My blunder became obvious. The Marini wouldn’t attack. Why would they? They could simply hang back, and watch an old mortal enemy and a new one punch and counterpunch one another into hamburger. Decades of fighting Slugs, Buddhists, Atheists, Christians, Muslims, and assorted lunatics should have taught me that what makes sense to one culture usually doesn’t make sense to another.
I clenched my teeth. The only thing that made sense to me, at this moment, was to get Jude, and Ord, and Howard, through this debacle alive. Time enough later for recrimination about bad advice.
I spun Rosy until I picked out Jude again, a billboard in his infrared-cheating crimson armor. I swiveled my rifle muzzle toward his duckbill. I could shoot Jude’s mount out from under him. Then Jude would lie here in the rear, nose in the dirt, away from the close-quarters battle. With luck, the bulk of his mare’s corpse would both pin him to the ground and shield him from stray rounds. In the chaos, Jude would never realize what I had done.
I aimed at the flank of Jude’s duckbill. A three-round burst would tear her heart out. She would go down in seconds, and die almost before she felt it.
Before I squeezed the trigger, I coughed, and paused to wipe my eyes.
Bren gunsmiths had advanced far enough that their single-shot weapons fired unified bullet-and-casing cartridges. But their gunpowder was decades away from smokeless.
Already, the Napoleonic pall that spawned the phrase “fog of war” shrouded the battlefield, so thick that its acrid tang overloaded my helmet ventilator.
“About time!” Ord’s voice rang in my earpiece.
“Sergeant Major?” I looked away from Jude, toward the tree line.
Leaves parted, twelve feet above the ground, as a hundred crimson snouts scented blood.
The Marini carnosaurs stalked into the meadow, crushing saplings and tearing tree limbs like spider webs. Black-armored charioteers clung to the two-wheeled carts that the monsters dragged behind them on rigid booms. Infantry, rifles at port arms, trotted in the chariots’ wake.
The carnosaurs stalked only as fast as a man jogs, heads turning left and right. The pins that had clamped shut the iron muzzles now dangled from chains beneath the animals’ jaws, and the beasts flashed dripping teeth, and bellowed as they advanced.
“Wronnkk!”
No wonder Casus called them wronks.
The Slug Heavys lifted fire from us, shifted, and rounds began falling among the onrushing chariots. The respite we got was the first dividend paid by the suddenly-two-pronged human attack.
My clenched jaw relaxed one millimeter, and I stopped aiming at Jude’s duckbill.
We were upwind of the onrushing chariots, but Rosy reared and squealed when she heard the wronks bellow.
I reined her in, hard, until she settled and stood fast.
Howard’s mount squealed and reared as it dashed alongside Rosy and me, while Howard clung to his saddle.
Howard said, “This ends the debate.”
“Debate?” I said. About my leadership abilities?
“Whether tyrannosaurid carnosaurs were predators or scavengers.” He pointed at the advancing chariots. “They’re too slow to chase down prey.”
“They look plenty predatory to me.” With their lumpy red heads, slobbering jaws, and teeth like rusty cutlery, they looked as unfriendly as eight-ton buzzards.
“Mean isn’t necessarily predatory. Big, ugly, and grumpy scares competition away from a carcass.”
The first chariots reached the Slugs’ flank.
Green-dripping armor crunched, then flew like crawfish husks. The carnosaurs rolled up the Slugs’ lines, open-mouthed heads scooping like bulldozer blades. Warriors that didn’t get bitten in half got trampled beneath clawed feet bigger than they were.
The Casuni pulled back before the wronks, but humans and duckbills that moved too slow got mangled as thoroughly as the Slugs. So did Marini infantry who came within range of their own carnosaurs’ jaws. The beasts were more unguided missiles than smart bombs.
As more Slugs turned to battle the Marini attack, the Slug ranks broke, and Casus’s cavalry were able to slash through formations, pistols ablaze. Then the cavalry reloaded, wheeled, and slashed through again.
The only things that slowed the plodding wronks were themselves. Every few seconds, one would pause, drop its great head like a power shovel’s bucket, and tear at a downed duckbill, a human corpse, or a limp Slug.
