The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  There were a lot of stops and starts, and twice when he’d tried to struggle, he’d felt the prick of a blade. There was a long time when they carried him without pause, until a voice barked a challenge, and those carrying him halted. There was a reply, and the next thing he knew, he was moving again. After a few steps, he realized that he was going up some sort of wooden ramp.

  There were a lot of noises, none of which were recognizable. After a few minutes, there was a snapping crack that sounded a lot like canvas. As if to confirm that, he felt gentle motions from the rough wood he’d been dropped on, and he realized that he was on some sort of ship.

  He was manhandled, pushed, and shoved down a ladder and then forced into a chair. The bag came off his head and he saw his captors. They were Arvalans, he was sure. All of the Arvalans came from just a few hundred ancestors and generally were the same height, hair, eye color, and build -- many of them even had the same general appearance.

  He stared at them with curiosity until he noticed his side. He’d felt a wash of warm fluid when they’d been dragging Denise off of him. He’d hoped he’d see her now, but it wasn’t going to be. The fluid had been blood, and there was an enormous quantity of it splashed down his front. His curiosity vanished, replaced with hard wariness and an inner vow that a lot of these men were going to pay in extreme measure for this.

  One of them held up the Barrett and mimed shooting it. It took a while and a few blows before Charles realized the other man wanted Charles to teach him how to shoot it.

  Charles shook his head. There was nothing left to shoot; he’d fired off all of the ammunition the morning before.

  There followed the first of many beatings.

  * * *

  Ezra Lawson looked at Helen Boyle standing in front of him back in the infirmary on the Earth side of the door. “You’ll recall that I told you that the forensics in this matter were patently obvious. A garrote of some sort was used to sever the head. Depending on how you want to look at it, death was caused by blood loss to the brain or bleeding out.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I can’t begin to say. There are no signs of defensive wounds, so it was either a surprise or very quick. Almost certainly the latter and probably both.”

  “Could Charles Evans have done this?”

  “Could he have? I imagine so. There was -- a quantity -- of DNA evidence. But there is no sign of forced intercourse, no signs of bruising or tearing.”

  “Her fellow workers are positive that Charles was drunk on killing and saw her as just another notch on his rifle.”

  “Except that she wasn’t shot,” Helen pointed out calmly.

  “I spent weeks with the guy. You get to know someone pretty well when you’re with them day in and day out and in stressful situations. He was like me in a lot of ways. He’d been a sniper in Iraq and swore off of it. He hinted that he’d kill animals if he had to, but he wasn’t happy with that, either. He told me he was hoping to get into civil affairs. That’s not a career path many in the military pursue.

  “I suppose he might have gotten angry enough to kill her, but he’d have shot her, knifed her, or maybe even strangled her. But a garrote? And you say she was killed from behind?”

  “Yes. It’s possible she never knew what was happening.”

  Ezra slammed his fist into his palm. “Why did Evans run?”

  Helen looked at him strangely.

  “What?” he asked, seeing her expression.

  “What makes you think he left under his own power? If he didn’t kill her, someone else did. Suppose it was one of the other groups in Arvala that Kris and Andie talk about? The Dralka order or the pirates? Everyone in that town had seen him work that morning or had heard about it. Andie showed the Arvalans how to make crossbows and now cannons and rifles. Why not grab someone they would figure could do the same thing -- only for them?”

  “I’m an idiot!” Ezra said, very, very angry at himself. “There was all the talk about Charles killing the woman, and the only thing I thought about was finding a way to show that he didn’t do it! My God! You’d think I’d realize that if he didn’t do it, someone else had to have! How stupid can you get?”

  Ezra turned brisk. “Get word to Kris and Kurt. I’ll pass the word to Arvala and Andie. They can get someone back to the town days faster than I can get there, but I’ll be there in three days.”

  With that he rushed out, heading back to Arvala.

  Ezra spoke to Andie, who in turn called Linda Walsh to the radio as well.

