No Man's Land

by James Axler

  He frowned.

  “What’s that?” demanded Captain Randolph Peters, who rode at the colonel’s side. Turnbull had refused to accept the rank of general without a full meeting of the council, although he had agreed to take command of the army.

  The young officer had attached himself to the new supreme commander as aide-de-camp, if not actual second in command. Cody was uncomfortably certain he was there to ride close herd on him on behalf of McCormac and Asaro, even though that pair of plutocrats were riding right behind.

  And for the treacherous temptress Jessie Rae. Cody still couldn’t believe how his sweet-faced angel had played him like a violin. How could she allow this...this callow fool to sully her fair white flesh with his touch? How could she choose him over a gentleman of breeding and proved valor like Cody Turnbull?

  That the blond-headed lady—now baron of Siebertville in her own right—had offered to let him assist the younger officer in...pleasuring her... He cut the thought off midstream. He wouldn’t allow himself to think such things. Much less imagine them. What troubled him most wasn’t the sickness that caused in his stomach, but the even more pronounced effect it had in regions south of there....

  “Looks as if our messenger has met with some accident, Captain,” Turnbull said, stammering a little at the outset. Fortunately the sheer habit of command kicked in and he finished, at least, sounding like a leader of men instead of a blushing schoolboy. “Send a small detachment to investigate, if you will, Captain.”

  Peters’s long yellow locks swung as he twisted in his saddle to shout orders. A quartet of soldiers from the squadron of sec men riding right behind the new commander put spurs to their steeds and galloped past.

  That Oliver Christmas rode at the head of the commanders’ bodyguard didn’t bother Cody much. The sec men were mostly new faces. And even though most of the sec men McCormac and Asaro and their faction had secretly suborned had by sheer bad luck gotten themselves chilled by the mercie coldhearts Al had employed, Cody didn’t worry about the men still loyal to the sec boss, either. Suspect what he might about the sudden demise of Baron Al, Christmas loyally served the office, not the man—as he’d said all along.

  Then again, Cody had few illusions the fat sec boss would protect him against the machinations of Jessie Rae and her cohorts any better than he had her husband.

  He continued to lead the army forward at a sedate walk. Jessie Rae had quit her carriage twice already since the army set forth to ride up on a borrowed mount and harangue him to force the army to go faster. But he had refused point-blank, and McCormac and Asaro backed him up. There was no point getting the men and horses exhausted, to say nothing of getting the horse troopers separated from the plodding infantry. The whole point of the exercise was all to land on the ville where their objective lay in one force, and let Baron Jed or anyone else do what they pleased.

  He was skeptical of this whole treasure thing, at best. What quickened his pulse was the chance to draw Baron Jed to the decisive battle Al’s misguided sense of mercy had denied them. And end the lowland threat once and for all.

  And maybe, he thought, if I truly bring us final victory—and give her vengeance over her sister, unseemly as that may be—Jessie Rae will look with favor on me. And me alone.

  The four horsemen reached the unmoving shape and dismounted a few yards short of it. One held the animals and another stood guard with a Springfield at the ready. The other two went to examine the dead animal.

  “I don’t see the rider,” Peters said. “Where could he have gotten off to?”

  A flash of orange fire enveloped the two men kneeling by the dead horse. Cody caught a glimpse of the sentry being flung like a rag doll into the ditch before a giant cloud of dirty gray smoke hid the scene.

  The horses turned and ran in wild panic back toward their herd—the rest of the cavalry. Somehow the man who was holding them got his arm tangled in the reins and was dragged up the road between the middle two.

  The sharp, flat crack of a detonation hit Cody with such force he actually felt it on his face, like a brief gust of wind.

  The dragged trooper’s shrill shrieks of agony went on and on, gradually getting louder. Until one of the stampeding horses stepped on his head.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Riders come!”

  Seeing the way her own mare pricked up her ears Krysty already knew the animal was sensing other horses even before Jak called his warning. She didn’t know how he’d detected him. Possibly by reading the reaction of his own scrubby horse, although his own senses were almost as sharp as a wild animal’s.

