The dune was a monstrous wave, frozen right before it broke. The bike slid up a wall of yellow-gray sand that seemed to march up into the thin clouds gathering overhead. Black, skeletal shrubs poked through the rippling slope, and white boulders littered the trough like immense crustaceans crawling out from a dry sea.

Despite the sun, Caly had wrapped herself in her knapsack to keep herself from shivering. She cursed herself for not stealing a jacket or something from Blacktree, when she had the chance.

Halfway up the dune, Olm asked her to stop the bike.

“Smells wrong,” Olm said. He leaned over, making the bike and Caly both tilt with his weight. The hrutskuld scooped a fistful of sand, touched it to his tongue, and winced. “Tastes wrong, too.”

The old Caly, the one who knew nothing about hrutskuld beyond their basic military uses, might’ve said something sarcastic. But since the two of them had partnered up, Caly had learned a lot about hrutskuld. For instance, never doubt their olfactory senses.

“Think we’re close?”

“Think we’re here.”

They stopped just before the crest of the dune, dismounted, and Caly crawled the rest of the way, keeping her profile low as she peeked over the rim. She let out a low whistle.

From up high, the dune looked less like a wave, and more like the outer ring of a broad, shallow crater. The sand sloped down, deeper than Caly would’ve thought possible, toward a long, low wasteland.

Huge scorch marks covered the wastes, like strikes of lightning had blistered the earth. Some of the blackened sand was glassed, creating huge cracks in the ground that radiated out from the tallest, most tangled Spirine she’d ever seen. Massive tendrils of that twisting Dyssian metal wrapped around each other, forming the trunk as each one struggled to choke out the others, and reach higher than the rest, hurting and helping its siblings at once. Only, this Spirine’s exterior was wrong. The spiny parapets gleamed in glorious colors, rippling reds and marble white, laced with veins (or roots?) of pure silver.

In a word, it was beautiful. And yet, the sight of her made her stomach squirm. And the clouds that clung to the Spirine’s branches … odd.

“What’s she need a wall for?” Olm asked, “Out here?”

Caly had been too caught up in the Spirine to notice the ring of sheer, white walls at its base. She aimed her scope, and her helmet projected the view across the center of her visor. The base of the wall was half-buried in the sand, so the stone seemed an organic piece of the earth, grown to a prodigious height, holding the falling clouds like a bowl full of mist. A perfect line cracked the wall. Too straight to be natural.

“Think I see a door,” she said. She let Olm look through the scope.

“Bit tall for a door. Five stories too tall, at least.”

A flicker of movement caught her eye, somewhere high up on the Spirine. Was something up there? But she saw only the branches and thorns of the Spirine glittering in the light. The sun was setting somewhere over the rim of the crater, casting a halo of light around those twisting red and silver branches. Like some towering saint, lost in the desert.

“Nothing on the ramparts,” Caly said. “And can’t see through the mist. Nothing on the sand either—wait.”

It almost looked like a cactus, tall and a little spindly. Only this cactus could walk.

“It’s him.”

She swept her scope back and forth, searching for any sign of his vehicle. None.

Yet he got here faster than us… Despite the fact that they were now hundreds of klicks north of that frozen stream. How?

“What’s he doing?” Olm asked.

It took her a moment to find him again; his poncho blended in with the white walls, and he was just standing there, a silhouette standing at the bottom of that unnatural crack in the wall. His hands were cupped to amplify his voice. As if someone on the other side of those gargantuan heights would be able to hear him.

Caly trained her scope’s aural sensors on him, waiting for them to cut through the wind and the whispering sands. They picked up his voice, tinny and small, and amplified it:

“Hello in there! My name is Taws, and I’ve come to speak with Yole!”

The stone walls did not answer.

“He’s trying to talk his way in,” Caly said.

“Alone?” Olm frowned, confusion painted on his face. “Not much of a plan, is it?”

A new, rushing buzz cut through Caly’s aural sensors, distorting the human’s weak, tinny shouts. It wasn’t the wind.

“Oh, shit,” Caly pulled away from the scope and scanned the slopes around the crater, searching for the source.

She found the tail of dust, riding high to their east. An engine. No, six of them. Scrap bikes, and a rusted-out pickup that was missing its back wheels. Someone had rigged a massive repulsor engine to the pickup’s bed, allowing the beat-up vehicle to rip across the sands.

With a skip of her heart, she realized that she knew the riders. Snarl-faced xeno thugs stood on their bikes or bristled their weapons out of the truck’s windows. At their front rode an angry-red kell, whose oversized bike kept bumping against the sand, making it splash behind him. A pair of goggles shielded his eyes, and his grin was vicious enough to bite through stone.

“Our friends from the saloon are back,” Caly said. “I think they see the human.”

“Does he see them?” Olm asked, and Caly swung her scope around.

