Sky Raider

“Well, I found a few grens.”

Excellent! Any ammo?” Mildred asked.

“No.”

“Damn.”

Just then, the concrete floor shook with a low rumble.

“Is that a quake?” Krysty asked, looking over a shoulder, her hair flexing as if stirred by secret winds.

“No, too weak,” Ryan snapped as the sound increased in volume and strength.

“Mother of god…that’s the blast door!” Mildred gasped in astonishment, dropping an ammo box. It hit with a crash, spilling brass rounds across the floor. “Somebody is coming inside!”

The startled friends turned to stare at the front of the redoubt where a wide tunnel opened in the wall. The distant end of the zigzagging tunnel couldn’t be seen, but there was no mistaking the sound of the powerful electric motors hidden inside the walls as they started to cycle open the massive nuke-proof doors that lead to the world outside.

THE CRATER WAS blisteringly hot under the sun, the hard stone ground seeming to reflect the solar heat until the temperature became almost unbearable.

Carrying a small umbrella, Sandra Tregart relished the meager shade it gave as she watched the almost-naked eunuchs toiling under the harsh sunlight. The lean men were wearing only sandals and loincloths, their sweaty skin burned to a deep, rich brown. The eunuchs were crawling along the rocky ground, removing every bit of windblown trash or sharp rock from the volcanic ground. The predark tires of the Angel were heavily patched, and every bump threw off their balance and shook the plane badly. Sometimes, it was difficult for her to gain enough speed for take-off. Thus every obstruction, no matter how small, had to be removed. It was a dirty job, inching along the strip that served as the runway, but Sandra refused to have slaves do the job. Slaves always wanted to rebel, and couldn’t be trusted. The eunuchs were fanatically devoted to her, and so only they could perform the vital task.

That is, Sandra griped, unless the Demon worked. Then all of her prayers would be answered. After which…

From the tent that served as the eunuchs’ barracks, she could smell roasting meat and bread. After she had bombed Indera ville out of existence, her eunuchs had ridden the last few horses there to loot the ruins. In return, she gave them the first pick of the food. Naturally, the rest went to Thunder ville, but her men were fed before the ville folk. After all, they guarded her at night, and, what was more important, they protected the Angel. Although few enemies had ever gotten onto the impact crater that served as an airfield.

Jagged peaks of ancient lava formed an impassable barrier around the crater. There was only one break in the rocky walls, and it was closed with a barrier of tires filled with rocks and topped with rusty barbed wire. Flanking both sides of the small door were wooden sentry towers containing armed eunuchs who trained every day with their homie crossbows. They could ace a vulture on the wing at a hundred yards. Neither man nor mutie got close to the wall, and nobody had ever even touched the gate without her permission. Anything that headed in its direction was chilled on sight. Even her brother Edmund had been wounded once for coming too close. To her father and mother, Sandra had professed her most sincere apologies for the terrible accident. But in private, she had praised Digger for his marksmanship and promoted him to sec chief for the airfield.

Pausing on the barren field, Sandra frowned at the thought. Such a pity that Digger was gone. Perhaps Stone would take his place. After the teen had been properly altered, of course. She smiled at that, and continued her inspection tour of the airfield. Everything needed to be perfect this day. A lot depended on the success of her newest experiment. Black dust, the whole world depended on its success!

Glancing skyward, Sandra frowned at the orange and red sky, streaks of black ripping across the polluted heavens as endless lighting crashed amid the roiling death clouds. It was the same way almost every day. But on rare occurrences, the wind would shift direction and the cloud cover would break. That was when blue sky would show through, tempting her into the beyond, calling a sweet siren song of freedom. She turned and walked away. But it was a dream unfulfilled. No matter how quickly she got the Angel off the ground, the clouds would roll back in to the fill the momentary gap and steal away the blue once more. Her brother had often warned that even if she made it through to the clean air above, she would be trapped on the other side, maybe for days, or even weeks. Sooner or later her plane would run out of fuel and she would sail powerless into the roiling chem-polluted clouds to suffer a death beyond words. It would be unlikely that even her bones would make it through to fall upon the nuke-blasted soil below.

Sandra had quickly learned that flying was a matter of staying high enough so spears couldn’t hit the Angel, yet low enough to avoid the deadly sky. It was a balancing act, but the results were worth the terrible risks involved. The freedom of flying! The incredible power!

Just then, an eruption of steam caught her attention, and she headed toward a group of swearing men. They were working around an iron van set on top of a brick hearth. A couple of bare-chested boys were shoveling scraps of wood into the banked fire under the vat, while a second group adjusted pressure valves. Coming out of the top of the vat was a large coil of copper tubing that arched downward to dribble a clear fluid into a fuel container. As it was filled, a man capped it tight, and slipped another container under the end of the tubing without spilling a single drop. Nearby, a lone man with a horribly scarred face was chopping up cactus plants and piling the juicy innards into a plastic bucket. With every burst of steam from the pressure valve, the disfigured man flinched as if to protect his scars.

