“That doesn’t look good,” Mildred said from the passenger seat of the wag.
Ryan braked the vehicle.
“Fireblast!” he said, staring with his one eye at the mirrorlike ellipse that had suddenly appeared forty yards ahead of them. It lay on its side, fully as wide as the badly frost-heavy, two-lane blacktop road they were driving along through slow-rolling, spring-green prairie.
He felt a rare instant of indecision: Better to get out of the wags? Or keep everyone inside and ready for a full-throttle bug out?
He hit his palm against the steering wheel hub three times quickly. The trio of short horn blasts was the agreed-upon signal for everybody to exit the vehicles in a hurry.
“This is some serious whitecoat shit,” he said, yanking his own door open. “If they cut loose on us with some kind of energy weapon, we don’t want to be sitting on top of ten gallons of fuel.”
Jak already had his right-hand rear door open and was gone. Behind Ryan, Ricky made an unhappy sound as he fumbled with the door handle. He got it open before Ryan felt obliged to intervene.
Ryan brought his longblaster with him. Ricky and Mildred emerged with handblasters at the ready. Behind him Ryan heard J.B., Krysty, Doc and Mariah climbing out of their wag.
It was late afternoon. Clouds were rushing overhead from the southwest with a speed that would have set off alarm bells in Ryan’s head about an acid-rain storm coming on, except these were slate gray, not orange green. Precipitation was coming—he could feel and smell it in the breeze—but it was likely to come in the form of regular rain, if likely in double-heavy doses, with mebbe a violent electric storm thrown in.
Cautiously, Scout held leveled before him, Ryan advanced to the nose of the pickup wag. Across the black hood he saw Jak vanish into the tall grass in the ditch on the right side of the road with barely a rustle. Ryan knew the albino would keep watch from there and be ready to flank any enemies if they appeared, as the one-eyed man expected they would directly.
And so they did. Two lines of men filed out of the mirror at opposite ends of the ellipse. They had helmets with black face shields, gray and shiny black body armor that looked to Ryan to be some kind of plastic, and black weapons like long, skinny black eggs with a sort of notch scooped in the bottom where the handgrip was. They formed up eight men strong on either side of the road, weapons ready, with a six-or seven-foot gap in the middle.
Meanwhile Ryan’s friends, apart from Jak, came up to stand with him, keeping close to the wag in case they had to dive for cover.
A pair of people stepped out. Both were tall, thin and dressed in gleaming white in no doubt deliberate contrast to the faceless black-armored sec troops. One was male, one female. The woman sported blond hair cropped so close to her head it looked almost silver in the waning daylight. The man’s head was shaved bald.
A strange sound like a whistling scream came out of Doc. It sounded almost like a hurt or frightened child.
“It is them!” he shrieked in horror. “The whitecoats! They have come to take me back!”
He fell down next to the cab of the wag, curling into a fetal ball of fear and sobbing.
“Are you with Operation Chronos?” Krysty asked the white-clad pair.
“You know about those amateurs?” the man asked curiously. “No, we are not. And we have no interest in this demented old man. Now, lay down your weapons.”
Ryan laughed harshly. “Not likely. A person might construe an entry like the one you just made as downright unfriendly.”
The bald, skinny dude laughed. “Do you actually believe your primitive firearms can harm us?”
“Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact,” Ryan said. “We banged heads against your kind before, once or twice. We’re willing to take our chances.”
“You may take for granted,” the gaunt woman said, “that if we need to summon further resources in order to destroy you, that lies within our capabilities.”
“But it is not you we are interested in,” the man said. “Which fact you have to thank for being alive at this moment.”
He turned his pale blue gaze toward Mariah, who stood beside Krysty, holding her hand.
“You, child,” he said, in what Ryan reckoned he thought was a reassuring voice. A quick glance sideways told him it hadn’t worked any better on the girl than it had on him. “Come with us.”
“No,” Mariah said.
“But we can give you—opportunity.”
“I want to stay with my friends.”
“You can help build a world of peace and order for everyone—not over the course of a century more of suffering, as our projections say it will take now. But in a matter of mere decades. Or even a handful of years!”
“I don’t trust you. You’re whitecoats.”
“Forget the silly superstitions you’ve been taught by those around you,” the woman said. “We represent science, order and hope. Look around at these people you’re with. They represent filth, decay and random violence. What do you expect the likes of them to think of us? They are incapable of understanding us, with their dim and rudimentary minds.”
“They’re my friends,” Mariah insisted. “They’re not like you say at all. I don’t think I like you much.”
“But you belong with us, child,” the woman said, dropping her voice low, into what Ryan reckoned she had to think were persuasive tones. To his ears it just made her sound like a different kind of threat. “Where do you think you come from, if not our laboratories? Do you remember who your mother was? Your father? Somehow you came to be abandoned in this dirty, dangerous world, all alone. Now we have come to take you home.”
