Ill Wind (54 page)

One of the airmen finally shot a flare into the sky; it burst into an incandescent white spotlight surrounded by glowing smoke streamers. Under the sudden glare splashing across the landscape, they spotted horses running off in all directions.

Two young men rode a pair of stolen horses, galloping off into the night. Bayclock yelled for the riflemen to shoot, but they missed. The young riders vanished into the dark distance. Waving his arms, Bayclock sent his troops out to round up the horses and to search for the attackers.

Lance hurriedly pulled on his hiking boots and went to help, but he knew it was a lost cause.

Chapter 66

With somber tears burning his eyes, Spencer stood at the electromagnetic launcher. Although he knew in his heart it was necessary, the beautiful dream he had chased for so long was being torn apart piece by piece to build a defense against “barbarians.” He felt sick at what they were doing to the launcher, possibly destroying his hope for the solar-power satellites—it wasn’t fair, especially now that an expedition from JPL was on its way!

Rita Fellenstein supervised connecting the power-transmission line from the microwave farm to the launcher’s battery facility. He was thankful they didn’t need a transformer to boost the voltage, like the one that had failed at the water pump. Spencer’s other techs were still working on
that
problem.

Gilbert Hertoya grunted as he helped Arnie, his refugee scientist friend from Sandia, pry open an aluminum
side wall
of the launcher housing. Spencer glimpsed the two gleaming parallel rails lined with capacitor banks and batteries.

Gilbert’s workers had unbolted and lifted a ten-meter-long section of the launcher, mounting it on a swivel so the railings could turn through a 45-degree arc, horizontal as well as vertical. The launcher looked like a giant tuning fork jutting from the dismantled building, anchored by black cables running to the capacitors. He called to Spencer. “What do you think?”

“This thing is going to save us from Bayclock, huh?” Spencer stepped over the cables, careful not to trip. He sighed, trying not to show his brooding despair.

Gilbert proudly swept an arm along the length of the device. “The hardest part was mounting the rails on the swivel.” He motioned. “Get behind the base.”

Stepping around blue capacitor boxes, Spencer could see the equipment he himself had worked on just a few days ago. Now, timing cables, rail-gap switches, induction lines, and wire from the battery array littered the floor. Gilbert had cleared the area by the base to where they could lift five-pound metal-coated
sabots
onto the railgun.

Gilbert pointed out the switching mechanism. “The homopolar generator is over here. The rail is short, but we should still be able to launch the projectiles at a couple of kilometers a second. That’ll pack a real punch.”

“I hope so,” sighed Spencer. “But is it worth it?”

“If it works it will be.”

“Does it work?”

Gilbert shrugged. “Let’s see.”

They left Arnie to continue his work and met Rita outside by the transmission line. She pushed back the bush hat she had reclaimed from Lieutenant Carron. “This should do it. I need to get back and help Bobby extract the citrus oil for the explosives.” She nodded toward the electrical wiring. “Gilbert only needs a ninety-second cycle time to recharge his capacitors. With the current we can draw from batteries, he can probably get nine, maybe ten shots before we’re depleted.”

Spencer looked worried. “I’d hate to dismantle our precious satellite launcher for something that might not be decisive against Bayclock.”

Gilbert rolled his dark eyes. “That’s the physicist in you. Listen to an engineer for once. These projectiles are four to five times faster than a bullet—”

“So the energy is
16 to 25 times greater
,” finished Spencer. “But still, what if you miss the target?”

“Wide-area munitions,” Rita said. “Gil’s got us filling sabots with shrapnel, so when we launch it’ll be like a super shotgun.” She turned to the short engineer. “Bobby wants to push the trigger himself when you go after Bayclock. If he’s not flying his balloon, that is.”

Spencer scowled at her eager smile. “Rita, this is going to be messy. We busted our butts to cobble this antenna farm together, but I never thought I’d have to
kill
anybody for it.”

Rita whirled. “Spence, a lot of people have died since the petroplague. This is a war here!
Civilization against the cannibals.
The golden age against the dark ages.”

