It made me think a bit about history classes back in school, and the nineteen-page chapter that exhausted the subject of World War II, or the five-page chapter that wrapped up the World Unification Wars. Like a lot of other things taught in school, history was buttwind. No one on Earth ever learned a damned thing from the past, because the past was done past. History was history. You couldn't smell blood or taste fear in a history class, unless the students pulled cutters, slashed and trashed the place, and burgered each other. What's happening now was the only thing that ever had a chance of getting through the head fog. The only problem with that was that most of what's happening now was nothing. That's why no one paid much attention unless the war was taking place in their wallets or in their faces.
The Battle of Fire Alley would probably involve grand issues and the movements of mighty forces. The lives and liberties of millions hinged on what we did next and how we did it, yet the thing that filled my mind the next evening as I rode with Comini at the head of the bait column was an ingrown hair on my ass.
As we reached the point through the valley where it was narrowed enough to see the mountains on both sides, the sky was overcast, the easterly wind sharp and clammy. Mercy Jane made a house call, brought me that silver hat, gave me a gulp of that anti-infection juice, and made me drop my drawers. To the amusement of my end of the column, she stabbed my boil, tucked my smalls with some kind of moss, and I was back on my critter again.
With only a dull ache where the sharp pain had been before, I was free to concentrate on our suicide mission. It wasn't officially a suicide shot. It was more like the deal the man with the rod gave the worm. "You climb down that line, sit on the hook, and draw their attention. I'll be behind you one hundred percent."
That was all right with me. I figured my place was in the maggot trough anyway. Just ask Prophet's ghost. What kept my breath short and my knuckles white, however, was all of those in the bait column who didn't deserve to die. Lauris, Ratt, Mercy Jane, and even Deadeye. Yani Comini. Especially Margo. She hadn't been exiled to Tartaros. She was born there. I couldn't figure out why she was filling my head right then. I glanced over at Comini.
The general rode next to me, his desert sheet flowing behind him like a cape, his left fist on his hip, his nose in the air like he was leading a parade of crack troops down Philly's Franklin Parkway, lean, mean, and loaded for mummers.
I looked back at the mighty column he was leading. It was all smoke and shadows. One rider would lead a string of critters, every other critter a fiction made up out of desert sheets and greensticks suspended between the living beasts. For every living person in the column, there were a dozen dummies either riding or strung between the critters as though they were on foot. The critters and the foot soldiers dragged brush to raise as much dust as possible, and I thought back to the old vids we'd watch back in the crowbars, and was anyone in the past ever really fooled by the dragging-the-brush gag?
Comini's real troops, under the command of Shava Ido, were screening the flanks and running scouts ahead. Meter by meter they were looking for positions that could be defended by our limited force, and we chose our route accordingly. Although from a distance Comini looked like an old Earth dictator full of the struts, close up his eyes were looking everywhere at the same time, his mind working high speed. I didn't know enough to know what he was menting about, so I just hoped he knew something I didn't.
I pulled Jontine's vidcam out of my kitbag, ran out the zoom, and did a little scan of my own. Within the span of about a minute I saw three different groups of squats off in the distance observing us. One of the groups wore Hand sheets, the other two groups didn't wear any sheets at all because they never got to the desert. They were spotting for Iron Lee.
"Do you see them?" I asked Comini.
"I see them." He nodded his head toward a slight rise in the valley floor capped with jagged rocks. "That's Rock Island. Just before dark, when the column reaches it, we'll fire off a signal flare. That's the signal for Nance and Stays to go for the warlords. The fighting will sound like the big fight to Carlo's spotters, and if everything works according to plan, we can expect to get hit by Carlo's Fire Alley army within a day."
"And if things screw up?"
"Both of Lee's armies can be here by daybreak."
I looked at the hill and a strange feeling came over me. The feeling of a thing from a dream suddenly come real. The rocky walls and columns of the island gave it a rough resemblance to a castle. "How long can we hold out there?" I asked Comini.
