The Far Side (55 page)

Kurt explained the situation, and Jon Bullman spoke first.  “Look, you guys are military and I understand that.  But so far we haven’t seen anything from these Tengri that could be construed as hostile.”

“That’s because we’ve been told that if they see a white skin, they’ll get hostile right quick,” Kurt told him.  “These guys are clearly moving in to stay for the long haul.  It looks like they are quarrying limestone and building a defensive position.  You wouldn’t go to that much trouble for a temporary spot you were planning on abandoning -- or if you’re planning on being a good neighbor.”

“Kurt, I never thought I’d agree with the government about any of this, but I agree with Jon,” Oliver said.  “If you kill a half dozen of them, even if you succeed, they’ll be missed, and they’ll step up patrols.  And if we weren’t enemies before, we’d be enemies after that.”

“They probably will be anyway,” Kurt replied.  “I would, if I ran into something I didn’t understand.  You understand that Jake didn’t do anything with the dralka, either, he just left the carcasses.  We’ve seen them shooting muskets, and we know they’re smooth bore, muzzle loaders.  They aren’t going to be sure what killed the dralka, but it’ll be pretty obvious that it was a firearm.  And locals aren’t supposed to have firearms.  Did I mention that at least Jake got Kyle’s?”

“Yes, you did.  Kurt, you have to make it clear to Jake that the priority right now has to be to get a radio north as fast as possible.  Kris, Andie, and Ezra will just have to be extra careful on the way back.”

Oliver could hear Jake’s voice through the connection.  “Will do, but just so you know, I’m pretty sure that this is going to bite us in the ass in some way.  Honestly, I don’t know how, but there are just too many ways that things can go wrong.  Okay, I’m signing off for a while, while I make some tracks out of here.  They aren’t going to be able to see me, but if any of them are any good at tracking, they’ll be coming after me, so I’m going to have to go pretty good for the next few days.  I’ll still check in, but it’s going to be short.”

“Roger that, Jake, you be careful!”

“Go with God, young man,” Jon Bullman told him.

Kurt signed to Linda, and she cut the link back to Earth.  Kurt spoke to Jake.  “Jake, you are clear to take them out if they are still on your six, this time local, tomorrow.  Do whatever you think best, so long as there is minimal risk to the basic mission.”

“Do what I think best?” Jake said with a laugh.  “Now that’s a winner!  Okay, I’m out of here -- you guys watch yourselves, because they might get curious about whether or not they are already under observation.”

“Roger that.  Get going.”

“Roger, Jake out.”

Kurt looked at Linda.  “You won’t rat me out, will you?”

“No, but I wish he was just going north, not bothering with the men following him.”

“Doggies own the night,” Kurt said cryptically.

“Pardon?”

“The infantry feels that it owns the battlefield at night.  Those guys might have muskets, but Jake has night vision equipment.  And, in case it isn’t obvious, and while I can’t be sure exactly what Jake will do, but if I were a betting man, along about sunset here tonight, Jake is going to be checking on where they are.  If they are coming on his back trail, well, he’ll figure that they’ll still be there tomorrow -- and act now.”

“Won’t it be dangerous?  What if he gets killed?”

“Well, odds are he won’t get killed.  If I don’t hear from him by tomorrow morning, another pair goes north tomorrow night, with even more draconian instructions -- move at night, stay down and stay safe, get north no matter what happens around you.”

About two hours before sunset Kurt came and sat down next to Linda.  “More trouble.”

“What’s that?”

“I wish you could get a chance to look outside, Linda.  It’s a hell of a thing to come so far and not at least be able to look on alien skies and alien oceans.”

Linda chuckled.  “I’m getting around better all the time, one or the other of you sees to it that I walk an hour in the morning and a half hour before supper, even if it’s in circles.  Another week or so and I can probably get up to the watch point.  Honestly, from the description of how low the tunnel is, I’m not that certain I’m in a hurry to peek outside.”

