Against the Tide of Years (64 page)

“Make it count, Garry,” the sergeant said, with a taut smile; his face was sweat-beaded too. “We need your right arm when baseball season starts again.”

“ Best outfielder on Seahaven Engineering’s team,” he agreed.

A voice came from the next hole. “A hero in your own mind. With a bat you couldn’t hit your own feet.”

He looked over and grinned at Evelyn Grant.
Never noticed she has a cute smile before,
he thought.
After this is over, have to do something about it.
That moment seemed infinitely far away and suddenly more desirable than anything in the world.

Longing turned to rage as he saw something tiny moving at the edge of sight, over toward Sconset. Black ant-figures in a strung-out line, trampling the barley planted there, then more distinct. Enemy. On
his
ground,
his
land.

A voice behind shouted: “Lieutenant says open fire at seven hundred yards—sixth fence out! Sixth fence—count it!”

He did, and checked the range estimate himself. Checked that his Werder rifle was loaded, checked that there were two grenades firmly planted in the sand near his right hand, checked that the six rounds in the strip of loops sewn to the left breast of his khaki tunic were in place, checked that the cover of the bandolier at his right hip was buckled back to show the staggered rows of shells. Then he noticed how dry his mouth was and took a sip from his canteen.

Thousand yards,
he thought, when he put it down. They were only a thousand yards away, and he could see the flapping of a banner in their midst. The enemy were advancing in two lines twenty yards apart, with a spacing of twelve feet or so between each man. Not too different from the formation he’d been taught
.

His head whipped around at the
crack
of a shot off to his right, and he heard someone reaming someone out for firing too soon.
Now they’ll know we’re here,
he thought.

The Tartessians checked a second at the sound, then a trumpet sounded, two rising and three falling notes. They came on at a trot now, and the spring sunlight blinked on their fixed bayonets. His mouth was dry again, and there was a tremor in his hands. He took a deep breath and forced it out, another, and felt a little better.

But I
really
have to piss,
he thought. Suddenly it rammed home that not only were those men going to kill him if they could . . .
but I have to kill them to stop them. I
have
to.

To quiet the thought he brought the rifle to his shoulder and checked again, this time that the sights were set at seven hundred yards. They weren’t; the little arrow at the side had
200
under the pointer, the lowest setting—point-blank range. He shifted his thumb to it and clicked it up to
700.

The sergeant came by again, stooping as he ran this time. “Check your sights, check your sights,” he said. His Fiernan accent was thicker. “And for Moon Woman’s loving sake, don’t forget to adjust them as they get closer. Doesn’t do any good to shoot unless you
hit.
”

“Hope they don’t
get
any closer,” Hopkins muttered.

His tongue felt thick and dry despite the water he’d drunk, as he brought the rifle to his shoulder, leaning forward against the cool, damp surface of the firing pit. It soaked through the khaki jacket in spots—hung up fresh-smelling and spotless after his mother took it down to Squeaky Steam Cleaning when he came back from Drill Weekend last month.

Mom will be with her unit,
he thought—she was in the last-ditch outfit, the over-fifties.
Jesus. I really hope she doesn’t have to do this.

The bright morning narrowed down to the little notch at the top of the rear sight, and the pip of the foresight through that. He could see the fence, gray weathered oak planks nailed to square posts. He’d earned a little extra money one summer over on Long Island, putting up fences like that. That had been the summer he’d lost his cherry with a Fiernan girl working on that farm, in a pile of clover that smelled like honey, like her.

A man was climbing over the fence; awkwardly, holding his rifle out in one hand for balance. Hopkins adjusted his rifle’s aim automatically, and noticed things—the green tunic and bare hairy legs and strap sandals, dark bearded face with a round iron helmet, a heavy pack.

His finger squeezed, as if the word had pulled a wire in his brain that ran down his arm to his hand. The Werder kicked against his shoulder and a puff of smoke rose from the muzzle, wafting away to the right as the wind caught it.
Bambambambambambam
as the rest of his platoon fired as well, and the hot shell ejected and bounced off his cheek, burning a little.

