Always it was the same.

The multi-colored clouds parted. The huge dark disk obscured the blazing sun. The evil alien warriors in their hideous razor-winged battlesuits dropped from the heavens bent on slaughter and pillage.

His father snatched up his blaster, pushed him under their vehicle and fired energy bolt after energy bolt into the sky in a futile attempt to drive the Ikarean raiders off. Sam crawled out from under the buggy and tried to cling to his mother. Weeping she pushed him away, told him to run and hide, bundled him once more into the evil-smelling shelter beneath the buggy's chassis.

The Ikareans descended, whizzing over the desert almost too fast for the eye to follow. A haze of blood filled the air as severed heads rolled from the stumps of necks and then the Ikareans rose again like great birds of prey to pick another target.

His father snapped off a shot that send an Ikarean spiraling earthward. The Ikarean's mate let out a scream like an angry hawk and descended in a blur. His father fell, clutching the stump of his amputated arm, his gun lying in the sand still held by the fingers of his severed hand.

The Ikarean made another pass and his father's other arm thudded onto the sand. His mother raced to his father's aid. The Ikarean casually decapitated her with a stroke of one razor-edged wing, then landed lightly beside his father who rolled in agony on the ground.

With a whine of servomotors, the Ikarean's beaked helmet popped open, its visor swung upwards to reveal the face below. He caught sight of the strangely delicate features, dominated by mad-seeming eyes. The Ikarean smiled and spat on his father and then kicked him in the head.

Sam raced from cover to attack the alien. With a casual backhand it sent his six-year old form sprawling then walked over to look down on him. He saw that there was no mercy in its eyes, only a cruel gleeful humor."I could kill you," it said, in an eerily beautiful voice. "But that would be a mercy. The desert is far crueler than I could ever be."

Then it sprang into the sky and flashed upward and away, leaving him alone with the corpses of his parents in the burned-out wreckage of the vehicle that had been their home.

Sam Rio sat up and shook his head. The nightmare had come again and that was a bad sign. It only ever came to him before something terrible happened. He shivered. The dream had been so vivid, exactly recalling the events of twenty years ago that had left him an orphan.

"Nightmare?" The voice was cold and deep and mechanical. It suggested something lethal and deadly. If a gun could speak it would sound like that voice.

"Yes," Sam pulled himself upright and stared out over the crystalline sands of the desert. The sun was starting to sink and the blazing heat of the day would soon be almost tolerable. Nonetheless he was careful to stay beneath the shadows of the lean-to made from the chassis of his skimmerbike and the stretched survival blanket. His years in the desert had taught him caution when it came to matters of survival.

His companion needed no shelter. He stood out in the sunlight scanning the distant horizon with his mechanical eyes. The camouflage pattern of his duralloy skin shimmered in the heat but Ravensberg showed no sign of discomfort. He could not. He was a Panzer, a humanoid death-machine produced in the autofacs of Prometheus. He had been designed to endure the deep deserts, to survive in those hellish places where life would be impossible for humans.

"Not good," Ravensberg said.

"Not good." Sam agreed.

"We must go. We need to reach Toxic Springs by dawn." Sam nodded. As soon as the sun went down they would mount up and ride. They needed to be in the isolated hab before sunrise.

There were seventeen men there they had to kill.

The desert blurred past. Dunes crumbled under the bow wave of the skimmerbike. The shimmering suspensor field deadened the sound of the rushing wind. Overhead the fixed stars that legend said were the fortresses of the Galactic Compact glittered. Sam leaned forward behind the aerodynamic fairing of his bike and glanced at the fluorescent dials.

Everything checked out. Power was nominal. The DPC cells were nearly full. The weapons systems were charged. They were running at a cruising speed of 150 clicks per hour. That was all Ravensberg's overloaded skimmer could handle while bearing the Panzer's enormous weight. Still they would be there in plenty of time.

Sam studied the sensor arrays. Nothing showed in the red. Radiation levels were acceptable. Ambient toxins were no worse than normal. Entropic disturbances nil.

The sands had a bluish sheen through the UV filters of his goggles. They were running without headlights, not wanting to attract the attention of any of the predators, human, machine or beast that haunted this stretch of the Great Western Desert. There were only too many things out there that would be willing to kill them and strip them for the meat, water, power and food they represented. The Armageddon Wars had turned everything on the surface of the planet into either predator or prey or both.

Just look at him. From a howling orphan boy found by a Promethean panzer deserting his duties, he had grown up to become a Ranger, one of the elite guild of bounty killers who tracked down criminals, thieves and other scum in the wild lands normally beyond the law. He had learned every trick of combat the deadly robot could teach him. The bitter lessons of a lifetime of battle had taught him a few more. He smiled grimly. He hoped it would be enough when the time came to confront the man he meant to kill.

