The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  A slug dimpled the fender in front of Adele and punched downward. That tire was already flat, but to hit it from that high angle—

  “Aircar!” Tovera said. “Aircar!”

  Another slug hit the pavement twenty feet ahead, shattering a cobblestone as osmium sprayed in a score of vivid pastels. Adele leaned through her side window and looked upward at the aircar curling slowly into sight ahead.

  The shooter leaned out from the back seat, aiming a stocked impeller. It would be an awkward weapon to use from a platform circling above the rooftops while keeping a hundred yards out from its target, but a hit with it would rip through the truck’s capacitor bank as easily as it would any of those riding.

  Tovera shot, but the light pellets of her sub-machine gun weren’t accurate at half that range and the gunman was wearing a helmet with face shield. The impeller lifted from recoil; from the muzzle puffed metal which the coils’ electromagnetic flux had vaporized. The slug ticked the roof of the cab and rang through the truck bed. If Tovera had been in the way, then Adele had lost a frequently valuable servant.

  Adele ducked back inside, dropped her pistol on the seat, and took the larger weapon from Brock’s lap. He said, “What—”

  “Drive!” Adele said. She leaned on the window frame again, presenting the heavy pistol.

  The car was traversing clockwise. The impeller recoiled, but the slug hit nothing useful this time. Adele shot and shot again. Brock’s pistol jolted back harder than she was used to, so it took longer than the usual heartbeat for her to bring the sights in line.

  The impeller dropped, spinning like a tossed baton; the shooter had slipped into the car’s interior. The car reversed its curve to dive away to the left.

  Adele shot, aimed, and shot again. The aircar turned on its back. Two bodies spun away before the vehicle dropped out of sight behind the buildings. There was probably a crash, but the sound of the shredded front tire slapping the truck’s wheel well was too loud to hear much over.

  “Bloody hell, woman!” Brock said, but even now he didn’t turn to look at Adele instead of watching the road. “What did you do? How did you do that?”

  Adele picked up her own pistol in her right hand. It had charred a streak in the upholstery fabric, and the foam padding beneath had started to melt; there was a smear of it on the titanium shroud.

  “Do what?” she said. “I shot the gunman and his driver, if that’s what you mean.”

  If she understood the question, it was absurd. It was like being asked what the bright thing lifting over the eastern horizon at dawn was.

  “From a moving truck, you shot down an aircar with a pistol?” Brock said.

  The road kinked again, this time a fairly sharp left. Ahead was a convoy of cars two abreast—civilian and probably commandeered at gunpoint. Spacers sat on window sills and on the roofs of the vehicles, armed to the teeth.

  “Friends!” called Tovera, who wasn’t dead after all. I should have checked, I suppose. “It’s the Sissies come to get us!”

  “It’s a very good pistol,” Adele said, setting the weapon down between them. The barrel was too warm to be laid on an ally’s lap. “If you hadn’t brought it, we would have been in difficulties.”

  She leaned out the side window and waved her little pistol in the air. It would be embarrassing to be shot dead by her rescuers. She knew that the Sissie’s crew, though faultlessly brave, was more likely to demonstrate enthusiasm than fire discipline.

  “I suppose you can drop us here, Master Brock,” Adele said. “I appreciate your help. As soon as possible, I will pay for the damages you’ve incurred in this business. Assuming I survive, of course.”

  Cars were turning around or parking on the sidewalks so that Sissies could pile aboard the big truck. Cory, holding a sub-machine gun, jumped onto the running board and cried, “Mistress, you’re all right?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” Adele said. “Thanks to your timely warning, I am.”

  There was room ahead to get through safely; Brock started the battered truck rolling forward again. “If it’s all the same, lady,” he said, “I’ll take you to the dock. This has been the first real excitement I’ve had in twenty years.”

  He barked a laugh. “And I’m bloody glad,” he added, “that I picked the right side!”

