Tale of the Thunderbolt (42 page)

Valentine heard the high, sputtering sounds of engines and reached for his binoculars. They were loaners from the Rangers. Carrasca hadn't been willing to part with any of the
Thunderbolt
's optics. He brought up the lenses and searched the distant hillside.

A sharp-nosed head, no, two heads, were bobbing over the sun-dried grasses. The vehicle broke out of the tall grass and into the open. It looked something like a baby carriage with a single-bore piston-engine on the back. At the motorcycle-style steering controls was a ratbit, a second rider clung on behind, facing the engine. It appeared to be working some kind of lever. A throttle?

“Ingenious little fellers,” Ranson said, pulling his horse up next to Valentine. Valentine passed him the glasses. “I wonder if they drill for their own oil and refine it.”

“Easier to steal it, probably.”

“They're paralleling us.”

Valentine felt something was wrong with the picture. “It's plain enough to see that we're leaving. Are they making sure of it?”

The wagon train ground on to the squeal of wooden axles and the tramp of feet and hooves; the ratbits disappeared behind the hill.

 

“I think a tight picket line tonight is a good idea,” Valentine said to Zacharias and Baltz as they began uncoupling the wagons and building the nightly laager around the oxen and cattle. “The ratbits have me worried.”

“They seemed friendly enough,” Baltz said, groaning and rubbing her back as she got off the horse. “Left us food, didn't they?”

“Nobody's dropped dead from poisoning,” Zacharias agreed. “But it won't hurt to be in tight tonight. I figure on a brush with the Grogs when I set the pickets. I don't think we'll need eyes way out to buy us time to get set.”

“Post,” Valentine called.

“Sir?”

“New orders for tonight.” Valentine stepped over and explained to Post what he wanted the sentries to do. Post made a circuit of the camp, passing on the instructions. He returned and idled next to Valentine, taking in the sky, until Valentine noticed his leg twitching.

“What is it, Will?”

“You okay?” He kept his voice down.

“Why shouldn't I be?”

“You look played out. I've never seen you this tired, even when we were crossing Santo Domingo.”

“Tired of campfires and cold water, I think.” Now that the journey was almost over, Valentine looked forward to turning over the quickwood and taking a leave. Saunders and the
Thunderbolt
, the Once-ler, Malia . . . He needed peace, a quiet room looking out over a lake, perhaps. He'd never work in the Kurian Zone again.

“You told me once to ask you about what you did to get your captaincy in the Coastal Marines,” Post said, as though reading his mind. “You sounded unhappy about it. You said it would give me a real reason to hate you.”

“Having second thoughts about not leaving with Carrasca?”

“No, it's not that. Val, if it troubles you, talk about it. If anyone's in a position to understand, it's me. I wasted half a life under the bastards. After talking to you about my wife that night back on the
Thunderbolt
, I felt better about myself than I had in years. Took the bottle right out of my hand.”

Valentine felt uneasy. The Ranch was getting to him. Talking to Post was better than empty fretting. “Let's walk.”

They walked, side by side, the summer-dried grass crunching under their feet as they circled the laager. At first, the words came slowly. He wasn't sure where to begin, exactly, and the events were vague as they came back to him, as disturbed mud obscures the features of a body being dredged from a lakebed.

He'd never even told Duvalier. So the story came hard at first.

“I came down from the north with fake papers saying I'd served on a cruiser on the Great Lakes. I talked right for the identity, and I'd been to some of the places in the background. They put me in this police boat on the Louisiana coast, looking for smugglers. There was a gunfight or two, but we had a pair of fifty-calibers on the patrol boat that settled most arguments when those opened up on the shoreline . . .”

The Coastal Marines had a tip about a big cargo going out of the west side of Lake Pontchartrain, in a red-painted barge. He and a squad of men took the barge easily. The tug captain tried to bargain his way out, offered Valentine and the troops money, liquor, tobacco.

