The Dying Time (Book 2): After The Dying Time (4 page)

As things stood now, the rough terrain of the canyon worked greatly to the advantage of the Cheyenne. Good cover allowed them to set up ambushes, get close for an attack and retreat without exposing themselves, just as their ancestors fought the cavalry. A small number of warriors could impede enemy progress down the canyon, while the remainder held the high ground on either side. And though a concerted attack by the enemy would force the Cheyenne to retreat, yielding the ridges to the enemy would cost Daniel’s fighters nothing--as the enemy commander knew by now. For in this part of Wyoming there were only two directions--up and down--and the canyon they were in was the best and most open, for miles around.

Daniel saw movement through the trees. Instantly his mind and body went on full alert. He paused behind a cottonwood and scanned the surrounding area. He heard splashing followed by the sucking squelch of boots in mud, as one of the enemy scouts crossed the stream and waded through the marshy area near its banks. Cigarette smoke drifted to him on the faint up-canyon breeze.

He changed course and sidled up the slope of the canyon wall until he was hidden from view by a screen of boulders, then sprinted forward for a good quarter of a mile. Peering around a large rock he could see the two making their way along the stream, one on either side. Below him was a small clearing. He headed down toward it, his mind planning the attack while figuring how long it would take them to arrive. Crouching behind a big cottonwood, Daniel uncoiled his whip and readied his small, pistol-style crossbow. Then he cocked his 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol and returned it to the holster he wore nestled into the small of his back. The gun was strictly a last resort, as he needed to kill them quietly.

He checked his watch again: two minutes till five. He fingered his medicine pouch and muttered a brief prayer, settling down for a short wait. There was a certain Zen about the way Daniel waited, his body relaxed and perfectly still, save for the slight rise and fall of his chest. No sign showed as the tension mounted inside him. He could have been meditating instead of planning murder.

Less than five minutes later, a change in the feel of the woods told him of their approach. The slap-smack of footsteps in mud and the whooshing of damp grass against legs located them for him. Daniel waited until the closest man was only five feet away. He stepped quickly from behind the tree, placing it between him and the man on the other side of the creek. His left arm came up, bringing the crossbow to within two feet of the startled man’s face. The flanker had no time to react as the bolt from the crossbow tore through his left eye and imbedded itself deep in his brain.

Daniel sidestepped swiftly to his right, clearing the tree just as the other scout’s head turned in his direction. Daniel’s right arm snapped forward and twenty feet of rawhide bullwhip flashed through the air and coiled tightly around the neck of the man across the creek. A sharp jerk, an ugly cracking sound and the second man was dead before the first hit the ground.

With a satisfied smile, Daniel stripped the men of weapons and ammunition. He took their radio, then dragged the men to higher ground away from the creek to avoid fouling it, hoping the local wildlife would make short work of them.

Twenty minutes later he used the radio to eavesdrop as the flankers scouting the ravine on the other side of the canyon reported in. In his mind’s eye he saw Susan Redfeather and Raymond Stormcloud strike them down. No shots. That was good. He nodded to himself, certain that the enemy was now without flankers and would remain so for at least another half hour.

Spurring his horse through the rain, it took him less than thirty minutes to join up with Minowayuh and Earl Baker, a mountain man who had become a member of the tribe, on the ridge above the gap. From that vantage they watched as dozens of enemy soldiers, unable to believe their good luck, sprinted unmolested through the narrow, twisting defile that led back out to the open valley. Not so long ago, they had fought for an entire day to breach that gash in the rocks so they could pursue the Indians into the mountains. Now, that gorge was their lifeline; for once out into the valley the lack of good ambush sites and their superior numbers would insure their safety. Eager to escape, they bunched up at the head of the choke-point.

Once more, Daniel gripped his medicine bag, thanking Mah-hay-oh for the rain and apologizing to Mother Earth for the necessary violence to come.

He nodded to Earl, a former hard-rock miner and demolitions man, who knelt in the wet grass beside a detonator and waved a signal to his men on the opposite ridge. Earl unlocked the detonator handle and shoved it home. The blasts didn’t seem like much, just a series of muffled whumps--but as Earl had promised, they were more than adequate to jar the water-saturated soil loose from its precarious grip on the substrata. Hundreds of thousands of tons of mud slipped loose, gathering momentum with every second as it thundered down the deadly slopes. The twin slides slammed into each other at the bottom in an earth-shattering collision, smashing into the enemy with such overwhelmingly vicious force that it literally mangled them. Pieces of men, mixed with geysers of mud and rock, were flung so high in the air Daniel and Minowayuh had to duck below the ridge to avoid being hit.

