Desert Kings

“Cyborg,” Ryan interrupted in a hard voice. “This wasn’t set here by Delphi to guard the blasters. Somebody else put it here to wait for him.”

“A cyborg chiller,” Jak whispered, impressed and uneasy at the same time. Then he eagerly added, “Still work? We use now.”

“No, it’s busted to drek.” Mildred sighed, standing and dusting off her hands. “The circuit boards are fried, the ribbon cables melted, the focusing ring warped…” She dismissed the device with a hand wave. “The only way we could use this to hurt Delphi now is if we dropped it on his head from a great height.”

“This means that most likely Delphi has not been here in a long while,” Krysty added, ruminating out loud. “Weeks, mebbe, or even months.”

“It also means that somebody else wants Delphi aced,” J.B. stated. “Which is fine by me. The enemy of my enemy, and all that, eh, Doc?”

“True words, John Barrymore,” the silver-haired man intoned. “Although, I have usually found that the ‘enemy of my enemy’ axiom loses all coherent meaning after the aforementioned protagonist is finally eating dirt. Then all bets are off.”

“Fair enough,” Ryan said savagely, working the bolt on a Kalashnikov. Then his stomach softly grumbled. “Come on, let’s finish the recce of this redoubt. The sooner we know it’s safe, the sooner we can have some chow.” In an effort to save their stomachs, the companions had deliberately not eaten before doing the jump. It seemed to work, but now they were paying the price.

“I hear that,” J.B. added eagerly, heading for the exit. “I’m not quite hungry enough for Millie’s boot soup, but will be soon.”

“Well, it kept us alive, that’s for sure,” Mildred shot back proudly. “Although it must have been a month before I finally got the taste out of my mouth. It made hospital food seem absolutely delicious in comparison.”

“Indeed, madam, the flavor combination was rather reminiscent of the haute cuisine of Hades,” Doc observed, glancing sideways and trying to hide a smile. “Although to be honest, it was truly the finest boot soup that I have ever had!”

“Aw, shut up, ya old coot,” Mildred shot back, pleased and annoyed at the same time.

Reaching the exit, the companions paused to check over their weapons before proceeding down the long hallway. Jak was the last to leave and closed the armory door behind them. Even though the machine was smashed to drek, he didn’t trust droids and felt better with a good foot of steel between them.

“Wait a minute, I may have something,” Krysty said, rummaging in her bearskin coat pockets to finally pull out a handful of jerky. She offered it around and everybody took some. “Been saving it for a while,” she said. “But it should still be good.”

It took some determined chewing before the dried meat yielded any flavor, but as the reconstituted juices trickled down their throats, the hunger pains in their bellies eased.

Slightly refreshed, the group reached the elevators at the end of the corridor, but instead took the stairs. They had been hesitant about using the elevator before as the noise would announce their presence to the whole redoubt. Well, the blaster fight had already accomplished that. But the cage was a deathtrap if they got ambushed. The stairs at least gave them some room to move.

Climbing and chewing, they proceeded to the next level and found the barracks empty and unused, but spotlessly clean. Ready to house hundreds of soldiers at a moment’s notice. Ominous.

Continuing up the stairs, Ryan took the point and eased open the door to the garage level. The parking area was full of civilian vehicles from the predark soldiers rushing to the base to escape skydark: pickup trucks, a couple of Harley bikes, battered station wagons, an SUV and the like, but there were no mil wags in sight. Curious.

Staying low, the companions spread out through the ranks of the vehicles, checking out the workbenches along the walls, fuel depot, grease pit and wire cubicle where all the heavy equipment was stored.

“Okay, we’re clear,” Ryan announced, standing upright again. “Let’s go outside so J.B. can find out where we are.”

“And then we eat,” Mildred declared, patting the MRE envelope in her coat pocket. Sealed in a Mylar envelope, the Meals Ready to Eat was military ration that was as fresh and tasty today as when made a century earlier. It was almost as if the government knew the nuke war was coming, Mildred thought, and had made preparations for some people to survive. The observation was not new, just disturbing. Politicians, smart enough to plan for war, but too damn dumb to hold on to peace. Thank goodness they were all gone.

