No Man's Land (13 page)

Suddenly his head snapped forward. He sprawled on his face on the camp road, which fairly constant resurfacing with gravel couldn’t keep the far more constant wag wheels from wearing ruts into. He fell gracelessly atop his blaster and lay still.

For a moment Private Reiser just stared down at his buddy with his mouth hanging open. Even without the stupefying shock of the bomb blast to knock him double-stupe, he would’ve had a hard time assimilating that twist of events. For all the carillon going off yet in his ears, he knew he’d have heard a blaster going off nearby.

Haldeman’s kepi had fallen off, and in the lantern light there was no missing the big round hole, dark and oozing darkly shining fluid, in the back of the veteran’s close-cropped head.

Reiser wasn’t that stunned. Whether he’d heard it or not, somebody’d just blasted his buddy in the brainpan. He ran, stumbling, down the short block to the corner of a dark warehouse, around into the narrow space between it and a carriage shop. A terrible sight stopped him dead.

A ghost stood there—or somebody as white as one, with white hair hanging almost to the shoulders of a jacket that glittered strangely in the flame light. Somebody small enough to be taken for a kid stared at Reiser with eyes that showed unmistakably the color of blood.

His eyes traveled down and they took in the big bowie knife jutting from a chalk-white hand, its deep-belled blade dripping blood, and the body lying facedown by the intruder’s feet.

They looked at each other.

“Run,” the stranger ordered.

Reiser ran.

Chapter Fifteen

Baron Al staggered into his quarters upstairs at the Lenkmans’ house. He was way more intoxicated by fatigue than he was the booze he’d taken on board during the course of the evening—even the extra bottle of what claimed to be scabbied Jack Daniel’s Black he’d sucked down after another screaming fight with Jessie Rae at dinner led to her storming out to spend the night with some of her officers’-wives pals camped under canvas on the house’s grounds.

So he was expecting to be alone when he entered his bedroom. It wasn’t that unusual an experience, anyway. Jessie Rae didn’t much care to pass the night in the same bed with her husband these days. Said his snoring and tossing and turning made it hard to sleep.

Come to that, she didn’t spend much time in his bed with him for other purposes, either. But that was a situation that would have to wait for peace to get addressed. Like so many others.

It took him three tries to light the kerosene lamp on the chest of drawers just inside the bedroom door with his pocket striker. He scorched his right thumb in the process. Jessie Rae would have scolded him. He had orderlies to do such menial tasks for him, to say nothing of the Lenkmans. But he thought damned little of a grown man who couldn’t tuck his own broad ass away to sleep at night. How could he manage a ville, much less an army, if he couldn’t keep his own house in order?

Of course, that thought might raise certain questions in relation to his wife, which he would try to keep from his mind this night, thank you very much. He needed to sleep so he could address what seemed like the whole new world of problems the morning would dump on his doorstep.

He turned...and stopped dead, his blood temperature dropping like a stone.

It took him a moment to recognize the lone intruder sitting in his chair as the one-eyed boss of the gang of mercies he’d hired on to do commando-style dirty work against the Protectors. When it did, the fact little reassured him. The man was clearly a coldheart.

And the very nature of mercies was that their loyalty—and their blasters—were available to hire.

“Back away off the trigger, Baron,” Ryan said quietly. “You and me need to talk. Man-to-man—and in private.”

* * *

“R
AD
-
BLAST
IT
!” Baron Jed screamed. “Rad-blast all of them. And rad-blast all of you triple-stupe bastards for letting them make idiots of us time and again!”

At some level Jed Kylie knew he was out of control, but he’d been working up a good head of rage recently. The fact that this night’s vigil had been a time of growing anticipation of the best of news—not just that the marauders who’d been such a burr in the bunghole of his Grand Army had at last been zeroed out, but that the murderers of his poor dear boy had been brought to justice.

If he struck real luck, some of them would even be captured alive, and dragged back here to face the most protracted and painful retribution his fevered yet fertile mind could devise.