Some of the mud shot through the gap, gouging huge boulders from the canyon walls and hurling them out into the valley, killing soldiers who had thought themselves safe. In the canyon below, all was chaos as mud with nowhere else to go surged back up the gorge, almost, but not quite, reaching the prisoners and their keepers as they fled into the arms of the Cheyenne and Ute warriors.

The battle was over.

The slave driver, disarmed and turned over to his former charges, justified his actions by saying he was just following orders. Didn’t work at Nuremberg--didn’t work here. Women tied him to a tree, carefully slit his intestinal wall and pulled his entrails from his body while he jerked and twitched--too much in shock to scream. Then they simply walked away.

The flies found him first and he watched, trembling, bathed in cold sweat as they laid their eggs inside him. Then came the ants and he screamed until his vocal chords shredded. But it was the ravens dark beaks that taught him the full horror of being eaten alive.

After witnessing that example the captive soldiers from the Army of the King eagerly spilled everything they knew.

*

The knowledge he gained from the prisoners weighed heavily on Daniel’s mind. His tribe usually avoided contact with white men, preferring to go their own way. But now...

True to his heritage, he built a sweat lodge and sought a vision. He had much to think about.

Steam billowed from the hot rocks as Daniel poured water over them. He closed his eyes. Sweat and the taint of past failures poured from his body, brushed away by sprigs of sage he moved along his arms and back. The scent cleared the toxins of battle from his mind. During the third day of his fast an eagle rode on clouds of steam to a valley guarded by a golden-eyed polar bear and Daniel knew what he had to do.

Chapter 4: Power Problems

Luna City

General Alice Anderson looked around the conference room, nodded to Heinz Obermann and said, “Let’s come to order, people.” The meeting was “all hands” so everyone not on duty was present and many who were on duty were listening in via the local intranet.

The excited babble swiftly died down and faces turned toward her.

“Heinz,” she said, gesturing toward the man. “Why don’t you fill us in.”

The small, muscular German stood up, pointed a remote at the large view screen on the wall in front of the semi-circular table and clicked a button. An image of the facilities solar arrays came up.

He cleared his throat and began. “Olivia and I just completed an inspection of our power plant and I’m afraid the news is not good.”

He zoomed in on the image. “You can see the spider web cracks and dust. This lack of maintenance has led to a decrease in power generation of almost sixteen percent.”

He zoomed in closer. “We can clean the dust off and repair most of the cracks with silicon gel, even jumper the broken links.”

He heard a murmur of concern, subdued whispers, “Yes, I’m afraid it will require extended time outside.”

“So basically you’re saying our power is failing?” Commander Clark Kent asked, tugging on his carrot red mustache.

Olivia de Garza glanced at Heinz then back to Clark and nodded, her lustrous dark brown hair bobbing softly in the lunar gravity.

“Both here on the surface and on the ISS?” General Alice Anderson asked.

“Yes.”

“And the fix is to replace part of the port side array on the ISS, then clean and patch our surface arrays while dodging meteorites?” Alice Anderson ran her hands through her wavy brown hair and sighed.

“We brought this problem on ourselves,” Leila Yoruba, their astrophysicist said. “I warned you repeated trips from the ISS to Luna City would drag some of the debris along. I even...”

“We know that, Lieutenant,” General Anderson snapped, “and ‘I told you so’s’ aren’t productive.”

Leila, who had opened her mouth to reply, clapped it shut, her dark eyes glittering. All the civilians who joined the ISS crew had been assigned military rank so they would fit within the chain of command--a topic that, after fourteen years, was becoming a divisive issue. Leila was among those who thought the military command structure was too rigid and unaccommodating to the rights of Lunar citizens--chief among them, the right to procreate. Due to the sheer numbers of young children (fifty-six at last count) Alice Anderson had placed strict limits on population growth. And while she understood why the General made that decision, the sheer gall of a leader telling her she couldn’t have more children was the kind of tyranny that led to revolutions.

“That laser we all need to stop Havoc’s Twin is taking a beating too,” Captain Henri Dupree said, hoping to change the subject before open conflict could erupt. “I think we should move it to a higher orbit. It’s barely above Earth’s ring.”

