It took him less than a minute to retrieve his gear and get moving back to where he’d stored the raft and the rest of his supplies. Moving on foot helped warm him up, and he was running through his next options when the sound of excited voices ahead reached him over the background fireworks of cooked ammunition popping off behind him. He left the trail and froze behind a tree as a glow of light grew beyond the bend in the trail. Moments later, two Kaerin warriors, one carrying a lantern with a directional lens, appeared, moving fast towards what sounded like a firefight at the harbor.
While he could understand the patrol’s need for a light, they might as well have been carrying a neon sign that said “Shoot Me.” His rifle up, he tracked their progress, weighing the pros and cons of dropping them. They might see his trail before the rain could wash it away, and make a report. If they didn’t make it back to report at all, it would raise questions even earlier, shedding extra suspicion on what would hopefully play as a naval accident.
In the end, he let them go past. They passed within fifteen feet of his position. He’d trust his luck that they weren’t looking for signs of any activity on the trail. Stealing a boat to get off the mainland was going to be hard enough without worrying about a manhunt. He waited for a full minute after the glow from their lantern disappeared down the trail before hurrying back to where he’d stashed the raft. There he had what passed for civilian work clothes among Arsolis’s people, complete with the sewn-on patches, lice, and authentic medieval stench. He would bury the raft and everything he didn’t intend to bring with him.
There were several small settlements lining the coast further west. He’d make for one of those and hope he found a boat to steal that wouldn’t be missed. Job one was done. Job two was to get back and hunker down, maybe do some fishing while he waited for Kyle to show up with Doc Jensen’s magic telephone booth to get his ass home. Two weeks ago, the idea of stepping into a medieval setting had been exciting. Right now, nothing sounded so good as a hot shower and food that had started with legs. He’d had his fill of barley gruel, turnips, and fish.
*
Chapter 24
Island of Gotland, Chandra
Audy was developing an appreciation for one of Jake’s sayings that had never made much sense to him. He could hang that label on much of the language of the Edenites, and in fairness, he knew they would say the same of his people. Whatever the origin of the phrase “shit going sideways” was, it seemed a solid fit as he thought back on the last twenty-four hours.
One of the RHIBs had developed engine trouble two hours into their flight westward to the large island of Gotland. In local terms, the island was called Ran’dor, which meant north base in Chandrian. Like the whole of the Chandrian tongue, it was a Kaerin word and, in his mind, illegitimate. The Terran word for the place—Gotland—was as good as any name he could have come up with. Whatever name his people had called the place before the Kaerin had arrived was lost to history.
Running on its remaining outboard, the partially disabled boat had slowed their three-boat convoy. In the wind and rain of the storm that had been blowing out of the west, it had slowed them to the point where another RHIB had run out of fuel, several kamarks short of the small cove on the east coast of the island that they had been shooting for. Towing it the remaining distance had not been easy and had used all but the last of the onboard fuel for the single working RHIB he had. The thirty-person-strong “advance team” he brought wasn’t going to do anything until the rest of his people and supplies arrived on the larger and much slower sailboats captained by Arsolis and his people.
He was standing on the headland that made up one of the arms of rock that formed the small cove, gazing out to sea with binoculars, looking for signs of Arsolis’s ships. The sea was only a darker shade of gray than the low-hanging sky, and he doubted he was going to see anything. He had done what he thought Jake would have done, and transferred all the remaining fuel to a single RHIB. He didn’t dare send it out to act as a guide until he spotted the sailboats and actually knew where it was going.
He wasn’t a sailor; he had no idea how far behind the sailing ships would be. Thinking like the soldier he was, he’d initially climbed the nearest hill, which was nothing more than a small bluff overlooking the landward edge of the cove. The cloud cover had been so low, he had seen less from there than he could from his current position.
