New Praetorians 1 - Sienna McKnight

by R. K. Syrus

  New skirmish plan: covering fire. Grab the non-com. Up this tree. Reinforcements. Then a scraggy pelt with no tail hanging on a wall.

  The wolf circled away. Silently and with intent. It was the bad kind of circling. This she knew from having watched every kind of stalking animal at play. This move came right before a serious dash forward at her flank. It would happen so fast and so violently her hamstrings and the tendons in the back of her knees would be crippled before she even got a good stab in.

  This wasn’t like the movies, where wild animals just stood there and let you kill them. Glantzer had taken her along on a varmint hunt for razorbacks. An aggressive sounder of ferals had destroyed a cornfield. All ten acres were rooted-up mud and pig dirt. They were legal to hunt year-round, so the ’billies went out for payback. Catch was, all of the men, for various reasons, were banned from having guns. They used spears.

  Eventually, they cornered a feisty one in a gully. In the midst of a headlong charge, this wild hog got stuck. It took a 160-pound man for a ride on the end of the sticker. It was another five minutes of four guys avoiding being gored by a pair of eight-inch tusks before they finally killed it enough that it stopped moving. Forty pounds of bacon on hooves did that.

  In front of Sienna was a meat eater more than twice as big. As she thought tactics, the wolf executed his. He zig-zagged forward. No more need for radio silence. The kid could not see the wolf. The wolf knew exactly where everyone was. Instinct told him who to attack first. If the kid ran, he’d be it.

  “Yo! Kid! Your cat is safe. It’s with me. Just stay still.”

  “Who are you? I’m not supposed to talk to—”

  “Look, I’m not a stranger.” Damn. It had to be Safety Kid wandering alone in the woods. “Your pa and ma work on the Base, right? You know a tall fellow, white skin, red eyes? Sarge Bryan, he’s my uncle. So do what I say.” As she made introductions, Sienna took off her jacket and wrapped it around her left arm.

  Silence.

  “Don’t move. When you hear screaming, then you move. You run home, straight back home, and lock the door.” And just in case he can remember it, she adds, “And get your folks to call an ambulance. Hooah?”

  “W-who’s gonna be screaming?”

  “That would be me,” Sienna said and hurled a nice jagged rock at the wolf. “Haw! C’mon and git sum!” she yelled, trying to sound like Sarge on the parade ground. The words came out really brave.

  Then she noticed she wasn’t. Her right hand shook so bad she almost dropped the Bowie. Her chances of cutting the wolf’s eyes out of its head as it munched on her arm were entirely crappy. She had little expectation of future use of said left arm. She’d seen attack dogs rip apart K9 training dummies. Except all that came out of them was cotton and straw. Sienna expected the stuff that would come out of her arm to be more colorful.

  The red wolf rolled with the missile strike to his rump. No telling if the rock drew blood. It did draw his attention. He came straight for her outstretched arm. Eyes narrowed to yellow-orange slits, black lips drew back, neck scruff puffed out to seem bigger. There appeared lines on his cheeks, brow, and snout she never knew existed, ones specifically carved into his attack face to freeze prey in its tracks for the instant necessary to clamp down. His only mission was to rip and tear, to search for jugular and windpipe, to suffocate and exsanguinate. In seconds, the wolf’s jaws would do just that.

  Tunnel vision now. Situational awareness, gone. Frame-step slo-mo, the attack played out in her head. The four-footed killer loped in. He drew up tailless hindquarters for a leap. That leap. The one that would be followed by the screaming she predicted.

  The pain, it would come.

  The knife, big before, now small. Shiny steel would tremble and fall and be lost among roots and leaves.

  The kid. He was only trying to get his kitten back. What would happen to him was just so wrong. But there was nothing, totally nothing, she could do. That feeling hurt the most.

  In mid-leap, the wolf’s jaws clamped shut.

  On air?

  This desperate hurt released something. Like the first deep breath of sub-zero air, when it felt like the roof of your mouth would freeze solid. Except this went outward. A part of her, a part without feeling, separated. A cold shadow of herself, like an icy breath of fog, hovered out and clung. In those shady woods, it had to be seventy degrees. Still, chill it was. It was fear.

