Bloodfire

The noise was deafening. This was why they had a comp and Eric to nurse it. To give them an edge like this. But was it enough? Would it work? There had never been a chance to try their missile defense system before, and now it was all or nothing. Aces or diamonds, as the river folks liked to say. Life or death.

Unexpectedly, the machine guns stopped firing, and in the ringing silence the beeping of the radar could still be heard, but different, slower and less urgent.

“The missile is starting to descend,” Red Jack reported in disbelief. “Look at her drop! Nukeshit, the damn thing didn’t have the range to reach us this far away! Must have just been a LAW or HAFLA or mebbe something he cobbled together.”

Just a man-portable rocket, not a real missile like War Wag One was packing, Kate realized, easing the tension in her shoulders. Shitfire, she couldn’t lock on to Gaza from this distance, and he couldn’t reach her. Stalemate.

“We could use the L-Gun,” Jake stated.

Kate cut him off. “Not with all this smoke,” she replied sternly. “That cuts its power by half. I wanna ace the bastard, not merely piss him off.

“Okay, we have no choice,” she continued. “We go in as a group, the wags keep close and chill everything in sight. Send a runner to Two about not using the standard radio channels.”

“Roger that, Chief!”

“Switch to channel four and use the scramblers,” Eric said over the speakers. “No way the baron can hear us then.”

She grunted at that. “Good. Red Jack, stay glued to that radar. You get a blip, don’t waste the breath to tell me. Give the info straight to Eric. The closer we get, the less time we have to shoot down one of his rockets.”

“Then we give him missiles up the ass,” Jessica spit hatefully.

“Damn straight,” Kate ordered. “We’re going in nose to nose with that bastard, and end this now!”

The control room crew scrambled at their posts, sending messages throughout the wag over the phone lines while a runner hit the salty ground and started racing for the other wags.

As the tandem engines started revving to full power, the lights of the war wag brightened to full strength and the rig began to roll along, staying a good distance from the crumbling cliff.

“Here we come,” Kate muttered softly, looking across the swirling smoke at their invisible enemy.

AS GAZA AND HIS WIVES fired another rocket into the billowing smoke clouds, left unnoticed on the ground Shala forced herself to painfully crawl for the safety of the nearby desert. She could see the wide open plains of salted ground only a dozen yards away. She was close, so very close…

But every motion brought racking pain to her chest, the salt stinging like acid in her terrible wounds, and Shala could see the blood dripping off her arms as she tried to claw another foot forward, just one more inch toward the blessed sands of time.

Rising from the shifting sands, the women of the Core started for their girl only to see her tremble and die, a single gory finger resting on the clean sand of the true desert outside the forbidden zone. A crimson trail of her blood marked a direct path backward to the machine and the top-walkers near the cliff. Raising a spear, a woman started forward but others held her back. There was no courage in dying. The spears and mindkillers of the men had sadly proved the superiority of the brutal norms.

Gathering the still child in holy strips of tan cloth, the women brought the little one deep into the heart of the earth where she would lie forever safe and warm. And lying on the ground at that spot was a large leather bag removed from the ruins to the north, the outlanders’ water bag. But the polluted contents had been washed out and replaced with mineral water from a clean spring, then laced with enough undetectable jinkaja to cause instant madness, violent seizures and eventually agonizing death.

It was a hard truth that the Core couldn’t match the mighty machines of the norms, but the desert always found a way to balance the scales of death.

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