The Omega Cage (24 page)

He was radar-ghosted, laser-reflective and had a cruising range of five thousand kilometers at speeds up to three hundred klicks an hour. Once he got inside and left, nobody was going to be bringing him back. Not even Karnaaj and all his men.

Stark took a deep breath and climbed up into the armored womb of the Juggernaut.

Dawn found them running smoothly to the north, skirting the desert, hidden in the trees. Juete had dozed off, and Maro leaned forward to talk to Scanner over the sound of the wind. Scanner had used the GE gear several times, and it seemed to be working, though he kept saying he didn't trust it to last.

"How long?" Maro asked.

"Couple more hours. We should find the end of the desert, if my maps are right.

It's scrub land past that, not as much cover as the forest, but better than being a bug on the sand."

"Can we make to the port, Scanner?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe. No way to tell."

"If we get past the scrub, then what?"

"We go north until we hit the volcanic plain. Still a lot of activity there, a lot of heat and electrical flux, so even the satellites probably couldn't pick us up unless they just happen to footprint us directly. Which isn't very likely."

"I wonder how Sandoz and Chameleon are doing."

"I hope they're burning in some fanatic's hell," Scanner said bitterly.

"They were just trying to stay alive. We all were."

"Yeah, but we weren't trying to do it at their expense. Maybe the guards will follow them instead of us."

"Nice thought."

"Yeah."

They rolled on, using the GE gear over the rougher spots, bouncing on the tires otherwise. Juete slept.

Stark walked into the fence surrounding Stores, not bothering with the gate. The electricity played over his outer shell harmlessly, and the wire tore like thread as he stepped through it. Automatic alarms sounded, loud in his amplified hearing.

He turned the gain down on the suit's hearing. He grinned, in spite of his situation. This thing was powerful. Maybe he would not be as adept in it as was a trained operator, since he had only managed to practice with it surreptitiously a few times in the years since he'd acquired it, but still he felt unstoppable, and for the first time in days, his sense of helplessness fled. Let somebody try to stand in his way.

Nobody did. He saw startled guards, but none of them were so stupid as to fire at this monster.

He flipped the control for the GE and the bouncers. The chambers warmed and the repellors gave out a throaty growl, almost like a big cat's purr. He hit the thrust button and the Juggernaut leaped into the air.

His radio came to life with hails, but he ignored it. Some alert guard managed to trigger the manual wall lasers, and thin fingers of red stabbed at him, but missed by a dozen meters. He was tempted to fire a rocket at the guard's tower, or tickle the place with pulses, but decided against it. Some of the guards were good soldiers; no point in causing them any more grief than they were going to run into already.

He turned the Juggernaut away from the prison, climbed several thousand meters straight up and ordered the suit's computer to pilot him to the mining camp. He soared away, deadlier than the largest dragonbat that ever flew Omega's skies, at a speed no living creature could hope to match.

The fuckers who broke out of his prison and ruined his life were going to be sorry they were ever born.

Juete was jolted awake as she leaned against Dain's muscular shoulder. She had been dreaming, but whatever the dream had been was gone.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"About a hundred kilometers north of the mining camp. They haven't spotted us yet, apparently. A cycle flew by half an hour ago, but it didn't slow."

She nodded. The reality of their situation was worse than any nightmare she could have had.

The radio came to life.

"This is Stark. Has anybody seen anything?"

Scanner slowed the cart slightly as he listened to the dialog.

"Copy, Warden. One of our teams found a broken-down cart about thirty kilometers south of the camp."

Scanner allowed the vehicle to slow to a halt. Dain said, "Well. It looks as if Sandoz's choice was a bit premature."

"Give me the coordinates. I am on my way."

That brought a sudden chill to Juete's neck.

"Ah, that might be inadvisable, Warden. It seems our men got careless when they were examining the cart. We have two dead on the ground and their weapons are gone. The cycles were coded, so they're still there, but the handguns weren't ID keyed. The escapees are armed."

"It doesn't matter," Stark's voice came back. "So am I."