  Not hers. The wolf’s. Everything and anything he had feared in his life, all the things that had terrorized the lives of all his kind as long as there have been wolves, passed from girl into animal. This shadow settled into a form they both recognized: a bear. A pretty pissed one.

  Confused by her sudden change from prey into 500-pound death machine, his teeth clacked closed inches from her chin. He did a kind of doggy summersault, skidding on three, then four, legs spread wide to keep from toppling. It might have been funny in a dumb pet tricks video, except for the mortal danger she and the kid were still in. She kept the Bowie knife raised, but did not strike. She could not be sure of killing the creature and had an idea any pain might break the spell.

  He looked at her. Rather, around her, up and down. Sniffing. Shifting his triangle-shaped head this way and that. He tried to make sense of the different things eyes and nose and ears were telling him.

  She, too, could smell it, the angry musk of bear pee and bear sweat hotly clinging to fur. She exhaled not her own breath, but moist air tinged with the smell of digesting meat from deep down an omnivorous gullet. The wolf teetered between striking at what he saw or dodging the big-clawed paw that his nose told him was there and could snap his spine as easily as stepping on a twig.

  His nose won. Gore-oozing tail stump between legs, the red wolf made a tactical retreat. For the next county, judging by his speed and pace.

  Her arm, wrapped in thin jacket cloth, was stuck in an L-shaped formation in front of her. The Bowie was a steel icicle, steady despite the insensibility of the fist holding it. Safety Kid broke the spell, though it was quite a while before she could smell anything but bear.

  “I don’t hear no screamin’. I’m getting Triskit and telling Ma about you all.”

  “You do that, I’ll be right behin—”

  She shut up. Up on the ridge appeared another set of snaggly teeth framed by a hairy, blood-dripping snout.

  “Glantzer!”

  Darius Hofer Glantzer’s lone eye looked down after the retreating wolf. He aimed the damnedest firearm. It looked to be a home-made blunderbuss. He had duct taped a Korean War vintage flare gun to a broken hockey stick. No doubt the chamber was filled with black powder, bolts, and rocks. It was more likely to perforate her and the kid—and blow Glantzer’s hand off—than have any beneficial effect on the attitude of the wolf, who was long gone.

  “Arrrh?” the scraggy man demanded.

  “Don’t you dare pull that trigger,” Sienna shouted back up. At this time she noticed he was walking funnier than usual, a ragged cloth wrapped around his torn pants leg. “Thing ran off. Musta smelled you comin’.”

  Glantzer spat brown baccy juice through his beard. His facial hair was nearly as bloody as the wolf’s had been.

  “Thanks I git.”

  Along with a new gimpy style of walking, Glantzer was dirtier than normal. Turned out, the red wolf had paid him a visit first. The rogue canine got in the first bite.

  “On account of him comin’ up on my bad side.”

  The wolf, taking unfair advantage of the ’billy hermit, had leaped without warning and chomped on his leather pants. These leggings were so crusty dirty they were like thick hide. By way of counterattack, Sienna’s irregular warfare tutor, finding himself without his favorite knife, had half bitten, half twisted the wolf’s tail off. He had it in his pocket and showed it to a clearly impressed Safety Kid.

  “Can I have it?”

  �
��I can sell it to ya. You know where your ma keeps her money?”

  The boy, whose name was Kylie McNabb, was indeed Ellie’s boy. He said that his own finances were sufficient to allow for the acquisition of this conversation-worthy local keepsake.

  After performing the tailectomy, Glantzer claimed the wolf, having met his match, ran off. By the looks and smell of him, Sienna concluded it was more likely he rolled himself into the skunkweed swamp by his hootch and hid.

  On their walk back to Ellie’s, Glantzer kept gawking back.

  “Once a critter git up in the blood like that, like that, I ain’t never seen one turn.” He looked at Sienna with suspicion, and maybe as much respect as his ’billy brain could muster. “Dog, coyote, wolf, don’t matter. They don’t stop till they’s kilt.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s gone. And don’t point that thing.”

