Rats, Bats and Vats rbav-1

by Eric Flint

  The moon was up, the charges laid, the tank trailer full, the last supper eaten and the waiting hour… done.

  Nym had stalked off in a huff.

  "A-one, a-two…" The tractor began to roll. Glacially, and then more easily. More easily. More easily.

  It was rolling down the hill, picking up speed. Picking up speed.

  Fal was not a happy rat.

  "Whoreson!" he shrieked. "Why isn't it stopping?" The rat had both feet thrust hard down on the pedal. The pedal was flush with the metal.

  "Put the blade down!" shouted Chip, heels dragging as he now tried to hold the tractor back.

  "HOW?" The rat frantically grabbed levers… Pressed pedals.

  Crunch.

  The wheel hit the rock that Nym had rolled in the way. The big rat had picked the biggest he could move. Even so it wasn't a very large rock… she was going over…

  Over the rock… and the tractor stopped. Virginia hadn't tried to stop it by arm-strength. When the tire hit the rock she'd jumped up, and, not knowing what to push or pull, had grabbed the gear lever at the same time that Fal had jumped off.

  A few gear teeth the poorer, the tractor halted.

  " `Trust me,' he said. `There's nothing to it,' he said." Fal's fangs glittered wickedly in the moonlight as he stalked closer to Chip.

  "Look, rat. This is the clutch. This, on the opposite side, where I put you, is the brake," snarled Chip. His own teeth were bared.

  "Look yourself, you-you… tripe-visaged shogging rascal! I tried that one first. Then I tried the one next to it. Then I tried the grab or clutch…" He dug in his pack. Produced a clear-fluid filled half-pint bottle. "Here… Ginny. Do an old rat a favor. Open this screwcap for me."

  "Fine bloody lush that can't even open his own bottle," Chip growled.

  "Methinks you're walking on a thin edge, Connolly. I just wanted to give the lady a drink for saving my tail." Fal's lofty tone was betrayed by a slight shake of the paws that were holding out the bottle.

  Chip snorted. "You're going up in Fal's estimation, Virginia. `Lady,' now. Weren't you a lusty jade earlier?"

  She handed the rat his bottle, ignoring Chip studiously. And, with great ceremony, he passed it back to her. "No. You first. I insist. Have a good belt!"

  ***

  She wished like hell he hadn't insisted. That hasty mouthful made her glasses mist up. Still, it was warming…

  Maybe that was why she was so ready to urge Chip into that saddle. In the moonlight he was dark faced, his features stern and heavy browed… his eyes and gathered eyebrows were ireful now… the book words flowed unbidden into her mind. He wasn't Heathcliff. He was Edward Rochester. How could she have not realized it?

  That made her… Jane Eyre. Well… well. Jane was courageous. Cathy was a wild headstrong child and a tearful emotional adult. He was Edward…

  She took another swallow. But in some ways he was more like Heathcliff…

  ***

  Again, the tractor was rolling down the hill, bats following in its erratic wake. In the stillness of the night she heard Chip swear. But there was still no ignition. She followed the pack down the hill.

  There was a small rise on the downhill road, before it plunged steeply again. The tractor had paused just short of the top. Chip was off and examining it.

  Well…

  Off and kicking it.

  "What's wrong?"

  "In case you hadn't noticed, `lady,' " he snarled, "it hasn't started. And Fal was right. Neither of those two pedals work as a brake. Maybe they're not connected, or maybe they only work when the engine's running."

  He walked around the little tractor, poking and prodding in the eternally hopeful fashion of the nonmechanical. Must be sumkinda magic

  …

  "I'm sure these wheel things should be joined. Attached to this propeller thingy. At least I think so."

  "A fan belt?" offered Virginia

  He snapped his fingers. "That's it. A fan belt! I remember. We broke one when I did that trip to collect coalfish with Dieter. He was our mechanic. He took a pair of panty hose off Alette. Alette cried. She only had the one pair. Um. I don't suppose you have…"

  "They're rather laddered," Virginia said.

  She saw the flash of teeth. "I don't care if they have escalators. Gimme."

  She blushed fiercely. "I, um, I'll go back up and get out of them."

  "Just go around the other side of the tractor," Chip said impatiently. "We haven't got time."

