The Killer cadet’s jaws began to work. He flushed. “A Killer is born a Killer,” he said thickly. “A Killer is permitted the glory of fighting whenever the Prophet so decides. Save your breath to scream with when we destroy you, Animal!”
“You mean to tell me that you crummy little punks weren’t along just for the ride, just to watch the big boys fight? Don’t put me on—Moro wouldn’t let little turds like you have a piece of the action!”
Something seemed to give way within the Killer cadet. His calmness evaporated, was burned away by mindless rage. He straggled against his bonds, bit his own lips cruelly. “Cadets have already killed gloriously all over Sangre!” he screamed, his eyes blazing hate. “We kill like all other Killers! To kill is glory! We will kill you all, Animal! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
He lunged at Fraden, kicked out, used his head as a ram. Fraden sidestepped as one of the guerrillas brought his rifle-butt down sharply on the back of the boy’s head. The Killer cadet crumpled. The guerrilla caught him by the arm as he fell, the other guard caught the other arm, and the two of them held the unconscious Killer cadet limply upright.
“Okay, Olnay,” Fraden said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. Moro’s getting so hard up that he’s sending cadets into combat. Means they’ve got no reserves left, they’ve got their asses to the wall. It’s time for the Big Push. Send out agents to all districts. I want as many bandit leaders as you can round up in camp a week from today. Tell ’em there’s big news, tell ’em anything, but get ’em here. We’ve got the Killers where we want ’em, but now we need all the gun—, er, troops we can lay our hands on, and to hell with discipline.”
Olnay nodded. “And what about y’Killer-cub?” he said. “We’d have t’guard him night and day, and we don’t have no food t’spare…”
Fraden studied Olnay’s expectant face, the grim grins of the two guards. He sighed unhappily as he realized that while he controlled the Sangrans, that control had its limits, that they would only follow him to the extent that he led where they wanted to go. A show of mercy would mean weakness to them. They did not understand mercy; they only understood power. He could not afford to be incomprehensible at this point.
“Shoot him,” Fraden said. Olnay shook his head approvingly, motioned to the guards, and they began to drag the boy off.
“But make it quick and make it clean!” Fraden called after them, feeling sick to his stomach.
Fraden heard low murmurs go up from the crowd as Vanderling emerged from the hut. He paused a moment for dramatic effect, then stepped out into the hot red sunlight.
A roar went up, a roar that quickly became the familiar chant of “BART! BART! BART!” Fraden let it go on for a while as he stood there, the red and green flag of the Free Republic waving from the hut behind him, flanked on either side by a long crescent of officers who stood silently facing the motley group of several hundred men who stood chanting before the hut They were sure a sad-looking lot, these bandit leaders. Skinny, emaciated-looking—and they were probably a lot better-fed than the men they led at that—mostly armed with captured rifles and morningstars—though their men largely had to make do with scythes and clubs and spears. They were desperate men, more desperate perhaps than even the men they led, for with the Meatanimals all concentrated under heavy guard, their bands were starving, and sooner or later (and probably sooner) starving men turn on their leaders. Yeah, they were up against it, all right, just desperate enough to let their men, if not themselves, be used as kamikazes…
“Long live the Free Republic!” Fraden shouted. The bandit leaders returned the salute somewhat perfunctorily, then quieted down.
“So y’got troubles,” Fraden said. “Y’live by raiding, and all of a sudden, no more easy pickings. Y’men are getting mighty unhappy. Maybe they’re starting t’think you’re not such hot-shot leaders any more, eh?”
The bandits began to mutter among themselves. He had said what they were all afraid to admit to themselves, and they didn’t like hearing their unvoiced fears out in the open.
“Well why don’t y’raid the corrals? Plenty of Meatanimals there…”
Despite the presence of the snipgun-armed herogyn-heads, the bandits began to hoot and jeer and snarl. “We could just slit our own throats, ’n’save the trouble!” a bandit shouted. “Be dead before we started, ’gainst a couple hundred Killers!” another yelled.
