By Force of Arms (8 page)

The Naa shook himself off, secured his trousers, and slipped through the rocks. The bedroll looked like a long lumpy tube. Nocount Quickknife jerked as a hand covered his mouth, went for his blade, and relaxed when he smelted who it was. Dimwit nodded toward the trail. His voice was little more than a whisper. “We got company. Easy pickin’s. Move your ass.”

Nocount yawned. Dimwit winced at the smell of his companion’s breath and started to gather his gear. There was no particular hurry, something neither of them liked to do, since every stride carried their victim further from the fort. An advantage if the idiot called for help. Not that it mattered … since he’d soon be dead.

Booly left the reins loose and allowed the doom to pick its own way up the rock-strewn trail. A good decision since the animal was native to Algeron and well equipped to survive there. It had been a long time since the officer had ridden anything more challenging than a command car, and his knees were starting to hurt. His butt would come next, followed by his lower back. The legionnaire had already started to regret the journey but was too stubborn to turn back.

The dooth completed one long stretch of trail, tried to snatch a bite of greenery from a likely looking bush, and took a kick to its barrel-shaped ribs. Dooms were never ones to suffer silently and were famous for the variety of sounds they could make. This particular animal produced something that bordered between a belch and a grunt.

Booly kicked the animal again and guided it up through still another hairpin turn. The gravelly trail stretched up toward the swiftly rising sun. It was then, as the dooth started to climb, that Booty detected, or thought he detected, a foreign scent. The officer’s hand went to his sidearm. He stood in the stirrups and took a long careful look around.

Weather-smoothed boulders littered the surrounding hillside. Many were the size of battle tanks. A full company of legionnaires could have hidden there, concealed among the rocks, and he wouldn’t have been able to spot them. Especially if they were Naa—and didn’t want to be seen.

Uneasy now, but not sure why, the legionnaire climbed toward the sunrise. Everything was normal… except for the fur that ran the length of his spine. That stood on end.

The Trooper IF rounded an outcropping of rock, “saw” a patch of green smear itself across the blue grid that overlaid her surroundings, and stopped dead in her tracks. Then, weapons ready, she backed around the corner. Numbers shifted in the lower right hand comer of the cyborg’s vision as the threat factor gradually decreased.

Neversmile, who had allowed himself to be lulled into a sort of half-conscious trance, came fully awake. He spoke into a wire-thin boom mike. It was jacked into a panel at the base of Wilker’s duraplast neck. “What’s up?”

“Naa,” Wilker replied. “Two of them. Both mounted.

Maybe a quarter mile ahead. Between the general and us.”

Neversmile swore silently. Just his luck. The general get’s a wild hair up his ass … and the colonel chose him to deal with it. “Can you nail the bastards?”

“A shoulder-launched missile would handle it. assumin’ you ain’t too worried about due process or how big a hole I make.”

Neversmile remembered how many innocent females and cubs the Legion had accidentally slaughtered over the years and knew he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Not to mention the fact that he was supposed to maintain a low profile. “No, hold your fire. Feel free to close the distance, however—but don’t let the shitheads see you.”

It was a stupid order—Wilker thought so anyway—but knew better than to say so. Not to a sergeant—and not to this Sergeant. Gravel crunched under her weight, and the cyborg continued to climb.

Dimwit emerged from the rocks still buttoning his pants. It was the second time he had stopped to take a pee and the second time he had fallen behind. Nocount was irritated. “Hurry up! The human’s slow but not that slow. We’ll lose the furless bastard.”

“It ain’t my fault,” Dimwit complained. “I had to pee and it hurts.”

“Alt because you’ll screw anything with a pulse,” his companion replied unsympathetically. “Come on, let’s go.”

Dimwit mounted his dooth, kicked the animal onto the trail, and kicked it yet again. The animal groaned, sent plumes of lung-warmed air down toward the ground, and passed a prodigious amount of gas. The trek resumed.

