A World of Difference (41 page)

A flash, a boom—Fralk froze in horror. Turning four eyestalks toward Oleg, he screamed, “
You told me they didn’t have rifles!
” He was too shaken to bother with the human language.

Oleg followed the Skarmer speech. “Not a rifle,” he answered in the same language. He also followed Fralk, literally: a guard jerked him along by a cord tied around him between his arms and head.

“What do you mean, not a rifle?” Fralk shouted, still frantic. Flash, boom—another shot punctuated his words. With the couple of eyes that weren’t on the human, he saw his males begin to waver. They hadn’t expected the Omalo to have a weapon to match theirs.

“Not a rifle,” Oleg repeated. “That is
pistol
”—a human word Fralk hadn’t heard before, but one Oleg went on to explain—“like rifle, but not as good. Not shoot so far, not shoot so fast. Not hurt us where we are here.”

“Oh.” That made Fralk feel a little better, but not much. Flash, boom—his warriors were definitely having second thoughts now.
They
didn’t know the
pistol
was too far away for its bullets to reach them. Fralk thought furiously. “Can I kill whoever has the
pistol
from here?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said.

That was all Fralk needed to hear. He pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Omalo had shot, set the change lever to full automatic, and fired a long, satisfying burst. Ice splashed from the Omalo barrier.

“Do you think I got him?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said again, this time in his own language. “As for what I think,
nichevo
. Soon enough you will know. If he does not shoot back, you got him. If he does, you did not.”

Flash, boom—Fralk cursed.

Emmet Bragg was having fun, only slightly hampered by the fact that, as Irv had reminded him a couple of days before, he couldn’t afford to do anything stupid. Had only his own neck been on the line, he would have worried a lot less. But four other people were depending on him to get them back to Earth. With Frank dead, he didn’t even have a well-trained backup.

So he threw himself flat on his belly the second the Kalashnikov started barking and stayed there till well after the burst was done. The wisdom might have been forced on him, but it was wisdom nonetheless: a couple of rounds punched through the barrier to wound Minervans behind it. One might have got him, had he not hit the deck when he did—the snow and ice it kicked out froze the back of his neck.

More males fell from bullets that had clipped them above the level of the rampart. Still, Bragg thought, most of the rounds from the burst had gone high. That was bad shooting, worse than he had expected from the Russian. Maybe it was because Lopatin was KGB and hadn’t got proper training.

“Isn’t that too bad for him?” Bragg muttered. He was just glad Sergei Tolmasov was on the far side of Jötun Canyon. Tolmasov, he was grimly certain, would not have used the AK-74 like an amateur.

Staying low, Bragg scrambled twenty yard to his right, jumped up for a quick shot over the barrier, then dove onto his stomach again. A short burst chewed up the ice and snow almost at once, followed a few seconds later by a long one.

“Changed clips again, did you? Good,” Bragg said, as if he were playing poker, not soldier, against the man with the rifle. “Now how many do you have left?” That was a question, all right. Lopatin, he thought, was shooting as though he had brought along a truckload.

This time, Bragg crawled a couple of hundred feet to his left,
almost to the trees anchoring that end of the line. He popped up for three shots at Fralk’s right wing. They might even have done some damage; the Minervans there weren’t much more than a hundred yards away now, and they made a big target. Bragg didn’t stay up long enough to look, which was just as well—the answering fusillade came hard on the heels of his last shot.

Reloading while on his belly was not a skill he had practiced much since basic-training days, but he managed. Still down there, he pulled out his radio and called his wife. “You all ready there?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be.” Louise’s voice emerged tinnily. “Is that that damn gun I hear, Emmett? Watch yourself, now.”

He chuckled. “I intend to, hon. Love you. Next time I call, I’ll really need you. Out.”

He started making his way back toward the center of the line and quickly forgot about Louise. He did love her, as he had said, but he loved what he was doing more. He had loved Carleen, too, come to that, but he had figured out early on he was never going to make it to Minerva married to a historian of ancient Rome.

Crazy, the stuff that goes through your mind, he thought. Carleen hadn’t, certainly not since
Athena
touched down. He dismissed the memory of her once more as he got back to Reatur.