  ***

  For reasons that had nothing to do with the red wolf, Sienna was glad to get to the McNabbs’ place. Along the way she’d called Bryan. He was on his way with Mr. McNabb, who worked a cushy civilian job. They were accompanied by a medic to take a look at Glantzer’s leg. If anyone needed rabies shots, it was the wolf.

  “Shhh,” Kylie cautioned them as the energetic kitten tried to climb his head. “Ma’s resting. She got shot, but she’s better now.”

  While riding in a convoy truck overseas, Mrs. McNabb had taken an AK round to her Kevlar helmet. This was a big Army base, but a small town. Everyone knew everyone’s business. The hall table was filled with food neighbors had brought. Except for a small bandage, Ellie looked just like she always did. She seemed surprised to see them come in. By her still-concussed sense of time, only a minute had passed since she put Kylie in his room for a nap. She had enough wherewithal to ask Glantzer to stay on the porch, which could be hosed down.

  Kylie looked intently at Sienna. “I know you.”

  “Told you I wasn’t strange.”

  Kylie thought. He could tell it hadn’t been an ordinary walk in the woods. The sudden appearance of our man on the ridge, stinky and bloody head to toe, waving a home-built musket, these things had to have made some impression, even on a first grader. He just didn’t know how unordinary it had been.

  “When Triskit has kittens, you can have one. Your pick.”

  If Triskit has kittens, we’ll enter him in the Raleigh science fair, she thought. “Thanks.”

  Without warning, Sienna needed some air. Right quick. She excused herself and dashed round the side of the house. Bracing herself on the siding, she felt she would pass out or puke. Her head shook of its own accord and she gulped for air not filled with bear musk.

  Reverberating behind her eardrums were echoes of that weird thunderclap of fear. The one that saved her and Kylie from a bad mauling at the very least. The one that had connected her to the animal.

  Soundlessly she heard it, nervelessly she felt it. She knew the red wolf. Knew that he had wanted to tear her up, and the boy, and the kitten. Destroy their carcasses until only scattered meat and random gristle was left. The wolf was sick. It could hunt and kill but could not satisfy its hunger. That made him crazy. Somehow her silent, half-second struggle with him had crushed his killing madness, and at the same time had broken his will to live. The wolf would go into a dark place and die. She knew this.

  Those things were fading. Other things were rising. Later when she thought of the day, she would recognize the adrenal dump following acute stress response. It was her fight-or-flight system’s revenge on her for discovering some strange third option. Sienna McKnight, just turned twelve, also grasped at memories her body and mind could not hold, then or ever. The memories of killing entire civilizations as casually as garden shears would snick the heads off inconvenient chickens. Mirages from a cold place at the base of her skull, inside. These clawed at her. She bent over and retched. Only clear drool and snot came out.

  Through teared-up eyes, she saw Glantzer sidle around the corner. Oh no. If he said anything, or tried to help her…

  He kept his distance and stood with his patch-eye side to her. As courteous as she’d ever seen the coot. After a while, she was done trying to hurl. She spat out and sucked in clean air. Glantzer had her knife. She never felt him take it.

  “This ain’t no proper gift for a girl.”

  What?

  “I’mma take it back,” he said. “An’ fix it.”

  Which he did. He commandeered some no-slip paint from somewhere and lacquered the handle of Jane Bowie bright pink. Sometime between then and when she got it back, she decided a few things. She knew who she had to be. Sienna understood what she wanted more than not being afraid.

  That day behind the McNabbs’, Glantzer stuffed the long knife into one of the many hidden pockets of his raggedy woodman’s outfit. As she squared up to him, his eye rolled over her, assessing her fitness to do something useful.

  “If you’re a’right now, you can go in and bring me some of that fried chicken I saw. And cornbread, and gravy, too. Rescuin’ defenseless kids and their pets, it shore works up a ap’tite.”

  2

  TEN MONTHS AGO

  BENTLEY SUBGLACIAL TRENCH

  ANTARCTICA

  Second Lieutenant Sienna McKnight stared up from the bottom of the world. The midday sky was ethereal. It was dark and shrouded across half its horizon by Southern Lights of neon green. Glowing, feathery brush strokes on a canvas of deepest blue. To Sienna, the sky seemed hardly part of her planet. It seemed that from this point, there was no separation, or a feeble one at best, between her and the cosmic breath of the stars beyond.