He needed the rest of his soldiers. Arsolis hadn’t known how big the Kaerin fort on the other side of the island was, only that it had many buildings, and there were usually two or three large ships anchored in the harbor there. He had made a study of the Terran maps they had brought with them, and he knew the Kaerin fort was very close to what Jake’s people would have called Visby. It made sense; a decent anchorage and sources of fresh water were necessary for any island settlement, on any world. On Chandra, and according to Arsolis the place was called the ‘Holding of Sy’rane’. The fort was Lord Madral’s westernmost outpost.
They’d come ashore on the east coast of the northern half of the island, almost directly opposite the Kaerin fort, which lay on the west coast. Here, the island narrowed in comparison to further south. Audy figured the Kaerin were perhaps as few as ten kamarks directly to the west. It was a distance he or the Kaerin could cover on foot in a few hours. That would have been good news, if he’d had all his people and the supplies they needed. For the moment, it only meant they were that close to being discovered without the numbers to defend themselves. Survival wasn’t the only issue; they needed to take the Kaerin fort without anyone knowing about it.
The sea’s fuzzy horizon blended into the gray clouds, and he dropped the binoculars to his chest. He was beginning to realize that Colonel Pretty and Kyle had been right. They should have moved slower and set up a real base somewhere that did not risk exposure. Jake had been unrelenting in his opinion that the large island of Britain would have served far better. That his Terran friends had acquiesced to Jomra’s plan to investigate the Baltic area was baffling, or would have been, had they not known that Jomra would have sent warriors back regardless, through the natural gates.
It wasn’t just Jomra; most of the Jema were driven by a need to lift the rest of Chandra out of slavery. In realistic terms, that meant providing the other clans here with an example that it could be done. Beyond that, it would mean providing them with the tools to do it themselves. He knew that was the idea that had driven Colonel Pretty’s agreement with Jomra’s plan. Eden needed to create pressure on the Kaerin here, on Chandra, lest they be left free to assault Eden. If he were in their position, it would have been his paramount concern as well. It spoke well of their allies that concerns of the Jema were taken into account. He was not certain his own people would have been so understanding had their roles been reversed.
It was a moot point. Now, there was nothing the Jema would not do for the people of Eden. Eden had pulled Jema heads off the chopping block and then given them an opportunity to earn their freedom. He smiled to himself; and . . . all the headaches that came with it. The opportunity to destroy the Kaerin, as Jake would have put it, was a bonus. He glanced back to the gravel shore of the small cove and saw that the fuel transfer process was still underway. One of the Edenite volunteers, Mullen, was a mechanical genius, and the older man had set up a system to transfer the fuel using a foot pump that had been designed to bail water. The actual hand pump was packed along with their few remaining barrels of fuel on one of Arsolis’s missing ships.
*
“The storm blew us off course.” Arsolis shrugged. “I think we are well south of where we wanted to be.”
Lupe resisted the futile urge to pull out his compad and check their position. The device had a map that he could bring up, but they would still have no idea of where they were. The compad was a repository of knowledge but it was close to useless at the moment without a GPS network. “Can we sail north?”
Arsolis regarded him for a moment with a look that could have been one of contem
plation, or, he could have been thinking this would be a great place to drown one of the troublesome strangers who had turned his life upside down. Lupe glanced at Tama, once again appreciating the fact that she looked nothing like her father.
“With this wind?” Arsolis spit upward into the steady breeze. He and half a dozen crewmen standing close by watched the gobbet of lung cheese arc through the air as if its trajectory would determine their fate. Arsolis gave a nod of appreciation as the wind caught his projectile and whisked it away off the starboard rail.
“Easily,” the old man grunted. “Battling back from wherever it takes us would be a different matter. If we’ve sailed underneath the island, we’d hit it, and could make a course up its coast. If we’ve been blown past the island, and go north, we’ll be up around the pike for weeks, waiting on another blow to bring us back.”