Instead it had all turned into a chamber pot full of fermenting shit. As their spy in Baron Al’s camp reported, the raiders had struck Fort Thor, their key transhipment point for supplies dragged up the river from Hugoville. Only the reported infiltration attack hadn’t been a Trojan horse—
that,
they expected—but a trap of a different sort.

The hijacked wag had contained full barrels of powder, cunningly covered in percussion caps, apparently held to the outsides of staves with windings of cloth, so that incoming bullets would set the whole thing off in one gigantic blast. It had wiped out a quarter of the elite cavalry troop he’d had waiting to ambush the raiders.

Worse, because he could get more men to fire blasters for him far more easily than he could the powder to make them blast, the concealed bomb had served as a diversion. While all eyes were on the front of the camp, a handful of coldhearts had slipped in the back, chilled the sec men who got in the way and blown up a whole warehouse full of gunpowder. A couple nearby warehouses had been flattened in the process, torching or scattering everything from replacement uniforms to a week’s supply of hardtack.

The glorious anticipated success had turned into the worst setback yet. Worse than the whole Uplander Army had managed to hand the Association in open battle in a generation, in ways.

Hours after receiving the news, and the sun not yet daring to show its red eye on the baron’s righteous wrath, Jed was still pacing his headquarters tent raging at subordinates. His fury wasn’t near played out yet.

The only reason he wasn’t having somebody tortured to death in front of him for allowing this whole colossal screw-up to happen was that he couldn’t settle on who he blamed
most
. Though Jed was sorely tempted to hang the collar on that pallid scar-faced sec boss of his. Colonel Toth was looking even paler than usual, his seam scar nearly blue-white, and he kept half murmuring, half hissing excuses that masqueraded as factual observations in a way that was actually stoking his baron’s nuke-red anger.

But the bloodless sec boss was useful. Not even in the throes of his tantrum did Jed lose sight of
that
. And also both the sec boss and his master had taken certain measures to secure themselves against each other. It was a sort of mutual assured destruction arrangement. Even though Jed Kylie wasn’t a man to accumulate useless knowledge for its own sake, he was well aware how
that
turned out for the U.S. and its rival, the Soviets, back in the day.

“I’ve dispatched men to detain the commander of Fort Thor,” Toth said. “Perhaps when he arrives you can find...
satisfaction
grilling him.”

Jed’s brows pressed down so hard in a frown he was hardly able to see out his own eyes, which he was well aware were on the squinting side to begin with. Major Gray Linds was the officer commanding Fort Thor. He was also a major Association landowner, a baron in his own right and one of Jed’s key supporters. It was why he’d pulled such an ace billet.

What Jed wanted to do was turn around and rip his sec boss a new one for suggesting Jed scapegoat a man he could no more afford to alienate than he could Cody himself, a fact the too-elegant colonel was well aware of. But no matter how tempestuous his nature Jed Kylie never quite let himself lose control of it altogether. That part of him that kept him alive in spite of the inevitable intrigue among the wealthy and powerful Association—the landowners, rich merchants and arguable barons being the only ones who counted a spent, bent casing, after all—reminded him now he couldn’t really afford to blurt anything about his reasons for not stepping too hard on Lind’s neck, either.

Toth was far from imperceptive. His own watery blue eyes widened slightly at the laserlike focus of his baron’s fury. Impossibly his face got even whiter.

Then a junior officer appeared at his elbow. He whispered something into the colonel’s ear.

Jed prepared to unload the full force of his fury on this subordinate. The protection Toth had secured for himself didn’t extend to his flunkies. And Jed, whose sec staff wasn’t so vast he didn’t know at least a bit about all its members, was aware this particular man came from a very modest family of little consequence—scarcely better than a tenant himself. There was very little downside to scapegoating him.

But even as he pried open his trapdoor lips to pronounce doom on the junior officer, Jed noticed some color had returned to Toth’s gaunt cheeks. That checked him at least momentarily.

