The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Of course, he would never have dreamed about hunting an animal with his sniper rifle -- that wouldn’t have been sporting, what?

  He slept, expecting to sleep badly. He woke up only once during the night when someone coughed. There was no other sound, and after a bit, he went back to sleep.

  The morning was interesting. He was roused a half hour before dawn, and indeed, there was a thin slice of light in the eastern sky. People busied themselves with breakfast, and as they were seated around the fire, Ezra spoke.

  “Hamburg, I heard you cough, last night. I also smelled cigarette smoke. I promise whoever is smoking, I don’t give a shit about the light -- I care about anything that gives my position away. If I smell smoke again, I’ll line up every last one of you and sniff your breath. If I smell cigarette smoke on your breath, your next conscious thought will be in the infirmary back on Earth. Do I make myself very clear?”

  The man involved shrugged but nodded.

  Shortly after daylight, he and Ezra were in position, and Charles built himself another firing position of stones. This time it was Charles who was curious. “Mister Lawson, these rocks are rounded, like they’ve been in the water.”

  “They were in the water. Before a bout of climate change this was all jungle and swamp. Arvala has no axial tilt -- the days and nights are the same length. There are no seasons, and the sun always rises and sets at the same time. Still, the weather seems to have long-term cycles. Right now it seems to be swinging back to a wet cycle, as there were two hurricanes last summer.” He laughed, “Our summer, anyway.”

  Ezra waved to the north. “See there?”

  Charles looked north and didn’t see anything there. He glanced at Ezra who was looking through binoculars and talking into his radio. Alerting the others, Charles was sure.

  He looked back up, and finally spotted a single dralka, about two miles away, flying low, over towards the ocean. He bellied down in his firing position and got ready.

  “He’s flying just inland of the ocean, Cadet. It means that he’s not terribly hungry. Dralka are smarter than you might think -- if he was hungry he’d be over the water, making circles, looking for a school of fish. Here he is, over land. Thus, he’s not very hungry, because there is nothing to eat on the land, except us.”

  “May I fire when it’s in range?”

  “Sure. Open up any ol’ time. The laser says two point one miles. You’ll pardon me if I get my ear plugs on.”

  Charles watched the dralka carefully. It wasn’t flying very fast -- it would take a half dozen strokes from its wings and gain a couple of hundred feet of altitude, and then settle down to some cruising. It was obvious that it wasn’t going to get anywhere near them.

  He looked over his shoulder. “I don’t suppose you would get up and wave at it, would you, Mr. Lawson?”

  Charles was quite prepared for the other to tell him to jump up and wave himself, but instead, Ezra was up and waving after a few seconds. There were some startled queries from the rest of the camp, but the veteran ignored them. Sure enough, the dralka swerved a bit and started gaining altitude as it came towards them.

  Ezra Lawson dropped down next to Charles. “Any of these critters are a danger. Killing one is a good idea. Still, there are two dozen people here who are going to be pissed as hell if it gets close.

  “They have two attack modes that they favor. They fly low and hide that way, or they fly high and drop like rocks. Just then it was in the typical cruising altitude. They know the Arvalans have bows and so they fly higher than the bows can reach. We’d just as soon you not miss, so that there will be no survivors to let them know that they have to keep even higher these days.”

  Charles’ eyes had never left the dralka. “No problem, Mr. Lawson.”

  The flying predator slowly approached, having settled at an altitude of about five thousand feet above ground level. If it had been truly smart and had been quartering towards them, instead of heading straight in, it might have made it a difficult shot.

  Charles let the motions of the dralka sink in, going totally still, more or less a fire control computer. As almost always happened, the shot, when it came, surprised him.

  The dralka flipped backwards in the air and then fell like a rock.

  Ezra Lawson audibly swallowed. “Shit! That was a good two thousand yards!”

  “It’s a big target, Mr. Lawson.”

  “Not much wider than a person,” Ezra said absently. He laughed then. “Well, Cadet, you are going to be extremely popular with the Arvalans if you can keep shooting like that!”

  He stood up and yelled for everyone to saddle up. While everyone was getting their gear cleared away, Ezra stood on a small hummock of ground with a pair of binoculars, glassing the horizon, mostly to the north and west.

  Then he hastily put his gear together and the ATVs formed a new perimeter around where the surveyors were working. It was, Charles saw, a layered defense. There were the perimeter guards out about a mile, four of them, with only Charles doubled up.

  There was a middle ring, again, in a diamond around where the surveyors were, about half a mile out. Both Sally and Adam were there with their escorts. There were three surveyors and three helpers, plus seven inner perimeter guards.

  After two hours of uneventful waiting, he glanced at Ezra. “This seems like overkill for the occasional bird.”

  He laughed. “You’d think so. But once, up north, there were a couple of hundred at once. Since then, we’ve seen flocks in excess of twenty three times. One of these is no big, you’re right. Twenty? Now that’s right sporty! A couple of hundred? You might as well relax to the fact that you’re going to lose people.”

  Charles patted the Barrett. “Do you know how many rounds this has up the spout?”

  “I heard it had a magazine, but I never heard how many.”

