They Also Serve

by Mike Moscoe

  “Braking!” the kid hollered, and skidded to a halt that fish-tailed the mule’s rear and the trailer behind.

  “Zed, I’m gonna turn those nanos loose on your head.”

  “Wouldn’t find nothing?

  “He didn’t drive that way yesterday,” Harry pointed out.

  “Wouldn’t dare; Cassie’d hauled his ass off to church,” Lil laughed.

  “Just having some fun,” the kid defended himself.

  Jeff studied the map Lek fed to the mule’s display. “Dancer says the two are fighting it out up the James River, with flanks seventy miles on either side,” Lek told them as the screen showed a large blob of pink in front of them. Blue was on the far side. Both spread north and south of the James. “Dancer figures the Pres was outmaneuvered. He’ll take the worst hits from the hurricanes unless he gets inland fast. Any places we can disrupt the Provost?”

  Harry overlaid his geology data on the display, “Several rocky outcroppings close to us.” He highlighted four. “Does Dancer have a preference?”

  There was a short pause. “Dancer has no idea. Hit a few. He’ll let us know what happens.”

  “Great targeting system we got here,” Zed growled.

  “Best we got is always great,” Lil said cheerfully.

  “What’s that?” Zed shouted, pointing behind them.

  Jeff turned, just in time to see the tarp on the trailer move. He leveled his gun. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  “Just me,” came a very familiar voice. The tarp raised; Annie stared at his gun. “Could you point that somewhere else?”

  “Annie,” Jeff safetied his rifle as Lil and Harry leaped out to help Annie. Jeff got there just in time to put his arms around her and help her over the trailer’s side. She was very holdable. “Damn it, woman, what are you doing here? Can’t any Mulroney woman stay where she belongs?”

  “If Mulroney women had stayed home, there wouldn’t be any Mulroney men on this planet,” she shot back. “I heard you griping there weren’t enough on this team. I have two hands.”

  “You should have asked,” Jeff cried.

  “And you’d have said no,” she answered primly, looking around, taking a poll of those present, “Wouldn’t he?”

  “Boys what think they’re in love do crazy things,” Lil answered. “Let’s roll.”

  Jeff took his seat up front, rifle handy. Annie squeezed in the back between Lil and Harry. As Zed got them moving, Jeff relented. “There’s more room in front.” In a flash of hiked-up skirts and revealed legs, Annie was over the seat and settling down beside Jeff in a second.

  “There’s plenty of room close to me,” Zed pointed out, patting the seat next to him.

  Jeff pulled Annie close. “Why’d you do it?” he whispered.

  “I’ve missed you for the last month. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  Jeff kissed her. Sometime later, Old Ned coughed. “Son, I don’t mind keeping an eye out your side of this rig, but the girl’s got to breathe.” The others laughed. It was contagious. Annie and he ended up laughing, which made kissing rather difficult. He settled for holding Annie in his arms, her snuggled close to his left side, his rifle on his right. This had to be the craziest way any man had ever gone traveling.

  So what? Annie was with him. No matter what happened, Annie was with him.

  Nikki shivered as the blimp shook, playing mouse to a big cat of a wind. The gondola twisted, its skin showing long cracks that let in streams of water. Nikki was hungry but afraid to eat; her tummy had emptied itself violently yesterday. Today it dared her to put anything in it but water. She was miserable.

  Beside Nikki, Kat unstrapped from her seat and came to kneel beside her, holding on tight to both chairs. “You okay?”

  “No, this was another dumb idea.” Nikki groaned.

  “Yes, it was,” the young woman agreed, as she rearranged Nikki’s blankets to make her more comfortable. “You want something to drink?”

  The blimp’s engines revved, responding to the pilot’s demands. They climbed higher. Kat glanced at the flight deck. “Wonder what Rhynia’s trying now.”

