Eden's Twilight

Lurching into motion, the war wags charged backward from the writhing fireball filling the valley. They barely made it to the treeline when an avalanche of snow arrived, mixed with hundreds of small woodland animals. Birds, conies and squirrels pelted the escaping armored vehicles like a shotgun blast of life. Then came the wreckage from all of the other vehicles destroyed by the madman, wooden cart wheels, tank treads, rubber tires, engines, bicycles, car hoods, motorcycles, horse saddles, everything and anything imaginable, along with a graveyard collection of gnawed human bones and horribly decomposing body parts.

Rolling below the crest, the wags dropped out of the hellstorm but kept going until the roiling force of the detonation eventually began to diminish and then fade away.

With ringing ears, the crew of the lead war wag stared blankly at the blood-smeared windshield, each of them lost in private thoughts.

Unbuckling his seat belt, Roberto Eagleson stood, then grabbed a ceiling stanchion to sway for a moment before regaining his balance. The big man was heavily muscled, but his long arms hung loosely at his sides as if taken from another body. Wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, his clothing was spotlessly clean and without patches, an unheard-of condition these days. But the trader believed in the power of advertising. Look tough and a lot of coldhearts would simply step aside and leave the convoy alone. And for the coldhearts not impressed, Roberto carried an S&W .357 Magnum blaster in a fancy shoulder holster, and a sawed-off shotgun rode at his hip, his shirt pockets sewn into cartridge loops for the deadly alley sweeper.

Reaching up for a mike clipped to a ceiling stanchion, Roberto thumbed the switch. “Goog…” He paused to cough and clear his throat. “Good shooting, Tex,” he said, the words echoing slightly along the metal hallway. There was the faint trace of an accent in the words, a whisper of his Spanish ancestry. “Quinn, I want a damage report in ten. Abduhl, check the tanks to make sure we don’t have any leaks. Eric, Suzette, check over the comps and get us up and running again pronto. Jimmy, check the laser for any cracks in the lens, and you better bring a rag and a bucket, it’s pretty messy out there.”

The control room crew chuckled weakly at the joke, their hands moving across the array of controls, checking electrical systems, water, air, fuel, tires, motors and the all-important blasters.

“Well, that was fun,” Jake Hutching said, forcing his hands to release the steering wheel. The pulped remains of small animals covered the front windshield to mix with the melting snow to form a ghastly pink sludge that oddly resembled human brains.

“Kind of nice to know what skydark looked like, eh, boys?” Jessica Colt said, trying not to grimace, both arms wrapped tight across her chest. The pretty woman barely reached five feet tall. Dressed in tanned buckskin, her long blond hair was tied back in a loose ponytail. Knives jutted from the top of each of her boots, and a hulking big Russian T-Rex .44 revolver rested on a shapely hip.

“What’s wrong?” Roberto demanded, noticing her odd posture.

His second in command might be small, but she had generous breasts, and they bunched up like a gaudy slut on the prowl for business with her arms in that position.

“Nothing, just a bruise…” Jessica started, then saw his stern expression. “I busted a rib.”

“Healer to CNC,” Roberto said, thumbing the mike again. “Shelly, on the jump, we have injuries!”

“I’ll be there as soon as somebody removes whatever the frag is blocking my door from opening,” a woman replied from the intercom on the wall. “I swear that this…Okay, I’m free. On the way, Chief!”

“Acknowledged,” Roberto said.

“Nuke that drek,” Jessica shot back, hobbling to the corridor door. “I can still walk.”

Roberto glared at the woman, but she just glared right back defiantly, and he dismissed her with a curt wave. The man had never met a woman more aptly named. She resembled a Colt blaster in every way: small, cold and deadly, yet smooth to the touch of the right man. She was even a pistol in bed, too.

Shying his mind away from those kinds of thoughts, Roberto hung up the mike and pulled a walkie-talkie from a recharging unit set into the metal wall. “Scorpion to Big Joe, what’s your status?”

“Alive and undamaged,” Scott Gordon replied from War Wag Two. “We just have to clean what used to be a moose off the windshield and we’re good to go.”

“Acknowledged,” Roberto replied, feeling a knot of tension ease in his guts. He took every conceivable safeguard to protect his crew. They were like kin. The one time he had been reckless, Kathleen got aced. He would never forgive Ryan Cawdor for his part in the loss of the Lady Trader, even if it was accidental.

Just then, the ceiling speaker crackled.

“This is Tiger Lily to Scorpion,” Diana Dunn said in a thick Southern accent. “We’re undamaged and hot to trot. Say the word and we’re good to go!”

“Roger that, Tiger Lily, we just have to patch some ribs,” Roberto replied, sitting again to ease the pain in his stiff leg. “We should be back on the move in an hour.”