The slight pain jarred him out of the daze of seeing the foreigner pitch backward and lie still, one leg caught in the middle plank of the fence, tunic falling up to show a soiled loincloth.

Hopkins swallowed something that tasted like his breakfast ten days dead and reached down to reload. The voice in his head sounded like the Marine regular who’d taught him during his basic camp—harshly accented, with the staccato choppiness of someone born speaking one of the Sun People dialects, bored, slightly contemptuous.

He shot, reloaded, shot. The Tartessians were much closer now, coming forward at a slow run. Another pitched forward just as Hopkins was about to fire at him.
Jesus.
Limp, gone, dead, thud facedown and lie there. Hopkins swallowed, tracked the man next to him, fired.

Crack. Ping.
Reload, and the chamber was hot enough to scorch his thumb a little when he pushed the round home. The first line of Tartessians went to one knee, thumbing back the hammers of their rifles—just like the Westley-Richards he’d trained on first before they got the new Werders. Which meant—

“Christ!” He dropped the rifle onto the pile of dirt he’d been leaning against and ducked.

The volley, and ugly flat whizzing
craaak
sounds above him—whipcrack sounds, meant for
him.
Screams from nearby, louder screams than he could believe possible, someone he knew. The Tartessian war shouts were much closer; he forced his body to stand again, snatched up the rifle. The ones who’d fired were reloading, and the second rank of the Tartessian formation had run through them, sprinting forward. He could see a thick scatter behind them, all the way to the fifth fence—dozens, maybe hundreds, lying in the oats, sprawled still or thrashing or crawling back toward where they’d come from.

“You fuckers can all go back where you came from!”
he shouted, firing again. The numbness that had gripped him since he shot the man climbing the fence was gone, replaced by a wild anger.

The man he fired at dropped his rifle, staggered, and stumbled away. The others around him threw themselves to the ground and a ripple of fire ran down their suddenly hidden ranks, only puffs of smoke showing where they were. Hopkins suddenly looked at the sights; they were readjusted to “400,” and he couldn’t remember doing it. Then he fired again, as the line that had fired first finished reloading and charged through their prone comrades. More fell, and the rest went to ground in their turn and opened up. This time the men behind them crawled forward; that would have given them better protection if the ground hadn’t sloped gently upward, putting the Islanders above them.

Hopkins aimed at a trail of oats that was moving the wrong way, fired, fired again.
They’re getting too close—

Then a Tartessian rose and dashed—backward this time, away from the continuous crackle of rifle fire; he threw away his own weapon to run faster, and made perhaps ten yards before something slapped him between the shoulder blades like the hand of an angry invisible giant. He fell, lay still. More Tartessians ran; others crawled backward. Then there were shouts among them, and whole groups got up and ran back, while others covered their retreat as best they could, the same leapfrog drill they’d used in the attack, only reversed.

“ They’re running!” Hopkins whispered, as the last of them dashed past the torn-down fence where their attack had started and “Cease fire!” ran down the Islander firing line.

Then he stood, cheering, shaking the rifle over his head as the same savage howl went up from all his comrades.

“Silence in the ranks!” someone called, and he coughed and reached for his canteen. It was nearly empty, and he made himself take a small swallow. A corporal he recognized—she worked in the compressor-engine shed—came by.

“ Where’s Sergeant Folendaro? ” he asked.

“Dead,” she said and jerked a thumb.

Hopkins looked to the rear. There was a row of bodies there, with their khaki groundsheets spread over them; the lieutenant was standing nearby, looking at a map and talking to someone. He swallowed again.

“Anyway, Lieutenant says to check your bandoliers and sing out if you’re short. Blocks down to cool. Gimme your canteen.”

“ Where’s the latrine? ” he asked, handing it over. She laughed.

