Chains of Freedom (18 page)

Captain Sikes stopped just short of catching the blast. Now they were four. Sikes' illogical sense of doom mounted. He looked at the picture on his comlink—once again he was privileged to view the back of Senator Kirk's head.

"Senator."

She turned.

"Senator, I . . ."

"I take it that you do not have good news for me, Sikes," she said angrily.

"I've lost a man," he said. "But the rebels are on foot now, and we should have them shortly."

"How did the man die?" she asked curiously.

"An explosive device was set up on the bike. I see no tripwires, so I assume that it was a timed charge. They must have estimated how long it would take us to arrive at this point."

"She must know that you're tracking her with infrared," Jessica thought for a second. "OK. Stay to one side of their trail and be careful. She'll no doubt set more traps. You can't kill
them
if
you're
all dead. This RJ is no one's fool. From the data we have on her, it is more than likely that she used to be a high-ranking Elite. So, Sikes, help is on the way. All you have to do is keep a bead on them. In a few minutes, that whole area will be so full of troops that a fart couldn't get out. Just don't lose track of them."

"I won't, Senator," Sikes said. Communication ended.

He looked at his men. Two of them were busy with the body of their fallen comrade. "Leave him. If we don't catch RJ, what happened to him will seem like child's play."

They started off, but without their former enthusiasm, and using much more caution.

Sikes' lower lip trembled. His hands inside his gloves were unnaturally sweaty. He was an Elite. He'd seen combat before. Hell, the odds were in his favor, and more troops were on the way. The rebels were on foot now. The odds were all in his favor. Still . . .

He wondered how well they were armed. Hell, they had to be pretty well armed. They had killed the governor and his entire entourage, not to mention the patrol that had first spotted them. Another charge went off on the trail beside them. One of the men was startled and almost went down. This explosion wasn't as spectacular as the first, because it didn't have the added attraction of the alcohol tank exploding, but it still scared the shit out of them.

Sikes bit his lip to stop the trembling. He knew now that he was fighting something the likes of which he had never fought before. These two fanatics were fighting for a cause. How could men who fought for a paycheck and the dubious glory of plastic medals match their spirit?

Sikes was a Reliance man. He had a Reliance wife and two lovely Reliance children. All his loyalty belonged to the Reliance. After all, he had been raised Elite. He knew in his heart that the Reliance protected and nurtured the people it served. But he couldn't help but respect the people he hunted. They fought with a fervor that he didn't have now, and probably never had possessed.

The thought of a rebel Elite intrigued him. He knew he had never had the inclination. He really couldn't conceive of any Elite rebelling. Elites had it made in the Reliance. They got the best of everything.

He did know one thing. For whatever reason, she had to believe that she was right. Just like Sikes knew
he
was right. After all, that was the way wars got started, and
this
was
war
.

"Damn! I missed!" RJ stopped, and David tried to catch his breath. "They must have figured out what I did, and started to follow the trail to one side." She thought about it for a second, then grinned. "OK, assholes, try this." She took more charges out of her pocket and planted one on either side of the trail, taking care not to disturb the ground too much. After all, she didn't want the infrared to detect that they had done any more than walk by.

"I can't . . . believe it! You're actually . . . enjoying . . . all of this!" David gasped, exhausted. RJ grabbed his hand and started to drag him along. "I . . . don't know . . . if I can . . . go on," David said between gasps.

"Of course you can," RJ said. "You have to. That was the last of the charges."

"Great! No cycle . . . no charges . . . What do . . . we do . . . now?" he puffed. This had all ceased to be fun for him about two miles back.

"Now we improvise, David," she said simply. "Now we use our heads."

Sikes got on the comlink again. This time, Kirk was facing him, and he decided that this was worse.

"Well?"

"I've lost another man, and yet another needs medical attention. Two bikes were destroyed," Sikes informed her. He didn't know how he managed to sound so cool with his heart stuck somewhere in his throat. The wounded man was screaming in the background.

"What happened this time?" Jessica demanded.

"She must have figured out what we were doing. The second charge missed us—it was on the trail, we weren't. She set charges on both sides of the trail this time."

"Imbecile! You should have known that she would change her tactics to match yours. She's obviously timing you. Change your pace. Set no patterns. Go back and forth, on and off the trail. That should throw her off. If she had mines, she'd have used them by now. I will not tolerate failure, Sikes."

"Yes, of course, Senator." This time, it was Sikes that cut the link. He looked at the smoldering remains of the bikes and the rider.

"You, ride with him."

The man did as ordered, in spite of his barely functional leg.

"What can you do to me, Senator?" Sikes mumbled. "If we fail, there won't be any of us left to punish."

Sikes was following the other bike, so it was that bike's driver who screamed out in pain. Not Sikes.

The lead bike fell. Sikes stopped short and jumped off, laser in hand. He scanned the area, but saw nothing. The man held his upper arm. It was a nasty wound, and the blood flowed freely. Sikes helped him to bind the wound then he looked at the trap.

The limb of a small tree had been sharpened into a spear. The top of the tree had been tied down, and a rope wrapped half way around the base of another tree. The rope was then stretched across their trail at chest height, and carefully placed on the small limb of another tree. Crude, but obviously effective. The secondary was lucky. If he'd been any further away, the spear would have struck him in the head. Any closer, and it would have hit him with enough force to penetrate a limb or his body cavity.

Sikes once again called the Senator. This time, he was in no mood for pleasantries. "I've got good news and bad news." Was that hysteria in his voice? He couldn't be sure, and he didn't really care.