  Andie explained to Ezra. “Linda and Jo are Caltech alumni. They have some sort of kinship relation I don’t quite get. Ezra, I told Denise that she shouldn’t fool around with the men at the listening post. She would have welcomed someone like Charles. And you’re right; if it was a crime of passion, he wouldn’t have run. He doesn’t know anyone, he doesn’t speak the language, and he’d have to know that everyone would be hunting him.

  “There’s no way to tell for sure who has him, but I’m sure someone does.”

  Linda Walsh was blunt. “I don’t care who it was, or why. I want whoever did that to Denise dead, do you understand?”

  “Ditto,” Andie chimed in. “I’ve sent a messenger to Collum and Melek, and I’m sure they’ll send a strong party to inquire as well. This could be a serious problem for them.”

  “Except I don’t think Evans has anything like your knowledge base,” Ezra told her. “He’s not going to be able to tell them squat.”

  “In which case,” Andie said roughly, “they’ll either try to get what they can from him or kill him. Odds are, he’s a dead man unless we can find him quickly. I had put my UAV project on hold; now I think it’s time to revive it. I’ll get a couple of birds and we can look north of the road, and my personal favorite -- south or southwest of the Eastern Finger. The Arvalans have never explored down there... and that one ship headed that way after the Dralka-instigated dralka attack on Arvala.

  “Get yourself up to Siran-ista as quickly as you can, then have them come to Arvala and pick up Linda and me.”

  “Roger.”

  The problem with making a rapid departure was that his cousin Jake, who commanded the American contingent at the rookery, quite rationally pointed out that if a single ATV had been over-flown by five hundred dralka, even if there had been three people aboard, they would have all been killed.

  So, while it was easy to organize a single vehicle and two-person convoy quickly, it took more time to organize a convoy of two dozen people and a dozen vehicles.

  Worse, they were within a half hour of departure when he was called to return to Earth for a phone call from General Briggs, Kurt Sandusky, and Kris.

  “My mother called me,” Kris told him. “Ezra, you need to slow down a bit. The Arvalans will have people there, looking for Charles Evans long before you can get there.”

  “A day and a half.”

  “They’ll turn out the entire Wall Guard force there, Ezra. If this is the Dralka or Rangar again, it is as much of a catastrophe for them as it is for us. What I want you to do for now is go south to the headland as fast as you can go and use binoculars and anything else you can think of to observe the ocean. Lay low and don’t let yourself be seen. The odds are, if it’s Rangar, they’ll round the headland in a day or two, close enough inshore to be seen.”

  “What if they are the Dralka order and are going north?”

  “If you think about it for a second, you’ll realize that’s the least likely scenario,” General Briggs told him.

  “Pardon?” Ezra said, startled.

  “Ezra, we know the Dralka left people behind -- spies. They have to have a bunch of those in Arvala. Those spies would be able to get a lot of information about muskets and cannon, about steel-making, and a dozen other topics without the risks involved in kidnapping someone. Moreover, Cadet Evans doesn’t speak the language, and there are only a few Arvalans who speak English -- all of whom are in Arvala.

  “I’m pretty sure it’
s Rangar,” Kris concluded.

  “And I’m here running around in circles, screwing up,” Ezra said bitterly.

  “Ezra, everyone understands, and no one faults you for what you’ve done. You did the right thing bringing Denise Courtland’s body back to the Far Side door for forensics,” Kurt told him. “Now, we have to be smart, to see what we can do for Cadet Evans, and above all to once and for all put the fear of the long arm of Andie Schulz and Kris Boyle into every God damn bad guy on the planet.

  “We’re sending you someone -- Pete Sharp,” General Briggs continued smoothly. “He is boarding a G6 even as we speak and will be there in four hours. Go south, watch on the headland. Get with Dick Haines; we’ll be shipping some building supplies through in the next few hours as well. We want a permanent, secret observation post for the headland. It’s going to have to be made of concrete and will undoubtedly take some time to build.