The human was still standing at the gate, cupping his hands and hollering up at the wall. Totally unaware.

Caly aimed. Shot. A moment later, an explosion of sand snapped at the human’s feet.

The human spun around, and for a moment Caly thought he was looking straight at her. But then, his attention was pulled to the growing stack of dust riding up behind the ogre and his cronies.

“Now he does,” she said. “And this is why you can’t just bag up the trash. You gotta take it out, before it starts to stink.”

“Agreed. I don’t know why he didn’t kill them. And now the trash smells even worse than before.”

“Lucky for him,” Caly sighted down her rifle again, “He’s got us.”

A jet of light bloomed behind one of the bikes, making it pull ahead of the rest. Probably some hack-job aftermarket repulsor, Caly thought. The driver’s head tentacles whipped in the wind and his cheeks rippled as he opened his mouth in a mad howl. That bike must’ve been his pride and joy because when he throttled it up, it leaped, and ate the distance twice as fast as the others. The brilliance of his repulsor throbbed dangerously, and the metal glowed red-hot. He was making a bee-line toward the human. Too easy, she thought. The front of the bike was plated with thick, rusted scrap, enough to stop most bullets. But Caly didn’t aim at the front.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Her sensors clocked the bike’s acceleration, and she drew a bead.

The xeno leaned slightly, taking potshots at the human with a plasma handgun. Nothing hit, but they weren’t meant to. The real trick was the huge blades that snapped out from either side of the bike. Ankle-shavers, some xenos called them. Caly just called them ‘stupid.’ If you had to get close enough to use them, you deserved to get shot.

So, she gave him what he deserved.

The speeding bike was mere moments from the wall. The xeno stood up in his stirrups and leaned hard the other way, slicing the sand with one of his blades. She could imagine the xeno, gibbering away enthusiastically at the thought of such a glorious kill. The human, back to the wall, had nowhere to go.

Caly squeezed the trigger of her rifle. She leaned into the kick without thinking, and her scope bucked and fell back to view her handiwork.

The bike’s rear repulsor exploded. A bloom of violet light, followed by the furious belching of flames. The back lurched up, and the bike’s armor-plated head exploded into the sand. The seat catapulted the over-eager thug into the wall. He flailed and grabbed at air. At that speed, without a helmet…

Caly allowed herself a smirk.

There was a flicker of movement. The human was in the air. How he had gotten there, Caly couldn’t figure. One moment he was on the ground, and the next he was high enough to catch the flying, screaming xeno. Another flicker, the human and xeno both crashed into the soft sand, a confused tangle of limbs and black hair and tentacles.

Caly let out a growl of frustration. What is he doing? They’re going to kill him, and he’s treating them like children.

Now, the other bikes weaved and kicked up so much dust, Caly couldn’t track any of them. Even if she got lucky, she couldn’t shoot them all. The human would have to deal with most of them. If it wasn’t the bikes, it was the pickup—weighed down with all those rabid thugs—that would end him.

“You coming?” Olm asked. He was sitting astride the bike, holding out a hand for her to hop on.

“You want to go down there?”

“You said it yourself. The human’s got us. Which means we’ve got to have him, right?”

There was a backwards logic to his words. Problem was, this wasn’t Scipio’s saloon. They wouldn’t get so lucky again. Down where the slope flattened out there were no corners to hide behind, no tables to flip, not to mention twice as many thugs. And Caly was pretty sure there was a gat in the back of that truck.

Chances were, Taws would be dead before Olm and Caly made it halfway down the dune. Then what? The enforcer’s bike probably outclassed anything the ogre’s thighs could run at them. Probably. The voice of caution screamed at her. She wasn’t exactly wearing armor, and plasma bolts could fly faster than any bike.

But there was another voice. One that said, if we get him out of this, the human will owe us a real debt. A life debt.

Before the pendulum could swing back the other way, she grabbed Olm’s hand, and swung onto the bike, barely in her seat before he throttled up. They screamed down the slope, making their own tail of sand, while Caly fired round after round toward the swerving vehicles. One lucky round hit another bike’s repulsor. Though it didn’t explode, the bike spluttered and bounced against the sand, and threw the xeno into the sand. Before he could even stand, Olm pulled up alongside him, reached out his gloved hand, and engulfed the xeno in a flash of lightning.

They rode on.

Up ahead, three more bikes swirled around in a circle, kicking up a spiraling cloud of dust. Caly could barely see the human in there, his poncho thrown over his shoulder, his hand hovering over that oversized pistol, which was still in its holster. Why doesn’t he shoot them? The riders leaned off their bikes, whooping and taunting him, and he was just standing there, his expression calm and serious while the ring of humming machines grew smaller.