In less than half that time, the three war wags rumbled into motion and started carefully forward, zigzagging through the steaming wreckage filling the valley. The explosion had toppled over trees and uprooted boulders, which was not really surprising, but mixed with the gigantic chunks of the battleship, the combination made for difficult and treacherous passage. Several times, crews had to plant explosives to blow clear a path, and once, Roberto was forced to unleash the laser again. At such a short range, the beam didn’t just punch through a target, it damn near vaporized the steel, and then the convoy had to wait for the pool of bubbling metal to cool enough for them to cross without risking the tires. This was going to take longer than expected. But the prize on the other side was worth any effort. Civilization.

Chapter Four

Hopping to the floor, Krysty started looking among the piles of wreckage, turning over this and that. The others joined her and tried to stay out of the way.

“What exactly are we looking for, dear lady?” Doc asked, using his ebony stick to nudge a partially melted hunk of droid.

“This,” Krysty said, lifting a laser from the piles of loose rubble. The weapon was in good shape, with only a few scratches on the barrel, but the lens at the end reflected the candlelight like a mirror. “Now all we need is some wiring and a live battery!”

“Burn through mil armor?” J.B. cried out. “Unless we find a nuke battery, I don’t think we’ll have that kind of power. Mebbe a shot or two, but not much more.”

“That might just be enough,” Ryan muttered, studying the UCV. “Not on the doors, but on the roof hatch. The lock is probably made of regular steel, nothing special. If they were trying to save jack, why armor something nobody is ever going to reach?”

“Makes sense,” Jak said hesitantly. “But how shoot something inside locked wag?”

Mildred burst into laughter. “How? We shoot it through the window!”

“Exactly,” Krysty declared, hugging the laser.

Long ago, when the companions were battling a robotic tank armed with a laser cannon, Mildred had told them how a laser worked on light absorption. A green-colored laser did very little damage to a green target, or a blue laser to a blue target, and so on, which was why most military lasers were polycyclic, able to shift through the entire spectrum every second. That way they always did maximum damage. Back in high school, Mildred had seen a demonstration of the principle. Her teacher had inflated a blue balloon inside a clear one, then zapped it with a blue-colored laser. The blue balloon popped, but the clear one was unharmed.

If the Lexan plastic was clean enough and could take the heat expansion, Mildred thought, then the energy beam should go through the window as if it were empty air. It had been an interesting demonstration, one of her favorites, and now it was coming in handy to unlock a tank.

Placing the laser on the flattened hood of a Hummer, J.B. and Mildred checked the weapon to make sure it was in working condition. The rest of the companions scavenged through the assorted wreckage and hauled out a wide variety of batteries and power couplers. Each droid seemed to have a unique power source, almost as if they had been individually constructed. It was a ridiculous concept, but nothing else made any sense.

Wrapping his hands in some dry cloth, Ryan went through the batteries, checking the power level by touching the terminals with a piece of wire and studying the resulting spark. Most simply gave a weak crackle, but one flashed like a miniature lightning bolt.

“All right, this one will do,” Ryan said, unwrapping his hands. “It’s full of juice.”

“Nuke?” Jak asked curiously.

“Don’t think so, more likely it’s just an accumulator, with a limited amount of stored power.”

“Which means only a brief test shot before we try to burn the lock,” J.B. muttered, attaching dif gauges of wire together to try to regulate the voltage. “This may take a while…Nope, we’re ready. Okay, here goes nothing. Fire in the hole!”

When the others were out of the line of fire, J.B. touched the ground wire to the main terminal of the droid battery. At first nothing seemed to happen, then the laser began to softly hum, rapidly building in volume and strength. A scintillating beam shot from the end across the truck garage to hit the far wall. The cinder blocks exploded from the thermal expansion, then the already weakened section tumbled down in a cloudy avalanche of powdered concrete, sand and salt.

“Excelsior!” Doc grinned, brandishing a raised fist. “A weapon fit for Ra himself!”

“How aim?” Jak asked, kneeling to squint along the device. Instead of a smooth barrel like a blaster, there were rings, metal fins and all sorts of odd stuff to block a clear view.

“Couldn’t aim, not really,” J.B. replied, laying aside the wires. “I had to shoot from the hip. How’s the arm, Millie?”

“Still pretty sore,” she said suspiciously. “Why? You…you don’t want me to fire this Frankenstein monster, do you?”

“Sure. Aside from me, you’re the best shot,” Ryan said in blunt honesty. “And you’ve had a bastard lot more experience with lasers.”

“Plus, madam, with such limited resources,” Doc continued, displaying his oddly perfect teeth, “the task may require, if you will excuse the pun, surgical precision.”

“True enough,” Mildred said, hefting the weapon to guess the weight. “There’s not much play on this power cable. Can you make it any longer?”

“No prob,” J.B. said, reaching down to rip a handful of high-voltage cable from the guts of a spider.

Going to the UCV, Mildred found the roof hatch, and with the assistance of Krysty and Doc built a low mound of debris to stand on. Then taking supplies out of her med kit, the physician cleaned a section of the Lexan plastic until it sparkled. Sadly, there was nothing she could do about the inside surface, other than hope that the laser would burn away any fingerprints or smudges. If not, the beam might reflect and go wild, possibly even coming right back into her face. It was a chilling possibility.