Which was enough for the colonel, now smooth as oil on raw sewage, to say in a much more assertive tone than he’d been using previously, “Baron, I’ve been informed we have a visitor from the Uplanders’ camp. I think you’ll want to hear what he has to say at once.”

For a moment Jed glowered at his subordinate. He twitched the hot glare briefly to the junior officer, who gratifyingly seemed on the verge of bursting into flame from sheer horror. Then he fixed it rigidly on Toth, who bore up unwilting; he was used to it.

What are you trying to pull now, you sneaky little shit? Jed thought. But he said, “Bring him on.”

Even in advance of Toth’s imperious wave the subordinate scampered out. An eyeblink later he came back squiring a plump brown-bearded figure wearing a uniform turned inside out.

Baron Jed couldn’t help it. He burst into laughter. He knew why his spy had done it—to prevent any random Protector patrols he encountered in no-man’s-land from blasting him on sight, to say nothing of main camp guards whose trigger fingers were understandably most itchy after the night’s escapades. But the fact he had literally turned his coat was just too much for the baron to keep his composure.

If he couldn’t find outlet for his rage any other way, he’d laugh his fool head off like a hyena. He was the nuking baron, after all.

The major was a man who managed to appear mousy despite his portliness, a chubby mouse, mebbe. His brown eyes widened at his baron’s outburst.

But Toth, having given his master a few moments until the edge of hysteria came off his laughter, smiled thinly.

“You might wish to wait to laugh until you hear what our Major Bear has to say, General,” he said.

Jed choked the laughter right off. “Tell me,” he snapped, all business.

Bear’s Adam’s apple rode up and down beneath his beard in a convulsive swallow. He nodded.

“It’s Baron Al,” he said. “He’s...out of it.”

“Wait,” Jed said. “What? What do you mean ‘out of it’?”

“Incapacitated,” the spy said. “Mebbe dead, even. Nobody knows. It’s all rumor now.”

“What do you actually know, then, Major?” Jed asked, in tones that could have left the spy, already quaking, in no doubt that he was on thin ice.

“What I saw with my own eyes, Baron,” Bear said. “When Cawdor and the others got back from their raid on Fort Thor, he got to partying hearty. You know how Al is, Baron. He started whooping and hollering and slamming the booze straight from the bottle.

“Until he stiffened like he got a ’lectric shock. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell straight down like he’d taken a ball to the back of the head. Was all thrashing and foaming in his beard when a bunch of staff monkeys carried him out. And since then the whole command structure of the Uplander Army’s gone to shit.

“Nobody knows which end is up or who’s in charge. It’s total chaos, Baron. Total chaos!”

Jed stared at him for a moment, then looked around at the cloud of anxious officers hovering around him.

“Mobilize the army,” he said. “Get everyone who can hoist a blaster up on his pins and be ready to march. Get the artillery and the supply wags hitched up and rolling north. Get the cavalry out screening them. The foot sloggers can march past them if they get rolling first.”

“What are you doing, Baron?” Toth demanded in something like alarm.

“Putting an end to this war once and for fucking all,” he said. “We’ll smash the Uplanders so bad we can reclaim what the bastards stole from my granddaddy.

“Action this day, gentlemen! We march to final victory.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Quo vadis, domine?”

Jed Kylie looked in frank irritation at Snake Eye, who had without ceremony—much less permission—just taken his place riding his gleaming black gelding flank-to-flank with the baron’s chestnut stallion in the very midst of his cortege. The baron of Hugoville rode at the head of the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, although he had a cavalry troop out scouting the way ahead.

“I’m not even gonna ask how you managed to get past all the aides and sec men who are supposed to keep the rabble away from my skinny august ass,” Kylie said. “But I will ask what the glowing night shit that was you asked me?”

“It meant, ‘Whither goest thou, Lord,’” Snake Eye said. “A classical allusion. A weakness of mine.”