If the mesa had a name, Booly didn’t know what it was. Only that it stood straight and tall, just as it had the last time he’d been there, camping with his mother.

It was she who showed him the narrow, often dangerous, path that circled the sheersided cliffs, pointed out the tool marks the ancients had left on the rock, and fired his imagination. “Who were they?” she asked. “And from whom were they hiding?” For surely some great evil had been upon the land, a threat that drove them up off the slowly rising plain, to make a home in the sky.

Had they won? These hard-pressed Naa? And survived that which sought to hunt them down? Or had the group been decimated? And wiped from existence? There was no way to be sure.

And there was another story, a more personal tale, which came back to Booly as his dooth labored toward the top. It had to do with his grandfather, William Booly I, a onetime sergeant major who was wounded during an ambush, taken prisoner, and nursed back to health by a Naa maiden, a beautiful maiden, named Windsweet.

His grandfather was smitten, very smitten, and soon fell in love. But the whole thing was wrong. Wrong according to the Legion, wrong according to the Naa, and wrong according to her father. Windsweet helped the legionnaire escape, bandits gave chase, and a patrol saved his life.

Later, after returning to his unit, the soldier tried to forget the maiden and the way he felt about her, but found that impossible to do. That’s when Booly’s ancestor did something which Booly himself, as an officer, could never forgive: William Booly I went over the hill.

The dooth rounded a comer, rocks clattered away from its hooves and fell toward the scree below. They rattled, started a small slide, and tumbled down the mountain.

The noise caused Nocount to jerk his animal to a halt. He turned to Dimwit. ‘The motherless alien is halfway to the lop.”

“So?” his friend inquired sarcastically. “If he can make it, so can we.”

“I know that you idiot,” Nocount responded impatiently.

“But why bother?”

Dimwit frowned, processed the words, and brightened.

“We could wait here!”

“Now there’s an idea,” Nocount replied sarcastically. “Let’s try it. No point in doin’ all that work if we don’t have to.”

Dimwit agreed, swung down from the saddle, and headed for some likely looking rocks. He needed to pee.

The trail wound through the site of an ancient rock slide, shelved upwards, passed through a rocky defile and ended on a windswept plateau. A crust of icy snow covered what remained of the ancient walls. Yes, Booly thought to himself, whatever roamed below must have been very unpleasant to force the old ones up here.

The officer dismounted, took the dooth by its reins, and led the animal toward a rocky spire. It was there if memory served him correctly that his mother and he had camped.

Not on the surface, at the mercy of the groaning wind, but below, in chambers created by the ancients.

He located the spiral stair without difficulty, pulled a torch out of his pack, checked to ensure that the underground common room remained habitable, and allowed the light to play over some empty ration boxes. Others had camped there since his childhood visit, but not for many years, judging from the dust on the containers.

Someone had left a mound of somewhat desiccated dooth dung, however, which meant the legionnaire could enjoy a fire and a more pleasant evening than he had counted on.

But dooths came first, as all Naa learn the moment they are allowed to ride, and Booly returned to the surface. He removed the animal’s saddle, rigged a nose bag filled with grain, and hobbled its feel.

Then, confident that his mount would remain nearby, the officer carried his gear below. It took the better part of a hour to build a dooth dung fire, clear the room of trash, and prepare a simple meal. Firelight danced the walls as the story retold itself.

Having deserted the Legion, his grandfather went back for the maiden, and took her away. Knowing that her father would follow, and fearful of what might happen if the two of them came into contact, Windsweet led her lover to the high plateau.

The Hudathans attacked Algeron shortly thereafter. Booly’s grandfather went off to fight them and left Windsweet by herself. And it was there, in that very room, that his grandmother threw the Wula sticks and learned that the child in her belly would be male.

Was that what his mother meant? That what he needed was here? Buried among old memories?

Something caught Booly’s eye. Something white, something beyond the dance of the flames, something almost obscured by graffiti.

