“Beats walking, huh?” J.B. said.
“Yeah,” Ryan replied automatically. His mind was elsewhere. He was counting the ways the whole thing could collapse. They had no weapons. Their battlesuits didn’t work. They were heading into the enemy stronghold. And they were up to their eyeballs in highly radioactive ore. He stopped counting and thought about Krysty, who could already be dead. He thought about Dean, too, who was going to be dead if he didn’t pull this off.
“I’m going to be damned glad to get off this fucking sea of glass,” J.B. said. “I don’t mind dying, you know that, but I don’t want to die out here. I don’t want my spirit roaming this nuked-out shithole forever.”
Ryan understood what he meant. Dying here would be like dying on another planet. Or on the moon.
“We left friends behind,” Ryan said.
“I’m not forgetting that. I sure as hell don’t want them to die out here, either. What are we going to do when we get to Slake City?”
“What we always do,” Ryan said. “Make it up as we go along.”
Chapter Twenty-One
After Ryan and J.B. left Ground Zero, everything was fine for a few minutes. The camp appeared to have settled down. The slaves had resumed their dismal labor. It was as if the glass throwing demonstration— and the guards’ display of force—had never happened.
Mildred and Jak bided their time just inside the mine’s entrance, holding their captured weapons well out of sight while they kept track of the troopers’ movements.
About ten minutes had passed when all the guards seemed to stiffen. Mildred and Jak noticed the nearly simultaneous reaction, and arrived at the same conclusion: a new set of orders had come through their battlesuit com links.
The troopers looked at one another, then at their prisoners. Then one of them shouted to the slaves on the flatland, “Everybody up! That means everybody! You’re all going down in the mines. Everybody is going to work! If you don’t get up, you will be sliced and diced.”
“They can’t make those dying people get up,” Mildred said. “The poor bastards can’t walk, let alone work.”
A group of troopers formed a ragged line and started advancing across the compound, driving the slaves who could move toward the mines. When they came upon those who couldn’t move, those curled up in the dimples, they opened fire, point blank. The shrieks of their energy weapons mingled with the screams of the dying.
The sick and the injured who weren’t comatose or paralyzed used the last of their strength to drag themselves out of the dimples and crawl toward the mine.
“This is too much,” Mildred said, dropping the trigger-block safety of her pulse rifle. “I’m not going to stand here and watch this without doing something about it.”
Jak shook his head. But Mildred wasn’t looking at him. She was already swinging up her tribarrel. As Jak started to speak, a naked man dashed out of the mine and rushed past him in a pale blur. It was the trooper they had turned over to the slaves. He had gotten free somehow. Battered, bleeding, with boot prints on his backside, he ran across the compound. He ran waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs.
Mildred swung her sights down on him. Her finger tightened on the trigger, but she held up. It was too late to stop the man. The cat was already out of the bag. And he was unarmed.
Jak fried him. He tapped the trigger of his laser rifle, firing a green beam as straight as a bowstring. The energy pulse cut the running man’s spinal cord, flash-cooked his heart and made the front of his chest open up like the petals of a gory flower. The unstoppable bolt of light continued on, whistling as it slammed into the side of a sledge. The metal glowed red for an instant, then faded back to its original rust-brown color.
“One less,” the albino said by way of explanation.
There was no time to discuss the matter.
The troopers by the ore truck and the water tank were returning fire. Those who had been slaughtering the helpless joined their victims, taking cover in the closest dimples.