Conquistador (22 page)

“Run for it, Jim!”
Adrienne shouted.

The Scout didn't need any prompting. At the first shot he was up and dashing toward the horse. Reckless of the other rifleman hidden in the reeds, she came up on one knee and fired off the rest of the magazine. A bullet made an ugly
wiizzztft!
sound past her ear, and more arrows came arching out of the reeds, seeming to start slowly and then accelerate as they slid down the arch toward her—no less disconcerting for being an optical illusion. She dropped flat again to eject the empty magazine and slap in another; there were ten in the bandolier across the dead horse's neck, and another two hundred rounds boxed in the saddlebags, and she spared some brief flicker of consciousness to thank the God of Regulations for that.

Jim Simmons staggered and cried out as he ran for the scant cover of the fallen horse. An arrow had gone through his leg above the knee, and it buckled under him as he moved. That sent him to his hands and knees. Another shaft plunged down and took him in the back below the left shoulder, and he collapsed flat with another cry.

“Oh,
hell,
” Adrienne said in a snarl, profoundly unhappy at what happened next. “Give me a hand!” she shouted, and came up from behind the body of the horse, running forward crab-wise and shooting at the reeds as she went, trying to find the bowmen by backtracking the shafts.

Behind her, Schalk van der Merwe gave an inarticulate cry of rage and ran forward as well, bellowing his anger at what the crazy Rolfe woman had gotten him into now. They ran zigzag, with arrows and an occasional bullet whipping past them. Simmons was alive; she could tell by the trembling jerks that ran through the shaft sticking up out of his back—it must have stuck in the shoulder blade, though only time would tell whether it had penetrated past that shield of bone into the lung.

“Take him!” Adrienne said.

Schalk fired off the rest of his magazine at the reeds and the half-seen figures dodging about in the fringe of the swamp, then gripped the back of Simmons's jacket in his left hand and hauled him up like a suitcase before he slung him over his shoulder, ignoring the hundred and seventy solid pounds the smaller man weighed. His sprint back toward cover showed no effect from the weight, either; van der Merwe was nearly as tough as he thought he was. He dropped the Scout behind Adrienne's barricade of horseflesh, then did another jinking dash back to his own.

Adrienne slung her rifle and scooped up Simmons's weapon. It had a cut-down forestock, a glass-bedded barrel, an adjustable cheekpiece and a sniper's telescopic sight. Her run back to the shelter of her dead mare turned into an undignified tumble as an arrow plowed a shallow furrow across the outside of her right buttock, the sharp steel head slicing the fabric of her trousers like a pair of scissors in the hands of a tailor.

“Goddamned ass cutters!” she shouted in frustration.

Simmons was conscious, but sweating with pain and shock; he couldn't move his left arm, and cried out through clenched teeth when it was bumped. His skin wasn't gray, and his pulse was thready but regular; the arrow wounds were bleeding, but not in pulsing jets; and there was no blood on his lips—hopefully the point in the back hadn't penetrated the lung. The Lord alone knew what was going on inside, but for the present it was better to leave the natural tourniquets of the wooden shafts in place. Blessing the God of Regulations once more, she got the medical kit out of its boiled-leather case on the saddle, pulled out a hypo of morphine, stripped off the cover on the needle with her teeth and stuck it into the back of his thigh, pressing the plunger with her thumb. After a moment he sighed and closed his eyes.

“Lucky bastard,” she mumbled, and stole a glance at her watch.
Ten minutes?
Nine and a half, to be strict.
That's ridiculous; it must have been longer.
A glance at the sun told her that it was correct: still not quite noon.

“This is bad. This is very bad,” she mumbled as she checked over the Scout's rifle and adjusted the cheekpiece and shoulder buffer for her size. “This is very, very goddamned bad.”

From the volume of fire, there must be at least two rifles and maybe twenty bows among the Indians, and they'd killed only three or four of them all told. There
could
be a hundred of them waiting to attack.

“I'd better use this fine product of O'Brien engineering to buy us some time,” she muttered. “All right . . .”

