The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (54 page)

The light scored near misses.

The dust flattened itself, changing from the shape of a sting ray into the shape of a spear.

Not three milliseconds had elapsed.

Father Moontree was talking human words and was saying in a voice that moved like cold molasses out of a heavy jar, “C-a-p-t-a-i-n.” Underhill knew that the sentence was going to be “Captain move fast!”

The battle would be fought and finished before Father Moontree got through talking.

Now, fractions of a millisecond later, the Lady May was directly in line.

Here was where the skill and speed of the partners came in. She could react faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense rat coming directly at her.

She could fire the light-bombs with a discrimination which he might miss.

He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it.

His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alien enemy. It was like no wound on Earth – raw, crazy pain which started like a burn at his navel. He began to writhe in his chair.

Actually he had not yet had time to move a muscle when the Lady May struck back at their enemy.

Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundred-thousand miles.

The pain in his mind and body vanished.

He felt a moment of fierce, terrible, feral elation running through the mind of the Lady May as she finished her kill. It was always disappointing to the cats to find out that their enemies disappeared at the moment of destruction.

Then he felt her hurt, the pain and the fear that swept over both of them as the battle, quicker than the movement of an eyelid, had come and gone. In the same instant there came the sharp and acid twinge of planoform.

Once more the ship went skip.

He could hear Woodley thinking at him. “You don’t have to bother much. This old son-of-a-gun and I will take over for a while.”

Twice again the twinge, the skip.

He had no idea where he was until the lights of the Caledonia space port shone below.

With a weariness that lay almost beyond the limits of thought, he threw his mind back into rapport with the pin-set, fixing the Lady May’s projectile gently and neatly in its launching tube.

She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of her heart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edge of a “Thanks” reaching from her mind to his.

5. The Score

They put him in the hospital at Caledonia.

The doctor was friendly but firm. “You actually got touched by that dragon. That’s as close a shave as I’ve ever seen. It’s all so quick that it’ll be a long time before we know what happened scientifically, but I suppose you’d be ready for the insane asylum now if the contact had lasted several tenths of a millisecond longer. What kind of cat did you have out in front of you?”

Underhill felt the words coming out of him slowly. Words were such a lot of trouble compared with the speed and the joy of thinking, fast and sharp and clear, mind to mind! But words were all that could reach ordinary people like this doctor.

His mouth moved heavily as he articulated words. “Don’t call our partners cats. The right thing to call them is partners. They fight for us in a team. You ought to know we call them partners, not cats. How is mine?”

“I don’t know,” said the doctor contritely. “We’ll find out for you. Meanwhile, old man, you take it easy. There’s nothing but rest that can help you. Can you make yourself sleep, or would you like us to give you some kind of sedative?”

“I can sleep,” said Underhill, “I just want to know about the Lady May.”

The nurse joined in. She was a little antagonistic. “Don’t you want to know about the other people?”

“They’re okay,” said Underhill. “I knew that before I came in here.”

He stretched his arms and sighed and grinned at them. He could see they were relaxing and were beginning to treat him as a person instead of a patient.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Just let me know when I can go see my partner.”

A new thought struck him. He looked wildly at the doctor. “They didn’t send her off with the ship, did they?”

“I’ll find out right away,” said the doctor. He gave Underhill a reassuring squeeze of the shoulder and left the room.

The nurse took a napkin off a goblet of chilled fruit juice.

Underhill tried to smile at her. There seemed to be something wrong with the girl. He wished she would go away. First she had started to be friendly and now she was distant again.
It’s a nuisance being telepathic
, he thought.
You keep trying to reach even when you are not making contact
.

Suddenly she swung around on him.

“You pinlighters! You and your damn cats!”

Just as she stamped out, he burst into her mind. He saw himself a radiant hero, clad in his smooth suede uniform, the pin-set crown shining like ancient royal jewels around his head. He saw his own face, handsome and masculine, shining out of her mind. He saw himself very far away and he saw himself as she hated him.

She hated him in the secrecy of her own mind. She hated him because he was – she thought – proud and strange and rich, better and more beautiful than people like her.

He cut off the sight of her mind and, as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.

“She
is
a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is – a
cat
!”

But that was not how his mind saw her – quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.

Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

David Drake

“Collateral damage” is perhaps one of the most chilling phrases ever to feature in the vocabulary of modern warfare. In this story, one of the earliest entries in Drake’s acclaimed Hammers Slammers series, a woman whose community has been invaded to facilitate an ambush strives desperately to avoid becoming another statistic. In 1970 David Drake was drafted out of law school and served as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armoured Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse, in Vietnam and Cambodia. This experience enables him to bring a strong sense of realism to his tales of the armoured mercenary force led by Colonel Alois Hammer.

On leaving the military and returning to the World, Drake finished law school and took up writing. Among his recent titles are
The Road of Danger,
a space opera, and
Out of the Waters,
a fantasy.

M
ARGRITTE GRAPPLED WITH
the nearest soldier in the instant her husband broke for the woods. The man in field-grey cursed and tried to jerk his weapon away from her, but Margritte’s muscles were young and taut from shifting bales. Even when the mercenary kicked her ankles from under her, Margritte’s clamped hands kept the gun barrel down and harmless.

Neither of the other two soldiers paid any attention to the scuffle. They clicked off the safety catches of their weapons as they swung them to their shoulders. Georg was running hard, fresh blood from his retorn calf muscles staining his bandages. The double slap of automatic fire caught him in mid-stride and whipsawed his slender body. His head and heels scissored to the ground together. They were covered by the mist of blood that settled more slowly.

Sobbing, Margritte loosed her grip and fell back on the ground. The man above her cradled his flechette gun again and looked around the village. “Well, aren’t you going to shoot me, too?” she cried.

