“Your guides,” the Kedlakis-Ur said, drawing him from his observations.
Chalmers put his tea down and smiled at her. “I thank the tribe, you, and our guides for the gifts of your aid.”
She cocked her head, lovely eyes narrowed on him. “The tribe is not involved. Solely the Kedlak.”
“I beg pardon. I misspoke.” Chalmers said the words without knowing what, exactly, he’d said that was incorrect. He’d thought the Kedlak were the tribe. He suppressed the urge to glance at Jackson and decided to shut the hell up. Clan politics, he decided.
The Kedlakis-Ur waved a hand. “There is nothing to pardon. My something will see you to Clarthu and help you uncover the traitor.”
“Thank you,” he said, restraining the urge to hit on her. Much as he wanted to chat her up, now was not the time. Not for the new, better Chalmers, anyway. Old Chalmers would have followed where this attraction led at the expense of just about anything.
“Travel easily and lightly,” she said. The Kedlakis-Ur then turned to the guides and nodded once to each, repeating the benediction. The bows they gave her were the most formal thing Chalmers had seen from an indig thus far.
The Kedlakis-Ur walked away, Chalmers trying not to stare after her in case it offended the young pair.
“Head’s up,” Jackson said, shoving Chalmers’ bag into the warrant’s hands with a quelling look that made the older man wonder what he’d done now.
He loaded the buggy while Jackson topped off the tanks from the jerry cans. Their guides looked on, impassive, as the partners prepared for travel. The rest of the camp paid them no more attention than they had the night before.
“A little less than one and a half cans left, Chalmers,” Jackson said, the impact of one knuckle drawing a muted bong from the partially-empty jerry can.
“Copy that. Should be plenty, so long as we don’t have to fight sand or something.” He looked a question at the guide.
“No sand,” the guide said, shaking his head. “No big rocks. Some small gravels when we get down the something, and then green lands to Clarthu.”
“Green lands, eh? Sounds nice,” Jackson said, looking at the sere beiges, browns, and grays of the mountains surrounding the camp. “Though I suppose, growing up here, anything would look green.”
Chalmers checked the tautness of the tie-downs keeping their packs in place, slung his M-14, and hustled to claim the driver’s seat. He really enjoyed driving the buggy. Driving it made him feel both useful and in active command of his own destiny. In control of something that was, in fact, hard to manage. Like exerting control over his lifelong inclination to lie and fuck things up, only safer.
His rush caused the slung M-14 to bang into the steering wheel and shoved him off balance.
Or maybe not so much safer, after all. Murphy’s Law always found a way of leveling those who started thinking too highly of themselves or their skills. Flushing, Chalmers removed the weapon, carefully slipped it into the rifle scabbard between the seats, and secured it.
“What?” asked Jackson with a grin. “I thought you were getting ready to lay on some dumbass redneck shit, driving with a gun in one hand like a wild man.”
Chalmers did not respond, but put the buggy in gear and accelerated smoothly—and slowly—back toward the open wastes.
* * * * *
Chapter Thirty-Seven
R’Bak
Chalmers was going too fast to do more than brace himself against the wheel as the herd of alien whinnies appeared in front of the speeding buggy as if by magic.
A cop he’d once known said that was what all the responsible parties said in car accidents: “The other car just appeared in front of me!” when they might have seen that shit coming if they hadn’t been going too fast for the conditions.
He supposed the big lizard-like creatures did not deserve the moniker “alien,” at least not here, not on their home turf.
They certainly resented the buggy’s sudden intrusion into their midst; a couple of the herd sounded a loud resonating threat-whistle while the others ran for it, scrambling up the side of the draw.
Chalmers tried for a clear spot in the herd, the big tires of the buggy spitting grit and gravel in their wake. He couldn’t help but grin madly under the goggles. This was the most fun he’d had in almost a hundred and fifty years, for God’s sake!
Then one of the whinnies feinted toward the nearest wheel, mouth open. The red-orange interior of the throat and finger-length opalescent teeth were all the encouragement he needed.
