Removing the throat-mike hookup, Kane stepped out of the Deathbird, ducking his head beneath the vanes, striding through the dust devils the rotorwash had created. The other two choppers were alighting behind him, but not as expertly as Grant had maneuvered theirs.
The craft were not easy to control. Grant, who was rated the best Bird jockey in the Cobaltville Division, had experienced his fair share of close calls over the years. Though it wasn’t common knowledge except among the handful of techs and mechanics, the Deathbirds were very old, dating back to the days right before skydark. They were modified AH-64 Apache attack gunships, and most of the fleet had been reengineered and retrofitted dozens of times.
For that matter, every piece of Magistrate hardware was based on predark designs and materialsthe body armor was the same polycarbonate substance used by twentieth-century riot-control police officers, the Copperheads were SA80 submachine guns, issued in the 1980s, and the Sin Eaters were customized, reframed Spectre autoblasters.
Kane had never asked where all the ordnance had come from. He was familiar with enough postnukecaust history to know that Stockpiles, caches of material and technology, had been laid down by the predark government just in case of a national emergency. He also knew that many of the original barons had built their power bases with the Stockpiles, but all of that was a long time ago, nearly a century before the Program of Unification.
The rest of the hard-contact team tumbled out of the Deathbirds. Unlimbering their Copperheads, the six men fanned out in the standard deployment of firepower. They spread out with about twenty yards between them. Backlit by the burning Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower, they cast long shadows over the canyon walls and floor.
Carefully the squad worked its way forward. No one spoke over the helmet transceivers. They were all experienced fighters and needed no last-minute warnings or pep talks.
They searched the rocks for snipers, scanned the ground for trip wires or motion-activated blasters. They gripped their Copperheads in gloved hands, selectors switched to full-auto. All of them knew the remote uplands of the Colorado hellzones had claimed their fair share of Magistrates, so anything moving in the shadows would have been decimated by six streams of continuous fire.
“Where the fuck are they?” Pollard whispered over the helmet link. “They know we’re here.”
“Cut the backchat,” snapped Salvo.
They moved on slowly through the canyon, every man watching the man ahead of him, glancing back at the one behind, peering into the dark depths at something that might have stirred, avoiding small mounds of sand that might conceal an antipersonnel mine.
Kane snatched a backward glance. The gun turret continued to belch plumes of dark smoke, curling and twisting into the sky, visible to anyone for miles around. He wondered where Reeth, a small-time slagger specializing in the smuggling of outlanders into the villes, had gotten his hands on such tech and firepower.
According to doctrine, all the Stockpiles had been discovered and secured decades ago, so it didn’t seem reasonable the smuggler had stumbled across one overlooked in the program.
Salvo’s voice rasped in his ear. “Halt.”
Obediently the squad stopped.
Over the helmet link, he said tersely, “Kane. Take the point.”
Kane had expected the order. For the past few years, he had always been assigned the position of pointman. He was never quite sure why, except that his superiors knew he was very good at it. When stealth was required, most men moved uncertainly, even clumsily in the armor, but Kane could be a silent, almost graceful wraith.
He had never led a contact team into an ambush and, in fact, had prevented an entire squad from being ambushed during a Pit sweep the year before. Kane no longer bothered to question why Salvo always chose him to be the advance scout. If he hadn’t, he would have volunteered. When he acted as pointman, he felt electrically alive, sharply tuned to every nuance of what he was doing. Only when performing his duties as pointman did all doubts about his choices in life vanish, and he knew that this was the work he had been born to do.