The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  “Linda, they keep slaves. We’ve seen several beatings and now the one killing. These guys aren’t the sort of people you would be comfortable having for neighbors. It’s why I gave Jake a free rein.”

  * * *

  Ezra was walking steadily south, the Big Moon occupying half the night sky in the dark phase, making even his low light gear have to sweat to get pictures. Still, he was careful and doubly so, since he knew he was not more than two days from the rookery. He wasn’t about to rush the last few miles and blow the whole thing.

  There was a loud “Bam!” ahead and to his right. He went instantly down on one knee. His instincts were well honed, and he flipped the low light equipment off. Two seconds after the loud bang was a second, as loud, but this one accompanied by a brilliant flash.

  Concussion grenade, his brain told him, followed by a flash bang. There was the stutter of an automatic weapon firing three shot bursts, and now he put the low light gear back over his eyes and looked. He couldn’t see the muzzle flashes, but he could tell the general direction.

  He mentally crossed his fingers and reached for the radio that he’d originally brought with him and keyed it twice.

  A voice came back, “Doggies own the night!”

  “You got that right, cuz!” Ezra said, feeling an infinite sense of relief. “I make you about a thousand feet lower on the mountain than I am and about six hundred yards southwest of my position.”

  “Are the girls with you?”

  “No, but they’re safe.”

  “I have a bit of a situation here just now. Wait a few and I’ll come to you.”

  “A situation I can help with, cuz?”

  “Naw. Ezra, Kyle Parsons was killed yesterday afternoon by those dralka things. Now some Tengri have been following me -- there were six of them earlier. I just hit their camp but there were only five. One either went back or went bush.”

  “You need to hustle, cuz! I didn’t like the look of the weather earlier. It could be fixing to storm.”

  “Sure. Gimme ten minutes.”

  It took more like twenty minutes before the two men shook hands and then hugged. “I called it in,” Jake told Ezra. “There are some happy campers back home.”

  To the east a flicker of lightning appeared in the dark sky. “We need to get shelter, cuz! The storms here have to be seen to be believed! We need to find a cave or something. I’ve been searching for one.”

  “Hey, I’ve got just the thing! I saw what looked like a cave just below us!”

  The two men went downhill for a hundred yards and found the entrance, and Ezra led the way inside. The chamber was large, and Ezra used his flashlight. He laughed. “Cuz, you see the beehive shape?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is an old dralka rookery. Literally, one of the soldiers we met shit himself when he realized he was standing in one.”

  “I’d say they were a bunch of wusses, Ezra -- except I saw what those things did to Kyle.”

  “Don’t think that, cuz! Up until a few days ago the best weapon the Arvalans had was a longbow, and the only place a flying dralka is vulnerable to an arrow is a small patch on its throat and its anus. Those guys cleaned them all out of this area a thousand years ago -- but they are making a comeback.”

  “The bastards ate Kyle up, Ezra. They just swarmed him and chewed him to bits.”

  “I don’t suppose you got his weapon?” Ezra asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I did, and five mags.”

  “I only had three mags and it’s been a busy time, cuz! I left the P90 with Kris, but it has exactly five rounds.”

  “What are you packing?”

  “Just a 9 mil.”

  “Well...” Jake handed his cousin the P90.

  “Oh! Righteous sights!” Ezra exclaimed.

  “You bet.”

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “I told you, I called it in. Right now it’s early evening back in LA, and the Boyles are en route to Otto Schulz. They’ll call me when they’re ready to talk. We can do it all at once.”

  There was light from another lightning flash and a low growl of thunder.

  “You better tell them to hustle, because in an hour or so, the lightning will be like nothing you’ve ever seen before!”

  Jake lifted the radio and called again. Linda came back, but Ezra was right. There was a lot of static. “The storm is going to mess up the radios,” Jake told Linda. “Kris and Andie are safe as of the last Ezra knew, five days ago.”

  “The families are expected to be another ten or twenty minutes.”

  “The storm...” Jake said, lamenting.

  “Are you safe?”

  “Hey! I found another rookery!” Jake said with a laugh.

  “Empty, I hope!”

  “You bet.”

  “The reception is getting really bad, Jake. Kurt says hello to both of you; he’s glad that you’re all okay.”

  “Yeah, tell him I scraped some doggie do off my boots a while ago. Ezra heard the noise.”

  “Okay, Kurt heard that. He says that there was a long message from the Tengri camp just before sundown and that like as not, that was a warning to their bosses back east that they were going to be out of contact for a while.”

  “A long message?” Ezra asked.

  “Yeah. They have cannons, muzzle loaders -- and spark gap radios. They use Morse code, or something like it.”

  There was another visible flash outside, followed at once by the rush of rain. Jake tried the radio again, but there was nothing but static.

  “Shit!” Jake said. “This is awkward.”

  “Cuz, it may or may not be awkward, but I’ve never been happier to see you in my life.”

  Jake laughed. “I dunno, you looked pretty darn happy when I gave you your birthday present for your twenty-first.”

