The message repeated several times. She double-checked, to be sure she’d gotten it all. She passed it to Carter when she finished.
“REPORT. GUNNERY SGT. BURKE, SHANGHAI DELTA. ASSAULTED BY UNITED NATIONS AIRSHIP. ENCOUNTERED SINGLE WOMAN. SUSPECT A SPY. DANGEROUS. SUSTAINED DAMAGE FROM LIGHT ARMS FIRE AND GRENADES. WOMAN SPOKE ENGLISH. CLAIMED ORIGIN CALIFORNIA. DARK HAIR, MEDITERRANEAN COMPLEXION. WOMAN ESCAPED AND FLEW INLAND IN AIRSHIP. WITH MULTIPLE CREW ON BOARD, APPROX. 5-10. WOMAN’S NAME: SILVER. RELAY TO ALL UNITS. END REPORT.”
He finished reading it when a new set of beeps began. She transcribed this one as it came in, the old muscle memory kicking in. She passed it to Carter too.
“FROM COMMAND. ACK. SGT. BURKE. REPORT TO BATTALION HQ. ALL UNITS: REPORT ANY OUTSIDER CONTACT OR AIRSHIP SIGHTINGS. RELAY AND REPORT IN. END COMMAND.”
She looked at Carter. “Well, that answers some things.”
“They say you are dangerous,” he noted, tapping the paper.
“Well,” she said, smiling. “They’re not wrong.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
They spent the night in the cage, bundled up tight in their little nest. She asked Uncle to keep a watch over anyone approaching and slept with the gun in easy reach. There were guns in evidence among Kolton’s—Xian Lai’s, she corrected herself—troops. But not with every trooper, which seemed reasonable.
Guns, modern guns, were difficult to manufacture. Easier, if you were well armed, to preserve and maintain your weapons. Plus, she wasn’t sure that China ever had all that many guns in private circulation. She could ask Uncle, but it didn’t matter. The guns she saw looked old. Heirloom pieces, she suspected, carried for status as opposed to something troops trained with consistently.
She slept fitfully and woke with the dawn. She climbed down from the cage and stretched, nodding to the sleepy sentry Kolton had posted in the gatehouse, who looked at her. She went behind Truck to piss and pulled a bundle of dried twigs from their store. They had gathered them and stored them lashed to Truck’s back whenever they camped, for convenience. Dry wood was never around when you needed it, and Truck could carry tons more than they had him loaded with. Why not?
She was just getting the fire going from embers of their previous night’s campfire, when the gate opened and Kolton came out, flanked by Xian Lai, the leader of the horsemen from the previous day. She saw more troops behind the gate.
“Good morning,” Gold said, squatting in front of the fire. She looked up at Kolton, who stayed stone-faced. Lai’s face was impassive. So, accusation, interrogation, or both? “Or is it?”
“You call yourself Gold,” Kolton said. “Who is Silver?”
“Silver is a friend,” Gold said nonchalantly. “Didn’t know you two knew each other.”
“Don’t be flip with me,” Kolton said. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
Gold considered this. Did she, truly, not know what she was dealing with? It might be true, so find out.
“You’re part of a military unit that stranded with the Blooming, or whatever it was.” Gold waved her hand. “Since then, you’ve been, what, occupying China? Waiting for orders that never came?”
“Who is Silver?” Kolton said, her tone rising. Frustration. That was good.
“Like I said, a friend.” Gold stood. “I’m not denying I know her, just wasn’t aware she was in China.” Or on this planet. Or this timeline. Or this universe.
Kolton stared at her. “You a spy? Scouts for an invasion?” She laughed. “Everybody in your unit have heavy metal code names? What’s next, Platinum?” She stopped, jerked her head up at the cage, at Li, who was looking down at them. “Is her real name Platinum?”
“Her name is Li. She’s from, as I told you, Changsha. I met her there.” She was gauging how far away Kolton was. Three, four feet? Just under four, she decided.
Kolton bristled; this wasn’t going as she planned. “You never explained how you got to Changsha,” she sneered. “Let’s start with that.”
Gold shrugged. “I’d rather not tell you.”
“I don’t recall giving you that option,” Kolton said.
