by David Drake
The Telugu seemed to have gotten things under control after the rocky start. The sled's speed built up until they were belting along at close on ninety knots by the Colonel's estimate. They could have done with a proper windscreen, though the reverse curve of the sled's dash panel did a remarkably good job of directing the airflow over the pair in the immediate front of the vehicle. Buffeting was much worse for the common soldiers farther back.
The Colonel gave his usual half-mouthed smile. Rank hath its privileges. In this case, the privilege of taking the first round himself if they happened to overfly an Enemy outpost. God knew Enemy troops should've been patrolling well out from their bases in the mountains.
But even if the local commander knew what he was doing, his subordinates might still have ignored his orders or simply done a piss-poor job of executing them. You couldn't assume that the Enemy was ten feet tall, any more than you could count on the Enemy not knowing his ass from a hole in the ground.
The air sled continued slowly climbing. He'd told Rao—told Krishnamurtri, at any rate—that they needed to stay within ten feet of the treetops; they were up to thirty by now and going higher. Rather than go through the Brahmin, the Colonel tapped on the top of the dashboard to get Rao's attention and mimed a gliding descent with his right hand.
Krishnamurtri immediately shouted at the pilot and slapped the back of his head. Rao looked around in wide-eyed amazement. The air sled yawed; the troops in the back cried out with fear. They had a right to be afraid: the sled didn't even have a grab rail. The Colonel was more than a little surprised that they hadn't lost somebody during the wobbling takeoff.
He put his hand over Rao's again, steadying the Telugu instead of trying to take control, and said to Krishnamurtri in a clipped, very clear voice, "I'll handle this if you please, Captain. And I suggest that you not hit our pilot again while we're in the air. A Claymore mine isn't in the same league as an air crash for shredding human bodies. As I've seen many times."
God knew he had.
The air sled stabilized. They flew on without further incident until the ground beneath changed abruptly from rolling scrubland to fractured terrain where rocks stood up in sheer-sided walls from the softer earth beneath. Rao pulled back on the joystick. He was adjusting his altitude instinctively by the mountains on the horizon rather than the broken hills immediately below the air sled.
The Colonel tapped the dashboard and again mimed a descent. Rao glanced at him sidelong and adjusted the stick only minusculely. The sled continued to rise, though at a flatter angle.
"Tell him to follow the gully to our left!" the Colonel said to Krishnamurtri. The sled's drive mechanism made no sound other than a low-frequency hum and an occasional pop of static electricity, but wind rush meant words had to be shouted to be heard. "We need to be down below the level of the gully's walls!"
The Brahmin nodded several times as though he understood, but he didn't say anything to Rao. "Well, tell him!" the Colonel said, wishing he spoke Telugu.
But why stop with a little wish like that? He could wish that he had a team of Special Forces instead of Third World farm boys qualified as soldiers by the fact that they wouldn't fall over if you leaned a rifle against them. He could even wish that he'd lived his previous life in a fashion that didn't have him now commanding troops on the side of Hell in Armageddon.
The Colonel smiled. "Tell him," he repeated. His voice was no longer harsh, but Krishnamurtri looked even more frightened than before. Maybe it was the smile.
Krishnamurtri spoke to the pilot without his usual hectoring violence. Rao looked at the Colonel with a desperate expression. The Colonel put his hand over Rao's and gently forced the joystick forward.
"Tell him he can slow down if he has to," the Colonel said to Krishnamurtri. "But not too much. Remember, if we don't do this fast, they're going to do us."
He smiled. "Just as sure as Hell."
* * *
It was mostly bad luck.
The Colonel had a phenomenal talent for correlating maps with real terrain at ground level; practice had honed an innate skill. Nevertheless he had to concentrate to guide them along the route he'd planned after ten minutes with an aerial photograph, and he wasn't paying much attention to the Telugus. After the fact, he wished that he'd remembered to warn Rao that the gorge they were following took a hard jog to the left, but there was only so much you could do.
