Matador - The Omega Cage Part 23

Maro gently moved away from Juete, easing her head down onto the jacket he'd found at the camp. She slept hard, not stirring.

He climbed the boulderlike rock behind them. It was easy enough, the moons' light was bright, the sky clear. It was maybe twenty meters to the top, a soft incline, and from the pinnacle he could see kilometers in any direction.

Here and there, reddish-orange glows lit the sky. And twice in five minutes, bright discharges like lightning flared whitely. Such an eerie landscape, like something out of a prehistory holovid. He almost expected to see dinosaurs stalking across the hardened lava, or a herd of curl noses lumbering past. Below him, Juete slept, while Scanner communed with his electronic spirits. Maro felt very much alone on this alien plain. So far away from anywhere he ever thought he would be. He thought about the others who had trusted him to lead them to freedom. Four dead- five, counting Fish, who had never even managed to climb the walls. Sandoz, Chameleon, Berque and Raze. Raze most of all he was sorry about.

The sadness welled in him, filling his chest and throat, and it almost overcame him. No. Not tonight. Later, maybe, if they lived, later he would have time to mourn properly. For now, he needed to concentrate on staying alive. Otherwise there would be no one to pay respect to the others.

He climbed back down the rock and stretched out next to Juete. It was cold and hard, but sleep finally came.

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

Stark awoke, and for a moment did not know where he was. He felt panic close in until he remembered. The Juggernaut lay on its back, and the seat padding made it as comfortable as any other field cot he'd ever slept in, albeit somewhat limiting insofar as motion.

He touched a control and the repellors hummed as they lifted the suit to a standing position. He clicked the exit controls, waited until the hydraulics opened the clamsh.e.l.l doors and climbed out.

He looked about the landscape, bleak and desolate as a moon. He stretched, relieved himself, and jogged around a bit. The morning sun was only beginning to show over the horizon. He reentered the Juggernaut, sat in the control seat, and fastened the unit tight again. The water from the mouth tube was cold and clean, and the nutrient paste was warm, if somewhat tasteless. It was sustaining, however, and that was all he needed. He reconnected the penile catheter and powered up the flight mode. Even the computer could not say exactly how the fugitives would cover the ground, since detailed maps were not available, but that was unimportant. He would head northwest, zig-zagging. It would take a little longer to cover a fifteen-klick-wide swath, but in the end. he would catch them.

The Juggernaut lifted amid a spray of volcanic rock dust, a giant raptor on the prowl.

Juete had almost gotten used to the rhythm of the cart's swaying flight as it dodged rocks too high to hop. Scanner was driving again, and for a time, the plain was flat enough for nearly top speed. An hour after they started the ground ridged again, becoming more convoluted. She wondered how it had come to be formed that way. Were there some underlying rocks which had become encysted? Or did the cooling lava pile up on itself? It was not important that she know, but it did make her curious.

Next to her, Dain stared across the plain, not speaking. He seemed far away this morning, lost in his own thoughts.

In the middle of a particularly rough stretch of ground, Scanner stopped. "Got to rest the GE," he said. "It's overheating."

Juete looked around. The surface reminded her of a stormy ocean she'd once sailed over on another world; it was as if someone had frozen the wind-driven waves into stone. There were peaks and troughs and a thousand different shapes surrounding them.

They had pa.s.sed several more fumaroles, pits that exuded hot and stinking gases or bubbled with molten rock and mud. And yet, even among the solid rock and killing heat, she had seen plants. They were mostly small, stunted blobs of gray-green, some kind of lichen or moss anch.o.r.ed to the rocks at odd angles, usually in shaded spots. Even in the midst of such desolation, there was life. Some kind of a lesson there, wasn't there? The sun beat down, but it was cooler than the desert when they were away from the fumaroles. Juete wore a flat-brimmed hat Dain had found at the camp, and slathered herself every few minutes with sunblock. Even so, she felt her skin burning where it was exposed to the light.

After half an hour, Scanner restarted the cart and they moved on.

Maro trusted Scanner's driving more than he did his own. Scanner plugged into the cart's simple computer and controlled the vehicle directly, for the most part. But the concentration required for the interlink was hard on the man, and Maro offered to spell him every hour or so. Scanner looked drawn, tired, and he had lost probably five kilograms since the escape. They were all wearing thin, Maro knew. If they couldn't get to some kind of safety within another day or two, the stress would burn them out. The price paid for constant fight-or-flight was too much to continue for long.

"Dain?"

Maro turned to glance at Juete. Scanner was asleep in the back next to the beautiful albino. "Yeah?"

"Listen, no matter what happens, I want you to know I love you. I appreciate what you've done for us. For me."

"Thank you," he said.

He somehow felt better, even though nothing had changed. Win or lose, he had done what he'd had to do.

Back and forth Stark tacked, flying a Z-pattem that extended seven and a half klicks on either side of a straight line toward the mining port. He looked at the land below from an alt.i.tude of a hundred meters. The suit's sensors worked sometimes, and sometimes they did not. Once he had been nearly over a large fissure that had suddenly ground shut, and only his polarized faceplate had saved his eyes from the actinic flash of a giant spark as it leaped from the ground and floated up past him like ball lighting. His sensors had gone off the scale.

But, even though he could not track the escapees, there were very few places for them to hide. He would see them among all the ripples and valleys of the slag, sooner or later.

He worried for a time that they might have fallen into one of the steaming lava pits, but he somehow did not think that Fate would cheat him so.

Methodically he flew, back and forth, searching.

As the afternoon wore toward dusk, Scanner stopped the cart more and more frequently. Finally, an hour before dark, with the shadows stretching over a landscape grown more and more mountainous, they halted.