  Sunbright

  The horizontal line below the horizon ahead was too even not to be manmade, but that was all Daniel could tell with his unaided eyes. He thought again of putting on his commo helmet. The visor’s magnification would be useful, and he could switch to the infrared spectrum to search the landscape for camouflaged watchers.

  “Careful!” Freedom—Tomas Grant—warned. The level of the surface didn’t change, but boggy soil became a shallow pool. The car lurched; brown water sprayed to all sides.

  A commo helmet looked military and more than that would be the only one Daniel had seen thus far on Sunbright. Presumably they were in general use among the Alliance garrison in Saal, but that was an even better reason not to wear one here in the backcountry. A helmet’s round outline was unique for as far as it could be seen, and a stocked impeller was deadly at equal range with the right marksman behind it.

  The car’s underside ticked the lip of the other side of the pool as they came up; the vehicle lofted a hand’s breadth into the air and flopped down again uncomfortably. Daniel grunted, though he had braced himself on his arms when he saw what was coming. Hogg cursed in a tone of familiar misery.

  Daniel was in the passenger seat, though he and Hogg had traded several times. The luggage was tied onto the frame of the vehicle so that the extra man could squat in the luggage space behind. It was too narrow for Hogg’s hips, but at least he wouldn’t slip off if the aircar slammed hard on a bump.

  The car didn’t have enough power to fly safely with three grown men aboard, so they were travelling the entire three hundred miles in ground effect. That was better than wobbling to a sudden crash from fifty feet up, but the ride hadn’t been a lot of fun so far and Daniel expected it to get worse.

  “That’s the Grain Web,” Grant said, glancing to the side and gesturing toward the line Daniel had been watching. “Part of what was completed, anyway. That’s really what convinced people to support the revolt, you know.”

  Daniel thought back to the briefing materials he had studied during the voyage from Madison. Adele had loaded them into his helmet and had included a very good natural history database.

  “How is a rail system a cause for revolt?” he said. “From—well, to an outsider like me, it looks more efficient to get the rice to market by hauling it cheaply to Saal where bigger ships could land. Everybody gains.”

  “It would be a very efficient way for the person at the center of the Web to control everything,” Grant said. “Which would have concerned the farmers even if they hadn’t had experience of Blaskett already. And it would have cut out the small shippers, since they couldn’t compete with long-haul vessels. Big ships would have ten times the capacity and could carry the rice straight to Cinnabar or Pleasaunce without transshipping.”

  Grant canted the steering yoke to the right, angling to mount a waist-high dike. He must use the car in ground effect frequently, because he maneuvered with the skill of practice. Control inputs were quite different from what would be necessary if the vehicle had been airborne and could bank.

  “So a lot of the little shipowners would have been willing to haul arms to us even if there hadn’t been so much money in it,” Grant said. Then, bitterly, “But there is money, lots of money. Until everybody’s dead!”

  The car fishtailed as it rose onto the dike, but the rebel leader kept it under control. They could travel faster on compacted earth than they had in the paddies where Grant kept their speed down to avoid spraying themselves with the liquid muck. The surface was narrow, even for so small a car, but they sped along it without difficulty even where a spiky native tree grew from the side and required a twitch of the yoke to avoid.

  Hogg le
aned sideways so that his head was between those of the others. “I could spell you on the driving, y’know,” he said.

  Not for the first time, of course; and perhaps not for the twenty-first thus far on the ride. Hogg’s enthusiasm for driving wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if he hadn’t also been a really terrible driver.

  Daniel didn’t reply. Grant said, “We’ll be coming to a farm shortly. I think we should overnight there. We have another hundred kilometers ahead of us, but it’s nearly dusk now and it’s unwise to try to enter Saal after dark.”

  They bumped up onto the right-of-way for the Grain Web. It was a magnetic levitation system; the current-carrying rails had been buried in a smooth pavement of stabilized earth. Even after four years of disuse and damage, it seemed a real thoroughfare.

  “There’s a curfew?” Daniel said, glad for a change of subject.