"It's a good defensive position. Because of the rocks, when they come they'll almost have to do it in single file. There are only three avenues through the rocks, and one of them isn't much more than a barely climbable footpath. We can cover all three with the rifles and autos we have now."
"How long?"
"Until we run out of ammunition. Then it's slash and snap time."
The front of the walking column made it to the rocks about an hour before sunset. An Earth hour. I thought for a moment about all of those timepieces stored back in Kegel's homemade cave, and mentally kicked myself for not grabbing one of the adjustables. I looked up at the rocks, and from down below it looked like the castle from my dream. As the column climbed up into position, Comini, me, and about twenty squats with autos rode around the island.
At one point Ratt poked me in the arm and pointed. He was pointing at the squats, and I noticed that all of them were glaring up at the rocks like they hated them. Comini was grim, too.
I pulled up my critter until I was riding next to one of the squats. "Been here before?" I asked.
The ex-Hand job was one of those chunky bulbs that could be either a lump of lard or solid muscle. He had brown eyes that glittered as they aimed at me. He looked at Comini, the general nodded back, and the squat's face softened an atom.
"Yeah. We been here before," he growled.
I waited for more, but the squat wasn't the expansive type. He just rode on his critter glaring at me. Eventually he aimed his glare back at the rocks.
"There was a slave revolt several years ago," said the general. He cocked his head toward the rocks. "The last of them, maybe six thousand men and women, made a stand up there. Carlo had my men dig them out. We had them outnumbered and they were short on weapons and ammunition. Even so they held out for nine days. I lost almost three thousand men. As I said, it's a good defensive position."
"How many of the slaves were taken alive?" I asked.
Comini's gaze rested on me for a split second, then he turned on the back of his critter and faced forward. "None," he stated in a flat voice. Bando Nicos wasn't the only one with a ghost or two in tow.
On the eastern side of the island, there was a road toward the east. It was rutted dirt and rocks. I looked up at the island and shuddered as the image of my dream returned. Up there. My real enemy was up there. "Hell," I muttered to myself. "It's just a damned dream." I turned about on the back of my critter and looked eastward. There was no army of skulls.
By the time we had finished circling the island, it was twilight. Yani Comini studied the darkness for a moment. I heard him mutter something, and then he said out loud to one of the squats, "Send it up."
One of those blinding white flares streaked up into the sky, and like an idiot I looked at it. Long before my eyes again adjusted to the dark, I heard the distant roar of auto rifles coming from both the north and the south. The Battle of Fire Ally had begun. We headed up into the rocks.
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Ghostwalk
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Shortly after the RC wagon was parked, I went in, stretched out, and tried to sleep. My leg and my head were bothering me, and I was all flogged. It didn't matter. I couldn't sleep. I listened to the faraway gunfire until I was almost lulled to dreamland, then the firing from the south abruptly ceased. It was supposed to stop if all went according to plan. The warlord was burger an
d Lee's squats'd come over to the Razai, so no more shooting was necessary. That's why it made me wonder how come the shooting was still going on in the north. Not only that, the firing from that direction sounded like it was getting closer to Rock Island. The longer it went on and the closer it sounded the farther away the night horse rode.
I sat up and saw Ratt propped up on a chair next to a stack of law copies, sound asleep. I wasn't putting the bed to any good use. I felt strong enough, so I went over, gently picked him up, and put him in my sack. The air was cold so I covered Ratt with a couple of desert sheets.
Funny. Some nasty-looking little bastards when they're asleep look as sweet and innocent as new born babies. Ratt wasn't like that. Dead to the world he still looked like a rattlesnake with a creased attitude. I wondered how much of what Ratt looked like was due to the cards he'd been dealt, and how much was due to how he'd played them.