“Fast fuckers,” Chalmers muttered, shifting gears and hammering the accelerator. He spent the next moment counter-steering against the shuddering skid he felt through the seat and wheel, then aimed for an opening in the rocks ahead.
They made it, but the gap ended up being a yard or so above the lower slope, and the buggy left the ground doing a feather under fifty.
They were airborne before Chalmers realized the animal—the freaking animal—had feinted an attack at the buggy, just like he used to mess with his stepmother’s pissy old cats.
The landing pushed the buggy’s occupants, both Terran and local, hard into their seats. The broad tires slipped before biting into the patchy turf of the uneven slope they bounced along. Chalmers adjusted his steering three times in as many seconds, fighting the inertia and momentum that threatened a roll-over. His efforts and the heavy-duty off-road suspension finally steadied the buggy, the uphill side compressing as the lower smoothly traveled to give them a more-or-less steady platform.
“Bastards know how to make a damn good buggy,” Chalmers mused, taking a hand from the wheel to wipe something green-brown from his goggles.
“What?” Jackson shouted, his brown knuckles lighter where he clutched at the roll bars.
Chalmers would have to talk to Jackson about that. Chicken bars were there so you didn’t lose digits holding onto the roll bars during a roll. It was yet another example of how little training they’d had before going on this mission.
But for now, Chalmers just shook his head, grinning madly behind his scarf as his downshift made the engine throb loudly. He’d been doing that a lot recently—smiling, not downshifting.
He glanced in the mirror at the well-equipped, by local standards at least, indig warrior riding in the rear passenger-side seat. Kenla was another example of the varied advantages this place and time had over Fort Leavenworth’s prison: women.
“What?” Jackson repeated.
Chalmers raised his voice over the wind and engine noise. “How we doing for time?”
Jackson checked the pad in the hand he was not using to clutch the sissy bar. “Not bad, Chief!” he shouted. “So long as you don’t wrap us around a tree, we’re golden…” he continued, quietly enough that Chalmers could pretend he hadn’t heard.
He glanced at the shiny display. The miniaturized computer was the only piece of modern Terran tech Chalmers had access to—well, it and a feed from the tiny spy sats crisscrossing overhead in whacky orbits. Seeded in advance of their arrival, the Dornaani satellites were almost entirely plastic—or something like it—and not much larger than a hubcap. Non-reflective and sheathed in some kind of temperature-equalizing material that made them thermally invisible, they sounded like something straight out of Area 51. If the locals did manage to detect them, though, they were reportedly programmed to take a swan dive into the atmosphere: burnt to ash in minutes. Still, Chalmers figured that if the opposing team found one, they’d look for more until the last one committed re-entry suicide. And then the Lost Soldiers would be well and truly on their own.
But, hey, as long as they lasted, there was no way Chalmers was going to rely on barely remembered land navigation courses when his continued survival was on the line. Not when such wonders were available. Not on an alien planet with a different diameter and magnetic pole. GPS systems had first made an impression on him back in Desert Storm, and while Chalmers wasn’t sure it operated on the same principles, this device was eve
n more accurate and less bulky than what he had used back then.
He slewed the buggy around a stand of tree-sized plants that looked like a clump of insanely large blades of lawn grass pulled from the ground by a giant’s shitty golf swing. Passing close enough to reach out and touch it, he realized the earthy clump at the base of the lawn grass was some kind of weird root-ball of dense-looking fibers.
The passenger directly behind him asked something like, “Fight wanted?”
Chalmers wasn’t sure of the indig’s name, just that he was the leader of the local resistance cell, and as such, was one of two “types.” Either a guy with too much hero and too little common sense for his liking, or just another hopeful warlord in the making. Neither were high on Chalmers’s list of people to hang out with, so Chalmers pretended not to hear the question.
