The door slammed open. One of the invaders was inside. A woman. Small, wiry. Her face was hidden in a black stocking with holes for her eyes. She stood tense, balanced for quick movement, silently begging the guards to move.
The four men had started to roll away and bring their weapons up, but froze before the threat of that eagerly quivering weapon. Only their eyes moved-shifting from the woman to the other raiders, the stocky man, masked like the woman, another, taller man, a fourth raider just visible behind him. The stocky man pointed a gloved finger at one of the guards. “Stand,” the woman said, her voice like cracking ice.
The guard got slowly to his feet. The fourth raider came quickly and silently into the room, a stubby man with muscles on muscles, arms, neck and chest straining the thin knit shirt he wore. His hands were gloved, supple leather gloves he wore like a second skin. He pulled a coil of wire from his pocket, jerked the guards’ arms behind him, wound a bit of wire round his thumbs, snipped it off the coil, twisted the ends together. He came round in front of the man, pushed him in the chest with a deceptively gentle shove that sent him staggering against the wall then down onto the floor. He squatted and wired the man’s ankles together.
One by one the others were immobilized, quickly, efficiently, with no unnecessary moves or sounds. The raiders didn’t bother with gags. Apparently they didn’t care how much noise the guards might make once they were gone. The woman who’d given all the orders was last from the room. At the door, she turned. “Yell and I’ll be back. You won’t like that.” She vanished after the others, pulling the door neatly and quietly to behind her.
She joined two of the smaller women who were standing guard. The rest of the raiders were moving back and forth between a large vehicle-like the van but broader, bulkier, a brutal mass to it, a canvas top stretched over ribs. They were packing boxes and metal containers into it, filling it with supplies of all sorts, breaking open the larger boxes and distributing the contents in the cracks and crannies between the smaller boxes. One man was working over a number of two-wheeled vehicles, installing bits and pieces, pouring something that sloshed from a can into the small tank on each of the vehicles. The work went on and on, silent and quick and impressively efficient. No questions, no fumbling about, no hesitation over what to take.
When they were finished loading, they pulled uniforms like those of the guards over their own clothing, took off their masks and put on shiny black helmets whose smoked visors hid almost as much of their faces. Georgia looked around, made a soft hissing sound. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Fill a couple cans for our friend. Put them up front, that’s the only space left.”
The short, powerful fighter brought back two large metal containers painted the color of the uniforms. While he stowed these in the front, the others wheeled the small vehicles into place around the large one, six in front, six behind; they mounted them, feet on the floor holding their metal mounts erect. The guarding women swung the great double doors open, then ran back to the big brute, scrambled inside the cab, two sitting in view, one crouching behind the seats. The riders on the two-wheelers stamped down, the warehouse filled with a coughing throbbing roar much louder than the purr of the van. Moving with ponderous majesty, the procession edged out of the building. The last two riders closed the doors and after they were through the gates, closed those, replaced the sheared padlock with another lifted from the warehouse, then they rolled on, leaving the place looking much as they’d found it.
They went unchallenged through the silent streets. A few drunks stumbling along muttered curses after them, several night-shifters looked curiously after them, but no one seemed to question their activities, no one tried to stop them; what was visible of their faces was disciplined, their bodies were alert but relaxed; they were soldiers about an everyday task, nothing to fuss about.
The Mirror blinked.
There was a glow of pink low down in the eastern sky and the convoy was rumbling along a broad empty highway, moving in and out of patchy fog without slackening speed. The ocean was close, a few hundred yards on the far side of a line of scraggly sandhills high enough to block the view of the water. A little later they came round a broad shallow bend and into a clear patch of road, then slowed abruptly enough to startle Serroi.
On one of the higher and weedier sandhills a rider sat his beast like a statue carved from the darkest cantha wood, his hands crossed on the saddle in front of him, his long black hair lifting on the wind. He waited until the convoy turned onto a drifted, broken side road that slanted off from the highway a short distance past his knoll, then he brought his mount around, galloped recklessly down the slope and clattered ahead of the machines onto the main street of a deserted and half-destroyed coast village. More clatter of hooves-half a dozen others came riding down the street to meet him, short dark youths, long black hair held out of their faces by beaded leather bands or strips of bright cloth. They wore black trousers, skimpy knitted tops with no sleeves and scuffed, high-heeled boots, and rode like demons, as if they were sewed to their mounts; they came swooping around him waving their weapons, but maintaining a disciplined silence all the more impressive when taken with their exuberantly grinning young faces. They slowed to a calmer pace and rode ahead of the convoy along the shattered street.
Many of the houses and stores were smashed into weathered splinters, a deep layer of dried muck cracked into abstract shapes, graying every surface to a uniform dullness, drifts of sand piled against every semi-vertical wall, sand dunes creeping slowly over the wreckage, beginning to cover what was left of the town. Here and there, by accident of fate and the caprice of the storm that had wrecked the town, a building stood more or less whole. The riders dismounted in front of the open loading door of one of these, an abandoned warehouse, and led their beasts inside.
Georgia held up his hand, stopped the convoy, dismounted and wheeled his machine after the dismounted riders. In a few minutes the street was empty, the big machine and the little ones tucked neatly away into the empty interior of the building.
Georgia walked over to the lounging youths, tapped the leader on the shoulder. “Angel.” He raised thick blond brows. “Run into trouble? Where’s the other half?”
“Heading home with a new cavvy. We lifta buncha good horses from ol’ Jurgeet’s; don’ worry, boss, they scatter and go way round. Nobody going to follow ’em through the brush. Us here, we each got a spare horse; seven of us c’n haul as much stuff as the dozen, yeah.” He grinned suddenly, his pitted face lighting into a fugitive comeliness. “And boss, we leave his prizes alone; don’t want his goons on our tails, besides they too delicate, not worth shit except running.”
Georgia chuckled, shook his head. “Long as you’re loose and considering it’s Jurgeet. Take your horse thieves and brush out the tire marks from where we turned off the highway to here. I want to get this place neated up before the sun’s out and they maybe send choppers after us.”
“Uh. We go.” Another flashing grin. Whistling his companions to him, Angel trotted out of the large room.
Georgia wiped his smile away, turned to frown at his raiders. Several were working together to peel the canvas off the ribs, the rest were stripping off the uniforms, folding them neatly and putting them aside against future use. “Liz,” he called.
The small intense woman who’d done all the talking at the armory ran a bony hand through her mop of coarse black hair, came over to him with short quick steps. “What is it?”
“Pick up a pair of binoculars and head back to the highway; find a place where you can get a clear view down the road. Dettinger should be along fairly soon. If he’s got lice on his tail, I want to know it.”