"I'll take a report in a minute," the lieutenant said; and turned his gaze back to Bleys.
"I think this vehicle isn't going to be moving for a long time," Bleys said. "We need to transfer to another vehicle and get away from here, unless you're confident you've driven off whoever attacked us."
"That's not going to be easy," the young officer said. He seemed to have recovered his composure. "Our communications are jammed, and the only vehicle we have left is my armored car, which can't hold all of us."
"Where are the enemy?" Bleys asked.
"My sergeant is out scouting right now," the lieutenant said.
"Have you taken many casualties?" Toni asked.
"Yes," the officer said, his face tightening and turning a little pale. There was a sort of longing in his eyes as he looked at Bleys, as if he were wishing that the uncomfortable questions were coming from a superior officer rather than a female civilian. "They took out the lead armored car with some sort of rocket, and another one took off the back half of the other troop carrier. Sergeant Lemoyne got out of it, along with about a dozen men, a couple of them wounded. One of your staff people got out, too, but I'm afraid he ran right into the sights of the cone rifles." "Oh, no ...," Toni said softly.
"What do you suggest we do?" Bleys felt he had to ask, despite being unsure of how much he could trust this young officer's judgment.
"Your party will get inside the armored car immediately," the lieutenant said. "We can get some, possibly all, of the wounded in with you. We'll have to take a chance and send the car off in whatever direction seems to be safest in light of my sergeant's report."
"And the rest of you?" Toni asked.
"That will depend on the situation." The lieutenant was evading her question, Bleys thought. His estimate of the young man began to rise a little.
"Meaning you intend to leave some of your force—including yourself, I suspect—behind," Toni said flatly.
"They may be needed to provide cover," the lieutenant said. "And the car would have to be slowed to a walking pace if it tried to stay with us. Speed is your best defense, I think."
"He's right, Toni," Dahno said. She looked dissatisfied, but had no response.
"Sergeant Lemoyne is coming back, sir," a soldier yelled down from above the gulley.
"In any case, let's get you up to the car," the officer said. As they scrambled out of the hatch he directed a couple of his men to help them climb the gulley side, using a narrow, less steep, connecting ravine.
Their escort, making use of power pistols to blast a series of shallow steps in the steeper parts of the slanting walls, soon had them up on the rolling grassy surface from which they had fallen. As Bleys, the last one up, came over the edge, he could see the smoldering wrecks of the two ruined vehicles, as well as several sprawled bodies. He also saw the lieutenant return a salute from his sergeant, who turned away and began organizing the nearby soldiers.
"If you would all get in the armored car, please?" the lieutenant said.
"What did your scouts find?" Bleys asked, ignoring the order for the moment while waving Toni and Dahno forward.
"The enemy seem to be in force back the way we came," the officer replied. "And we expect they'll be looking for us to continue on the shortest line toward protection—the way we were going, I mean."
"That's to be expected," Bleys nodded.
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said. "So I'm sending the armored car on a perpendicular axis to the right of our line of travel. That will take you over the rise there—please don't look in that direction."
"You think someone might be watching us?" Bleys said.
"Frankly, I don't," the officer said. "But I'd rather not take chances."
Bleys nodded, impressed.
"Please continue," he said.
"This area was fought over last year," the lieutenant said. "That was before I was activated, but the sergeant went through this area during that campaign, and he believes there were some light fortifications in that direction. There might be a chance of finding some landlines we can tap into and call for help; and if nothing else, it might give us a place where those of us on foot can be under cover while the car moves on to send back help."
"All right, Lieutenant," Bleys said. "Tell us what you want us to do."
"Get into the car, please," the officer said.
"Are you coming with us?" Bleys said. He was pretty sure he knew the answer by now.
"No," the young man said. "I'll stay with my men."
"Aren't you afraid someone might say you should have stayed with the people you were assigned to protect?" Bleys was now genuinely curious, intrigued by the unexpected maturity he was seeing in this very young officer.
"No," the man said now. He looked at Bleys more closely. "I don't think you're asking that to try to get me to go with you, are you?" he said.
"No," Bleys said, "I'm not."
The young man nodded, seeming satisfied.
"We're leaving the car in the hands of its normal crew," he said. "The rest of us are going to fan out in a double arc to provide cover when the car takes off. I'll take charge on one side of the arc, Sergeant Lemoyne the other."
"I'll leave you to your work, then, Lieutenant," Bleys said. He nodded, and turned to climb into the armored car. In the doorway he paused, looking back at the young officer, who was already moving away.
CHAPTER 9
The inside of the armored car was crowded, and Bleys, Dahno and Toni, all wearing bulky blast protection jackets, were confined to the vehicle's central well. The two tall men had to stand, crouching under the hatch that opened to the car's topside. Toni had been given a padded helmet, but there were none large enough for the heads of the two men. Dahno's protective jacket would not close over his chest.
The six wounded soldiers had taken up so much space that the car's driver and one gunner were the only healthy soldiers who could be fitted in. The driver was carrying out his orders to move as fast as he could, with the result that everyone was tossed about, the conscious among the wounded crying out involuntarily at the worst bounces.