  She grinned at him. “Ready?”

  For answer he sent his mount galloping straight ahead, in the general direction of the Grand Army of the Association.

  Krysty galloped after him. They’d pushed their horses hard to get to this encounter in time to have a hope of doing some good. And they’d need to push the animals harder still to pull it off—and maybe even survive. But there was no help for it. They had to play it this way or not at all.

  No more than a quarter mile ahead horsemen abruptly appeared against the afternoon skyline. First one, then three, then a dozen or more riders. Some of them wore blue shirts, but the fact that they were visibly armed and the direction from which they appeared identified them positively as a Protector patrol, presumably screening the main body from blundering without warning into the Uplander Army. Or marching blithely into another ambush.

  Krysty’s heart raced. There’s not going to be any strike reverse-ambush where we all ride away unscathed here, she thought. The numbers were too great, the enemy too aware.

  So naturally she turned her mare straight toward them and rode at full speed, Jak right alongside.

  While they weren’t the least-distinctive-looking people in the Deathlands, it was unlikely the Protector cavalry could possibly recognize them at this range, even if any of the patrol’s members had glimpsed them during their brief yet eventful stay among Baron Jed’s troops. But weapons came out. Carbines were brandished and a few sabers winked in the sun. While on a hunt for fabled treasure on the edge of enemy territory, the soldiers were inclined to prepare for the worst.

  They didn’t shoot, though. Not that mounted men could muster enough accuracy to hit mounted targets except by lucky accident. The problem was, there were a lot of them, and it wouldn’t take much for their luck to hit, and Krysty’s and Jak’s to go straight south.

  She let the looped reins fall to her horse’s neck and waved her arms. The mare continued to close with the cavalry.

  “Hey!” Krysty shouted. “It’s us you’re looking for! We chilled the baron’s son! Us! Come and get us if you can, you bastards!”

  At her side Jak raised a wolf howl. The sound sent a chill down her back.

  Whether their enemies could understand the words she couldn’t know, but they knew a challenge when they saw it. They reacted the way cavalry troopers naturally would: cotton balls of white smoke puffed suddenly from longblaster muzzles.

  Slowing their mounts, Krysty and Jak wheeled about and headed away. A quick glance over her shoulder showed Krysty that the bluecoats were racing in pursuit. They stopped shooting as some officer or noncom doubtless snarled at them to quit wasting the baron’s good powder and ball, but they began to whoop in the sheer excitement of the chase.

  Leaning well over their horses’ necks, Krysty and Jak led the troopers on a wild chase, but not exactly back the way they had come. Rather, they angled slightly to the northeast. Now all they had to do was keep the Protector cavalry interested—and not die, which might be the tricky part....

  * * *

  “THEY’RE GOING right,” J.B. said.

  The sun was halfway down the western sky. Ricky lay on his belly on the grass beside the Armorer, peering through a tall clump of weeds beside the partly ruined farmhouse.

  Five hundred yards to the southeast, the advancing Uplander column slowed visibly. It wasn’t any great mystery why. The body of
the chilled messenger lay in the middle of the dirt track—right where J.B. and a mystified Ricky had left him.

  The column’s lead riders turned well shy of the corpse and rode along the ditch. It had a couple of inches of water trickling among the weeds at the bottom, as Ricky knew well, since he’d recently been wading in that same ditch, helping the master at his work.

  J.B. had his minisextant out and was using the little telescope he used to shoot the sun when they needed to know where they were. He lowered it and showed a quick, rare smile to Ricky.

  “Watch this.”

  Ricky felt his pulse pick up its beat. He had an idea what was coming, but he didn’t see the flash. Smoke billowed from the ditch, throwing out clumps of dirt and sod. It swallowed at least two riders and their mounts. A third horse following a few paces behind simply fell onto its side in the ditch and lay still.