Part of the ejecta field from The Impact had stabilized in orbit forming an invisible ring around the planet--invisible, but deadly. Flying the Aurora space planes back and forth between the orbital supply pods shipped up before Havoc struck and Luna City had altered the tidal bulge in the ring caused by the moon’s gravity to the point where it was much more dangerous to go “outside” now than in the early days when they’d assembled the solar arrays.

“I agree,” Colonel General Ludmilla Gargarin said. Her husband, General Pavel Yurimentov, wasn’t so sure but since she’d made her opinion public he nodded in support.

“Not sure I do,” Captain Mary Adams, the other Aurora pilot spoke up. “Moving that thing will be like screaming, ‘Hey, we’re up here,’ to those...people down below.” Since there were children present she refrained from using the word, assholes.

Several heads turned her way and from the nods of encouragement both Ludmilla and Alice could see the idea of attracting attention from those on Earth was unpopular. Nonetheless...

“We cannot allow that laser to be destroyed or degraded,” General Anderson said. “We will move it out of harm’s way. Captain Adams, see me about scheduling the move.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mary Adams said, obviously willing to follow orders in spite of being publicly opposed to the move.

Murmurs of protest were cut short when Leila Yoruba said, “I doubt anyone down there will notice.”

She held up her index finger and said, “Point. No one has communicated with that thing since The Dying Time.”

She raised another finger. “Point two. It’s quite likely everyone down there who knows about that laser is dead.”

She now added a third finger. “Point three. Anyone with a telescope already knows we’re here.”

Alice Anderson was quite surprised to receive support from Leila, especially after having slapped her down. She grimaced as she understood she’d made a mistake calling Leila, Lieutenant. Most of the civilians had long since abandoned the use of military rank. But for all their political disagreements, Leila was a scientist first and foremost. Alice made a mental note to give serious thought to the idea she had more than one kind of power problem. But first things first.

“Leila’s right,” Alice said. “Not all of those down below are too busy scratching in the dirt to look up. They undoubtedly know we’re here.”

She glanced around the room noting the concerned expressions.

“But to get back on point, according to Heinz it is either do the repairs or replace the entire array.”

Rana Hamide raised her hand like a schoolgirl and said, “That last may not be possible.”

All heads turned her way, puzzled expressions almost universal.

“The robotic factories we use to produce our industrial equipment, including solar arrays are wearing out and we’re really short on the raw materials we need for production. You all know I and my staff are kept busy repairing assembly and process line failures. But the problem is getting worse and the failures more extensive every week.”

She shook her head, her tightly curled brown hair barely moving in the light gravity.

“I doubt we can maintain production long enough to reproduce the entire array. The robofacts simply weren’t designed to last this long and even the twenty-five year design life of our solar cells did not include parameters for this degree of damage from the Impact.”

“Whew!” Pavel Yurimentov blew the breath out hard from puffed cheeks. “I think many of us must go for a walk outside then. Does anyone know how we can make such walks more safe?”

Little Angela Kent piped up, “Yuri does.”

She pulled him up from his seat and pushed him towards the front of the room.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell them. It’s a good idea.”

Ludmilla beckoned to her son and Yuri, eyes darting as if looking for an escape walked to the front of the room like an inmate approaching his execution.

“Let’s have it,” Ludmilla prodded.

“I think we should move Iota into Lunar orbit,” he said, his voice trembling a bit. Iota was a city block sized chunk of ejecta that had found a home at the L5 point. That is, it shared the same orbital path as the moon but because of it’s gravitationally stable track it would never catch up to the moon or be caught by it.

“It would act like a vacuum sweeper and collect most of the dust and stuff. And after it does the job here we could park it at L3 and it would eat Earth’s ring.”

Commander Kent scratched his scalp through his short, carrot red hair and asked, “Can the Auroras generate enough thrust to move that rock?”

“I don’t know for sure, sir,” Yuri admitted. Then he pointed to Leila Yoruba and said, “But she does.”

Leila’s wide eyed open mouthed look evinced her surprise at being out thought by a twelve year old boy, but her stunned expression cleared and she began to nod.

“Give me a second,” she said as she pulled out her tablet and began running calculations.

Two minutes later she looked up with a smile on her face and said, “It will work.”

Pavel squeezed his son’s shoulder and said, “Yuri, I think you just earned that trip to the ISS you wanted.