Finally the walls dropped below me on all sides and I was outside. The others cheered.
“Good work, amigo!” shouted Vargas. “Now get us the hell out of here!”
“Absolutely.”
I took us higher, then banked north and put Guardian Citadel behind me — and not a moment too soon.
The others looked back.
“Damn shame we couldn’t finish ‘em off like we wanted to,” said Hell Razor.
“We’ll come back,” said Vargas. “And when we do we’ll bring a few more ranger teams with us. Do the job right.”
Ace still didn’t look comfortable with that sentiment.
Angie, on the other hand was just enjoying the view. “Place would make one hell of an HQ, wouldn’t it?”
Vargas nodded, thoughtful. “Yeah,” he said. “Could be. Could be.”
“Speaking of,” said Hell Razor. “Been a while since we called in.”
“Been a while since their receiver was working,” said Vargas. “But I guess it’s worth a shot. This thing have a radio?”
“Right there,” I said, pointing.
Vargas leaned over me and grabbed the mic, then tuned to the ranger frequency. “Captain Vargas calling Ranger Center, come in?”
For a few seconds there was nothing but hissing static, but then a voice blurted out from the speakers. “There you are, Vargas. Thought you were dead.”
The voice sounded drunk. And, if my spotty secondhand memories were accurate, that was probably true. General Surgrue was a good man, but he tended to fight off the aches from his old war wounds with hundred–proof painkiller.
“No sir, sir,” said Vargas. “Just haven’t been able to reach you.”
“Yeah, tower went down. Robots. Just got it back up last night. Anything to report?”
“Yes sir,” said Vargas. “We have acquired the means to destroy Base Cochise and the computer that keeps pumping out all these death machines, and we’re on our way to shut it down. Hundred and sixty miles northwest of Vegas.”
“Good work,” said Surgrue. “Best news I’ve heard for a month.”
“Well, we still gotta finish the job,” said Vargas. “Don’t suppose you could give us some backup?”
“That far north?” said Surgrue. “Sure, if you got two weeks for ‘em to get there.”
Vargas sighed. “I figured as much. Thanks anyway.”
“No problem.” The radio crackled, and then Surgrue was back. “Oh, almost forgot. Sounds like yer doin’ good work out there. Everybody on your team gets a promotion. Yer all now Brigadier Generals, First Class.”
“Uh, yes sir,” said Vargas. “Thank you, sir. Vargas out, sir.”
Ace raised an eyebrow. “Brigadier Generals? All of you?”
“That’s nothing,” said Angie. “Last month, after the old bear finished his third bottle of the morning, he promoted me to Imperial Scarscalp.”
“That’s a rank?” asked Ace. “What does it mean?”
“Only the general knows,” said Vargas. “The rest of us don’t have a clue.”
The flight to Cochise was breathtaking, but it took me a while to see it that way.
For a while, remembering that earlier flight I’d had in the simulator with all the green fields and the blue lakes, all the people in the parks and on the streets or driving in their cars, all I could do was mourn the world we’d lost, the busy cities, the quiet little towns, the supermarkets and drive–ins and ice cream parlors and smooth highways that everyone back then had taken for granted, that they’d thought would go on forever and ever. I kept looking at the desolation below me, the charred cities, the abandoned towns, the roads that looked like rivers of shattered floor tiles half–buried in the dust, and tried to map that beautiful, prosperous past on top of it. What had that rusted factory looked like when it was shiny and new? What had the crowd been cheering in that stadium? Who had lived in that big old house that now was just a blasted foundation? Had that blackened field been a park, once?
I wanted that lost world so badly I started to hate the ruins that had replaced it. I hated the people living in the ruins too, for making wrecks of what was once perfect and pristine, for using the technological marvels of that lost paradise as washtubs and fire pits and blunt instruments. I wanted to take all that beauty away from the fools who didn’t know how to appreciate it and keep it safe from the bad new world until I found a way to bring the good old world back. I—
Wow.
Damn.
I’d fallen into the mind–trap of the Guardians in about ten seconds flat. It was damned seductive, dreaming of the good old days, but it suddenly occurred to me that wishing to bring back the lost world was exactly the same as me wishing I could somehow become the original version of myself. It wasn’t going to happen. There was no going back, and thinking there was — denying the reality of the present you actually lived in — was a sickness that would only ruin any chance you had of making a better future. You had to work with what you had, and you had to see what you had for what it was, too, instead of endlessly comparing it to things that didn’t exist anymore and never would again.
And that’s when I began to see the beauty unfurled below me for the first time. All the time I had been slogging through the canyons and the hills on foot, all I’d seen was the dust I’d kicked up with my boots as I’d marched along. Up here, I saw the striations in the rocks — layer upon layer of reds, golds, and purples exposed by eons of rivers and rains. From below I’d seen stout towers of rock that meant nothing to me but another obstacle in my way. From above they were fragile fingers of stone thrust up through the earth, reaching for the sky. Gorgeous.
Even the ruins I’d been cursing only moments before had their own kind of beauty, faded and forlorn and etched by the wind, but beautiful nonetheless, like the bones of dinosaurs in the light of a dying sun.
As I started to see the glory of it all, I brought the chopper down closer to the ground, working my way around hills rather than just sailing over them, so I could see all the details. I watched our approach scatter herds of green elk and tri–horns. I saw a pack of waste wolves freeze on a hillside, then start howling as we passed. And the more I saw, the less I wanted it to end. Just like when I had flown in the simulator, all I wanted to do was fly around forever, looking down at the wonders below, soaking them in, but way sooner than I wanted, Thrasher tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to some approaching mountains, then the map.
“The Stonewall Mountains,” he said. “Bear left.”
I angled around the mountains and as I cleared the last crag I saw a concrete dome peeking up amid a forest of stunted evergreens on a hilly plateau to the west. We’d found Base Cochise.
Vargas came up and hung over the back of my seat. “Let’s circle it once, at a distance. See what we’re up against.”
I nodded and banked south, then started making a circuit at a distance of about three miles. The steep sides of the plateau made any approach from the east difficult at best, but as we came around we saw that the ground dipped down into a pass to the southwest wherethe dark ribbon of a road wound north through it. We also saw sunlight glinting off moving metal all along that road — some kind of robot ambush waiting for the unwary.
We continued the circle west and north, but as far away and low as we were, the trees and hills remained in the way, and we couldn’t get a good look at our target.
“I’m getting closer,” I said, and dropped the chopper down to treetop level. I turned in for a straight shot from the east, keeping the hills between us and the dome. As the plateau rose before me I rose with it, and a few seconds later came up over the trees for our first full–on look at the base.