by Allen Steele
“Zoltan?” Carlos whispered.
From somewhere nearby, voices. The gargoyle looked up, glanced in their direction. Without another word, he stood up and scuttled away, heading for the waterfall only a few feet away. He climbed onto a large boulder overlooking the gorge. His wings extended to their full length; he raised his arms to grasp their leading edges with taloned hands.
“No!” Carlos yelled.
Then the figure flung himself into the chasm.
Carlos raised himself on his hands and knees just in time to catch a glimpse of a bat-winged shape gliding across Johnson Falls. Within moments it disappeared from sight, vanishing into the shadows of the trees at the bottom of the gorge.
He was still staring after it when Chris came up behind him. Several men were behind him; Carlos couldn’t tell if they were following him or chasing him, and for the moment it didn’t matter. “Hey, man, you all right?” he said, laying a hand on his arm. “We thought you were dead.”
“I just . . .” Carlos found himself shaking, not so much from the cold but from the face he’d just seen. Would they believe him? He wasn’t sure he believed it himself. From somewhere not far away, he heard a gyro approaching. They weren’t out of trouble yet. “Never mind,” he murmured. “Let’s just get out of here.”
GABRIEL 76/0932—FORT LOPEZ
The screen showed two men on a rope bridge, one lying face-down, the other standing above him with a rifle, firing toward the camera. Then the camera zoomed past them, briefly focusing upon a couple of figures within the shadows of the trees on the other side of the creek. One of them bore something on his shoulder. Above the chatter of gunfire, they heard the squad leader’s voice:
“Reinforcements spotted. Moving in to . . . oh, shit, they’ve got a . . . !”
A brief flash from the opposite side of the bridge. The last image was that of a small, dark shape hurtling toward the camera. Then the screen went blank.
“That’s it, sir.” Cartman looked up from his console. “No contact after that.”
Baptiste said nothing. He didn’t need another replay from Alpha Leader’s external camera to know what had happened: the Diablo team had been taken out by a shoulder-launched RPG, probably one of the weapons stolen from Liberty during one of Rigil Kent’s raids.
And it wasn’t just Diablo Alpha that had been brought down. When Diablo Bravo had closed in upon Constanza’s signal, about seven miles downstream from the falls, they found the missing patrol skimmer afloat next to the creek bank, tied to a tree. It appeared to be abandoned, but when the Diablos moved in to investigate, they came under fire by a small group of armed men lurking on the nearby hillside. Bravo could have fought them off without any problem, but it turned out that they were only a diversion; the skimmer wasn’t deserted, and the men aboard knew how to operate its chain gun. All contact with Bravo team was lost less than a minute later; ten minutes after that, Alpha went off-line.
Two Diablo teams—four specially trained soldiers, equipped with state-of-the-art Union Guard combat armor—taken out by little more than guerrilla forces armed with stolen weapons. What was supposed to have been a tactical operation had become a total loss of men and equipment. Baptiste closed his eyes, rubbed his temples with his fingertips. It should have been easy. . . .
“Sir? Flight One and Flight Two are still on standby. Awaiting new orders.”
Baptiste opened his eyes. Cartman patiently waited for him to tell them what to do now. The situation room had gone quiet, the officers seated at the consoles silently watching him. Two gyros remained on the scene, hovering at opposite ends of the operation zone; if the mission had been successful, they would have retrieved Alpha and Bravo, perhaps even taken aboard prisoners. That wasn’t going to happen now, though, was it?
“Tell them to return to base,” Baptiste murmured. “We’ll . . .”
“No. Cancel that order, Sergeant.”
Luisa Hernandez had been standing quietly off to one side, observing events as they unfolded. Now she walked into the light, her back erect as she approached Baptiste. “We’re not through yet, Captain. There’s still work to be done.”
Baptiste let out his breath. “With all due respect, Matriarch, I disagree. Our ground forces . . .”
