Under Strange Suns (41 page)

Ahead he could see two dozen ladders leaning against the slope of the wall. He watched a rope flick over the ramparts then snake down, a weight at the end pulling it toward the ground. Then a couple more.

A javelin whipped by his left ear, plunging into the ground a few paces in front of him and narrowly missing the joon in front of him who was picking them up and putting them down for all he was worth. Aidan wondered if the lack of two counterbalancing arms to swing was as important a factor as short legs in limiting the joons’ top speed. He told himself,
Shut up and keep running
.

More javelins flickered by. He saw two Girdled-by-Fields men go down, pierced through the back.

And then an answering flight from the top of the wall, arcing high, plunging.
Please have the distance
, he thought.
I don’t want to buy it from friendly fire
.

He heard the impacts behind him, a patternless series of sounds like two dozen uncoordinated amateurs all punching speed bags.

Then the leading joon reached the wall. The first grabbed ropes and were hauled up. The others following on made for the ladders. Here the single arm of the joon was going to hurt them. They simply could not scramble up ladders with any speed.

Aidan angled toward McAvoy. The geologist was steering the wagon toward the lone remaining rope.

“I need a fresh magazine,” Aidan said.

McAvoy tucked the pistol into a pocket, fished out a magazine and tossed it to Aidan.

Aidan reached the base of the wall and turned. In his peripheral vision he saw McAvoy and one of his miners attaching the rope to a bracket on the front of the wagon. Then his attention settled on the pursuit. Javelins continued to plunge into the Lhakovi from the ramparts above. But a good fifty soldiers were still coming undeterred, five or six of them leading a wedge flaring back about twenty yards either side.

Aidan dropped to one knee and began to take apart the wedge, taking full advantage of the caseless rounds’ lack of recoil, holding a steady sight picture and firing rapidly. The first three fell in succession, dead or at least out of the fight. A javelin struck the wall above his head to stick, quivering. He had spoiled the caster’s aim at the last moment, drilling him through the forehead.

Still, they kept coming. So Aidan kept firing.

He put down ten. Javelins from the wall felled another five. And that, finally, was enough for the pursuit. They stopped, the nearest just beyond sword’s reach; then they turned tail and fled.

Aidan stood and found he was the last man left on the ground. McAvoy was already halfway up a ladder. The rest of the ladders were disappearing, hauled up the side of the wall.

Aidan made his way to McAvoy’s ladder, set his foot on the lowest rung, and started up with slow deliberation. He was too tired to scamper up, so he might as well arrive in style.

He began to whistle.

T
HESE HEATHENS FOUGHT WITH THE GRIM
obstinacy that could only be the result of the demons stiffening their resolve. Obstinacy and, yes, a degree of simple trickery. Pontifex-General Vongük admitted that he’d been gulled. The ruse with the mock soldiers had been clever. Perhaps if he had not spread his initial assault over so broad a front, concerned about the unexpected concentration of defenders, he might have broken through.

Nonetheless, the Dictates assured him that the Watchful God rewarded patience, persistence, and faith. He had no intention of giving up. This was not his first campaign, not his first assault on a fortified position.

The circumnavigation of this laughably primitive mud wall had provided him with sufficient information regarding the strengths and weakness of the defense to make a plan. He had tricks of his own to show these demon worshipers.

He had maintained his command post south of the village. The supply train spread behind him, an expanding village in its own right, currently absorbing an immigrant population of the wounded soldiers able to return under their own power. Vongük ignored them. His business remained the benighted, demon besotted rabble behind the walls. He had no time for noncombatants, neither the quartermaster’s servants nor those bloodied joon whom the Watchful God had turned his face from.

“Thergal,” he called, summoning his lieutenant.

Vongük knelt above a crude map of the defenses sketched with the tip of his sword in the tilled soil–good, tillable land here, an admirable addition to the Northern Protectorate–and gestured for Thergal to join him.

“Thergal, we concentrate here, commence an elaborate demonstration. Make, for example, a show of constructing shields.”

