“This is it?” Nat Bergen asked.
"Five more coming." Lan said. "And this is what we're up against . . . " He began filling them in.
"Tell me about these promotions, General?" Mario Lopez asked when Lan had finished. It was the only question he asked and it cut right to the heart of what they had all been thinking.
"You'll write your own tickets boys, and girl, and Molog." Sanchez said. "Just get us the Senator back in one piece and the sky is nearly the limit."
"Does this tub move any faster?" Briar Murdoch asked with his rakish grin.
Chapter 21
Baldwin had held out longer than she had expected. She had begun to worry they would be caught before he tired completely, his pace not what she would've called exactly rapid, but he finally exhausted himself and she had been able to do what she needed to do. The idiotic fool was stuck on chivalrous idealism and was not using his common sense.
Well there was more than one way to skin a cat, and she had skinned Baldwin. The thought brought a smile to her face. The chivalrous fool!
It had not been hard to get near those who followed. She had just returned to their previous evening's camp and had simply waited. She didn't have to wait long. As soon as they arrived two of them had begun to fight, like scavengers over the carcass of a lion's kill.
They were probably already fighting over her, as if her capture were an inconsequential factor in the equation. It would be a bit more than that.
Her opening shot reduced their numbers by a third, at least. She did not miss how one of the two combatants used her diversion to treacherously finish his opponent. Nor the look upon his face as he did so. No, she would not forget that!
The moment she ceased her attack she slipped quietly away, back the way she had come. Her attack was meant to slow them. Make them wary. Guerrilla tactics. Harry the enemy. Whittle them down with treacherous attacks from concealment, best done when least expected. This had been a thorough success.
Baldwin had again covered more ground than she had expected, but the wrong way. He was rushing to her aid. Rebecca was furious when she found him coming back the wrong way.
"You've undone what I did!" Rebecca exploded, now truly angered by his ridiculous behavior.
"I can handle a weapon!" Baldwin said without remorse, but he couldn't meet her look. He had never seen anyone so angry. Had he acted irresponsibly?
"Hasn't it occurred to you that I might know what the hell I am doing? Or is it that I am a woman? A woman just simply can't be capable? Is that it?" Rebecca demanded. Any feelings she might have felt earlier were, for the moment, banished from her mind. She was now Colonel Collins. She was now a soldier doing her duty. She had to make Baldwin understand. "You've jeopardized both our lives! What about that don't you understand?"
Baldwin did not answer. He wasn't sure what he could say. The heat of her accusation burned him. She was right of course, he had screwed up.
"Let's go." Rebecca said disgustedly. She thought she had gotten through to him, but she had to be sure. Their lives depended on it.
She turned and moved off again and Baldwin fell into step behind her, though slowly, now most certainly realizing how much farther ahead they would have been, had he acted intelligently.
"You're right." Baldwin said shortly. "I should've let you do your job. It won't happen again."
Rebecca hardly acknowledged his words. They continued on, running when he could, but now mostly just walking. He had exhausted himself.
Baldwin could not fail to note her worried looks along their back trail and soon she took up drag, sometimes falling back out of sight to reconnoiter their back trail, then running to catch up. She looked very nervous. Uncertainty was not something he would ordinarily have expected from her, and it was all his fault.
"It would be nice to know what we're up against." Baldwin said later, after hours of silence had passed between them.
"There were twenty of them. And they're right behind us. I killed four or five and injured a few more, though I can't be sure exactly. Two of their number were fighting. I hit them hard and then got out." Rebecca answered, just as if their earlier argument had never occurred. Water under the bridge. Ancient history. A soldier could not spend her time worrying about what could not be changed. It was enough to worry about what yet could be changed.
"What were they fighting about?"
"Probably over me. Who would get to have me." She said it so calmly it took Baldwin a moment to comprehend her meaning.
He did not want to think about what it would be like for her if she were captured. Yet it was no different for her than it would've been for any of the women he had sentenced here so blithely. Or any of the men for that matter. But this was different.
Or was it. What was so damn different! He would never be the same man he had been before. That much he knew for sure.
"How could they have known about you? You said they were already fighting when you attacked?"
"My trail. Or they smelled me. A woman has a distinctive smell, you know." She gave him a slight smile.
"Well yeah, but they're not bloodhounds. Is that possible?"
"There's no telling. An evolutionary turn like that could have easily occurred. This wouldn't be the first Prison Planet where it's happened. But it's possible they were fighting over something else. I have no way of knowing for sure. All I do know is they'll be a lot more wary now. That's what's important. My attack will have served to slow them down. Now they have no choice but to be on their guard. They know I will attack again."
"And you cut their numbers." Baldwin said.
"It won't be that easy again."
"How were they armed?" Baldwin asked, that suddenly occurring to him to wonder. They had certainly been aboard Benefactor.
"Just their primitive stuff. They didn't know what they were looking for. Their ignorance won't last long." Rebecca said. Her conversation turned to what was strictly necessary for survival and she would not be further drawn into idle chatter. After several attempts to get her to talk, Baldwin gave up and they traveled on in silence.
