Rita Longknife--Enemy in Sight

by Mike Shepherd

  He fired and one spun backwards.

  But another one picked up the pike that one dropped and drove it into a fleeing human.

  Calico shot and the big one fell, but another was picking up the pike before it hit the ground. Another had scooped up a rifle dropped by the human.

  That big one ducked behind a barrel before Ed could put a shot in him.

  A moment later, shots drove Ed to duck.

  “Quick learners,” Calico said.

  “Smarter than some of the fools in that meeting we were wasting time in,” Ed spat.

  A ceramic jar with a sputtering fuse dropped behind them and rolled away. Grace O’Malley didn’t miss a step, but changed her leap to join them to one of scooping up the jar and hurling it back.

  This time it hit something, burst and then began to burn with a struggling light.

  Ed fired at a shape that moved in that light. The scream that was his reward came from no human throat.

  “Cover me,” Calico said, and made ready to race up the street toward a water trough. Grace and Ed put both of their pistols up and fired as rapidly as they could pull the triggers while Calico low-ran up the street.

  By the time he was back under cover, Anne had joined them.

  “Shoot while we reload,” Ed said, and she kept up the fire while he popped out the magazines from his two pistols and slammed a new one in each. He slipped the empties into his shirt pocket. If this kept up, he’d have to find time to reload them.

  “And find cartridges,” he muttered to himself.

  “Don’t tell me, Ed, that you didn’t bring a small armory to this shindig,” Grace said.

  “Three mags each, then I got to find some ammo.”

  “Check my bag, boy. There’s a hundred-round box under my tampons. And don’t mess with those, it’s a bad month.”

  “I won’t,” Ed said, and turned at something he’d caught out of the corner of his eye. A big fellow was charging at them with a lowered pike.

  He put four rounds between that one’s eyes, an easy enough thing, with all those eyes to shoot for, and the big one skidded into the dust, the pike stopping just inches from Anne’s foot.

  “Thanks,” Anne said.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  Further up the street, Calico had slipped into a barracks and returned to the street with an automatic rifle with a grenade launcher under the barrel. He had two bandoleers, one of grenades the other of rifle ammo slung over his shoulders.

  He emptied the rifle at full rock and roll at the shadows in the next alley. There were screams and a fused jug rolled out to explode harmlessly in the middle of the street.

  “What are you doing back there?” Calico shouted, reloading. “Get up here and empty this armory before those bastards get at it.”

  “You heard the man,” Grace said, and with Calico covering for them, she made a dash to the barracks, drew a carbine with rocket launcher, grabbed a bandolier of ammo for each of them, and rejoined Calico.

  Ed took a few moments to wave a couple of his captains from the door where they’d been bunching up. “You cover down the street that way,” he ordered, and two of them ran for a couple of rain barrels while another two pirates provided cover.

  Where the hell are Billy and his bad boys? Ed thought, but Calico was waving for him to make a run for the barracks and its armory. He waved for one more of his captains to make a run for the guns, then followed him.

  It was nice to trade his pistols in for a big magazine rifle and grenade launcher. He sent the last captain back to provide cover for the crew he’d sent down the street and joined Jack and the gals looking up the street.

  “You take that side of the street,” Calico Jack said, motioning Ed to the right. “I’ll take this side. Gals, pick your man and back us up.”

  “Back you up, hell,” Grace snapped, and leaped out ahead of them. Anne was running for the far side, so Ed followed her, firing at anything that moved. Too many of the figures sprawled down in the street looked small and limited in legs and arms.

  It was a bad night and likely to get worse.

  From the looks of it, the bastards had gotten loose and started the killing before any human sounded the alarm.

  They worked their way up the street, shooting at anything that moved. They shot a lot of empty shadows, but they got themselves a few big fellows, too.

  At the end of the street were the pens where the big fellows were supposed to spend their nights.

  They were empty.

  “No surprise here,” Calico muttered.