“Yeah, well, I was wondering if we made you a rope chair if you’d like to go up now?  There are a couple of things I’d like to have your opinion on.”

“My opinion?” Linda sniffed derisively.  “Sure!”

“Your opinion.  I don’t figure you for a total idiot.”

“Sure, of course.  I can do anything if I put my mind to it.”

He smiled.  “It just so happens that Steve Crandall has been a fireman since he got out of the Army, and he’s just about got that chair finished.  How about now?”

“Sure, let me tell Jo,” Linda told him.  She called Jo Christiansen back on the Earth side of the door and told her that she would be out of radio range, but someone else would have radio duty.

She walked into the main chamber and stared at the forty-foot climb.  She had watched the others go up and down several times, but she was still nervous about it.  They didn’t do much in this chamber, afraid some stray sound might make its way outside, and there were only two of the men playing chess in the light of a Coleman lantern to one side.

A mess of ropes dropped down from above and Steve quickly rigged her up in them, and then she was hauled upwards.  Really, Linda thought, if you have to climb forty feet and couldn’t use steps, a rope chair was a perfectly adequate way to do it.

She was helped into the narrow tunnel, and she went past the two doglegs that led to the outside with Steve Crandall right next to her, which helped.  She reached the spy holes, and the man who was there nodded and squirmed around and went back as there was only room for three in the small chamber, but not for four.

Kurt showed up a few minutes later.  “Okay, first, take these,” he handed her a pair of binoculars, “and look at the camp.  That’s the middle slit, about a mile and a half away.”

She looked through the glasses, adjusting the focus.  The glasses made things look much closer, but also seemed to flatten them out.  She hadn’t looked through binoculars very many times and it took a bit to get used to.

The camp was filled with people doing things, most of the tasks she couldn’t even begin to guess.  She could see the wall that Kurt had talked about on the radio with Mr. Boyle, and she could see the ship offshore, anchored.  There seemed to be a fair amount of activity on the ship as well.

“They seem busy on the ship,” she said, not sure what she was supposed to be looking at.

“Yeah, now look at the sky,” Kurt told her.

It wasn’t easy, but there was one place where you could look up at about a 70 degree angle.  “Clouds,” she told him.

She looked back out towards the camp and the ship beyond.  There weren’t any clouds visible.  “You don’t suppose there’s another storm coming?  And the ship is getting ready?” Linda asked him.

“Yeah, that’s my thinking.  I think a lot of the camp activity is battening things down as well -- so this could be another big storm.  If you look at the terrain, there’s not a lot of large vegetation, but there is a lot of green new stuff -- I imagine that’s from the hurricane Kris and the others reported.”

Linda looked again and nodded.  She’d seen the same thing often enough in her native Arizona.  A couple of well-timed thunderstorms in the spring would cover the hills and mountains with green fuzz.

She looked at Kurt.  “Andie’s note said that this used to be a swamp, but the rains failed.  I wonder if the climate’s shifting
again?”

“Climate change is a bitch,” Kurt agreed.  Steve also laughed at that.  “But I don’t think they’re going to be able to blame climate change here on fossil fuel consumption.”

“Probably not,” Linda agreed.  “But I grew up in Arizona, and this sort of thing was bad news.  Early spring storms that saturated the ground made for a lot of weeds a few weeks later.  When the summer arrived, those weeds made a lot of fuel for brush fires.”

Kurt laughed.  “Ah!  I knew there was a good reason for having you along!  Nasty!  Very nasty!”

With a start, Linda realized he was thinking about brush fires and their enemies.  Sure, they hadn’t seen anything overtly hostile from these people, but their actions were certainly suggestive of people who weren’t very nice.

Just how were you supposed to go about finding out what people were really like, if they would try to kill you the first chance they had if what you’d heard was right?

“Can we do something like that?  To people we don’t know for sure are hostile?”