Her voice became quieter. “When I was a kid, I took a lot of shit from gorillas who wanted to pick on a beanpole, egg-headed girl—but now I am not going to let a bully come down here and take our dreams. Not when I can still fight.”

#

“Incoming!”

Bobby Carron looked up just in time to be hit on the side of the head with a soft orange. Already leaning forward, he lost his balance and tripped into the tank half-filled with ripe citrus rinds. He sputtered and gasped at the bright, acidic stink. He climbed back out of the knee-deep vat, picking clots of spoiled lemons and oranges from his hair.

Rita grinned as she tossed another orange into the air and caught it. “Gotta keep those reflexes tuned up, flyboy. Hate to have a killer orange take out your balloon.”

Bobby brushed himself off in disgust. “What did you do that for? I was checking the acidity.”

“Awww, the big sensitive football player got his feelings hurt? You were too good a target to miss. You’re lucky it wasn’t the batch of saltpeter!”

He held his hands in mock apology as he stepped toward Rita.

“Hold it right there, you uncouth, smelly excuse for a pilot,” said Rita. She cocked back her arm. “One more step and you’re dead, zoombag.”

Bobby sprang forward and grabbed her by the wrist, yanking her to the edge of the vat. “Okay beanpole!” He picked her up and heaved her headfirst into the fruity mixture. “Now who’s calling a Navy aviator a ‘pilot’?”

#

Spencer’s body ached from riding back and forth: railgun launcher, microwave farm, and the encampment for the crowd of Alamogordo ranchers and townspeople. Too many things still needed to be done, and General Bayclock could arrive within a week—if he was coming at all.

The Alamogordo city council had assigned nearly fifty people to prepare a site where the coalition of ranchers, businessmen, and city workers would establish their defenses. Spencer had insisted that the encampment be far enough away from the circular expanse of whiplike microwave antennas to avoid danger from the smallsat power beaming every day at noon.

Now he sat beside a small cookfire outside the command trailers. Rita joined Bobby and Gilbert as they formulated plans for the next day; she made an extra effort to sit by Bobby, Spencer noticed, who seemed too accommodating when she motioned for him to scoot over to give her more room.

Rita turned to the side and spat some of her last tobacco. “If Bayclock has a couple hundred soldiers, there’s only one direction he can come—north. I rode out west today, and the Organ Mountains are too damned rough for an army to negotiate.”

“Could he approach on the other side of the mountains and circle up from the south?” said Gilbert.

Bobby shook his head. “Bayclock isn’t going to be interested in surprise. I’ll bet he doesn’t expect much resistance from a few wimpy scientists. He plans to strut in here, puff out his chest, and ask us to hand over the keys.”

Spencer grunted. “Then he’s in for a shock.” The others gave a nervous chuckle. “How are the other defenses coming?”

“Railgun test in three days,” said Gilbert. “We’ll try to calibrate the range. And the big catapults are almost complete. They can throw a hundred pounds of rocks half a mile. That’ll add to Bayclock’s misery.”

“Good,” said Spencer. “Any luck with the citrus explosives?”

Bobby rocked back on his heels and tossed a small stick into the fire. “Last week we located a couple hundred crates of oranges and lemons decaying at the depot in Holloman Air Force Base. One of the local businessmen remembered delivering a batch right before the base closed down; a wagonload more is due in from the surrounding groves. Rita’s, uh
,
coordinating
the extraction and it looks like we can start mixing the stuff by day after tomorrow. If Romero can get the catapults ready, we can try the first test after Gilbert’s calibrated the railgun.”

“Good. What about the gunpowder?”

Bobby shook his head. “The piss detail—er, I mean the ‘saltpeter resource group’—has already done their part, and we’ve made plenty of charcoal. But we’re having trouble finding enough sulfur to make it worthwhile. It would take a month to ride over to Silver City and back, where they’ve mined gobs of the stuff. We’re lucky to have any gunpowder at all for the rifles.”

