Engaging the Enemy

by Elizabeth Moon

  Right about now…yes…the first traffic of the day, a truck whose engine had made the same squawk and growl when its driver shifted for the downgrade every morning since they’d come. It was too early for birds to show her if anyone lay hidden in the rock outcrop, now a dark blur on slightly lighter dark. Movement caught her eye. She scanned the top of the outcrop…small, alert but uninterested in the hollow below, ears cocked to something uphill. It stood and trailed its bushy tail over the rocks as it slid down on the riverside. Fox. What had alerted it?

  The gentle tonk-tonk-tonk of sheepbells came to her ears, and now she saw, pouring off the road in a slow torrent, a flock of sheep. Two shepherds were with them, and four dogs. Sheep and dogs passed the rock outcrop; one of the dogs leapt up to the top and sniffed, tail wagging wildly, but jumped down and went on when a shepherd called it.

  Without moving from her comfortable bed, Grace checked the other sides of the house. Nothing. Ponies up near the house end of the paddock, waiting for the children to run out and feed them. Their girl Caitlyn from the town on her bicycle, leaving a dark trace in the silvery dew as she rode on the footpath instead of the road.

  Grace turned off her system and let herself doze as light brightened in the room. She had been up until almost four, interfering with the sleep of the wicked, making them nervous enough to call each other on what they believed were secure lines, and she knew were not. She had recordings; she had made copies; she had transmitted copies to various locations. She needed to think about what they’d said, make sense of it, make plans…but she was tired, and hated the years that had stolen her ability to stay up two nights running.

  A cry woke her, completely alert in an instant. She was halfway across the room, bare feet slapping on the floor, weapon in hand, when she thought to grab the security system’s master control and plug in her implant.

  The paddock. One pony down, legs thrashing. Justin, Jo’s elder child, sprawled in the grass. Helen running. The other pony standing stiff, head thrown up, ears pricked, with Shar, the younger child, clinging to its mane.

  They weren’t supposed to ride until after breakfast. It was after breakfast; she’d overslept and Helen hadn’t woken her. She threw the scans to full power. There. A glint in the briars. No time to get downstairs, outside—

  She was across the second-story bridge to the far side of the house, out on the balcony, peering through the exuberant flowering vine and its equally exuberant bees, when the assassin stood up to get a better shot at the other pony or its rider. Or at Helen, who was ignoring the obvious danger and running straight for the fallen child. Ignoring the bees, ignoring Helen’s yells and the second pony’s sudden bolt, Grace focused her whole attention on drilling a hole through the assassin.

  He fell. Grace scanned the area again for any other threat. No. A lone assassin? Stupid of them, and she wasn’t sure she believed it. Movement in a neighboring field caught her eye. A rabbit, streaking away from where it had been quietly nibbling grass. Her gaze tracked the streak back, back, to another tangle of briars. There—her vision aided by highly illicit processors in her implant—she detected heat radiation. And there, aided again by other highly illicit bioelectronics, she directed her next shot.

  Helen had reached Justin, thrown herself over him as a protective blanket. For all the good that would do, Grace thought. Stay down, Helen, she wanted to yell. The second pony had slowed from its wild bolt; the child still hugged its neck, unhurt, mouth a round O, eyes wide. The pony flicked its ears back and forth, then suddenly lowered its head to snatch grass; the child slithered off, unbalanced by that move. Unhurt, apparently; Shar threw a leg over the pony’s neck and tugged at its mane, trying the trick they’d taught the pony two weeks before, to raise its head and lift a child rider to its back.

  Grace didn’t want to leave the window, where she had the best view…but she had to. Downstairs, she heard voices, exclamations, the scurry of feet. She was still wearing her night clothes, the close-fitting black garment with pad-protected elbows and knees in which she’d climbed out of her own window at midnight and back into it at four in the morning. When she went downstairs, Caitlyn saw her and gasped, fist to her mouth. Grace thought of what Caitlyn was seeing—a slim black figure holding a very nasty-looking weapon. One of them.