  “And, if you’ll recall, cuz, I sent her back untouched.”

  Jake laughed. “Ezra, old buddy, you might have sent her back, but she didn’t arrive back home untouched!”

  “Ick!”

  “A man does what a man does to get laid.”

  “Not me,” Ezra said with finality.

  “Still saving it for Miss Right?” Jake asked with fake jollity.

  “You bet.”

  “And those two toothsome morsels?”

  “Andie likes girls and Kris...” Ezra sighed. “She likes me, but it’s more like how she likes Andie. Jake, both of them -- wow! I mean, wow! Super troopers!”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. Andie told you about the crossbows in her note, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, right now they’re building some cannon for the Arvalans, forking over guano piles and robbing old volcanoes for sulfur. Kris -- wow and wow some more!”

  “What sort of weapons has she made?”

  “She helped kill some of the local big wigs, cuz. You would not believe her! She’s not bloodthirsty, but when it comes time to drop the hammer on someone, she drops it. Bang! No windup, no hesitation, just bang! She and Melek and Collum basically overthrew the government here.”

  Jake started choking, and Ezra was worried for a moment. “What?”

  “Sorry, like father, like daughter.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ezra said patiently.

  “Right now the President of the United States is trying to avoid impeachment -- his Vice President did a Spiro Agnew and resigned, and the consensus Vice President was George Mitchell. They are still trying to sort out the mess -- half of the Congress -- the House and Senate both -- were caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

  “Oliver Boyle is working to force a few more resignations while getting reform-minded replacements installed. At a certain point the House will get off its duff, and impeach the President and the Senate will convict him.”

  “Good grief!” Ezra exclaimed. He stopped, remembering the look on Andie’s face when he’d cut her bonds that first awful day they’d been castaway. “Kit Richards and
Art Foster? What’s with those assholes?”

  “Foster bought a refrigerator for his new house that he got at the same time as his new Corvette. Who could figure that the electrician who did the work installing the fridge not only forgot to ground it, but messed up the icemaker as well? Foster went to fetch a cold brewski, and when he grabbed the handle to open the door, he fried, standing in a puddle of water. Tsk.”

  “Andie will be heart-broken to hear that. And Richards?”

  “Oh, he’s alive if you want to call it alive. Once a day someone puts a round a few inches from his ear. It doesn’t matter where he is or how well he’s guarded. It was really cool when they put him in a bunker with six guards. Two of whom decided to sit it out, while the other four unloaded their weapons in his general direction.

  “It’s been made clear to Richards that at some point you guys come back and he drops his claims to the fusor invention, or the next day the bullet doesn’t miss. It wouldn’t miss if we didn’t find you guys, either.”

  “Every day, eh?”

  “Yep, they haven’t missed one yet. Kurt was tempted to let him have a day off now and then, to get his hopes up -- but I didn’t want to be deliberately cruel.”

  “You are so kind, cuz. Kris just hauls out her piece and shoots the fucker.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Both times, when the guy was measuring her for her coffin.” He patted his armpit. “I loaned Andie this and I asked her for it back. I’m willing to bet no one has the balls to ask Kris for hers.”

  “What’s it been like?”

  “Hairy -- but that said, cuz, I tell you, I’ve never felt this alive. Not ever. I’m in as good a shape as I’ve ever been in, my back behaves...”

  Jake laughed. “Feeling spry, eh?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Well, Ezra, I have news for you. The boffins back on Earth agree with Andie that this planet is larger than Earth. I’m not sure exactly how it works -- it has to do with density and distance from the center of the planet, not to mention that great honking moon in the sky -- but you weigh three percent less here than you did on Earth -- and when the Big Moon is at the right angle you weigh a few ounces less. More when it’s beneath you, so to speak, and less when it’s up there in the sky.

  “Scientists have been going ape shit over the numbers, Ezra.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, they think the star is about two billion years older than ours. They think that volcanism has reset evolution here a couple of times, and that meteors, like what did for our dinosaurs aren’t much of a problem any more.”

  “And Andie thinks that the dralka are like birds back on Earth -- they build their rookeries with a few million generations of hard-coding of the design. Like it’s downhill from here to the entrance -- rookeries don’t flood.”

  “Cool,” Jake said. “We have a lot of catching up to do!”

  * * *

  Kris was sitting in a group of adult Arvalans, teaching them math, when a boy of ten came running up. “Melek says, come quick! The Eastern Gate!”

  She stood and bowed to the others. Originally they weren’t going to include women in the classes she was going to teach, but she’d put her foot down. If they wanted a woman to stand in front of the classes she was giving, they bloody well could have some women among the students.

  For three hours each morning, she taught. Math for an hour, chemistry for an hour to men only, because there were simply no women who had even the least experience in the field, and then an hour of biology. She was sure her mother would be aghast at her teaching biology, particularly when she knew almost nothing about local plants and animals, but she didn’t care. There were some common things, after all, but she was teaching the local equivalent of doctors and nurses. She’d already stunned her audiences with a crude microscope and the squirming masses of life in the average drop of water.

