The shadows of Judgement Top lengthened as the Gamma Knights gathered their gear, the weight of Tehwhisz’s warnings clinging to them like rad-dust. “We press south,” Paul Best declared, his voice cutting through the murmurs. “Through the Old Place. No detours, no fights if we can ghost it. The wastes beyond wait for no one.”
They slipped into the crumbling veins of the necropolis, weaving past toppled spires and vine-choked overpasses that once spanned the ancient sprawl of San Francisco. The air grew thicker with the reek of rust and decay, the group’s footfalls muffled by layers of ash and shattered glass. Hours bled into dusk, the sun a bruised smear on the horizon. Alone in the encroaching dark, with the ruins looming like silent sentinels, prudence won out. “Dawn’s light or we’re ripper-bait,” Mordecai rumbled, and they hunkered in the husk of a fallen hab-block, watches set against the night’s unseen teeth.
Morning cracked open with a staccato fury—gunfire echoing from the east, sharp and relentless, like hounds tearing at prey. The Knights stirred, bleary-eyed, but pressed on south, the barrage fading to a dull thunder behind them.
Mordecai’s Geiger counter chattered to life as they skirted the skeletal remains of San Jose, its Geiger’s frantic clicks a siren’s wail amid the twisted rebar and glowing slag-pools. “Hot zone ahead,” the great ape growled, thrusting the device into Noelani’s callused hands. The navigator’s eyes narrowed, her Maori tattoos stark against sweat-slicked skin, as she traced the worst of it—craters pulsing with unnatural light, air shimmering like heat off a forge. Together, they threaded the needle, skirting the lethal glow, picking through the ruins where shadows hid both salvage and death.
By midday, the Old Place’s southern fringe yawned before them: a jagged lip dropping into barren plains, the open ground beyond a vast, unforgiving expanse under a merciless sky. Paul halted, scanning the haze. “Elevation first. Spot our path before we commit to that void.
“The gunfire from the east persisted, a grim symphony growing no quieter as the sun climbed. They crested a rise to a skeletal telecom tower, its guyed lattice mast clawing at the clouds like a beggar’s fingers. Noelani flexed, slinging her pack. “I’ll take it. Fittest legs here.” The climb would chew 45 minutes up, 45 down—plenty of time for the rest to kill.
While she ascended, the Knights prowled the perimeter. Eyes sharp, they spotted them: two short figures in tailored dusters, darting from cover several blocks off. One hauled a bulky comms pack, an archaic slab of Ancient tech—man-portable relic from wars long dust, its antennas bent but proud. The spies vanished into a two-story warehouse at street’s end, mansard roof hunched like a predator’s back, massive doors yawning on one flank, checkered windows winking from the second floor.
“Ambush bait,” Paul muttered, but they moved anyway, Ghost 4 humming to life in Mordecai’s grip. The Anduril drone—a sleek, expeditionary whisper of autonomy, quiet as a shadow, modular for the edge—lifted off, its tactical eye piercing the gloom. Too late: the spies had bolted up the adjacent stairwell, scampering across the second floor toward a rooftop ladder.
The Knights breached the front doors, clearing corners with practiced sweeps. Echoes mocked them—the spies’ footfalls bouncing off rusted beams and crumpled crates. They chased the sound up the stairs, lungs burning, to the rooftop. There, the duo balanced on a taut highline, a Tyrolean traverse snaking to the next structure: a squat, one-story bunker of brutalist concrete, neo-neo edges unyielding as a clenched fist.
Mordecai’s drone captured it in crystalline 8K, but unarmed, it was eyes only. The spies dropped through a trapdoor into the bunker’s bowels.
The Knights reached the line. Paul gripped the cable, hauled himself out—and seized. Muscles locked, breath ragged, he dangled, staring into the abyss below. “Come on, Venusian!” Garet barked. Paul gritted his teeth, pushed again. Worse—legs buckled, vertigo clawing his gut like a fresh mutation.
Inside, Mordecai piloted Ghost through a pillbox slit, thermals painting the spies’ heat-trails plunging deeper. But the bunker crumbled into sewers via a shattered culvert; the drone lost them in the labyrinth.
“Spies ain’t worth a corpse,” Paul rasped, hauling back. They retreated, the highline mocking their caution.
Noelani descended as they regrouped, breath steady. “War. Unmistakable. Cannon booms under battle-cries shrill as banshees. Armies clash between here and the mountains—tents, wagons, flyers wheeling like vultures.” Her gaze hardened. “French tricolor, gammadion stamped over it. Ranks of the Fit. Bonapartists. Mutants lead the charge.”
The Knights veered clear, holing up in the spies’ bunker at the Old Place’s tip. Garet rigged a pressure plate by the broken pipe—chemex grenade, Ancient cunning reborn: sticky fire that clung and burned, cheap to make, hell to endure. Night deepened; Vulgaris’ watch shattered by the blast. Screams cut short—one spy cooked in clinging flames, the other fleeing on singed paws.
Daybreak lit a raccoon-kin corpse: Dabber, meter-tall intellect in fur and cunning paws. The comms pack—KY-38 man-pack, Vietnam-echo—slag now. Mordecai salvaged guts; the rest was trinkets. Suspicions swirled—scouts for Fit, Mutationists, or worse?—but morning light urged south.
Day 12 dawned with a podog pack loping across the flats: massive mongrels, clever as whips, built for the saddle. The Knights shadowed them to a great oak, where seven beasts slumbered. Mordecai approached the lead, murmuring low; it stirred, sniffed, and accepted a rationed scrap. The pack woke ravenous—for hardtack, iron bars, friendship.
Soon, the Gamma Knights rode like thunder, podogs eating ground due south. The South Lands and Old Place fell astern. Ahead, flat plains cradled one scar: a walled theme park, battlements mocking joy long dead. Waldis’ domain. Melkath.
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