The horsemen drew up in a rough line, a sort of half-circle centered on the small plot being ditched. The marines in the plot had lowered their hoes, and their hands rested by the butts of their sidearms.
The man in the purple cloak reined up well short of Ryba, inclined his head, and declaimed something.
“Not good,” whispered Nylan. “They know she’s in charge.”
Ryba inclined her head slightly, then, without turning her head, asked, “What did he say?”
“The general idea is that we don’t belong here.”
“I could tell that myself,” snapped Ryba, her eyes still fixed on the man in purple.
The leader of the locals added a few more words, the last ending in what seemed a partial snarl.
Ryba looked back at him, then responded in an even tone. “I suggest you do the same to yourself.”
Purple cloak drew the big hand - and - a - half sword, holding it at the ready.
“Now what do you suggest?” asked Ryba.
“Put one of those Sybran blades through him and run like hell from the guy in white,” suggested Nylan.
“I’m afraid we can’t recognize your authority.” Ryba’s voice was almost musical.
Another sentence followed from the local’s leader, and he gestured toward the heavens overhead.
Nylan pursed his lips. Did the locals know they had come from space?
“Returning to where we came from is clearly impossible,” Ryba responded.
The sword jabbed skyward again.
“No.”
The purple-cloaked man barked a command. The sword swept toward Ryba as he spurred his horse forward, as did the other horsemen.
“Fire at will!” yelled Ryba.
Even before the local’s heavy blade was within a body length of Ryba, the purple-clad rider was sagging from the big horse, a length of Sybran steel protruding from his chest.
The other horsemen continued to charge whoever happened to be close, blades out and looking for targets, maintaining a rough double-line formation. Only the man in white held back, his eyes scanning the meadow area.
Crack, crack, crack, crack… Even the first staccato impacts of the marine slug-throwers that echoed across the high meadow hurled nearly a dozen armsmen from their mounts. One of the purple banners fluttered to the ground.
The others ignored the sounds and rode toward the handful of marines in the open.
Crack! Crack! Crack! More slug-throwers discharged, and more horsemen tumbled, their frozen faces wearing expressions of disbelief.
Nylan aimed at the man in white. Crack!
Nothing happened, but the engineer had the feeling that somehow the ceramic composite shell had fragmented before it reached the target.
Crack!
With a long and dramatic-sounding set of phrases, the man in the white tunic and trousers raised his right hand and gestured.
Ryba dove behind the nearest boulder, and Nylan ducked. The two of them jammed together.
Whhssttt! The firebolt seemed to bounce off the rock, flared over the half-hoed field, and smashed across the side of the nearest lander. White ashes cascaded onto the meadow. Where the firebolt had struck was a gouge in the dark tiles that showed metal beneath.
“Frig…” muttered Ryba. “Personal laser! Can’t believe it.”
Whhhsssttt!
Another firebolt flared above them, gouging a line of fire through the meadow clover.
Whhhssstt!
Crack! Ryba’s shot also failed to reach the man in white.
“That’s no laser.” Nylan peered over the edge of the boulder, then frowned. The man in white was gone, although Nylan thought he could feel someone riding up the hill. More feelings that seemed to be correct, and that bothered the engineer.
“Where did he go?” snapped Ryba.
“Forget him!”
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Nylan lifted the slug-thrower as two horsemen, low in the saddle, swept around the end of the rocks and headed toward them.
Both the captain and the engineer fired again.
Crack! Crack! Crack! When the hammer came down on the empty chamber, Nylan scrambled to the other side of the rock, emerging a moment later. His mouth dropped open as he saw Ryba on one of the horses, chasing down, and slicing open one of the hapless armsmen, and then another.
“Get the damned horses!” yelled Ryba before she rode uphill after a fleeing mount.
Nylan looked at the nearby horse, then flung himself behind the boulder as another horseman galloped toward him.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The slugs whistled over Nylan’s head, and one of Saryn’s shots dropped the horseman.
“You’d better reload!” suggested Saryn.