“I’m guessing you’re not just along to help me enjoy the morning sunshine,” the baron said.

“No, indeed. Although it is a fine, fair morning.”

It was. The sky was blue and brushed with fluffy horsetails of cloud. The only off note was a line of cloud above the Western horizon, black with an ominous orange tint that the sun was just too high in the sky to explain away as dawn light. It might be that the valley was due for a thunderstorm, if not one of its infrequent acid-rain storms.

“Well?” Cody snapped from the baron’s other elbow—his left.

He was visibly not pleased by Snake Eye’s sudden appearance out of nowhere. Although Snake Eye found it hardly mysterious, to his own private amusement. The aides and sec men all knew the tall, lean man with the black hat, the yellowish cast to his skin and the black eye patch was the baron’s personal hired assassin.

And there was that in Snake Eye’s manner that didn’t encourage forwardness of any sort in those whom he encountered.

“I came to ask a question,” Snake Eye said. “Which I have duly asked.”

“Let me ask a question,” Jed said sternly. “Why haven’t you chilled that bastard coldheart Cawdor and his murdering friends yet?”

“That is no easy task, Baron,” Snake Eye said with his standard calm. “How successful have your shiny sec boss and all your brave soldiers been on that front of late?”

“Impertinence!” Toth hissed. “General, one word. One word and my men will have him down and be peeling the scaly hide right off him!”

Snake Eye bent his head forward to show the man a smile. “Feel free to try that, Colonel,” he said, tipping his black hat.

An uncharacteristic grin warped Jed’s rumpled features.

“I feel too good to take offense at what he says, Bismuth,” he said. “Which is true, anyway. Not that that’s anything a man should count on as an offense. A baron’s privilege is the foundation of an orderly society. Without it we’d have anarchy.”

“We certainly can’t have that, Baron,” Snake Eye agreed.

“As for what I’m doing, isn’t it obvious? I’m leading my troops to put paid to the Uplands Alliance once and for all. Or hadn’t you heard? Their commanding general, Baron Al, partied himself into a stroke last night when he heard about my powder warehouse blowing up, and fell down stone-paralyzed. Which, about now, the entire Uplander Army should be too.”

“Indeed,” Snake Eye said. “I can see how one would draw such conclusions, certainly. Still, don’t you think a certain degree of caution is in order?”

“Caution?” Jed laughed. “When the greatest opportunity of a lifetime lies before me? I think not.”

Snake Eye shrugged. “It is, as you say, your prerogative. So I’ll take my leave of you, Baron. As for my contract with you, I continue to pursue it. At my own pace. And with guaranteed results. I always fulfill a contract.”

He tipped his hat. “Good day, Baron, gentlemen...Colonel.”

“Are you sure you don’t at least want to stick around and watch?” Jed called after him as he turned his horse off the road to trot across a fallow cornfield. “It’s going to be historical. The decisive stroke will be struck today!”

“No doubt it will be decisive, Baron,” Snake Eye said, and spurred the black gelding to a gallop between the broken stalks.

* * *

S
NAKE
E
YE
FOUND
a vantage point in the second story of a derelict barn. The associated farmhouse had had its stone walls half-caved-in by cannonballs at some point during the wars. A fire had completed its ruination by burning through the ceiling beams and letting the roof cave in. The barn, which was wood and corrugated sheet metal, remained mostly intact, occupied largely by dust, and the ghosts of smells of mildew and long-rotted hay. Not a recent casualty, apparently.

The barn, like its ruined farmhouse, stood on what passed for a height on these bottomlands—more a fold in the grassy land. Its second-story hatch looked to the east, where with the aid of his telescoping brass spyglass he was able to get a decent view of Baron Kylie’s army marching along the road a mile or so to the east.

Doffing his coat and spreading it on the warped floorboards, Snake Eye sat to enjoy the show.

* * *

“W
ELL
,
M
AJOR
,” Colonel Toth said, “are you eager to see your former comrades get their comeuppance?”

