by James Axler
Seeing that the Pilatans were adopting a primarily defensive stance, Jak decided to sit back and wait. He wouldn’t intervene unless strictly necessary, for his sudden presence could throw the Pilatans into confusion. A conflict was looking likely, however, as the wag was headed with an almost unerring accuracy for the spot where the sec patrol was hidden.
“They’re not going to turn away,” the patrol leader whispered. “Be ready.”
“Do you think they’ve seen us?” asked the patrol member who had earlier voiced apprehensions.
“Do you think it matters?” the patrol leader snapped.
There was no time for any kind of reply as the wag swerved into a turn that would take it along the edge of the wood, obviously the extent of its patrol route. This would have alleviated the need for any kind of action on the part of the Pilatan sec patrol, if not for the fact that the angle of the turn was about to send the back wheel skidding over at least one of the concealed Pilatan sec. They had no choice but to make their presence known.
As one, they sprang out of cover, firing at the wag. In the quiet of the night—broken only by the throb of the wag engine—the sound of blasterfire cut through the air and penetrated into the woods, reaching the Pilatan camp. Markos immediately mobilized some of his sec and set off in the direction of the noise, leaving others to protect the camp. Sineta and Mildred were left behind, the latter suddenly noticing for the first time the absence of the other companions.
Meanwhile, at each of the sec posts, the incumbents went to triple-red, sending one member of each party toward the sound of the firefight. The companions, watching these posts, elected to stay with the majority, hoping that Jak was on hand.
The albino hunter pulled his .357 Magnum Colt Python, but stayed up the tree, electing to see how the firefight would develop. From where he was, the sec patrol seemed to be doing just fine.
The jeep screeched to a halt, the engine stalling as some of the H&K fire splintered the glass in the windshield. Jak could hear the men in the wag curse and yell in confusion, falling from the stationary wag and attempting to return fire, but not being able to see the Pilatans against the darkness of the backdrop, the dark clothing of the sec men blending them into the trees as they dropped back to take cover, firing as they went.
It looked for a second like stalemate, as the sheltering outsiders began to return fire steadily, spraying the area with blasterfire, blindly attempting to hit something…anything.
The Pilatans, on the other hand, had a clear night sky backdrop across the plain on which to pick out the men crouching in cover of the wag. Their returning fire was more sporadic, but closer to the bone. The men behind the wag had themselves concealed well enough to avoid being chilled, but there was no way they could emerge from that small area of cover.
Things would have to change—and quickly. Jak decided it was time for him to enter the scenario. He dropped from the tree, planning to circle around from a distance to pick off some of the outsiders from the rear. It would take all of his skill as a hunter to make an unseen approach, but he was sure he could do it. He began to move across the wooded area to the rear of the Pilatans, but pulled back when he heard the members of the sec posts approaching. There were also the sounds of men coming through the woods to rear of him—sec men from the camp.
Jak swore softly to himself. There was no way now that he could go through with his part of the plan without making himself known. He went back up the tree. The Pilatans would have to sort it out for themselves.
On the contrary, it wasn’t necessary for the approaching forces to muster and mount an attack. Under a sudden barrage of concerted cover fire from the outsiders behind the wag, one of the four men scrambled into the driver’s seat of the jeep and attempted to start the engine. It whined and squealed three times before catching, all the while slugs from the Pilatan sec force ricocheting off the metal body of the wag. As it caught, and the outsider gunned it into life, the other three men scrambled in, firing recklessly into the woods as they did. The sheer consistency of their fire prevented any of the concealed Pilatan sec men from taking a concerted aim. The outsiders were able to gain the wag and keep firing as the driver turned it, then put his foot down, hammering the accelerator as the wag bumped over the plain, back in the direction it had come.
The Pilatan sec men kept firing at the retreating wag, even as Markos and others from the sec posts and main camp reached the scene. Breathlessly, the patrol leader told the sec boss what had occurred.
Markos nodded solemnly. “I did not think that any ville would send scouts this far out. I fear that we will have to adapt sooner than we expected to the ways of the mainland.”
“But we defeated them, sir. That is all that matters,” the sec patrol leader said with a barely concealed note of triumph in his voice.
It was a feeling echoed by the others. What Markos had to say to them, Jak didn’t wait to hear. He had something else worrying him and he swiftly traversed the distances between the compass point posts, gathering the companions with a few words of explanation as he went. While he journeyed to the next post, the companion keeping guard returned to the main camp.
Traveling counterclockwise, Jak met J.B. last of all. The two men returned to the main Pilatan camp to find an upbeat mood pervading those who had been told of the skirmish by returning sec men and considered that they had made a good show of strength. The companions, on the other hand, were more subdued…particularly Mildred.
“Dark night! I knew we should have mentioned this to Mildred,” J.B. muttered to Jak.
The albino shrugged. “Too late worry now. She should know more important things worry about.”
As they approached the gathered companions, Mildred was about to speak when Jak cut her short.
“Earlier not matter now. We’ve got big trouble.”
“In what way?” Mildred asked.
