“You think anyone actually heard that?” his driver said as slugs from the Hellbenders’ blasters whined and ricocheted off the armored wag.
“Dunno.” Baron Al shrugged. “But at least we’ve tried. Now hit the fucking gas!”
Ayesha heard the message from her father on the radio as she tried to hotwire the wag with all the women who were the trade from Charity. The sec driver had taken the ignition key with him, possibly as some kind of private token of his own security, or just from habit. As he was now lying chilled in the center of the arena bloodbath, there was no way that either Ayesha or Claudette was going to risk getting it back again.
Claudette, seated beside the girl, also heard the message. “Lovely man,” she muttered. “No mention of us in there.”
“Did you expect anything else?” Ayesha said through gritted teeth as she stripped, then joined the wires. “Please work this time, you stupe bastard,” she added to the machinery. With a cough and a splutter, the wag’s engine came to life. “Shit, I thought that’d never happen,” she added with relief, then, “let’s get ourselves out of here and wait for the dust to settle.”
“In this storm?” Claudette grinned.
Ayesha didn’t grace the poor joke with an answer. Instead, she stared ahead of her at the chaos framed by the windshield as she tried to put the wag into gear. With a squeal and grind that was painful, and made all the women inside the wag wince, the wag ground into gear. Swinging on the wheel, Ayesha pulled it out of the convoy.
Straight into the line of the approaching wag.
THE HELLBENDERS, led by Correll, had completed four or five circuits of the convoy, and the firefight was starting to get monotonous. In the wag driven by the gaunt man, Ryan and Krysty exchanged glances that spoke volumes, and both knew that their thoughts were being echoed by Jak, Dean and Doc in the wag behind, and by J.B. and Mildred in the opposing convoy. Any attempt at strategy had gone out of the window, and after the initial gains made by the Hellbenders when they had been able to pick off sec men who hadn’t been able to make it back to secured or armored wags, the firefight had degenerated into the assault party driving around and around taking shots at whatever they could see through the storm, while sporadic fire returned at them suggested that the sec men from Charity were now all safely inside wags that offered them some protection from the fire.
It couldn’t go on like this. Sooner or later, ammo or fuel would run out, and then it would descend into hand-to-hand combat. Ryan knew that his people were more than capable of holding their own, but they would be outnumbered, and if it came to a situation where blood lust held sway, he knew that they couldn’t guarantee that the Hellbenders would recognize them when it came to face-to-face combat in a sandstorm.
Glancing across at Correll, Ryan could see that whatever shreds of sanity and reason had kept the man going for so long had now all been cast to the winds of the storm. The Hellbenders’ leader was staring maniacally ahead through the windshield, hunched over the metal box on his lap, stroking it and muttering to it as he piloted the wag in a continuing circle, occasionally whooping as he saw some blasterfire hit home.
“Not good, lover,” Krysty whispered to the one-eyed man, noticing the direction of his glance. “I figure he’s gone totally. Problem is, how do we get out of this?”
Ryan spared the woman a look. Her hair was coiled tightly to her head and neck, reflecting the way she felt about the conflict and the manner in which it was proceeding rapidly to stalemate.
“Fireblast! There’s nothing we can do while we’re stuck in here.”
It was at this point that fate took a hand.
Ayesha pulled the wag out, stamping on the accelerator to get the vehicle out of its confinement quickly, while the wheel was still at full spin and the tires bit into the swirling earth, turning the wag out of the space it occupied in the stationary convoy. The wags had been stopped and parked up close to one another, and she braced herself as the wing of the wag caught the rear of the wag in front with a squeal and a shower of sparks as metal ground on metal, slowing the progress of the wag with the women, and making Ayesha bite so hard on her lip with concentration that the salty taste of blood flooded her mouth.