Lupe nodded sagely. Showing signs of confusion around Arsolis would put you in a penalty box you might never escape from. The older man’s explanation almost made sense to him, based on his very limited experience of sailing, which, when he thought about it, consisted entirely of time spent on this very same floating casket.
“Can you long-talk with the Jema?” Tama asked.
“Maybe,” he admitted. Jake had told him to stay off the radio unless it was an emergency. “But he can’t tell us where to go.”
“Why would he not tell us?” Arsolis growled.
Tama saved him. “Because the Jema, Audrin’ochal, does not know where we are, either.”
After a moment of contemplation, Arsolis grunted in acceptance.
“Would you recognize the island if you saw it?” Lupe asked, as he hit on an idea.
Arsolis looked at him like he was crazy. “What do you mean? It’s a large lump of dirt, trees, and rock floating in this sea.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Arsolis’s meaty fist dropped down to his daughter’s eye level. “I know I said I like this one better than that idiot Jakas, but I think they are all crazy.”
“We don’t know their ways.”
Arsolis rolled his eyes. “Girl . . . we know what an island looks like.”
With nothing but Arsolis’s best guess on a direction to go by, Lupe launched the gas-powered drone, and gave himself a mental pat on the back that he’d fueled it up before they’d set out. It looked like a giant model airplane with a pusher propeller in the back end. It was meant to be launched with the help of a man-height slingshot hammered into the ground. He’d hoped the steady wind blowing off the sea would provide the same lift, and it had.
He’d been playing with commercial drones since they’d first come out twenty years earlier. There had been no better tool to track the herds of mule deer, antelope and the occasional bighorn sheep in the Owyhee range that he’d relied on during his on-and-off guide business. More often, the eye in the sky had been even more valuable keeping a lookout for overzealous game wardens during the pheasant or duck seasons. His familiarity with drones had been what had landed him in the Eden militia to begin with. During the fighting on Eden, he’d tracked Strema and acted as a weapons targeter for militia mortar teams and artillery; finding an island should be easy.
Then, he’d had the rudimentary GPS system that they’d orbited around Eden to both orient himself as well as direct the drone. He’d launched the plastic drone, with a wingspan the width of a dining room table, on nothing more than Arsolis’s best guess, pointing to a few degrees off the front bow. That had been ten minutes ago, and he was still looking at nothing but open sea broadcast to the small screen on his controller.
“The machine can see?” Arsolis had moved to stand behind him, where he could watch over his shoulder. The wind coming off the sea wasn’t strong enough to hide the smells of garlic and fish on the man’s breath.
Lupe thought of how to explain how cameras worked, and how an image could be transmitted. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it can.”
“If it goes higher, will it see farther?”
“If I go higher,” he explained, pointing at the sky with his chin, “I won’t be able to see through the clouds.”
“Not you, fool. The machine!”
“I’m controlling the machine.” Lupe did his best to keep his cool. “The machine is me.”
The old man made a strange sound and moved away, mumbling something to himself. Lupe couldn’t help but flash Tama a smile. She was looking at him like he was the hero who had just saved the day. It was an aura of approval that he could bask in, if he didn’t know the drone had only about an hour of fuel left. He’d made the decision to lose the drone in a one-way trip when he’d launched it. There was nowhere he’d be able to land the thing on this tub. Maximizing its range was his best chance to spot the island.
All he had to go on was the direction indicator of where the drone was relative to him. He didn’t even have a distance indicator without a GPS network. What he did have on the remote control was a signal strength indicator, and it had already decreased by about 25 percent. Once the drone lost that signal, it would just circle until it ran out of gas, or until they caught up with it.
He glanced up at the one sail that was stretched tight in a broad billow beyond the smaller forward mast. The two other ships following them in a line were running with reduced sails as well. He figured there was a nautical reason for that, one that he was not about to ask Arsolis for.
He waved Tama closer. “Can you convince your dad that we need to follow the drone as fast as we can?”
“Why? Have you found the island?”
“Not yet, but the faster we go, the longer it can look for us.”