“I know you didn’t, but,” she said, “here’s the thing. You really don’t want me to tell you, you want me to tell your superiors. My origins, where I came from, and what I’m doing here, I will tell them. Not you, second lieutenant. I will tell your superior officers, your command, as you call it. Face to face. Can you arrange that?”
Kolton took a deep, frustrated breath. “If you think you can walk in here and issue orders…you don’t get it. I am in charge here. I could shoot you in the face, and nobody would say boo.” Her hand went to her hip, to her sidearm. It was a bluff, Gold knew. But it was time to act and so she acted. Gold moved, flowing like water, crossing the distance between them in under a second.
She grasped Kolton’s wrist before it had done more than close on the butt of the pistol. She pinched the nerves, in between the bones of the wrist, a move which causes a sharp, short pain, but leaves the hand numb. With her other hand, she circled Kolton’s neck and twisted left other arm high behind her head, pinning her. She swiveled, turning Kolton’s convulsive reaction to the wrist pinch to her advantage, so that Kolton’s body was between her and the gate. This took all of two, maybe three seconds, as she had gauged that it would.
“Please order the guards to stand down,” she said gently “I will not harm anyone. If they stand down.” She looked at Lai when she said this.
“If you harm her, they will kill you. I will shoot you myself.” He said this calmly, but took a few slow steps backwards. Truck had whined to life the instant after she had moved on Kolton.
“You’re crazy,” Kolton said. “There’s no way this can work.”
“Perhaps,” Gold said. “I’ve been called crazy before. You saw how fast I disabled you. I could have left you and General Lai dead on the ground in as much time.” She tightened her grip on Kolton’s neck. “Tell them to stand down.”
Kolton cried out in Chinese, telling the troops to fall back and not attack. “OK,” she said, hoarsely. “Pull them back.” She looked back at Gold. “What’s next?”
Gold was thinking fast. “Your radio, where is it?”
Kolton hesitated. Gold tightened her grip. “Back of my house. There’s a radio room.”
“Let’s go,” Gold said. She paused. “Li, we’re going to the house. Shoot anyone who gives you trouble. Stay safe.” Then she started Kolton, frog-march style, towards the gate.
“Keep your people back,” Gold said. “I will break your neck and take at least four of them with me. Tell them this,” she hissed at Kolton when she was silent. As they approached the gatehouse, Kolton called out to the troops, massed now in a confused semi-circle that parted as they passed. They let them pass.
Gold knew this was a folly. She had only vague recollections of similar situations in her past, of taking hostages and trying to compel obedience with them. It never worked. Or if it worked, it didn’t work for long. She didn’t need it to work for long, though, this time. Just long enough.
They reached the house, and she pulled Kolton inside. General Lai followed them. Gold scowled at him. He was still holding a pistol, low and at the ready.
“Tell him to wait outside,” she told Kolton. “Can you work the radio?”
Kolton nodded. “I’m the only one who can do it,” she said. “Security.”
Kolton told Lai to wait outside. “He wants to know why,” Kolton relayed.
“Tell him I don’t like his face,” Gold said. Lai sneered at her as Kolton translated, then spun on his heel and left.
Gold filed this datum away for consideration later. It said a lot. It said that this Unit’s hold might be tenuous, might be in danger. Or they considered it a threat enough to ensure that only they could use the radio. It was possible.
Focus, she told herself. “If I release you, will you send a message to Command?” Kolton hesitated, then nodded.
&n
bsp; Gold considered. “If you try to fight me, I will kill you,” Gold told her. “I can work a radio.” She released Kolton and stepped back quickly, out of range, watching Kolton closely, ready for anything.
Kolton shook herself, rubbing her neck. “I won’t fight you. Command will want to talk to you. You’re right.”
Gold looked her over, not seeing an overt threat in her posture. No hidden tenseness, eye glances, or the other usual preludes to an attack. “Show me the radio,” she said, keeping her hands free and shoulders loose.
Kolton led her, massaging her throat to a back room. A rack of plastic, weathered-looking batteries wired to what looked like a disassembled walkie-talkie mounted to a board. There was a speaker and her eyes traced the wires, a telegraph operator’s switch. The switch looked Victorian, ornate, with scrollwork.
