The burning wreckage of an APC sat blown apart before the rig, and all around the blast site bodies of the outriders eroded under the onslaught of the acid rain.
“Hit it again!” Kate ordered, brandishing a fist. “No prisoners!”
A few moments later, the rig shuddered as another missile was launched from the roof pod, and this time the APC was hit dead center. The crew in the control room cheered, as the radio crackled with static. Nobody paid attention to it, as the comm did that with every flash of lightning, but this time somebody started speaking.
“Anybody hear us on this?” a gruff man’s voice demanded. “We got this hand comm from a bike that rain hadn’t swamped yet.”
Kate spun at that and stared hard at the speaker.
What the hell was going on here? That sure wasn’t Duncan over in War Wag Two.
“You listening in the big rig?” the stranger continued. “The name is Ryan Cawdor, and I used to run with Trader back in the Darks. I’m here with J. B. Dix and some others.”
“Weapons on full, shoot anything coming our way,” Kate ordered, taking out her hand comm and extending the slim antenna until the telescoping silver almost reached the ceiling.
“Ryan, eh? The name is familiar to me,” the woman said, pressing the transmit switch. “So where the hellblast are you?”
“Out here in the rain,” the man said simply. “Look on your four.”
“Bullshit,” Blackjack growled in disbelief, checking the radar screen. “Ain’t nothing out there but deaders and wreckage. It’s some kinda trick.”
“Incorrect,” Eric said from above. “The ear is picking up their voices through the rain. They are exactly where they claim to be.”
While the gunners in the machine gun blisters swept their blasters across the soaked desert, Kate worried a knuckle.
“Mebbe,” she relented, then went to the periscope to track the area. But sure enough, there they were, a half dozen or so people wrapped in plastic like MRE meals, and standing on a sandy mound, the yellow runoff creeping steadily up the side of their dwindling island.
“What the hell is going on here?” Jessica growled, leaning into the windshield to try to get a look. “Some of his sec men left the wag?”
“Men or women?” Jake asked, flipping a switch to turn on the halogen headlights. The beams stabbed into the rain but were swallowed whole after only a few yards. “He’s got all those damn wives, ya know. I heard it was a hundred.”
“Only a few. But this looks like a mix,” Kate said slowly. “Might be a kid and wrinklie, too. But I can’t tell for sure.”
Taking a rag from his pants, Blackjack wiped the inside of the blister to remove the thickening fog of condensation that the damn AC always caused. “Think it’s a mutiny?” he asked, squinting outside.
“No,” the Trader said, leaving the periscope. “No way that one APC could hold a dozen people even if they were stuffed in like cordwood.”
“Might have been riding on top,” Jessica suggested. “Then the rain came and they ran just before we used the missiles.”
In spite of her gut feeling on the matter, Kate had to admit that did cover everything and made a damn lot of sense. The logical thing would be for them to start the engines and leave, letting the rain ace the strangers in its own way. Only that civie had spoken well of Ryan, and she had been hearing rumors of such a man who traveled the Deathlands chilling slavers, and such. That alone earned him a lot of ammo in her book. Mebbe even enough for a face-to-face.
“Hello?” the radio cracked once more. “You still there?”
“I hear ya,” Kate asked bluntly into the comm, walking over to the front window. There wasn’t much to be seen through the downpour. “So what do you want from me?”
“How about letting us in? We’re getting chilled out here.”
Jake and Blackjack both snorted rudely at that. At the door, the guard worked the bolt on his M-16 and tested the locks to make sure the hatch was firmly secured. Kate approved. Her people knew their jobs; hopefully so did she.