"That's it," Scanner said wearily. "The GE gear is dead. If I had parts and tools, I

might be able to fix it. But we've burned a rotor and there's no way we can continue on hover." "It's okay," Dain said. "You pulled off a miracle getting us this far. We'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way, on the ground."

Scanner looked around. Juete was shocked at how thin and gaunt the man's face

appeared. "We'll move like snails. There's hardly a centimeter of flat ground as far as I can see."

"We'll manage. We can always walk, if we have to."

"It's about forty kilometers, I figure," Scanner said.

"We crossed that much desert, didn't we?" Juete put in.

"Yeah. I guess."

"Should we stop, do you think?" Dain asked.

Scanner shrugged. "Might as well go until dark."

"Okay then. We roll."

Stark's anger could not be held back. Where were they? He had not missed them, he was sure of it! And yet, the s.p.a.ceport lay only another fifty or sixty klicks ahead. Surely they couldn't have gotten that far yet? They had to be on the plains still. But darkness was coming and there was still no sign of them.

A yellow fog seemed to cover the ground ahead.

"Better avoid that," Scanner said to Maro, who was now driving. "Could be sulphur dioxide. Probably has a lot of carbon dioxide in it, too."

Maro turned and began to circle the gas cloud. They had been lucky; they had managed to travel another fifteen kilometers on a winding but fairly flat stretch. But darkness was making the driving treacherous, and now Maro decided to halt for the night. He pulled the cart to a stop in the shelter of a tall spire of rock. Almost there, he thought. We're almost there.

Stark cursed the darkness. And then, he saw something on his scopes.

He had gotten a number of ghosts and bad readings since he'd entered the lava fields, but this looked like the readings of three large, warm-blooded animals. He had seen nothing like this on the plains until now.

It had to be them. It had to be!

The darkness would not impede him if he chose to take them. The Juggernaut was equipped with spookeyes, light intensification equipment that would allow him to see in almost total darkness. He could pluck them from the dark as easily as if it were midday. But no. Now that he had them, he wanted to make it last. Now that he knew where they were, they couldn't outrun him.

He climbed, wanting to be hidden in the night, and flew past the position of the prisoners.

"What was that?" Juete asked.

"What?" Dain's voice was sleepy.

"That noise, didn't you hear it? It sounded like a jet."

Dain shook his head. "Probably a fumarole venting gas."

Juete strained her ears, but the noise, whatever it was, was not repeated. "Yes, I

guess that must have been what it was."

But she felt an icy touch within as she lay curled next to the man she loved. It followed her into sleep.

In the morning they started off again, bouncing along the pitted rock, jolting around in the cart like insect specimens in a shaken bottle.

Scanner was driving. He saw it first.

"Jesus," he said softly. "What is that?" Ahead, directly in their path, stood a monster.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

As Maro watched, the monster raised one arm and pointed an extended finger at them. In that second, Maro realized what it was: some kind of armored exoskeleton. And at the same moment, he knew who rode within-Stark!

This was what had killed Sandoz and Chameleon.

"Out of the cart, fast!" he yelled.

Scanner locked the brakes. The little cart skidded to a stop on the hard black rock. Scanner jumped to the left, while Maro shoved Juete out to the right and followed her.

The cart rocked as the front was blasted by a pulse beam. Hot plastic bits sleeted through the air. One of them landed on Maro's shoulder, burned through the orthoskin coverall and raised a blister.

He didn't slow, but urged Juete behind a block of lava two meters tall. Behind them, he heard an amplified laugh.

"It won't do you any good!" the warden's voice thundered.

"It's Stark," Juete said.

"Shhh, he might be able to hear us."

The responding laugh echoed across the lava. "He's right, my love. I can hear your faintest whisper! I can hear your heartbeats, if I want. Although Maro and Scanner won't be having any in a few minutes."

Juete stared at Maro, afraid. She grabbed his arm tightly with both hands. Maro didn't think she was aware of her move.

"You can come out, Juete. I won't hurt you."

Even with the electronic distortion, Maro could hear the voice soften. He caught Juete's hands. "I don't think he'll hurt you. You could give yourself up-"

"No!"

As if in answer, the rock shuddered. A few pebbles rattled down the side and hit them as the pulse beam baked the opposite side of the stone.

"Look out!" Scanner yelled. "He's coming!"

The warning wasn't necessary. Maro felt the footfalls of the ma.s.sive exoskeleton reverberate through the ground. He grabbed Juete's hand and tugged her away from the boulder, keeping it between them and the approaching Stark. They ran, dodging around small rocks. A pair of honeycombed black pillows three or four meters tall loomed ahead to the left. They made it to the nearest and ran behind it.

A line of fire arced between the two rocks and drew a burning bar upon the ground. In a moment, another line bracketed the opposite side of the rock, and then a third fell on the far side of the block next to them."Careful, Maro-you might get burned!" Stark yelled.Juete and Maro looked at each other. He's got us boxed in, Maro thought, and he knows it.

Inside the Juggernaut, Stark grinned widely. Oh, this was going to be wonderful!

Something pinged off the back of his helmet. What-?

He checked the rear display. There stood Scanner. Throwing rocks!

Stark laughed. Give the little runt credit for b.a.l.l.s. He knew he was dead, and this

certainly was a stylish way to go-better than cringing behind a boulder. He turned the Juggernaut to face Scanner, raised one arm and prepared to pulse the circuit-rider.

Then he paused. No. He didn't want to kill him just yet.

Scanner bent and picked up a fist-sized chunk of rock. He drew back and threw.

The rock sailed past, half a meter to Stark's left. Stark extended one arm and fired the pulse. A lucky shot-the rock exploded into powder.

He turned back toward Scanner. He shifted his aim to the man's right a meter.

There was a knee-high boulder there. He opened up with the pulse finger, and the rock blasted apart. The concussion and a certain amount of lava shrapnel hit