Forming a semicircle around the still were eight large tents. One was for Sandra’s ground crew to take shelter in during an acid rain storm, the floor raised high with rocks and old sheets of plastic to protect them from the runoff. The next was her home, with a bathtub for washing and a lockbox full of weapons and precious ammo. Two more tents were the workshops, another contained the Angel, and the rest were what Sandra called her lab, miscellaneous parts and bolts of cloth salvaged from ruins across the land. The last tent held the Demon.

“How is it going, Carter?” Sandra asked, stopping a short distance from the still. Between the crackling fire and the hissing steam, she couldn’t understand how the men survived the awful heat. That was how Karl had been disfigured. He’d fallen asleep from the heat and caught a steam blast in the face. Incredibly, he’d lived, but never spoke again, and flatly refused to work the still again.

“Good afternoon, my lady,” Carter said in a squeaky voice, grinning widely. Sweat poured off his hairless chest as if he were standing in the rain. “We just finished a new batch of shine. And Karl harvested enough cactus for a second batch. We’ll start it fermenting tonight.”

“Excellent,” she said, mopping her forehead with a cloth. Already her white shirt was soaked, the thin material clinging to her skin. None of the men seemed to notice. “Take ten gallons and fill the tanks on the Demon. The wind is good, and I’m going to try again while we still have sunlight.”

“But ten gallons is barely a quarter tank, mistress,” Carter began in his child’s voice. “How will you know if the Demon can be trusted until you fill the tanks completely?”

From under the shadow of her umbrella, the woman stared in growing anger at the giant.

“Yes, of course, you’re right. Ten is more than enough,” he burbled, cowering slightly. “I’ll get them myself.”

As the colossus lumbered away, Sandra allowed herself a private smile. She knew that Carter meant well, but the man was overly concerned with her safety. He was so large many believed him to be part mutie. The man stood almost seven feet tall, his wide barrel chest rippling with hard muscles. Yet his face was as smooth as a newborn infant’s, his body completely without hair. Castrating the men working on the airfield had been her father’s idea. And she knew that the main purpose of the mutilation was merely to keep her safe from the lustful advances of the sec men and to safeguard the ville throne from any bastards. But it was her mother who suggested using boys too young to notice her figure and face. Sandra had decided to do both, and the sexless youths grew utterly devoted to their female master.

Many years ago when she had first dragged the Angel to the crater, a coldheart had leaped out of hiding in a mountain pass and clubbed her to the ground. As the man started to rip off her clothing, the eunuchs leaped upon the man and literally ripped him apart with their bare hands. The story soon spread to other villes, and nobody had ever bothered Sandra again on her many journeys across the Deathlands.

Once, long ago and far to the east, she had found a graveyard of hundreds of predark planes, along with dozens of other things, machines that looked like soap bubbles but with rotors on top. Sandra had no idea what those could be, and so ignored them. She almost could have believed that the soap bubbles were also flying machines, except for the fact that they had no wings, nor anyplace for a wing to be attached.

Now, most of the planes in the junkyard had only been rusted skeletons, but a few of the machines stored inside a crumbling building were still intact, and one seemed repairable. Unfortunately, the yard was infested with some mutie form of millipede. With no other choice, Sandra had set fire to a forest to cause a stampede of animals through the yard. The millipedes attacked, eating everything that came their way, and in the bloody carnage, she and some eunuchs had been able to steal the Angel.

Over the next few years she had gone back twice more for spare parts, cloth and engines. But on the last raid, Sandra lost five eunuchs to the millipedes and still carried a nasty scar on her arm where one of the bugs had attached itself and started burrowing into her flesh before she’d doused it with shine and burned it off.

Someday, when she had a large enough army of sec men, the woman planned to return to the junkyard, slaughter the bugs and build a wall around the yard and make it her private ville. But that was for the future. This day, she had to worry about the Demon.

Heading for the last tent, Sandra heard a pervading hooting. Inside one of the tents to her left was a row of iron cages with stickies inside, bowls placed underneath to catch the natural gluelike resin they oozed when tortured. A red-hot knife could get her more glue than boiling the bones of a hundred horses. And the bones of people produced very little glue, even if they were red-raw and fresh.

Entering the last tent, Sandra lowered her umbrella and savored the delicious drop in temperature. The roof of the predark tent somehow blocked most of the sun’s heat, and a cooling breeze from the nearby river ruffled the edges of the cloth along the ground. Wonderful.

Using stiff fingers to fluff out her hair and help it dry faster, Sandra emotionlessly studied the Demon resting in the middle of the tent. A humming man was energetically polishing the wooden propeller while another worker checked the pressure on a tire with a patched hand-pump.