"Something like that," replied Hauk.

  "You weren't the first Mag Division administrator to give an order like that," Kane pointed out. "And you're not the first Mag Division administrator to come after us personally."

  For the past several years, all of the nine villes in the continent-spanning network had engaged in a cooperative search for the three of them. The search had concentrated mainly in the old military redoubts scattered across the face of America. The subterranean installations, constructed two centuries before to house the most advanced scientific miracles of the day, had been sealed for generations, since the Program of Unification.

  Over the past year or so, the redoubts located in ville territories had been methodically visited and inspected by the respective baron's Magistrates. More than one redoubt had shown signs of occupation, as if the quarry had known it was being sought and had moved from redoubt to redoubt to escape capture and to confuse the trail. "I can understand that Breeze got word to you about us contacting him to arrange a buy of his merchandise," Brigid said, "But I can't understand why he did it, or what he hopes to get out of it:'

  "Last question first since it's the easiest;' Hauk retorted. He raised his gaze a trifle, looking toward where Breeze Castigleone stood behind and a little to the left of Kane. "You can field that one, singer."

  Castigleone shuffled his feet uncomfortably, cleared his throat and intoned bleakly, "My life. That's what I get out of selling you to Baron Snakefish. My life and those of my strong-arms."

  "Straightforward enough;' Kane declared approvingly. "And pretty much what all of us expected to hear." He stared levelly at Hauk. "What's the rest of it?"

  Hauk's frozen facial muscles finally displayed a hint of emotion. His lips curled in a sneer, as he answered, "We had a Mag go renegade, Kane...that's something you should be able to relate to. Chaffee by name. When the baron was trying to restock the ville's armory—like you said, we lost a lot of ordnance over the last six months—I assigned Chaffee to inventory and restocking detail.

  "He decided he didn't like the detail, didn't like being a Mag and didn't like living in the ville anymore. So he started selling arms to Breeze here, because Breeze fed him a line about arranging a new life in a new place for him."

  Grant nodded in understanding. "You assigned the Mags to come after us and then you assigned Chaffee to the armory. Yeah, I can see where the baron might start wondering about your powers of judgment. Particularly when the ville's armory is involved."

  Every one of the nine villes possessed a huge storage facility secured behind a massive vanadium-alloy sec door. Each was filled with enough death-dealing ordnance to outfit a midsize army. Only direct voice authorization from Baron Snakefish would allow admittance into the vault.

  Each chamber contained rack after rack of assorted weaponry; everything from rifles and shotguns to pistols, mortars and rocket launchers. Crates of ammunition would be stacked to the ceiling to allow for the parking of armored assault vehicles, including Hussar Hotspurs and Hummers, not to mention disassembled Deathbirds.

  Almost all of it was original issue, dating from right before skydark. The planners of the old COG—Continuity of Government—programs, had prudently recognized that, unlike food, medicine and clothing, technology—particularly weapons—if kept sheltered, would endure the test of time and last generation after generation. Arms and equipment of every sort had been placed in deep-storage locations all over the United States, within vaults filled with nitrogen gas to maintain below-freezing temperatures.

  Unfortunately the COG planners hadn't foreseen the nukecaust to be such a colossal overkill that the very people the Stockpiles had been intended for would perish like all the other useless eaters. Some survivors of the nuking and their descendants had carved out lucrative careers looting and trading the contents of the Stockpiles. Hordes of exceptionally well-armed people had once rampaged across the length and breadth of the Outlands.

  When the Program of Unification was instituted nearly a century before, one of the fundamental agreements had been that the people must be disarmed and the remaining Stockpiles secured. Of course, to institute this action, the barons and their security forces not only had to be better armed than the Outland hordes, but they also had to know the locations of the Stockpiles. The barons were provided with both, and far more.

  Rather than address Grant's observation, Hauk lifted his left shoulder in a dismissive shrug. "Chaffee got sloppy and left a trail, which I followed to the Tartarus Pits and Breeze. He couldn't tell me where Chaffee and all the materiel had gotten to, but as perfect timing would have it, he told me Kane had just gotten word to him about being in the market for stolen ordnance. And I knew where there was Kane, I'd probably find Grant and Baptiste, too."