“Nullified, yes. I’m aware of that.” Her face was taut, her mouth drawn into a straight line. “Nonetheless, we still have two units in the air. We can use them to our advantage.” Before Baptiste could object, she pointed to the screen he had just been studying. “Sergeant, run back what we just saw.” Cartman turned back to his console, tapped a few keys. Once more, the last few seconds captured by the team leader’s onboard camera appeared. “Freeze it. Look at this, Captain, and tell me what’s out of place here.”
Baptiste examined the image. Nothing here he hadn’t seen twice already. “I don’t understand what you . . .”
“The bridge, Captain. Look at the bridge. For almost nine Earth-years, we’ve searched every square mile of Midland, both from high orbit and from low-altitude sorties. Never once have we spotted anything like this. Now, out in the middle of nowhere, we find a rope bridge. Why do you think that is?”
Before he could answer, Hernandez marched over to the map wall. “No one builds a bridge unless they mean to use it,” she continued as she pointed to the last-known positions of Alpha and Bravo teams. “It can’t be a coincidence that there were armed men in the area.” Laying a fingertip upon the glass, she traced a circle around the upper part of the river valley. “Put it together. Their settlement must be located somewhere within range. If we act quickly enough, we may be able to find it.”
Murmurs around the room as officers caught on to what she was saying. Baptiste found himself nodding in agreement. With two gyros still airborne over the valley, they might be able to backtrack the opposition’s movements to their base camp. And yet . . .
“We can do this,” he said, carefully choosing his words, “but I must urge you to be cautious. You may be overlooking something.”
Hernandez scowled. “And that is?”
“We tried to lay a trap for them . . . but could it be that they’ve laid a trap for us?”
GABRIEL 76/0946—PIONEER VALLEY
Carlos was pulling on a dry shirt when he heard voices from the mouth of the cave. Leaving the coarse tunic unbuttoned, he bent down to snatch up his rifle from where he had rested it against the wall. A few seconds later, the chopping thrum of rotors echoed through the tunnel as a gyro passed low overhead, just a few hundred feet above the gorge.
“Someone’s coming.” Seated near the lantern burning on the cave floor, Chris looked up. “Think it’s the other Diablo team?”
Carlos didn’t reply. He checked the cartridge—about eight rounds left. Not enough to hold off a determined assault. He glanced at Ted LeMare; the older man was guarding Chris, his rifle pointed at his back. Ted said nothing, but his attention was no longer on their prisoner but on the cave entrance. Chris had sworn that he wasn’t carrying another homing device, and even if he was, they were far enough underground that a low-frequency radio signal wouldn’t penetrate the granite around them. The gyro could simply be making another random sweep, as it had done three times already.
Chris had saved his life up on the bridge. But Carlos wasn’t ready to trust him quite yet.
Jack Dreyfus was standing watch near the cave entrance. As the gyro moved away, he raised a hand to signal that the coast was clear, then disappeared from sight. More voices, this time closer. One sounded like Barry; Jack was doubtless relieved to find that his son was still alive. Carlos relaxed; he put down his gun, reached for the wool sweater lying nearby. Jack wasn’t the only one to be grateful; when Henry Johnson had discovered this natural cave in the bluffs below the falls that now bore his name, he recommended that it should be stocked with spare clothes, food, and a fish-oil lantern, just in case a hunting party who’d lost their way might need them at some future time. Henry’s foresight had been correct; Carlos made a ment
al note to buy him a drink the next time he saw him.
Light flickered off the cave walls. Jack appeared a moment later, flashlight in one hand, his other arm around Barry’s shoulder. Behind them were Marie, Lars, and Garth, with Jean Swenson bringing up the rear. Marie rushed past the others, almost dropping her rifle in her haste to embrace her brother. No words were necessary; they wrapped their arms around each other, and Carlos felt his sister tremble against him. The disgust he’d felt toward her only the day before vanished; she was safe, and right then that was all that mattered.
“Welcome to the party.” Ted lowered his gun, stepped away from Chris. “Got some food if anyone’s hungry. Just beans, but—”
“Man, I’d eat a creek crab if . . . hey, there’s the son of a bitch!” Chris had barely risen to his feet before Lars lunged across the cave to grab him by the collar of his jacket and slam him against the wall. Before anyone could stop him, he yanked a Union Guard automatic from his belt. “Man, I was hoping I’d see you again,” he snarled, shoving it against Chris’s face. “Payback time for you!”
