merged with the sky. It was impossible for Ryan to guess its height. Despite the wind all around them the fog did not move, beyond a gentle rocking, pulsing movement that seemed to be generated somewhere within its enormous bulk. It looked as though a light glowed somewhere within it, like some settlement glimpsed at a great distance through mist.
He took a few cautious steps toward it, and the swaying increased. The whole mass moved the equivalent paces toward him. Tendrils came creeping from its base, edging along the road in his direction. They stopped moving as he did.
Hunaker threw back her hood, ice gathering immediately on her short, green hair. 'Let me waste this shit with my rifle!' she shouted.
Immediately the fog reacted, swooping with its sinuous fingers down toward them, sending them all scurrying quickly back along the trail, back toward the bend. The fog reached to within a few steps of where Hunaker had been standing, then seemed to gather itself together and resume its previous condition, swaying smugly within.
'If I might proffer a small suggestion, Miss Hunaker?' began Doc.
'What? How 'bout, don't make any fuckin' noise or threaten it or even go close to it?'
'Those were my thoughts, dear lady. Those were indeed my thoughts.'
While it had been just Kurt's ravings, or the mythic words of Krysty and Doc, it had not seemed as if it would be such a problem. Ryan had somehow thought that they'd walk through it or climb around it. Confident that once he saw it, assuming it really existed, it would just be a minor problem like hundreds of others, and with an easy solution. Now that he stood so close to it, he realized that this was in fact a form of primal force that functioned in ways that he had no idea about.
'Now what?' J.B. muttered.
Ryan unzipped his coat. Despite the ice and the bitter wind, he found that he was sweating freely. 'Who knows,' he said angrily.
Dix widened the question. 'Anyone? How about you, Doc? You know about this bitching thing?'
'Not to put too fine a point upon it, young man, I am as much in the dark as you. I believe this is here to keep malefactors away from the Redoubt and the gate.'
Ryan noted the word
'We could try some grenades,' suggested Okie.
'Could do,' Ryan said. 'Gotta think. No other trail. Not one that we could ever hope to find. It's this or nothin'. And there's no way under it. It hangs over the edge of that sheer cliff. There's no way over it. So you want to know what I think? I think one of the Barons out east's got him a chopper. If we just had that...'
'If we had a balloon we could float up and over it,' said Koll. 'But we don't.'
So they tried grenades.
High-ex and incendiary looked the best bets. No point in wasting shrap or nerve against a fog.
The hand bombs made a load of noise and some fire. The flames seemed muffled by the fog and the high- ex did nothing at all that anyone could make out. Some rocks and ice from high above them came rolling down, pattering on the road. The fog retreated about as far as a man could spit, then came back. Back toward them, stopping at the bend of the trail, becoming a huge wall, almost as if it had been cut clean with a giant's cleaver.
Doc had sat down, drawn and pale, looking as though the confrontation with the fog had exhausted him. He felt Ryan's eye on him and clambered up, pulling himself to a standing position with his hands on the rock face.
'My apologies, sir, but all the noise and fire has quite...' The eyes cleared as though a veil had been ripped from them. 'Antimatter, Mr. Cawdor. I believe that might do the trick. Implode, and the foul fiend will be undone — it will separate from its source.'
J.B. banged one gloved fist into the other. 'Implosion grenade. Turn that chiller inside out. Yeah. Koll?'
'What?'
'You got the implo?'
'Yeah. Couple.'
'Go hurl them into the middle of that bastard fog. Right in, far as you can throw.'
'Sure,' said Ryan. 'You got about the best arm, Koll. Go close as you can, then get the heat out of there.'
Koll lowered his hood, wiping tiny gems of steel-gray ice from his long mustache. He unhooked the two implosion bombs, with their distinctive scarlet and blue bands around their dull tops.
'Chill it, Koll,' whispered Hunaker, patting him on the arm.
The towering mist, with the strange pale light throbbing at its center, had retreated once more until it hung precisely where they had first seen it, countless small tendrils creeping from its base as though tasting the air for the scent of an enemy.
Koll crouched like a runner readying for a sprint, a grenade in each fist. He drew in a number of deep breaths, composing himself. Ryan stood at his heels.
'Not
Koll nodded his blond head. Five more breaths, faster and more shallow. He powered himself up the trail, boots sending chips of stone and ice flying back into the watching group. For some seconds the fog showed no sign of awareness of the threat. Then it began to move.
Faster than before.
Koll skidded to a halt less than fifty steps from the nearest tentacle of the fog, looking up at its shimmering bulk for a second or two, as if he was hypnotized.
'Now!' yelled Ryan Cawdor at the top of his voice. Breaking the spell.
Koll lobbed the first of the implo bombs into the fog. For one sickening moment Ryan wondered if it would simply stick there, like a pebble in fresh dough, but it vanished deep within. The second one followed it, thrown with all Koll's most desperate strength.
'Back,' said Doc calmly, speaking in a conversational tone to the eight others who stood near him. He led the way by shambling quickly around the bend of the trail, behind the rock wall.
'Koll!' shouted Ryan. 'Get the...' but the words died in his throat and for a moment he closed his eye, turning away.
The fog had sensed the threat to its existence. The tendrils had shot from its base, faster than a shooter drawing his blaster. They slapped at Koll's feet and legs, before he could take more than a half dozen steps toward safety.
Ryan was the last of the party to move with Doc out of sight, and he saw it all. As the first coiling arm of the fog touched Koll, sparks flew from the man's flesh. Orange and blue fire sprayed out into the cold day as if from a welder's torch. Koll dropped his rifle and screamed, rolling onto his back and kicking. For the briefest of moments he managed to break free from the caressing tendril.
One fell across him, not hard, but more flames spat from Koll's body, at the top of his thighs, near the groin. He arched back, and the scream rose higher and higher. Smoke and the smell of burning filtered through the crackling air. The screams continued, thin and piercing, like a stallion's at the gelding.
Another tendril lashed at Koll's face and he raised his hands to take the impact, thrashing at the unknown power. Now there were a dozen or more of the thick gray tendrils enshrouding him, cording and swelling. Koll was lifted into the air by them, drawn toward the main expanse of the fog.
All this occurred within the eternity of seconds before the first of the implo grenades went off, followed a second later by the other. Ryan ducked away at the familiar hollow boom, bracing himself for the bizarre sucking feeling that came from the antimat bombs. He and the Trader had found a small supply of them years ago in a ravaged Redoubt close to the great swamps where once the Mississippi had rolled. Nobody, not even J. B. Dix, greatest of armorers, understood what they did. All that was obvious was that they caused an implosion and matter was pulled into a vacuum of limitless smallness.
Ryan looked back around the cliff immediately after the noise had faded. The fog was coiling and shredding as he watched. It seemed to be disappearing into frail towers that crumbled in on themselves. In less than a dozen
