Inside the wag, the fog wasn’t nearly so dense. He could see Nara struggling with a black-helmeted man half again her size. She had him facedown on the floorboards of the passenger compartment with an arm pinned behind his back. He was kicking and thrashing his free arm. If he was yelling inside the helmet, Ryan couldn’t hear him over the clanking of the tracks.
In the front, the driver was looking over the back of his seat, steering with one hand, likely torn between trying to race the wag out of the fog and abandoning the steering wheel to help his weapons system engineer before it was too late.
Damm reached in between Nara and the guy she was holding down and affixed the antipersonnel mine. As he jerked the man toward the rear doors, he told Ryan, “Get the driver!”
The one-eyed man rushed through the passenger compartment and wrenched the driver clear of his seat. As he dragged the man backward, Nara slipped behind the wheel and eased off the speed. Damm pushed Ryan aside and lifted the man in black armor to his feet. In the helmet, the driver was two inches taller than the scar-faced merc.
“Don’t kill me,” the driver pleaded in a scratchy, metallic voice. “I never did anything to you.”
“We’re coming out of the mist, Damm,” Nara said over her shoulder. “I can’t hang back here much longer or it’ll look suspicious. It’s too late to frag the guy.”
“Let’s see your face, you cowardly tac unit bastard,” Damm said.
The helmet cleared, revealing a pale-faced man with a buzz cut.
“You did bad things to my crew back there.”
“That was orders,” the driver said. “I was just following orders.”
The sheath knife came away from Damm’s harness in a blur almost too fast to follow. The mercie slid the double-edged point in under the third breastplate from the top. Fighting frantically, the driver tried to pummel Damm as he searched and probed beneath the plate with the knife tip. The mercie didn’t seem to mind the full-force blows he was receiving to the face and head; if he did, he didn’t show it. He kept searching until he found what he was been looking for.
A weak spot beneath the plate.
The driver stiffened as the gleaming blade slipped into him about an inch and a half.
“They were all good fighters,” Damm told his captive, “the kind a man wants at his back. Hard to find a crew like that these days.” He pulled the driver closer to him. “They died without begging anybody for mercy. There was no begging in them.”
“Please, no.”
“Time to pay the piper,” Damm said. He pressed his nose against the outside of the helmet and snarled into the man’s face. “And I am the fucking piper!”
With a scraping sound, the long knife slid in to the hilt. Damm held the man skewered until the kicking stopped, then he let the heavy batflesuit crash to the deck. He put his boot on the breastplate and wrenched his knife free.
Ryan noted the location of the entry wound, for future reference. He figured there had to be a small opening, or an unprotected area beneath the overlapping plates.
Ahead of them, the fog thinned, then parted. They could see the back end of the other APC as it clanked up the ramp, which was now dry. The air temperature took a big drop, so much so that it made Ryan shiver.
“Oh-oh,” Nara said. “I got a blinking light on the comm unit control panel. Our compadre up there is trying to hail us. Probably wondering why none of the suits in this can are responding.”
“Let him wonder awhile longer,” Damm ordered.
AS MAJOR LUJAN’S APC lumbered toward the wall of mist, his weapons system engineer turned to him and said, “Sir, shall I saturate the area with cannon fire? I can program the batteries to scrape them off the walls.”
The idea was appealing, but impossible for Lujan to authorize. Even the lowest-power laser pulses wouldn’t stop at the intended targets. They would take out anything between the APC and the mouth of the ramp, and then continue on to blow a few more holes in Gloomtown.