  “How’d they get loose?” Grace asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Calico said, “but I doubt that ambush out in the jungle and this break out are accidents in timing. They’ve been working on this.”

  “Wouldn’t you if you got a look at what we did at Fort Four,” Anne said.

  “They weren’t supposed to see it,” Ed said.

  “They got four eyes,” Grace said. “How blind do you expect them to be?

  Ed looked around for the big fellows. He didn’t have to look a lot.

  “The wall,” Calico Jack hollered. “They’re trying to make it over the wall.”

  Sure enough, at the end of the road, there was a break in the wall for the road out. A half-dozen big bastards, two with guns, the others with pikes, were storming the gate guards.

  Anne opened fire, but missed. The big ones spotted the fire from behind and the two with rifles turned to take them under fire while the other four kept up the charge with lowered pikes. Even as Ed fired, one of them took a pirate at the gate full in the neck.

  The body went one way, the head the other and suddenly there was another four-eyed bastard to pick up the pike and swing it at a kid that was cringing in the shadow of the gate. He skewered the youngster and raised his body high, blood splattering.

  Ed knew he needed to duck from the incoming rifle fire, but he knew the kid. He was from Ed’s crew. The youth who had started the trouble up at Fort Four.

  Ed blew away the big one, even as a slug took him in the arm.

  He dropped down behind some crates, cussing his bad luck and stupidity.

  “It bad?” Anne asked.

  “It hurts like hell, but I can move my fingers and nothing’s broke.”

  Anne tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of her shirt and wrapped it around the bleeding cut. “Nothing’s spurting. You got more luck than you deserve,” she said.

  “Thanks for caring.”

  “Don’t we all,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss for no good reason before grabbing her rifle and returning fire.

  Ed found himself grimacing at the pain and trying to work up enough nerve to stick his head back up and shoot some bastard with too many eyes.

  As it turned out, it was good that he was looking the wrong way.

  He spotted movement down by the river. The wall there wasn’t as tall, what with the river being a good two hundred meters across there. Tall or not, Ed spotted big forms with too many arms and legs rolling over the wall.

  He pulled up his rifle and took a shot. Maybe he hit something. Maybe the big bastard just rolled over the wall. It was hard to tell in the dark.

  “They’re going into the river,” Ed shouted.

  Calico Jack turned, eyed the river wall for a moment as a half-dozen big ones rolled over it, then took them under fire.

  “The attack on the gate was a diversion,” he shouted. “They’re headed into the river. Ed, you and Annie try to keep the gate in our hands. Grace, with me.”

  “You bet,” Grace shouted, and the two of them headed for the river.

  “Cover them!” Annie shouted, and Ed did his best. He was up and shooting, putting his now vulnerable flesh at risk. He got one of the shooters, but another soon picked it up.

  So Ed shot that one.

  And something sailed over the wall with a fuse sputtering against the night. It exploded before it hit, sending shards of pottery flying, but none close t
o Ed and Annie.

  More followed. Some exploded early. Others hit first. They either caught fire or did nothing.

  Annie and Ed kept up their fire, cutting down more shooters but other big bastards stepped in to take their place. Still, it couldn’t last. There was only so much ammunition. The guns fell silent. From further down the wall, humans advanced, shooting.

  The big fellows with the pikes formed a rough line and charged Ed and Annie.

  They shot them down to a man. Or bastard. It was hard knowing what words to use.

  Ed and Annie ran for the gate . . . and got there just as a rough line of big fellows with bows and clubs were coming out of the jungle, two hundred meters out.

  They cut them down with rapid fire and the smart ones that survived fell back.

  To his right, Ed could hear Calico Jack and Grace making their own way toward the river wall. There was a lot of rapid fire punctuated by a few single rifle shots. Those were usually answered by a grenade explosion.

  Ed kicked himself. He’d forgotten, in the heat of battle, that he did have a grenade launcher and grenades.