“Thanks!” Nylan, crouching behind the boulder, fumbled the second and last clip into the slug-thrower. He hoped the marines had more firepower. He also hoped they were better shots than he’d proved to be.
When he scrambled up, there were no horsemen nearby, just the mount of the man Saryn had dropped. Nylan, ignoring his apprehensions about grabbing onto anything ten times his size, grasped the reins of the nearby mount, which promptly reared. “Now… now…” He tried to be reassuring, but the horse reared again, nearly dragging him off his feet before it settled down.
Whhheeeee… eeeee… eeee…
“I don’t like it any better than you do, fellow, lady, whatever you are.” Horses? What was he doing hanging on to horses on an impossible planet? He tried not to shiver and concentrated on calming the horse.
Slowly, somehow, he managed, even as he looked across the meadow. He swallowed. From what he could see, there were large numbers of bodies strewn almost at random. Three of them, beyond the plot, wore shipsuits.
Absently, Nylan patted the neck of the horse.
Wheee… eeee…
He glared at the beast that towered over him, and, surprisingly, the animal seemed to whimper. Patting the animal’s neck, he added, “Just take it easy.”
His eyes flicked across the meadow, then toward the top of the hill where Ryba had reined up.
“They’re gone, frig it!”
Nylan led the horse toward the lander shells and the half-grubbed and ditched plot, not quite sure what to do with the animal. At the least, he needed to find someplace to tether it. Several marines were working over two angel bodies as he led the horse toward the nearest lander, where, absently, he tied the reins around an internal door loop. No one was going to be closing the door anytime soon.
Then he hurried through the fallen horsemen. One moaned as Nylan passed. He looked down at the hole in the man’s abdomen, and his guts twisted at the blood. The man moaned again. Nylan knelt. There wasn’t much he could do.
The soldier muttered something, blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. Had he fractured ribs in his fall from the horse? The man’s hand clutched Nylan’s, and he muttered, “Nerysa… Nerysa…”
His hand loosened, as did his jaw.
Nylan closed the dead man’s eyes and slowly stood. Then he walked toward the group between the end lander and the plot where three gathered around a prone figure in a ship-suit.
“It’s no use.” One of the marines sat back and wiped her forehead.
The unmoving figure was that of the junior officer- Mertin. Above sightless eyes and streams of dried and drying blood, his forehead looked slightly lopsided.
The marine stood. “Those blades are more like iron crowbars. Not much edge. Damned sword caved in his temple. He just stood there and shot, never ducked He got about four of them.”
Nylan looked toward the other grouping. “Who’s that?”
“Kyseen, I think. Mangled leg. Three of them hit her at once. She got two. The third got her with his horse. She still got him.”
Nylan shook his head. The entire fight still seemed both horribly real and terribly unreal.
From what he could tell, several other marines were also down.
From the hillside above
, Ryba rode downhill, leading three more riderless mounts. More to the west, another marine and Gerlich were on horseback, trying to corner several more of the riderless horses. Nylan counted nearly a score of mounts being held, tethered, or chased.
Nylan glanced back toward Kyseen.
“Dumb bastard!”
Since she sounded as though she had a chance for recovery, and since he was certainly no medtech, he walked back toward the uphill side of the lander shells where Ryba was directing the construction of something where the horses could be tethered.
“Nylan!” ordered Ryba. “Get a couple of marines and check the bodies. Those that aren’t too badly wounded we’ll try to save for information. Gather all the weapons, anything valuable, and have your detail bury the rest deep enough that scavengers, or whatever they have here, won’t get them. Keep any cloaks or jackets or armor or boots-if they’re in good condition.”
Nylan nodded. While he didn’t like the idea, he understood the need.
“Don’t bury any of the dead horses yet.” Ryba made a sour face. “Maybe we can butcher some and stretch out the concentrates.”
Nylan frowned. Horse meat? Maybe it would be better than concentrates, but he had his doubts. To stop thinking about that, he asked, “Who got away besides the fellow in white?”