"Go," Dain said to Scanner. "Maybe Sandoz and Chameleon can keep them busy long enough for us to get away."

Scanner throttled the cart up.

* * *

The guards at the small clearing in the woods where the cart had been found looked appropriately surprised and startled to see the Juggernaut settle to earth.

The foot pads on the exoframe sank a couple of centimeters into the soft earth, but each had enough surface area to keep the thousand or so kilograms of the machine distributed enough not to cause problems. Some of Kamaaj's men were there, and they backed away.
Good
, Stark thought. He had no use for those troopers.

Stark's amplified voice boomed out at the men. "What have you got?"

The search team leader wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, looking up at Stark's face behind the plasteel plate. "Just like we said, Warden. Two dead, two pulse pistols gone. The tracks lead off that way. They can't be more than ten minutes ahead of us, we figure."

"Fine. Stay here. I'll get them."

He could have flown, but he wanted to use the machine to impress the troops. He turned in the direction of the escapees' travel and started to walk.

The brush hindered the hydraulic muscles of the Juggernaut no more than weeds would a man. Small trees fell under his mechanical feet; larger ones he shoved aside. He was able to move as fast as a running man, despite his great size, taking strides two meters at a step.

It took him less than ten minutes to catch up to them. He only saw two; Sandoz the assassin and the mue called Chameleon. They heard him coming; the metamorph cut to the left and ran, snapping wild shots from the pulse pistol at the Juggernaut.

Almost idly. Stark raised his left arm and triggered a blast from his flamethrower. A thin line of fire jetted forth and covered Chameleon with oily flame. There was a scream. The man ran in a small circle and then collapsed into a bonfire that moved feebly.

Sandoz snapped his weapon up and began firing. He was good. Five for five hit Stark, starting at the belly of the Juggernaut and walking up to the faceplate. The last shot clouded the clear metal slightly to the left, but did no real damage. Stark aimed his pulse finger at Sandoz, but then decided not to use it. He moved ponderously toward the man, who kept firing until his weapon ran dry.

Sandoz was fast. He dodged as Stark reached for him. It took five minutes for the warden to run the prisoner down, and it was over that quickly only due to a lucky fluke: Sandoz tripped over a root and sprawled, and Stark caught him before he could scramble to his feet. The Juggernaut's mighty arms lifted the struggling man up so that their faces were level. Stark grinned at him.

"There's only one escape from the Omega Cage, Sandoz," he said. And squeezed.

Too fast and too hard—he didn't have the delicacy of touch of a trained operator.

Bones cracked and Sandoz's chest collapsed. Blood gouted from the man's mouth and ears and he died instantly.

Stark dropped the body.
Damn
. He had wanted him to suffer more.

Scanner would. And Maro. Especially Maro.

He sprang into the air, repellors working, and climbed to three hundred meters.

He put his sensors into full scan. His miniature holoproj heads-up display showed the troopers where he had left them, along with Chameleon's burning corpse and that of the crushed Sandoz. Several other animal lifeforms registered, but nothing that gave off the signature of a human. So. The others weren't here.

They had split up.

It didn't matter. He would find them. There weren't too many directions in which they could run.

"Two of the prisoners died while resisting capture," he said. "Come in and pick up the bodies."

A hundred and seventy-eight kilometers away, Stark's casual message reached the ears of the three remaining escapees. They looked at each other grimly, but no one spoke. The same thought was going through each of their minds: How could Stark take Chameleon and Sandoz— Sandoz!—alone?

With what was he armed?

Chapter Twenty-Six

Stark's radio buzzed with queries, mostly from Karnaaj; he ignored the calls and continued his flight pattern. He worked a spiral away from where he had killed Sandoz and Chameleon, his sensors turned to full gain. The Juggernaut's equipment was sensitive enough to tell a man from a large animal, were the operator of the exoframe properly skilled, but Stark was not an expert.

Several times he dropped from the skies, only to find himself covering schweinhunds or sand cats. The last time, in frustration, he flamed the animals into cinders.