  On the road horses reared and bucked. The crack of the booby’s blast reached Ricky and J.B.’s lookout, along with the screams of horses. And, more faintly, men.

  Officers were trying to regain control of their troops when an explosion erupted in the far ditch, then two others on the same side.

  As the heavy, hard sounds reached them, J.B. looked thoughtful. Then he shrugged.

  “Four out of five,” he said. “Not too shabby for this kind of work.”

  The multiple blasts—coming from off the road, where the column had gone to avoid what now looked like an obvious trap—had induced complete disorder in the first half of the long column.

  J.B. watched through his minisextant as a figure on a black horse gesticulated with a saber. Troops were dismounting and deploying, gingerly, into the untended fields to either side of the road. Infantry squads came up at the trot, longblasters at port arms. They likewise spread out to the flanks into skirmish lines.

  “Ace on the line,” J.B. said. “The commander’s cautious. He doesn’t know yet whether those were all boobies or somebody’s shooting cannon at them. Mebbe more ambush. It’s that skinny prissy-pants character. Al’s second in command. What’s his name?”

  “Turnbull,” said Ricky. “Cody Turnbull. Colonel.”

  J.B. tucked his minisextant away. “Never would have reckoned he had the sand to make a move on old Al. Then again, I don’t pretend to know how people work.”

  He came up to a crouch and moved back behind the cover of the house. Ricky followed, carrying his longblaster.

  J.B. was untying the horses from the posts that held up the sagging roof of the back porch.

  “More I see of people,” he remarked, “better I like machines. Come on, kid. We’ve done our job here. These fellas won’t sort things out for a good hour. Mebbe two.

  “Time to get back and lend our friends a hand.”

  * * *

  KRYSTY FELT her mare’s strength begin to fail beneath her.

  She and Jak had managed to stay no more than a hundred yards ahead of the pursuing cavalry. Because they’d left their packs with Ryan outside the deserted ville, their mounts were more lightly laden than the Protector horses. But the truth was the cavalrymen were more experienced riders, and just better at getting the most out of their mounts than their two intended victims were.

  Krysty could feel her mare trying to keep up the pace, but her steps were beginning to falter; she could feel it in their rhythm.

  Then Jak, who had pulled ahead, called back over his shoulder, “There!”

  He pointed ahead and to the right. Beyond a deceptively easy rising slope of grass, waving in a stiffening afternoon breeze, rose a brown cloud. Dust.

  Already leaning forward over her saddle horn to reduce drag, Krysty stretched out even farther. “Go, brave girl!” she shouted to the horse. “Just a little farther! Then you can rest.”

  Whether she understood the words or simply the encouragement in her rider’s tone, the mare’s head and ears came up. Her strides neither lengthened nor became faster, but became stronger.

  They reached the top of the rise. There, several hundred yards off to her right, rode the Uplander cavalry vanguard under the green and white banners of the Alliance. Behind trudged what looked to Krysty as their entire army, including their smoothbore artillery on its caissons.

  Well, she thought, since the whole point of this scheme was to get well and truly stuck between the hammer and the anvil...

  She rode straight at the marching army, whose hundreds of blasters made the menace of the relatively small party closing in hungrily on their horses’ tails seem like a mouthful of warm spit.

  At her side Jak gave voice to another uncharacteristically loud and piercing cry. This one was a serious of shrill yips, like a coyote.

  Whether Jak’s call had anything to do with it, Krysty saw a ripple pass through the column. Arms pointed. Soldiers began to unlimber weapons, although few pointed their way yet. A pair of riders was no threat to an army, no matter how crazy they acted. If they acted as if they were really going to charge, a volley could easily vaporize them both before they got close enough even to sting the larger force.

  Then heads seriously began to turn. Krysty heard shouts with frantic notes. Trumpets blared hastily. She glanced back. The pursuing Protector patrol was coming over the low crest no more than fifty yards behind. They reined in their horses so hard they almost stumbled as they got a look at just exactly what they were riding toward.