“Wag from a ville, four sec…regular patrol by look of it. Now know we’re here and in firefight. Be back in daylight, with more sec, find out what fuck’s going on.”
“So is that a problem? It’s what you’d expect,” Mildred replied.
“Yeah, what we’d expect,” J.B. said pointedly. “Trouble is, Jak’s heard them talking to Markos. He’s cautious, but he seems to be the only one. And take a look around you. They think they’ve won and that it stops here. They sure as shit won’t listen if you tell them it never ends, so it’s up to us to keep alert till the morning.”
Mildred nodded. “Guess you were right to shadow them, then. I just wish you’d told me.”
“Couldn’t.” Ryan shook his head. “You were with Sineta and Markos when we had to go for it. There was no way we could safely tell you. Believe me, that’s all it was.”
Mildred pondered that for a moment. “Okay, it’s easy to forget that these people have got a lot to learn and they’ve got to learn it the hard way. I just hope there’s enough of us to cover their asses and ours when the shit hits the wall.”
THE PILATAN SEC POSTS had been remanned and the patrol had returned to the central camp full of their victory. Despite the best efforts of the sec chief, the people of the camp had celebrated their “victory” over the outsiders and were still sleeping when the sound of wags could be heard roaring across the plain.
Markos was instantly awake and found that the only ones prepared to meet the intruders were the companions, all of whom were awake and fully armed. Rearming his H&K, he hurried across to them, kicking awake Pilatans as he passed.
“You knew this would happen,” he said to Mildred. When she nodded, he added, “You never made the point.”
“How could I?” she countered. “I heard you try to make the same point, and no one was listening. So why do you think they were going to listen to me?”
He conceded the point with a shrug. “No matter now. It sounds like a heavy force, many wags…but I doubt they’ll be able to get them through to here.”
Ryan shook his head. “Probably just for transport.
The ville seems to be a long way off. But then they’ll pour through the woods, and they could be coming from all angles. And remember, they know this area probably better than we do. I think I’d have preferred it if they could have driven right up to us. At least we’d know where they were.”
Markos spoke grimly. “I’ll divide us up into parties, send them out to counter any actions. Will you help me rouse the people?”
Ryan nodded, and the companions separated, moving among the sleeping and half-awake Pilatans, rousing them as they went. Their actions were greeted with a mixture of fear and hostility—fear at being attacked and some residual resentment that it was whitelanders who were telling them to get up to prepare for battle.
Markos sent scouts out to the sentry posts to see what was happening and to recall those sec men so that they could be briefed. The job of the scouts was to send back reports with the returning sec men, then keep a roving brief, so that they could plot the progress of the outsiders.
Swiftly, the mood in the Pilatan camp changed. As they fully awakened and could hear the arriving wags, the Pilatans realized that they were in for their first taste of a firefight on the mainland. They rapidly checked and primed their blasters, and assembled in front of Markos, who received the reports of the incoming sec force. He turned to the assembled Pilatans and the companions, and spoke concisely, rapidly.
“They come from the one area, across the plain where the skirmish took place last night. There are ten wags, with approximately five or six people on each. This means that we outnumber them, but they appear to have machine blasters. They may have grens, mebbe even rocket launchers. We cannot know their firepower, therefore must assume the worst.
“I will divide you into small groups and assign posts. We will concentrate our efforts in the direction from which they will come, but also have outlying parties to flank them. You must be alert and shoot to chill. Use the natural cover. They undoubtedly will.”
With which, Markos moved among the Pilatans, dividing them into groups and mixing some of them with the companions. “They have experience of firefights in the whitelands—listen to them,” he told the relevant groups. But despite this, J.B. and Krysty were put into small war parties where there was hostility from diehard separatists who weren’t comfortable with the idea of listening to pale ones.
Before the groups set off into the woods, J.B. managed to snatch a few words with Ryan, telling him of the residual resentment. “Another thing—I don’t like the idea of so many people with blasters wandering about in such a small wooded area, blasting at anything that moves.”
Ryan agreed. “I know. We should be drawing the enemy out where we can get a clear sighting of them. It’ll be too easy to blast our own out there.”
“Yeah, I’ll go with that,” the Armorer agreed grimly. “Good luck out there.”
The war parties were about to move out when a scout returned with further information. The wags had rolled to a halt and discharged their cargo of heavily armed men, with a guard of four left to cover them. The men had fanned out and were now in the woods.
“We outnumber them heavily, so the odds are on our side,” Markos added when he relayed this to the baron, “but we need to proceed with caution.”
Sineta agreed, clutching her blaster. She turned to Mildred as Markos gave the order to move. “I fear I shall not be of much use in the conflict to come.”
“You concentrate on keeping alive, sweetie,” Mildred told her. “We’re a far-flung group, so the chances of you being risked are low. Markos has made sure of that—”
“But I must lead my people,” Sineta protested.
“You can’t lead them when you’re chilled,” Mildred countered, cutting her short. “He’s done the right thing in the circumstances. Now just stay close to me and don’t argue about it, all right?”
The Pilatan war parties moved out into the woods and straight into trouble.