  She could swear she could feel herself bathed in infrared torchlight. Then there was a clatter up behind her, and something fell onto the roadway. She whirled, undergarments in hand, between anger and fright.

  "What the hell do you stupid bastards think you're playing at?" Chip had scrambled halfway up the front cowling. He was wrestling a bottle from the grasp of a portly rat-form. Pistol was trying to help Fal pour liquor into the air filter.

  "We're only giving it a drink, Chip," protested Pistol.

  "Tis true. We just wished to give it something to live for." Fal's ratty voice was full to overflowing with generosity. He pointed at Virginia, who was trapped in Chip's instinctive follow of the headlight. "I mean, isn't that what you're doing?"

  "Methinks it would have preferred a stripshow from another tractor," said Pistol, leering as only a one-eyed rat could leer.

  "Will you dumb, oversexed, drunken bastards get the hell out of here!" snarled Chip.

  "We were only trying to help," they protested, in a mutual chorus of insincere innocence and affront.

  "Did you pour any of this muck into it?" demanded Chip, withholding the bottle.

  "Barely a stoup for a miserly knave," insisted Fal virtuously, reaching for it.

  Chip pondered the matter. The bottle really didn't seem to have much out of it, and he had other things to do besides fight with them. He gave it back. Forgetting that Virginia was there, Chip came hunting the top section of the air filter. Fortunately, she'd finished, and was able to give the metal plate to him, along with her pantyhose. In tight-lipped silence.

  To find the wingnut which had fallen off the top of the air filter took the rats' senses of smell, however. For which arduous self-created labor they extorted another swallow from the bottle.

  ***

  A few minutes later, the makeshift fan belt was in place. Now, they considered another small technical problem. With five yards of slight uphill, Virginia and the combined rat-weight couldn't budge the tractor with Chip on it. It was going to take both of the humans to push it again.

  "Fal! Front and center!"

  "Oh no. Never ever again, Chip! Thou whoreson knave! You can thrust me into base durance and contagious prison first. You can even take away my drink." The portly rat backed off with a surprising turn of speed.

  "I'm sure they're just power-assisted brakes," insisted Chip. He sneaked closer to Fal, cooing: "It'll be fine when the engine is going; all we've got to do is put it in gear as soon as we're over the hill… and I'll jump up and do it."

  "Shog off, Connolly!" Fal was now a good twenty feet away.

  "I'll do it," offered Nym eagerly. "Machines like me."

  Chip snorted. "Oh yeah. Do you think we're stupid, Nym?"

  "No, honest," said the rat. He pointed a stubby foredigit. "All I'll do is stand on that clutch pedal, push the gear lever up, and then jump off the clutch pedal. Nothing to it. Simple mechanical device."

  "That's what he said about the drill press," muttered Pistol darkly.

  Chip tried for other volunteers. "Well, Pistol? Mel? Doll? Will you do it?"

  "Not shogging likely," replied Doll and Pistol in unison.

  "I'll go with Nym," said Melene warily. "And let's take Doc, too. We'll make sure he does the right thing, Chip."

  Chip realized he wasn't going to get any better offers from the rats. And the bats were conspicuous by their silence. Mechanical devices-well, nonexplosive ones, anyway-were a closed book to them. Which they obviously intended to keep closed.<
br />
  ***

  "A-one, a-two, a-threeee…"

  It was a far steeper slope.

  Their panting was drowned in a sudden roar. A flame, fully twenty feet high, leapt out of the air filter. In its sudden stark light Chip saw Melene and Doc clinging for dear life to the steering wheel. The still valley was filled with an over-revved tractor bellow.

  "Told you what it needed was a stoup of good strong drink!" boasted Pistol.

  "To be sure," said Bronstein drily. "And do you think there might possibly be a single Maggot, on the whole southern front, that doesn't know exactly where we are now?"

  Chip was running after the tractor, shouting, oblivious to the danger of alerting the enemy. "Get after them, bats, and tell them to put the brakes on!"

  He and Virginia started gaining on the tractor, which had left the road and was now careering wildly in a drunken madcap fashion. Jumping up onto the back stabilizer, Chip seized the wheel around the clutching paws of the manic Nym. He thrust his foot down on what he had decided was the brake pedal. Hard. Nothing happened.