He nudged her shoulder with his.  “Linda, there are some things we haven’t wanted to burden you with.  Right out there, yesterday, they whipped a man to death, and I’m pretty damn sure that the man who was killed was wearing some sort of leather or metal collar.

“Linda, they keep slaves.  We’ve seen several beatings and now the one killing.  These guys aren’t the sort of people you would be comfortable having for neighbors.  It’s why I gave Jake a free rein.”

* * *

Ezra was walking steadily south, the Big Moon occupying half the night sky in the dark phase, making even his low light gear have to sweat to get pictures.  Still, he was careful and doubly so, since he knew he was not more than two days from the rookery.  He wasn’t about to rush the last few miles and blow the whole thing.

There was a loud “Bam!” ahead and to his right.  He went instantly down on one knee.  His instincts were well honed, and he flipped the low light equipment off.  Two seconds after the loud bang was a second, as loud, but this one accompanied by a brilliant flash.

Concussion grenade, his brain told him, followed by a flash bang.  There was the stutter of an automatic weapon firing three shot bursts, and now he put the low light gear back over his eyes and looked.  He couldn’t see the muzzle flashes, but he could tell the general direction.

He mentally crossed his fingers and reached for the radio that he’d originally brought with him and keyed it twice.

A voice came back, “Doggies own the night!”

“You got that right, cuz!” Ezra said, feeling an infinite sense of relief.  “I make you about a thousand feet lower on the mountain than I am and about six hundred yards southwest of my position.”

“Are the girls with you?”

“No, but they’re safe.”

“I have a bit of a situation here just now.  Wait a few and I’ll come to you.”

“A situation I can help with, cuz?”

“Naw.  Ezra, Kyle Parsons was killed yesterday afternoon by those dralka things.  Now some Tengri have been following me -- there were six of them earlier.  I just hit their camp but there were only five.  One either went back or went bush.”

“You need to hustle, cuz!  I didn’t like the look of the weather earlier.  It could be fixing to storm.”

“Sure.  Gimme ten minutes.”

It took more like twenty minutes before the two men shook hands and then hugged.  “I called it in,” Jake told Ezra.  “There are some happy campers back home.”

To the east a flicker of lightning appeared in the dark sky.  “We need to get shelter, cuz!  The storms here have to be seen to be believed!  We need to find a cave or something.  I’ve been searching for one.”

“Hey, I’ve got just the thing!  I saw what looked like a cave just below us!”

The two men went downhill for a hundred yards and found the entrance, and Ezra led the way inside.  The chamber was large, and Ezra used his flashlight.  He laughed.  “Cuz, you see the beehive shape?”

“Yeah.”

“This is an old dralka rookery.  Literally, one of the soldiers we met shit himself when he realized he was standing in one.”

“I’d say they were a bunch of wusses, Ezra -- except I saw what those things did to Kyle.”

“Don’t think that, cuz!  Up until a few days ago the best weapon the Arvalans had was a longbow, and the only place a flying dralka is vulnerable to an arrow is a small patch on its throat and its anus.  Those guys cleaned them all out of this area a thousand years ago -- but they are making a comeback.”

“The
bastards ate Kyle up, Ezra.  They just swarmed him and chewed him to bits.”

“I don’t suppose you got his weapon?” Ezra asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did, and five mags.”

“I only had three mags and it’s been a busy time, cuz!  I left the P90 with Kris, but it has exactly five rounds.”

“What are you packing?”

“Just a 9 mil.”

“Well...”  Jake handed his cousin the P90.

“Oh!  Righteous sights!” Ezra exclaimed.

“You bet.”

“What the fuck happened?”

“I told you, I called it in.  Right now it’s early evening back in LA, and the Boyles are en route to Otto Schulz.  They’ll call me when they’re ready to talk.  We can do it all at once.”

There was light from another lightning flash and a low growl of thunder.

“You better tell them to hustle, because in an hour or so, the lightning will be like nothing you’ve ever seen before!”