Dark Reckoning by James Axler

Grabbing a sack of grens, Ryan held one out to J.B. so the Armorer could see the safety pin was firmly in place. J.B. nodded, and the two began throwing the deadly bombs wildly into the warehouse.

Shouting warnings, Sheffield and the sec man scrambled to reach the exit. Tossing the half-filled bag into the chamber, Ryan and J.B. each grabbed one more item from the stack of supplies still on the fork-lift, then slammed shut the door to the gateway.

With pounding hearts, the two men waited for the swirling mists to engulf them, or for the chamber door to swing open again and for them to be brutally cut down by a hail of bullets from the hated blues

REACHING A RILL in the forest, the LAV-25 of Beta team drove along the woodsy embankment until spying the sprawling ruins of a predark city in the river valley below. To their right was a large flat expanse that sloped inward to a small lake of fused glass.

“Mininuke,” Campbell growled, and looked at the dashboard of the APC. Set off prominently by itself was a rad counter, but the red lightbulb wasn’t flashing, and no ticks came from the tiny speaker.

“Clean.” He sighed.

“If that’s working,” a private muttered, spooning hash from a MRE envelope.

“Hey!” the gunner called down. “Ville!”

The driver killed the LAV’s engines, and the sergeant quickly climbed into the turret with the binocs. This was their last chance at finding a dish. However, a nice ville for Sheffield to move them to would do a lot toward appeasing his anger.

Campbell adjusted the focus until the walls of the ville came in sharp. The ville was situated right in the middle of the ruins, and from that angle the sergeant could see how certain streets had been blocked with rubble, forming a maze around the ville. Unless they knew it was there, coldhearts would simply drive right past the place.

Its walls were the usual mix of whatever was handy, but good and thick, rising twice the height of a man. Inside were rows of houses and huts, all heavily repaired but looking rainproof. Armed sec men walked the walls, with watchtowers set inside the ville to give support fire in case of a successful breech. Damn, this pesthole was well designed. But aside from the defenses, the ville was like any other civilians walking about talking and doing things, while some wretch hung from a gallow’s noose with birds eating his skin. Near a tavern, a couple of bald sec men were having a fistfight in the mud, while an old man across the street was boiling laundry in a bathtub. A crude still was cooking shine over by the barracks, and Campbell guessed the building held a couple of dozen sec men, but that was it. A young busty female butcher was gutting a hog tied upside down to the limb of a tree. Some sluts were hanging their tits out the windows of a gaudy house, trolling for customers. Nice.

The ville looked perfectly normal, except for a fenced enclosure that was filled with rows of long huts whose roofs had been removed and replaced with hundreds of tiny panes of glass. Inside the glass houses were growing plants, a couple of sec men standing guard while workers pulled weeds and tilled the dark soil.

“Fifty, mebbe sixty men,” Campbell said to the blues down below. “Got three wags, one up on blocks getting repaired. Sec men got longblasters, but bolt-actions, no rapidfires. Civilians carrying homemades. No slave quarters that I can see.”

“Don’t like it,” the blue shirt muttered. “Too peaceful.”

A private blew his nose on his hand and wiped it off on his shirt. “You want us to do a recce? Couple of us could walk to the gate and say we’re traders. Give us a handful of ammo and we’ll buy some food, lose at dice, talk to the sluts.”

“You’ve done this before,” Campbell stated as a fact, narrowing his eyes to mere slits. “Coldheart?”

The man shrugged in a noncommittal manner. “Raided a few villes out west, if that’s what you mean. But I work for Sheffield now. As long as he’s got blasters and ammo, I stay loyal.”