Hellbenders

Catherine was already some way down the corridor ahead of him. She turned and hissed, “Come on, fuckwit, we haven’t got all night.”

Ryan allowed himself an inward smile at the bad temper of the small blonde, and also allowed that such spirit would probably make her good in a firefight as he quickened his pace to catch up to her.

She led him through the deserted corridors and down a level to where one of the berths contained old sec camera equipment. Ryan followed her into the room, to find two of the Hellbenders sitting in front of the screens, with Correll standing behind them. He turned to acknowledge Ryan as he heard them enter.

“You were slow,” he admonished Catherine.

“Sorry about that,” she replied, rubbing her still sore throat, “but some people think that trying to wake them in the middle of the night means you want to fuckin’ chill ’em. And mebbe you should.”

Correll allowed himself a rare flash of humor. “Mebbe Rudi’ll figure that one out one day,” he said to her. “Subtlety isn’t your strong point, is it? Still, he’s here now.”

“So can I go and get some sleep, and dream about my neck being covered in hot tar all night instead of getting ready for a firefight, then?” she said with a heavy sarcasm that was directed at the one-eyed man.

Correll assented, and Catherine left them with a glare at Ryan that could have struck him down as stone if preDark mythology had been accurate.

“I apologize,” Correll said as she retreated. “I should have sent someone better, but she was the first to hand as she’d just come off watch. That put her in a bad temper anyway, as she does like to sleep. A good and true fighter, though.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Ryan said, recalling the iron grip of her small hands as they tried to tear his fingers from her throat. “So why did you bring me here?”

“Look,” Correll said simply, standing back so that Ryan could see the monitors.

Most of them were for the interior of the Redoubt, as he recalled from the occasion when the companions had viewed this room earlier in their sojourn. At this moment, they showed a skeletal watch preparing some last minute details for the attack to be mounted on the morrow, and little else. The vast majority of the Hellbenders were, as had been Ryan himself, getting some much needed and all-important rest.

But four of the monitors on the bank were for the outside. They covered north, south, east and west, rotating through almost 180 degrees on their respective mountings, and taking in almost all the territory that surrounded the rock outcrop where the redoubt was based. There could be little, if any, of the surrounding desert that wasn’t covered—no blind spots where potential attackers could hide.

It was, however, no human or animal agency that had taken the attention of Correll. The night was lit up by the raging clouds of a chem storm, the chemical reactions inside the rad-blasted clouds creating flashes of light that made the outside seem almost as bright as day. Rains lashed down horizontally onto the rock, eventually scoring across the sandy and dry soil, churning it up with the winds and the force of the water into a quicksand of mud and deep puddles that would make the journey treacherous as they set out the following day. As the sun came up and burned into the earth, then the soil would dry out and make the going easier, but it would also harden the tracks they had left behind them—tracks that wouldn’t have existed on the dry earth, and tracks that could give away their position and movement, and thus betray the ambush.

That was always assuming, of course, that the chem storm would abate by morning. It was also highly possible that it could continue for hours, even days, and so completely wipe out the planned rendezvous for the two convoys.

All this raced through the one-eyed man’s mind as he watched the monitors. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.

“About two hours,” Correll replied.

“How long do they usually last?” Ryan queried.