Thoughts of warlords sent Chalmers on a trip down memory lane, remembering the big souk in Mogadishu, where you could buy anything, including some of yesterday’s shipment of food, fresh off the UN relief trucks. These people had yet to prove themselves, so he wasn’t about to go out on a limb for them. Because if he did, Murphy’s Law made it a sure thing the locals would saw it off at the trunk. From the sticks, himself, Chalmers understood one immutable law of insular cultures: outsiders were afforded neither the respect nor care that insiders could rely on. He wasn’t one of them, and there was no telling when they would decide to saw Chalmers’ own shit off at the trunk if he did go out on limb for them.
“Fight wanted?” the indig repeated, loud enough that Chalmers couldn’t ignore him without offending him.
“What’s that?” Chalmers asked, working his way up through the gears as the way ahead became clear. They were still heading downhill toward where the valley debouched onto a wide floodplain crisscrossed with canals fed from a huge, shallow lake. The dry land between the waterways was the source of most of the local food production for the region. At least, that food which the nomads didn’t herd through the mountains they were leaving behind. The village itself was visible now: twenty to thirty low edifices, water mill crouching on one edge of the largest, all surrounded by fields of ochre-green crop lands.
“You want fight, Warrant Officer?” the local repeated more loudly, emphasizing Chalmers’ official title.
The locals were intensely rank conscious. It was almost as bad as the regular Army had been. Worse, even. Chalmers had no idea how to identify an indig’s status at a glance. Not yet, anyway. He supposed he’d have to learn soon enough.
“I hope not.” He slowed his speech, careful with his diction. “Not a straight fight, anyway. Want to get there and catch them with their pants down.”
The male indig spoke equally slowly and carefully, clearly wanting to be understood. “Respectfully, then, may I ask you to slow, Warrant Officer Chalmers?”
“Why?”
“Because if you go fast, like raiders, they open fire. If they see me and Kenla, they less likely to shoot first, question later.”
“Less?” Jackson said, jumping on the word before Chalmers could.
“Clarthu not friendly. Not all the time. We raid them from time to time. Nothing so bad to make them hate, but they not like a surprise.”
Chalmers downshifted and let engine braking slow them. “I don’t want to give the people we’re looking for time to bail or hide their comms.”
“Bail?” the indig war leader asked.
“Run away,” Chalmers clarified. There were still some errors in translation, but the weird tech they’d been subjected to sure beat shit out of attending Defense Language Institute courses for months on end. Then again, DLI had been close enough to San Francisco to hit the clubs on weekends, so it had that going for it. Had. Very past tense. He hadn’t even thought to ask if either place still existed.
He dropped the buggy into first gear and slowed even further as they came into range of the big-bore weapons the indigs used. And there were armed men and women manning the earthen berm surrounding the village. Some had no doubt fled to the fields when they heard the buggy’s snarling approach.
Jackson grunted and turned to look at their guides. The male indig unbuckled and stood up in the seat.
“The Kedlakis-Ur sends greetings and something,” he shouted through cupped hands. “Something of the Kedlakis-Ur wish to meet with the hetman.”
One of the guards, a tall, wasp-waisted woman, waved them on.
Chalmers kept the buggy at a walking pace as they crossed the last few yards to an opening in the berm. There was talk between some of the other villagers and the woman, but she mostly ignored it and waved them through the gap without any further discussion.
Chalmers, mildly astonished that a brief statement was all the villagers required to give them access to the village, almost caused the buggy to stall.
“You insisted on driving,” Jackson said. “Least you could do is keep us from looking stupid in front of these people.”
Chalmers just drove on, his head on a swivel.
A space Chalmers assumed was the equivalent of a village green lay just beyond the berm. A brief drive between low, adobe-brick buildings followed. They entered a small square with a well in the center and a larger building on the left.
“Stop there,” the talkative guide said, pointing to the building opposite the large one.
An older, richly dressed man stood at the entrance, a fruit of some kind surrendering its skin to a wicked-looking knife wielded by capable hands.
Chalmers stopped the buggy and shut her down. The hot metal of the motor pinged as it cooled. Chalmers immediately felt the sweat, held in check by the wind of their passage, begin to run down his flanks.