  “It’s all right, Caitlyn. It’s just me—”

  “But…but…Miss Grace—”

  “Caitlyn, go in the kitchen and stay there.”

  “The police—”

  “Don’t call them. I will or Helen will.”

  “The doctor?”

  “One of us will call if a doctor’s needed. Stay in the kitchen until you’re called, can you do that?” A nod from Caitlyn, still paler than she should have been.

  Grace moved to the back of the house. The garden, from above, had an obvious plan, but from the ground presented too many obstructions and distractions. She wanted to hurry; she might be needed now. But hurry brought her too predictably to walks and open spaces easy to range. They—if any such were still out there—would expect the hurry, the predictable direct approach through the main aisle in this garden, wide enough for a small tractor and its implements. Grace chose a slower route, but not much slower for someone who had prepared carefully, for whom the straight lines of apparently solid walls and hedges had gaps ready for use by those who knew them. She knew them all.

  Now she came to the paddock, where the injured pony still made those unhorselike sounds but more quietly. One leg was gone, ending in a mangled stump still spurting blood. The other legs kicked less vigorously. She should kill the pony humanely, but she had humans to check on.

  “Helen,” Grace said, just loud enough above the pony’s groans. “How bad is it?”

  “Not hurt,” Helen said. “Just stunned. Shar?”

  Stunned could kill, as they both knew. “Shar’s fine,” Grace said. Down the paddock, Shar was back astride the second pony, kicking hard, but the pony didn’t want to approach.

  “Are they coming?” Helen asked.

  “Not those two,” Grace said. “I’ll get Shar.”

  “I meant the police,” Helen said.

  “Not for a while,” Grace said. “Not until after we call them, so don’t.”

  “Don’t call—?”

  “No.” She walked up to the first pony, whose glazing eyes barely turned to see her, squatted down, and aimed carefully at the crossing of the X made by lines from right ear to left eye and left ear to right eye. “Sorry,” she said to the pony, and fired. The pony jerked and then went limp.

  “What did you do?” Helen asked.

  “Gave it peace,” Grace said. “Get Justin inside, if you can. I’ll get Shar.” She walked down the paddock, itchy with tension, an easy target, to the far corner where the second pony was grazing in quick, nervous snatches. Shar, sitting bolt upright on the pony’s back, stared at Grace as if she were a stranger. Perhaps the child didn’t recognize her. She herself felt more at home than she had in decades, the carefully constructed veneer of slightly batty and prudish old lady falling away to reveal the same familiar interior Grace, a Grace perfectly at home in black climbing suit with a weapon in hand.

  “Easy now, Buttercup,” she said to the pony. And to the child, “Shar, your mother wants you. It’s time to go in.”

  “He won’t go,” Shar said. She looked so much like Jo at that age that Grace almost choked.

  “He’s scared,” Grace said. “You sound a little scared, too.”

  “What happened to Rosy?” Shar asked. “Did you shoot Rosy?”

  “Rosy broke a leg. It was a bad break. It couldn’t be fixed. Come down, now.” She started to reach for Shar, but the pony sidestepped and she had only one hand, the other being still occupied with her weapon. Shar had tilted toward her, and now slid too far off balance, falling to the ground just as something slammed into Grace’s left arm, whirling her around as if in a dance. She fell, furious with herself, knowing instantly what it was and that there had been
more than two. The pony bolted again, the quick thuds of its flight scarcely faster than the rhythm of her heart.

  She was on the ground. Shar, facedown and head-up, stared at her. “Stay down,” she said to Shar. “Stay flat—put your head right down and be quiet and hold still no matter what.” Waves of pain washed over her, nausea racked her. She turned her head and saw, without surprise, that her arm was lying folded up all wrong, in a widening pool of blood. “Damn,” she muttered.

  “Bad word,” Shar said. “Gramma says…”

  “Quiet,” Grace said. “You be the baby possum, like in the story.” She had to do something about the bleeding or she would be dead, like the daddy possum in the story. But that would mean letting go of her weapon, something she was sure the assassin would like to see.

