Matador - The Omega Cage Part 19

"Jesu," Raze said softly. "You'd better hang onto him. He's a keeper."

"I intend to. But for now, I want to hang onto you. Come on."

She took Raze's hand and led her into the next room.

Stark and Karnaaj faced each other over Stark's desk. For once the warden felt that he held, if not the upper, then at least an equal hand.

He had explained the procedure for locating the escapees. Karnaaj had merely nodded and ordered the two dozen troops he had brought into the field to help Stark's guards. While Stark did not trust Karnaaj's soldiers and was certain Karnaaj felt the same about his guards, he was sure that each of them could control his own troops.

So-rather than an enemy, Karnaaj was, for the moment at least, an ally. Stark would trust him no further than he could shot-put the planet he stood on, and he was certain that once Maro and the others were retrieved the alliance would be off; still, it was a better situation than before.

Except for Juete. He was not yet ready to bargain her away. He loved her, he knew that, and Karnaaj would only use her for a while before he grew bored and destroyed her. Stark did not want that to happen. Somehow he had to find Juete before Karnaaj did, and hide her from the man's grasp. He had some ideas as to how to do that, but they would have to wait until the escapees were located.

In the meantime, he would be polite. And cautious.

Maro dozed. He heard the sounds of the two women making love in the next room, and even caught the faint scent of s.e.xual musk from them. It was exciting, but he felt no particular jealousy of Raze. Juete had told him what she was, and he understood it, or at least thought he did. It had been hard for her, this trek, and he didn't want to add to it. Besides, one could not possess another man or woman -he had learned that in his studies of the spirit. He loved Juete for what she was, not for what he would have her be, and her s.e.xual drive was a large part of her.

Which was not to say that he would mind being in there with the two women, but he hadn't been invited.

Maybe next time, he thought, as he slipped completely back into slumber.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Scanner was like a child with a room full of new toys. Maro smiled as the circuit-

rider babbled about the equipment he'd found.

"I can't believe they left this. Look! The circuits in this control box are worth six months' pay, easy! There's not a spot of corrosion on it! Christus, if I'd had this in the Cage, I could have run the whole place."

They were in the Maintenance building, where a rapidly growing pile of mechanical and electronic components lay spread out on work benches and the floor. Chameleon ran a power socket nearby, stripping nuts from a repellor a.s.sembly, while Raze and Juete pushed one of the carts into the work bay. Sandoz fiddled with a laser torch, and Maro dug through a spare-parts bin, trying to fill Scanner's list. There was the coil-and-arrestor a.s.sembly he needed...

Maro looked toward the work bays. The cart Juete and Raze moved into place stood next to another. They were boxy rectangles with the front end angled into a blunt point, the bodies made of stacked graphites, with a plastic winds.h.i.+eld and no top. The operator sat in front, while two friendly pa.s.sengers could squeeze into small seats behind him. The wheels were fat slunglas radials, two to a side.

The whole unit was maybe three meters long, and a trip of any distance wouldn't be the most comfortable ride anybody had ever taken. But it sure beat walking.

They would need two of them, unless they wanted to sit on top of each other. Scanner was confident that he could get the pair running, though he was having trouble with one of the scavenged repel lor circuits.

"See, we can link the systems, here and here, and get a kind of ground effect. Probably can't balance it good enough to fly more than a meter off the ground, and it'd be better to run on the surface whenever possible. We'll need two sets of controls. I can recircuit the repellor to a slave, here." He pointed to a jury-rigged aluminum box. "But it'll be tricky to run. I can do it direct, through the computer, but manual will be a b.i.t.c.h."

Then he was off in technical land again, spouting electronic language as if it were his native tongue. Maro caught about every fifth word. He understood the gist of it, though. If it worked, they had transportation.

Red light flared behind him. Sandoz had the laser welder working. It was a small unit, about the size of a man's arm, not counting the power supply. That was strapped onto his back like a knapsack. The a.s.sa.s.sin adjusted the controls, and a bright needle a meter long stabbed out from the nozzle. Grinning, Sandoz waved the thing back and forth like a sword.

"Saw part of an old, old flatvid once," he said to no one in particular. "Back from the nineteenth or twentieth century. Had guys running around and fighting with things like this."

Maro turned back to his scavenging. The welder was a tool, but it would also serve just as well as a weapon. Maro was only too aware of that. He had been keeping his eyes open for something more powerful than the flare pistol; he had the feeling he would need it to stay ahead of Sandoz. In the a.s.sa.s.sin's hands, almost anything could be made deadly. Maro only had a few flares left for the pistol, and he wasn't sure of the damage he could do against a man in any event. Especially a man like Sandoz.

