There was nothing to be gained by stirring up the mob.
“Forget the cannons,” the major said. “If they’re in the fog, we’ll flush them out.” Then he passed on the no-fire order to the driver of the APC bringing up the rear.
It was the last communication between the two vehicles before Lujan entered the condensation layer. The moment the mist closed in around him, except for the interior and exterior lights, which weren’t computer-controlled, all of his electronic systems promptly crashed. Navigation. Surveillance. Weapons. Everything went stone dead.
He held the steering wheel steady in his hands, trying to keep the vehicle on a straight course. The width of the fog barrier varied from minute to minute, and there was no way to tell how long they were going to have to drive blind. The longer they traveled, the more likely they were to gradually veer off course. At any moment, the side of the APC could start grinding against one of the opposing walls. At least they couldn’t get lost.
As Lujan drove out of the fog and his headlights speared the darkness ahead, he expected to see one of two things. The mercs and their hostage would be either facedown on the concrete, having succumbed to the lethal effects of the agrobacteria, or they would be visible, easy targets running up the tunnel ahead.
As he looked out through the APC’s view slit, neither scenario greeted him. To the limits of his headlight beams, about three hundred yards ahead, the tunnel before him was empty.
Lujan stared in disbelief.
All of his arrays were still down. He couldn’t hear anything but the clankety-clank of his own tracks on the ramp. He continued to advance until one by one his sensors came back on-line. Then he used them to search beyond the range of his headlights. Not that he seriously thought they could have gotten that far ahead. He scanned all the way to the tunnel’s end with infrared and found nothing.
“Shit!” he said, as it finally dawned on him. “They’re still in the fucking fog!”
He keyed the comm link to the APC following behind. “I’ve got nothing ahead of me,” he said. “I think we might have driven right past them.”
When he got no response, he figured their systems were still rebooting.
After a moment, he tried again. “What’s going on back there? Did you see anything in the fog?”
Still nothing.
There was no room for the APCs to turn around on the ramp. The easiest and quickest thing to do, if they had to go back and search the fog for bodies, was to exit at the top of the ramp, turn around in Gloomtown and return. They could go back through the tunnel side by side, with their wheels rubbing the walls, if they had to.
“Can you hear me?” Lujan demanded. All he got was static.
What the hell, he thought. As long as they kept following him up and out, that was all that mattered. As he approached the head of the ramp, he drove over the bodies that had been thrown down the tunnel. He met with much less resistance this time, having made the heaps more compact on the way down the ramp. The APC topped the rise and roared out into the crowded street.
In the haze of plastic smoke and flashing light from the tell-yous high overhead, masses of milling, dirty-faced people sullenly gave ground. They knew the APC wouldn’t stop or turn to keep from running them over. Those who couldn’t run, those who appeared, prostrate on the street, when the forest of legs swept apart, Lujan made no attempt to avoid. Some of them were alive, if barely. Alive enough to scream as they were crushed. The major tried the comm link again, and again he was frustrated. Behind him the other APC was pulling out of the ramp tunnel.
“Bailey,” he said to the lone crewman seated in the passenger compartment, “hop over there and pound on the door. Tell them we’re going to head back down the ramp and grid search the fog. Keep your pulse rifle on maximum, in case a gloomer wants to pick a fight.”