“No shit?” She turned back to Alec. “Look, your father told me all about the platform you’ve got up in the sky. They can’t see the raiders—not down under the trees. There’s at least a couple hundred of them linking up together a few klicks from the airport. We’re trying to keep them off balance...”
“It’s a trick,” Kobol insisted.
She scowled at him.
“Where is my father?” Alec asked her.
Angela waved a hand. “Up north... seven, eight hundred klicks from here.”
“And the fissionables?”
“The what?”
So he hasn’t told her everything. “The machines and things that were in these buildings. My father has them up north with him?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. These buildings have been empty for years.”
I’ll bet. “Come on,” Alec said to Kobol, “we’ve got to get back to the airport. If there really are several hundred...”
“There can’t be,” Kobol said.
“I don’t like being called a liar,” Angela snapped. “Especially by a fughead who doesn’t know a tree from a turd.”
Alec bit his lip to keep from laughing. Kobol staggered a step backward; a lanky, helmeted, booted, armed man retreating from this tiny girl.
“Come on,” Alec said, forcing his voice to remain serious. “We can’t afford to ignore her warning. And there’s nothing left here for us. Let’s move out.” He reached for Angela’s wrist. “You can come with us.”
She pulled back slightly. “I can make it on my own.”
Holding onto her wrist, Alec said, “We’ve got the truck here. It’s faster than walking.”
She stopped arguing.
Once they piled aboard the truck and got rolling, Alec radioed Jameson. “Everything’s peaceful here,” his calm voice replied. “No sign of movement except for a few birds.”
“Check with the satellite,” Alec ordered. “Have them make the most intensive scan of this area that they can.”
“They’re halfway on the other side of the globe now,” Jameson answered. “Won’t be back over here for another four hours.”
“Damn,” Alec muttered. “Well, keep a sharp watch. Protect those ships.”
“You betcha,” Jameson said.
Ferret quivered with a mixture of excitement and fear as they crouched in the brush, watching the strange ships sitting on the airfield runway and the handful of men guarding them.
“Now remember,” Billy-Joe whispered, fingering the scar across his chin the way he always did just before a fight started, “once we knock off all them guys, we got to grab their weapons fast. There’s a dozen other gangs spread around this-here airport and they’re all lickin’ their chops over them fancy guns.”
Ferret nodded and bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. But inwardly he was sick with fear. It was one thing to overrun the men standing around those weird flying machines. But the real battle would be among the rival gangs once the strangers had been wiped out.
Grab a gun as quick as you can, he told himself, and then hide in the woods. Stay hidden until Billy-Joe gives the word to get back to camp.
The first sounds of battle came to Alec’s ears while they were still several kilometers from the airfield.
“What’s that?”
It was an odd, muffled sound coming from beyond the ridge ahead of them. Soft thumps, almost like an airlock hatch slamming in a distant corridor.
Alec was sitting up on the laser mount, his legs dangling over the edge of the turntable platform. Angela sat beside him.
She tensed at the sound. “Mortars. Will must’ve made contact...”
Alec yelled down at the driver, “Top speed! Get this truck back to the ships!”
The electric motors whined and strained, but the overloaded vehicle did not seem to move any faster as it labored up the grade to the crest of the ridge.
Angela said over the rushing wind and another trio of distant explosions, “Will Russo... he’s one of your father’s friends. He’s got a small group of us here, trying to tie up the raiders long enough to give you a chance to take off.”
“William Russo,” Kobol snapped. He’d been squatting cross-legged behind them. “So he didn’t die after all; he turned traitor along with Doug.”
Alec twisted around and squinted up into the noon sun to see Kobol. “We ought to put out flankers,” he said. “These woods could be swarming with barbarians.”
“No, not on this side of the airfield,” Angela said.
It was a tense ride. The truck was agonizingly slow, and it seemed to take forever to get through the spots where the tangled trees and undergrowth crowded up to the very edge of the highway. The men kept their weapons in their grips, straining their eyes on the foliage. Alec saw that they were sweating despite the cool shadows of the trees and the wind blowing against them.