The speed did them no good. They had gotten less than a mile when an explosion tore up the front of the armored car, bringing it to a sudden halt that threw everyone around, and leaving it tilted sharply down toward the front.
Toni, who had been sitting awkwardly on the coated polyfiber floor at Bleys' feet, was pitched sideways into his legs, and he fell over her, taking a blow on the side of his head from the edge of the central well; but he managed to get his arms down as he fell, taking most of his weight on them rather than on her. The car began to fill with smoke.
Bleeding from a cut on the side of his head, Bleys regained his balance and pulled himself over Toni and between two of the wounded soldiers, who appeared to be unconscious. Reaching the hatch at the rear of the armored car, he threw it open and scrambled out, turning to help Toni, who had crawled right behind him and,
lying on her stomach partially out of the car, was scrabbling to pull herself through the tilted hatchway. He set her on her feet and reached back to give Dahno a hand as he dragged an unconscious soldier to the opening.
"What about the rest of them?" Bleys asked.
"The driver's dead," Dahno replied, stooping forward to get his head out into the cleaner air. "And most of the others were closer to the driver's compartment and took more of the blast than we did ... I think there can't be more than one or two still alive—" At that moment a secondary explosion rocked the vehicle again, pitching Dahno out the hatch onto Bleys, who, hampered by his hold on the wounded man, was knocked down again. A fresh wave of toxic smoke poured from the hatch.
"Forget it!" Dahno yelled now, struggling to his feet. "I think some ammunition went off, and between that and the smoke, no one can be alive in there anymore."
"Over here!" Bleys heard Toni call. He needed a moment to locate her.
She had found a cluster of low, flat rocks and was crouching in an opening between two
of the largest of them, waving at them. Bleys and Dahno scrambled over the rough ground in her direction, struggling to carry the dead weight of the unconscious man between them; and threw themselves down into whatever low spots they could find among the rocks, just as cone rifle fire opened up from beyond the smoking ruin of the armored car.
"We're in trouble now!" Dahno gasped. Incredibly, he sounded almost cheerful about it. Even as he spoke there was a new burst of firing—this time from power weapons. They ducked as low as they could and kept quiet, but Bleys was unable to keep himself from trying to look in the direction from which the firing had come.
In a few minutes he was rewarded by the sight of soldiers led by the young lieutenant. They came on rapidly in a skirmish line that swept to and beyond the ruined vehicle, spreading out in a great arc about Bleys' position. The lieutenant turned and began to trot in Bleys' direction; but when he saw Bleys looking at him, he stopped and waved for them to move toward him, half-turning to point in the direction in which their vehicle had been heading, at a small ridge that made the horizon seem startlingly near.
"There's a trench and a bunker just over that rise," he yelled as Bleys stood up. The young officer had lost his helmet and his face was smeared and dirty, as if he had been thrown into the dirt repeatedly. The whites of his eyes stood out against the dirt, seeming to be wide-open and glaring. He turned to trot in the direction he had indicated.
"Come on!" Bleys said, turning to look for Toni. She was already up, and Dahno was rising, trying to pull the wounded soldier up with him. Bleys stepped over to help, and found himself interrupted as several more soldiers showed up, rounding the rocks to both sides of the civilians.
"Thank you, but we'll take care of him," one of the soldiers, a corporal, said. "Head for the lieutenant, there. We'll be behind you."
"Thank you," Toni said; and for a short instant Bleys marveled at the politeness everyone was displaying. Toni pulled at his arm, and he found himself running beside her. Turning his head, he saw Dahno—not exactly running, but moving at a fast walking pace that managed to cover ground effectively. He seemed to be breathing hard. The small group of soldiers behind them were also in motion, but more slowly.
The lieutenant and several of his men had stopped, crouching cautiously at the top of the rise and apparently trying to ascertain what might be on the other side. As Bleys ran he saw three of the soldiers get up, trot over the top of the rise, and disappear. Their officer waited, looking back as his three civilian charges neared, puffing.
"Just wait here for a moment," the lieutenant said. "My men are checking out the bunker ahead."
"Will we use that, if it's safe?" Toni asked.
"I don't think we have much choice," the lieutenant said, looking back in the direction from which they had come. They turned to look with him, in time to see a line of armed figures close in on the armored car they had just left. Some of the figures raised long, slim weapons, and cones began whistling in their direction.
Bleys found himself being pushed backward, over the top of the rise; and looked to his side to see that the young lieutenant had him by one arm and was yelling at him ... strangely, Bleys could not seem to understand what the man was saying.
That realization jolted his mind back into action, and he turned his back on the enemy and plunged ahead in great lunging strides that totally cleared much of the most uneven parts of the reverse slope. He could see Toni and Dahno a short distance ahead of him. Toni was looking back at him frequently as she ran, which slowed her down to Dahno's pace; and Bleys was catching up to them quickly.
"Keep your eyes forward," he yelled at her, waving one hand as if to push her faster. He wanted to tell her they could not afford it if she lost her footing, but he had no breath to spare.
The two ahead of him were nearing a kind of ditch, above which two soldiers were standing, waving them ahead.