  Brigid smiled wanly. "Yes, I'd say that is pretty perfect timing. For you. Pretty lousy for us."

  Hauk's sneer turned into a frown. "My question is how you knew about what Breeze and Chaffee were doing."

  Imitating Hauk's own negligent shrug, Kane said, "There's nothing mysterious about it. Chaffee's allies told me about Breeze's little experiment in free enterprise."

  Hauk nodded. "I see. And how did you come to know Chaffee's allies? Where are they? Where is he?"

  Grant rumbled, "Beyond your or anybody else's reach. We were told by a reliable authority that he's dead. He was double-crossed and killed."

  Hauk snorted. "That figures. And it's fitting. I have a lot more questions—a whole lot more—but they can keep until you're all in the interrogation cells on E Level."

  Everyone on the deck of the barge knew the place Hauk referred to. The barony of Snakefish, as the eight others, had been consolidated by the Program of Unification into a network of city-states: walled fortresses that were almost sovereign nations. They were named after the barons who ruled them and each conformed to standardized specs and layouts—fifty-foot-high walls with Vulcan-Phalanx gun towers mounted on each intersecting corner. There was a single legal way into and out of the villes; the path was deadly to anyone who didn't have business walking it. People convicted of high crimes against the ville itself were served termination warrants and executed. If they were suspected of participating in activities that fit the baron's exceptionally loose definition of sedition, they were detained indefinitely, questioned incessantly, tortured viciously.

  Inside the walls, the ville elite lived in the residential Enclaves, four multileveled towers joined by pedestrian walkways. A certain amount of predark technology was available to the elite, the so-called "high towers." Since ville society was strictly class-and-caste based, the higher a citizen's standing, the higher the residence in one of the towers. At the bottom level was the servant class; those who lived in abject squalor in the Pits, which were consciously designed as ghettos. Rumors were whispered about prisoners in the E Level section being flayed alive, their entrails unwrapped, their bones carefully broken into many, many pieces. The practices reserved for women were particularly vile. Grant, Brigid and Kane knew the rumors had a very strong foundation in fact.

  The residential towers were connected by major promenades to the Administrative Monolith, a massive cylinder of white stone jutting three hundred feet into the air, the tallest building in the villes. "I know probably regret asking this," Kane said, "but how do you figure just the two of you will be able to get us to those cells? The ville is about 180 miles away, right?"

  Every level of the Administrative Monolith fulfilled a specific ville function. The base level, Epsilon, was the manufacturing facility. At the bottom of E Level there was a sealed-off section where convicted felons were held pending execution. Loxley spoke for the first time, his voice as melodious as a wood rasp being dragged over wet gravel. "We can just fucking shoot the three of you in your heads, how about that?"

  Although ville laws were complex, convoluted and often deliberately arbitrary, violators were never sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the cell blocks. Locking away a criminal either for rehabilitation or punishment was not part of the program. Perpetrators of small crimes, those involved in petty thefts or low- level black-marketeering in the Tartarus Pits, were sentenced to permanent exile in the Outlands. Grant smiled at him pityingly. "That'll make it a little hard to interrogate us, won't it?"

  "Shut up," Hauk growled to Loxley. To Grant, he said, "It won't be a problem."

  Neither Grant, Brigid nor Kane were inclined to question him further, particularly when they saw the small, cold smile crease Hauk's lips. "Signal them, Loxley."

  In a loud, authoritative tone, Loxley said into his helmet comm link, "Ready for pickup. We have the packages."

  Within a handful of seconds, two tiny flecks of jet-black outlined against the vast tapestry of azure appeared in the sky. The three outlanders instantly identified the waspish configuration of Deathbirds swooping from the shoreline on a direct course with the barge.