The halted wronk’s charioteer would jerk the chains joined to the rings mounted in the beast’s skull, and it would growl, raise up, and stalk forward, devouring the next animate object that came within reach.
Within fifteen minutes, the Slugs withdrew. I had never seen Slugs withdraw.
Marini infantry trailed after the chariots, shooting or stabbing anything that twitched.
The chariot force had split as it advanced, bypassing and ignoring us, and the few Casuni cavalry around us. So a column led by chariots had swept by our position on the upslope side, and another on the downslope, isolating us in between.
Across the barrier created by the advancing Marini infantry, Casus looked at me, twirled his sword above his head, and pumped his fist.
I saluted him.
Ten Marini chariots, these pulled by duckbills smaller than the ones the Casuni rode, peeled off the upslope column, and rumbled toward the four of us, low-drifting gunsmoke swirling around their wheels.
The chariots wove around heaped Slug carcasses and dead Casuni duckbills. As the chariots drew closer to us, they swung wide around a wronk bleeding buckets from a neck wound. The beast lay on its side, its flank heaving, its chariot overturned behind it, with a wheel still revolving slowly in the wind. The monster lunged at the Marini as they passed, and a Marini fired a pistol round into the dying monster’s eye.
Ord said, “Sir, those chariots are coming after us.”
“Yeah. But why?”
The chariots approached in a line, then circled the four of us, while black-armored marksmen in nine of the chariots aimed outsized pistols at us.
When the chariots had surrounded us, they stopped, their duckbills panting.
We raised our rifles, and I felt the selector switch to be sure I was on full automatic. The four of us were outnumbered, but hardly outgunned. We could easily have mowed down the lot of them, while their handful of rounds would have pinged off our Eternads like beebe shot.
But the rest of the Marini army, not to mention their monsters, were more than we could handle.
I said into my mike, “Hold fire.”
The brown-helmeted passenger in the tenth chariot stood, his shoulders crooked, and laid his gloved hands on the chariot’s woven wood rail. He blinked his eye, and stroked the black silk patch that covered the other. “May I invite you four to accompany us, Jason?”
“What if we say no, Bassin?”
“You wouldn’t get your questions answered, would you? And neither would I.” He craned his neck, visored his hand above his helmet, and scanned the smoke-stained sky. “Where is that marvelous insect of yours? Where did your weapons and armor come from? Where did you come from?”
I glanced at Casus, who eyed us across the battlefield through his spyglass. “You may have trouble kidnapping us if Casus wants us to stay. He’s curious about us, too.”
Bassin shook his head. “Casus knows the law. Someone else outbid him fairly for you, and for your goods. Not even a Clan head who hates the Marini will interfere with the movements of another’s property.”
“Another? You. The law protects you, even though you Marini sleep with the devil?”
Bassin rolled his eyes. “Yes, even though.” He sighed, then motioned to the riflemen in the chariots to lower their weapons.
I nodded to Ord, Jude, and Howard, and they followed suit.
Bassin reached inside his tunic, withdrew a folded parchment, then held it over his head in two hands. He pointed at two of his riflemen, who nodded. “As for kidnapping”—Bassin tore the parchment in two,
and let it slip away on the wind—“I owned no slaves before today, and by this Act of Emancipation Before Witnesses, I hold none once again. Jason, you and your friends may accept my invitation—or do as you please.”
Jude’s whisper sang in my earpiece, as he pointed at the soldiers who still surrounded us. “Some invitation. He’s a phony.”
Howard whispered, “But I’m curious.”
Ord said, “Your call, Sir. The devil you know, or the devil you don’t know.”
Thirty-Three
Jude was right. Bassin was a phony who had fooled me once. If he fooled me twice, shame on me. But Bassin had also saved me—and the people I was responsible for—once. And that made me as curious as it made Howard. Curiosity won.
I turned to the other three Earthlings, and waved them toward Bassin. “Let’s go sleep with the devil we don’t know.”
I patted Rosy good-bye, then the four of us got loaded one-each into chariots, and Bassin’s little caravan bounced downslope toward the river.