  “But right now, we need you out on the headland, ASAP,” the general concluded.

  “Okay, we’ll be there within a couple of hours,” he told them. “Sorry, guys.”

  “Don’t be, Ezra,” Kris told him. “Also, tell Andie that the delivery of her UAV project is going to start the first thing tomorrow. At first it’s going to be a short-ranged Israeli vehicle that we’ll want to fly off the headland. There are four Israeli Defense Force technicians with it. In a week or so there will be two more techs and a longer-ranged vehicle. For the purposes of Arvala, they are stealthed -- they fly at fifteen thousand feet and except on take-offs and landings, they will be too high to see.

  “Get with Jake; he’s headed back right away. The larger UAV is going to need a relatively flat, five hundred foot runway, preferably not within easy view of the coast.”

  “We have that little bulldozer that the railroad people brought through. They’ll scream, but we can borrow it from them for a few days,” Ezra told her.

  General Briggs was direct. “We’ve never had a cadet kidnapped before. The board has authorized a million dollars of contingency funds to pay for costs involved in the rescue. We’ll have another dozer there in a few days.”

  “We’ve been operating from fifty-five gallon drums of gasoline and diesel,” Ezra told them. “We’re going to need a lot more.”

  Kris laughed. “Get in touch with Andie -- she’s been advising the Arvalans on a coal-fired steam-powered dozer. Trying to rebuild the road south is taking too long. They know they need a better way to get quickly south, and so she’s gotten together with the train folks, and they’re working on a coal-fired steam engine that they can put into a heavy dozer. As usual, the major problem is that they just don’t have the steel capacity ramped up yet. I’m not sure that Andie can get them working any faster on it -- it’s already a top priority.”

  “Okay,” Ezra told them. “Let me get some people south at once. We can do that safely enough. I can talk to Captain Milan, the commander of the Arvalan fort, and get some additional guards.”

  “Just remember it would be a really good idea if they don’t see you,” Kris reminded him.

  “They won’t!” Ezra promised.

  After the call he spent five minutes in the bathroom doing nothing but staring at himself in the mirror. He’d messed up with the search for Evans, he knew. Even if the others were too polite to mention it, he should have known that Evans wouldn’t do what he’d been accused of. He’d known it himself -- if Cadet Evans was around, he’d ream the young man out -- Evans had gone to the party that evening without his personal weapon. If he’d have killed the girl, his first stop would have been to pick up that weapon. That the Barrett had been missing should have been a red flag -- instead he thought some Arvalan had stolen it as souvenir. As one of them undoubtedly had.

  No, he’d simply screwed up. He stared at himself in the mirror. He knew Andie and Kris were smarter than he was, and he’d long since made his peace with that. They’d wanted someone to play nursemaid to the three Norwich cadets on their visit and he’d volunteered, thinking it was a simple task.

  He’d admired Charles Evans’ easy familiarity with the big sniper rifle and had been dumbfounded by what the cadet had done to stop the dralka. Evans had been a killing machine, shooting far faster than Ezra had thought humanly possible. Sure, he missed some shots, but he’d scored a lot more than he missed!

  Nearly four hundred bone-hammering shots in a half hour, he was sure. The value of having a prepared firing position had been clear from the first. Ezra had seen any number of examples of how important it was to dig a shelter, and he’d forgotten that fact in the year and a half since he’d left the army.

  He squared his shoulders. There wasn’t much chance of getting Charles Evans back alive, no matter who had him. But he was going to do it, if it could be done.

  Chapter 34 :: Kidnapped, or Two Lifetimes Before the Mast

  Charles hadn’t had many choices since he’d been captured. His captors had undoubtedly not thought through what they wanted from him with any degree of intelligence.

  He took nearly an hour of repeated beatings, leaving him with several loose teeth, with blood streaming from his mouth and nose. They didn’t realize it, but the blood was dripping onto his skin, to mix with Denise’s blood. There wasn’t anything they could have done to him that could have stiffened his resistance more.

