“You know I can’t keep this up,” she said. “If I screw up the timing just once, we’re in deep trouble.”
“Got get out,” Jak said.
“And do what?” Mildred asked him.
“Drop road with them on,” Jak told her.
“That would certainly solve our problem,” Doc said. “How do you intend to manage it?”
“With these,” Jak said, slapping the side plate of the pulse rifle he had picked up from the floorboards. “Undercut road with these. Make it slide into big hole.”
“I think our lad has something there, Mildred,” Doc said. “The captured longblasters will cut through the supporting strata like hot knives through butter.”
“I’ll take slaves from cargo box,” Jak said. “Go around big hole. Hit road from other side.”
“What are the rest of us supposed to do while you’re circling?” Mildred said.
“Keep troopers in wags,” Jak said. “All go down at once.”
With that, the albino teen popped open the passenger door and slipped out. Without a word, Dean, who was sitting beside him, grabbed a pulse rifle from the floor and ducked out behind him.
“Dean! No!” Mildred cried. “Come back!”
The boy either ignored her or couldn’t hear her for the scream of the laser cannons that once again pounded the truck’s EM shield. As the wag slid backward out of control, Dean ran past the cargo box on Jak’s heels. Not only was the boy lightfooted, but he was also frisky and wild with excitement, like a pup who had just evaded righteous punishment.
Jak shouted for the armed slaves to follow them. As six of the former residents of Ground Zero piled over the rear gate of the cargo box, he and Dean sprinted down the road, keeping the wag and its cab’s EM shield between them and the enemy cannons. When they reached the point where the sides of the crevasse came together, Jak didn’t stop but turned for the shoulder.
“Jak, the cuffs!” Dean shouted. The albino didn’t answer, and he didn’t stop. There was no time to check whether Ryan and J.B. had succeeded in disabling the manacles. No time to drag out a dead body and throw it off the road. To reach the firing location Jak had in mind meant taking a treacherous route over glass. If they didn’t reach it as quickly as possible, their effort would have been in vain.
Jak took the offroad plunge in a mad leap, his eyes shut tight.
“Jak!” Dean cried. Nothing happened.
The teenager landed on the balls of his feet, and his feet remained attached to his ankles. His hands stayed stuck to his wrists. “Ha!” he shouted triumphantly, waving the others on.
Dean jumped off the road, and the armed slaves followed him. Jak took them on an erratic route across the field of glass, dodging the branching surface cracks whenever he could, vaulting over them when he couldn’t. The splits were only six feet wide, but they opened onto nothing. One look down told Dean that the chasm continued beneath their feet, that only thin bridges of glass separated them from the abyss. As they worked their way toward a ridge of rotten glass, its wafer-thin summit like the back fin of some gigantic sailfish, shot through with thousands of holes from a century of windblown grit, they got their first side view of the straightaway. It hung precipitously over the drop-off, sitting atop a two-hundred-foot-long mass of deeply undercut glass.
Looking in that direction was painful.
Mildred, Doc and the slaves in the ore truck were taking hit after hit from the first two assault wags. The green glare of deflected laser pulses was tremendous.
Once Jak, Dean and the slaves moved onto the flat, they came under the cannons of the back pair of assault wags.
The tortured squeals of air ripped asunder arrived a half second after the energy pulses impacted. Even though Jak anticipated the barrage and guided the men around the back side of the ridge, it offered no real cover. The blasts of big-bore laser light burned four-foot-diameter holes through the glass, sending sprays of molten droplets flying. The beams continued on, flat and straight, through the next ridge, seventy-five yards away.