“ You’re the fifth person’s asked me that. No time. Piss in your hole if you have to.”

She walked on. Hopkins found that he
did
have to; at least the sandy soil absorbed the stream quickly. He checked his bandolier as well after he’d buttoned his fly, and found to his astonishment that there were only forty rounds left.

I fired sixty rounds?
he thought, incredulous.
No wonder the chamber’s hot.

He pressed the block down until it clicked into the open loading position and set the rifle on the mound of dirt in front of him; that way air could flow down the barrel and carry off some of the heat. Then he drew his bayonet and slid it under the rawhide bindings of the ammunition box that Folendaro—
he’s dead, Jesus—
had dropped off earlier. Two swift jerks and it slit open; he pulled off the lid and began transferring the brass shells to the loops in his bandolier.

“ Thank God for Ron Leaton,” he called over to Evelyn Grant, who was doing the same.

“ Yeah, that would have been a lot harder with the old Westley-R,” she said, her voice hoarse. “ I think we could have done it, but they’d have gotten closer and I didn’t like the look of those bayonets, no sir.”

“Say, Evelyn . . .”

“ Yeah? ”

“You want to catch dinner at the Brotherhood on Friday, then do the concert? ”

She looked up at him, a cartridge poised between thumb and finger of her right hand.

“Jesus, Garry, you’re asking me for a date
now
? ”

“ You know a better time? Hell, we could be
dead.
”

“ Yeah . . . okay, provided we’re alive on Friday and they don’t cancel the concert,” she said, shaking her head. “I wonder what’s going on everywhere else.”

“ We sure kicked their butts here,” he said.

That’s one way to put it.
He could hear some of the enemy wounded calling out and could see a lot more bodies—he carefully didn’t look too closely at the ones nearest, about a hundred yards out.

Further eastward was confused movement, and there were columns of smoke over toward Sconset. Something was coming down Milestone Road from that direction too.

“Uh-oh,”’ he said.

“I know what ‘uh-oh’ means,” Evelyn said, and ducked back into her foxhole, hunkering down.

The corporal came along the line, hurrying, dropping off canteens. “ Lieutenant says watch out,” she said unnecessarily.

“Uh-oh” means we’re in the shit again,
Hopkins thought. He loaded his rifle and thumbed back the cocking lever.

“Jesus, I’m starting to hate that sound,” he muttered.

 

“Man-birds!”

Zeurkenol looked up sharply. Tiny shapes were rising into the air off to the southwest—right where the map said the
air-port
would be.

“Sound the alarm!” he said.

It snarled among the confusion of ships packed near the beach, and among the warcraft anchored further out. Zeurkenol looked up at the tops of his own ship; men there were unlimbering an antiair rifle, the same as the Westley-Richards but twice the size and mounted on a ring that ran around the mast. More of them would be on shore, and crewmen were scurrying for their personal weapons. There was nothing he could do but wait.

On shore the first of the antiair rifles spoke, from the low ridge above the beach. The engineers had built a roadway of planks to the Eagle People’s asphalt road, and soldiers were marching up it. A dozen ships were beached, and twice as many more were swinging loads overside to rafts and boats, or pushing horses over the side—a few of the gods-abandoned beasts started swimming out to sea, but most of them had enough wit to follow the boats shoreward.

“Message to General Naudrikol,” he said. “Remind him that we must secure the airport.”

The signaler began to clack, turning its mirrored surface to flash the orders ashore. The dots grew closer, until they were giant painted birds, eyes and beaks fierce. The hunting hawks of the gods, of the Eagle . . .

Men do this,
he told himself.
Not gods, but men like us. We too will ride the wind, when we have won the secrets they strive to keep for themselves.

One was coming toward him on the flagship. It swooped downward, out over the crested blue water at scarcely more than bulwark height. The antiair rifles in the tops were barking at it, as rapid as a rifle with four hands to help load. Ordinary rifles began to crackle along the rail as well, and it was closer, closer, only a few hundred yards . . .