Tale of the Thunderbolt (17 page)

“Wait,” he repeated.

The riders approached.

“Wait.”

The Horsed Police slowed their horses to a walk as they saw the obstacles.

“Wait.”

Now he could see the trucks: beds crammed with equipment, furnishings, and loot. Women and children, probably families of some of the Horsed Police, rode atop and among the cargo. Corrugated aluminum welded over the doors and windows protected the driver and passenger. A motorcycle with a sidecar puttered before the big diesels, but the sidecar held only a mound of possessions rather than a passenger ready to fire the machine gun mounted there. More soldiers jogged amongst the mob, already panting and casting aside their weapons in an effort to keep up with engines and horses. Strained, anxious faces in a dozen different skin tones looked warily at the partially blocked road and to the buildings at either side.

The vanguard of horsemen did not like what they saw and called to their fellows, drawing rifles and shotguns from saddle sheaths.

Valentine nodded at Ahn-Kha, who blew into the circular horn. Its wavering wail filled the air.

Wide-shouldered Grogs filled the windows and doors of the first floor of the barracks. Valentine heard shots crack from above. Horses screamed and plunged as their riders turned tail, fell out of the saddle, or dismounted by flinging themselves to the ground.

Valentine dropped two uniformed Jamaicans shouting orders. The PPD chattered out its harsh coda as he aimed short bursts into the crowd. Ahn-Kha methodically fired his rifle into the aluminum-covered cabins of the vehicles. The .50-caliber rounds blasted thumb-size holes in the plating and slumped the drivers within.

Cartridges fell like brassy hail from the balconies above as the Jamaicans emptied their weapons into the mob.

The motorcycle roared to life. Its uniformed rider gunned it, expertly swerved around dying horses and between the barricades. The cyclist threw his hips off the saddle to counterweight the tight slalom. The colorful insignia on the rider's uniform tipped Valentine to his identity: Hsei. He fired a burst but missed the racing figure.

“Ahn-Kha! The motorcycle!” he shouted.

Ahn-Kha stood and took a round from his mouth. In battle, the Grog kept cartridges in his lips, tucked into his flexible ears, and between his knuckles. He closed the breech of his gun, sighted, and fired. The bullet's impact threw the rider bodily into the motorcycle's handlebars. The bike spun sideways and crashed.

One truck, its driver dead, went nose-first into the ditch at the side of the highway. Riders and cargo tumbled forward and out. The truck behind halted, dead horses blocking its path.

Jamaicans flooded the street, wielding improvised weapons. Some grabbed the unwounded horses and ran off, leading their prizes. Others leapt into the trucks, looking for booty. But most of the mob concentrated their energies on the hated Horsed Police.

“Cease fire!” Valentine yelled, fearing any more firing would do more harm than good. At a word from Ahn-Kha, the Grogs put up their smoking guns.

Years of death and brutal treatment resulted in ugly scenes in the street. Whole and wounded Horsed Police, their hands raised in surrender, fell victim to the mob. A few Jamaicans flung themselves over the wounded and protected them from the clubs and knives with their own flesh, but the mob merely sought other targets. Valentine heard women's screams and saw some of the Horsed Police's children caught up in the mob's fury. A child fell under a club, skull opened and yellow-gray brains spilling to the pavement.

He shouldered his way into the crowd, stepping over bodies of the dead and dying, and jumped on the cab of the second truck. He fired his gun in the air.

“Enough!” he yelled, putting every decibel his body could produce into the bellow.

Ahn-Kha grabbed a horse, threw off its saddle, and mounted. He led his Grogs into the fray. The spectacle of the strange, apelike creatures distracted the mob enough for Valentine to get their attention. Eyes turned to Valentine and the Grogs.

“Enough!” he shouted, forcing a grin to his face. “The time of death is over!”

The mob turned from rage to celebration. Jamaicans joined Valentine atop the truck, waving their arms and calling out to their fellows.

“Free!” “Death is dead!” “Death is over!” came the cries.

Something gave way inside the exhausted Cat. He stood in the celebrating throng, shaking with exhaustion and emotion. He realized his head hurt; the sun struck his eyes like knives. He summoned a few Jamaicans and began to carry the surviving wounded into the shelter of the barracks. As his hands grew sticky with sweat and blood, he thought of the clean sea.

 

It was not a bad storm; the Caribbean sees far worse during hurricane season. The spring storm lashing the channel in between Hispaniola and Cuba made up in bluster for what it lacked in size.

Valentine watched Captain Carrasca on the
Thunderbolt
's bridge. A knotted rope and a stick, in a curious mix of hairstyle and seamanship, restricted her thick hair to the back of her head. She stood next to the wheel, bending first one knee and then the other as she rolled with the ship's motion like a slow metronome, owlish eyes watching the storm.

Since leaving Jamaica — gaps in the crew filled with the commodore's sailors — Carrasca had taught Valentine a good deal about the islands of the Caribbean: cays and atolls where some found refuge, larger islands such as Cuba and Cozumel, which fed the appetite of the Kurians. She knew winds and weather, currents and courses, radio procedure and sail setting; she spoke of them as easily as Valentine could describe his old platoons in the Wolves.

“How's the rudder?” she asked the steersman.

“Biting fine. She's a heavy ship. All that steel in this old ice-shover. Wouldn't care to ride this out in the
Guideon.
We'd have to heave-to.”