Valentine had none of it. His job was to impress his superiors with his diligence and efficiency, not pluck tempting feathers for his nest. Within the hearing of his sergeant and men, he turned down the bribe, made a show of moving the captain and his mates along with a pistol to the ringbolts.

Then he opened the cargo hatch.

Six families, in the dingy yellow overalls of Louisiana rural labor, were rousted from hiding spots among the more legitimate loads of cargo. There was resignation, not lamentation, as they were lined up, counted, and put in steel restraints.

He had no choice. A Reaper met the barge when it tied up at the Coastal Patrol dock.

“. . . and you're thinking ‘So what?' It goes back to my first time leading men into the Kurian Zone. My first real responsibility. I took five families out of Louisiana after a raid. It was a hard march — we even had Reapers on us.

“When we got back to the Free Territory at the fort, each and every one thanked me. Hugs, kisses, tears. I even met one of them a couple years later. Her name was Theresa Brugen. . . . She was a nurse-trainee at a hospital where they looked at my leg wound. She cried when she saw me again.

“I've always been proud of that trip. Those twenty-six lives, twenty-six lives changed, saved — it was the first time I really thought I'd made a difference. When I turned the families from the red barge over to the Reaper — it was like that evaporated.”

Post shrugged. “What could you do?”

The faces appeared in the darkness, this time accusing. “I could have got them out. It would have blown my cover. Someone else would have had to go get the quickwood. Maybe in a year, maybe in a month. There are other Cats. Other ships.”

“Ships with me?”

Valentine said, “What do you mean?”

“I'm not a philosopher, so this is going to come out wrong. Hope you'll understand anyway.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, Val, sometimes you'll try your damnedest and everything will go to shit. Other times you'll be drunk off your ass, trying your damnedest to kill yourself, and you'll find an answer to your prayers through a haze of gin. If I'd been as squared away as Worthington, would you have trusted me with your friendship?”

“Possibly. Depends on how I read you at the time.”

“For all we know, Worthington was unorthodox as an upside-down cross, and just kept it hidden. Why let it worry you? Cause and effect is slippery stuff. Forget about the ‘what-ifs.' ”

“Easier said than done.”

“Remember, I've got my own set of ‘what-ifs.' Do what I do. Keep thinking about the ‘what's-nexts.' ”

 

Valentine heard engines in the distance when he hardened his ears as they passed out dinner. Some of the horses shifted restlessly as the wagon train settled in to camp. The sun was setting, and the moon wouldn't be up for hours. It was the time he'd attack, if he were the ratbits.

The ratbits were intelligent, no doubt about that. If they were hostile, why leave food? If they weren't hostile, why would they not communicate their good intentions in person or simply leave them alone?

He heard a familiar heavy tread behind him. “I will be glad when we are clear of this land,” Ahn-Kha said. “I feel watchers.”

“Did you hand out the shotguns?”

“Of course. My Gray Ones are armed, and Post is speaking to the other men who will be on picket duty now.”

“What will you use, if it comes to that?”

“A shovel, my David. You remember the
skiops
the Golden Ones used. It is close enough. This will be a tough-and-rumble fight.”

“Rough-and-
tumble
is the way you usually hear it. Shall we meet it at the pickets, or back at the wagons?”

“The pickets would be better, give your hearing a chance. The sun is touching the horizon now.”

Valentine left Post in charge of the inner ring of sentries. Valentine had placed extra men at the wagons, reserves of weapons and ammunition ready just in case, and every bucket filled with sand or water. He wasn't about to have his cargo burned by ratbits, with a few hundred miles to go. He and Ahn-Kha, with the other two Grogs to either side, walked just behind the line of sentries.

“Excuse, sir. Where the sun swelled up. Hurts to look, but I think some of that grass might be moving,” one of the Jamaican recruits said.

“Wind?” Ahn-Kha asked.

Valentine listened with hard ears. The brush and grassland were alive with the sound like bacon on a skillet.

“They're creeping up on us, right out of the sun,” Valentine said. He had to admire the ratbits. The men brought up their guns.

“Don't shoot until you see them coming for you,” he added, but worked the slide on his .45 and chambered a round just in case. “Maybe it's an embassy.”