  She heard a crackling in the brambles beyond the paddock fence, footsteps, and willed herself to stay conscious until she could shoot the scumsucker in the gut…there was the dark shape, in a suit similar to her own, but with a hood and mask. She struggled to bring her weapon to bear…and then the figure staggered, fell facedown, and behind it was someone she recognized too slowly as MacRobert, bloody fish-gutting knife in hand.

  “You—” she said.

  “You’re having an interesting morning,” he said. He moved up beside her, grabbed her left arm, and shoved what felt like a spear into the bone. She knew it was his thumb on the artery, but that’s not what it felt like.

  “I got two of them,” she said, and wondered why she was justifying herself to him.

  “Good,” he said. “Because I don’t think I could sneak up on any more that way. May I take your weapon if I need it?”

  “Go ahead,” she said, relaxing her grip.

  “I heard their shots, but no answering fire,” he said. “Took me a while to make it from the river—”

  “Glad you did,” Grace said. Her vision was going; she was peering down a dark tunnel at a small bright image.

  “Stay with me now,” he said. She felt his hand at her mouth, a tiny hard something on her tongue that tasted bitter. “Bite that.”

  She bit. She had tasted it before, and military-grade stimtabs hadn’t changed that much. The tunnel shortened, then disappeared; she saw very clearly, with little bright halos around everything.

  “You may lose this arm.”

  “I thought so,” Grace said.

  “Aunt Grace…” That in a near-whisper, from Shar.

  “This is a friend, Shar,” Grace said. Or maybe not, but she could not at the moment cope with the possibility that he was one of them.

  “Can I get up?”

  “Not yet,” MacRobert answered for her. “Just lie quiet, and let me help your aunt Grace.”

  He had placed a tourniquet now, doing it one-handed with a deftness that indicated he’d done it before. Grace thought of offering to replace his thumb with her right hand for arterial pressure, then—as another wave of nausea hit her—decided to just lie there and let him work.

  The stimtab and her own biochemistry finally reached equilibrium about the time he had the tourniquet tightened and started to straighten her arm out. She rolled her head to see.

  “Better not look,” he said.

  She looked anyway. A mangled mess where her elbow had been, only a shred of skin holding it on. Beyond, her undamaged left hand, now looking like the corpse it was, bloodless.

  “Might as well take it off the whole way,” she said.

  His brows went up. “I’m no surgeon.”

  “It’s not an arm, at this point,” Grace said. She felt only mild regret, which she knew to be shock and drug combined. Still, two live children for one lost arm was a good bargain.

  “As you wish.” He cleaned the gutting knife carefully, something she appreciated fully only later, and cut the arm free. Grace felt nothing physical, but despite her determination to accept the loss, there was something profoundly wrong about her arm—her arm—lying there with no connection to her. It was not her arm; it could not be her arm…it must be someone else’s arm. What a disgusting thing to leave lying in the paddock, where a child might find it…

  _______

  She had a dim memory of MacRobert helping her back to the house, of his voice assuring her the children were safe, Helen was safe, everyone was safe, when she opened her eyes to find herself in bed, floating above the mattress in a pink cloud. That was so unlikely that she closed her eyes again, willing herself to dream properly and wake up completely. On the second try, she recognized the drifting sensation as drug-induced, and the memory of the morning’s—that morning’s?—events appeared in chunks, accessed by her implant’s recording.

  “—Transfer to regional trauma center immediately—” she heard a voice say. She wanted to argue, but her mouth was full of very dry cotton. “Should have called immediately—”

  “She said—” That was Helen’s voice.

  “She said!” A pompous voice, full of scorn. Grace felt anger stirring. “Why would you listen to a woman missing an arm, a woman in shock? People in shock say all sorts of stupid things.”

  Her tongue was working its way through the cotton. “Na’stoo-id,” she croaked. Even to herself it sounded more like a frog than a human.

  A stranger’s face appeared on one side, Helen’s on the other. “Grace!” Helen said. “You’re awake.”

  Not really awake, she wanted to say. Too full of drugs to be really awake. But the other face annoyed her, as full of self-righteousness and scorn as the voice had been.