  He hauled at the mess of hydraulics levers. The blade came down with a clunk and started rectifying the shell damage to the terrain. The tractor still didn't stop. Virginia, panting, jumped up next to him. Belatedly, he thought of taking it out of gear.

  They stood, stationary at last, in the middle of a war-torn field, the tractor still roaring away at full throttle. Chip vainly searched for a stuck accelerator pedal. Whatever that other pedal was, it didn't affect the throttle. Trust them to find a buggered tractor. Oh well. They'd just have to do their best.

  Eamon fluttered out of the darkness. "Maggots!" he shrieked. "Maggots coming fast! Get up that hill and get the trailer."

  Chip pulled wildly at the hydraulic levers again. The blade started to lift the front end of the tractor. Hastily he pushed the other way. The blade came up and the tractor began to roll downhill again. Desperately, Chip tried to thrust it into gear. Remembered the clutch. Tried again and let the clutch out…

  With a jerk that nearly threw them all off, they began their blundering passage back up the hill.

  "Faster!" yelled Nym, bouncing wildly on the tip of the saddle between Chip's legs, endangering Chip's family jewels. Still under the happy delusion he was driving the thing, the big rat was clutching the wheel with one paw, and belaboring the dashboard with a short stick.

  "Faster!" shouted Eamon. "The Maggots are gaining!"

  Chip ignored them all as he grimly hunched in white-knuckled fifteen-mile-an-hour concentration over the wheel. He proceeded up the once elegantly raked and graveled curve of the winery driveway. Doing his bit for aesthetics, he reduced the last three surviving plump-cherub statuette-befouled pillars to eye-pleasing plaster chips as he wove his way back up to the workshop. There he dropped the blade onto the cobbles in a screaming streak of sparks before getting the tractor out of gear.

  He and Ginny leaped down from the still-roaring tractor and began manhandling the loaded trailer up to it. The rats scrambled to help-all except Nym, who stayed on the saddle, shaking the wheel.

  They'd just got the linchpin in, when the bull-throated bellow of the over-revved diesel was muted. Reduced to a throaty chuckling thrub-thrub. Nym stood on the saddle looking as if he'd just burned his paw. "I just… um, pulled that lever."

  "For God's sake, get off there," shouted Chip. "This time you found the throttle. Next time you'll probably blow the whole thing up."

  "Not I!" protested Nym. Smugly: "Just as I said. Methinks I'm a natural with machines."

  Chip's bellow showed he was sergeant-major material in one way at least. "GET down here! Give us a hand with this drive shaft. We've got to move!"

  Ten seconds later, they'd figured out that it couldn't be done, short of losing fingers. "We'll just tie the trailer end of the drive shaft out of the way! We don't have time. There must be a way of stopping it turning-but I don't know how!" Chip's voice was sounding a tad desperate, even to him.

  "I'll find out," said Nym serenely.

  "No you won't!" snapped Eamon. "Tie it up and out of the way. We'll go and arm the mines."

  Half a minute later it was done. And not half a minute too soon. A huge mass of Maggots was streaming up the hill from three sides, dark in the moonlight, except where the light flashed off snapping chelicerae.

  "Okay, chilluns! All aboard the Maggotdom Midnight Express!" yelled Chip, caught up in the manic-ness of it all. "Grab your toys and let's go go GO!"

  "Where is Fluff?" cried Virginia. "And where is the Professor?"

  "Never fear! I am here!" The galago stood rampant in the moonlight on the trailer-top. Head back in a noble pose, he beat on his chest with tiny fists.

  "Where the Professor, Fluff?"

  Chip would have shouted "leave the stupid bastard," except he knew by now the others cherished stinky-prickles. The rats and bats fanned out, searching and calling. Chip followed his instincts to the cellar, with a piece of cargo netting. The Korozhet was lurking behind the farthest vat.

  "You must flee, human. The enemy approaches," said the Korozhet.

  "Come on," cooed Chip. "We have the tractor waiting."

  "No, no. I will just delay you." The Korozhet retreated farther into the corner, rattling spines at him.