“Cut it out!” Carlos got his hand on the gun, pulled it away. “No one’s paying anyone back! He’s with us!”
“A little late for that,” Marie said quietly, as Ted hauled Lars away from Chris. “His pal’s already paid up.”
Carlos looked at her. “Don’t tell me you . . .”
“She had no choice.” Barry went to assist Garth. For the first time, Carlos saw that the kid was walking with the aid of a tree branch, his right knee wrapped in a bloodstained bandage. “Constanza was playing possum all along,” he continued as he helped Garth hobble over to the thin circle of warmth cast by the lantern. “After we made it to the rendezvous point yesterday, he dropped the shell-shock act and made a grab for Garth’s rifle. He got off a shot before Marie took him down.”
“Enrique was an intelligence agent.” Chris’s face was ashen; he avoided looking at anyone. “He was a civilian scientist, sure . . . I didn’t lie about that part . . . but his primary mission was this operation. I guess he wanted to make sure that the skimmer didn’t fall into enemy . . . into your hands.”
“We searched his body, found the tracking device.” Barry helped Garth sit down, making sure that his wounded leg was set straight. “We tried to contact you, but we couldn’t get through.”
“My unit was switched off. The shags bolted when the gyros showed up, and that’s when I lost it.” Carlos nodded toward Chris. “He was wearing one, too. The whole thing was a setup. We were supposed to capture them so that the Union Guard could track us down.”
“But it backfired.” Ted moved away from Lars. “When Marie called in and told us what happened, Captain Lee sent Jack and me out to find you guys and Jean to look for the others. Lucky for us that we caught up with you at the bridge.”
“Lucky for us that you decided to pack an RPG, too.” Carlos couldn’t help but grin.
Jack shrugged. “No luck to it. We figured that you might need some heavy artillery if the Union was sending a squad after you.”
“We left Constanza’s tracker aboard the skimmer, then hunkered down and waited for them to show up.” Marie bent down to check Garth’s bandage. “The skimmer’s gun was what saved us. Weren’t counting on having those . . . what were those things, anyway?”
“Diablos. Nasty stuff.” Chris was nervous, but he appeared to realize that he wasn’t going to be executed so long as he cooperated. Or perhaps there was more to it than that; Carlos noticed how he kept looking at Ted, Jack, and Jean, former Alabama crew members, with newfound appreciation, familiar faces he hadn’t seen in years. They were far from being long-lost friends, but neither were they strangers. “It’s a good thing you managed to—”
“Stop yanking me.” Lars wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He took his gun back from Carlos. Although he didn’t aim at Chris again, neither did he return it to his belt. “If you guys hadn’t screwed up, we’d all be prisoners by now. Or dead.”
“And Constanza might have led them to Defiance.” Barry glanced at Chris. “You had the right idea, leading him away like that.”
“I had a hunch, that’s all.” Carlos shrugged. “It was the long way, but . . .”
“What sort of . . . ? Wait a minute, I don’t get it.” Now Chris was confused; he looked first at Barry, then at Carlos. “I thought you were taking me back to your camp.”
Carlos knelt by the lantern. “Not the straight way, I wasn’t,” he said, warming his hands. “The path we took is a hunting trail. We put up the bridge late last year as an easy way of getting across the creek to Mt. Aldrich, but it’s not the direct route to getting home.”
“Then you knew. . . .”
“I didn’t know anything.” Carlos shook his head. “Like I said, I only had a suspicion. That’s why I told Barry to meet us upstream from where we found you. If your friends hadn’t shown up, we would have crossed the bridge, then doubled back and met up with them a few miles down the creek. If everything looked safe, then we would have taken you to Defiance.”
He clasped his hands together. “Which brings us back to the here and now,” he went on. “Technically speaking, you’re a prisoner of war. Not only that, but you’re a traitor, too.”