The wooded areas they had to traverse were thick, and it was impossible for them to move stealthily. The same was also true for the incoming attack parties, but the sounds by which they could have been tracked were obliterated by the noise of the Pilatans. Blasterfire filled the air in staccato and irregular blasts, and the air became thick with cries of surprise and pain.
Leading his party, J.B. signaled them to halt, as he was sure that he could hear the enemy approach.
“Why are we stopping?” questioned a separatist who had bridled at the Armorer taking the lead.
“So I can hear what’s going down,” J.B. whispered, adding, “and keep your voice down, for fuck’s sake. Don’t need to give away our position.”
The separatist took a step forward.
“What are you doing?” J.B. whispered.
“You may be frightened, pale one, but I am not,” the separatist replied. “And I take no orders from you.”
An astonished J.B. watched the man move openly through the wood, then signaled to his party. “Follow. We’ll have to cover him.”
Cutting a swath through the foliage, the separatist came across a group of outsiders as they tried to make their way stealthily through the woods. It was hard to know who was the more surprised at the sudden confrontation.
The separatist looked at the stunned war party. They consisted of a white man, two blacks and a Hispanic. Addressing the black men, he said, “But you are my brothers. Why should I make war with you? We can talk about this, can we not? I would rather—”
He was cut short by the startled exclamation of one of the blacks, who was the first to snap out of his stunned reverie.
“Nuckin’ hell! Take the freak down before he stops talking and starts firing!”
And as he spoke, the black opened fire with his Uzi, the slugs cutting the separatist almost in two with a neat line of fire across his abdomen. The sound of the blasterfire galvanized the others in the war party and they all began to open fire. Blasterfire was directed at the already chilling separatist, who was hit in the chest, head and stomach, his body reduced to a spray of blood, ribboned flesh and splintered bone, suspended in an upright position only by the momentum of the slugs that poured into him.
“Take them out, now!” J.B. yelled, swinging his Uzi around and firing through the chilled separatist as he swung an arc of hot metal across the gathered war party. The stunned Pilatans behind him snapped back to reality and took aim, also beginning to fire.
The offensive war party retreated rapidly into the woods, leaving behind two chilled—the white man and one of the blacks—and J.B. certain that at least one of the others had been hit and was losing blood.
“Let us pursue them,” snarled one of the Pilatans, now roused to anger and, like the others, realizing for the first time what combat could entail. But J.B. stayed him with an arm.
“No, let them go. It’s too easy for them to rig an ambush out here. Fall back.”
“Retreat? Like cowards?”
“No—like people using our brains,” J.B. replied. “We pull back and lure them into the open.”
With which, the Armorer started to track back toward the clearing where the Pilatan camp had been established.
As they reached the campsite, they found that more parties were following this course. Certainly, all the companions had encountered similar problems to his own, and the talk among the Pilatans was of other separatists who had met the same fate as the man in J.B.’s force. Their confusion was partly echoed by Markos, as he came over to where the companions had gathered.
“This is a completely alien situation to me,” he began without preamble. “We have lost several of our people, although we have made dents in their personnel to compensate. But my people cannot adjust to the idea that other blacks will fire on them. Surely we have solidarity that runs over any other consideration?”
“Keep that attitude up and there won’t be any Pilatans left to make a new home,” Mildred said harshly. “I’ve tried to tell you—it doesn’t matter what color you are out here, only that it’s your vill
e against the rest. Whatever it takes to survive. And you’re going to have to get used to shooting blacks as well as whites and Hispanics and whoever else. Got it?”
The Pilatan sec boss nodded shortly. “But I am out of my depth now.”
He turned to the one-eyed man. “Ryan, I would like you to take over the action. Then we may have a chance. I am not good enough—”
Ryan cut him short. “Markos, cut the self-pity. You’re a good sec chief who’s never had this kind of experience before, so learn from it. You’re still the boss, but take advice when it’s offered…like now.” Markos chewed his lip and assented, so Ryan continued, outlining his strategy.
“I see your point,” Markos said briefly. “Let’s put it into action.”
Ryan charged Jak and Mildred with relaying the plan to the individual groups along with Markos. The albino and Mildred were the two companions in whom all the Pilatans had trust, and this wasn’t a time for any last residual traces of resentment to surface. As soon as they had finished, the Pilatans sprang to action.
Small groups ventured to the lip of the woods and established sentry posts up in the trees. While they did that, others formed a small circle of covered wags in the center of the clearing, with the livestock gathered inside, some of the Pilatans remaining to make it seem as though a full-scale retreat into the center had been ordered and implemented. The remainder of the Pilatans, along with the companions, then made their way to the sentry posts, where they established a series of positions in the upper reaches of the foliage.
From the reports of the different parties, Ryan had realized that the opposing forces had retreated when faced with the onslaught. They’d had time to regroup and would be making a second offensive. They would be suspicious that they were meeting no resistance as they moved through the woods, but when they caught sight of the covered defensive position, with the Pilatans within arranging things to look like the whole community had pulled back into cover, they would attempt to rush the wags, leaving themselves wide open to attack from above. The key would be keeping silent and still until the right moment.