“We are to attack with sword-and-shield pairings, sir? Against a fortified position?”

Though the Lieutenant’s tone remained neutral, Vongük could guess at the worry–or outright shock–Thergal must feel if he truly believed Vongük would conceive such a foolhardy maneuver. Pairing a shield-bearing soldier with a swordsman was a battlefield tactic, and an antiquated one at that, a relic from a time of slow, heavily armored troops wielding cumbersome, heavy weapons. Sword-and-shield pairs would be utterly ineffective for an escalade.

“No, Thergal, we are not. As the Dictates tell us, the Watchful God is wroth with the dishonest man, but also instructs us that it is lawful to mislead the unbeliever. While we hold their attention here, we will prepare an attack from there, sending the troops a circuitous route out of sight of the heathens. Then, when the heathens’ attention is fully occupied here, we will strike.”

He waited while Thergal absorbed his plan, looking closely at the colored pebbles he had placed to simulate the troop movements he envisioned.

Thergal nodded. “Excellent, sir. We have them.”

* * *

Aidan maintained a steady shuffle as he followed McAvoy to the mining craft. He feared if he stopped moving his thighs would seize up, his calves would cramp, and he would end up fighting the rest of the battle from a stretcher. He would be this Alamo’s Colonel Travis and Jim Bowie, all wrapped up in one crippled figure.

He tuned in to the live feed as he went along. Then he stopped, despite his earlier commitment to keep moving.

“What the hell?” he asked of no one in particular.

The cordon about the walls appeared to be undergoing an alteration, beginning to bulge to the north of the wall where the stream exited, looking vaguely like a snake digesting a rat. The Lhakovi were concentrating there, a number of flags already planted with more arriving. But why? The defenses there were no different than those on the opposite side of the village, and the defenders fresher, more numerous. What did the enemy general hope to accomplish?

He zoomed in tighter, sweeping around the walls. There. He paused. To the west of the wall clustered the farm buildings he had noted earlier. The Lhakovi general had apparently noted their tactical significance as well. Concealed behind–and probably in–those structures, soldiers congregated. And their numbers were growing. In twos and fours Lhakovi solders trickled in, arriving by roundabout paths, depleting even further the ranks of the cordon about Girdled-by-Fields.

A clever strategy. One that might work if Aidan weren’t aware of it.

He nudged himself forward again, fighting the tightness that threatened to immobilize his legs.

He caught up to McAvoy where the geologist was overseeing the unloading from the wagon of lumps of ore, tightly wrapped in sacking of some sort of densely woven fiber. A chain of joon transferred the cargo into one of the many bins adding to the lumpy appearance of the mining craft.

“Yuschenkov,” Aidan called through the hatch. “I sincerely hope we are about ready. I’ve got ‘em right where I want ‘em.”

Doctor Yuschenkov emerged, ducking out through the cramped circular hatchway.

“Now is the time,” Aidan said. “We can barbecue the fuckers and get out of here. Win one for Echeckok.”

Aidan’s voice faltered, losing the anticipatory edge of contained joy. Yuschenkov looked wan, pinched.

“I’m sorry, Aidan,” Yuschenkov said. “I truly am. We won’t be barbecuing anyone. I just checked the fuel reserves. We don’t have enough even for liftoff, let alone for torching the Lhakovi.”

Aidan felt as if he’d just been plunged into an ice bath. A chill raced through him and he felt shocked into immobility, his mind as numb as his body. No. Goddamnit, no. He was going to let down everyone, Brooklynn, Checkok, Yuschenkov. The entire village of Girdled-by-Fields. The Lhakovi army would storm the walls. Without the mining craft he couldn’t destroy them all, couldn’t win the convincing victory. He wasn’t even going to eke out the temporary satisfaction of bloodying the Lhakovi noses and sending them back over the Wall for a season. It had all been pointless.