Rao tried to go over the sudden barrier instead of banking with it. That might have been all right if the sled hadn't been so heavily loaded; as it was, they were going to clear the rock but not the thorny trees growing on the creviced top.
The Colonel acted in a combination of reflex and instinct, two of the supports that had kept him alive longer than even he could credit when he looked back on his life. He thumbed the ion gun's safety to position three, rock and roll, and triggered the weapon.
The ion gun's discharge dazzled the night. Trees vanished and the limestone slope beyond glowed white under the lash of the beam. The air sled sailed through a momentary Hell of furnace-hot air. The troops were screaming.
Ash flew into the Colonel's eyes when he opened them after shooting. He blinked furiously to clear them so he could see again.
Rao fought the sled under control, then clapped the Colonel on the shoulder with a cry of delight. The Telugu was thrilled to still be alive.
"Watch your—" the Colonel said, unable to see clearly himself but aware that this was no time for the pilot to be thinking about dangers already past.
Rao curved back over the lip of the gorge they'd been following. The air sled dropped precipitately as it left the updraft from rock heated by the ion blast. The back end ticked the ground hard enough to throw the rearmost Telugus overboard. Without their weight, the nose tilted sharply down.
Rao screamed; the Colonel hauled his hand fiercely back on the joystick. Neither man's action made any useful difference. The sled scraped along the rocky soil, disintegrating as it threw its passengers off to either side.
The Colonel bailed out at the first hop, before the sled started to tumble. He curled into a ball and hit rolling; there wasn't a good way to smack the ground at forty knots, but he'd done it before and survived.
He clamped the ion gun to his belly. The barrel was searingly hot from firing, but the Colonel's instinct to cling to his weapon was stronger than any pain.
He skidded to a halt well down the slope and paused a moment before he got to his feet. He'd once seen a man leap from a C-47 as it bellied in on a grass strip. The fellow would probably have been all right if he hadn't tried to stand up before he'd come to a complete stop. Momentum flipped him in an unexpected cartwheel; he broke his neck when he came down again.
The Colonel had seen people die in some of the damnedest ways. God knew he had.
He checked himself over. He didn't seem to have broken any bones. His left elbow had taken a knock, but it bent and straightened all right. His ribs felt like there was a white-hot sword in his side every time he took a breath, but there was no blood in the phlegm when he cleared dust and soot from his lungs in a wracking cough. Pain had never kept the Colonel from moving when his life depended on it. His life certainly depended on moving now.
There'd been a box of six reloads along with the ion guns; five remained after the Colonel tested the weapon. He thrust one of the silvery tubes into the receiver now and turned the safety back to single shot. The Colonel had taken all the reloads himself since he hadn't been with his troops long enough to know which men might be trusted with extra ammo.
Probably none of them. Christ, what a mess. Ten klicks into hostile territory with twenty farmers, no commo, and no transport but their own feet. The Telugus—Krishnamurtri included—didn't even have boots.
The Brahmin sat weeping. He seemed healthy enough except for scrapes.
Rao lay on his back, whimpering as he tried unsuccessfully to breathe. The pilot had separated from the air sled only moments after the Colonel did, but a blow fr
om the joystick had crushed his ribs. Rao's chest quivered, but without the rib cage for an anchor his diaphragm couldn't suck air into his flailing lungs.
The Colonel shook Krishnamurtri. When that didn't rouse him, the Colonel slapped him hard. "Get the men together," he ordered. "Tell them we're hiking back to base. Anybody who can't march gets to make his own peace with the Enemy, but I haven't seen much sign of heavenly mercy in the past."
Krishnamurtri looked at the Colonel in sick amazement. The Brahmin's teeth had cut his upper lip in two places, either during the crash or when the Colonel slapped him.
"Look," the Colonel said in a soft voice. He slid out the double-edged knife he wore in a sheath sewn to his right boot. "If you can't talk to these people, you're no good to me at all."
Krishnamurtri crawled backward in a sitting position, his eyes on the Colonel. He shouted orders in high-pitched Telugu.