  “I guess that’s why we train grunts,” he muttered to himself . . . and loaded a grenade, held his rifle at a forty-five-degree angle and sent a round arching out into the jungle.

  The big bastards answered him with a couple of their own fused shells, and something else. These rounds came in big sacks with a couple of fuses.

  Where they hit, fire exploded. Tents began to burn. The few remaining thatched huts caught fire with an eagerness that was stunning to watch.

  “What’s in those sacks?” Ed asked.

  “I don’t know,” Annie said, “but it stinks to high heaven.”

  Their contemplation of what was happening behind them had to be postponed as shapes began to form up in the thinned jungle ahead of them. They took turns lobbing grenades at the near threat while sending some out as far as they could in the hopes of catching whoever it was burning the place down.

  Around midnight, things finally got quiet.

  17

  Captain Edmon Lehrer rubbed his eyes as dawn lit the eastern sky. If his looked like Annie’s, they were red as a cut throat. The smoke and the stink from the fire bombs irritated the hell out of his eyes, his nose, this throat, his lungs. He hacked up crap from his sore throat and spit it out.

  “Do you think there’s anything poisonous in that fire shit they tossed at us?” Annie asked.

  Ed shrugged. “We’re alive and still hurting, ain’t we?”

  They half chuckled at his half joke.

  Ed and Captain Annie Bonney now stood on the wall beside the opening they called the South Gate. It would be nice if they actually had a gate to close, but for now, it was just a gaping hole where there was no wall and no moat in front of it.

  Some of the younger farm kids had put aside their pole weapons and lugged sand bags up here, so now Ed was able to hunker down with his borrowed rifle and look everything over without worrying about being picked off by one of the rifles the big bastards had taken.

  Or one of their long arrows.

  The kids who lugged up the sandbags had taken away the bodies of the earlier defenders of the wall that hadn’t managed to dodge the arrows or be missed by the bullets.

  A shot came from somewhere on the edge of the jungle. The bullet went wide of them. Annie sent a rocket grenade arching out to explode just inside the unburned trees.

  “You think you got anything?” Ed asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Annie said, wiping her eyes. “But we got to keep them back.”

  “I wonder what our supply of grenades looks like?” Ed said.

  Both of them grimaced.

  “At least they ain’t good shots,” a farm kid said as he added a sandbag to the wall’s growing parapet.

  “No, they aren’t,” Annie said. “I don’t think our kind of rifles fit all that well in their hands.”

  “You want to bet me that their kind of rifles will fit just fine in the hands of their soldiers?” Ed said.

  He and Annie shared a scowl at that thought. The kid who’d made the comment slunk away.

  Calico Jack joined them. He gave them a tired wave, rested his rifle on the sand bags, muzzle out, and eyed the jungle silently.

  “How’d it go on the river side?” Ed asked.

  “They swim like fish,” Calico said, his voice rough with exhaustion and whatever it was in the air. “They rolled over the wall, scrambled out into the water and dove. I think they can hold their breath for a couple of minutes. Or maybe those things at their throat. Someone thinks they may really be gills.”

  “I’ve never seen them use them,” Ed said.

  “You’ve never seen them underwater, have you?”

  Ed admitted he hadn’t.

  “Billy wants to have a meeting of the captains right after they have breakfast.”

  “That’s mighty kind of him to be thinking about our stomachs,” Annie said. “Where was he when we were fighting for our lives? And his?”

  “He says he and his captains were holding the North Gate,” Calico said. “Who knows, maybe they were.”

  Ed turned from the jungle to let his eyes rove over the destruction inside. “Is it as bad as it looks? The town?”

  Calico turned to follow his gaze.

  “It ain’t nice, I can tell you. I don’t know what all was in those fire bombs they tossed at us. Animal fat? Some kind of thing like a pine cone that burned like Willie Pete. It didn’t matter. We didn’t have any water to fight the fires with. You take a bucket to the river and you were as like to be shot with an arrow from the other bank as to be knifed by some big fellow coming at you out of the water.”

