Even with only the one-color night vision supplied by his helmet, Grant saw Kane’s jaw muscles knot and bunch. “Forget it,” he said quietly. “They’re only outlanders, most of ’em Dregs and slaggers. They’re better off.”
Bitterly Kane intoned, “The Magistrate’s mercy.”
Within a couple of minutes, Salvo, MacMurphy and Pollard emerged from below and into the tunnel. All of them reeked with the sharp tang of cordite. Salvo stalked past Grant and Kane without a word or a glance. They fell into step behind him.
Salvo issued no orders, and no one asked him any questions. They left the ancient fortress by the same way they had entered it, cutting across the courtyard to where they had left Carthew. He was groggy from the drugs, but the pain of his injury was under control. Led by Grant, he was able to walk out of the dark ruins.
As the team entered the canyon, Kane automatically checked the chron inside the wrist of his left gauntlet. Over three hours had elapsed since they left the ville. As far as he knew, Salvo hadn’t transmitted a status report back to the division, so if the mission had been strictly by the book, a backup Bird squadron should be arriving at that very moment.
Kane wasn’t surprised to see only three choppers still squatting on their skids. A backup was nowhere in sight, either overhead or on the ground.
The team climbed back into their respective Deathbirds. Grant powered up the engine. It whined, coughed and caught. The vanes spun, agitating the dust of the canyon floor into swirling eddies.
Slowly the craft lifted off, rising vertically until it topped the uppermost rim of the ramparts of Mesa Verde canyon. Grant’s practiced hand rotated it gracefully, and then sent it winging through the night. This time Salvo’s Deathbird took the point of the delta formation.
It was only fitting, Kane reflected acidly. Old Salvo was returning from commanding another successful foray against the legions of chaos, of anarchy, of the sick and victimized. He thought about spitting, but he knew it would irritate the pilot, and he had made enough enemies for one evening.
Chapter Five
Kane looked down at the hellzone, gleaming a dull gray white in the moonlight. It was like looking upon Earth’s bare bones, scoured and bleached by nearly two centuries of chem storms and lingering radioactivity.
On the border of the zone, soil, humus and desiccated vegetation still clung obstinately to an imitation of life. People, more than likely Dregs, still toiled and tilled down there, while the others, only a hundred miles away, enjoyed the cake distributed to them by the ville and the benevolent Baron Cobalt.
Things had been different in antiquity, Kane knew. He couldn’t be sure how different or exactly in what way. The history he had been taught mostly covered events following the nukecaust, and before that, before skydark, it was dim and inexact. It was said in the texts that people had taken a savage joy in raping and ravaging the world, deaf to the entreaties of more-enlightened minds.
The population had been staggering in number, billions supposedly. Then came the nukecaust, which had fried eighty percent of them, and the subsequent horrors of geological catastrophes, fallout and a horrific retribution for the sins of humanity.
The world had suffered a dark age, though in actual chronological terms, the age had lasted only 115-plus years before the Program of Unification had been put into practice. With the cooperation of the nine most powerful barons, the program had reached a success point in a little less than a decade. Unity Through Action had been the rallying cry.
Part of the program had been education. People were taught that to be alive, to be a human, wasn’t a special privilege, since humanity had brought about an apocalypse and its near extinction. The hierarchy of barons was dedicated to preventing another such holocaust.
Their role as guides and protectors for humankind revolved around the same themepeople must never again be allowed to choose their own destinies, since invariably those choices led to disaster.
Kane swallowed a sigh. He didn’t understand why he should want things that were dead and buried and gone. The predark, Beforetime world had festered with hate and suspicion and pollution and war. It had taken the barons to clean it up the only way it could be cleaned upby stamping out any deviation from the standard, forbidding all technology except to the very few elite who defined and maintained obedience to that standard.