There were other traders, of course, mostly small timers who did more smuggling of fuel and blasters through coldheart country than did any bartering. If they were honest, and didn’t sell nuke water that glowed to fools who couldn’t tell the difference, or deal in slaves, or jolt, then Kate would cut a treaty with them, and sell them a few blasters, and always toss in a book or two.
“Hold on,” Jake said, and there was a moment of softly crackling static from the comm. “Okay, we have a report of blasterfire to the north of here. One mile, mebbe less.”
“Explosions or handcannons?” Kate demanded, looking through the binocs again.
“Blasterfire, that’s all Eric can confirm over the mike.”
Rubbing a hand across his unshaved jaw, Roberto glanced over a shoulder at the parabolic dish on top of War Wag One. In reality it was merely a large ceramic soup bowl with a microphone positioned in the exact center. But the dish collected sounds too faint for people to hear and concentrated them on the mike for Eric to hear at his station inside One. The crippled tech had found the directions to build it from a children’s book of fun science, and more than once the fellow had foxed an ambush by muties or a night creep with the contraption. Yet it was no more than a child’s toy for the preDark whitecoats.
That thought always made Roberto uneasy. There were tales of preDark war machines still functioning in distant lands, randomly chilling folks as if all life was their sworn enemy. War machines that hovered above the ground in legs of wind, and were armed with L-guns even better than War Wag One possessed. Perhaps just tall tales for drunks in a tavern, or creepies told to scare little kids. But the chief gunner for the Trader had a gut feeling that some part of those stories might be true.
“North is toward Rockpoint,” Roberto stated, looking first in one direction, then the other. “But the nuke cloud was east of here. Mebbe just a coincidence, but then again, mebbe the Core and Gaza have declared war on each other.”
“All the better,” Kate said with a hard smile.'”That would just make it easier for us to chill them both.”
“Unless they know we’re coming,” Roberto added slowly, as if thinking out each word before speaking, “and are staging a fake fight to lure us into an ambush.”
Gaza and the Core combined—there was a grim thought. With his firepower and their mind demons, the two would be unstoppable and could seize control of the whole of Texas, forging an empire of death across a thousand square miles.
There were always outlanders and coldhearts who didn’t want peace, folks who thrived on chaos. She chilled them at every opportunity, and left them hanging naked with their cock and balls cut off, and her brand burned into their flesh—a lightning bolt crossing a star. The sign of the Trader.
Once, just once, she caught another trader pretending to be her and using the symbol. She gutted the man on the spot and rammed his heart down his throat right there in the ville bar. Sometimes, she’d hear the story repeated a thousand miles away, always with a lot of new details and embellishments. Good. It put fear into people, and reduced the number she had to ace to stay alive. Chilling was just a task, something she did when necessary. Kate had already seen more death in her life than any dozen people.
“Hopefully not. But either way, we’re ready,” Kate said firmly. “We’ll head for the blasterfire. The nuke ain’t going anywhere.”
“Sooner started, sooner done,” Roberto said, brushing back his hair. “I’ll ride point and take Horta and Jennings along with me for flankers.” Frowning in thought, the Trader turned and started for the war wag. A curved section of the chassis was swung out, displaying steps to climb inside the elevated vehicle. A guard stood near the opening with an M-16 assault rifle resting in his hands.
“Not this time,” she ordered. “I want everybody behind steel with fingers on triggers, and Eric running the L-gun in case it is the Core. That’s the only defense we have against their tricks.”