  The leader had stood back watching him carefully, never saying anything to him, just watching his minions beat Charles over and over again.

  Finally the Barrett was shoved into his chest and there was an imperious demand that he was quite sure was to show them how the weapon worked -- or die.

  He laughed and wiggled his bound shoulders, then spat at the man’s feet. How could he show anything with his hands tied behind him? The leader said two words, and one of his men untied his hands, and then looped rope around them, giving him some freedom of movement, but not much. His feet remained tied.

  The Barrett was again shoved into his chest. He took it, pulled the bolt back and pointed at the empty chamber. He held the weapon one-handed and mimed fitting something into the chamber. There was a grunt from the leader and he said something to the man who’d been beating on Charles.

  The man said something and produced one of the empty cartridges. That brought a solid punch in the gut from the leader, into the man’s gut. The leader kicked the other man as he sank to his knees and while Charles didn’t know the words, he knew the other was getting reamed out good.

  One of the others handed the empty cartridge to Charles. He laughed, and pointed to a table a few feet away, and a container of water or some other fluid. He mimed filling the cartridge up.

  The leader’s eyes furrowed in concentration, then he barked a command and the cartridge was taken from Charles, filled with water and handed back to him.

  He simply turned the cartridge upside down and whatever it was ran out on the filthy floor of the compartment. “Empty!” Charles told them. “It’s empty! It doesn’t work anymore!”

  The leader gestured for him to put it in the Barrett. Charles didn’t think that boded well for him -- the man was smart. Still, he did as he was told, working the bolt and inserting the empty cartridge.

  Then, with a move long-honed from entirely too much practice, he slammed the bolt shut, jerked the rifle from the grasp of one of them who had written Charles off as no threat. Charles pointed the Barrett at the leader and pulled the trigger.

  The dry metallic click was followed by blows and someone grabbing the rifle away from him. When they finally stopped pounding on him, he gave the leader a finger. “If I could have killed you, asshole, I would have. But, you dumb stupid shit, the rifle is empty! It doesn’t work!”

  The English words must have made an impression, because even though the others were ready to beat on Charles some more, the leader stopped them. He spoke to two of the others and they left and Charles was frog-marched to a table and forced to sit on a bench.

  The men returned in a few minutes with a box full of metal scrap
. It took Charles a few blows and a few minutes to realize they wanted him to make the rifle work. He remembered Kris Boyle’s description of Andie Schulz making a crossbow from leftovers in the trash. These people had obviously heard about that!

  He looked at the leader, waved at the trash, held his belly and laughed. He was hit again, but instead, he wrested the Barrett away from the one who held it. The man struggled with him, but the leader said a word, and the man let go.

  Charles sat down at the table and field stripped the Barrett. He held up one piece after another and compared it to the junk that they’d brought him, trying to show how hard he was laughing.

  The result wasn’t what he expected. The leader spoke a command and the junk was removed, and so were the pieces of the Barrett. He wished them luck putting it back together again.

  Instead, the leader planted himself in front of Charles, pulled a knife from his belt and putting the blade to Charles’ throat. Charles gulped. Well, he’d done his best to show just how useless he was. He steeled himself for the thrust, but the other just pressed a little, not even enough to break the skin. Not that the threat wasn’t clear enough.

  Then the knife went back into its sheath. The man made a talking motion with one hand and pointed at Charles. Charles talk, was the simple translation, Charles thought. The man then pointed in a direction, swept his hand over his head, then straight down and then back to the original direction. The leader spat out a word that Charles was sure meant “a day.”

  He nodded and the man grinned evilly. He did the circular motion again, and then held up one finger. A second sweep and a second finger. Then, finger after finger, until he reached six. He folded them up and held up one finger again and said another word.

  “Week,” Charles said, hoping that he was right.

  One finger, two fingers, three fingers and then a fourth, followed by the talking motion. The man used both hands to make talking motions again, pointing to Charles and himself. Then the knife was again at Charles’ throat.