  She walked quickly to the gate, not wanting to look like she was terrified or in fear. She climbed the steps, and walked up to Melek. There was no doubt what he wanted her to look at, not really. His wave indicated the clouds that lined the eastern horizon.

  “This time the storm comes to Arvala.”

  “Arvala is made of stone,” she reminded him. “You will want to make sure that people only shelter in the sturdiest buildings. You might want to think about using the steps again.”

  He bobbed his head. “My people value luck a great deal, Kris. Leaders use that knowledge to make sure they get on the good side of the odds.”

  Collum came up the steps, and he too looked at the clouds. “There is a storm coming,” he said simply.

  “It will be worse than last time. The storm that was so bad for us brought only a little wind and much rain here. This time it looks like a lot of lightning, very much wind, and huge quantities of rain,” Melek told him.

  “We must get people under cover,” Collum told him.

  “Yes, Sachem. I have already told the city council to tell people what to do.”

  “Tell them that the citadel will be open at once,” Collum told Melek. Collum turned to Kris. “You told us that the best place to store food would be in that stairway.”

  “Yes, Sachem,” Kris told him. Collum wasn’t going to be King until he returned to the city of Tirala and was acclaimed as such by the other Sachems. No one had quite decided what to do with the Dralka yet. More than half of the fighting order was, so far as they could tell, blameless and knew nothing of Mardan’s plans. Most of the remainder, who, when presented with evidence of dralka imprisoned to attack Arvala at need, had flown into rages, demanding ways to die with some shred of honor that others had stolen from them.

  Collum was well aware that accepting such oaths meant that he was taking in some of the plotters as well -- men who could tell which way the wind was blowing and feared it. Given the immediate circumstances, too ironic by half.

  When the sun vanished from the sky, Kris and Andie were in the citadel, helping pass in people who had thought they understood storms and who had, by then, lost their nerve.

  When the last of the people were under shelter, Collum, Melek, the head of the council, Kris and Andie stood on a battlement of the citadel watching the storm as it approached.

  Andie had been blunt. “If a lightning bolt flashes and I can’t count to ten, slow and measured, before I hear the sound, you will not want to be standing between me and the door leading inside.”

  Everyone had laughed.

  “Is the Golden Bough safe?”

  “In this? No. She’s as safe as we could make her, but in this -- all bets are off,” Andie told Melek.

  “We can ill afford to lose her.”

  Andie laughed. “She’s a useful tool just now, where we can teach seamen how to sail into the wind. As a sailing ship, the ones under construction will be far, far better. We’ll lose a few weeks of training, which will hurt, but it won’t be a catastrophe. A catastrophe would be losing some of the eight tons of iron you’ve put together.”

  “I don’t think the wind will blow it away,” Kris said lightly.

  A lightning bolt hammered the top of a tower, perhaps forty yards away. No one said anything, but they very quickly went further inside.

  Andie turned to Melek and Collum. “You’ve never heard of hurricane Katrina, but so far we’ve done better than they did -- we got most of the people evacuated. What you need to do is alert your most reliable men to go out into the city as soon as the wind drops to a safe level. They have to learn where it’s safe to go and where it’s not. If they find people in need of rescue, they need to send for help.

  “First, you rescue those in need. While you’re doing that, assess the damage. That’s not just big things, but little things. Trees that have fallen, utilities broken -- anything. You need to set someone in charge of the tasks of repair, someone who can’t be argued with. You need to make sure that before people start returning to the city, that where they are going is safe. You need
to send soldiers with them to make sure that they are going where they said they were going and that the crews evaluating damage didn’t mess up.”

  “And this gives us what?” the head of the council asked.

  “It means that you won’t piss people off when they return to a building that’s falling apart and perhaps falls on someone’s head. It means that you learn what’s broken and figure out in what order to fix things. It is pointless to fix an aqueduct in the center of the city, if it is severed three times, closer to the cliffs. Better to fix the breaks closest to the source first!” Andie told them.

  “The people just now,” Kris elaborated, “are afraid. When they see the damage, some will despair. You don’t want that to happen. You want people to remain civil and obedient, but more important, you want them thanking you for the help you gave them when they needed it.”

  “That sounds logical enough,” Collum told her.

  “Sure... but you would be surprised how many kings make sure they and their friends are seen to first, and how many just ignore the plight of the common people. This is a time where a little charity will go a long way, Collum,” Kris told him.

  “Do you know many kings?” Collum asked, knowing from what Kris had already told him, that she’d never met but the one.

  “No, I don’t know any, but where we are from, we write down the lessons from our history and remember them. We have a saying: ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’ You want to learn from the examples of your ancestors and others and do better.”

  “That’s good advice, even for a sergeant turned captain,” Melek said.

  The storm was as bad as the one they’d experienced in the rookery, but the citadel was a solid building and never once so much as trembled.

  When dawn came, the clouds were breaking up, and the winds had died away. Collum, Melek, and the city council had men off at once seeing what had happened to the city.

  Kris and Andie went to reassure people waiting on the steps after a long and hard night.