Tinker's Justice (18 page)

“Kupe,” she said.

Kupe kissed her again and made an inquisitive noise.

“Kupe, there’s a lot of ways to pass our shift without waking anyone. I guarantee this isn’t one of them.”

Day three in the potato bunker started out like day two, except drier. Unfortunately, there was limited ventilation, and the dank, cool air lingered despite sunshine above. Kupe had suggested looking for a time when none of the farmhands were watching, then throwing their clothes over a tree branch to dry. No one else had found the suggestion amusing.

“This is it, right?” Kupe asked. “We don’t find nothing today, they come bring us back to the ship?”

“Yep,” Barvy replied. “Next group’ll come in. We get a few days in real beds and a chance to dry out.”

“I’m planning to stand behind a liftwing prop for a few hours,” Gandric said, cracking his neck. He was the bruiser of the group, and the one who seemed least suited to the cramped quarters.

“I’ll just be happy eating something that’s cooked hot,” added Thurm from above, where he was on duty at the periscope.

“How’s it, Charsi? What’re you lookin’ forward to?” Kupe asked.

She winked so that only Kupe could see it. “A little privacy.”

“I hear that one,” said Barvy. “Nice place to hide for a few days, but not fit for living.”

Kupe managed a sly wink back at Charsi, ignoring his squad leader. He declined to mention what
he
was looking forward to, once he got back. He tried to imagine Charsi into one of her dresses, but found that his imagination had run dry. Living all his life in the deeps hadn’t made confinement in so
small
a deep any more bearable. He just wanted ten miles of tunnels in front of him and no one to stop him. It would cost him a pair of boot soles, but that was just the sort of thing he didn’t need to worry about anymore. A wink and a word to a world-ripper technician, and he could have his pick of the finest human-sized boots in Korr—or Tellurak or Veydrus, for that matter. Kupe found himself wondering what it would be like to own a pair of Telluraki boots—not the simple, floppy-topped boots the farmhands wore, but a pair with some flashpop appeal to them.

“World-hole!” Thrum shouted. The time for idle musing was at an end. The squad grabbed coil guns and buckled on belts hung with rune grenades. “One … two … three.” Thrum counted off kuduks as they came through.

“How close?” Barvy asked.

“’Bout a hundred-fifty, maybe two-hundred paces.”

“What do we do now?” Charsi asked.

“We wait,” Barvy replied.

Kupe’s heart sank. For a moment, he had actually relished the thought of going out beneath the sky to shoot kuduks, if only it meant an end to his confinement.
Of course more waiting. It’s not like we haven’t got our fill of
that
yet.

“… eighteen … nineteen … twenty,” Thrum counted off. There was a long pause, with all the squad waiting with just the sounds of their breath and the hum of the dynamo. “Looks like that’s all of them. Clubs for sure. Too far to tell if they’re armed proper.”

“Lemme see,” Barvy said, jostling his way in front of the periscope. “Bust me … those blighters are gonna pay for this. Them’s women, half of them, and they’re beatin’ them like they was stuck valves.”

Kupe nodded. “So, we go rescue ‘em, right?”

“Not yet,” said Barvy. “We gotta make rusted sure we ain’t got surprises. Twenty to five ain’t my favorite odds, but we got a job, and drain me dry if we ain’t gonna do it.”

The wait seemed like hours. Kupe hadn’t thought to go down and check the clock to see. They all huddled around Barvy, waiting for the order to attack.

“All right,” Barvy said. “You’ve all seen up there enough to know what’s what. Charsi, Thrum, Kupe, you lot make for the low hill on the north side. Get behind some trees and start shooting kuduks. A few are pretty close to the farmers, so don’t go killing kin—hold your shot if it’s not a good one. Me and Gandric will grenade the world-ripper. With any luck, someone’s watching from the
Jennai
, and we might see some reinforcements once their world-ripper goes down. They won’t risk something getting through on their end.”

Barvy counted down from ten, and when they got to one, Gandric shouldered open the hatch, throwing off a half foot of dirt, some of which rained back down into the potato. Kupe was the last one up, watching each of his squad mates climb the ladder ahead of him. The coward’s voice in his head suggested that maybe it would be better to let the four of them handle things, but he ignored it and climbed after them.

The smell above was sweet with rotting fruit—the mislaid portions of the harvest left scattered in the orchard. Kupe struggled for a moment to identify things from higher than the knee-high periscope, and in full color instead of shades of amber. Thrum and Charsi were already on the run, ducking low to avoid being seen. Kupe dashed off after them, pulling his coil gun from its holster.
This is it. In the real line of fire again.
He had forgotten how scared he had been on the thunderail raid. Hayfield’s trip to the liftwing factory had been all looting, no firefight, dulling the memory of kuduk soldiers pointing guns in his direction. The bile churned in Kupe’s gut as he joined Charsi and Thrum on the far side of a low rise. He slid down to his stomach and peeked out into the orchard.

Kuduk thugs were rounding up humans, shouting at them in Korrish, though the humans seemed to understand better when they swung clubs. A few humans ran, but a perimeter of kuduks seemed to be hemming most of them in. Kupe, Thrum, and Charsi were outside that perimeter.

“What now?” Kupe asked.

“Pick one and shoot,” Charsi suggested. She took her own advice and fired off three shots in succession. One of the kuduks went down in a spray of blood, and one of the fleeing humans got past.