The legionnaire stood, circled the fire pit, and found what he was looking for: the badge of the 13
^th
DBLE. A coincidence? Or something more? The officer discovered a lump in his throat, wondered why the room felt so warm, and took his coat off. That’s when Booly knelt on his parka, felt for his combat knife, and started to dig. The well packed earth was dry and hard.

The fire, augmented by some Legion-issue fuel tabs, burned hot and bright. Nocount took a pull from his canteen, passed the container to Dimwit, and delivered a prodigious belch. “I hope the human comes down tomorrow. We’re almost out of drak.”

The second Naa took a drink, felt the liquor bum its way down into his stomach, and wiggled his nose. That odor … What was it? Not drak, not his friend’s pungent body odor—it was something else. Then he had it. Dimwit’s brain sent the message to his lips, told them what to say, but not in time.

First Sergeant Neversmile had stripped to the waist. His fur was black with patches of white. They seemed to glow as he stepped out into the firelight. “Greetings my brothers … I saw your fire and wondered if you might spare a traveler something to eat.”

Both of the bandits were in the habit of taking things from travelers but never gave them away. They ran their eyes down the newcomer’s body, saw no sign of weapons, and felt a lot more secure. Nocount decided to toy with the stranger. He pulled a Legion-issue .50 caliber recoilless out from under his jacket and waved it back and forth. “Sure, I’ll give you something to eat… How ‘bout a bullet?”

Neversmile smiled. A bad sign if there ever was one.

“Sure, if you don’t mind eating a few yourself.”

Nocount frowned. “I have a gun, and you don’t.”

True,” the legionnaire said agreeably, “but I have a friend… and her gun is bigger than your gun.”

Dimwit squinted into the surrounding gloom. “Friend?

What friend?”

“That would be me,” Wilker replied, stepping out into the light. Servos whined as weapons came to bear. “Hi, how ya doin’?”

Dimwit peed his pants. Nocount decided to gamble.

The knife point struck metal and skidded through olive-drab paint. Booly gave a small grunt of satisfaction, scooped dirt with his hands, and revealed the top of an old ammo box. Though faded, the words “Grenades 40 mm HE,” could still be read. Such containers were highly prized by the Naa and used for a multiplicity of purposes. The officer dug around both ends, freed the handles, and checked for wires. There were none. Then, careful lest the box be resting on some sort of spring-loaded mine, he felt underneath. Nothing.

Confident that it was safe the legionnaire grabbed the handles and pulled the container out of its hole. It was light, too light for a box with grenades in it, which confirmed his initial impression. Someone had used the box for something else.

Booly carried the container over and placed it in front of the fire. Most of the dark green paint was intact, but there were patches of dark brown rust, and any number of scratches. There was no lock, just a series of latches, all of which were stiff. He pried them open, took a long deep breath, and pushed the lid up and out of the way.

The contents were sealed in clear plastic, and Booly recognized some of the items even before he sliced through the outer covering. He saw his grandmother’s Wula sticks. his father’s Medal of Valor, his mother’s long-barreled target pistol, and much, much more. There were photos, diaries, Naa story beads, his grandfather’s flick blade, and a Hudathan command stone. Not the sort of items most mothers would leave for their sons—but the kind that a warrior would. For each and every one of the objects told a story, was part of who he was, and a source of strength.

It was her way of reminding him of where he came from,

of who had gone before, and the nature of his inheritance.

Not land, not money, but a legacy of honor.

Suddenly, without knowing why, the officer thought of Maylo ChienChu. She had doubts about their relationship. That was obvious. Could her doubts have been related to his? After all, why should she be sure of him, if he doubted himself? Or was that too easy?

Whatever the reason, he felt stronger now, confident that he was entitled to the stars that rode his shoulders and the responsibility that went with them. Because of the objects in the box? The pilgrimage to get them? The fact that his mother cared? It hardly mattered. What was, was.