  He deliberately hadn’t questioned Grant about how he was going to enter the fortified capital. The fellow was an excellent driver, but he had a tendency to look toward the person he was speaking to and wave his hand. That had already led to some near misses as a result of this broken terrain and the fact that the overloaded vehicle didn’t handle the way he expected it to.

  “There’s no regulation,” Grant said. “My identification would be checked, the same as any other time. My concern is that it would be checked in the morning, when they sent out a patrol to investigate the wreckage. The troops in the bunkers at night don’t like to see vehicles driving toward them.”

  He slowed. “We should see a track leading to the left soon,” he said, scanning the brush on that side. Interspersed with spiky bushes were hollows which were covered with flat circles of leaves. Vivid yellow spikes shot up to knee height from the middle of each green splotch.

  “How is it you gallivant all over this bloody mudhole however you please?” Hogg said, sounding accusatory. Not only was he wedged into the back of the car, he really had wanted to drive—almost as much as Daniel didn’t want him to drive.

  “I’m responsible for Saal’s water supply,” Grant said, twisting to look back at Hogg. “I make inspections every—”

  “Is that the road?” Daniel said, stretching his arm past the driver to indicate the wallow of mud angling into the hills to the left.

  “The devil!” Grant said, turning sharply and lifting the outer edge—Daniel’s side—of the car as though they were on a banked track. Even so they skidded through brush that slapped the car’s body and occasionally twanged from the fans before the vehicle looped back to the mud path.

  “They’ve been using heavy trucks,” Grant added in a doubtful voice. He was looking over the side of the car at the crushed vegetation.

  “I think that tracked vehicles have come this way,” Daniel said, looking out his own side. “See the way the heavier stems are chewed, not just broken?”

  He hadn’t brought a weapon himself, a decision for which he now felt a vagrant regret. Still, if this was what he thought it was, a pistol—or even a stocked impeller—wouldn’t make a great deal of difference.

  “Tractors, I suppose,” Grant said. He spoke more loudly than he needed to. “They must have gotten heavy tractors instead of using the ground-effect transport.”

  “There’s smoke, young master,” said Hogg, his lips close to Daniel’s ear but his hoarse voice loud enough that Grant must have heard him. The smell was obvious regardless; not just the sharp, sneezing tickle of wood smoke but also the rasp of electrical insulation and the sludgy black stench of paint and rubber.

  “Grant, perhaps you should wait here while Hogg and I—” Daniel said, but the driver had thumbed forward the verniers on the yoke. One switch controlled the fan speed, the other the blade angle.

  Grant was holding the car low, but they quickly accelerated to a speed faster than even Hogg would have been willing to drive on a track punctuated with stumps and branches standing upright from toppled boles. Daniel gripped the side of the open car with one hand and the edge of his seat with the other, smiling pleasantly.

  “There’s a watchtower,” Grant shouted. He had to compete with the throaty howl of the fans, of course. “Herrero’s Farm is very well defended!”

  Then, “Where’s the watchtower? We should be—”

  They came over the ridge at speed. Grant tilted his yoke to raise the bow, using the car’s underside to brake their rush. They mushed down onto the track instead of slamming. The maneuver must have been instinctive, because his eyes and surely his mind were on the ruin ahead.

  The watchtower of coarse red limestone was still there, the base at least, but the upper portion had been shot away. Daniel couldn’t be sure how much was missing but he guessed about ten feet, judging from the gravel which slugs from automatic impellers had sprayed around and beyond the remnant.

  There had probably been a watchman, given the enthusiasm with which Sunbright’s skin-winged “birds” fluttered over and dug into the gravel. They were tracking the scent. The stone had been crushed too thoroughly to make a good cairn.

  “You really need sensors that give you warning at a greater distance,” Daniel said as the car slowed to a walk. “If they knew where the tower was, and I suppose they did, then they were shooting as soon as they came in sight of it. No matter how good the watchman’s reflexes were, he didn’t have a chance.”

  “I’d have had a chance,” said Hogg in a voice like rocks in a tumbler. He was looking at the farmstead itself and imagining Bantry in the place of these smoldering buildings. “I’d have had a bloody chance!”