“That makes no sense . . .” Tama’s response wasn’t the knee-jerk reaction that would flow from her father. She was clearly thinking about it.
He held up the remote. “This machine can only talk so far; we can’t let the drone get too far ahead of us.”
Within minutes, following shouts off the stern by Arsolis to the following ship, the crew scrambled in response to the captain’s commands, and additional sails were unfurled. He could feel the old ship bulling its way, rather than cutting through the waves, and could hear the tension in the sail’s rope stays as they turned with the wind. He hoped Arsolis’s dead reckoning guess was close to being right. Wherever they were headed, they were getting there in a hurry.
*
It took him a moment to see what his people were pointing at. When Audy finally spotted the drone, he pumped his fist in victory. Lupe had found them! There was no one else who could be directing it. He didn’t need to worry and send a RHIB out to find them. He watched as the drone circled their cove slowly. It was strange how a piece of technology that he could not have even imagined not very long ago, gave him a sense of relief, perhaps even comfort. Watching the drone circle until his neck started to ache, he wondered if Eden’s technology would over time make the Jema soft, or somehow dull their edge.
Technology was only a part of the force changing his people. He did not think that the process could be stopped or should be. His children, and more so, his children’s children would lead lives centered on something other than slavish devotion to the clan. It would be a gradual change, but one he would welcome. The honor of the clan? It was something that had always existed, and always would to some extent; but it was the Kaerin who had emphasized it above all else. The bastards had used their own honor to fashion chains of control.
He glanced up as the sound from the drone reached him. It had been too high to be heard but was now diving on the camp and flying erratically, waggling its wings. The thought of what he could do with a single one of Colonel Pretty’s A-10s and a pilot crossed his mind. They could fly over the middle of Kaerus and bomb the capital city back to the bricks it was made of. The drone continued flying along the beach, less than a hundred feet off the ground. He knew it had a camera on it, and Lupe was probably watching them now. He stretched out his arm, and extended his thumb.
What was Lupe doing? The drone dove right at
him, causing him to duck before it climbed for altitude back over the water. If Jake had been directing the drone, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Lupe, though . . . the man was quiet and did not seem to be someone who would have done something like that without a reason. He watched as the drone continued to climb before turning back over the beach, dipping again when it neared him, and then disappearing in a straight line headed inland.
He glared off into the direction that the drone had flown. What was Lupe thinking?
Audy started running to rejoin the others as the answer came together in his mind. Hyrika saw him coming; she and her team were standing ready in expectation by the time he slid to a stop in the waterworn gravel of the beach.
Tur’ma had been posted to Sy’rane following his initiation into the fraternity of High Blood warriors three years earlier. As a lowly Kaerin Dadu, he’d had nothing but his ambition and will to succeed. His will had been sufficient; three years was a challenge at a post on an island that was in effect nothing but a massive free-range sheep pen owned by Lord Madral. There was little opportunity to show one’s worth, outside of hunting down the crews of occasional shipwrecked fishing boats and the annual foray across the straight into the northern mountain lands to hunt honorless Creight—those few subjects who had managed to escape their local lord’s grasp in an attempt to make a life outside of Kaerin control.
He’d had the will; he’d worked hard and had risen quickly in rank. He was now the youngest Teark at the Holding of Sy’rane, in command of fifty warriors, and the first of four such fingers posted to the fort. His finger was the knife’s edge of Sy’rane. He had led the assault on the Creight village the winter before, and even his bastelta, Fas’toal, had been forced to acknowledge his and his men’s performance. The recognition had come in the form of a recommendation to send him to Kaerus for the required training to attain the rank of bastelta. He’d been requesting the transfer for a year at that point, and Fas’toal had refused him time and time again. After the raid, and the performance of the men who were now running below his hilltop perch, Fas’toal had agreed. He knew the man didn’t care for his ambition and, at this point in time, just wanted him gone.
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 34