The Colonel half walked, half slid, the twenty feet down to Rao. The Telugu watched in sick desperation. His lips moved, but he had no breath to form words. He couldn't have spoken a language the Colonel could understand anyway.
The Colonel had heard the words often enough, in at least a score of languages. God knew he had.
The Colonel thrust the bootknife behind Rao's left mastoid and drew it expertly around to the right, severing the Telugu's throat to the spine. He stepped back, clear of the spurting blood, and tugged the pilot's dhoti off to wipe his blade while the body was still thrashing.
It wasn't the kind of help Rao had wanted, but it's all the help there could be: a quick death in place of the slower one of suffocation.
Krishnamurtri was on his feet, calling orders with increasing confidence. Men were moving among the trees and brush. At the bottom of the gorge, vegetation burned with an occasional blue electrical splutter to mark where the air sled had come to rest.
That fire and the one the Colonel had lit with his ion gun would mark his unit for the Enemy, too. They didn't have a prayer of getting out of this goatfuck. Not a prayer.
The Colonel smiled at his joke. He sheathed his knife as he waited for his surviving men to gather.
There were thirteen of them left, twelve Telugus and the Colonel himself. Four of the troops hadn't showed up after the crash; three more had been too badly injured to march. And there was Rao, of course.
Only eight Telugus were armed. Ion guns had gone skidding off into the night when the sled tumbled. Unlike the men, the weapons hadn't walked back up the slope looking battered and worried. The Colonel didn't have time to waste searching for guns in the moonlight.
He'd left the wounded men as they were. He couldn't do anything to help them, and they couldn't tell the Enemy anything that wasn't obvious: the survivors were hiking home.
The Colonel would have killed his wounded if he'd had a reason to do so, but he'd never been one of those who liked killing for its own sake. That kind wasn't good for much. Like the looters and rapists, they were so absorbed in their desires that they didn't pay attention to the real business—till they took a charge of buckshot in the back, or a pitchfork up the bum, or a roofing tile splashed their brains across the pavement.
The Colonel had seen all those things and more. God knew he had.
He didn't hear any night birds, but frogs of at least a dozen varieties clunked and chirped and trilled from the bottom of the gorge. There must be open water, at least in pools.
The Colonel kept his unit just below the crest. It would have been easier to walk either on the ridge or down the center of the gorge. The first would have left them exposed to observers and very possibly silhouetted to a sniper; the latter was, like a trail in hostile jungle, an obvious killing ground.
Krishnamurtri objected to having to march on a surface so steep that frequently a man slid until he grabbed a spiky tree branch. The common soldiers didn't seem to mind, or at any rate they didn't bother to complain that life wasn't fair. Maybe they thought it was.
The Colonel smiled. Maybe they were right. Maybe everybody got exactly what he deserved.
Through Krishnamurtri he'd told the troops to keep two meters' interval. That plan had broken down immediately, as the Colonel knew it would. The stronger men bunched at the front of the line while the weaker half dozen straggled farther and farther behind. The Colonel had called a halt after the first hour—measured by the moon, not his watch—to regroup, and it was about time to call another.
The Colonel marched at the rear. The gorge itself provided the direction, so he was best located where he could keep stragglers from falling out of the column altogether. Krishnamurtri was immediately ahead of him.
"We'll halt in three minutes," the Colonel said. Krishnamurtri had lost his weapon in the crash. "Pass it on."
The Colonel's boot slipped; he dabbed a hand down and caught himself, but a thorn hidden in the gritty soil jabbed fire up his middle finger. The pain in his ribs had subsided to a background awareness, dull because of its familiarity.
A metallic whistle trilled behind them; how far behind the Colonel wasn't sure, but it couldn't be more than a kilometer even with the breeze carrying the sound. Not far enough.
"Cancel that order," the Colonel said, checking his weapon again by reflex. "We'll keep going till we get there."
Another whistle—this one was pitched a half-tone higher than the other—called. It was from the righthand distance, either on the opposite ridge or from somewhere within the gorge itself.