“She's working. We're shipping more water than I'd like. The sea hasn't worked up much — I'd put it at three meters.”

“Four sometimes, Cap,” the steersman said.

“Any sign of the coast?” Valentine asked, trying to pierce the rain-filled darkness forward.

“By dead reckoning, it's there,” Carrasca answered. “I don't dare get much closer. The best harbors are on the other side of the island, and we can't use them.”

Cool and professional. The warm moment they shared that night on the balcony where she admitted her thrill at her command seemed like a childhood game of you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine. Now she just watched him every now and then out of the corner of her eye, as though checking the professional wall between them for cracks.

“Your ships don't land here?”

“Nothing worth landing for, except fresh water or firewood. We hit richer lands. Now Cuba, there's good hunting there, especially on the north coast and in the stretch between it and the Florida peninsula.”

“My work is on Hispaniola — the Haiti side.”

“I'll get you there. Nothing's going to happen until this blows itself out, Valentine.”

“I'll try and sleep. Have me woken if this clears, please.”

Valentine descended from the bridge, weaving past a mix of the
Thunderbolt
's old crew and new shipmates from Jamaica. He went to his cabin, formerly shared with Post, who now lay almost recovered in sick bay, thanks to the skilled teams of Jayport's aged hospital ship. Sea air and sun were speeding his recovery, but the former Coastal Marine was still not up and around for more than a few hours a day.

Ahn-Kha was on the cabin floor. The quarters smelled of Ahn-Kha's horsey odor and vomit, the contents of the Golden One's stomach having abandoned ship when the storm started.

“My David, take out your pistol and put an end to my suffering,” Ahn-Kha groaned. He lay on his stomach, with four-fingered hands clasped over his pointed ears.

“Carrasca says it won't last long, old horse,” Valentine replied. The motion stimulated Valentine, if anything, though he longed for surcease of the endless sounds of rain, wind, and the ship groaning in the weather.

“It's a new hell each hour.”

“What's that?” Valentine asked, dropping into his bunk.

“My people . . . say there are four hells. The theosophists need to add one more, the Hell of Motion.”

Valentine placed his boots on the floor, tucked them away from Ahn-Kha's head in case the Grog decided to bring up another ten gallons of digestive matter. Best to keep his friend's mind on something else. “They left out a hell?”

Ahn-Kha lay silent, as if gathering his words and putting them into English. “The Golden Ones believe that you must be purified by Hell before gaining Paradise. There is a Hell of Hunger and Thirst, a Hell of Pain, a Hell of Illness, and a Hell of Loneliness. If you suffer deeply of these in your life, you are spared them after death, and reach Paradise that much quicker.”

“That's a lot of suffering to reach Heaven.”

“By our creed, ‘Only through suffering do you grow a soul capable of understanding others, and appreciating the' — what is it — the word for grace of gods?”

Valentine thought for a moment. “Beatitude?”

“I must look that up as soon as I can open my eyes again. I've never heard it. English has too many words for some things, and not enough for others. You take too long in the telling. Your words can never match the music of our proverb-verse.”

“I'll work through a King James Bible with you. It'll change your opinion.”

“Arrgh. Those tracts, most of them read like the family history of a group of nomad
pfump
-raisers. One of your theosophists tried to instill in me a belief in my own soul, and me having tasted only the bitter surface of the Hell of Loneliness and Hell of Pain in the time before we met. The fool. As if Paradise could be gained by affirming the divinity of some human. Bah!”

“I've always thought there was more to it than that, my friend.”

“My David, if you wish to learn the true path to Paradise, you must read of the Golden Ones'
Rhapsodies.
Then you will be steeled to torments that must be overcome before a joyful afterlife.”

“ ‘There are four and fifty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them are right,' ” Valentine quoted.

“Then what is your opinion of your gods?”

“God? You mean Bud?”

“There is only one? I thought you had two or three.”

“Depends who you talk to,” Valentine said, sinking into his bunk. On his back, the ship's motion seemed to tilt him headdown first, then feetdown.

“I don't remember anyone calling your god Bub.”

“Bud. It's from an old story the top sergeant from Zulu Company used to tell.”

“Old stories are the best ones. The bad ones die young. Tell me about Bud.”

Valentine sifted his memory. “The sergeant's name was Patel. He was built almost as broad as you, a helluva wrestler, too, and he always fought clean unless someone tried something. Then it was anything goes. But back to the story, before he was in the Wolves, he fought with the regulars, the Guards — ”

“Yes, I've seen them,” Ahn-Kha said from the noisy darkness. “Good guns, better uniforms, and the best food.”

“They can fight when it comes to it. I think when Patel was with 'em they didn't have the nicest clothing. Especially where he was. He said it started while he was watching the ground south of Saint Louis. For a while there, it was trench warfare: the men and Grogs working for the Kurians were trying to blast them out of these hills with artillery. Got so there wasn't a tree standing, but the Guards just kept digging and digging. They'd build little caves of wood with tons of dirt overhead — they were called ‘dugouts.' Anyway he was young, and he had this real nervous NCO running the dugout these twenty men were crammed into. The damn Grogs — sorry, old horse — the damn Kurian Grogs started building these rockets they were launching off of railroad rails, and they had enough of a bang in them to collapse a dugout.