None could argue with that statement.
With the rising sun the next morning, they began again. Working once more in shifts, they searched the last area of debris. It was empty.
“Fireblast! What the fuck happened to him?” Ryan seethed with impotent rage. “He can’t have just vanished. Mebbe…mebbe he was thrown beyond us.”
“How could that have happened?” Krysty queried. “For Gaia’s sake, Ryan, look around you. Where else could he have been? There is nowhere else.”
Ryan slowly turned 360 degrees. Beyond the circumference of the debris there was nothing except flat dust bowl earth. Nowhere that the Armorer could be hidden, chilled or alive. The flat, dusty landscape seemed to mock him with its bland openness, hiding nothing and revealing nothing about where J.B. had gone.
“We’re here. All of us,” Ryan reiterated. “We got thrown out. J.B. must have been, too. He can’t have been left in there.”
“Ryan,” Krysty said softly, “it was a maze down there. It’s incredible that we all ended up in the same place. We could have been swept down any number of tunnels that didn’t immediately cave in. J.B. might still be down there.”
“I can’t leave it at that,” Ryan said with an irritated shake of his head. “We’ve got to search around here, just mebbe…I dunno, just mebbe…”
They divided into two parties, Doc joining Mildred and Jak, and they started to search the immediate area, moving out in a spiral to cover as much ground as possible.
It was a short, bitter search, fraught with frustration. All the while they walked under the burning sun, they knew it was useless. But it was something they had to do. They couldn’t rest until at least the token had been made. No matter how exhausted, no matter how dehydrated.
No matter how hopeless.
Eventually, they could search no more. They were low on supplies and water and they had to move on. Ryan acknowledged this when they came back together.
“J.B.’s gone,” he said simply. “Bought the farm. I guess we have to say that, now. We could stick around and keep looking, but where? As far as I can see, this fireblasted flatland is giving us nothing. It’s kept him down there, in a rock grave.”
No one else spoke. There was nothing to say. Ryan continued.
“Seems real weird having no body to bury, nothing to speak over, but I guess that shouldn’t stop me saying something. If he’s gone, then he deserves a send-off. I’ve known J.B. a long, long time. He seemed a strange kind of man when I first met him. I’d never met anyone who knew so much about the one thing and who was so intense about it. When I joined Trader, people talked about J.B. in a funny way. He didn’t have many enemies, but didn’t have many friends, either. He was a difficult man to get to know, but I did get to know him. And a better man I’ve yet to meet. Always at your back, always by your side. I’ll never meet anyone like him. That’s all….”
Ryan turned away. Strong emotions other than anger and fury were things that you didn’t let show. You couldn’t afford them, at least not outside of some kind of privacy. But losing J.B. was a time when he could let it show, just for a moment. Truth was, Ryan Cawdor had just lost a part of himself, a friend and an ally. And it pained him.
His back still to them, Ryan heard them all say something about the Armorer. Krysty and Jak were to the point: a good comrade lost. Mildred had a little more to say. J.B. had been the closest person to her since her revival from cryogenic suspension and to lose him was devastating. She whispered a few words, and then Doc had his turn. He, predictably, rambled on. He had good things to say, but a way of making them last forever. Ryan wanted to stop him, say they had to start moving on right now. But he owed the old man his right to say goodbye.
Finally, Doc petered out and Ryan turned to them.
“Okay. We’ve done what we had to do. Now we need to get the hell out of here. There’s nothing for us around here and it’s been a while, so I figure we should give this up as lost and head back to the redoubt. Mebbe we can jump to somewhere better than this.”
Mildred furrowed her brow, eyeing him up. “You sure about this, Ryan? We haven’t rested well since we were thrown out of the caves and we’re dehydrated. Are you sure we should jump?”
“The chances of finding a ville quickly are slim, Mildred,” Ryan replied. “And we can get some water at the redoubt. The water recycling was working okay a few day ago, right? We’ve jumped in worse states than this. It’s our best option.”
“You’re the boss,” Mildred replied cautiously. She wasn’t too sure of the wisdom involved. They had left the redoubt partly because they were worried about the air system, which cut out the alternative of resting up a night before jumping. How would Doc and Jak take a jump, given that they were the ones who suffered the most afterward?
Having said that, they had no idea how long it would take them to get to the nearest ville and it was obvious that Ryan was determined to leave the dust bowl behind. He had no intention of staying in the place that had claimed the life of his best friend. And she couldn’t, in all truth, disagree with that notion.
And so, taking their position from the time and placement of the sun, they struck out for the redoubt.
It was another grim day. The heat was oppressive. Each step seemed like an effort and in many ways it didn’t seem to matter if they ever reached their goal. They had lost one of their number and things would never be the same. Others had come and gone, but J.B. was different. And on a practical level, it meant that they had lost their ammo supplies, grens and plas ex. It didn’t matter right now, but it may wherever they landed.
The light was failing when they reached the area housing the redoubt. The fact that it had taken them so little time to reach the entrance was an indication of how far the earth wave in the tunnel had carried them.
It was quiet around the area and there was no sign of any life at all. It seemed somehow appropriate. Ryan found the hidden keypad, still recessed despite the rigors that had stripped the landscape, and tapped in the access code. The door groaned open.
They wearily entered the redoubt and made their way down the tunnel. There was nothing to make them keep alert. It was empty, just like when they arrived. Deserted for decades and likely to be deserted for an equal length of time once they were gone.
Which was why it struck Jak so hard. Something just out of the corner of his eye didn’t seem right. He looked again.
“Ryan, wait,” he said sharply. “Look.”
Ryan’s eye followed the direction Jak indicated. There, on the floor and partially up the wall, was a smear of blood with a small pool gathered beneath.
It was still wet.
“Shit! Someone else?” Ryan spun. There had been no sign of anyone approaching the redoubt from the outside and the smear was too fresh to have been left by the companions a few days before—even assuming that they had forgotten about it.
Ryan slipped the Steyr from his shoulder, gripping it in one hand while he drew the Sig Sauer and checked its status: fully loaded.
“Triple red, people,” he breathed. “We’ve got company.”
The others didn’t need telling. Already, they had blasters in hand and had snapped out of their torpor. It was a mystery how someone else came to be in the redoubt, but a mystery that was completely unimportant right now. All that mattered was locating the enemy before the enemy located them.
“Keep together—line out and stay hard,” Ryan whispered.
Stringing out in a line, with Jak taking J.B.’s usual point position, they began to make their way down into the lower levels of the redoubt. There was no sound to indicate where