They had doctors that could snip and tuck this and that, rework the plumbing, making women out of men and men out of women. Way back there someone surely could've landed Ratt firmly on one sexual side or the other, rather than leave him sitting on the fence. But maybe Mihviht was like Earth: so many people that they couldn't feed them or keep them safe, and nothing left over for frills, like one punk kid's need to know who he was.
I didn't have a piece and I spied Ratt's auto leaning against the wall near the door. I picked it up and checked it out. The little bastard still didn't trust anyone. He'd taken out the auto nut. I put it back, saw the green copies of the Law, and took a set. I didn't need it. I had my own copy, the one Stays had written down, the first edition revised. The new copies were made from grass juice soaked photo paper. The process made the sheets green. I thought of green snow and that creepy tingle I felt when I first saw the island buzzed me again. I shook my head, and stepped out into the night.
The cold was bitter and I pulled the heavy curtain over the door. There were plenty of campfires among the rocks. Real ones, too. Not fire cubes. Some of the dead vegetation here burned like real wood. The fires kept us warm, heated up the food, and chased away the ghosts. In addition, we weren't worried about being seen. We'd made a big point of announcing that we'd arrived with our parade and fireworks display, so there wasn't a whole lot of point in pretending we weren't there. Also, the more fires, the bigger the army looked. I stayed outside the light of the fires, observing, becoming one of my own ghosts.
At one fire Comini's squats were hashing over whether to stick it out with the Razai or desert and get back to the families before Carlo could return and kill them. They didn't seem to think that the Razai was going to survive much past the morning. They'd given their word to Yani Comini, however, and that seemed to carry a lot of weight with most of them.
At another fire, Lauris Nhandi, Margo, and Lewis Grahl were discussing the Law with some of Comini's men and a few ex-Kegeleros. One of the Hand jobs was sharing with the others that he thought the max payback for any kind of death, regardless of the age or intent of the perp, was unfair.
"Tough shit," Lewis Grahl responded. The man was definitely getting the hang of it. Margo laughed and her laugh was like salve on a burn. Her image was fixed in my mind as I turned away and continued my prowl. I was getting to like her a lot, and I couldn't figure why. She wasn't a piece of emotional wreckage. There wasn't anything about her to repair. I stuck it on the shelf. There wasn't any point in giving Margo and me a ment. I had a date with Prophet and Ratt Katz.
At another fire Deadeye was conducting the trial of Ed Zhang v. Bud's Sudz. Zhang had a black eye and had brought an action against Bud for payback. Bud said that the motto "Payment upon delivery or I'll kick in your face" amounted to a contract. Zhang did not pay upon delivery, hence the black eye. Ed Zhang answered that Bud had not kicked him in the face, but had used his fist, thus violating the specific terms of the "contract," if such a contract did in fact exist.
Deadeye ruled that the term "kick in," as it is generally used by sharks in the context of Bud's motto, covered just about every form of bodily mayhem more serious than pushing yet short of actual death.
Zhang wanted to know if he still owed for the laundry, or was the poke in the eye sufficient, since the motto did say "payment upon delivery or ..."
Deadeye considered it for a second and looked at Bud. "How do you look at it?"
The defendant finished picking his teeth with his fingernail and said, "He still owes. The shot in the head was for bein' late."
"I got nothing to exchange," claimed the plaintiff.
"You can sew, right?"
"You want me to work it off?"
Bud nodded and faced Deadeye. "If I'm sewin' blues every minute, I got no time to do wash, and this is one raggedy gang."
I got out of there before the foundation of the firm of Bud's & Ed's Sudz & Threads.
Business law. It was coming. Along with peace and a place that was worth living in, there'd be property disputes, all that landlord-tenant stuff, civil rights, copyrights—I shook it out of my head. That was tomorrow's problem, always supposing we had a tomorrow.
The firing from the north picked up, ceased for a few minutes, then exploded. I found a tall clump of rock columns, climbed it, and looked toward the noise. I could see three fires in the distance, a glitter of muzzle flashes. It looked like part of Lee's north army was making a fight of it. They were heading toward us. Maybe they were on the run, being driven by Nance's army. It was awfully close.