“Y’dead right,” Fraden said. He paused, grinned. “Alone, that is,” he said, “Of course, if you had well-armed regular troops with you on those raids… If you were part of the People’s Army…”
The bandits went quiet. They had no eyes for fighting for the Free Republic or anything else but loot, but he had painted them into a corner. Fight for the People’s Republic—or do nothing and eventually be killed by their own men.
“Deal!” Fraden said, not giving them time to fully see the naked club he was holding over their heads. “You put yourselves and your men under the command of the People’s Army. You’ll be led by experienced officers, backed up by well-armed troops. Together, no Killers can stop us. Our plan is short and sweet. With your men fighting with us, we can attack those estates, ten, twenty, fifty at a time, all over the planet. We can throw a thousand men against a couple hundred Killers every time. The Killers have no reserves—they’re starting to use cadets as it is. Five or six to one is good odds, even against Killers. But you’ll have to follow orders, no questions asked. What d’y’say?”
“What d’we get outa it?” someone shouted. There were strong mutters of agreement, but already they were edged with a sullen resignation to the inevitable.
“Everything y’want!” Fraden said. “Let’s not put each other on. Y’People’s Army is out t’kill Killers, and you’re out for loot and plunder. Okay, you help us do what we want to, and we help you get what you want. You help us kill Killers, put yourselves under our orders—and it’s all yours! Everything in the estates we sack except guns and ammunition—Meatanimals, grain supplies, women, all of it! All there for the taking! What d’y’say now?”
There was a long moment of silence. He had shown them the stick, the stick of starvation and eventual mutiny among the men they led, and now he had thrown them the carrot. There was no free choice for them to make; they could only bow to the inevitable.
“Long live the Free Republic!” someone shouted. The cry spread, somewhat reluctantly at first Then it picked up steam and they were all shouting it. They wanted in before it was too late. No doubt, they were already convincing themselves that they would be using the People’s Army to do their dirty work and not the other way around. And for the ones who survived, it would indeed work out that way…
For the ones who survived… But there would be precious few of those. When the Revolution was won, these bandits would have to be crushed anyway. There would be no place for looting and pillaging in the Free Republic when Bart Fraden ruled Sangre. Agriculture would have to be re-established on a new basis, later industry. This was a time for tearing down; after the Revolution was won, it would be time for building up—and the last thing a successful government needed was a horde of bandits tearing up its property. This was better than killing two birds with one stone—the birds, the bandits, and the Killers, would end up killing each other!
“Field Marshal Vanderling will assign you and your men to units,” Fraden said. “You’ll be given your orders, and within ten days, you’ll be sacking estates. Good hunting!”
Fraden retired to his hut, leaving the bandit leaders to Vanderling. I can’t turn my back on Willem any more, he thought, but at least there’s one thing I can still trust him to do—use up gunfodder to the best possible advantage!
Fraden huddled closer to Sophia, who slept lightly beside him. Better than three weeks had passed since he had commandeered the bandits into the People’s Army, and dozens of fortified estates had already been sacked. It was going well, it was going very well indeed. Victory was no longer a vague, far-off goal—it was
the culmination of a train of events that he had already set in motion, a sequence he could trace in his mind’s eye from beginning to end, Sangre would be his. The Revolution would be won, and in the easily foreseeable future.
So he wondered why he felt uneasy, tense, unsure. Unsure of what? What did he have to be unsure of? Not eventual victory. As sure as the woman sleeping beside him was his, he would have Sangre. His woman, his planet… What else was there to be unsure of? What else was there?
He found himself caressing Sophia’s back, stroking her gently as if she were some talisman that could hold back… hold back what, dammit?
She stirred, rolled over, blinked, stared across the crude bed at him. “What is it?” she mumbled.
“Huh?” he grunted, suddenly realizing that he was awakening her. “I’m sorry… didn’t mean to… I was just thinking…”
“With your hands?”
