“I can see the sense in that,” the queen replied. “But how the fuck do we get our forces in the right place at the right time without being spotted?”
Ryan smiled. “That’s why I want us to wait. We establish their routine, then fit in behind it and hit them when they’re at their most vulnerable.” Gloria returned the smile, her crooked grin lighting up her face, her vulpine teeth making her look like a predator about to spring.
“Now, that, I like the sound of…”
IT HAD BEEN A ROUTINE sec patrol. Ryan was accompanying Tammy and two other Gate warriors on a mission that took them close to the blacktop that ran in from the south toward Crossroads. It was the first time that the one-eyed man had been near the blacktop since leaving the ville, and he idly wondered what Baron Robertson thought of their disappearance. Then he remembered the speed with which the epidemic was spreading, and his face hardened.
Soon…
His train of thought was disturbed by the distant rumble of wags.
“Convoy,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Tammy replied, gazing into the distance at the dust raised on the road by the wags. ‘”Bout four, I’d guess, two trade wags and a couple of sec, mebbe.”
Ryan nodded. “That’d be about right. Let’s secure cover and watch them pass. Poor bastards must be on their way into Crossroads.”
The Gate party retreated from the blacktop and was hidden by scrub and stunted elms as the convoy drew level with their position.
But as they became aware of another sound, coming from behind them: the drone of two wag engines, setting up an unholy harmony as they sped across the scrub toward the blacktop.
“Illuminated wags,” Tammy breathed. “What the fuck do they want?”
“Mebbe… No, I don’t know,” Ryan said quietly. “They don’t usually want to be seen.”
As he spoke, the Illuminated wags parted from the course they had followed, diverging so that one was headed for each end of the trade convoy.
“They want to stop it,” Tammy murmured. “Why would they want to, unless—?”
“Unless they want to try and infect the men on the convoy,” Ryan finished.
As they watched, the two Illuminated wags adopted a pincer movement, moving around to cut off the blacktop to the front and rear of the convoy, the wag at the front assuming a position across the blacktop while the wag to the rear followed up to tighten the gap between the two. The trade convoy slowed to a halt, unable to drive off the road because the wags containing the trade materials were too big and clumsy to cope with the rough terrain and the ditches along the edge of the blacktop.
The convoy came to rest. There was little ground between the sec wags at the front and rear of the convoy and the Illuminated wags that stood silent and menacing before and aft of them.
“Shit, the tension is chilling,” murmured Sandy, the dark haired woman who was squatting beside Tammy in the undergrowth.
“Part of the plan,” Ryan commented. “If it’s chilling you, think how the sec on the convoy must feel.” He could remember his own days riding shotgun for Trader, and yet it was this memory that enabled him to keep his cool. He could remember Trader telling him about ambushes such as this. The older man had said, “They say, ‘Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.’ I say, ‘Don’t shoot until you can shoot the whites out of their eyes.”
It was a maxim worth pondering. The convoy sec had nothing to aim at except an armored wag. They had no choice but to sit and wait.
Not true. They had a choice. They could either sit tight, or they could do totally the wrong thing. Unfortunately for them, they chose to do the wrong thing.
From the front and rear of the convoy, the sec men tumbled out of their wags, some rolling across the blacktop to the ditches at the sides, where they would provide covering fire for their comrades who followed, attempting to mount an attack on the Illuminated wags.
“Fireblast!” Ryan swore. “The stupe bastards are walking right into it.”