  As if in reply, there was a shouted “Yes” from up forward. The blimp settled down as much as it had in the last three days and seemed to steady on course. The engines slowed to idle. In a few minutes, Rhynia came back to talk to her passengers and the off-duty mechanics. “We had a bad time there, but I think it’s over. I got a bit too far out on hurricane number one and ran into crosswinds where it and number two were thumping each other,” she grinned. “No place for a self-respecting blimp.”

  “Will it happen again?” Nikki ventured.

  “Not if I can help it.” The blimp shivered. Everyone looked up at the gas bag. Nikki wondered if they were leaking hydrogen out like the gondola was leaking water in. “We’re picking up speed,” the pilot said, “but we’re behind schedule. May take us an extra day to get to that mountain range on North Continent.”

  “I’ll call that in,” Kat said.

  Ray listened to Kat’s report. Part of him wanted to recall that team; he snorted at the idea. He could no more recall them than change anything he’d done with his life thus far. They would succeed or crash into the ocean with no help from him. The same with Harry and Jeff. He’d launched them into this impossible battle more on hope than expectation of victory. Mary had broken his back the last time he’d charged in with hardly a shred of intel. At least then he’d been fighting humans. Now!

  Now he waited, his paltry forces in play. He had one more card to try, but that would have to wait. Wait to see what developed from the other side. Wait to see if any of his assaults were even noticed by the computers.

  Wait. A familiar word in any commander’s vocabulary.

  Wait. Ray hated it, even as he hunkered down and did it.

  Mary paused for a moment on the roof of the factory building to take a deep breath. It smelled of rain and chill and mud. A hundred feet up, she had the best view of the base. To the west lay the landing strip, filling rapidly with parked wagons and carts, canvas covers over them, tarps stretched between them to add some shelter from the rain for more and more people. Little kids chased each other, splashing through puddles. Their elders stared up at the weeping sky and worried.

  The factory beneath her and the shuttle hangar off in the far right distance beyond the hospital, barracks, and HQ, had the best vantage points to see what was going on around the base perimeter—and inside. She turned to Dumont. “Sergeant, I want half your squad here, the other half on the shuttle hangar.”

  Du measured the distance to the wall with a jaundiced eye. “A thousand meters at best. No sleepy bullets from here.”

  “Don’t have that many left. I’m issuing what I got to the rifles leading the riot troops, and only fifty per. When they’re gone, it’s live ammo only.”

  Du answered with a low whistle. “Lots of people out there. What we gonna do with them all?”

  “I sent the priest out to circulate a map of where the safe elevations are. Suggest they go elsewhere.”

  “Do any good?”

  “Padre came back with the Bishop of Refuge, asked me to let him and his chancellery officials in,” Mary sighed.

  “And?”

  “I let them in. I owe that little priest. If he hadn’t suggested saving the turf and rolling it back over the wall, we wouldn’t be patrolling it tomorrow, we’d be wading through it. Yeah, I let them in. Trying to find something for them to do, but they’re about as willing to work as San Paulo and her cronies. Holy horror that they should take a turn in riot gear.”

  “What did you want me and my crew to do up here?”

  “If someone out there with an airgun starts popping our folks, I want you to take them down. Clean, exact.”

  “We can do that.”

  “And if everything comes apart and a mob charges the wall, I want you and your sharpshooters to take down the leaders. Single shots. One round, one leader.”


  Dumont took that one in without a blink. “That may be harder than it sounds. A lot of folks up front may just be passing through. Real leader may be a few rows back.”

  “I know. If you can spot a leader, put ‘im down. If not, start at the front and work your way back.”

  Du knelt on the building’s ledge to sight his rifle along the perimeter. “They get too close, Captain, I can’t get over the heads of the troops on the wall.”

  “I know.”

  “Who gives the order to start shooting?”

  “I do,” Mary snapped. The look Du gave her said he could do the math as well as she. “But there’s a lot of wall, and it may get busy. A ruckus on the east wall, while I’m knocking heads on the west.”

  “So I may have to make the call,” Du filled in.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Growl,” he said.

  “I’m worried about Cassie. She may have lost her edge, gone gentle on us,” Mary said of her oldest friend.