The transceiver crackled, and voices went back and forth over the operations channel. Everybody stopped to listen, save Scanner.

The talk centered on the search. After a few exchanges, however, it stopped. Maro let out a relieved breath. Earlier the channel had been alive with new voices. Stark had gotten some help, it seemed, and Commander Karnaaj's name was mentioned at one point. Not good. But at least they hadn't turned the search toward the mining camp. Yet.

"Dain, give me a hand," Scanner said.

Maro complied, helping the smaller man lift a capacitator onto the bench. Scanner busied himself with the heavy plastic device, and Maro stood back, watching. By tomorrow, according to Scanner, they could have one or maybe even both carts working. With luck, they could make the s.p.a.ceport in another couple of days, if the projected speed of fifty klicks per hour came off. They had food-canned and bland, but nouris.h.i.+ng-left behind by the miners. And they had enough fuel to run the carts for a week, if it came to that. If their luck held and the search didn't focus in this direction, they might make it yet.

But as Maro watched Sandoz doing a kata with the laser, cutting down imaginary opponents, he wondered if Stark and Kamaaj were the greatest danger at this point.

"Dead?" Stark repeated.

The voice of his search leader said, "Yessir. We found him buried in a sand dune. Wasn't for the transponder on the cycle, we probably wouldn't have seen him; he hit the sand pretty hard. Only the tail of the vehicle stuck out, and that not far."

"So it was an accident."

Kamaaj leaned forward in his chair, still as stiff as he ever had been, listening to

Stark's conversation. The office seemed very quiet. The tropical night was falling outside, and the dregs of a rainstorm lingered.

"Uh, yessir, had to be. We got a call that he was having mechanical problems

and he would try to make it back to base. Something must have glitched and he

drilled in."

Stark felt his stomach flutter. It sounded reasonable enough; the aircycles were usually dependable, but they had not been designed to operate in full desert. The heat, the sand, anything could have caused a breakdown. There was the call, too.

But it felt odd.

"How did he die? Can you tell?"

"Well, there're no marks on him, except where the sand sc.r.a.ped away part of his

face and shoulder. Looks like his neck and back and one arm were broken. He's got soft spots all over. I'm no medic, but it sure looked like the impact did it."

A beat. "All his gear still there?"

"Yessir. Pulse pistol, rations, radio, everything."

"All right. Continue the search."

After the discom, Stark turned to look at Karnaaj. The SDI man's face was, as

always, unreadable. He asked, "Something bothering you, Warden?"

"You heard the report. One of my men was killed in a cycle accident."

Karnaaj shrugged. "Men die. It's part of being a soldier."

"Something doesn't feel right about it."

"Intuition?" The word seemed an insult.

"Maybe. That's the wrong way for the escapees to be heading. We know they

have a compa.s.s, and there's no civilization for thousands of kilometers in that direction. But I only had one man checking that way before he crashed. Now, there's n.o.body."

"So send another man. It isn't likely they can hide on the desert."

"No. It isn't likely." Then again, he thought, it wasn't likely that anybody would ever escape the Cage at all, much less stay at large as long as this bunch had. An excited voice broke into his thoughts. "Commander Stark!" It was the search leader again.

Stark looked at the com. "Yes?"

"We've found one of them!"

Both Stark and Karnaaj leaned toward the com. "Where?"

The man rattled off a series of coordinates. Stark punched up a computer map as

he said, "Who? Who is it?"

"Was," the voice said. "He's dead. The animals and plants got to him pretty

good, there's not much left, but the computer dent.i.tion matches the teeth to prisoner #769869."

Stark knew the numbers from memory. Berque. The map lit the holoproj field,

and the coordinates flashed a blue dot over the location.

Southeast of the flitter.

Toward the desert.

Stark felt certainty building within him. "What about the others?"

"No sign of them. We have a vector, based on a line from the flitter. They're

heading toward-"

"I know where they're heading," Stark snapped. "The desert. Concentrate your

search in that direction. Half your men." He glanced toward Karnaaj, who nodded. "And half of Kamaaj's troops, too."

"Copy, Warden. Discom."

Stark clenched his fist. At last! They had a direction in which to look! But-why

were they going that way? It made no sense.

"Computer," Stark said, "I want references to any human or mue settlements to the southeast of the on-screen coordinates."

It took less than a second. "No human or mutant settlements extant."

Just as he thought. Were they crazy?

Karnaaj said, "What about the mines?"

"What mines?"

"There used to be mining along the tilt of the edge plate, somewhere in that