She put her legs through the opening and locked into the cable system.
“You good?” Alfred asked.
She nodded and slid out, using the brake lever on her harness to slow her descent. The wind wasn’t bad, though it did rock her body slightly.
For a moment, she took in her surroundings without the aid of her night-vision goggles. Like most of the poisoned surface, this place was the color of rust. The ocean lapped a shoreline rimmed with fish poisoned by the petroleum spill.
The piers had broken away, leaving slabs and concrete pilings protruding from the water like broken bones. The beach was littered with pieces of a bridge and the craters of exploded land mines, but she saw no evidence of Sirens or other monsters.
She pulled on the brake lever again, slowing her descent to barely a crawl. Her boots hit the deck a moment later.
After getting out of her harness, she gave a thumbs-up, and Alfred’s team began winching the cable toward the ship.
“Mags, let’s go!” Les yelled from the back of the armored troop transport, which rode on tank tracks instead of wheels.
“Where’s General Santiago?” she asked.
“He must be staying belowdecks,” Les said with a shrug.
A Cazador opened the back hatch to the troop transport, and she ducked inside. Les joined her on a bench facing the warriors already inside.
Magnolia nodded to them, but looking back at her through their oval eyepieces, they may as well have been machines. Several more Cazadores squeezed into the vehicle before the hatch banged shut. The troop transport jolted, then swung slightly coming off the deck.
The front windshield provided the only view in the armored truck. Magnolia watched them rise past the warship’s command island. They rose above it, swaying slightly.
On the shore, tendrils of lightning illuminated the brown central tower of the outpost. Discovery pulled them higher until even the tower was out of sight.
The cables brought them all the way to the docking area underneath the airship, where cargo brackets locked the transport into place. Alfred used remote arms to secure the vehicle.
“Cargo secured,” Timothy said. “Proceeding to target.”
The ship’s thrusters kicked on, and the AI piloted them across the water, up the beach, and over the tower. They hovered there for a few moments while Team Raptor launched the drone.
“Cricket is deployed,” Michael confirmed over the channel.
“Stand by for landing,” Timothy said.
The cables lowered, and the troop transport’s stiff suspension jolted as the tracks touched down. The path they were on wound through a ravine that had to be on the north side of the refinery.
The hatch opened again, and two Cazador soldiers got out to unhook the cables. As Discovery lifted away to pick up and deliver the first of the two tanker trucks, Magnolia could see the road now, or what was left of it. Cracked red dirt covered most of the asphalt. The winding path led back to the shoreline and the central tower of the outpost.
Discovery pulled away and flew back out to sea.
An hour and a half later, both empty fuel tankers were on the ground and convoyed with the transport between them.
“Good luck, Captain,” Timothy said from the bridge of Discovery. “And good luck to you, Magnolia.”
She grinned at that. “Thanks for remembering me, bud.”
“Keep the airship in range,” Les said. “Just in case.”
“Roger that, sir,” Timothy replied.
The soldiers slammed the hatch, and Magnolia looked ahead through the windshield as the transport set off. Tracks crunched over the battered roadbed. The tanker ahead blocked most of the view, but what she could see was mostly barren wasteland.
Purple vegetation grew along the path and snaked over the road. A few minutes into the drive, the convoy had to stop for the Cazadores to clear the dense flora.
Flames shot away from the lead truck, and a soldier with a flamethrower walked into view. He raked the fire over the dense wall of foliage, which sizzled and curled back from the heat.
The troop transport drove on, the man with the flamethrower walking alongside.
A transmission from Timothy crackled over the encrypted channel.
“Captain Mitchells…” The voice was barely audible through the white noise.
It came again a moment later. “Captain Mitchells, do you copy?”
“Lots of interference, but I copy,” Les replied.
“We’re picking up some very big life-forms in your sector,” said the AI. “Do you have eyes on anything?”
Magnolia could hear the transmission well enough to catch the emphasis he put on “very.” Les moved with her for a better look out the windshield.
“You guys see anything up there?” he asked.
The driver said nothing, either not understanding English or not pleased at having guests in his vehicle.
“Timothy, where do you see them?” Les said over the channel. “Sky or land? I can’t see shit.”
“Any of you speak English?” Magnolia asked the Cazadores sitting in the troop hold.
One of the men replied, “Un poco, nada más.”
“Ask your buddies if they can see anything up there,” she said.
The soldier shook his helmet. “No comprendo.”
Magnolia grunted, then reached up and turned the spin wheel to open the top hatch to the turret. Before anyone could stop her, she climbed up for a view.
A mounted machine gun with a large barrel was attached to the armored turret. She unslung her laser rifle, preferring its proven firepower to the archaic machine gun.
Ahead of their convoy, she spotted several low warehouses, a row of silo-shaped structures, and a three-story brick building that had taken some damage over the centuries. She didn’t study it long enough to determine whether the destruction was from Mother Nature or something else. Right now, other matters took precedence.
She brought up the laser rifle and scanned above for male Sirens.
Seeing nothing, she watched the surface for movement. Through her scope came a familiar view from other tropical wastelands: spindly purple vines, bushes with fishhook barbs, and the occasional thorn tree.
Nothing moved in the green hue of her optics. Switching to infrared, she picked up several small heat signatures, but nothing that would be a threat from this range.
Magnolia opened the channel to Discovery. “Timothy, I’ve got nothing in view besides a few oversized insects.”
The reply hissed into her ear. “That’s odd,” said the AI. “The scans are now showing nothing. Must have been a glitch.”
Magnolia felt like sliding back down into the shelter of the vehicle. Something was out there. She could feel a presence, but she couldn’t see anything.
The brakes screeched on the oil tanker ahead of them. It turned off toward the row of silos that contained the diesel fuel the Cazadores needed for their warship.
“Mags, you got anything up there?” Les asked over the channel.
“Nothing but poisoned earth and some truly nasty-looking plants.”
“Get back down here, then,” he said.
She did another scan of the cracked earth surrounding the settlement. The terrain here was mostly flat and barren but with a few random thickets of barbed purple bushes, and a lone tree whose skeletal branches reminded her of arms raised in prayer to an uncaring deity.
Lightning speared the horizon. The boom of thunder rattled the turret, but she stayed there, watching what appeared to be something slithering across the cracked earth.
“Wait a second,” she said into her comm.
Bringing the laser rifle’s scope up to her visor, she aimed at the first mutant creature and then almost laughed at what appeared to be a snake with two heads.