As the one-eyed man slipped into the seat beside Correll, it seemed to snap the gaunt man out of his reverie, and he turned to face Ryan.
“Ready?” he asked, his voice no more than a hoarse husk.
“If the rest of the party are ready to go,” he stated.
“They will be,” Correll said simply and, without even bothering to check if this was the case, gunned the engine of the wag. It had been ticking over while they boarded, and now the powerful engine roared deafeningly in the enclosed space of the wag bay. The noise grew in intensity as it was joined by the roaring of the other wags in the war party.
Correll put the vehicle into gear, and it began to move toward the exit ramp that would take them up the necessary levels of the redoubt and out onto the rock plateau.
As the leading wag approached the sec doors, Correll leaned out, punched the exit code onto a small console and jerked the lever that would open the door. As the door lifted, he took the wag through and out into the chem-raddled morning.
Ryan winced as the change in light hit his eye. The low-level lighting of the redoubt was replaced by the scorching sun, which hit them with no mercy as they exited the redoubt, the red, rad-bloated orb distorted even more through the haze of chem fumes that rose from the rapidly drying earth. The air stank of sulfur and a sickly sweet undertone that couldn’t be identified as the quality of the air changed. Instead of the cool, cleaned air that was passed through again and again via the air conditioning and purification system, they were hit by the heat, dust and chem-soaked air that came after a storm.
The wag turned sharply on the rock plateau, gravel and loose shale moving under the large, heavy-tread tires and shooting over the edge of the rock table, down to the base of the outcrop. It was a sharp turn to maneuver the large wags on the relatively small space and take them down onto the road that wound around the far side of the outcrop. In the second wag, J.B. gritted his teeth as he swung the steering wheel, the wheels locking as the wag spun on the loose surface. He righted it, hoping that the rear tires would hold on the shale, and followed Correll’s lead. Already clouds of loose earth and dust were being thrown up by the motion of the wags, and it crossed the Armorer’s mind that the wags that came at the very rear of the procession were in danger of being blinded by the opaque clouds that were being raised.
Correll had already hit the road that wound down the far side of the rocks. It looked a steep and narrow path, and he took it at a speed that—to Ryan—verged on the suicidal. The wheels locked on the angles of the road, the rear of the wag sliding across toward the edge of the precipice, back end of the wag waving wildly into space.
“The one problem with being so secure is that it makes it a bastard to get down again,” Correll said with a humorless grin that spread across his thin, drawn face.
“As long as we get down the right way, and not the quickest,” Ryan returned.
Correll laughed harshly but said nothing.
The convoy of wags from the redoubt spread out down the mountain track, other drivers following J.B.’s lead in hanging back from the wag in front, allowing the dust some time to settle before they hit the lowering clouds. It also stopped the spray of loose shale and stone from battering the windshield of each preceding wag. Although the shields were of a material that could not be broken by the missiles, they could nonetheless obscure the driver’s view with their constant hammering.
In the leading wag, Ryan and Krysty both breathed a sigh of relief when Correll took the wag onto the flat of the desert floor, coming out of the final turn and gunning the engine as he hit a straight trail, intending to eat up as much ground as possible with the minimum of delay. Correll himself, and Cy and Travis, seemed not to have noticed the perils of the descent. Each was in his own little world, focusing on the firefight to come.