Taking the zigzag tunnel to the exit of the redoubt, the companions abruptly halted at the sight of a vehicle parked just in front of the huge black doors. It was a huge smooth sphere, vaguely egg-shaped, mounted on a set of armored tank treads.

“Delphi!” Doc bellowed, brushing back his frock coat to whip out the LeMat and start fanning the hammer. The Civil War handcannon boomed and miniballs slammed into the wag.

“Hold fire!” Ryan yelled.

“See him inside?” Jak asked.

“No, I did not,” Doc rumbled angrily, waving the LeMat to dispel the volumes of smoke pouring from the hot barrel. “But the windshield can be made opaque.”

“So, mebbe he’s not inside,” Krysty said.

“Mebbe he’s playing opossum,” Mildred shot back tersely.

“Got the implo ready?” Ryan asked, working the bolt on the rapid-fire.

“All set to go,” J.B. replied grimly, the sphere tight in a hand.

“Odd that he hasn’t returned fire yet,” Krysty said hesitantly.

“Got a test for that,” J.B. said, and stepped around the corner to whip something forward, then duck back behind the wall once more.

After a few seconds there came a resounding explosion, followed by a thick ringing silence.

Tensely alert, the companions waited. A minute passed, then another, and some bitter smoke drifted along the tunnel following the gentle breeze coming from the air vents.

“That not implo.” Jak scowled. “Reg gren?”

“Sure,” J.B. replied, lifting the precious implo gren into view from a pocket. “I’m not going to waste this until I knew the son of a bitch is in there for sure. Lots of reg grens, but only got the one implo, remember.”

Listening hard, Ryan couldn’t hear any movement from around the corner, and bent low to take a quick look. The wag was exactly the same as before. Suspecting a trap, he rolled another gren under the wag and waited to see what would happen. After another minute, he stood in plain view. Still no response.

“Okay, it’s clear,” Ryan stated, walking around the corner. “There’s no way Delphi would sit still for this long unless he’s unconscious.”

“Or aced,” Doc rumbled dangerously, the LeMat held in a white-knuckled hold. “I do not honestly know which I would enjoy more, seeing him deceased or doing the job myself!”

“Bloodthirsty old coot,” Mildred shot back.

“And you have never been his captive, madam,” the time traveler growled. “While, sadly, I have.”

Gathering around the huge wag, the companions now could see it was in poor shape. The treads had several shoes broken off or missing entirely. There was some sort of box on top reduced to little more than twisted wreckage, and the opaque windshield was badly cracked. The normally smooth white hull was badly pitted in spots, tiny rivulets of silvery steel congealed along the sides.

“That was his LAV,” Doc stated in his stentorian bass.

Tilting back his fedora, J.B. gave a whistle. “Well, somebody kicked his ass, that’s for trip damn sure,” he said happily. “Mebbe he is dead. That’d sure solve a lot of problems.”

“He was probably trying to get the LAV into the garage for repairs,” Krysty guessed, running a hand along the armored hull. “Anybody know a way inside this thing, so that we can check?”

Almost too soft to hear, there came a low click and then a section of the hull jutted slightly. Quickly the companions stepped backward, bringing up their weapons, as the hatch cycled downward forming a short set of stairs.

Wordlessly, Ryan pointed to the left and right, J.B. and Krysty heading around the machine to attack from the other side.

Then his heart skipped a beat as a long, black, metal leg extended from the interior, closely followed by two more and the globular body of another droid. It took only a nanosecond for him to see this machine did not have a cyborg chiller mounted to its belly, but something else, a sleek, ferruled tube with pulsating fiber-optic cables and a narrow red lens that glowed like the eye of a demon from Hell.

“Las!” Ryan bellowed, throwing himself to the side and raising the Kalashnikov as a shield.

The same as before, he was still airborne when the beam stabbed outward. But this time it was a brilliant red beam the color of burning blood. Ryan felt the rapid-fire get hot in his hands, and when he hit the floor, he threw it away only a moment before the ammo detonated.

The blast rocked him, but he went with the force of the concussion, rolling away until hitting the wall. There was a pain in his side and another along his neck, but Ryan ignored those and pulled the SIG-Sauer as he stood, tracking and firing.