  “The war changed us all,” Du offered with the grin of an innocent kid the streets had never let him be.

  “Not you and me, bucko.” Mary grinned back.

  “Yes, you and me, sister. Remember, this isn’t war. We’re supposed to be keeping the peace here, not shattering heads.”

  Mary looked out over the wall. Really looked from face to face, trying to see them as people, not one large milling crowd. “They are people, now. But Du, crowds don’t stay people. Let them become a mob and it won’t be people you’ll be shooting.”

  Du joined her, studying the refugees. “They’re hungry, cold, tired, scared. A week ago they ran trains, sold stuff, went home to dinner, and tucked their kids into bed. Now the kids are clinging to them, hungry, cold, and whining. And because they may turn into an unthinking, killing mob tonight or tomorrow night, I’ll put a needle between their eyes.” He turned to Mary. “Can’t you make it so I don’t have to?”

  “The Colonel’s trying. You heard him this morning. He’s trying everything he knows how to do.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I’ll pull the trigger when I have to. We’re trying for something better.”

  Mary rested a hand on Du’s shoulder. “And we’ll keep trying. I wish I could pray. I’d say every prayer I knew that the Colonel finds a way.”

  “Same for me,” Du answered. “You see the little priest, tell him for me he better start praying, Praying a lot.”

  The sky was leaden, robbing the surrounding hills of color. The rain smelted faintly of salt, and might have been warm once. Jeff both shivered and sweated as he poured charges in the holes Harry drilled. Lil had designed a daisy chain that should convert this seam of rock into one big gravelbed.

  “Think computer nanos could climb out of one of those holes and chew the metal out of my bones?” Zed called to Lil.

  “Hell, Zed, there ain’t enough metal in your backbone to attract a nano, no matter how starved it be.” Both laughed, though Zed’s seemed a bit forced.

  When Lil lit the fire line, explosions walked down the hillside, sending up the upper area first, encouraging it to just keep sliding as it came down. It looked beautiful—from the next ridge over. Jeff would hate to be under something like that. Zed had the mule moving before the rocks quit falling.

  The next stop was a long shelf of rock jutting up from rolling farmland. People in the distance walked drearily up roads. Jeff was pouring charges when Lek called. “Dancer says Prov’s right wing is weakening. Pres pushed him back several klicks. Dancer says keep up the good work.”

  “Only too happy to help,” Harry answered as he drilled. It took them another hour to reach the end of the rockbed. They waved Annie to bring the mule and pick them up.

  She didn’t. After a few minutes of her head under the steering wheel, she started waving frantically. Laden with drills, they hustled for her.

  “It won’t start!” Annie shouted as they came close.

  All six spent the next half hour trying to get the mule started. Nothing worked. “This thing got a computer?” Harry asked. Zed nodded. “Think it could have a nano in it?”

  “Oh, shit,” the marines groaned.

  Jeff called the situation in to Lek. “Should have thought of that.” With Lek’s guidance they disconnected the mule’s computer. “It’ll be a bitch to drive, but you can. Problem is the solar cells won’t charge the battery. I could work around it, but you don’t have the tools to do it.”

  “We got enough juice to hobble home?” Zed asked.

  “Almost but not quite” was Lek’s somewhat delayed answer.

  “We aren’t going home,” Jeff said. “We got two more rockbeds to hash.” The others looked at him. Harry nodded first. Slowly the others joined in.

  “I guess we did come to this little war to fight, not run,” Zed finally muttered.

  Jeff took the wheel, moving the mule slowly away from the soon-to-be gravelbed. He studied the ground to the north, where their next target lay, and selected the gentlest path he could see. He didn’t slow when Lil set off the charges; it took energy to start up again. Jeff measured the map against the sinking hand of his battery readout. They could make the next rock, maybe halfway to the fourth. Then they walked.

  “I’ve taken you about as far as this gas bag is gonna fly!” Rhynia shouted to Kat over the roar of the wind whistling through the holes in the gondola’s skin. “If you’re not in range of those mountains, I’m afraid you’ll have to walk.”

