Kane moved quickly, heel to toe, his image enhancer bringing into sharp relief everything around him. He moved instinctively from cover to cover, from shadow patch to shadow patch, automatically placing his feet so they raised a minimum of dust and didn’t dislodge loose stones. He studied places where sentries and blastermen might be lurking.
Thunder boomed in the distance, accompanying a purple flash of heat lightning. A storm was approaching, bringing not fresh, clean rain, but the acid-tainted rain of the hellzones. His armor was treated to withstand exposure to toxins, but a shower of acid rain, even if only a drizzle, wasn’t something to take lightly. This region of Colorado had recovered only minimally from the nukecaust, and its peculiar geothermals attracted chem storms. Almost all hellzones did. Though fewer hellzones existed now compared to those many decades when much of the entire continent was the Deathlands, there were still a number of places where the geological or meteorological effects of the nuking prevented a reasonable recovery.
The west coast of the United States was one such hell-zone, where most of California was under water. The best known zone was the long D.C.New JerseyNew York Corridor, a vast stretch of abandoned factory complexes, warehouses and overgrown ruins. D.C, otherwise known as Washington Hole, was still the most active hot spot in the country. Fortunately this region of Colorado was only warm, not hot, but it still attracted its share of chem storms.
Seven hundred yards past the Vulcan-Phalanx gun tower, the canyon twisted in a curve, then cut straight south. It yawned open into a wide, stony expanse, half encircled by the overhanging rim of a cliff. Thousands of years had eroded the rim down to a series of stairlike ridges.
Below the jutting ridges of rock was a vast, sprawling complex of ruinsinterlocked buildings of mud and stone, abandoned, rebuilt, expanded and abandoned again over the long track of time. Looming above an open courtyard was a massive structure cut into the rock of the canyon, protected by the overhanging cliff shelf.
The Cliff Palace fortress was a monument to the highly evolved Pueblo Indian culture many thousands of years ago. According to the briefing, the ruins had fascinated pre-dark archaeologists and tourists. Once, the complex had been a maze of hundreds of rooms, hundreds of kivas and a labyrinth of twisting passageways.
The last people to reign over the Cliff Palace were long, long dead. What remained was still grimly formidable. But the thick adobe walls had gaping holes, and many of the interior buildings were half-collapsed. Most of the structures were without roofs.
Kane felt a distant wonder that even a fraction of the Cliff Palace was still standing. The savage earthquakes birthed by the nukecaust hadn’t dropped the sheltering cliff rim atop it, nor even shaken many of the ancient dwellings to their foundations. Acid rainstorms had bleached out much of the stonework but not seriously corroded it.
His lips quirked a mirthless smile. The holocaust had virtually vaporized cities barely a hundred years old, but had spared settlements that had watched inestimable centuries crawl by.
Creeping to a heap of broken shale, Kane hunkered down behind it. Ahead of him was a short open space, then a shallow drop into an old drainage ditch. The far bank of the ditch butted up against the base of the outer wall. It was a yard thick but barely seven feet tall.
A sentry walked the wall. He was only a hundred feet away, shouldering a sniper rifle. Though the light of the rising moon was uncertain, Kane identified it as a Dragunov SVD, outfitted with a telescopic sight. Though the blaster was old, it looked to be in pristine condition.
Salvo’s voice was harsh in his ear. “Kane. Report.”
Not daring even to speak, Kane used one finger to tap a brief coded signal into the microphone mounted in the helmet’s jaw guard. The taps were transmitted back to the squad, telling them to hang back.
Salvo didn’t speak again. One oversight or distraction on the part of the pointman could cost the lives of the entire team. The only reason Kane was alive and able to tap out a code signal was that he weighed all options before choosing one, and paused for a moment to reconsider before implementing any decision in a hellzone.