Screaming beams bracketed the slave who was farthest down the slope. They melted the glass around him as they sawed through his body. The first slash bisected his torso from right shoulder to left hip. The others chopped him into much smaller pieces. His remains sizzled and smoked along with the bubbling puddle of glass.
“Over the top!” Jak cried. “Everybody goes! Mass your fire, drop the road! I’ll cover!”
Dean scrambled up the slope along with the others. Every step they took reduced the angle of advantage the troopers had. Behind him, Dean heard the squeal of Jak’s laser rifle returning fire. There was no time to look. He picked his way over the glass rubble near the summit, found a gap in the ridge’s fan and threw himself belly down.
Before him, the road stretched out straight. The forward wags were punishing the ore track, driving it backward toward the abyss with double pulse after double pulse. He could see the people in the cargo box. They fell each time the EM shield was hit. As he shouldered the laser rifle and dropped the safety, the ore wag was hit again and the impact turned it sideways in the road, offering its unprotected flank to direct fire.
Dean pressed the trigger, holding it down as he fanned the point of the green beam over the fattest part of the road’s supporting glass. The other slaves opened fire at almost the same instant. Their combined beams melted back the layers of glass, in seconds creating a roaring waterfall more than a hundred feet wide. The entire section of road shifted with a short, shrill shriek that could be heard over the lasers’ whine.
Its facing edge dropped down a foot.
Then another, as Dean and the slaves burned back the top of the undercut ledge.
The resulting shriek was lost in a tremendous, ear-splitting crack as the road gave away. In slow motion, the four black wags slipped downward, along with a hundred feet of road and ten thousand tons of nuke-glass rubble. The wags tumbled, crashing against the sides of the chasm.
Dean looked over at the only vehicle remaining on the road, their ore wag. People were standing up in the cargo box, waving their arms excitedly. What they couldn’t see, or hadn’t noticed was how close they were to the edge of the cave-in.
As he opened his mouth to yell a warning, the road under the uphill side of the wag began to slough off, tipping the box toward the abyss. As the box tilted over, it spilled bodies and ore down into the crevasse. Then, with a groan, it slid off the edge of the road.
“Jak!” Dean howled, looking behind him for the albino.
The albino teen wasn’t there. He was hurriedly mopping up the troopers near the ridge. Having dropped big sections of the fan of glass on top of them, he walked among their trapped bodies, removing helmets one by one, and cooking their brains with short, single pulses of his energy weapon. At Dean’s shout, he looked over from his grim duty.
“Mildred and Doc!” the boy cried. “What about Mildred and Doc!”
MILDRED AND DOC WATCHED with delight as the road gave way and the attack wags dropped from view.
They were celebrating along with the other slaves as the cargo box began to tip.
“Jump!” she shouted to the others.
Over the grinding roar of the collapsing roadway, no one heard her.
As she jumped to the rim of the box, Doc launched himself ahead of her, stretching to the utmost, his skinny legs churning to reach the lip of solid ground that remained downslope. Mildred landed half on, half off the ledge. Doc turned and pulled her up by her armpits.
Their toes inches from the edge, they looked down into the chasm. Clouds of dust rose up as the ground rumbled underfoot. Like sand through an hourglass, big chunks of glass slipped through the dark slot below them. Bodies slipped through them, too, limp bodies cartwheeling into the void. The wags themselves were too big to fall through. They lay wedged between the edges of the second crevasse.