“Everybody keep thinking,” said Spencer. “I hate these one-point solutions. We’re just begging for something to go wrong at a bottleneck.” He felt a cramp in his leg as he stood. “Let’s get back to work. Sleep in shifts. We’re running out of time.”

As he bent to massage his calf, he watched Rita and Bobby head out side by side. He didn’t know why, but he felt a pang of loneliness. He remembered Sandy, the dark-haired girl who had rescued him from a life of nerd-dom back in high school; as he turned back to work, he wasn’t sure she had entirely succeeded.

#

Juan Romero surveyed the crowd of old farts by the catapult and suppressed a sigh. It wasn’t much of a fighting force, but all the men and women who could shoot or ride were training with Bobby Carron, learning details of guerrilla warfare. The few aviation-trained volunteers took turns in the lookout balloon; others had evacuated to Cloudcroft in the mountains.

That left Romero’s catapult group.
Forty-two members of the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight
,” he thought.
Why do I feel like this isn’t such a good idea?

Seventeen of the group must be eighty years old, and the rest looked like they would be more at home in a library, squinting through coke-bottle glasses.
Well
, Romero thought, running his palms over his face to slick down his long mustache,
if life gives you limes, it’s time to make margaritas
. He chuckled at that. He really enjoyed playing Pancho to Spencer’s Cisco Kid, overdoing the stereotyped Mexican much the same way a cartoon Frenchman wore a beret and slapped his forehead with a ‘Sacre Bleu!’ Romero hoped Spencer knew it was a joke.

He stepped up to the ten-meter-long bar cannibalized from the scraps of the railgun launcher. Ropes dangled from the bottom of an oversized bucket bolted to one end; a set of heavy-duty springs from disassembled truck shock absorbers hung on a rotating base anchored to the other end, weighted down with concrete blocks. Buckets of rusting scrap iron made indentations in the white sand.

Romero clapped his hands to get their attention. “All right, listen up!” He pointed to three old men standing in front. “Grab onto the rope and cock back the lever.
The rest of you, stand back.
Remember, there’s only one of these catapults, so if you get in the way and splatter yourself all over the workings, we’ll lose our heavy defense.”

No one laughed at the joke. If he didn’t explain, the safety lesson would be lost. “You three—be careful no one’s in your line of fire. The rest of you got that?”

The three old men strained against the ropes as they dug their heels into the loose sand. The metal arm of the catapult came back, groaning at the limit of its flexibility, until it lay quivering, parallel with the ground.

He held up a hand. “
Do not
let go of that rope!” Romero scrambled beneath the catapult arm. Reaching up to the base, he connected a hook around the lower part of the arm to secure it. “Okay, keep the rope taut, just in case, while I load the bucket.”

Romero and three helpers struggled with scraps of iron, dumping them into the oversized bucket. Satisfied, he stepped back and nodded to the boys. “Okay, release the lines—slowly!”

Shooing them away from the coiled weapon, Romero gathered the gang around him. Perspiration ran down his face. “That’s all it takes, ladies and gentlemen. Remember, don’t let go of the ropes until the safety hook is on.”

A feisty-looking woman with white hair sticking from under ten-gallon hat held up her hand. “Son, how do we shoot this thing?”

“Rotate the base to aim the throw. Unfortunately, the distance varies with the weight of the projectile, so our range is always going to be a rough guess. When the catapult is in position, the trigger is that line that runs from the hook.”

“Can I try it?”

Romero said, “Satisfy your curiosity now, rather than waste time in battle.” Ducking under the catapult arm, he picked up the trigger line,
then
walked back to the elderly woman.

“Now, if you’re frightened, I can help you. All it takes is a quick pull—” He hadn’t finished his sentence before the woman viscously yanked back the line.

The catapult slammed forward and banged against the restraining bar in front. Seventy pounds of rusty bolts, twisted nails, sharp cutting pieces of metal flew in a low arc like a cloud of bees. The team watched the metal disperse until they lost sight of it; seconds later, it rained down in a cloud of dust a football field wide, kicking up debris as though an invisible warplane had strafed the desert floor.