“I told you why I did what I did. You heard what I said last night. . . .”
“That was last night. We didn’t know you were setting us up.” Carlos turned the lantern’s wheel, feeding more fish oil to the wick to make it burn a little higher. Different campfire, but the same conversation, continued only a few hours later. “Cards on the table, buddy. Only way either of us is going to get out of this is to deal straight.”
From somewhere outside, they could hear the Union gyros prowling back and forth across the gorge as they searched for Rigil Kent. “We both have something to win,” Carlos went on, “and we both have something to lose. You want to see your mother again . . . and believe me, she wants to see you, too. We’ve got an injured soldier, and no one wants to wait here until Hernandez sends in another Diablo team. And I think you know by now that she considers you expendable.”
Chris slowly nodded. Everyone was watching him. “We want to go home,” Carlos continued. “Some of these guys would just as soon shoot you, but I’m willing to give you a second chance.”
“I . . .” Chris hesitated. “Why would you do that?”
“Oh, for the love of . . .” Lars turned away in disgust. “Don’t trust him. He’s a friggin’ boid in the bush.”
“Shut up and gimme your radio.” Carlos held out his hand, staring at Lars until he surrendered his unit. “A long time ago we were friends. We grew up together. Then I made a mistake, then you made a mistake, then . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s time we got past all that. Do you want to go home, Chris?”
For a moment, there was no one else in the cave. Just the two of them, guys who’d played army with toy guns, told each other dirty jokes, shared secrets about teachers and girls. They had gone to the stars together, watched their fathers die, gone on a misguided adventure and survived only to become distant from one another, and finally enemies. Yet Carlos knew that, even if Chris said no, he’d never kill him. He’d had that chance once already that morning and hadn’t taken it. For better or worse, he was still his friend.
“Yeah.” Chris’s voice was very quiet. “I’d like that.”
Carlos nodded. “Okay. We can do that . . . but first you’ve got to prove yourself.”
Chris watched as Carlos unfolded the radio antenna. “What do you want me to do?”
“You’ve been a traitor before.” Carlos extended the unit to him. “Now I want you to be a traitor again.”
GABRIEL 76/1036—FORT LOPEZ
“Have they spotted him yet?” Baptiste approached Cartman; who was now monitoring communications from Flight One.
“No, sir. He’s still . . .” The sergeant stopped, cupped a hand against his ear. “Just a moment. They’ve got movement on the river, not far from the falls.�
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“Pull up the forward camera.” Baptiste watched as the middle screen of the carrel lit to display an image from the gyro’s nose camera. He could see what its pilot was seeing: an airborne view of the gorge, the falls in the background, the creek directly below. The image tilted slightly to the right as the aircraft swung around. “Give me the audio feed, too,” he added. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
“Where’s Flight Two?” Luisa Hernandez had come up to stand beside him. “They should be close by.”
“Just saw something down there. Close to the creek bank, about seventy feet from the falls.” The voice of Flight One’s pilot was laced with static, yet discernible. “Closing in . . .”
“Flight Two coming in to cover Flight One, ma’am.” Without waiting to be told, Acosta tapped at her keyboard. The screen above her board showed an image from the Flight Two’s nose camera, nearly the same as Flight One’s, except from a higher altitude. The other gyro was visible in the foreground, about two hundred feet below. “Do you want audio feed?”
“Negative.” Baptiste spoke before the Matriarch could respond; he caught the sour look on her face, but chose to ignore it. He didn’t want to be distracted by cross talk between the pilots. “Monitor their channel and tell me if something important comes up,” he told Acosta, then returned his attention to the screen in front of him. “Patch me into Flight One,” he said, touching his jaw. “Flight One, this is Gold Ops. What do you have?”
The image steadied, became horizontal; the falls were no longer visible, and they could only see the rushing waters of the creek. “Gold Ops, we thought we saw something move down there. Could be our man. Coming down to check it out.”
“We copy, Flight One.” Baptiste continued to stare at the screen. “Get ready for pickup, but keep a sharp eye out. We don’t know what’s down there. Over.”