  Nikki wrapped herself tighter in her blanket. It was cold up here, five thousand feet above sea level. Still, the glistening white mountains seemed forever away.

  “Now comes the hard part,” the pilot continued. “We got a tailwind pushing us along at thirty, forty knots. I got a bag leaking hydrogen from so many holes my mechanic gave up counting. My rudder quit days ago and I’ve been maneuvering with the engines, but one of them just died. With all the loose hydrogen, none of my people wants to tinker with it. So we’ll drop ropes from the cabin doors. Go down them, but hit the ground running like mad.”

  Laden with food, a blanket slung over her shoulder, Nikki was lowered out the door. Kat went out the other door, vanishing box on her back. Nikki hit the ground, bounced back in the air as the blimp wobbled in flight, went down again, and fell. Nikki rolled onto her back and let the pack hit the rocks until the rope snapped. She tried not to cry, but she hurt everywhere. Kat bounced back into the air as the blimp rose, cut herself free, and fell. She hit, rolled, bounced up, then fell again as her leg folded under her.

  Stifling her own tears, Nikki struggled over to Kat. The starwoman sat, cradling her ankle, but her eyes were locked on the blimp. The four mechanics and the copilot dropped hand-over-hand down the trailing ropes. The blimp careened from one gust of wind to another. The five dropped as if by a single hand; the blimp was a mile away when they hit the ground.

  Quickly, a lone dot started down one rope. Nikki sucked in her breath…blue flame flickered around the engine that had quit working. The fire danced in the wake of the blimp for a second, then created a sheen all around the large gas bag. A split second later, the entire bag was one large yellow fire, falling faster than the pilot could go down the rope.

  The crew were running for the burning blimp before it hit the ground. Still, it engulfed Rhynia in middrop. Nikki stuffed her fist in her mouth, bit back her scream. “If only Daga and I had never opened the box. If only we hadn’t made the mountain disappear.”

  “Then the Colonel wouldn’t have the box to make those mountains disappear,” Kat said, nodding toward the beautiful white ramparts. “The computers were already headed south when we got here, when you and Daga opened that box. All this was gonna happen, Nikki. The only question was: Could we fight back? We’ve got the box,” she said, tapping the pack on her back. “Maybe we’ve got a fighting chance. That’s what Rhynia died for. Now we’ve got to make it happen.”

  Kat struggled to her feet, or foot. Nikki offered her a shoulder to lean on; Kat used it for
support as they hobbled toward the skeleton of the blimp. The fire was dying out; only the carbon composite framework still smoldered. The mechanics and the copilot stood watching. The seven of them stared at the wreckage; somewhere under it was the body of their pilot. “Let’s open that damn box and show those bloody computers what happens when you mess with a blimp crew,” the copilot said through tears.

  “Think we’re close enough?” Nikki asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” Kat said.

  Nikki felt one corner, found the spot, and pressed it. A small crack appeared around the middle, just as it had the first time. She probed the other end; a second catch let go.

  The box didn’t open. They used their fingers. They tried knives. Nothing would, pry the lid up.

  “We’ve come all this way, and it’s a dud!” a mech cried.

  Ray took Kat’s call; she spat it out fast. The blimp was wrecked; the box wouldn’t work. Like a good commander, he spoke the calming words he knew he had to, that they expected of him.

  Inside, he was crumbling.

  “Lek,” he ordered, “check with Dancer. Are any of our computer friends familiar with the damn box?”

  Lek was back far too quickly. “Sir, some of them might know about it, but they didn’t bring that data south with them. It’s locked away somewhere in those mountains.”

  Ray allowed himself a moan. “To get there from here, you got to be there first. Kat, afraid you’re on your own. See if Nikki remembers anything more about the day they fired it off.”

  “Will do, sir. Uh, we haven’t heard anything for a while. Does hitting this thing’s physical side do any good?”

  “Harry’s but blowing rock piles. It’s helping,” Ray said, trying to jack up hope without adding more pressure.

  “Then we’ll make this thing work, sir. Count on us.”