The baron raised an eyebrow at that. It seemed his sec boss was piling it on the turncoat Uplander. Major Bear’s round, bearded face, which was already damp with perspiration—the morning, though far from hot, was definitely humid with the river anchoring their flank not a quarter-mile east—suddenly had its forehead dotted with fresh little domes glinting in the sun.

The head of the Grand Army had just passed the halfway point between the rival encampments. Bear had swapped his Uplander uniform for a dove-gray coat over a dark gray vest and trousers. Though Jed had told him he was accompanying the Grand Army on its march in order to provide additional assurance he brought accurate information, Jed had allowed him to change clothes as well as getting himself a fresh mount before setting out. Jed reckoned there was less likelihood of him getting targeted in the heat of action—by his new Protector friends by accident, or by his erstwhile Uplander comrades by vengeful design.

Bear stammered something Jed couldn’t make out. As part of his sec-boss duties, Colonel Toth was naturally the Protector spy-master. It came to Jed to wonder just what hold his master spider had over the Uplander, to get him to betray the very people he’d grown up among. Whatever it was, Toth was tweaking him with it now and smirking in sadistic delight.

“Frankly, sir,” Bear said, working his way up from mumble to bluster, “I feel—”

His head vanished. A roar like a full-bore twister howled by. A hard blast of wind slammed Baron Jed on the side of his head.

As his horse reared and he reeled in the saddle, he saw blood shoot up like a red geyser from the stump of Major Bear’s neck. He heard a flat, hard crack like a big board being split clean across by a sledgehammer strike.

The major’s tubby torso still sat bolt-upright, reins still prissily upheld in a gloved right hand. Then his red roan mare jumped and hopped as the hot blood splashed onto her neck. The body fell away. The pumps of blood from the headless neck were dwindling visibly as he fell out of sight.

A strong arm caught Jed around the waist. “Get the general to cover!” Colonel Toth shouted.

With wiry strength the colonel hauled Jed out of his saddle. The baron kicked and screamed curses and threats. Holding the baron against his side, legs bicycling, the sec boss rode his own horse off the road and into the weeds of the ditch.

Jed snapped back into control of himself. Even as his sec chief handed him off to bodyguards who had already dismounted, he was screaming for the infantry and artillery to deploy, and for the cavalry to advance and wipe out the blasters.

Before a sec man unceremoniously pushed him facedown in the muddy weeds at the bottom of the ditch, he saw a horse torn in two as if by a giant hand, twenty yards ahead up the road. A second cannonball screamed by. It bounced again somewhere behind. The screams Jed heard then were from men and animals.

Nuke take it, he thought. He reckoned he knew what happened. The Uplanders, fearing just such a move from their mortal foe, had sent one or more of their pair of massive twentieth-century-made replica Parrott cannon south to delay the Protector advance as long as they could. Weighing in at over a ton each, the enormous beasts could hurl twenty-pound projectiles with some accuracy more than two miles. Though both sides relied mainly on a couple dozen Napoleon twelve-pounder smoothbores, backed by a couple of three-inch Ordnance rifled cannon, the Association possessed only one of the long-range Parrotts.

The weapons were well suited for indirect fire, to a map reference or in response to signals sent by a forward observer, by means of flag or heliograph. A week or two before both sides had bombarded the tiny ville of Taint in no-man’s-land, each under the mistaken impression the other was about to occupy the place. That episode ineffectually ended a brief stint in which both armies maneuvered to try to gain an advantage over each other, at the unsuccessful conclusion of which they both pulled back to their existing lines to try to work out what to do next.

That fat bastard’s Al’s providential stroke had shown Jed what to do now.

The Uplander blasters were clearly set to fire down the direct road—like triple-big sniper rifles. Jed judged whomever had ordered them out had sent both, given how close together the shots came. They were muzzle-loaders, like all the cannon used by both sides. The rifling grooves in their over three-and-a-half-inch bores made them slow to reload.

