Ryan and J.B. collected their food and joined the table, while the rest of the companions found spaces around the room. Dean, Jak and Doc joined Danny who, as usual, was seating himself a little apart from the rest of the group.
“Heard about the chem storm?” he said in an undertone as they joined him. When they acknowledged this, he continued, “I figure that Papa Joe would send us out whatever the conditions, way he feels about things. But the good news is that it’s stopped out there. At least we won’t have to fight our way through a shitload of acid rain.”
“Not good conditions, though,” Jak noted.
A sentiment that was being echoed on the table where Mildred and Krysty were now breaking their fast. At the request of Rudi, they had joined the table where he sat with Catherine and Cy, among others. Mildred regretted it almost as soon as she had sat down, as he put his arm around her to “settle her in.” She didn’t know which was worse, the feel of his unwelcome hand, knowing that she couldn’t deck the mother with a roundhouse punch in front of all his fellow Hellbenders, or the glare she received from Catherine, as the last thing they needed to do at this stage was to make enemies—not before going into a firefight.
“You ready for some action?” he asked her, with a wicked grin on his face.
“You’d better be,” Catherine added in a venomous undertone.
“I’m ready to go out there and fight, if that’s what you’re trying to say,” Mildred replied with a faked ingenuousness, shrugging him off.
“We’re all ready, aren’t we?” Krysty added, trying to change the subject.
“I’d like to say I am, but I dunno,” Cy said with a tinge of regret in his voice, gesturing to his still bandaged shoulder. “I can fire a blaster, but not a real heavy duty one. You did a good job on this, Doctor, but there hasn’t really been enough time for it to heal, y’know?”
“Just take it easy, and pick your shots,” Mildred said to him, glad to sidle away from Rudi and change the subject and focus of her attention. “Worse thing you could do is get carried away and end up opening up that wound—then you’ll be no good to anyone except the other side.”
While she handed out these words of advice, at another table Correll was filling Ryan in on events following the one-eyed man’s return to his rest.
“The chem storm carried on for another three hours, and believe me, my friend, it got to the point where I believed that we would have to postpone the mission. But when it cleared, it cleared with a speed that was breathtaking. It was as though the winds that drove the clouds together had suddenly reversed poles, like magnets. Where they had been driving themselves together, now they could think of nothing but driving themselves apart, and the faster the better. Within minutes, the sky was clear and dark, only the stars lighting the sky.”
“That’s good,” J.B. mused, “but what about the villes— would they still go?”
“More importantly,” Ryan added, “have you had any signals from them?”
Correll shook his head. “Not much chance of that, friend Ryan. The rad interference is still far too strong.
Nothing going across that air except ear-blasting static. There’s no way I’m gonna hear from either of my spies this side of next week, if the strength of the interference is anything to go by.”
“So how can you be sure the convoys will be going ahead?” Ryan queried.
Correll shrugged. “Can’t be a hundred percent sure, I guess, but I do know one thing—Jourgensen and Hutter both need to meet badly. Badly enough for them to risk taking their convoys across ground that has been hit by a chem storm. If the ground hasn’t dried out, then it’ll be muddy and hard going, and mebbe both of them’ll be late at the rendezvous point. But you can sure as hell bet that they’ll be going. And if they go, then we go.”
“I reckon that it’ll take them longer, but if you work out the distance and the likelihood of us having the same problems over the territory, it’ll kind of even out so that we don’t have to worry too much about changing our time of departure in order to reach them at the same time as they arrive,” Jenny added.