The Telugu just ahead of Krishnamurtri had been using his ion gun as a crutch; he'd torn his right thigh badly during the crash, but he was managing to keep up with the column reasonably well. Now he turned, balancing on his left leg, and aimed his weapon across the valley.
"Stop—" the Colonel said, lunging forward. He fell over Krishnamurtri who was trying to dodge back.
The soldier triggered six wild shots into the night. The first two bolts hit the tops of trees on the other slope. Recoil lifted the muzzle with each shot so that the last four drew quivering tracks toward the stratosphere.
The Telugu shot with both eyes closed. He'd probably never been told to shoot any other way.
The Colonel knocked him silly with a sidewise swipe of his ion gun. The Telugu's own weapon flew out of his hand and bounced down the slope. Plant matter as dry as the air itself caught fire at the touch of the glowing muzzle.
The ionization tracks of the six bolts trembled in the air, dissipating slowly. Each was an arrow of light pointing back toward the shooter.
"Let's go!" the Colonel said as he broke into a shambling run. Their only chance was to stay ahead of the pursuit, and God knew that was no chance at all.
As usual, the Colonel was more agile in a crisis than he could ever be with greater leisure to choose his footing. Krishnamurtri was wailing somewhere behind him, but the common soldiers stayed ahead with the ease of youth. The Colonel could see a few of his troops bounding like klipspringers across a stretch of slope scoured by a rockslide.
Despite the need for haste, the Colonel went downslope to stay covered by the trees. Nobody shot at the exposed Telugus. Another whistle called, this one seemingly from over the ridge to their left.
They didn't have a prayer. Not a prayer.
The Colonel had the map in his mind. A second crack in the rock, a crevice only ten or twenty feet wide, joined the gorge a few hundred meters ahead. Just beyond that junction was the tumbled edge of the hills, then the scrubland where an evader could choose his own direction without being channeled by the terrain. If they could make it out of the hills alive—
If the Colonel could make it out of the hills alive. He'd lost control of his unit, and anyway it had come to "Save what you can!"
It always came to that. The Colonel remembered an overloaded helicopter struggling off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon and many similar scenes. Scenes he'd survived.
But of course, there'd come the scene he didn't survive, as sure as the sun would rise.
The Colonel smiled. Eve
n surer than that, maybe, in these days.
An automatic weapon fired from dead ahead. It wasn't an ion gun. The distant, spiteful, muzzle blasts syncopated the projectiles' bursting charge, Whack/crack/Whack/crack/Whack/crack.
Ion guns replied, two or maybe three of them. Bolts traced across the sky, as ineptly aimed as those of the Telugu the Colonel had left unconscious after the second whistle blew.
The Enemy weapon fell silent after firing three rounds. The shellbursts had flickered blue-white through the vegetation, more like a short circuit arcing than any explosive the Colonel had seen before.
He understood the trap as surely as if he were within the mind of the Enemy commander.
"Go straight ahead!" the Colonel shouted. The Telugus couldn't hear him, couldn't understand the words if they did hear, and wouldn't obey if they did understand. "Shoot your way through! Don't turn!"
He reached the crevice. It led off to the left, trailing back into the hills before it ended in a spring and a pair of sheer cliffs. Rock dust still swirled where the Enemy gunner had scarred the main slope, driving the Telugus like a sheep dog snapping at the ears of his flock.
The gunner was somewhere out in the narrow wedge of rolling scrub that the Colonel could see beyond the mouth of the gorge. He might be as much as a kilometer distant. He wasn't there to stop the Telugus but merely to turn them.
The Colonel switched his safety to position three. He triggered the ion gun toward the empty landscape ahead.
The weapon spun out of his hand with a roar. Firing a third full-charge blast down the bore had eaten through the side of the barrel. Flame washed the right side of the gorge as well as the intended target.
The Colonel flung the useless gun away. He drew his bootknife and plunged into the blaze his plasma had ignited. His left hand held the tail of his fatigue shirt over his mouth and nose.