One of the Grogs hooted, and a Marine added, “Oh, my God.”

A brown tide surged out of the heavier growth toward the strip of trees that marked the western pickets. The spaniel-size ratbits ran with little bounces, almost bounding as they approached, covering a yard of sun-dried Texas grass with every hop.

At least the ratbits weren't using guns. The pickets fired a few shots, making no more of a difference than they would if fired into one of the gulf's waves. The ratbits did not slow at the gunfire.

“Back to the wagons,” Valentine yelled. “Just run!” The men did not need the encouragement. There was something terrifying about the brown wave undulating across the Texas countryside like a carpet unrolling. A few threw away their weapons in mad flight. Valentine saw one marine catch his feet and fall. Before he could rise, the ratbits were up and over him.

“Gettayahiiii . . . ,” the stricken man cried.

A few ratbits, farther ahead than the rest, were already beside Valentine, looking up at him as if to gauge whether he was worth jumping. Valentine leapt into one of the circled wagons. Ahn-Kha halted in a gap and stood behind interlaced trek-tows, swinging his shovel in warning.

All along the wagons, gunfire broke out, high rifle cracks, booming shotguns, and the snapping sound of pistol shots. Wounded ratbits squealed as bullets tore through their small bodies. Valentine emptied his pistol into ratbits climbing the wagon wheels, then drew his blade. He cut air again and again as the ratbits jumped onto the wagon and jumped off just as quick as he swung his blade. He saw a ratbit fly backwards, thrown by a blow from Ahn-Kha's shovel. The men caught on the ground did not last long — five or six ratbits would leap onto the unfortunate's limbs, slowing him so two or three others could jump on the back and bear their opponent down. He saw one man rise again, choking a ratbit with both hands, but another tore into his ear, bringing a scream of pain before he fell again. The air filled with high-pitched squeaks and squeals as the battle raged.

The ratbits drove the men from the wagons. Valentine could see them grabbing things and running off out of the corner of his eye. A trio of ratbits were making off with a sapling, grabbing it by the burlap that held the dirt and roots and —

He felt claws on his legs, and another rodent leapt on his arm. He punched at it, but it grabbed his wrist in wiry little claws and buried its sharp front teeth in the flesh between thumb and forefinger. He felt another running up his back. He dropped his sword to reach for the beast, desperate to stop the crawly feel on his body. A ratbit caught up the sword and waved it threateningly. But it did not slash at him.

A ratbit in the back of his wagon held up one of Post's spearpoints, and another made off with a quickwood quarrel. Something in his mind clicked. They were after the quickwood.
Quickwoods! Woods!

“Cease firing!” he bellowed. “Cease fire! No shooting! They're not trying to kill us — they just want quickwood.”

Already the ratbits were leaving. Valentine saw more saplings disappear, but the ratbits didn't seem to be taking any food, weapons, or other tools from the convoy. Nor were they stealing all the quickwood. They seemed mostly interested in the saplings, perhaps because that was the easiest thing to identify. While the ground was littered with dead ratbits, most of the men had just been held down and relieved of their weapons, to stand, as Valentine did, rubbing painful bites and watching the quickwood being taken. Even the first marine to fall came out of the tree line, holding his hands up, now avoided by the ratbits as he was no longer a threat. From beyond the tree line Valentine heard the sound of the small motors of the ratbits. He hopped out of the wagon and found a first-aid kit. With a cotton dressing pressed to his wound, he walked to the west, following the last few ratbits checking the bodies of their comrades and helping any who weren't beyond hope.

One wounded figure appeared to be of some concern, judging by the number of ratbits clustered around it. Valentine approached the circle of rodents, and a few turned, baring their teeth at him and reaching for small knives.

He held out his hands, hoping to make himself understood, and stopped. He pointed at his bandage, then at the prone ratbit. The teeth went away, but the ratbits gave no other sign that they understood. He tossed them the bandage. They jumped away as it landed, then returned, sniffing it and squeaking.