“Not unless we have to,” the mercenary replied quietly. He was sweating despite the stiff breeze, and he wiped his black face with his sleeve. “Helmuth,” he ordered, “start setting up in the building. Landschein, you stay out with me; make sure none of these women try the same damned thing.” He glanced out to where Georg lay, a bright smear on the stubbled, golden earth. “Best get that out of sight, too,” he added. “The convoy’s due in an hour.”

Old Leida had frozen to a statue in ankle-length muslin at the first scream. Now she nodded her head of close ringlets. “Myrie, Delia,” she called, gesturing to her daughters, “bring brush hooks and come along.” She had not lost her dignity even during the shooting.

“Hold it,” said Landschein, the shortest of the three soldiers. He was a sharp-featured man who had grinned in satisfaction as he fired. “You two got kids in there?” he asked the younger women. The muzzle of his flechette gun indicated the locked door to the dugout which normally stored the crop out of sun and heat; today it imprisoned the village’s twenty-six children. Delia and Myrie nodded, too dry with fear to speak.

“Then you go drag him into the woods,” Landschein said, grinning again. “Just remember – you might manage to get away, but you won’t much like what you’ll find when you come back. I’m sure some true friend’ll point your brats out to us quick enough to save her own.”

Leida nodded a command, but Landschein’s freckled hand clamped her elbow as she turned to follow her daughters. “Not you, old lady. No need for you to get that near to cover.”

“Do you think
I
would run and risk – everyone?” Leida demanded.

“Curst if I know what you’d risk,” the soldier said. “But we’re risking plenty already to ambush one of Hammer’s convoys. If anybody gets loose ahead of time to warn them, we can kiss our butts goodbye.”

Margritte wiped the tears from her eyes, using her palms because of the gritty dust her thrashings had pounded into her knuckles. The third soldier, the broad-shouldered blond named Helmuth, had leaned his weapon beside the door of the hall and was lifting bulky loads from the nearby air-cushion vehicle. The settlement had become used to whining grey columns of military vehicles, cruising the road at random. This truck, however, had eased over the second canopy of the forest itself. It was a flimsy cargo-hauler like the one in which Krauder picked up the cotton at season’s end, harmless enough to look at. Only Georg, left behind for his sickle-ripped leg when a government van had carried off the other males the week before as “recruits”, had realized what it meant that the newcomers wore field-grey instead of khaki.

“Why did you come here?” Margritte asked in a near-normal voice.

The black mercenary glanced at her as she rose, glanced back at the other women obeying orders by continuing to pick the iridescent boles of Terran cotton grown in Pohweil’s soil. “We had the capital under siege,” he said, “until Hammer’s tanks punched a corridor through. We can’t close the corridor, so we got to cut your boys off from supplies some other way. Otherwise the Cartel’ll wish it had paid its taxes instead of trying to take over. You grubbers may have been pruning their wallets, but Lord! they’ll be flayed alive if your counterattack works.”

He spat a thin, angry stream into the dust. “The traders hired us and four other regiments, and you grubbers sank the whole treasury into bringing in Hammer’s armour. Maybe we can prove today those cocky bastards aren’t all they’re billed as …”

“We didn’t care,” Margritte said. “We’re no more the Farm Bloc than Krauder and his truck is the Trade Cartel. Whatever they did in the capital,
we
had no choice. I hadn’t even seen the capital … oh dear Lord, Georg would have taken me there for our honeymoon except that there was fighting all over …”

“How long we got, Sarge?” the blond man demanded from the stark shade of the hall.

“Little enough. Get those bloody sheets set up or we’ll have to pop the cork bare-ass naked; and we got enough problems.” The big noncom shifted his glance about the narrow clearing, wavering rows of cotton marching to the edge of the forest’s dusky green. The road, an unsurfaced track whose ruts were not a serious hindrance to air-cushion traffic, was the long axis. Beside it stood the hall, twenty metres by five and the only above-ground structure in the settlement. The battle with the native vegetation made dugouts beneath the cotton preferable to cleared land wasted for dwellings. The hall became more than a social centre and common refectory: it was the gaudiest of luxuries and a proud slap to the face of the forest.

Until that morning, the forest had been the village’s only enemy.

“Georg only wanted—”

“God
damn
it,” the sergeant snarled. “Will you shut it off? Every man but your precious husband gone off to the siege – no, shut it off till I finish! – and him running to warn the convoy. If you’d wanted to save his life, you should’ve grabbed him, not me. Sure, all you grubbers, you don’t care about the war – not much! It’s all one to you whether you kill us yourselves or your tankers do it, those bastards so high and mighty for the money they’ve got and the equipment. I tell you, girl, I don’t take it personal that people shoot at me; it’s just the way we both earn our livings. But it’s fair, it’s even … and Hammer thinks he’s the Way made Flesh because nobody can bust his tanks.”

The sergeant paused and his lips sucked in and out. His thick, gentle fingers rechecked the weapon he held. “We’ll just see,” he whispered.

“Georg said we’d all be killed in the crossfire if we were out in the fields when you shot at the tanks.”

“If Georg had kept his face shut and his ass in bed, he’d have lived longer than he did. Just shut it off!” the noncom ordered. He turned to his blond underling, fighting a section of sponge plating through the door. “Via, Bornzyk!” he shouted angrily. “Move it!”

Helmuth flung his load down with a hollow clang. “Via, then lend a hand! The wind catches these and—”

“I’ll help him,” Margritte offered abruptly. Her eyes blinked away from the young soldier’s weapon where he had forgotten it against the wall. Standing, she far lacked the bulk of the sergeant beside her, but her frame gave no suggestion of weakness. Golden dust soiled the back and sides of her dress with butterfly scales.