As she extended a pallid hand toward the now openly trembling Mariah, the woman seemed unaware of the snake-eyed side look her male companion shot her.
“But I know who my friends are! And I’ll never go with you!”
The man uttered a sharp, hard yip of laughter, like a crazy fox. “What makes you think you have a choice? Security, secure the girl—unharmed—and dispose of the rest. I had imagined some of them might have possible value, as objects of study if nothing else, but I see that they are nothing but defective specimens in need of culling.”
Ryan caught the gist of what the skinny baldhead bastard was saying. “Blast them!” he ordered, raising his Scout longblaster.
Taking quick aim at the male whitecoat through the ghost ring sight, he squeezed off a shot. But even as he shouldered the weapon, the pair in the long, white coats stepped backward through the mirror-like surface.
Ryan actually saw the bullet squash itself against that surface, as if it had struck the vanadium-steel wall of a redoubt.
From the other side of the wag’s hood he heard J.B.’s shotgun boom. The helmet of a sec man on that side of the road suddenly snapped back. Ryan could hear its occupant’s neck break.
“Take cover!” he shouted as more shots cracked out from among his companions.
The sec men had their weapons pointed at the group. Seemingly, all they had to do was pull the triggers, or depress the firing studs, or whatever, to blast the companions, which, physically, was true. But in actuality things weren’t so simple.
In fact the sec team was at a disadvantage: they were in a state of not firing, and Ryan knew well the human mind needed time to work. The sec men had to perceive that they needed to shoot, make the decision to shoot, and their brains had to transmit the impulse to shoot to the muscles of their hands. Each step at time, even if only a fraction of a second. And if those delays added up to a second, that could make the difference between death and life.
But in this case it might only serve to delay the inevitable, by not many seconds more. Even as he hurled himself left toward the ditch, Ryan heard a peremptory buzz and the sound of a headlight shattering.
He put a shoulder down as he landed and rolled and saw to his horror that Krysty was still standing by the wag, apparently urging Mariah to seek cover with her. The sec men hadn’t blasted her for fear of hitting the girl—yet.
“Drag her or leave her, Krysty!” Ryan shouted.
He pointed the Steyr, found a fast target and fired prone from the bank of the round-bottomed, weed-choked ditch. The sec men had their heads down over their long egg-shaped blasters, making them harder targets. His bullet instead struck the side of an armored shin of a kneeling trooper. The leg crumpled, dropping the sec man on his face plate in the road ruts.
Ricky and Doc had vaulted into the wag’s bed and were blasting through the glassless cabin, sheltering from whatever it was the sec men were shooting behind the mass of its big six-cylinder engine. Ricky was firing his DeLisle, while Doc, who had recovered from his near-paralyzing fear of the whitecoats, was taking shots with his M4 carbine. Ryan heard the brief snarl of Mildred’s M16 from the far side of the track and caught a glimpse of J.B. milking short bursts from his Mini UZI as he dashed for the cover of the grass to the right of the wag.
Something made Ryan’s ears ring, the short hairs on his neck and arms rise, and his skin prickle as if with beginning sunburn. One of the sec men had shot his ovoid at him. He shot the man in the top of the breastplate, just left of where his clavicle notch would be.
The bullet had to have deflected upward and punched through whatever kind of armor protected the sec man’s throat. He dropped to his side and lay still.
But most of the sec men were still up and firing. Ryan and his people were in a tough spot. Their blasters could only hurt the faceless black-armored figures by accident. He gathered himself for a rush for the wag. If he could make it without having his insides pulped by near-soundless blasters that made dents like metal fists in the wag’s hood and frame where they hit, he could ram them with it. See how they liked that.
Krysty was bent over, pleading with Mariah to flee. Ryan wondered where the redhead’s own survival reflexes had gone. Then she jerked, her eyes rolled up and she dropped to her face on the road.
Ryan’s heart seemed to stop. Blackness welled up within his eye. He tensed to jump to his feet, charge the faceless, black-clad bastards, do whatever damage he could lashing out with blaster butt and panga and boots and fists and rage before they sent him to join the love of his life.
But Mariah was faster.
“You monsters!” she screamed, throwing out her hands before her. Blackness streamed from her palms. It spun itself into a whirlwind of blackness between the fallen Krysty and the sec men, tall as Ryan and three times as broad in the wink of an eye.
Ryan heard muffled outcries of consternation from the sec men. His own people had stopped shooting when the cloud appeared. Now he could also make out strange, dry buzzes as the ovoid blasters shot.
The intruders were shooting at the black whirlwind. It grew without showing signs of being affected until it was high as a house and wide as the road.
Then it advanced.
Ricky and Doc had pulled out of the wag bed and were dragging Krysty’s limp form to the open driver’s door. As Ryan hopped up to help, he saw the sec men break, turn in panic and begin jostling one another in their fear-fueled frenzy to get back through that strange mirrored aperture before the black cloud took them. He heard horrific screams as at least one man failed and was torn apart.