  “Are we besieged?” Annie asked.

  “If we aren’t, it’s close enough not to make any difference to me.”

  The next couple of kids with sandbags included a young girl with a bucket of water and a sack of bread and cheese. They drank first, then used what was left to wash some of the night’s grime from their skin.

  The young girl had brought an actual medical kit with her. Annie peeled the blood-soaked bandage off Ed’s arm, washed it down with wine, then took a needle to the long slash the bullet had made of his forearm.

  Calico pulled off his thick leather belt and gave it to Ed to chew on.

  Ed managed not to embarrass himself in front of his shipmates by screaming. He did put some serious teeth marks in Jack’s belt.

  About eight, a couple of shipmates from his and Annie’s Revenges showed up. They got the rifles only after they showed they knew how to use them. That done, the three captains headed for the Captains’ House.

  “Where’s Grace?” Annie asked.

  “She took an arrow last night,” Calico said, tersely. “I’m hoping to find her at the fort or the house before the meeting.

  They increased their pace.

  The fort was no longer a treasure house. In the morning light, it was a charnel house.

  Dead bodies lined the dusty road in front of it. Inside, living bodies lay on pallets on the floor. Shipmates offered some solace, but medical help was in short supply. Not that many doctors had chosen to flee Savannah; there had been few among the icicles.

  Grace, being a captain, was getting the best they had. They found her in an off room, seated at a table with several empty rum bottles strewn before her and a near empty one at her lips.

  Her right shoulder was bandaged, but red was seeping through the white.

  “How are you?” Annie asked, taking a chair beside her friend.

  “Fine. Fine,” she slurred. “Better if you can get me a new bottle. Make that three.”

  Calico turned to go hunt up some more rum.

  “No, really, how are you?”

  Grace scowled down at her shoulder. “Doc don’t think it will ever work quite right, ever again. Ever,” she muttered darkly, then seemed to brighten. “You can call me Lefty.”

  “I’ll call you Grace O�
��Malley, the best pirate skipper in the fleet,” Ed said.

  “You think the guys will follow a broad with no right wing?”

  “You got your arm,” Annie said. “With some physical therapy, we’ll work you back to as good as new.”

  “You ever seen a pirate thysical ferapist?” Grace spat,

  “I’ll find one just for you,” Ed said. “Even if I have to go to old Earth to steal him.”

  “You’d do that for me?” Grace said.

  “For you, we’d do anything,” Annie said. “Hell, you’ve had Calico doing just about anything you wanted.”

  “I did tell you that, didn’t I?” Grace said.

  “He’s hunting you up some more rum,” Ed pointed out.

  “I’ve got some more rum,” Calico said.

  But he’d arrived too late. The rum had finally done its job. Grace O’Malley had just done a face plant on the table.

  There was a bed handy. The three of them managed to get Grace from the chair to the bed. Annie removed her boots and they left her snoring softly, her face free of care and pain.

  Ed turned to Calico and Annie. “This better be a good meeting.”

  18

  Captain Edmon Lehrer noted how the captain’s table now automatically divided itself in two, just like it had last night. He sat at one end with his captains. Captain Billy Maynard was at the other end with his.

  There was no middle.

  Kim, along with two of his own farmers, now pike men, had pulled up chairs to sit behind Ed.

  Ed wasn’t too sure how he felt about being the patron of the farmers, but he liked eating, and it was a farmer’s doctor that had patched up Grace.

  I guess I owe you a few, Kim, Ed concluded.

  “This is a mess you made of things,” Captain Huzi said. If he’d been aiming his words at Billy, Ed would have said a hearty amen.

  But Huzi was staring hard at Calico Jack.

  “What do you mean by that?” Calico shot back.

  “You was in charge of the ground sloggin’. You could have kilt all them bastards the first time we seen them all.”

  “I do remember someone not being all that eager to wade into the river to pan for gold,” Annie said dryly.