The domain-master said, “Well done. They’re still coming, but with arms and eyestalks pulled in partway. They don’t like being on the wrong side of your human noise-weapons any more than my warriors do.”

Bragg jabbed a thumb at himself. “Not like, either,” he said. Reatur’s eyestalks wiggled. Bragg went on, “Now try to kill their human male with noise-weapon. Then we win—Skarmer lose courage when that male fall.”

“A human does not have their noise-weapon,” Reatur said. “It is the eldest of eldest of the Skarmer domain-master, the male called Fralk.”

“
Is
it?” Bragg wondered what the hell Lopatin was playing at. Whatever it was, it explained the bad shooting from the other side. The mission commander shrugged. Maybe it made his job easier. “Try to kill Fralk, then.”

“I want to tell you no,” Reatur said. Bragg looked at him in surprise. The domain-master explained, “I want to kill him myself. But you are right, Emmett. Slay him now, if you can.”

Reatur was a soldier like none America had known since the
War Between the States, Bragg thought—he took his fighting personally. The pilot readied himself. He wished he had been a cop: some work with the pop-up targets the police used would have come in handy now.

He bounced up and shot with a two-hand grip, one round after another, aiming at the Kalashnikov. His attention focused so completely on the rifle that he had fired several times before he even noticed Oleg Lopatin a few paces away, and twice after that before he saw the rope around the Russian’s neck. So things weren’t all going Lopatin’s way, he thought. Well, tough luck, Oleg Borisovich—serves you right.

The hammer clicked. The pistol was empty again. Bragg hit the dirt to reload. A moment after he did, the Kalashnikov started chewing away at the barrier in front of him. “Shit,” he said. He was just glad Fralk couldn’t shoot for beans.

Reatur’s guess was a good one: Fralk did not care at all for being shot at. A bullet kicked up snow and dirt at his feet. Another two zipped past him, closer than he ever wanted to think about. And two more struck a male close by Fralk. He did not even scream before he fell.

“Get back out of range, you idiot, before you get killed and get me killed with you!” Oleg yelled.

Fralk needed a moment to understand the human, another to figure out that he made good sense. “Back!” Fralk called. Several males in his small band had not waited for the order. He would deal with them later. “How far can that cursed pistol shoot?” he asked Oleg when they had retreated a good way.

“This should be far enough,” the human said, adding, “unless the man with the pistol there gets very lucky.”

Fralk thought about retreating some more, but enough males around him understood human speech to make that look like cowardice. He fired several rounds in the direction from which the shots had come but doubted they would do much good. The human on the other side of that frozen wall seemed to have a knack for surviving.

“What I will do,” Fralk decided, “is stay here and use the rifle to help our warriors on the flanks. I can reach the whole field from this place, and the pistol cannot. That still leaves us with the advantage.”

“
Khorosho
, Fralk,
ochen khorosho,
” Oleg said. “You are beginning to understand how to use your firepower. If you have
more range than your enemy, you set up where you can hurt him and he cannot hurt you.”

That made sense to Fralk, but he still felt peculiar standing off in the distance while his males and the Omalo first flung spears at each other and then began using those spears—and every other weapon on which they could lay their hands—at close quarters as the Skarmer tried to force their foes back from the barricade.

Several Omalo warriors stood very tall to thrust at Fralk’s warriors. He fired a short burst. One of the enemy males tumbled away from the barrier, the upper part of his body a chewed, bloody ruin. The other Omalo warriors flinched away. A couple of Skarmer started to climb over the frozen wall.

Fralk shifted his aim from one end of the line to the other, squeezed the trigger again. He was not sure he hit anyone this time, but the Omalo flinched anyhow. Skarmer males started trying to get over the barrier there, too.

“If they can make it to the far side in any numbers, we have them,” Fralk declared.

“
Da,
” Lopatin agreed. After the fighting was done, Fralk knew he would have to figure out what to do with the human, but now he valued his thoughts. Fralk felt pleased at regaining his equanimity: this was the first time since that other human had shot at him that he found himself able to plan for what would happen after the fighting was done.

