Doom Helix. James Axler

And mebbe only the single attack aircraft for backup. It doesn’t sound like they replaced any of the norm male soldiers they lost, either. It’s not going to be easy, no way around that, but we know where they are and they don’t know we’re coming. We can’t let any of them slip away. We’ve got to chill them all.”

      After a moment of silence, Mildred said, “They were gone from this universe for a long time. I can’t help wondering where they went after they left.”

      “Wherever it was,” Ryan assured her, “we’re gonna make them wish they’d stayed there.”

      Chapter Four

      Jak hunkered down on the flank of the ancient cinder cone, making himself as small a target for the wind as he could. In the past hour the breeze had picked up considerably, sweeping across the plain in shrieking gusts, lifting and fluttering his shoulder-length white hair, sandblasting his face with grit. The sawing wail was so loud it drowned out the chattering of his teeth.

      His eyes had long since adjusted to the dim light and his perch afforded him a panoramic view downrange, but detail was difficult to pick out. Starshine reflected off planes and edges of rock, and the twisted trunks and branches of limber pines, turning them shades of gray, but the fissures, the rills, the sinkholes—fully three-fourths of the landscape below him—were pitch-black. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of movement, of what appeared to be rolling tumbleweeds—vague, round, silvery shapes that bounded between and vanished into the impenetrable patches of darkness.

      He had had the foresight to survey the landscape from this position in daylight, and had mapped it in his mind, marking and memorizing all possible access routes to the cave’s back entrance—routes he would have taken if the mission was reversed, if he was the stalker, moving in for the quiet chill. He’d seen no evidence that the cave or the paths to it had ever been used by people, or by animals bigger than chipmunks. Which came as no big surprise. The plain was littered with similar hidey-holes.

      As Jak systematically checked and rechecked each of the routes, looking for movement he couldn’t otherwise identify and for the glint of starlight reflecting off eyeballs, J.B. was doing the same thing, on the far side of the sinkhole. They had both drawn the second watch.

      Despite what had been said in front of Big Mike about their not being followed, nobody had argued when Ryan suggested they post sentries throughout the night. Though pursuit by coyotes and sec men was a longshot, a bivouac in hostile, unknown territory demanded they take customary precautions. They’d been caught off guard before.

      If the darkness, cold and wind challenged Jak’s skills as a scout, they also challenged his endurance. As strong as he was, as battle-hardened as he was, the effects of exhaustion and lack of sleep, of days of walking under a blazing sun on low rations with minimal water, were taking their toll. His mind kept wandering from the task at hand to his discomfort, and from his discomfort to replays of recent events, including the action plan the companions had discussed and all agreed upon.

      They were heading deeper into the turf controlled by the flame-throwing baron and the freshly loaded ammo they carried was a prize he would surely covet. If Burning Man wasn’t in a trading mood when they crossed paths, he’d surely try to take it from them by force. Either way, parting with the ammunition wasn’t an option. They were going to need every round once they got to Slake City. The only answer was to avoid contact, to bypass the baron’s toll bridge and find another way to cross the river to the west.

      “Even if we have to build our own barge…” Ryan had told the others.

      A buffeting gust of wind jerked Jak back from the vivid memory. He had no idea how long he had been wool-gathering—a second, a minute, five minutes? To wake himself up, he pressed his kneecap into a sharp rock, leaning down with more and more weight until the pain made his red eyes water.

      Below him to the right, low on the cinder cone’s slope, something moved.

      A silent, silver blur against the blackness. There for a second, then it vanished.

      There were no straight lines of approach up the cinder cone’s slope. Long sections of the winding routes, like the cracks and the gullys, were either sheltered from his view or from the starlight.

      Tumbleweed, he told himself. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, he watched for it to reappear.

      It didn’t.

      Maybe it fell in a gully, or got pinned against rock slab, he thought.

      Holding his breath, Jak strained to hear over the howl of the wind, to pick up the scrape of boot soles, the scratch of claws.

      Nothing.

      A whole lot of nothing.

      Jak found himself wishing for one of the she-he’s tribarrel blasters. With one of those babies, he could have lit up the lower slope in an emerald-green flare. He could have also heated a nearby slab of rock to keep himself warm.

      Once again, seemingly of its own volition, his train of thought—and his attention—strayed.

      He recalled how the companions had turned captured laser weapons against the invaders. Tribarrels didn’t work against the battlesuits’ EM shields, so they had used them to alter the nukeglass landscape, to collapse roads that crossed the deep crevasses, taking the invaders down with them.

      The captured tribarrels’ nuke batteries had soon run out, and with the she-hes having fled to some other universe, repowering them was impossible. Even if they could have recharged the weapons, the tribarrels were designed for one purpose: chilling large numbers of tightly packed human beings. They weren’t any good for hunting game. The effect of three laser beams pulsing slightly out of sync produced grievous but cauterized wounds which, if they didn’t cause instant death, brought on intense shock. As the animal struggled to escape, nasty-tasting juices were released into the flesh.

      A clattering rock slide somewhere on the slope below pulled Jak back into the moment. His hand instinctively dropped to grips of his holstered Colt Python, fingertips tingling from the adrenaline rush.

      Fully alert, he strained all his senses trying to locate the source of the sound in the darkness, to pick up the slightest hint of movement. He heard nothing over the wind’s wail, saw nothing, smelled nothing. And yet he felt a vague pressure, a presence closing in on him from all sides. His pulse began pounding in his throat and the short hairs on his arms stood erect. The big, predark Magnum blaster came up in his hand, seeking targets, but there was nothing for him to aim at.

      Seconds slipped by and the rush of adrenaline faded, leaving him even more exhausted than before. The sense of building pressure, of being stalked, faded as well. Mebbe he had imagined it because he was so tired? After all, a silent approach over broken, uphill terrain on a moonless night was next to impossible. Must’ve been the gusting wind that caused the slide, he told himself.

      Just as he was about to reholster his blaster, it appeared as if out of thin air in front of him, not five feet away: a face as snow-white, as stoic as his own, blazing reflected starlight. For an instant it was like he was looking into a mirror.

      Then the impasto of war paint cracked around a grinning mouth.

      The sheer impossibility of it—that someone had scaled the slope, gotten so damned close, without his seeing or hearing anything—momentarily froze him. Before Jak could recover and sweep the Python’s muzzle three feet to the right, onto the target, the butt of a longblaster came out of nowhere and caught him full on the opposite cheek.

      The crunch of impact made lightning flash inside his skull, then everything dissolved into black.

      Chapter Five

      The naked stickie sprang from a low crouch, its needle teeth bared, sucker fingers outstretched, nostril holes streaming mucous. It hurled itself at Auriel Otis Trask, a blur of lemon-yellow in her battlesuit visor’s infrared mode. As the creature reached for her faceplate, it collided with the force field blocking the entrance to its cell. The stickie bounced off the invisible barrier and crashed