She looked at Kolton. “Very Gilligan’s Island.” Kolton gave her a blank look. “Never mind. Turn it on, please.”
Kolton flipped a knife switch. “It’s on. You know Morse code?”
Gold nodded. “It’s been awhile, but yes. No voice coms?”
Kolton shook her head. “That stuff didn’t last twenty years after the Bloom and the War.”
Gold glanced at her. “Things fall apart.”
Kolton regarded her. “You could say that,” she said sourly, massaging her neck. Gold must have scraped the scar tissue in their scuffle, as a thin line of red was running down her face, scarlet on black. Kolton, feeling it, wiped at it and looked at her hand, then frowned and wiped her hand on her pants.
“You could have that plate removed,” Gold said. “I suspect you would be OK.” She was trying conciliation, but Kolton wasn’t having it.
“Not interested,” Kolton growled. “It’s on, go ahead.”
Gold eyed her. “I need your word that you won’t try to rush me or anything.”
Kolton rolled her eyes. “I won’t. Command will want to talk with you.” She shrugged. “Might be a bonus in it for me, bringing you in.”
Gold nodded and rested her hand on the telegraph key, getting a feel for it. Remembering. She had used these extensively in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the field with the Russians in the Patriotic War.
She tapped. Tapped again, the flood of memories coming back to her. Cold radio rooms, a barn in Ukraine, not a mile from the front. Tapping out instructions, receiving them. Going out in the night with a rifle to kill Germans. She smiled.
THIS IS GOLD, she tapped. FOR COMMAND. OVER. She waited.
She tapped it out again. Waited, and was about to repeat when a series of beeps came from the tinny speaker, some short, some long. She translated in her head; the code sweeping back to her mind out of the past.
COMMAND FOR GOLD. STATE MESSAGE. OVER.
She pondered, for only a second. Clarity and precision, then. No point in beating around the bush.
GOLD FOR COMMAND. REQUEST MEETING TO DISCUSS SITUATION. OVER.
There was a long pause. Gold turned to Kolton. “Where is Command?”
Kolton shook her head, her lips a tight line. “Not nearby,” she said.
“Is there air transport? Planes? Helicopters?” Gold suspected there was not. If they couldn’t keep walkie-talkies working, she doubted anything was flying anymore.
Kolton shook her head. “Not for years and years.”
COMMAND FOR GOLD. MEETING AGREED. IS L2 KOLTON ALIVE? OVER.
Gold raised her eyebrows. Shrewd question, if a bit blunt. She keyed back.
GOLD FOR COMMAND. L2 KOLTON ALIVE AND HERE. OVER.
This time the pause was short. COMMAND FOR GOLD. L2 KOLTON WILL ESCORT YOU. LOOKING FORWARD TO MEETING. L2 KOLTON TO REPORT. OVER.
She looked at Kolton. “I think they want you to report in.”
Kolton looked sour. “They probably want more intel on you.”
“Tell them I’m a demon from outer space,” Gold said, trying to break through Kolton’s mood. She needed this woman on her side.
“Don’t joke about stuff like that. Command is jumpy,” Kolton said.
“Seriously?” Gold asked.
“Especially about ghosts,” Kolton said, repressing a shudder. Gold noticed. “Any stuff like that.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Silver and Carter looked for a place to land. They had left the river delta earlier in the day, leaving the ship and a few scattered boats behind. China had people, more than California had. There were people here who made boats. What made China survive when the US had essentially not survived? Sheer population size? She wondered. If a small percentage of your population survives an event, like a plague, like what Carter seemed to describe this Bloom as, doesn’t that mean the biggest population will have the most survivors?
With the most survivors having the best, earliest shot at bouncing back. Was this bouncing back? Wooden boats? Muskets? How low do you get knocked down to make the fifteenth century the top of your bounce? Still, there were people, which was good. Great, even. It meant maybe she could learn something. It also meant she needed to be cautious.
So she was cautious. Silver had come up with an idea she quite liked: land the Dutchman where there are no people. It had been easy in California, where people had been very rare, usually just small bands of hunter-gatherers who fled from the Dutchman’s approach. Neolithic. Here, in a seemingly more populous China, she needed to be more cautious.