  “Who you?”

  “I’m the local doctor. Please stay calm. You’ve had a rather serious injury, some kind of hunting accident. These idiot summer visitors never seem to think about how far their shots go…missed a rabbit, I daresay.”

  And he had called her stupid. Three hunters, shooting at and missing three rabbits?

  “Where Mac—” She couldn’t say the rest of his name.

  “The man?” Helen misunderstood the word. “The fisherman who helped you? He’s gone to help the police find the…the hunters.”

  So there was a reason for the stupidity about hunters. She wished she could think what it was.

  The ceiling of the regional trauma center’s amputation ward had been designed for the entertainment of those who must lie flat in bed. Grace had a choice of programs to display: games, news, sports. None of them served her purpose. She had been overruled by doctors, psychologists, and worst of all Helen, all of them certain that a woman her age needed the specialized services here, rather than specialists in attendance there.

  Surreptitiously, she hitched herself up in the bed until she could use the headboard to tilt her head forward and look across the room. Through the glass sliding door, she could see the man in uniform seated just beside it. The careless-hunter story had broken down; provincial authorities knew that the shots had been attempted murders. Her life, they said, might be in danger. They were not happy with her weapon, though she faced no charges for having wounded (unhappily not killed) the assailants. An unlicensed beam weapon was an indictable offense, she’d been told. Hadn’t she realized? Her explanations had been received in silence, without comment afterward.

  Her stump ached. No, calling it an ache was a euphemism. The attendants used euphemisms. Are we feeling some discomfort, dear? It wasn’t discomfort and it wasn’t an ache. It hurt, a lot. The med dispenser button lay just under her right index finger. She didn’t push it. No one died of pain, and she wanted to think. They had cleaned up the stump of her arm; the bulky wrappings prodded her ribs. She wanted a cloned prosthesis; they were saying she was too old, and she needed a way to convince them she wasn’t.

  Using heels, hips, and her right arm, she pushed herself head-ward a few more centimeters. It was never good to lie still too long. She couldn’t turn on her side; the arm board and IV line to her right arm made it too awkward, and she wasn’t about to try lying on her stump. But by the clock, she had eighteen minutes until the next official attendant check.

/>   The man outside the door alerted; she saw his head come up, his arm drop to his side. Her chest tightened. Then he relaxed, smiled, stood up. Helen already? She wasn’t supposed to visit until tomorrow. Grace made herself breathe more slowly. No use panicking the attendants.

  MacRobert peered through the door, winked at her, said something to the man in uniform, then came in. He had a sheaf of flowers wrapped in green paper.

  “You’re looking better,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Grace said, meaning more than the words or the flowers.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. He looked around for somewhere to put the flowers, and chose the pitcher from the bedside table. “Just a moment.” He took the pitcher and flowers into the tiny adjoining bathroom—to which Grace had not yet been allowed access—and came back with them. “There. Nothing makes a hospital room really cheerful, but flowers can’t hurt.”

  “They’re lovely,” Grace said. She did not believe for a moment that he had brought her flowers just to cheer her up. But as long as she was stuck in a ward with full patient monitoring, how could they communicate?

  He gave her a sweet smile, something so at odds with what she thought of him that she felt herself scowling back. “Are you in pain?” he asked. “You’re frowning.” Then, as if reassured, “I was due extra leave, and it was granted, so I thought I’d stay in the area until you’re out of the hospital. My time is up in the cottage, but—your niece, is it?—graciously invited me to stay at the manor with her and the children. I offered to do the back-and-forth for her; the children are upset about the pony.”

  Grace blinked. “That’s…very nice of her. Of you. Of course, we do have fishing rights to that whole area. I hope you’re scaring some fish.”

  “A few, yes.” He pulled one of the chairs around to sit facing her. “Wouldn’t you like the bed elevated?”

  “I would, yes, but they wouldn’t, and the bed reports to the nursing station if I do it. In would come the efficient attendants to put it back down and remind me not to hit that button by accident.”