Idiot, Caly thought. Then, because he clearly wasn’t going to, she shot for him. Another bike lurched and bucked its rider, and the bike went wobbling off into the desert before it smacked into a boulder.

The other two bikes dove at the human. Riders aimed, and opened fire. The moment bullets began to fly, the human’s serious face cracked. He shrieked as someone’s gun chewed a line in the sand that ended right by his foot. He jumped as a bike swooped in, he ducked and scrambled away from the fresh hail of plasma rounds that left steaming, glassy black stains on the sand. Every move he made looked like nothing more than an accident. Like he was just getting lucky, again and again. Hundreds of rounds and the only thing that got hit was the tails of his poncho.

A roaring whine split the air. The pickup’s repulsor guttered as it raced to join the ring. Xenos bristled out of the windows, and two of them popped up from the bed, wrestling with a canvas sheet.

“Olm. Truck.”

Olm slowed the bike, “Take the shot.”

The xenos in the back ripped the canvas sheet loose, letting it fall away to unveil the most rusted-out plasma repeater Caly had ever seen. It had to have come from before the enforcers clamped down on New Nowhere, and brought the Long Peace, it was that old. One xeno fed giant cartridges into its base, and the barrels whined as they began to spin.

Caly swung her rifle up and rested it on the hrutskuld’s shoulder. She gave Olm a moment to take his hands off the controls and cover his ears.

Their bike bounced hard enough that the first round whistled past the xenos, making the driver shout and point at Caly and Olm. A few of the xenos started spraying bullets at them. Olm slapped a hand to his chest, and his armor snapped into place, just as a line of bullets spit at the sand and rolled up the bike. Caly felt the rattling plinks on Olm’s armor, and at least one sizzling hiss.

“It’s yours,” Olm said. “Take it now.”

Caly aimed at the xeno at the plasma repeater’s control. She exhaled, nice and slow. Before she finished breathing out, she squeezed.

Missed.

But something exploded—one of the plasma cartridges, only a small blast, barely enough to mangle someone’s leg, but it knocked something loose on the truck’s oversized repulsor. The guttering whine turned into a metallic screech. Maybe the driver’s foot got stuck on the pedal, or maybe he just freaked out, because the truck roared forward and clipped a small dune, making it tip rear over nose. Problem was, the repulsor was still firing at full throttle.

The xenos in the back were lucky, they were only dumped on the sands. The ones in the cabin? The truck smeared their bodies across the sand. The repulsor, still glowing, kept the truck plowing through the sand, headed for the edge of the dune crater.

Back in the circle, one of the bikes slowed and the rider looked uncertainly at his ogre overlord. The ogre leaned over the side of his own bike (if you could call something that big a bike), making it sag to the sand. When he came back up, he hoisted a hollow tube onto his shoulder.

Caly shouted before she realized she’d said anything at all. Olm retracted his armor, and throttled up, making the bike lurch across the sands. But the ogre didn’t care about them. He aimed his launcher at the human, heedless of the other bikes still circling him.

One of these surged forward, slicing straight for the human. At the same time, the launcher kicked, and the back blast burst a cloud of sand. A blur launched from the launcher’s barrel, and smacked into the bike. Taws shielded his face from the blast wave and the shrapnel … and the body parts.

The ogre roared his frustration. A mechanical claw unfolded from the launcher’s rack, and slotted in the next round.

“Stop!” Taws shouted, “You’ll kill them!”

The fool even put his hands up in surrender. But that only made the ogre’s grin spread wider. The ogre aimed. Caly tried to pull her rifle up, but Olm was driving too fast, making their bike bounce.

The ogre fired again, and the kick knocked him a half-step back. At the same moment, the human launched himself forward. He flickered. Caly’s visor showed her ten different images all at once, a line of nearly-identical humans bolting across the dust, feet barely touching the sand.

The rocket hit something, and the ground heaved, belching flame and smoke.

Caly cursed. Then, she cursed again—this time in disbelief—as the human vaulted out of the smoke, unscathed, and threw himself at the ogre. The ogre’s grin turned into a snarl, and he dropped his launcher, letting it hang by its shoulder strap. He crouched, his back a mountain of red, rolling muscles, his black claws ready to tear Taws apart.

The ogre lunged at Taws, but Taws wasn’t there. Somehow, the human flung himself through the ogre, as if he was nothing more than an illusion. Taws reappeared just behind the ogre, one arm caught in the launcher’s shoulder strap. Without stopping, Taws heaved on the strap, pulling the ogre effortlessly backward in a flying arc. The ogre smacked the sand with a mighty whumpf, and let out a breathless gasp. He struggled to get up, but his arms were tied behind his back (when did that happen?), and all he could do was kick like an overturned turtle.

The ogre bared his teeth up at Taws and roared, until Taws stepped on some delicate part of the ogre's anatomy, and the roar became a squawk.