The Marini chariots were built of light woven reeds, for speed. Their solid-axle suspensions were for durability, not comfort.
I clutched the side rails as we bounded along, and shouted to my driver, “Why do you carry a marksman along in each chariot? He can’t hit anything from a platform this unstable.”
The charioteer shouted back, eyeing my unfamiliar armor. “Did you train in a cave? The marksman isn’t there to shoot the enemy. He’s there to shoot the wronk if it turns. I’d sooner trust a Tassini than a wronk.”
Our chariots skirted the Fairground. A few men struggled, loading corpses on wood carts and dragging them to pyres. They wouldn’t be able to cremate a tenth of the bodies before the scavengers arrived. Too many fairgoers had been asleep in their tents when the Slug attack fired the encampment. The dead had to number in the tens of thousands.
My driver shook his helmeted head, and asked nobody, “Why would they do this? The Peace of the Fair has held for three centuries.”
At the riverbank, Bassin’s chariots fanned out among the handful of ships that remained afloat, some listing in the shallows, some beached by their masters to save them.
My driver reined up in front of a green-lacquered vessel a hundred feet long. A man with a close-cropped white beard stood alongside it in the shallows, uniform trousers rolled above his knees, hammering wood pegs into a hull patch with a mallet.
My driver said, “She looks sound. You did well to beach her.”
The white-bearded man straightened, and stretched, hands at the small of his back. He nodded. “She’ll float the Locks.” He glanced back toward the Fair. “If my crew can scavenge replacement canvas, we’ll be the first to sail away from this graveyard.”
The charioteer said, “We need passage to the coast, Ship Master.”
“Suddenly everyone does. Who’s we?”
“I speak for the Queen’s personal representative.”
The Ship Master turned and cocked an eyebrow. “And who might represent Her Majesty this far upriver?”
“Bassin the Engineer.”
The Ship Master snorted. Then he threw back his head, laughed and slapped his ship’s hull. “Bassin? Bassin’s dead!”
The charioteer said, “No—”
“You’re blowin’ up the wrong trouser! I was this close to Bassin”—the Ship Master held his thumb and forefinger apart—“when the slavers offed his leg.” The Ship Master turned back to his patch job.
“An engineer’s faster on one leg than a pirate on two, Wilgan,” said a voice behind me.
I jumped, as Bassin limped up alongside me, and I stared at the well-formed prosthetic that had replaced the crude stump below his left knee.
Wilgan the Ship Master froze at the sound, then turned, and wheezed. “Bassin?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Mother’s blood! The slavers took your eye, too?”
Nine hours later, at midnight, Wilgan’s patched-up ship set sail down river on the tide that rose with the big, white moon. Four hours after that, Bassin, Ord, and Howard slept below deck, with our gear and the ’Bots, while Jude and I sat in the prow, helmets off, breathing the river breeze.
Trees walled the riverbanks, and the chirps and hoots of small animals in the trees echoed across the water.
Jude looked up at the second moon. “The crew says the white moon raises the tide, but the red moon never does. That shouldn’t be, should it?”
The altitude drop from the Stone Hills to the high plains to the valley of the Marin warmed the air and moistened it, but made two of my fingers throb. I tugged off my gauntlet, and rubbed them. “A lot of what you saw today shouldn’t be, Jude.”
Rehabilitation Command says organic prosthetics are “indistinguishable from natural limbs.” Like Quartermaster says MUDs “taste farm-fresh.” In the years since I acquired those two fingers, courtesy of a Slug Viper, every change in weather or altitude made them throb. My hand never let me forget that only the dead see the end of war.
“Today I saw men die, Jason. It made me sick. Does it get easier?”
“If it does, you should be a hangman, not a soldier. It still makes me sick. Every time.”
“I should be bump with this. It’s like living a holo game. Dinosaurs. Sword fights—”
“Half-naked women?”
He smiled, and looked down at the deck. “Jason, I’m sixteen. I’ve already—”
“I know. I was sixteen, too.”
“But even with all the cool stuff, I—” He swallowed. “This is the longest I’ve ever been away from Mom. The first night in the hills, when it sleeted, I couldn’t sleep. I just looked up at the sky and cried.”