Bleys had lost track of the lieutenant again, but another soldier, a very young woman, had caught up with him—he could hear her gasping as she ran, hampered by the kit that bounced at the top of her back every time a foot hit the ground. But she turned to look into his face as she drew ahead of him, and grinned. He realized he was grinning back.
Ahead of them, Toni and Dahno had reached a ramp that sloped down into the ditch. The two soldiers he had seen before were coming back in Bleys' direction, their weapons, held diagonally across the fronts of their bodies as they ran, looking like black slashes over their mud-stained gray-green uniforms. A third soldier had appeared, and seemed to be giving directions to Toni and Dahno as he headed back past them, toward Bleys. Toni and Dahno both stopped, looking back.
At that moment whistles ripped the air above him. He recognized them as a close hearing of the distinctive sounds made by the shaped propellants packed inside the long, slim, hollow needles fired by cone rifles. Something thumped the back of his blast jacket, and instinctively he tried to duck as he ran; but he lost his stride, almost falling sideways into a low patch of thorny brush. To his right and a bit ahead of him, the young soldier who had just passed him seemed to jerk in midstride, blossoms of bright red growing in two places on the back of her right thigh, below the hem of her uniform tunic. She buckled at the knees, and fell, her weapon flying off in front of her as if thrown, to tumble down the slope for a few feet, until its momentum died on the rough ground.
Bleys recovered his balance and lunged forward, reaching the young soldier even as the three soldiers who had passed Toni and Dahno ran, gasping, past him, heading back up the slope.
As he reached the wounded soldier, Bleys became aware he was winded, breathing now in great sucking gasps while clawing to clear sweat that was clouding his eyesight. He crouched beside the young woman and found her still conscious, and cursing. Her helmet had stayed on, but as he bent down one of her hands clawed at its catch, then threw it to the side before reaching back to paw futilely at the back of her thigh.
"Come on!" Bleys gasped, trying to yell. "You can't stay here!"
For a second she looked at him, her blue eyes wild and glaring; and then the skin around those eyes seemed to relax a little. She grinned again, and started to say something—but at that moment there was a loud outburst of power weapon fire behind them, and as one they looked back.
At the top of the slope behind them, a long line of their pursuers had appeared, strung out along the crest. Bleys did not try to count them, but he guessed there might be several dozen of them. He saw arms pointing in his direction, and then they leaped in pursuit down the slope . .. but now they had walked into an ambush themselves, as the young lieutenant and his men, using whatever cover they could find in the uneven terrain, had successfully avoided being noticed until the enemy had skylined themselves, within easy range.
"We've got to go!" Bleys yelled at the wounded soldier. It escaped his notice that his windedness of a few moments ago was gone. She turned to look back at him, and nodded; but when she tried to rise, she cried out, grimacing in pain.
Beyond her, Bleys saw, Toni was coming back toward them. He raised one arm and waved it, making a pushing motion as if trying to physically push her backward into the ditch. She stopped, and he rose up, pulling the young soldier with him by her shoulder, with a grip on the cloth of her uniform. The soldier cried out again, but then broke off the cry and pushed herself up from the ground; and together they began to stumble down the last portion of the slope toward the ramp.
Behind them, the power weapon fire had broken off; but he had no energy to spare for a look back. He was having to hold the soldier up as they moved, and she seemed near to passing out. Someone yelled behind him, and as he reflexively turned to look over his shoulder he lost his grip on the soldier; she slid down to the ground, giving a short cry.
Toni was running up the ramp as he reached down for the wounded woman, but even as he got a good grip on her weapons harness, Dahno appeared, seeming to pull the young woman up from the ground as effortlessly as some trained weightlifter might snat
ch a set of weights in a match.
"You're going to get us all killed yet!" he said; and turned, cursing, to stride down the ramp with the young woman in his arms. Toni reached Bleys and grabbed his arm.
"I'm fine!" he gasped. "I'm fine! Go!" He pushed at her, trying to turn her around and propel her ahead of him; but they ended up hurrying down the ramp and into the shelter of the ditch side by side. Ahead of them, Bleys could see his brother's broad back nearly filling the space between the vertical walls of what was, in fact, not a ditch at all, he realized, but the remains of a military entrenchment.
The soil that made up the walls of the trench was light in color, a sort of yellowish brown that he found distasteful. The floor of the trench was muddy, slippery and sticky.
Dahno had reached some sort of doorway set into the left side of the trench, in the middle of a stretch faced with crudely mortared rocks and logs. He seemed to be trying to turn in to the doorway, but was having trouble negotiating the turn, encumbered by the unwieldy form in his arms. He stopped, and started to shift the soldier's body into a more vertical position—and at that moment cones whistled from a point further down the trench. Dahno half-turned toward Toni and Bleys—and then fell backward, the young soldier sliding from his arms, down into the opening he had been trying to enter.
As he tried to throw himself to the ground, Bleys' feet slipped in the mud, and he fell sideways into the wall of the trench, his grip on Toni's arm pulling her with him, so that she fell on top of him.
Power rifles roared twice—three times—from behind them, and he saw a figure, beyond Dahno's body, tumble backward as if kicked in the stomach by some invisible god.
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 9