Below me I saw those who had been at the fires picking up their weapons and heading for the passes and the tops of the cliffs. The muzzle flashes and sounds of firing died out. They were followed by some shouting, and then silence. The fires burned for a long time.
"Nicos!" called a voice from below. I looked down into the shadows and saw the pale haze of a desert sheet at the bottom of the rock columns.
"I'm Nicos."
"Just cruise. The General wanted to know where you were. You going to be there for awhile?"
"Unless I'm someplace else."
"Okay," answered the haze with a laugh, and then it vanished.
What matter did it make where I was? Comini was running things. My talent was getting my men wiped out, and personally killing off the ones the enemy missed. I'd reached my leadership peak as the unconscious boss of the bait column.
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There was a soldier below, standing next to one of the fires. Brown sugar. She was one of the original sharks from Greenville, and she was looking into the flames, her arms wrapped around a flag and pole. Of all the unit colors, the flag she had was the only one I knew: the midnight blue and silver Eyes of the Spider. She looked up at me, saw me looking back, and smiled. Lolita, Rosita, who could remember names? She gave me the thumbs up. I waved back at the chili pepper and choked on panic as I looked into the shadows away from the fire. Thirty meters away I saw more rock columns, many of them taller than the one I was standing on.
"Don't move." The voice was Shava Ido's, quiet and menacing.
"What is it?" On a planet where even the damned apples were poisonous, I had no trouble imagining any number of possible threats: animals, plants, Carlo. "Dammit, what is it?" I looked behind me and there stood Shava Ido, his rifle slung on his back, an automatic rifle in his hands, aimed at my chest.
"Shut your mouth and don't move, Nicos."
"Is your corn popped, you whack? What do you think you're doing?"
"Don't move." Ido glanced to his left. I turned and looked down. Where the brown sugar with the banner had been all alone, she now had about forty Hand jobs for company. More of Shava Ido's accomplices were behind them running, their rifles at the ready. A takeover! Fear for Margo stabbed into my guts.
One of the Hand jobs below looked up at Shava, held his arms above his head, and clasped his left wrist with his right hand. Comini's number two high signed him back and returned his attention to me. "We have Yani Comini and we've been joined by those who were driven out by the vote. If you do what I tell you to do, you
might get out of this alive."
"You figure that's real important to me?"
"It's important to everyone." He seemed to loosen just a bit. "I expected you to be in the RC wagon." His face broke into a smile of relief. "You put the scare on me."
If he'd been to the wagon, what had happened to Ratt? I turned and faced him fully. "I'll put a scare on you, shit for brains." He lifted the muzzle on his auto.
"Stay smart, Nicos. You can get out of this alive."
"What makes you think that's some big priority?" I pointed toward his squats below. "Don't we have enough shit to shovel?"
"Too much." With the muzzle of his auto he gestured for me to sit down. "The Razai has too much. You can't even survive the Hand. Carlo and Iron Lee together will put all of you on the dark ride. We don't want to ride with you."
I sat down on a large flat boulder, my head light and my focus fuzzy. I couldn't afford to pass out right then, so I bit my tongue until the pain brought me back to my side of the road. "You're betting on the wrong horse, Shava."
"Maybe."
He found a rock spur facing me and sat on it, the auto rifle still pointed at my chest. We sat like that long into the night interrupted only by Ido's messengers making reports. With each message my heart sank. Two of the avenues up to the island were in the hands of Shava's squats. And Bando Nicos had been in charge. Damn, but I was tired of letting people down. I eased the pain in my leg and waited for morning.
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King of the Mountain
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From the squats I saw that night, and from the reports I overheard, there had to have been at least five hundred of the bastards in the takeover, but no more than a thousand. Here and there a shot cracked out, letting me know that there were still some good guys left. As the false dawn made the horizon shimmer, I looked at Comini's number two.
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