  She looked toward the heavens for any sign of Roger Halley. He was this mission’s commanding officer and Sienna’s boyfriend. She scanned for sight of supersonic combusting ramjet contrails from the plane that was scheduled to bring him over the drop zone.

  “Now,” Sienna said to her sergeant. She and Shetani Zeru Bryan stood on a glacier. Ice was a mile thick beneath their boots. Beside her in winter warfare gear, he was a familiar, solid presence. “They should have dropped him by now.”

  A single snowflake seemingly the size of her fist momentarily obscured her vision in the visor. It was on high magnification and the delicate crystal shape stuck on the lens. Wiping only smudged her view. Sarge Bryan’s eyes were better than her gear. In the gloom of noon, they glinted like embers of molten gold out from a cloud of breath vapor around his head. His features, often so comforting for Sienna to see as a girl growing up in North Carolina, were lost in the pale haze.

  “Say what you want about Air Force. They’re most always on time. Let me take a look while you check on the storm front, Lieutenant McKnight.”

  Sienna noted pride in the older man’s voice. Affectionately casual and reassuringly proprietary. In many ways, her family friend and mentor was responsible for her making it through four grueling years at West Point.

  It was only weeks ago she and her cadet graduate classmates stoically tossed their hats in the air at Michie Stadium in New York. The most somber graduation there in living memory.

  Only days ago she’d worn the formal mess uniform of a commissioned second lieutenant, with its distinct insignia: a rectangle of gold. Its likeness to a tiny metallic pat of butter gave rise to the slang: butterbar lieutenant. Here, out in the field, a stripe of matte aluminum under a flip tab indicated her rank. Snipers loved to pick off officers.

  ’Course the only shooting going on in this ice box was gripey lip from her small, tight-knit team of enlisteds. All about how the South Pole was damn cold and damn dark. Her lifelong ally knew how to handle them. She owed Sarge Bryan a lot. Right now she planned to repay him in part by not getting him frozen to death or otherwise killed on a supposedly simple rescue job.

  The more she mulled on it, the more she suspected she hadn’t been fully briefed before their triple-time departure from the Base.

 
Maybe Roger will have more information.

  He was a ninja for Pentagon bureaucracy; his uncle was chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Sarge Bryan squinted upwards. Sienna could only see his eyes and a curve of alabaster brow under his parka.

  “Remind me why I left my porch recliner on a fine North Carolina evening to come to the South Pole just ahead of a winter storm.”

  “Sorry, Sarge, that’s classified way above Enlisted-5 paygrade.”

  They’d had less than half an hour from roost to plane when they got the call. The request-for-forces brief had been routed to Sienna from the Pentagon through the commandant of the Base. That was standard procedure. Less standard had been the lack of vital details. The cryptic mission subheader, which ended up being pretty ironic, read:

  RFF [immediate] Hazardous journey, threat of physical harm constant; NO Imminent Danger Pay (basic pay only); Bitter cold; Long hours of complete darkness; Honor and recognition from AEO Acting Assistant Deputy Division Chief Perdix in event of success. AFFIRM REQUIRED (EO 12356 classified).

  The only other specifics were a takeoff time, projected in-flight time, and a note to bring milspec long underwear. Another odd thing: the mission was voluntary. She only had six minutes to decide. After that, the assignment would be offered to the Navy SEALs or Marine Force Recon. For graduate Lieutenant McKnight, accepting it would be a risk.

  She’d just taken command of the tiny special-ops unit in their unique command post on the far side of the Base. After West Point, she chose the duty assignment that would let her return to Sarge, Annalies, home. Even though it was made clear to her the Pentagon powers that be expected her to take a more political position in DC. And those powers were used to getting what they wanted. Her career had begun on thin ice.

  No one would have faulted her for declining the request for forces. She got the plum impression her immediate superior, a full bird colonel, wanted her to pass. If she screwed up and got all her people killed, it would look bad for him. Might even damage his prospects of becoming a general.