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twitched the reins on the horses drawing the wag, and it began to pick up
speed to match, leaving the baron gasping for breath as it pulled away from
him.
Leaving the main drag behind, the motorized wag and the convoy behind began to
pick up the pace, heading down the blacktop until it could turn for cover and
head toward the redoubt. As the speed increased, the outriders let rip with
shrieks that ripped across the quiet of the night sky, spurring their horses
to a gallop as they headed off to recce the territory ahead.
The chase was on.
Chapter Ten
It was as the Illuminated wag turned off the blacktop road and started to roll
across the fields toward the beginnings of the wooded areas that inspiration
struck Dean. The younger Cawdor had been keyed up, like the others in the wag,
and while the others had made little attempt to alleviate their boredom, he
had been moved to tinker with the section of burned out comp that was near his
seat.
At first, they had tried to keep the Illuminated helmets in place, to
acclimatize themselves to the constriction so that it
wouldn't prove a handicap when they had to assume their disguise entering the
redoubt, and wouldn't slow them unnecessarily when it came to a firefight. But
the heavy metal shells and the Plexiglas visors were too irritating to the
wag's inhabitants to be endured for long.
Gloria removed hers first, shaking loose her long, flowing red hair, and
scratching her itching scalp.
"Gaia, I don't know how they put up with that," she spit.
"I'll go for that," Ryan agreed, taking his hands off the wheel long enough to
remove the encumbrance before correcting the wag's course once more. "If I
kept that on for the entire journey, I'd be too triple crazed to think
straight in a firefight anyway."
They continued, the tension of imminent battle putting paid to all
conversation. All would be glad when the journey was over, and the battle
about to begin. Each fighter was wrapped in his or her own private world:
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Mildred concerned with the virus; Gloria and Tammy thinking about the Gate,
following close behind;
Krysty concerned with the health of her friends; Jon, the first
Gate male to really take part in such an action, wondering if he was up to the
challenge ahead Ryan concerned with whether his plan would work; and Dean&
The comp near him was the communication and directional system. He was seated
where the Illuminated One who operated the system would work, the swiveling
seat turning to face the now dead control panel and screens.
To alleviate the tedium of the journey, and so as not to dwell on the
firefight ahead, Dean began to take an interest in the comp. Losing himself in
the old tech, he began to tinker with the panel. Beneath the desktop
arrangement of the comp was a maintenance panel inset into the desktop itself,
lying flush.
Running his fingers along the smooth metal, Dean found a catch that enabled
him to spring the panel open. Sliding off his seat so that he was kneeling on
the floor and was therefore able to see the underneath of the desktop, he
pulled down a series of fiber optic cables that connected the dead system with
the electrical supply cable that had been shot out beneath the wag during the
earlier conflagration.
Tammy, noticing what he was doing, came over and knelt beside him.
"What are you doing, sweets?" she asked him.
Ignoring the sudden rush of feeling as she referred to him thus and that made
him almost forget what he actually had been about to do Dean concentrated on
the cables and pulled at the loosest. A long stream of cable came out from
beneath the desk until it spooled on the floor around them, ending with a
burned out and severed end.
"See this?" he asked her. "This is the cable that powered up the comp and the
radio. It got shot out when the wag was in
Crossroads. But I reckon that, if I reroute the emergency into here, then
mebbe we can get the comp working again."
Tammy gave him an askew glare. "Okay. And why would you want to do that?"
Dean shrugged. '"Cause I'm bored, and it'll take my mind off things. That's
all."
Tammy smiled. "Good a reason as any, I guess."
Then, while the Gate warrior watched, Dean took one of the other cables, which
he had traced by feel to be running toward the front of the wag, and pulled at
it.
"Watch you don't blow the wag's backup power," Krysty said with some concern
as she watched from the front of the wag.
"We don't want to get stranded while you have to patch up your own mistakes."
Dean grinned ruefully. "I wouldn't risk it if I thought it might do that. This
cable'll just allow me to tap into the power, it won't make the engine cut
out. I figure they'd have more than one outlet from the backup as a kind of
fail safe."
"Yeah, remind me of that if Ryan has to stop and reroute it all again because
of you," Krysty replied, wincing as Dean tugged
and snapped the cable, a shorter length of it coming out from beneath the
desk, so that there were now two spools of cable around him and Tammy.
"Tammy, you take this for a moment and keep it out of my way," Dean requested,
handing her the shorter length. Then, while the woman was holding the cable
aloft, he took the useless, burned out cable and pulled it loose from the
desk. Discarding the long loop of redundant fiber optic, he took the cable
from
Tammy's hand and stripped the covering back, so that the loose strands of
fiber optic sprayed out in a fine mist of substance around his hand. Selecting
some of the ends, he delved beneath the desk and attempted to connect them to
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the junction from which he had ripped the useless cable.
"This'll either work or give me something to think about," he muttered as he
tried to make the two pieces connect.
"Shit, it's actually working!" Gloria said as the desktop comp spluttered
twice, the lights flaring up briefly before dying away once more.
"Do we actually want it to work?" Mildred asked Ryan, who so far had said [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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