So when they spotted a good site, usually a hill near a river or stream, she had Carter do a wide circle around it. She instructed him to watch outside the circle, and she scoured the landscape inside the circle for signs of people.
“People are gonna see us, doing this,” he said, not really complaining. Carter didn’t complain. He just spoke his mind. Silver had grown to like this about him.
“If they see us, we’ll have until tomorrow until they get their shit together enough to pay us a visit,” Silver said confidently.
“How so?” Carter asked, glancing at her.
“Unless we see a village, we can count on people being an hour or so away from their home base,” she said. “Maybe two hours. It’s late in the day already, so even if they convince people of what they saw, which is itself unlikely, they won’t be visiting until dawn.”
“They could come at night. It wouldn’t be that far,” he said, philosophically.
“Would you?” Silver asked. “And anyway, that’s why we have the doggie. Mr. Bark Bark.” She smiled at the nickname she’d given him, which Carter hated. It fit. The damn dog had barked his way across the Pacific. “Time he earned his keep.”
They had discussed it, the merits of traveling at night instead of during the day. Night flying made for poor navigation.
Carter smirked at this. “OK, we’ve done a circle. Not a soul on my side.”
“Nobody on mine either,” she said, turning the Dutchman right and looking out over the nose for the little hill with the copse of trees nestled around the stream that ran by the base. The wind would be in her face so…
The radio beeped. It beeped again, a series of dots and dashes. She listened. Numbers. Lots of numbers. Coded traffic, then. Somebody, this Unit, was using code. She listened, for a while, the old game of trying to hear the operator’s “fist.” She had done enough covert radio monitoring in her time; it was second nature, to listen. The dots and dashes made numbers and letters, to be sure, but the individual operators, everyone did it differently.
It was hard to quantify, identifying an individual operator, but given time she could do it. She had known, for example, in Russia, and later in Berlin, the difference between the various telegraphers she heard, American, French, British…everyone was sending from Berlin in those days. And during the War itself, the night had been full of coded traffic, and plenty of en clair traffic, some of it quite desperate. People pleading for help. Ships under fire and sinking. Terrible things.
They parked the Dutchman, a matter of setting the right levers on the dashboard and tethering him to a tree. Car
ter didn’t trust just one tether, so he tied them off to two trees. The Dutchman hovered then, at about thirty feet up, held on station by whatever force kept it aloft. It barely swayed in the wind.
Silver had given up trying to figure it out. Dutchman did what it did and defied her best efforts to understand it. She busied herself setting up their camp, unpacking the cargo net of gear they had winched down with the dog. The dog had bounded off the minute they had released him. Silver wondered if he was coming back, and hoped that he was. She liked dogs.
They set up their tents, simple nylon pup tents, strung between two trees. She had found plenty of tents, some in their original packaging, but all the bungee cords in their poles had dried out long ago, so they had to fit their poles together without the guiding cords, which was a major pain in the ass. Easier to just string up fabric on two lines, tie it off on nearby trees, and shelter underneath it. She usually slept on the Dutchman, but with Carter around, she had decided it was safer to have him away from the controls, where she could watch him.
She brought down one of the portable hand-cranked emergency radios she had found in the Nevada desert, and kept it on while they worked, tuned to the emergency military channel. It had remained silent, after the initial flurry of coded messages, but she didn’t want to miss anything. Frequency of messaging was its own kind of message, and if she could get a feel for the individual operators, she would know how many she was dealing with. Or how many had radios, she reminded herself.
The night passed uneventfully. The dog returned; they ate their dinner. Leftover boiled rice from a long-ago stowed emergency food, freeze-dried and apparently still edible. It was bland, but it was dinner. They tossed in their last stringy rabbit nuggets and chased it with a few of the wild, sour oranges they had scrounged from a suburban wild orchard in Central California. The dog cuddled up with Carter and his stinking blanket. Silver sat up for a while, listening to the radio, spinning the dials for more traffic, but there was nothing, just ghostly static. It was eerie, the silence. After a while, she slept, light as a stone skipping across a pond. But she slept.
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