  Chapter 4

  Kane wasn't surprised by the sight of the Deathbirds cutting across the sky like a pair of hungry vultures. By now, it was almost de rigueur for Mags, whatever or wherever the ville, to call in air support when they thought he and his friends were cornered. It was becoming a predictable pattern, but opting for aerial travel wasn't surprising.

  The black choppers were the only form of air transportation to make a comeback after the nukecaust and they were the sole property of the ville's Magistrate Divisions. Painted a matte, non-reflective black, the choppers' sleek, streamlined contours were interrupted only by the two ventral stub wings. Each wing carried a pod of missiles. The multiple barrels of the chin- mounted chain gun in its swivel turret winked dully in the sunlight.

  Even though he was familiar with them, Kane couldn't deny that the Deathbird attack helicopters were frighteningly efficient pieces of machinery. They were modified AH-64 Apache attack gunships, and most of the ones in the Magistrate Division fleets had been reengineered and retrofitted dozens of times.

  Thirty feet long, fifteen feet high, the maximum speed of the insect-like choppers was 185 miles per hour. In the hands of an experienced pilot, they could maneuver like hummingbirds, up, down, sideways, backward, all very swiftly and fairly quietly. They could fly day or night in just about any weather, and the twin tail rotor blades crossed one another at fifty-five degrees to reduce engine noise.

  The turboshaft engines possessed exhaust suppression ports to further silence the craft. Their exterior armor could withstand hits from high-explosive rounds up to 25 millimeters.

  Nevertheless, Kane, Brigid Baptiste and Grant knew from experience that regardless of how formidable the machines were, they were still mechanisms operated by human beings. They were vulnerable to a few carefully calculated offensive maneuvers.

  "Looks like you have it all covered," Brigid said conversationally, "except for what you have in mind for Breeze and his crew."

  Hauk acted as if he hadn't heard. "Step out farther so the pilots can see you."

  None of the three moved. Kane sensed Breeze Castigleone, Belevedere and Tashlyn becoming more tense and nervous with every inch the Deathbirds progressed. "You didn't answer the lady's question, Hauk," Kane said.

  The Magistrate's lips curled back from his discolored teeth in a silent snarl and he lunged forward, driving the barrel of his Sin Eater hard into Kane's midsection. The air left his lungs in a grunt of pain and he doubled over, but by sheer force of will he kept himself from falling to his knees. He knew if he did, he'd receive a Mag-issue boot with its steel-reinforced toe in the mouth.

  Squinting against the amoebae-like floaters swimming across his eyes, Kane said through gritted teeth, "There's your answer, Baptiste. Breeze and his crew are dead."

  He turned his head, trying to focus on Breeze through the blur of his vision. "You didn't buy your life when you sold us out, Breeze...you just bought yourself a little time. And now that time is up. It's been pointless knowing you."

  The shadows of Deathbirds crawled across the deck of the barge, intersected, converged and separated again. The spinning vanes created a down-wash, sucking up the warm air and created a stifling semi-vacuum, full of swirling bits of trash and loose pieces of wood.

  Grant turned his head to look toward Castigleone. "You must have had a general idea that Hauk would pull something like this. Once we're aboard the Birds, this whole place will be flash-blasted—and you with it."

  Hauk waved up at the choppers, and they began to drop gracefully toward the stern of the barge, about thirty feet away. The gunships came to rest on their landing skids with barely a bump. The Magistrate pushed the bent-over Kane toward them. "Go."

  Kneading his midsection, Kane forced himself to straighten, gritting his teeth against the flare of pain igniting in his torso. He turned his back on Hauk and Loxley, and declared, "Breeze, you'd better make up your mind about who you want to throw in with. You don't have a lot of time to think it over."

  Growling in frustrated fury, Hauk grabbed Kane by the longish hair at the back of his neck and at the same time kicked him behind the right knee. His leg buckled and he would have fallen on his face, if not for Hauk's agonizingly tight grip on his hair.

  "Shut the fuck up!" he roared hoarsely. "He's not going to do anything but stand there like he's been told!"

