And this time they were deafening.
DOC LOOKED across at Raven, who had expertly slid into the driver’s seat to replace Ramona while the wag was still in motion.
“It would appear, my dear, that your immaculately performed maneuver was unnecessary, as we shall shortly be stopping, albeit possibly briefly.”
“Boy, you love those big words, hon,” Ramona muttered sleepily from the bunk, where she lay stretched out with her eyes still closed.
“Then allow me to be a little more succinct—”
“Still too big, hon,” she interrupted.
“Oh, yeah, and you wish you could say those words more often,” Raven said to her, barely keeping the laughter from her voice.
“Woo, yeah,” Ramona replied, in a tone that belied the expression. “Listen, Docky-babe, we don’t usually do the long haul like this, but there have been plenty of times on long stretches where we’ve had to swap over for one reason or another. The big wag drivers, like Ray and Reese and the ones before them, they use jolt and shit to stay awake. I’m not overly fond of that shit, and neither is my girl here.”
“Yeah, look at what it does to you…Why the hell you think they usually drive alone,” Raven pointed out.
“A fair point,” Doc conceded. He was still a little nonplussed at being called “Docky-babe,” but didn’t wish to press the matter. Instead he asked, “And so we slow down gradually before coming to a halt?”
“Well, how the hell else are we going to do it if we don’t want to have those riders smush themselves into the wag’s ass?” Raven demanded.
“That was my point,” Doc replied mildly. “No one has told you by what levels and over what time scale to decrease your speed. There seems to be no way in which you have an operational structure for this.”
Ramona sighed. “There you go again, Docky. Making everything more complicated than it has to be. We look
at the wag in front and adjust according to what it’s doing. Armand baby just leads the way, and we just let him.”
Doc said nothing, but his mind was whirring. He was no expert on the etiquette of trading convoy operation: he would be the first to admit that, and gladly. All the same, it struck him that there was something a little lax about the way they seemed to do things, and to place their trust blindly in a man like LaGuerre. Faith in a leader was a good thing. The example of himself and his friends when it came to Ryan Cawdor was the example that leaped out at him. Yet, at the same time, they had a structure to their group. People knew what was expected of them in an emergency.
That did not seem to exist here, which raised the question of how they had managed to get this far in one piece. And the further question of what would happen to them if a real challenge presented itself.
Doc itched to share this concern. He suspected that he was not alone in having it. Ryan and Jak would probably be unaware of this as yet, having been so isolated.
It would be good to have them back aboard, then, for more than just their own need of rest.
C ODY SAID NOTHING in the second wag. The humiliation of being turfed out of the lead wag just so the guy with glasses could ride with Armand and his piece was still fresh. But he harbored nothing against the glasses guy after that firefight. He had handled it well, and the fact that he had been quick to involve Cody and praise him for his shooting had gone a long way toward soothing those pains.
The stringy, mean-looking shooter was not a man to
harbor finer feelings toward any of his fellows, and in a way he saw no reason why they should stop and endanger themselves for the sake of picking up the bike riders. But—and this was where he prided himself on his ability to be a tactical thinker—he had seen how well they had performed in the firefight, as well. Whoever the fuck these people were that LaGuerre had picked up at Eula’s behest, they were shit hot. And the convoy was low on numbers.
Cody figured that it was playing one lot of odds off against another to stop and pick the good fighters up on the chance that their skills would be needed again, rather than risk losing them to fatigue because of fear of attack once motion ceased. He knew which ones he’d go for under the circumstances, and they were the same ones that the glasses guy had persuaded LaGuerre to take.
Suited him. He had no desire to end up chilled for the sake of a few minutes’ delay and lack of motion. Maybe that was all it was, in the end, that made him figure that the glasses guy was right. They shared the same kind of self-preservation instinct.
“Slow this fucker up, and don’t let that asshole behind crash into us,” he said simply.
The wag driver nodded and began to decrease speed gradually.