  The Uplanders, for their part, were getting seriously excited. Infantry had swung about and knelt to present their longblasters. Officers pointed with swords and shouted. Trumpets blew again and what looked like a hundred cavalry with green pennons rode out in a ragged mass. Toward Krysty and Jak.

  “Jak!” she screamed. “Veer off!”

  Now was the crunch time. If the two blood enemies were more excited at the sight of each other than of a pair of random riders—and she doubted any of the Uplanders would recognize them at this distance, even if some of the Protectors may have—they’d have a chance. Otherwise the hammer and the anvil were going to hit, and they’d be like a couple of ripe tomatoes caught between.

  Jak had already turned his horse’s head left and rode hell-bent west, paralleling the road. Krysty’s mare needed little encouragement to follow. Now she did pick up her pace, sensing her mistress’s urgency and fear if not recognizing a threat on her own.

  Krysty heard a few black-powder blasters pop. She winced, bracing her body for impacts. The huge soft-lead slugs moved much slower than the smaller, pointier slugs launched by more modern weapons, but they tended to act like battering rams on human flesh and blood, smashing huge and hideous wound channels through limbs and bodies. While she’d already been aware of the fact, they’d seen plenty of evidence over the past few weeks in the form of mangled chills. And worse, the wounded.

  Next came a rattle of at least semiorganized blasterfire. She didn’t hear so much as feel the moan of a fat bullet passing slower than sound.

  She looked around again. The tails of the Protector patrol’s mounts were just vanishing back over the rise in furious pursuit of Uplander cavalry.

  Nobody seemed to be looking at her and Jak. They just weren’t interested anymore.

  “We can ease off, Jak!” she cried. He was already sitting up straighter and bringing his horse to a trot with gentle pressure on the reins. Krysty did likewise.

  Her mare blew loudly. Her sides were drenched with sweat and quivering.

  “Good girl,” Krysty called. “Now get us back to Ryan, and your work is done!”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Struck by the nail of a strong and well-scarred thumb, the match flared into blue-and-yellow light. By its brief small glow Ryan read the sheet of paper he’d plucked from the cart bed, where it had been nailed next to the twisted and now-stinking corpse of the Upland soldier.

  You have to face me, it read in almost fussily precise cursive. Come with friends and watch them die first, or come and die alone. But you will come and you will die.

  He uttered a grunt. It mig
ht have been a laugh.

  “Nice of you to warn me,” he said quietly. “Never would have worked that out on my own.”

  He had felt no hesitation striking the match. Though the moon wasn’t up, the stars gave some illumination, enough to see him walk openly down from the hill where he’d parted company with his companions. But not enough to read.

  That tiny match flame, flickering its brief life away, would give a blaster as skilled as Snake Eye all the light he needed and more to drop Ryan in his tracks.

  But he wouldn’t.

  His enemy hadn’t set up this whole scenario so he could snipe Ryan down from the shadow of a derelict store. He wanted to savor the moment and he wanted his victim to be looking into his eyes, the human one and the snake one, when he died.

  The mutie mercie wasn’t the only one who understood his enemy loud and clear. He may have spent a lot more time studying the companions than vice versa, but Ryan was a quick study, especially when survival was at stake.

  He whipped the match dead just before the flame reached scarred and callused fingers and flung it down. The bare dirt, pounded so hard by years of feet and hooves and iron-bound wag wheels that it had so far resisted the efforts of rain and temperature to break it down, offered no tinder to risk starting a blaze that might burn the ville down around their objective.

  He surveyed the dark derelict structures, mostly made of wood scraps and other scabbie, that leaned together in the dark like drunken wag-drivers turned out of a gaudy after drinking down their pay. Somewhere in there, he didn’t doubt, his enemy watched. Waiting. Smiling.

  Ryan said nothing. He cared to waste words no more than bullets—or blood. He merely hitched the scoped Scout longblaster on its sling, muzzle down over his left shoulder, and walked into the waiting ville.

  He knew that would send his message to the mercie far louder than any blustering shout: challenge accepted.