The sight had adjustments for ranges from x3 to x10. You could estimate the range yourself, or just point it at a target and look. The scope showed crosshairs, and upper and lower stadia on the vertical line. Turning the adjusting knob so that they rested on the head and belt of a man moved a cam to zero the crosshairs for that range.

She wrapped a turn of the sling around her left hand, rested the stock on the barrel of her dead horse, and brought the scope to her eye. The edge of the reeds leaped to arm's length through the scope, and she gave a hiss of satisfaction as she saw an archer a yard inside the tules drawing a shaft, his teeth bared in effort as he bent the short thick bow staff—she could see sweat glisten, and the whites of his eyes against the band of black paint over his upper face. The stadia marks fitted neatly over his head and belt, which put the crosshairs precisely on his breastbone. . . .

The archer fell backward, chest-punched by the bullet. A spray of bone and blood and shreds of flesh erupted from his back where the mushrooming hollow-point round blasted out a hole the size of a small plate. The arrow wobbled up and fell to stand in the ground thirty yards beyond the edge of the marsh.

Ouch.
Unfortunately, the scope also let you see the expression on the man's face when the bullet hit.
Granted he was trying to kill
me,
that's still something I would rather not have seen.

She panned the scope down the edge of the tule reeds closest to the New Virginians' position, methodically shooting as targets presented themselves. Barring rescue, their only real chance of survival was to kill so many Indians that the rest were sickened with the business and ran.

Silence fell, save for the buzzing of the insects, something of which she was suddenly conscious again. An occasional arrow came out of the swamp, but the Indians had backed farther in and were shooting more or less blind.

“Good shooting, miss!” Piet Botha called. “They may give up.”

Cautiously, Adrienne raised her head. A bullet cracked by overhead, another kicked up a puff of dust fifty yards to her front, and a third struck the horse.

“Shit!” she said with quiet viciousness, dropping down behind the protective barrier of flesh. Then louder: “I don't think so, Piet. I don't think they
like
us, somehow.”

“Ja,”
the Afrikaner said ruefully. “They have us pinned down.” A hesitation. “If we kept
them
pinned down with some rapid fire, miss, you might be able to get out into the open and make it back to camp, get a rescue party here.”

Adrienne turned on her back, thinking carefully as she scanned the way they'd come. There was no point in heroic gestures. If running gave them all a chance, then she'd run; Adrienne didn't have testosterone poisoning to cloud her mind. She
would
be the logical choice; all three of them were in top condition, but while the men could lift a lot more weight, she could run faster than either of them over any distance longer than a sprint. And she could keep going a lot longer, too; she had ten years on Schalk, and fifteen on Piet.

On the other hand, they were about halfway into the embayment in the swamp, a little closer to the north edge than the south. The entrance narrowed several hundred yards behind them, and anyone running out would have to pass through a bottleneck between two and three hundred yards across.
After
running a five-hundred-yard gauntlet . . . with only two shooters to suppress the hostiles . . .

“I don't think so,” she called back to Piet. “Neither of those two riflemen are very good shots, and I think they're short of ammo, but they'd get anyone who tried to run. And there are probably somewhere between twenty and a hundred bowmen, too. Tell me you don't think they've got some of them back there where the swamp edges pinch in toward each other at the edge, waiting to rush anyone who tries to get out. If either of you want to try it, I'll give a written authorization.”

A pause. “You're probably right, miss,” Piet said; there was a sigh in his shout. “Bliddy hell.”

The Indians didn't want to pay the butcher's bill that rushing three rifles firing from behind cover would exact, but it was going to get dark eventually, and then . . . On the third hand . . .

“There's a good chance Heinrich will get suspicious and come investigate before sundown,” she said. “If he's not here by seven, we'll reconsider.”

“
Ja,
that's our best chance,” Piet said.
“Alles in sy maai.”
Which meant, roughly, that everything was
really
screwed up. Adrienne wished she didn't agree.