Realizing at that point that another shot from the ambuscade was a ways off, Jed shook off the well-meaning bodyguards who were trying to keep him under cover, to look up the road. Spotting where the blasters were sited was no great task: two localized clouds of dirty white smoke hung to either side of the road, about three-quarters of a mile ahead.

He watched his cavalry sweeping forward in two blocks to left and right. Though an attack was only really likely from the west or left flank—and only remotely, under the circumstances—Jed had ordered half his horse troopers to cover the right flank as well, riding between the road and the river, about a quarter mile to the east. He wanted to be able to get all his cavalry into action as quickly as possible once battle was joined, which required them to be split in two.

As he looked, Jed saw a white flash from near the base of the left-hand cloud, from a green smudge that suggested a stand of trees, a woodlot or an orchard. The shot whistle-roared overhead to strike the long blue column a couple hundred yards south.

Though he knew that ball had likely smashed up more of his men and horses, Jed smiled in grim satisfaction. Horrifyingly accurate though the big Parrotts could be, especially when fired by the wickedly proficient Uplander gunners, they didn’t hit moving targets for sour-owl shit. Between that and his slowness, the Protector cavalry would certainly take them both down quickly without taking much damage.

And now that his marching troops were ducking off the roadway into the ditch they’d be much less vulnerable to the bounding projectiles. Both sides had explosive shells, which would be marginally more effective against troops in cover. But because they had access to nothing like predark fusing technology, the things were unpredictable at best—most likely to explode ineffectually in midflight or not at all. And occasionally in the barrel of the weapon that fired them. Or—potentially worse—a yard or so past the muzzle.

His supply wags—and his own artillery train, including his own giant Parrott blaster—were far more vulnerable. But he consoled himself that the enemy superblasters would soon be silenced.
Forever
.

“Now watch this, Bismuth,” he said excitedly to his sec boss, who squatted inelegantly next to him with his spit-polished riding boots buried to the insteps in the mud of the ditch bottom. “Those rad-blasted rifled cannons have been a pain in our butts for two generations! Now they’re going to be ours. And once my cavalry sweeps this delay away—”

Fifty yards ahead of both wings of cavalry, still too far from the concealed blasters to charge and advancing at a lope, the very Earth seemed to erupt in stabs of yellow flame and puffs of smoke. Horses reared and fell thrashing to the ground. Others fled with emptied saddles.

From the left came a bigger, brighter flash. A giant invisible fist seemed to punch a hole in the advancing cavalry line as twelve pounds of musket balls with random bits of metal scrap hit them.

Just like that the Grand Army’s glorious cavalry were streaming back south, far faster than they’d been going north an eyeblink before.

Through the roaring of his ears, louder than the longblasters of his men lying in hiding, louder than the blasters, louder even than the screams of unendurable agony, Baron Jed heard Colonel Toth utter the most unnecessary words he’d ever heard in his life.

“It’s a trap!”

* * *

W
ITH
A
GRIN
Snake Eye snapped his spyglass back to a short tube and packed it away in its protective black velvet carrying bag.

He wasn’t especially surprised by the turn of events, although he suspected there were even more surprises in store for his current employer and associates. Such as when the body of Uplander cavalry he’d spotted a few moments before, winging around to the west, hit the disorganized and already demoralized Grand Army in the left flank.

He didn’t need to see any more. He enjoyed watching explosions and violence as much as any man, but the script for this old-days action vid was too familiar.

Plus he had a good idea how it all came out.

Hearing the crash of battle—or one-sided slaughter, to give it its proper name—crashing to a crescendo, he turned, climbed gingerly down a rickety wooden ladder and reclaimed his black gelding from where it was tethered in the stall. He rubbed its soft muzzle and blew up its nostrils briefly to reassure it. The animal was used to blasterfire, but not exactly on this scale, even at some distance away. And not impossibly some shift in the sluggish breeze had brought a hint of the spilled blood of fellow equines to its sensitive nose.