He thought about Echeckok, his life bleeding away, dripping from the shaft of the arrow. And of Checkok, his hospitality repaid with the death of his son, with the siege of his village. Of Brooklynn, of her years of preparation and laser-focused determination, of 40-light years’ travel to find her uncle. Aidan fumed, his frustration boiling away the chill of Yuschenkov’s pronouncement. How could he fail now? There had to be a way. Some last desperate throw of the dice.

“That can’t bloody be,” McAvoy was saying. “I left the ship with the tanks full. You must be misreading the gauges.”

“I can read the gauges, McAvoy. If you could fly this thing, you would have managed to land without burning up all the reserves.”

“Now you listen to me –”

Aidan interrupted. “Doc, tell me you installed the Y-Drive.”

“Yes. Wired in and ready. And a pretty job we made of it. It wasn’t meant to be crammed –”

“Great. Think about it, Doc. You know what we’ve got to do. I–we can still win this.”

Aidan watched Yuschenkov’s face as the physicist caught on. A broad grin stretched his face beneath the beard, eyes widening with abrupt eagerness.

“You’re serious? But what about –”

Aidan again interrupted. “Listen up, men. Here’s the plan. Doc, you need to send someone to fetch Checkok. This will depend largely on him. McAvoy, I hope you still have some spring in your step.”

T
HE GIRDLED-BY-FIELDS MILITIA ASSEMBLED AT THE
north wall, near the outlet of the stream. The enemy wanted to draw the defense here. Well, Aidan was willing to take advantage of that desire, let his opposite number believe the village had fallen for the feint. This is where he wanted his troops anyway. Not to mention the rest of the villagers, the noncombatants, the children, the wounded.

The defense of the remainder of the wall rested with the decoys. The Lhakovi could pour over the wall just about anywhere now and meet with no resistance. But the live feed showed precisely where the concentrations of the army grew, and Aidan was confident the Lhakovi wouldn’t mount an assault with the bare hundred or so left to keep up the pretense of 360 degrees of threat.

Persuading Checkok had proven a challenge. Aidan’s admiration for Yuschenkov grew, thinking about the man’s display of eloquence. He had not thought Yuschenkov could sustain such diplomacy without blowing a gasket. Aidan didn’t understand a word of the conversation, but he knew what it must consist of, the sacrifice Yuschenkov was requesting and the leap of faith that the reward would justify the effort and loss. The lack of options. The inevitable outcome if Checkok did not agree. Cashing in every debt accrued during a twenty-year friendship while ignoring his own, greater debts.

But Yuschenkov did prevail and the entire population of Girdled-by-Fields milled under the northern stretch of dirt wall, treading three or four fields worth of crops into mulch.

The entire population, that is, with two exceptions: Yuschenkov in the pilot’s chair of the mining craft and Aidan at the western wall. McAvoy did not, in Aidan’s estimation, count as a member of the population, his stay too transitory.

Aidan stood on the parapet in rank with a line of angled javelins and empty helmets resting atop sticks thrust into the narrow walkway of the parapet. The line of decoys now consisted more of empty helmets than upended buckets thanks to the Lhakovi–so many Lhakovi soldiers no longer had need of helmets and many of the joon too young to fight had been kept occupied stripping dead soldiers of their helmets and augmenting the appearance of the mock militia.

Now Aidan was the only living defender atop the wall except for McAvoy. He kept his attention riveted to the live feed. The buildup of troops behind the farmstead outbuildings looked nearly complete. He expected shit to begin its trajectory to the fan at any moment.

It would all come down to moments, to timing. He didn’t like this reliance upon precision, but this gambit was his only remaining play. If the dice did not tumble his way the game was over.

“Radio check,” McAvoy said.

“Read you five by five,” Aidan said.

“Just like the last time, and the time before that,” Yuschenkov said. “We’ve established that communications are functional and that you’re as nervous as a freshman during first semester’s final exams.”

“Easy for the man without the big, bloody bomb to say,” said McAvoy. “Happy to trade with you. I can sit in the pilot’s chair, you can set off the bomb.”