He turned to Nara and gestured with a thumb. “What’s that for?”
“So the driver can see outside,” Nara said. “It connects him via computer to the vehicle’s sensory array.”
When the sec man on the right donned a visor, too, Ryan said, “Okay, if that one’s the wag’s driver, then who’s the other guy?”
“Weapons system engineer. That whine you hear is the laser battery powering up.”
The engine started with more of a baritone rumble. After a moment there was a loud, grating noise.
“Security gates opening,” Huth explained, buckling up his cross-shoulder, webbed harness. He indicated that Ryan should do likewise.
After the one-eyed man had strapped in, the driver called out from the front of the wag, ‘ ‘Brace yourselves, everybody. We are go.”
He gunned the engine a few times, then the vehicle shot forward. Almost at once something slammed into the right side of the passenger compartment, metal grinding on metal. Despite the safety harness, the impact twisted Ryan half out of his seat. The wag swerved hard left, then accelerated. A halfsecond later there was an even more powerful impact from the rear, which jolted the vehicle ahead sickeningly.
“Just merging into the traffic flow,” Huth assured Ryan. “Nothing to worry about.”
Outside the hull of the wag, engines roared, sirens wailed, horns bleated, metal plowed into metal. Never in his life had Ryan been caught in this kind of man-made stampede; to him the chaos and tumult was unimaginable. And everything inside the passenger compartment was rattling loose, as if they were hurtling down a washboard road at an insane rate of speed.
Ryan stared across the compartment at the blurred faces of their armed escort, reading the simple brutality in then big, doughy faces. Their body armor looked like what he’d seen Nara and her friends wear in Deathlands, but it was much more abbreviated. The overlapping black plates protected only the most vital areas, chests front and back, the sides of their necks and their groins. They wore gauntlets made of the same material. Their hairy arms were bare to the shoulder, likewise big and doughy. The red glow of the interior light tinted their pale skins pink, and their battle scars an angry crimson. Their helmets had flanges that protected the backs of their necks and their cheekbones. They also wore armored shin guards above their black boots.
Ryan noticed that each of them carried the same model of tribarreled blaster, and at their belts was a short, double-edged knife with what looked like a knuckle-duster grip.
When he glanced up from the blade, Ryan saw that its owner was staring back at him with a vicious smirk on his face. The sec man leaned forward, puckered up and blew him a big juicy kiss.
The sec men who saw it broke out laughing. They were still laughing when Ryan leaned his face close to the kisser, and, looking straight into his eyes, responded with another universal human gesture. He drew his stiffened index finger across his throat from ear to ear.
The laughter died away.
The kisser pulled back with a snarl, but Ryan could see that his Deathlands sign language had had the desired effect. Behind the little pig eyes there was hesitation, and behind that was fear.
Sec men were sec men, he decided, no matter what world they were on.
Time passed, punctuated only by the occasional sideswipe collision. Ryan had no idea how far they’d traveled when the driver shouted something unintelligible at them over his shoulder.
Braking, it turned out, was also an intense experience.
Tires screeched, and Ryan was hurled forward against his seat harness. He smelled burning rubber, then the wag smashed into something on the left side. Whatever it was, it crunched and gave ground. The impact, coupled with locked brakes, put the wag in a squealing, sideways, four-wheel drift that seemed to stretch on and on. After another grazing impact at the wag’s rear left corner, the driver got the machine back under control and gradually slowed to a crawl. He turned left, moved the vehicle ahead carefully, then brought it to a full stop.
Ryan heard the gate sound again, this time barely audible over the howl of traffic. The wag moved forward a bit, then the traffic noise shut off as the gate closed behind them. The engine stopped, but no one made a move to get out. There was a lurch and the vehicle started to rise.