He flew over the desert, radar and doppler tracking the sand, looking for his prey. He would find them, no doubt, and when he did, they would die. Except for Juete, of course. She would hurt, but that would be later, when he had her safely off-planet. It would be a long time before she forgot this incident, and he looked forward to making her beg for his forgiveness.

Below, a sand cat started at the sound of the Juggernaut and loped off across the trackless waste, its big feet throwing up small showers of dry sand as it ran. He didn't bother to fry this one. That had been a loss of control before, and he did not want to let that happen again. He wanted to be calm when he found the last escapees. Filled with righteous anger, but calm. So that he could savor it.

"The lava plain is just ahead."

"How long will we be on it?" Juete asked.

Scanner said, "Most of the way. Fingers of it run almost to the edge of the mining port. It won't be as fast to stay on the plain, but it'll be a lot safer."

Maro stared at the plumes of smoke ahead, and caught the scent of burning sulphur, that characteristic rotten-egg smell.

"A couple of the volcanoes are still active," Scanner continued. "Nothing explosive, but some pretty good lava flows, according to the Cage's computer.

And there are fumaroles bubbling all over the plain, especially close to the new flows." Scanner chuckled.

"Something funny?" Maro asked.

The circuit-rider glanced at him, then back at the plain. "Well, I guess it depends on your sense of humor. There was a little historical note in the computer on the early exploration of this planet. Seems the world was largely settled by gentlemen of fortune—mostly Confed ex-military—and there used to be a race held each year on the plain. Lot of hell-bent heroes would crank up some of the old hydrogen-powered land cruisers and tear across the hardened lava, to see who could get to the other side first. The last year it was held, sixteen of the seventeen cars disappeared. Sank in pits or got covered by a new eruption, it was figured. The only guy to finish came in first—and last."

"I don't think that's particularly funny," Juete said.

"Like I said, it depends on your sense of humor."

The surface of the plain seemed to be mostly black and bubbly looking rock, and it was quickly apparent that running it on wheels would pound them into jelly.

Scanner switched to the GE mode and the ride smoothed.

"People used to race across this," Maro said. "Amazing."

"I think they had shock absorbers."

The pillowlike formations made for slow going—the repellors did not allow the cart much altitude—and the path had to be picked out carefully to avoid the larger hummocks. Maro's amazement that somebody would do this for fun was tempered by respect for the
langlaufers'
skill at being able to do it at top speed.

After an hour on the plain, they came to their first major obstacle. Along a gully like path that had made for the easiest travel so far on the plain, they suddenly found themselves rounding a hill and facing a fifty-meter-wide pit of bubbling liquid rock. A blast of hot wind smote them, even though they were at least a hundred meters away.

Scanner touched a control and dropped back into wheel mode. He braked the cart to a halt.

"I knew this road was too good to be true," he said.

"Is that lava?" Juete asked.

"I would say so, yes. And we're going to have to turn back and find a way around it. I don't want to be cooked trying to cross it, thank you."

"You want me to drive for a while?" Maro asked.

"Not yet. When I get so tired I can't stay awake, then you can drive. Otherwise, I might as well do it myself."

They turned the car and began to retrace their path.

Stark flew his pattern, trying to stay calm, but growing irritated despite himself.

Damn, where
were
they? If they had gone the same way as Sandoz and Chameleon, he would have found them hours ago. Therefore, the group had split up. Which way would they have gone?

Logically, he figured, they would have headed toward the closest starport, that being northeast of the Granite Girdle where the old mine was. But such a path would put them on the desert, and Stark didn't think they were that stupid—not after how canny they had been so far.

Sure, they could wander around on the planet for a while, but they had to know that he could find them easily if he kicked in search modes on the spy sat system.

No, they had to get off world fast, just as he would have to do were he to survive.

How? What was the best way?

The exoframe computer was bright, for what it was. Tactics and strategy were its strong points. He asked it.

"Computer, plot the three most likely routes for a land vehicle to travel from coordinates 56-69-074 east to 57-23-112 west."