  “Ten, Mr. Lawson.”

  “And you have how many spare mags, Cadet?”

  “I have six with me and twenty-five more in my gear.”

  Ezra laughed. “You better hope our ATV doesn’t break down -- because if it does, we have to hump our gear back to the cave. If we leave ammo behind, I’d have to write a lot of reports. You don’t even want to think about what happens if you leave a firearm behind.”

  “We don’t want the Arvalans to have firearms?”

  “No, not that. Andie Schulz is busy showing them how to make them. Like I said, these are interesting times. There are a number of factions among the Arvalans. The old leadership of the Dralka fighting order, among them. They weren’t happy with the changes we represented and tried to kill us. We haven’t seen any sign of them for a few months, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there.

  “Then there is a tantalizing hint of another enemy. Once, a long time ago, there was a pirate and bandit named Rangar. The rookery used to be his headquarters. He raped, looted, and kidnapped up and down this peninsula. One day he carried off a really big raid, and when they tracked him down after that, they found a beach where some ships had come to take them off. That was a hundred years ago.

  “Right after we started our reorganization of the Dralka fighting order, a ship left Arvala headed southwest. Except that the wind blows from east to west, and southwest would have been a difficult course to set and keep.

  “Moreover, someone noticed that the ship had a triangular sail, and that it could move against the wind. In short, we think it was a lateen-rigged fishing boat. The one fellow that was left behind wouldn’t tell us much beyond that they are loyal to Rangar. Since the Arvalans don’t live any longer than we do, so that has to be a hereditary title now. But someplace out there are some other baddies. And of course, the Tengri. We’ve shown them what modern firearms can do, but we’d just as soon not give them any samples to work from.”

  Charles sighed. “This is pretty complicated, isn’t it?”

  “Well, compared to Iraq, maybe so -- but it really boils down in the same way disputes always have -- there are people wh
o want more than they’ve got now and who are willing to use force to get what they don’t have. Our allies don’t do democracy or anything like that -- don’t get me wrong -- but they do demand what we call justice, and their enemies are more than willing to deny it to them, using weapons to make their point. It pretty much sucks that people can’t leave each other alone.”

  The day wore on, and again at lunch half the group was on watch while the other half ate. After lunch they moved two miles north and did the same thing again. There were no more alerts after the one, and the next few days blended together in a blur.

  Charles had to admit that living in a temperate climate like they were in was pleasant, even if evidently it never rained. The days were pleasantly warm, the nights were mild. The Big Moon appeared on the western horizon and edged its way slowly across the sky, until it finally set in the east.

  Four times a day they moved a mile or so, and that was the single most exciting part of the day.

  For Charles, it wasn’t that boring. The terrain was fascinating. He spent a lot of time looking at the variety of rocks they crossed over. Each move was an adventure as he arranged rocks so he had a good shooting position.

  After a week they’d moved twenty-five miles north. There was considerably less cargo as they headed further north, now bound for Arvala, two hundred and fifty miles ahead.

  Ezra pointed out where Kris and Andie had fought a battle. Charles, Adam and Sally walked the ground, while Ezra explained how the battle had unfolded.

  They moved north a little faster, and before Charles was quite ready, they topped a ridge and looked down on Arvala.

  He could see instantly why it was called “The Golden City.” It glowed from the yellow sandstone the buildings in the city had been constructed from, and there were sandstone cliffs west of the town that added to the color, with a river to the east, showing blue and green, contrasting prettily with the gold of the cliffs and buildings. It really was a spectacular sight, Charles thought.

  The next few days were a kaleidoscope of events, as Ezra and the other Americans tried to show the Norwich students everything there was to see. Eventually it was time to move on, and they followed the wagon road that led east, along the wall. Twice they stopped and they were able to observe some of the huge predators that lurked on the other side of the wall.

  “You really have to hand it to these Arvalans,” Sally said at one point as they watched something like a T. Rex chasing a dinosaur the size of a rhinoceros. “Facing a dralka with just a longbow and a sword takes real stones. Facing a tarin with just those -- I can’t imagine how much courage it takes.”

  Ezra nodded. “They do cheat a bit; they go in a large party, maybe forty or fifty strong. They spread out a bit, but close enough to support each other. Tarin are huge, but the skin isn’t armored. The eyes aren’t armored, either.

  “One good thing, according to the paleontologists, is that the jungle is very thick. They have critters like Jurassic Park raptors, but they don’t jump, and while they can run, they can only run about as fast as a person. Run any faster in the jungle, and you start running into trees. Running into a tree at full tilt is a stunning mistake.”

  They all tittered at the joke.

  Finally they reached the small town, Siran-ista, on the eastern sea. Everything was rock and had little going for it beyond that it was the eastern terminus of the wall. There wasn’t much water, and the people spent a lot of time just trying to keep from dying of thirst.

  The morning of their first full day in the town was a break in the routine. Ezra woke him up in midmorning, as Charles was still recovering from the party that had been held in their honor the night before. “You up for some target practice?”

  “You said you wanted some; sure, if that’s what you want,” Charles told him.