“I didn’t mean to…” He looked across at her face, could dimly see that she was browning, and all at once it came to him. She was all he had. There wasn’t a human being on the planet that he could call friend. Worse, there wasn’t a human being on Sangre that he could want to call friend. Except for Sophia, he was alone. He needed someone else, a specific someone else, and it scared him. He was dependent on another human being for something. It was a new experience, and he didn’t like it.
“Soph…” he mumbled. “Soph… I’m…”
She reached out, touched his cheek. “I know,” she said. “You’re lonely and you don’t like it. You’ve seen what Chrome-dome is, and here you are on a planetful of savages alone. Just you and me and no one else for a hundred light years.”
“How could you know how I—?”
“Because it’s the story of my life,” she said. “What am I? I’m Bart Fraden’s woman, and before that someone else’s woman. What am I without a man, what would I be without you? On a planet like this… in a universe like this. Without a man like you, a woman like me’s a slave, a thing, a nobody. I need you so bad… I need you just to stay me. And in a place like Sangre, you’re finding out that maybe you need me to stay you. Just to stay sane. That’s where it’s at, Bart, isn’t it, whether we like it or not—you and me against the field. We’re bound together, stuck with each other, by something a lot stronger than love. You and me in here, and out there the wolves are howling.”
“Soph… are you trying to tell me you love me?”
She laughed, with perhaps a bit too much cynicism. “If you want to call mutual parasitism love,” she said. “I suppose it does sound cleaner…”
“Why… why haven’t you said anything like this to me before?”
She put her arms around him. “Because until now, you wouldn’t have understood a word I said, Peerless Leader,” she said. “You wouldn’t have understood it because you didn’t need it.”
“Soph, I…”
“Don’t say it. Don’t give me any I-love-you crap. You don’t mean it. You don’t love me, you just need me. Just need me as long as I need you. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said, holding her to him. “Don’t worry—where else on this miserable mudball am I going to find an innocent young thing like you?”
He felt her laugh against his chest, a constricted, perhaps forced spasm, and felt constrained by the unvoiced rules of some unnamed game to laugh back. Nevertheless, they stayed in each other’s arms for a long, long time.
“First wave—yo!” Willem Vanderling shouted crisply, dropping his snipgun smartly to waist level. For a moment nothing happened, and Vanderling looked behind him irritably down into the shallow defile behind him and slightly below the level of the broad plain on which he and the estate compound about two hundred yards to the west stood. Hidden in this depression were three concentric crescents of about three hundred men each, and the tightly packed wedge of bandits nearest him, the first wave, armed with spears, dubs, knives, scythes, a few score rifles, a few dozen, morningstars, was milling about sullenly instead of charging forward.
“Move ’em out!” Vanderling roared, and three herogyn-heads armed with snipguns and sandwiched in between the first and second wedges of bandits waved their weapons menacingly at their own troops. Now the rear ranks of the first wave of bandits bolted forward, pushed into their fellows, and the whole ragged bunch finally surged forward up out of the defile and onto the plain toward the compound.
Vanderling kept one eye on the bandits running rather raggedly toward the compound, prodded onward by the three ’heads, and the other on the rest of his men—another three hundred poorly armed, all-disciplined bandits and a few more ’heads to make sure they moved on orders, and behind them three hundred regular, well-armed troops of the People’s Army.
The first wave of bandits was moving well now, toward the walled compound. The compound was between the bandits and the great corrals filled with Meatanimals directly behind it—a good thing too, because the bandits were little more than a horde being herded forward by the ’heads like sheep, and there was no telling what would happen if they, could get to the Meatanimals first. The bandits were the stupidest, most unreliable troops Vanderling had ever commanded.
However, in the past couple of months of fighting, Vanderling had evolved a simple, straightforward tactic for attacking estates which did not require the bandits to be anything more than pairs of feet heading more or less in the right direction—the maximum effort of which they were capable anyway. He had successfully sacked dozens of estates himself already, and he had reduced the method to such a simple formula that even his dumb herogyn-head officers had been able to use it independently. After all, he thought, when you’ve got five or ten to one superiority, who needs finesse?