“This is the village something, Larn Clarthu, Warrant Officer,” their guide said, waving at the fruit-peeler.
Jackson, always the superior linguist, handled the niceties of the introduction, providing the SpinDog countersign.
Chalmers tried to act casual as he took stock of their surroundings. There were a couple of oldsters staring at them from around the well, but on the whole, the villagers seemed a lot less interested in their arrival than the nomads had been. There were some kids watching, sure, but they were chivvied back toward the fields and work abandoned in the excitement.
“The somethings will come,” the hetman said, turning to enter what appeared to be his home.
Chalmers swallowed fears they were being set up and nodded at their guides. “Stay here, please?”
Both guides nodded, though there was something in the woman’s body language Chalmers didn’t like. His tolerance for things he didn’t like had been mightily adjusted by circumstances, so Chalmers ignored the feeling and followed Jackson.
The half-underground lodge was cool after the growing midday heat, and carpets of some beautifully-dyed material softened sound and lent an air of civilization to what would otherwise be a spartan, cave-like dwelling.
The village hetman was a hard-looking fifty-ish. Thinking about it, Chalmers couldn’t recall seeing an older indig, which fit the briefing. Namely, that those locals who didn’t collaborate with R’Bak’s elites lived neither well nor long. The SpinDogs had provided fairly good intel, but it wasn’t updated often enough to give more than deep background and a few points of contact for their area of operations. As Chalmers had reliably found reason after reason to doubt the accuracy of every intelligence briefing he’d ever been party to, he was always on the look-out for those moments when reality matched the brief. Of course, just because the SpinDogs had given the straight dope on the lay of the land didn’t mean they hadn’t spun the shit out of the details.
The hetman likely wasn’t the collaborator they were looking for, since the village seemed too far from any real center of power for it to be worth the cost of buying him.
Distance didn’t mean they were safe, though.
“A lot like Mogadishu,” Chalmers muttered.
Jackson shot him a look, but Chalmers waved him off.
The hetman asked someth
ing too quickly for Chalmers to understand.
“No, not yet,” Jackson’s answer was slow, and far easier to understand than the local’s.
“Not yet what?” Chalmers asked.
“Not here to overthrow the satrap,” Jackson clarified.
Chalmers smiled at the hetman, nodding slowly. “Not yet, anyway. We want to catch—” he sought the word a moment “—spies.”
“No spies here,” the hetman said. His tone was level, but his gaze hardened.
“I’m sure everyone in this village is super happy with leadership,” Chalmers said, in English.
“What does he say, Leader-Of-Ten?” the hetman asked.
Jackson shrugged and lied easily. “He quotes a general.”
The hetman’s suspicious gaze eased.
Chalmers noted the reaction and stored it under useful confirmation of information the SpinDogs provided. Specifically, that the indigs were militant in a way that most of Earth circa 1990 AD had gladly forgotten.
“Did anyone leave town as we came in?” Chalmers asked.
“No one, War Technician,” the hetman said.
Chalmers liked the man’s translation of Warrant Officer into the local lingo and decided not to correct him.
“Did anyone ask to leave, Larn Clarthu?” Jackson asked, glancing at Chalmers.
Smiling and nodding encouragement, Chalmers watched the villager and decided that, even more than before, he was glad Jackson was so much better with languages.
Larn Clarthu didn’t answer directly, but picked up an ancient-looking rifle that had been hiding among the cushions at his knee and stood with a fast, fluid grace. Chalmers dimly recalled that, in R’Bak’s outback, place-names were often taken from the clan that held dominion over them, and a hetman’s title wasn’t hereditary but earned in battle.
“Come,” he said, when he noticed the visitors had not followed suit.
Jackson got up with similar ease and gave a hand to help Chalmers to his feet. As much as the body armor they’d been issued in the Mog made getting up and down a pain in the ass, Chalmers wasn’t about to give up the additional protection it offered.
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