She took a swig from the canvas waterbag, then ate a handful of raisins and chewed on a strip of jerky. Now and then she took a cautious peek over her dead-horse sangar, careful not to do it twice in the same place. One of the Indian riflemen shot at her about every second time, usually not coming very close, but if she didn't pop up occasionally the bowmen would creep right to the edge of the reeds and start dropping arrows accurately again. The horse was beginning to bloat and stink even worse in the clammy heat, adding postmortem flatulence to the general unpleasantness; it struck her that this would be a very bad place to die.

“Water,” Jim Simmons whispered.

She put the nozzle of the waterbag to his mouth; it took considerable squirming around to do it without exposing herself to fire from the reed beds, and most of it dribbled down his chin—it wasn't easy to drink lying flat on your stomach and unable to move without pain.

“Hope this was worth it,” he said, a little stronger.

“I
still
can't tell you, Jim, but yes, this is really important. Sorry about your cousin.”

The man sighed and closed his eyes again.

I am going to find out who was responsible for all this,
Adrienne thought with cold rage. She didn't believe this ambush was a coincidence. Someone was violating the Gate Control Commission's edicts, either for profit or for power, and using murder to cover things up.
And I am going to see them die.

A sound caught at the edge of her consciousness, far and faint, but growing louder. A knot between her shoulder blades loosened. That was a helicopter, and it was coming her way. Which meant that Simmons's tracker hadn't just lit out for home; it also meant—

“Look sharp!” she called. “They may try to—”

The sound was louder now, unmistakable even to ears that didn't have much experience with aircraft; the
thupa-thupa-thupa
of a helicopter. Craning her neck around she could see the Black Hawk coming, like a deadly raven-colored wasp sliding through the blue heat-shimmer of the cloudless summer sky.

“—rush us,” she went on.

Less than three seconds later, fifty Indians left the shelter of the reeds and charged, screaming. Adrienne fought an almost irresistible impulse to curl up behind the dead horse and hope none of the sudden storm of arrows hit her. Instead she made herself switch from one target to another, squeezing steadily and unhurriedly. As she fired the last round and let the scope-sighted rifle drop—a hell of a way to treat a precision instrument, but needs must—the helicopter arrived overhead. Most of the Indians still on their feet fled. They were still screaming, but with despair now.

One paused a few feet away from her, and this one had a militia rifle. He squeezed the trigger . . . and the pin clicked on an empty chamber.

The Indian shrieked with frustration and sprang at her, the rifle reversed and swinging in a wide circle; the man was two inches shorter than the New Virginian, but he had shoulders like a bull, and the butt would smash any bone it struck. Adrienne did the only thing possible; she threw herself to the rear and down, landing on her back with stunning force. The hostile recovered from his swing and brought the rifle up over his head, his face a contorted mass of teeth and eyes and paint. Her hand scrabbled at the holster of her FiveseveN automatic, fighting the winded paralysis of the fall, and managed to get the weapon free. It snapped once, and the bullet smashed her enemy's knee by sheer blind chance, the heavy plastic sawing through tendon and cartilage like an edged steel blade. She forced herself back to her feet, skipped nimbly forward while he thrashed and ululated his pain and kicked him in the head—not too hard, so that he could answer questions later. He didn't look quite like a typical Indian from this area; for one thing he was too well fed, and for another his hair was short on top and very short on the sides, like a FirstSider military cut.

Then she stood erect, her rifle held up horizontally over her head; Schalk and Piet were doing likewise, driven by a similar desire to make absolutely certain that there were no mistakes about who should be shot from the air.

The Black Hawk sat five hundred feet above their heads, raising dust with the prop wash. The pilot aimed by a method that was simplicity itself; he pointed the prow of the helicopter down at the fleeing Indians and the edge of the swamp, jammed his thumb on the firing button of the minigun and swiveled the aircraft in place through a hundred-degree arc. The long roaring
braaaappppppp
of the weapon's six thousand rounds per minute overrode even the shriek of the turbines, and Adrienne had to lean over Simmons to protect him from the sparkling shower of empty brass cartridges that poured down from above. They were hot, too, painfully so.