  Ezra laughed. “No this is target practice for you. About an hour ago a flock of dralka passed east, well out over ocean. Now they’re coming back, only this time flying up the coast. It’s going to get sporty, because we’re looking at a couple of hundred critters.”

  He grinned at Charles. “Kris told me she’d cut my balls off if any of you get hurt -- so you will promise me that you’re going to be careful, right?”

  “You bet,” Charles told him.

  Charles gathered up the Barrett and all the ammunition and followed Ezra outside. They didn’t go far, just to a south-facing wall, just a hundred yards from where Charles had been sleeping. “If you run out of ammo,” Ezra told him, “you go back into the house, close the door, and don’t open it until someone comes and gets you. Do you understand?”

  “Whatever,” Charles said, bitterly.

  A few minutes later he took his first shot and watched the bird fall like a rock. He was mildly surprised. If you shot a bird on earth, and even dead, they would flutter down. Here, the dralka fell like rocks.

  It wasn’t much of an errant thought -- there were too many targets. He just fired and fired, whenever his brain told him it was time.

  At one point the Barrett fired its last shot and for a second he was stymied. Then Ezra handed Charles his own P90. “It’s set to single shot,” he was told. “The sights are laser and IR designated.”

  Charles started firing once more, knowing that the dralka were closer. Worse, almost at once, he realized that the weapon wasn’t nearly as accurate as the Barrett. Still, he fired and fired, taking additional magazines from Ezra.

  Finally he was looking in all directions for a target and found none. He turned to Ezra. “Is that it?”

  “Fuck!” Ezra said with feeling.

  “Mr. Lawson?”

  “Fuck!” the man repeated.

  “I don’t understand,” Charles told him.

  “Man, you went through nearly four hundred rounds, between the Barrett and the P90. You cleaned them out. I’ve never seen shooting like that.”

  Charles shrugged. “I’ve never shot animals before. It’s not very sporting. They never got close.”

  “No shit! Christ, you dropped them with a P90 at a couple of hundred yards! Good God!”

  “Your weapon shoots a little to the right,” Charles said patiently.

  “Whatever. You shoot right down the pike! My God! The Arvalans have gone totally ape shit! Look!” Ezra waved at a cluster of men a few hundred yards away. They were armed mostly with crossbows, held ready, and a few muskets, and not far away a dozen Americans were equally ready. They were looking Charles' way, pumping their weapons up and down in the air and cheering.

  That night there was a really wild party; Charles thought that he’d seen some really wild parties before -- but none of them compared to this one.

  Early in evening he met an American woman, Denise Courtland, who was a cryptographic analyst at the listening station. She was short and blonde and easy to talk to. “That was some shooting,” she told him.

  “I was a sniper in the army.”

  “Well, you did good!

  “I graduated from Caltech last summer, and I was despairing of finding a job with some solid crypto work and a bit of adventure. I took this job without much hope.

  “Wow! This is so much cooler than I would have ever imagined! You have no idea! We listen to the Tengri plot to conquer the world, certain that none of the ‘lesser breeds,’ as they call us, can read their messages.

  “A couple of days ago, we caught a message south of here that we couldn’t touch. It’s either a different sort of code, a different language, or both. My bet is that it’s both.”

  “And this is important how?” Charles asked.

  She giggled. “Hey dude, we can only guess at the transmitter signal strength, and from that try to figure some idea about how far away the transmitter is. Mostly, all we get is a line on the transmitter. The Tengri have a lot of ships with radios, so they are always moving around. They are all further to east. There are three very ‘bright’ radio sources that they use to send messages, and now they have a base a hundred miles east of here -- we hear them
frequently too.

  “The new signal was, like I said, to the south. It wasn’t a Tengri transmitter, and the Arvalans don’t have any radios. The best guess that they are one of the other countries, all of whom are either at war with the Tengri or in a truce, waiting until the next outbreak of fighting.”

  Charles nodded as if it made sense to him, which it didn’t. One thing though that was important was that the staff of the American listening post had beer and were willing to share it with the guests from home, particularly Charles, who had single-handedly held back the dralka host.

  He got a pleasant buzz and had no objections when Denise took him to her quarters and they got even better acquainted than they had been. It was obvious that Denise was suffering from abstinence as much as Charles. After one intense session she was resting her head on his chest, nibbling his nipples.

  “It’s hard, you know?” she said. “It’s not that the guys I work with are gross or anything, but I’m pretty sure that being the only woman here and being sexually active with them would lead to trouble. Andie Schulz was pretty clear on not making waves. Visiting firemen! That’s the ticket!” She’d laughed low, and he’d run his hand down her back. She moved higher and started kissing him, and he’d kissed back. How he was going to be able to stay awake tomorrow was going to be an interesting thing...

  * * *

  There was no warning, no hint of a problem. The world spun and twisted and Charles hit the floor with a jarring thump. A fraction of a second later, Denise landed on top of him. She let out a startled sound, but it stopped almost instantly. He started to make a noise and someone stuffed something made of cloth in his mouth as he opened it to shout. A bag went around his head, his hands and feet were quickly trussed up, and the next thing he knew, he was being carried horizontally.