  "It's all right. I've got a wonderful safe hideaway for you, Crotchet. We must look after you. Come." He quietly laid down the piece of netting. It was dim down here, and he'd noticed that the Crotchet wasn't very good at spotting obstacles in the dark. The Pricklepuss came wandering out of its dark corner. When it was half out and on top of the net Chip flipped the other side over it. Virginia, Siobhan and Melene came running in as he caught the corners.

  "Chip," Virginia yelled, as she tripped down the stairs, "the bats have mined this place! It is going to blow sky-high in less than four minutes. We've got to find the Professor and get out of here."

  "Grab a couple of corners," said Chip. "I've just arranged transportation for your Pricklepuss. Hey, Pricklepuss?"

  The Korozhet seemed to be undergoing a sudden change of heart. "Indeed, Miss Virginia! Let us flee!"

  ***

  The Crotchet was tied to the trailer like a bag of onions. Chip thought it an excellent place for him. And then the first Maggots came spilling into the yard. Bats dived into the attack as the tractor took the only open way out-back into the shed…

  "Heads down!" shouted Chip, thrusting the tractor into second gear and pushing open the throttle. They took off with a wild jerk and sway, bouncing off most of the contents of the shed before crashing into the corrugated iron wall in the back. In a terrible, tearing din, the wall shrieked off its rivets and clattered aside.

  They were out, free, and into the open. The tractor switchbacked down the hill through the barren fields as Chip kept frantically overcorrecting his overcorrections.

  "That was a brilliant idea," shouted Virginia above the engine roar. "Going through the shed like that."

  Chip didn't realize that it wasn't sarcasm. "Yeah. Sorry. Didn't realize how much space it took to turn the thing."

  "I thought you knew how to drive one of these?" demanded Nym, from where he clung to the saddle.

  "Um. In theory, yes. I've driven something similar."

  "What?" demanded the rat.

  They swerved erratically around a huge boulder.

  "A delivery truck. Hold tight!"

  They bumped and swayed wildly down the cut to the roadway. For an ugly moment the tractor's balance clung… narrowly. Then they were down on the road. "And how much driving did you do?" demanded Nym, terrier-like.

  Chip's grin gleamed in the moonlight. "I reversed it up the garage ramp. Went over the edge. Cracked the sump. Dieter never let me drive it again. Hold tight again. I'm going to try another gear. There is a half a sea of Maggots coming down that hill after us!"

  In a cloud of dust and bats, the tractor and its trailer bumped, surged and swayed erratically down the road.

  The hil
ltop behind them erupted. Melene, perched on Virginia's shoulder, blew a raspberry at the Maggots. Fal, perched on a cushion of insecticide-filled condoms, blew a raspberry at the tractor.

  Action; reaction. Fal's sharp claws punctured one of the containers. A cloud of insecticide enveloped him and the road behind.

  "Why I-never use-the damn things!" he coughed. "Can't be trusted!"

  Eric Flint

  Rats, Bats amp; Vats

  Chapter 24:

  A sign from above.

  IN HIS SMALL DINGY basement office, Major Conrad Fitzhugh sat staring gloomily at his desk. On one side was a tottering pile of book-disks, and on the other the pile of new grim paper reports from the front. As usual he was working late.

  The military history and strategy book pile told him they were doomed to lose this war. Fitzhugh had known that from first-hand observation, even without the terrible confirmation hidden in the nondescript report language of the paper stack.

  He hadn't really needed to read the books. What the book pile told him was that high command's strategy was outdated and ridiculous. Even twenty-five hundred years ago Sun Tzu had established more sensible premises. The other thing the book pile had shown him was that, historically, the military had made just these same mistakes time after time.

  In particular, the descriptions of Earth's First World War were eerily familiar. But Harmony And Reason just didn't have the manpower, not even with rat and bat troops, to slug it out with the Magh' as the damn Korozhet advised.

  And it seemed things weren't about to change. When Shaw had been killed, Fitzhugh had been sure things would get better at last. He'd thought that without Shaw and his cronyism they'd surely get a new General Staff.

  Hah. How wrong could he have been? The next tier of major Shareholders was now bickering about sharing out the spoils. This war was just something to profit from. Didn't the stupid bastards see this was the road to perdition? As for the General Staff… Well, they might get a new overall commander, but Carrot-up had been doing his scurrying and brown-nosing too well. He looked set to rise.