  “Easy, friend,” Daniel said, reaching back to put a hand on his servant’s shoulder. “We’ll take care of what we can.”

  The older buildings were stone; the rest were of structural plastic. The latter seemed to have been placed on tracts between the stone ones or around the farmstead’s original perimeter. The square, peak-roofed house in the center and the barn attached to it must have been ancient.

  A dozen plump black-and-tan dogs had been penned behind orange plastic fencing to the west of the main house. About a dozen; Daniel couldn’t be sure, since the burst from an automatic impeller had shredded them thoroughly.

  “There was no call for that,” Hogg said, swinging out of the car with a lithe grace that belied his cramped seating for the past two hours. He held his pistol along his right leg where from a distance it was hidden by the baggy fabric of his trousers. “Maybe some day I’ll meet this dog-shooter and discuss it with him.”

  “Dogs fatten on rice, and the wet doesn’t rot their paws,” Grant said, sounding as though he were talking in his sleep. He shut off the fans in the courtyard formed by a U of ruined buildings. “All over Sunbright, they’re eaten as often as chicken or pork. It took me years to get used to that.”

  At least two automatic impellers had raked the farm. One shooter had simply sprayed slugs across the buildings, rarely holding below shoulder level on an adult man. The other, though, had kept his bursts at knee-height. He had brought down the front and sides of every stone building and probably killed most of those who had thrown themselves to the floor when the shooting started.

  The plastic buildings fared better: small punctures at six-inch intervals dimpled the sheeting, but the plastic didn’t absorb all the energy of the hypersonic slugs and shatter to dust and gravel as stone did. It wouldn’t have made much difference to the people inside, of course.

  “Get out of here!” a cracked voice screamed. “Get out! There’s nothing left to steal!”

  Hogg had vanished; Daniel hadn’t seen him go. Grant whispered, “May the gods forgive me.”

  A man tottered out of a shed covering three carts—their drawbars canted up so that they nested—and a winnowing machine. The equipment had been riddled, but the rubber tires on the carts were the only things which could have burned, and the slugs hadn’t ignited them.

  “Get out!” the man screamed. He walked with two sticks, one of them a recent makeshift cut from a wooden pole. Age might hav
e been enough to explain his feebleness, but blood stained the bandage around his head.

  He tried to wave a cane, but it slipped from his grip. He slumped sideways. Daniel strode toward him, but a woman ran more quickly from the plastic barn nearby and caught the old man before he fell to the mud.

  “Here,” Daniel said, reaching out. “I’ll—”

  “Don’t touch me!” the man wheezed, though he dropped his remaining cane when he waggled it toward Daniel.

  The woman was younger than he’d first thought—younger that him, in fact—and would be attractive when her swollen face recovered from bruises and crying. She said, “I have—”

  She gasped and doubled up, clasping her belly. One thing at a time, thought Daniel as he lifted the old man. He carried him at a trot to the barn the woman had come from.

  As he had expected, there were shakedowns of bedding in the emptied rice storage bins. Eyes stared at him around posts but vanished when he turned toward them; nearby a child began crying.

  Daniel laid down the now-quiet man and turned to get the woman. She had followed him into the barn. She walked haltingly while pressing a hand to her abdomen, but she waved away his unspoken offer to help.

  She seated herself on an upturned basket. “I suppose I’m bleeding again,” she said bitterly. “Well, it could be worse, couldn’t it?”

  Daniel stood erect with his feet slightly apart and his hands crossed behind his back as though he were facing a superior officer. He said, “My servant and I are both countrymen. We can help with first aid.”

  Then he added, “I’m Captain Daniel Leary, RCN. That is, I’m from Cinnabar.”

  “If you’d come two days ago,” the woman said, “you could have helped dig graves. In the evening, I mean. If you’d showed up any sooner, you’d just have been three more to bury. I decided we had to bury them, you know. But it didn’t help with the smell. I don’t think the smell will ever go away.”