A lump swelled in my throat. I had been eighteen when the Blitz took my mother. I couldn’t tell my godson to get used to it, tell him that forever was a long time. I touched his shoulder armor. “I miss your mother, too.”
“You two get below!” Wilgan the Ship Master shouted from the stern, as the deck planks shook beneath the feet of running sailors. “You’re in the way!”
We dodged scurrying crewmen as we lurched back to the hatch ladder, and I paused with my hand on the ladder rail and looked up at Wilgan. “What’s going on?”
He let the wheel spin through his hands, then pointed toward a pale red stripe that grew on the horizon ahead. “First light, first portage.”
“What does that mean?”
He rolled his eyes. “Did you fall off the Red Moon? Just keep your rifles loaded.”
Thirty-Four
An hour later, as the sun rose, Wilgan put us, his First Mate, and the rest of the crew ashore at a log ramp carved into the river bank. Termites, or Bren’s analogs thereto, had swiss-cheesed most of the deadfall that littered the river’s banks, but the logs that made the ramp looked, and thunked underfoot, solid and fresh-cut.
The ramp joined a ten-foot-wide trail that twisted across a flat gray rock shelf. Unlike the log ramp, the trail was ancient, worn two feet deep into the rock by the foot traffic of centuries.
The crew split into two groups, one ahead of us, one behind. Every man carried a slim Marini rifle, and had a pistol in his belt. Most had put on lacquered leather armored vests.
Then we marched off downriver, east toward the sunrise. Wilgan steered the ship back into the mainstream and passed us by with a wave, headed the same direction.
Within another hundred yards, the pines thickened around us, until we neither saw nor heard the river.
After two hours’ walk, the trail grade dropped away. It switched back repeatedly, and the pines mixed more and more with deciduous trees until we were transiting a multicanopied, temperate rainforest.
The air grew warmer, sweeter with flower scent, and louder with bird cries and a distant rumble.
We had descended a thousand feet when the trail switched back at a bald rock outcrop from which we could look toward the river.
I walked up behind Bassin, who stood at the outcrop’s edge. He still wore the wide brown bowl helmet and thick leath
er armor of the engineers we had seen the day before, and his hands were on his hips. I looked where he looked.
We stood on one rock wall of a gorge that dropped away a thousand feet below us, and rose a thousand feet behind us. To our right, the Marin thundered in a glistening ribbon, its falls cascading a half mile over a red stone escarpment, sparkling in the morning sun. Rainbows pierced the mist clouds that swirled up from the catch pool at the falls’ base.
I sucked in a breath as I stared at the scene, then I gasped, grabbed Bassin’s elbow, and pointed at the falls. “The ship! Bassin, the ship can’t go over that!”
The First Mate, his rifle slung over a stiff leather vest that covered his shoulders, came up alongside us, smiling. Neither Bassin nor the Mate shared my panic.
I looked again at the falls, at insects crawling on the rocks alongside them, then chinned my magnification.
From the top of the escarpment to the catch pool at the falls base, a series of straight, manmade ribbons dropped. Up one set of ribbons crawled a water-filled box bigger than an ocean liner, within which a Marini sailing ship floated like a twig. Down the other set of ribbons crept a similar box, descending at the same pace the opposite box rose. The sprig of lacquered green floating in the descending box that counterweighted the rising box was our ship.
Howard stood alongside us and whistled.
The Mate nodded to Howard and me, as we stood open-mouthed. “I seen The Locks on the Marin six times, and the other Three Wonders twice each. But I still get the chills.”
Howard nodded to the Mate. “Astonishing civil engineering. Who built it?”
The man stage-whispered behind his hand to Bassin, and pantomimed a dig in Bassin’s ribs, without touching him. “He’s having us on, hey, Colonel? Like any sod in this world don’t know Bassin the Engineer!”
Bassin turned to Howard. “I had a hand in the design.”
Colonel. Bassin, who grubbed rocks from the mud with a flat stone, was not only a commander of combat engineers, he was the architect of at least one of the numbered wonders of this world.
I leaned out over the crag, and peered downriver.
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