“WELL, THAT’S ONE FOR THE BOOKS, like they used to say. We’re supposed to be stopping and Armand said right at the beginning that we wouldn’t be, so it must be something real important to make him change his mind. Either that or your friend with the glasses is real persuasive. Mind you, Eula seems to have taken a real shine to him, what
with persuading Armand to make Cody ride in the second wag, ’cause he’s been with Armand since the beginning. Hell, even longer than I have, which is saying something, I guess. But then, if it means we pick up your friends from the back of the convoy, then it’s got to be a good thing as far as you’re concerned, right? Still, it’s not like him to change his mind once he’s started on a course of action. We’ve never done a straight run without any kind of stop along the way, of course, so mebbe he’s realized that’s it’s not quite as easy as he thought it would be. I dunno. What do you think?”
Krysty blinked and looked into Ray’s questioning eyes. The small, almost wizened old man had eyes that sparkled and burned brightly. Part of that was no doubt due to the stimulants that he was popping regularly, and which stopped him nodding out at the wheel. But part of it was his personality, and the chem only brought this out. She wanted to answer him, but she realized that she had zoned out so completely that she had lost the thread of what he was saying.
“Mebbe,” she said cautiously. “I couldn’t say. You know LaGuerre much better than I do. Mebbe there’s something I don’t know that could account for it.”
It was about as noncommittal as she could get, and from the look on his face, he realized that she hadn’t been listening.
“Hell, I know I go on sometimes, but I kinda thought that you’d be interested, seeing as it’s your people that we’re stopping for.”
“I’m interested in that,” she replied, “it’s just that I don’t know why LaGuerre would want to stop for any
other reason than J.B. has persuaded him that it would be a good idea to pick up the bikers rather than run them into the ground and lose that defense.”
“Okay, so you were listening a little. I know I never stop talking, honey, it’s just that I can’t help it these days. I do it when there’s no one else in the cab, too, y’know, so it’s not just you.”
Krysty smiled at the old wag jockey. “I know, I figured that one out. And it’s not that I don’t care about LaGuerre—on the contrary, the more any of us know about him the better—it’s just that—”
“It’s just that it becomes one long drone after a while. I know, honey, I’m only too well aware of what it sounds like. Don’t you fret, you just ignore old Ray for now, as I ain’t really got much else to say. I’ll just slow the container down and let it all come to a halt. And I’ll just play some tunes while I’m doing it, so you don’t have to hear me talk.”
Despite the words, there was no sign of resentment or sarcasm in the old man’s tone as he turned on the ancient tape player once more. Distorted electric guitars roared out of the speaker, squealing in electric pain before a voice came in again, and his quavery tenor joined in. Something about working on a night shift.
Krysty let the sound wash over her as the container slowed its progress in direct opposition to the tempo of the music.
R YAN WAS KEEPING the bike upright only by the carefully balanced forces of motion and his own iron will. He suspected that Jak was more alert and awake than himself because he had seen the albino hunt; and when Jak did this,
he seemed to switch into a state of being that was almost beyond the limits of human endurance.
But Ryan wasn’t like that. He was strong and he had stamina, for sure. The firefight had, however, taken a lot out of him. His limbs felt heavy, and his muscles ached in places they usually didn’t. The posture of spending so long on a bike was beginning to reach areas of his musculature that weren’t often called into use for such prolonged periods. His eyes were also heavy. His vision, already blurred by the dust and grime on the goggles and in the air around him, was further blurred by fatigue, a dark tunnel closing in at the edges. Without comm transmissions, and with the white noise of the wag and bike roar to act as an isolation blanket, he could feel sleep inexorably closing on him. He shook his head to rattle his brain and waken himself, but all it succeeded in doing was unsettle his balance so that he wobbled precariously on the bike. He was still executing the patrol pattern he had established with Jak, but it was doubtful as to whether he was actually observing anything as he completed the circuit.
