Dean managed to avert his face from the mist of liquefied glass. It sizzled against the back of his coat. Two of the former slaves weren’t so lucky. They turned to look at the explosion above them, and the fall of scorching droplets burned through their eyelids and into their eyes. Screaming, hands over their faces, they staggered back the way they had come.
“Stop them!” Dean cried. “Somebody stop them!” When no one moved to help, the boy scrambled up from the glass.
Jak grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back.
“No,” he said, “can’t save.”
They watched from the ridge as the blinded, pain-mad men blundered, stumbling into the maze of cracks. First one, then the other was swallowed up by the glass.
“THE BOY WILL BE all right,” Doc told Mildred. “What is done is done. Jak will watch over him.”
“I’d feel better if he was with us.”
The cannons hit the ore wag’s EM shield again. Mildred reacted by thumbing the speed button.
“We are going to have to get out,” Doc said after their truck had recovered from the impact.
“If we get out,” Mildred countered, “they’ll push the wag off the road. And we need it for cover.”
“May I suggest that you advance up the grade. Halve the distance between ourselves and our enemies. If they persist in firing upon us, that will buy us precious minutes before our chariot is overthrown.”
Mildred drove the wag forward seventy-five feet.
“Let’s move,” she said as she set the brakes, “quick, before they blast us again.”
The two of them each seized a pulse rifle from the floor and jumped out of the driver’s side of the wag’s cab. It was also the cliff side. As they raced to the rear, Mildred glanced into the void. She saw sheer, striated walls angling together five hundred feet down. They met in a bulge of glass that wasn’t the bottom of the crevasse, but a second, narrower opening to a much deeper chamber.
As she and Doc climbed up the sides of the cargo box, the wag took another double laser blast. They hung on as the truck slid backward, wheels crunching on the glass. Accompanying the flare of brilliant green light was a wave of withering heat. Something they had not felt inside the protection of the cab.
To the five armed slaves who greeted them in the box, Mildred said, “Use your pulse rifles. We’ve got to try to keep the troopers in their wags.”
As they lined up along the front edge of the box, just above the cab’s roof, she knew they had their work cut out for them. The assault wags’ EM shields and the soldiers’ battlesuits would deflect their laser blasts.
“Shoot at their feet,” she told the others. “If they come out, shoot at their feet.”
Another blaze of green followed by a blast of heat made them duck back behind the cover of the box. The wag skidded down the road, its rear end twisting closer to the edge.
Then the rear pair of enemy wags opened fire. Not on them, but on Jak and the others, who were sprinting around the end of the chasm. The beams screamed across the road and slammed into the ridge top opposite.
“Bastards!” Mildred said. She popped back up and fired, using a sustained beam to define the limits of the forward wags’ EM shields. She had found it, some fifteen feet in front of their bumpers, when a pod on the roof of the left-hand wag opened and a barrel emerged.
“What now?” Doc said.
There was a loud bang and a projectile shot out. It flew almost straight up. It was very slow moving; they could track it easily with their eyes. It arced high over the cab’s EM shield, before dropping toward the cargo box.
“Oh, shit,” Mildred said, covering her head with her arms.
Then the projectile banged again, disintegrating in midair. As it did, it send a volley of smaller projectiles raining on them. The flechettes hissed like angry insects, their needlepoints plinking off the blocks of glass, off the rim of the cargo box, and slapping into flesh and bone.