restarted the cart and they moved on.

Maro trusted Scanner's driving more than he did his own. Scanner plugged into the cart's simple computer and controlled the vehicle directly, for the most part.

But the concentration required for the interlink was hard on the man, and Maro offered to spell him every hour or so. Scanner looked drawn, tired, and he had lost probably five kilograms since the escape. They were all wearing thin, Maro knew. If they couldn't get to some kind of safety within another day or two, the stress would burn them out. The price paid for constant fight-or-flight was too much to continue for long.

"Dain?"

Maro turned to glance at Juete. Scanner was asleep in the back next to the beautiful albino. "Yeah?"

"Listen, no matter what happens, I want you to know I love you. I appreciate what you've done for us. For me."

"Thank you," he said.

He somehow felt better, even though nothing had changed. Win or lose, he had done what he'd had to do.

Back and forth Stark tacked, flying a Z-pattem that extended seven and a half klicks on either side of a straight line toward the mining port. He looked at the land below from an altitude of a hundred meters. The suit's sensors worked sometimes, and sometimes they did not. Once he had been nearly over a large fissure that had suddenly ground shut, and only his polarized faceplate had saved his eyes from the actinic flash of a giant spark as it leaped from the ground and floated up past him like ball lighting. His sensors had gone off the scale.

But, even though he could not track the escapees, there were very few places for them to hide. He would see them among all the ripples and valleys of the slag, sooner or later.

He worried for a time that they might have fallen into one of the steaming lava pits, but he somehow did not think that Fate would cheat him so.

Methodically he flew, back and forth, searching.

As the afternoon wore toward dusk, Scanner stopped the cart more and more frequently. Finally, an hour before dark, with the shadows stretching over a landscape grown more and more mountainous, they halted.

"That's it," Scanner said wearily. "The GE gear is dead. If I had parts and tools, I might be able to fix it. But we've burned a rotor and there's no way we can continue on hover."

"It's okay," Dain said. "You pulled off a miracle getting us this far. We'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way, on the ground."

Scanner looked around. Juete was shocked at how thin and gaunt the man's face appeared. "We'll move like snails. There's hardly a centimeter of flat ground as far as I can see."

"We'll manage. We can always walk, if we have to."

"It's about forty kilometers, I figure," Scanner said.

"We crossed that much desert, didn't we?" Juete put in.

"Yeah. I guess."

"Should we stop, do you think?" Dain asked.

Scanner shrugged. "Might as well go until dark."

"Okay then. We roll."

Stark's anger could not be held back. Where
were
they? He had not missed them, he was sure of it! And yet, the spaceport lay only another fifty or sixty klicks ahead. Surely they couldn't have gotten that far yet? They had to be on the plains still. But darkness was coming and there was still no sign of them.

A yellow fog seemed to cover the ground ahead.

"Better avoid that," Scanner said to Maro, who was now driving. "Could be sulphur dioxide. Probably has a lot of carbon dioxide in it, too."

Maro turned and began to circle the gas cloud. They had been lucky; they had managed to travel another fifteen kilometers on a winding but fairly flat stretch.

But darkness was making the driving treacherous, and now Maro decided to halt for the night. He pulled the cart to a stop in the shelter of a tall spire of rock.

Almost there
, he thought.
We're almost there
.

Stark cursed the darkness. And then, he saw something on his scopes.

He had gotten a number of ghosts and bad readings since he'd entered the lava fields, but this looked like the readings of three large, warm-blooded animals. He had seen nothing like this on the plains until now.

It had to be them. It
had
to be!

The darkness would not impede him if he chose to take them. The Juggernaut was equipped with spookeyes, light intensification equipment that would allow him to see in almost total darkness. He could pluck them from the dark as easily as if it were midday. But no. Now that he had them, he wanted to make it last.

Now that he knew where they were, they couldn't outrun him.

He climbed, wanting to be hidden in the night, and flew past the position of the prisoners.

"What was that?" Juete asked.

"What?" Dain's voice was sleepy.

"That noise, didn't you hear it? It sounded like a jet."

Dain shook his head. "Probably a fumarole venting gas."

Juete strained her ears, but the noise, whatever it was, was not repeated. "Yes, I guess that must have been what it was."

But she felt an icy touch within as she lay curled next to the man she loved. It followed her into sleep.