“Maybe a half dozen. One or two were wounded, I think.” Ryba turned her mount toward the end of the meadow where Gerlich lurched in the saddle as his mount nearly carried him into an overhanging pine branch. “Use your legs, Gerlich, and your head!”
Nylan pointed to the three nearest marines. “You, you, and you-we’re the scavenger - and - burial detail.” He saw Huldran. “You too, Huldran. We’ll start up by the rocks and sweep down. Carry the bodies to the lower end of the meadow, near the drop-off.” He gestured.
“That’s a long ways,” pointed out a tall woman, who, like him, had come out of the mysterious underjump with silver hair.
Nylan tried to remember her name. Was it Llysette?
“Llysette, it’s downhill-”
“It’s Llyselle, ser.”
“Sorry. In any case, Llyselle, it is downhill and away from the water, and it’s going to be hard to bury them deep enough to get rid of the smell. There are rocks there, for a cairn, if necessary.”
“Yes, ser.” The four gave him resigned looks.
“Why don’t we just drop them over the cliff?” asked Huldran.
“That would probably just cause more trouble with the locals, and we don’t need that.”
“How would they know?”
Nylan shrugged. “I don’t know, but they’ve got something-call it technology, call it magic. They knew Ryba was our leader, and they knew we came from space or the local equivalent.”
“Great…” mumbled one of the other marines.
“Stow it, Berlig,” said Huldran tiredly. ‘The engineer’s usually been right, and these days that counts for a lot. Let’s get on with it.“
‘Take any weapons, knives, any gadgets or coins. Jewelry, too,“ added Nylan. ”The more we find, the more we might be able to figure out about these people.“
The sun had dropped behind the mountain peaks by the time Ryba, Gerlich, and their work crew had completed a makeshift corral for the captured mounts and by the time a large cairn and five individual graves had been completed and filled in the southwestern corner of the open area, just beyond the end of the meadow and less than two dozen steps from the beginning of the drop-off.
Saryn was by the cook-fire area, making an attempt to butcher a dead horse. Nylan shook his head, but kept walking toward the stream. He needed to get the blood and grime off himself, if he could.
Not much more than an eight-day and already five were dead-Mertin and four marines. Then, again, reflected the engineer, without the combat-trained marines and Ryba, things would have been worse, much worse.
Nylan bent down and washed the rock dust and dirt from his hands in the narrow stream. Then he walked back toward the lander where they had stockpiled the plunder, such as it was, from the corpses. They had gathered nearly three dozen of the heavy iron blades that scarcely seemed sharp enough to hack wood. After thinking about Ryba’s Sybran blade and how she had sheared right through the local plate and chain mail, Nylan shook his head.
He neared the lander, and Ayrlyn, who stood by the single remaining local. The man half sat, half lay almost against the side of the end lander on a thin tarp. The pale green eyes surveyed Nylan, and the man spoke.
Nylan almost caught the words.
“He’s asking if you’re the only true man here,” said Ayrlyn from his elbow. “He wants to give you his sword. Or he would if he still had it.”
“Honor concept, I suppose.”
“Only men have honor here? Are we in trouble!” snorted the former comm officer. Her brown eyes flashed that impossible shade of blue.
“If I take his sword, I’m responsible for him, I suppose.”
“Something like that, I’d guess.”
“Does that mean he gives his word not to escape, or is it meaningless nonsense?” Nylan’s voice was hoarse, tired.
“Who would know?”
Nylan stared at the local. “I’ll take his moral sword, or whatever. Tell him that if he breaks his word, he’ll wish no one in his family had ever been born.” Nylan was tired. Tired and angry, and he just wished that things hadn’t degenerated into slaughter so quickly.
Even before the flame-haired comm officer started to speak, the man paled, and words tumbled from his lips.
Ayrlyn looked sideways at the engineer. “For a moment, I thought you almost glowed.” She shook her head, and fires seemed to shimmer in her hair. “Whatever you did, he claims you’re his liege. His name is Narliat.” She lowered her voice. “You did something that scared the living darkness out of him. He called you master or mage, something like that.”