Now Vanderling saw that the ragged mob of bandits was within a hundred yards of the compound gate. Would the Killers try to hold the gate against three hundred…? Nope, here they came!
The gate in the palisade opened, and black-clad Killers poured forth, fifty, eighty, a hundred, maybe two hundred or so of ’em, which figured to be almost the whole force holed up in the estate.
Vanderling noted with a kind of detached professional approval that the Killers seemed to at last have learned something. Instead of the usual blind, headlong charge at the attacking men, they quickly formed a tight, semicircular firing line, a cup to catch the charge, stood their ground, and opened up with their rifles. An interesting, if futile, variation…
Seventy yards from the Killers, the bandits ran into a solid wall of lead. The first rank went down like tenpins. Instantly, the mass of bandits began to break and turn tail—and then charged right back into the buzz saw, as the herogyn-heads sliced down a dozen of their own tail-turning men with their snipguns.
It was pure panic, but a controlled panic, as the ’heads ruthlessly forced the bandits forward straight into the massed rifle fire. Fifty, forty, thirty yards to closing… Had to time this just right… Now!
“Second wave—yo!” Vanderling shouted, stepped aside as the herogyn-heads prodded the second wave of bandits forward toward the compound.
As the second wave charged across the plain, Vanderling saw that the remnants of the first wave—no more than a hundred and fifty men—had reached the Killers.
It was, of course, sheer slaughter. The Killer crescent locked its arms around the panic-stricken bandits, began clobbering them with morningstars, boots, gun butts, teeth. All that Vanderling could make out from where he stood was a tight, writhing pack of men in futile, mortal combat. Man, look at those Killers go to work! he thought A few more minutes, and there’ll be nothing left but dogmeat!
But the plan was working smoothly. The second wave of kamikazes was already halfway to the battle, and for every four or five bandits the Killers killed, they lost one of their own men. And, yup, they were obeying orders! The three ’heads who had herded the bandits forward were lying back, forty yards away, and were slicing into the melee with their snipguns, cutting down Killers and bandits indiscriminately.
And the beauty of
the whole bit, Vanderling thought, is that it couldn’t matter less. Both waves, all six hundred bandits, were dead men from the word go. The woods were full of gunfodder. Six hundred otherwise useless bandits were a small price to pay for the hundred or so Killers they would take with ’em.
Now the second wave of bandits plowed mindlessly into the already waning battle. For a moment, the solid crush of bodies, clubs, and spears pushed the Killers back, threw them off balance.
But then, inevitably, the Killers recovered from their momentary confusion, and just as abruptly, the tide of battle turned again. They tore into the new wave of victims in a mad battle frenzy, splitting skulls, ripping limbs, morningstars against clubs and spears, fearless, bloodthirsty human killing machines against terror-crazed bandits. Now, keening above the cries of the stricken, Vanderling heard the Killers’ terrible, massed battle-chant: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”
Man, you can just about time it by the sound! Vanderling thought. When you hear ’em chanting loud and clear, louder than the screams, it’s just about over, just about time to…
Vanderling motioned to the ’heads leading the three hundred regulars. The ’heads moved the troops into position just behind him. He took one last clear look at the battle. The bandits had about had it. The Killers were thrashing around in a heap of bodies, like cats in a garbage dump, cracking the skulls of supine bodies, stomping, milling about virtually at will, finishing off the wounded. It was hard to get a body count, but it seemed like the Killers had paid for their kicks according to plan—scores of black-clad bodies lay among the dead bandits, dozens of other Killers were minus arms or legs or both as the ’heads, lying prone in the tall grass, stood off and continued to take pot shots here and there with their snipguns.
It was time for the pièce de résistance.
Vanderling made his way to the rear of the long, thin skirmish line spread out on the lip of the depression like a picket fence. “Forward—yo!” he shouted.
The line of troops trotted quickly forward toward the waning battle, Vanderling trotted behind the screen of troops, clutching his snipgun. Fish in a goddamn barrel, he thought. Just like fish in a barrel…
The Men in the Jungle Page 20