Throughout the day, they ate of the meat they carried and when darkness fell, settled into the crooks in a tree and fell exhaustively into slumber. Or at least Baldwin did.
Rebecca could not sleep immediately. She peered about in the darkness assessing their situation. They had been extremely lucky so far. That luck would not last. She slept then, but though the sleep was fulfilling, she was never but barely below the level of unconsciousness. She was not awakened.
Chapter 22
Nago was furious. He had completely underestimated this woman. Then she had slipped away, like a ghost, as if she had never even been there. The death and destruction she left behind herself the only evidence that she existed. She left almost no trail. Almost.
Now they must move with utmost caution. That lesson she had taught thoroughly. The woman was deadly.
It took hours to determine her trail. That she was merely returning back on her original course. But that was not sufficient. Not enough merely to follow the more obvious trail the inept one left. The woman would have to be stalked and that carefully, to avoid a further incident. Their number would not withstand further degradation.
Of their original number only fourteen remained. Those who had been too injured to travel Nago had put out of their misery. By his own hand. One or two of them might have survived. No one dared to interfere, nor raise word of protest. Nago was not in a mood to tolerate it.
"Struck down by a woman!" Nago said scornfully as the blood of his victims dripped from the blade of his sword. Several who were wounded but able to be upon their feet made a great show of ability to function. They saw the consequence otherwise. Nago was in a killing rage.
Of these he doubted that two of them would survive. Their injuries were internal and severe and when they failed to keep the pace, Nago would kill them as well. He was not feeling charitable.
He did not think his men would allow t
hemselves to be so easily ambushed again. Now they had more than one reason to be careful. There would be no mercy from Nago if they were not.
They moved forward in a scattered skirmishing line, spread out, all wary, all knowing the consequence of failure. All understood that they faced a deadly foe, woman or not.
Naram accepted his promotion to Sub-Chief with less enthusiasm than might ordinarily be expected. A man of few words but of deeper intellect than most, he accepted it with the stoic poise that he accepted everything else in his primitive world.
"You are Sub-Chief now." Nago said after calling him to his side. Simply that and no more said.
"I will try to be worthy." Naram murmured. That was all.
"What do you make of this?" Nago said later, after they had traveled again some distance, pointing to the ground at his feet. Whatever he had found had brought their advance to a halt.
Naram, also a very skilled tracker, spent some small time studying the ground. He followed the trail ahead, then came back, before offering his opinion;
"The man returned, following the woman. Then they met again and resumed their original course."
"Why?" Nago demanded. Naram's observation had been plain enough to him, it was the underlying motive which had not.
"She confronts him here." Naram said. "He was to help in the attack but he was late? But that doesn't seem likely. Her prints are obvious here. I can only speculate. I think they were at odds here. More I cannot say." Naram looked at Nago with something approaching fear, as if he feared Nago would not be happy with his insufficient explanation. That was not the case.
"I see no more either." Nago admitted. "Anything more would be idle speculation and of no worth." Nago had no interest in alienating Naram. Naram already had a healthy respect for Nago, so further example need not be set. At least not for the present.
"The woman fights while the man remains back out of danger." Naram speculated. "What kind of people are these Outsiders?" He was making his open-mindedness known.
"Maybe smarter than we suspect." Nago observed.
"Or maybe the women are dominant." Naram said.
Nago scoffed at this idea, a twist of his lips that conveyed his meaning as well as any words, and yet, with their powerful weapons, could not something like that actually be possible!
Yet the concept was so foreign!
"That will only make them that much easier to subdue." Nago hissed. Men ruled by women! How pathetic!
Naram made no further comment. He did not seem to agree that she would be so easy to subdue. Nago waved him away and they continued, although slowly, as if in confirmation of Naram's thoughts. It rankled. No she would not be so easy to subdue, Nago concluded. No man had ever forced Nago to such caution, but then it wasn't the woman so much as her weapon that he feared.
It was, however, humiliating. Nago felt that humiliation keenly. It was a direct affront to his male superiority.
But his own mother had certainly been no warrior. Could she have hidden something like that all that time?
No. Absolutely not. She had been as inept as this man. The life here had worn her down and quickly killed her. The more he thought about these Outsiders, the less it seemed to make sense. The pattern became more confused, rather than less confused. There must be something obvious he was missing, that would clear up the whole puzzle, once that one piece was put into the pattern.
The little forest noises they used to communicate kept Nago informed of his men's progress, and they of his, as they slowly moved along. They were spread out so far that not even Naram was now within Nago's view. His men made no noise other than their communications, there nothing but those to convey that Nago was not completely alone within the forest.
If he were Herod or Jamel, the two walking dead men, he would use this opportunity to flee. To flee for their lives. But neither would. Their fear of the unknown was greater than their fear of the known. Better the evils one knows than those they do not.
Anyway, where in the hell would they go!
Maybe he would reconsider. Maybe he had displayed enough wrath. How they must be sweating, though. How they must be struggling to keep up.