  Tashlyn, her eyes wide with fear, blurted, "Kane's right, Breeze! They'll kill us! They can't afford to let us live now—"

  Hauk grimaced and turned his Sin Eater toward the woman. He tapped the trigger stud once. The sound of the shot was very loud. The 9 mm Parabellum round smacked into and through Tashlyn's lower belly, just above the top edge of her G-string.

  The woman didn't cry out, but her body was jolted backward, tottering on the stilt heels of her boots. The shock of the bullet's impact traveled down her arms and sent her club twirling from her fingers. The weighted end of it struck Loxley's Sin Eater, knocking it to one side, his finger reflexively constricted on the firing stud.

  A 3-round burst pounded into Hauk's armored back, the triple sledgehammer impacts staggering him He howled in surprised pain. The polycarbonate deflected the bullets, kept them from penetrating, but it couldn't absorb all the kinetic energy. Almost all the wind was driven from his lungs.

  As a horrified Loxley frantically shifted his pistol away from his superior officer, Grant hit the man's exposed chin with his left fist and kicked the man's ankle with his right foot.

  Dazed and off balance, the Magistrate nearly fell right into Grant's arms. Grabbing for the swinging gun, Grant closed his right hand on the barrel and jerked it skyward. At the same time, he drove the crown of his head into Loxley's nose.

  Blood spurted in crimson streams from his nostrils with such violence, droplets spattered on his helmet visor, obscuring his vision. The Magistrate careened backward, arms windmilling as he tried to keep his balance. He toppled rear-end first into the opening from which Breeze and Belevedere had drawn the metal cylinder.

  As Loxley's body disappeared, Hauk managed to drag a lungful of air into his laboring chest. He blinked repeatedly against the pain haze clouding his eyes— then gaped at the hollow mouth of the derringer gripped in Breeze Castigleone fist. The bore was no more than five inches from his face.

  Pulling himself up to his full height, Hauk demanded contemptuously, "And what do you plan to do with that little toy, slagger? You think I'm going to surrender?"

  Breeze Castigleone shook his head. "No...I think you're going to die, you woman-killing bastard."

  Hauk's eyes widened in startled comprehension when he realized the Pit boss was not bluffing. Castigleone planted the bore of the Semmering derringer under Hauk's exposed chin and squeezed the trigger.

  The report, muffled as it was by flesh and bone, had a flat, lackluster quality to it. There was nothing lackluster about the effect of the .38-caliber, steel-jacketed round. It punched a path through tissue and jaw, driving up through the roof of the mouth and deep into the brain.

  Hauk crumpled without a sound of surprise, pain or protest. Kane, Grant and Brigid saw the raw, crimson-edged, ragged wound where his chin had been. A sooty halo ringed the lower portion of his face. He stared upward at the bright sky without blinking.

  Brigid Baptiste, although surprised by the suddenness of the Mag's murder, wasted no time in gaping at the body. Nor did she attend to Tashlyn, who writhed on the deck, doubled up around her belly wound. Spinning on a heel, she snatched her Copperhead from where Castigleone had dropped it.

  She wasn't callous or even really dispassionate about the injured woman, but she had learned to prioritize over the past couple of years, particularly when her life or those of her friends might be at stake.

  Kane scooped up his Sin Eater and kicked the leather-encased Barrett toward Grant. He felt terribly exposed, but the pair of Deathbirds weren't in position to hit much of anything with their onboard weapons, not even the chin-mounted miniguns. That situation could change within a couple of seconds, once the pilots recovered from the shock of Hauk's murder.

  A body shifted behind the smoke-tinted foreport of the nearest Bird, and the hatch popped open. Brigid clamped her subgun to her shoulder and squeezed the trigger, spraying the chopper with 4.85 mm rounds. She was careful to fire only a couple of short 3-round bursts. If she held down the trigger, she could burn through an entire magazine in nothing flat. Sparks jumped from the metal chassis amid the clanging clamor of bullet strikes. The chopper hatch closed again.

 

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