Ravensberg made a sweeping gesture with his hand, a sign that they should slow down. He wondered what the Panzer had noticed. Ravensberg's eyes contained telescopic lenses and his robotic brain never grew fatigued, never rested, was always alert to every detail.

He pulled up alongside the Panzer just below the crest of a dune. No sense in silhouetting themselves against a skyline for all to see. They would make excellent targets that way. The suspensor drive of his bike whined down into inaudibility.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"Switch to IR," the Panzer replied. Sam obliged and gazed in the direction Ravensberg pointed. Suddenly he saw huge heat traces over to the west. They flared and died in brief moments then flared again. He strained his ears and could hear the sound of weapons, distant yet distinct. Over to the west a battle was taking place.

"We've got to get to Toxic Springs. That's where Kimabalee is. And he's not getting away this time. This is none of our business," Sam said, and meant it. Getting involved in other people's battles without agreeing a price was a sure way to get yourself broke or dead.

"It was none of my business when I pulled a squalling brat from the ruins of a burned-out buggy. I did it anyway. We're Rangers, Sam. Anything that happens out here could be our business."

Sam sighed. There was no use arguing. He would almost have said he recognized that tone of voice but the Panzer did not have one. His tone never varied, yet still there was something in Ravensberg's phrasing that made it clear that his mind was already made up.

"OK, I'll check it out," he said. He threw himself flat on his belly and wriggled like a snake on to the top of the ridge. Once there he pulled out his magnoculars, put them to his eyes, flicked the night sight button, and adjusted the range finder. He scoped the horizon for a few moments, then zeroed in on the flashes. What he saw shocked him, and caused him to freeze.

A small caravan of vehicles were drawn up in a classic Skavenger defensive ring. From among them bolts of blaster fire and lines of tracer leapt into the sky. Hovering over the battlefield like bats from hell were Ikarean warriors, just as he remembered them from his nightmares. They swooped and wove in evasive patterns, occasionally diving into the vehicles to drop a grenade or slash a hapless foe. Cold sweat beaded Sam's brow. It was his nightmare come to life once more.

Heavy footsteps crunched closer behind him. Ravensberg moved into position. There was a clicking sound as robot upped the magnification of his eyes.

"Raptor Legion," he said and even in his flat emotionless tones, the words came out a curse. Sam zoomed in on one of the figures and sure enough right there on the armor was the black hawk symbol of the legion. Cold fingers of fear tickled his spine.

The Legion were mercenaries of the worst sort, decadent Ikarean renegades too evil even for their own degenerate people to tolerate. They were exiles based in the commercial megapolis of Janus who fought for pay and their own twisted pleasure. They had a reputation as terror-troopers without equal. What were they doing here in the Great Western Desert ambushing a band of travelers?

To be frank, he had no desire to find out. His native caution told him to get back on his bike, turn around and forget that he had ever seen this. There was little to be gained in joining a fight like this. He heard the Panzer move off down hill towards the skimmerbikes and was glad that the robot obviously felt the same way. He heard the skimmer's engine hum to life then Ravensberg's bike hurtled up over the dune past his head and raced off into the distance towards the fight.

Oh no, Sam thought, as he rushed down towards the fight. He knew his partner could be quixotic, that some glitch lodged deep in his positronic brain forced him to protect civilians, but this once he was not going to go along with the foolishness. If the robot wanted to get himself terminated, that was his business. Sam was not going to join him in death.

He clambered back onto his bike, and twisted the hand grip. The engine came to life, and the bike rose from the ground like a balloon bobbing in the hands of a child. He put his foot on the ground and twisted the nose away from the sounds of combat. The Panzer could do what he liked. Sam was not going to get himself killed just because some bug had infected the mad robot's brain. He had better things to do than to get decapitated fighting against alien scum like the Raptors. No. He was having no part of this. Absolutely not. No way.

Then he rested his hand on the haft of the blaster, the same one his father had carried into his last battle. The nightmare came back to him, and he remembered the sick face of the Ikarean warrior and the monstrous metal hands that had lifted him from the wreckage where he huddled and given him the water that had chased away his delirium. He cursed and spat on the ground and instantly regretted wasting the moisture.

Well, what did it matter? In two minutes he was probably going to be dead anyway. He revved the engine and skidded the bike around, racing for the dune top, becoming momentarily airborne as he went over the edge. Ahead of him he could see the Panzer's overloaded skimmer. The battle was before him, his blaster was in his hand.

"Wait for me, you metal maniac," he shouted.

This is a work in progress by Bill King, and he's got tonnes on at the moment.  Requests for more could get it pushed up the priorities list...

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