Suddenly he was feeling better. Others' misery always made him feel better, and then there was the anticipation. The anticipation of possessing the fire stick weapon. He would have it. There was no doubt in his mind.
They did not catch up to them that day, but that was all right too. They could not run forever. The inept one was exhausted. Nago could see it in his dragging steps. It was only a matter of time, and Nago had all the time in the world.
Chapter 23
Jarlaxle Accor, King of the Tarovan, motioned his men and women to silence/immobility in the silent battle language hand signs of his people. The order was relayed instantly back through the ranks, and obeyed accurately and instantly. The large group acted as one. They were all well trained. They were all professionals.
Such order was amazing among so many hundreds spread out so far throughout the forest. Their discipline was ingrained in the very fibers of their muscles, put there through thousands of hours of training, from early childhood on. They came in search of the ship. The ship which had come down three nights previously.
Jarlaxle Accor knew they were not close yet, but he had not expected to take possession of it without resistance, either from the Outsiders themselves, or other competing Warlords, if any could overcome their stupid superstitions long enough to investigate. Jarlaxle knew a good bit about the Outsiders, because in fact, he had once been one.
Expecting resistance, he was moving his force slowly and carefully into the area. Jarlaxle Accor was no fool.
Jarlaxle Accor did not look like the King of a powerful tribe. He was small and wiry, rat faced with a weak, pointed chin and close set eyes, and not much of the woodsman at all. His skill with weapons, the sword in particular, and his hands and feet however, was unparalleled. He was a master. He was lethal.
When he was a boy on Sarvan, Jarlaxle was much bullied and picked on by the larger stronger children his own age, much to his father's disgust. He had not been genetically endowed with his father's physical attributes, a fact his father would never let him live down.
Angrily his father, a very successful mathematical theoretician employed by the R&D Division of a huge multi-world manufacturing conglomerate, hired a man at arms to teach his son to defend himself.
Jarlaxle was an embarrassment to his father. To a man who had killed several in duels of honor himself. He blamed Jarlaxle's mother for her son's poor physical endowments. He was a hard man.
The man at arms, over a period of long years, did more than merely teach Jarlaxle to defend himself. He turned a weak, ineffectual boy into a hardened weapon's master of extraordinary skill and prowess. The idealism of the master, however, was not so thoroughly passed along.
Jarlaxle was much like his father in that aspect. He took what he wanted from life and discarded the rest. The man at arms knew what he produced, but set aside his own idealism in favor of the financial reward. It could be said that the weapons master's idealism wasn't quite as ideal as he may have pretended. He had been very well-paid. It was often how such things worked out.
Jarlaxle became arrogant and unbearable. At age 19, Jarlaxle killed a man with his bare hands in a drunken fit of rage over the attentions of a woman who wanted nothing from him but his Credits, who sought her physical pleasures elsewhere behind Jarlaxle's back. The man refused to fight, refused to duel, knowing of Jarlaxle's skill, and there were witnesses.
That was twenty-four years ago. A lifetime. He had matured a great deal since then. Further, he had inherited all of his father's great intelligence and he knew that the only way to get off Bali was to unite the whole world in Democracy and then petition for Reunification. An impossible task at their present technological level. Possession of the ship could change everything. It could give Jarlaxle the tools he needed to unite the planet.
Twenty-four years he had bee
n struggling to build something from nothing. First he had wrested control of the small band which had taken him in, a simple matter once he learned how leadership was passed. Leadership was passed through single combat. Then he was their new leader and possessor of all that the dispossessed had owned, including his wives.
In the years that followed, his band grew explosively as they raided and warred on the weaker groups around them. Slowly he had transformed their nature, from that of mere hunter/gatherers to industrial manufacturers. They mined. They smelted. They cast. Built assembly lines and manufactured. They continued to war and to grow, and were highly successful with the weapons his manufacturing provided. The education his father had forced on him now proved its worth. The Tarovan were modern manufacturers set in a Stone Age environment. None of the local tribes could stand before them.
But progress was not proceeding fast enough.
Jarlaxle was aware that they moved into the territory of a minor but powerful tribe. He knew quite a bit about them, in fact. The Dunaj had been next on the list of Tarovan acquisitions. Jarlaxle was fully briefed concerning their location, numbers, leadership, and weaponry. The Dunaj were the single largest group the Tarovan had yet encountered, and in the Tarovan's early years would have proved to have been a much too powerful adversary, but not now. Not with the Tarovan's weapons and numbers. They were thousands and thousands to one now.
Yet the Dunaj were competent, chiefly resulting from their leadership. This Nago Bashin was a military strategist of some intelligence. The Dunaj had conquered all around them with little resistance, little loss of personnel, had incorporated the captured women of those tribes into their own, and were growing rapidly.
This Chief would have to be eliminated. That went without saying, but otherwise Jarlaxle hoped to meld the rest into his own Kingdom.
Kingdom! What a strange term for a man of the Federation. Jarlaxle still considered himself as thus. His incarceration here a mere interlude, something that was within his own power to end.
Duty, Honor or Death the Corps Sticks Page 14