"What do you mean?" Kirk asked.

"The good news is that she's out of charges. The bad news is that she doesn't need them." Sikes moved his arm in an arc, so that Jessica could see the trap. "So, tell me how I plan for that. I don't have enough men to go on."

This attitude did not please Jessica. "They are only two people on foot in the dark . . ."

"And I am the only one in this troop that isn't badly wounded. We can't go on. If you send us on, you send us to our deaths, Kirk."

"If you come back here without their heads, Sikes, I will kill you myself. Now quit wasting time. Don't you realize that you are giving her time to set another trap?"

Sikes moved out. This time he took the lead. He moved cautiously, slowly. He was resigned that he was riding to his death. He had no doubt now. That was why he had felt strangely from the first. That was the reason for his dread. He was going to die.
It's true
, he thought,
foresight is real. Too bad I'll be dead before I can tell anyone.

She'd set another trap. This one took even less time. They really couldn't afford to rest, but David's labored breathing told her that they must. She was tired, and she knew that this meant that David must be on the brink of total collapse. The fact that he had held up this long was a credit to his strength and his force of will.

The Reliance would be deploying more troops. At any moment, their running could shove them right into another patrol. These men were just the dogs sent in to tire them out. To bark until the others were in position, and then point the way.

Plans formed in her mind, and were discarded. She needed to know more about the situation to make any real plans. If she had had time to fiddle with the computer, she could figure out what they were sending in. She would have been able to call up maps and try to figure out where they were in relation to the troops, but that could take as much as thirty minutes. That was thirty minutes they didn't have. She was running out of tricks, and they were running out of time.

Sikes barely saw the rope in time to stop. If he hadn't been looking so carefully, he wouldn't have seen it at all. This time, the rope was just inches above the ground. Sikes got off the bike. He picked up a rock, slung it at the rope and watched in horror as the area he would have occupied burst into flame. The stench of battery acid bit his nostrils, his eyes teared, and he retreated to a safer distance, coughing. It was clear, now. She was a devil. This trap was the worst thing Sikes had encountered in all his years with the Reliance. Apparently, she had rigged a tree as before. Instead of a spear, however, she'd attached the opened battery in the improvised catapult. When the rope was tripped, the highly volatile acid was slung over the target area.

Sikes was old enough to remember a time when batteries contained a much more stable acid, but like everything else, the Reliance had been forced to start using a cheaper and less stable alternative. This stuff was less efficient in some ways, but much more lethal. Instant combustion—what a horrible death!

Slowly, it dawned on Sikes that this trap was even more subtle. The recent drought made the forest a tinderbox. Already the fire raged out of control. In a few hours, it would successfully block the deployment of troops from the east, and that was where the roads were. He got on his bike quickly and passed the flames before he, too, was blocked off. Sikes called Jessica on the move. "She's set the forest on fire," he reported calmly."You'd better send in some extinguisher planes, or we'll be completely cut off."

"Immediately. Just get after her," Jessica ordered.

Damn it, they were going to fart around and let her get away!
She quickly checked her map. She already had troops deployed in the area. A quick check of wind direction and velocity told a story she didn't like.

"Damn!" She checked again to be sure. "They're heading right into the fire." She got on her communicator. "Captain Fry, the rebels have started a fire and it's headed your way."

"We see it, Senator," the Captain said. "I think we can beat it and join Sikes."

"No, you don't have time. If you don't retreat, you will be stuck in that box canyon. You have to go west," Jessica ordered urgently.

Captain Fry beat his wrist communicator against a tree. "What's that, Senator? Can't hear you." He hit it again, "We've got a bad link—must be the fire."

"Damn it, man . . ."

"You're fading, Senator," Captain Fry hit his wrist unit hard enough to break it. He looked up at the secondary soldier who stood beside him.

"Oh, dear! My wrist com seems to have broken." He nudged the man, and said jokingly, "Give a woman a title, and she right away thinks she knows everything. Come on, let's go give Sikes a hand."

The extinguisher planes didn't arrive in time to save Captain Fry and his troop. Seventeen soldiers burned to death in the box canyon. Death by fire was terrible. Terrible to hear, terrible to see, but the most terrible thing of all was the smell.

It was an even more terrible thing to live through.

Alexi pulled himself through the flames. How he had escaped with no more than the equivalent of a bad sunburn was nothing short of a miracle. His sleeve was on fire. He stopped, dropped and rolled, then jumped up and ran again. He couldn't stop long. To stop was to die.

The smoke made him cough, and his brain was a blur. Too much horror. Dead, all dead. He'd been with some of those people since he'd made it to third class. They hadn't died like soldiers. They hadn't died in battle. They had died screaming like terrified children as the flames engulfed them.

He'd worked hard to make it to third class. He'd seen quite a bit of action. But none of his experience or training had prepared him for this.

Alexi was ambitious. He wanted to make it to Elite, then on to governor—maybe even Senator. It was a wild dream, a dream of power. He'd worked hard.

Then he'd almost died in a fire.

Till now, he had never seen how intangible his dream was. Now he realized the absurdity of it. He'd been third class for six years. He'd been passed over for promotion to Elite twelve times.

Who was he kidding? He was forty-five years old. At his age, if he hadn't been promoted to Elite, it wasn't likely that he would be. Hell, they hadn't even offered him a wife yet. Governor Alexi, Senator Alexi, what a fool he'd been.