So it was that he failed to notice that the convoy was gradually slowing. It was as though he was in his own private hell where nothing existed but the bone-aching fatigue and the monotony of the circuit. It took Jak breaking the circuit and adjusting so that he was riding parallel to Ryan before the one-eyed man realized that something was happening. Even longer before he understood that the convoy was coming to a halt. With Jak still riding parallel, his red eyes dulled behind the goggles, white hair whipping behind him, Ryan slowed his own machine.
The sound of the massed engines grew less in volume, dropped in pitch as gears changed. Then, for the first time since the journey had begun, he was able to hear the faint voice of the Armorer in his ear. At first he thought that he might be hallucinating, hearing something that wasn’t there: it was only after a few moments, such were his reactions dulled by fatigue, that he realized he was hearing the comm tech for the first time since the journey had begun.
“Stay in the center of the blacktop, keep the vantage. Repeat, Ryan, Jak, we’re bringing the convoy to a halt to take you on board so that you can rest up. The wags are slowing gradually. Decrease your own speed. Soon as you can hear this transmission, use the comm mics to respond. They’re open, so all you have to do is speak. When we stop for the transfer, we’re going to stay in the center of the blacktop, to keep vantage. Repeat—”
Ryan heard Jak’s voice, tinny and distorted in his ear over the sound of the wags and the bikes, still only barely audible.
“J.B., read you. Ryan almost out, wondering when fuckers give us break.”
“Almost, but not quite,” Ryan croaked, his own voice sounding alien and distant in his ear. “With Jak on this. Fireblast, I’ll be glad to get some rest.”
Now aware that the convoy was coming to a halt, Ryan regulated his own speed so that it came in line with that of Jak, and of the rest of the convoy. Within a few hundred yards of contact between the riders and the rest of the convoy being reestablished, the convoy eventually rolled to a
halt, the sound of the wag engines dying on the twilight air, being replaced by a silence that was almost as sweet to Ryan and Jak as the still dustbowl air that they could now breathe, untainted by wag fumes, dust and dirt thrown up by the blacktop.
Krysty and Mildred jumped down from the high cabs of the refrigerated container trucks almost before their engine noise had faded on the air. Both had reason. They wanted to escape their respective wag jockeys as much as they wanted to check on Jak and Ryan. They were beaten to their target by Doc, who had been closer.
Jak managed to dismount his bike with ease. He looked tired as the goggles were removed to reveal eyes that were redder than Doc had ever seen, but he had flipped over into hunter mode, and was proving once more his ability to run on empty.
Ryan was finding it harder. He halted the bike, veered to one side, and as he flung his leg across to dismount almost overbalanced, stumbling as it seemed that the weight of the bike would pull it over on top of him. Jak let his machine fall, moving easily across the distance between Ryan and himself to catch the machine before it trapped the one-eyed man.
Machine secured, Ryan found himself saved from falling by Doc’s spindly yet strong limbs.
“Easy, my friend,” Doc said softly, “you have come too far to injure yourself merely by falling over.”
Doc’s good humor was the boost Ryan needed as he righted himself, finding strength from the old man’s gesture.
“Take a lot more than that to take me out, Doc,” he re
plied with as much of a smile as he could muster through his fatigue.
“Good, for there is much we must discuss, I think,” Doc said in more of an undertone.
Krysty and Mildred had reached them as Doc’s murmured imperative died away.
“Shit, Ryan, you look all in. Let me check you,” Mildred said, taking over from Doc and snapping into medic mode, checking the one-eyed man’s remaining orb, as well as his pulse.
“Thought you’d both have to buy the farm out here, lover, the way this coldheart drives his crew,” Krysty added in a tone as low as Doc’s had been. She had, by now, taken over the role of supporting Ryan while Mildred moved on to check Jak. Not that there was much need. The hardy albino was looking as though he was ready to go again, only the layer of dirt and grime and the redness of the skin around his already blood-hued orbs giving lie to this.