Reatur flung a spear at one of the Skarmer scrambling over the rampart. It missed his target, but might have hit a warrior further on—the enemy was tightly packed at that part of the barrier. The domain-master shouted and waved his arms when one of his males killed the Skarmer with an ax.

But for every Skarmer who died, another—often more than one—did his best to climb over. “If they make it to this side in any numbers, we’re done for,” Reatur said.

“I know.” Emmett dodged a spear. His long legs made him extraordinarily nimble, Reatur thought.

Off in the distance, too far away for Emmett to strike back, Fralk’s noise-weapon began its deadly chatter once more. One Omalo male shrieked, then another, then another.

“They fight good,” Emmett said. “Sometimes—often—human warriors run away from noise-weapons, first time see, hear them. Your males brave, Reatur.”

The praise pleased the domain-master. “Where would they
run?” he asked. “If they lose here, they lose everything. They know it. But”—he let his deepest fear come out—“I doubt even they can hold against terror forever.”

“You right, I think.” Emmett took out his talking-box, spoke urgently into it in his own language. He put it away, dipped his head to Reatur. “We do what we can.”

Irv stuffed the radio back into his pocket. “You heard the man,” he said. Louise Bragg nodded. So did Sarah. She had been limbering up every few minutes, ever since the battle started a few miles northwest. Now she started stretching in earnest.

“Let’s give it one last check,” Louise said to Irv.

“Good plan.” They walked over to
Damselfly
together and went over it strut by strut, wire by wire, joining by joining. They checked the thin plastic skin of wings, tail, and cabin to make sure it hadn’t developed any holes that could rip wide open in the air. They didn’t find anything. Irv started checking again.

“Are we good?” Sarah demanded. She was peeling off parka and long pants, hopping up and down to stay warm in the Minervan summer sun. “If we are, we don’t have time to waste.”

“We’re good,” Irv said reluctantly. He gave his wife a fierce hug. “Be careful. I love you.” Ending up in bed—or rather, on the floor—with Pat hadn’t done anything to change that. It just made him feel like a hypocritical bastard when he said that to Sarah.

“Love you, too,” she answered now. He wondered what she would say if she ever found out. He was full of scientific curiosity, but that was one thing he did not want to know.

He set the wide stepladder by
Damselfly
, helped Sarah climb in, then lowered the canopy. The sound of the hooks-and-eyes snapping it closed, shutting Sarah away from him, seemed dreadfully final. Shaking his head, he got down from the stepladder and carried it out of the way. Then he went over and took hold of a wingtip.

Louise had the other one. She also had her radio out. Irv took his out, too. “Testing,” he heard Louise say. “One, two, three, four … how do you read
Damselfly?
”

“Read you five by five,” Sarah answered. Irv heard her both in the speaker and directly. “How do you read me?”

“Loud and clear. Break a leg, kiddo,” Louise said.

“Don’t tempt me.” Sarah started to pedal. “Let’s get the batteries good and charged.” A few minutes later, she said,
“Okay—here we go.” She let the prop spin.
Damselfly
rolled forward. Irv and Louise ran with it, keeping the wing level.

“Airborne!” Irv shouted. Sarah took one hand off the control stick to wave, then gave all her concentration back to flying. Irv watched
Damselfly
slowly climb. “There goes the the funniest looking warplane in the history of—two worlds,” he said.

“No arguments.” Louise was on the radio again, on a different frequency. “Emmett, are you there?” she called worriedly. “Come in.”

“I’m here,” he answered. “Busy, but still here.”

“
Damselfly
’s on its way now,” she told him.

“Not a minute too soon. Out.”

“Out.” Louise turned to Irv. “Now we can only wait.”

“The fun part,” he agreed. “I’d rather be doing something, doing anything, than just standing around here.”

“Me, too,” Louise said. “I hate it when something that’s important to me is out of my hands.”

“Sarah said the same thing when Emmett was landing
Athena
. It’s all in her hands now, though.” Irv made sure his radio was on
Damselfly
’s frequency. “How you doing there, honey? How does the plane handle with the changes we made in it?”

“Doing all right,” Sarah answered. “The extra weight isn’t bad, about what I’d have if I were pedaling in my parka. And I’m not getting enough extra drag even to notice—gaining altitude shouldn’t be a problem.”