Nylan rubbed his forehead. “This place makes me feel strange. It’s almost like being on the net, except it’s not.” He almost could understand the man’s words, and the language was somehow familiar, but not quite. He kept rubbing his forehead.
Ayrlyn looked at him. “It is strange. I’ve had a couple of flashes like that, except it’s more as though I could feel the trees or the grass.” She glanced around nervously. “I’m not crazy. I’m not.”
“We’re probably just tired.” Nylan looked at the prisoner. “Now what?”
“Tell him to stay here, and he will.”
Nylan did, and Ayrlyn repeated the words. Narliat bowed his head.
The two angels walked toward the cook fire where Ryba waited. Nylan glanced to the rocky outcropping where a pair of sentries were outlined against the twilit sky.
The captain turned her head. “How many in the cairn?”
“Forty-three.”
“Forty-three? That many?” burst out Kyseen from the litter by the fire.
“That few,” said Ryba. “There were almost sixty, I think. Probably another three or four were wounded. They’ll probably die, if the locals’ medical care matches their weapons. That means almost a dozen escaped.”
“Killing two thirds of an attacking force sounds pretty good,” pointed out Saryn.
“I’m more worried about the one in white,” mused Nylan. “It wasn’t a laser, but he had a lot of power.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Whatever weapon he used burned right through the lander’s ablative tiles like they weren’t there-until it got to the thin steel undershell. That’s not a laser. The ablative tiles would have stopped even a small weapons laser.” Saryn winced as she shifted her position on the stone.
“Call it magic,” suggested Nylan.
“Magic?” Ryba’s eyebrows lifted.
“There’s something here like a neuronet-”
“You think this is all imagination? That we’re really trapped in the Winterlance’s net?”
“Oh, frig…” muttered Gerlich.
“No. There are too many independent variab
les for a net to handle, especially the interactions and apparent actions between individual personalities. Also, there’s a feel about the net,” explained Nylan. “It’s not here.”
“Thus speaks the engineer.” Gerlich’s tone was openly sarcastic.
Nylan ignored it.
“What do you think of the local swords?” Nylan asked Ryba. “You’re the only one with any experience, I think.”
“Not quite,” said Gerlich. “I did club fencing for a while.”
“So did I,” added another voice. “Sers…”
Nylan looked at the wiry silver-haired marine.
“I’m Istril,” the marine explained apologetically.
“That’s a help,” said Ryba slowly. “You’re all going to have to use blades, I think, before the year is out, anyway. Maybe sooner. Unless we can manufacture bows and learn archery.”
“Why…” started a voice farther back in the twilight. “Oh… sorry.”
“Exactly. Fierral took inventory. That little firefight cost us nearly three hundred rounds. That’s actually pretty good. One in nine shells counted. Except we only have about six hundred rounds left. That’s maybe two battles like we just went through.” Ryba bowed to the marine force leader. “Without the marines, we’d all be dead or slaves.”
Ryba turned to Nylan. “I fear you were correct, Ser Engineer, about the need for a defensive emplacement, a tower.”
Nylan nodded. “You never answered the question about blades.”
“Most of their blades are hatchet-edged crowbars. That hand - and - a - half blade the leader carried is a fair piece of work, and so was one other thing like a sabre. Why did you ask?” Ryba smiled tightly. “You don’t ask questions, ser, unless you know the answer.”
“I saw what your blade did to the local leader,” Nylan replied honestly. “I just wondered what the comparisons were.”
“If we could find blades like mine, it would give us an advantage-not so much as slug-throwers-but I don’t see those for a long, long time to come.”
Neither did Nylan.
“But,” continued the captain, “I don’t know how we could find or forge blades like mine.”
Nylan frowned, then pursed his lips. Was there any way? He shook his head.
“What about the language?” Ryba turned to Ayrlyn.
Fall of Angels Page 5