Kupe fired at another, taking him in the shoulder. A second shot went through the chest. “Bleedin’ knockers, they’re scatterin’.” There was a series of thunderous blasts—rune grenades detonating.

“What’d you expect?” asked Thrum, taking a shot at a kuduk who had taken refuge behind an apple tree. “That they’d just hold still while we shot ‘em all?”

“Why’s the practice range got ‘em holdin’ still, then?” Kupe asked, firing and missing as a kuduk dove for cover.

“We won’t get them all from here,” Thrum said. “Spread out and keep low.”

Kupe watched as Charsi went one way and Thrum the other. He hesitated for a moment, then followed after Charsi. The ground was muddy from the previous day’s storm, and the footing treacherous owing to roots and fallen apples. Kupe slipped and fell more than once, thankful that the ground was at least a safe place to be.

The click and spark crackling of coil guns firing was whisper quiet out beneath the sky. He could hardly make them out over the sounds of kuduks and humans shouting. The kidnappers were organizing their defense. Kupe risked a glance over the mound he was using for cover and saw bodies strewn in front of the world-hole.

One of the kuduks made a dash to escape through to Korr. Kupe swore beneath his breath and took aim. Before he lined up his shot, the kuduk jerked suddenly and fell limp. Either Charsi or Thrum must have gotten him, Kupe realized. When he looked closer through the optics on his gun, he saw that Barvy and Gandric were among the bodies lying by the world-hole.

Bust me, they didn’t get it closed!
Kupe ducked back down just in time to hear the crack of wood from a tree two feet from his head. Someone was firing at him. He needed to do something. “Gandric and Barvy are down!” he shouted. He hoped that was enough information for Thrum and Charsi, without giving away their plight to the kuduks.

By Kupe’s best guess, seven or eight of the kuduks were down. Three of the remaining kidnappers held a string of chained humans as a shield. Somewhere, at least one of the kuduks was firing back with something quiet enough that it had to be a coil gun, and it was fool’s optimism to think that was the only kuduk who carried one.

Kupe poked his head over the rise, and pulled it back down as a shot thumped into the turf beside him. He slid down into the valley—all of three feet deep—and slunk away. He needed to regroup with Charsi and Thrum, and get away. Missions had failed before; no shame in that. There was no point getting killed in the bargain.
“Some you win, some you just try to survive.” That’s what I’ll tell ‘em, next time someone asks what it’s like being a hero.
Kupe tried to keep a positive outlook that there would
be
future recruiting trips. At the moment, the prospect was looking unlikely.

Kupe needed to get to his squad mates before the kuduks cut them off. There were twelve left, give or take a kuduk, and that left them outnumbered four to one. Kupe scurried on his hands and knees, coil gun getting muddier by the step. General Rynn had assured them all that the coil guns would fire when wet or dirty, or even when half busted. Kupe was going to have to find out for himself pretty soon, he realized. The shouts from the kuduks didn’t tell him where all of them were, but it gave away the positions of enough that he could use them as a guide to where he didn’t dare go.

“There’s one!” a kuduk shouted.

Kupe looked all around, but he saw no one. The apple trees were heavy with leaves and unpicked fruit, blocking his vision everywhere but up and down the planted row. There could have been kuduks within a few paces of him without either of them seeing the other, but the voice had sounded farther off. He heard the trigger clicks of multiple coil guns firing, but nothing hit near him.
They found Charsi or Thrum, maybe both.

Kupe plucked an apple from the tree, the branch coming with it until he twisted it free. There was a swish of leaves as the branch snapped back, but Kupe lobbed the apple into another row of trees making an even greater rustling.

“Over here!” came a shout in response. Kupe ducked inside the low canopy of leaves and peered through the branches as kuduks came to investigate.

Unhooking a grenade from his belt, Kupe recalled Davlin’s instructions. It was one of the few bits of his longwinded speech that had stuck in Kupe’s head. Twist the dial at the base. Five seconds later it blows. Tucking the muddy coil gun under his arm, he twisted the base, leaned out from beneath the tree, and repeated the same throw he had made with the apple. As soon as it left his hand, Kupe ducked under the tree and covered his ears.

He felt the concussion through the dirt. Scrambling to the edge of his leafy cover, Kupe aimed his coil gun at the vicinity of the thrown grenade. One kuduk stumbled away, disoriented by the blast. The optics were caked with mud, but Kupe lined up a shot by eyeball and put two steel balls through the kuduk.

Kupe heard three more concussions. One or both of his squad mates had taken the hint and brought out their own grenades. It was the best sound Kupe had heard since the battle started.
Eziel, if this is your idea of a battle, can you please show General Rynn something with a bit bigger boom for our side?
He could only hope they had good enough aim that they ran out of kuduks before they ran out of grenades.

Kupe spent the next ten hours of his life—or so it felt at the time—playing Rats and Knockers with the kuduk kidnappers. He’d scamper row to row in the orchard, quickly discovering that the kuduks couldn’t navigate between the close-planted trees without shaking every branch in their way. He fired. He ran. He found a new spot to hide. Every so often, he’d get a look at the world-hole, still sitting open and unmoved. He knew enough about how they worked that he was surprised that the technician running it hadn’t tried to use it to help swing the battle. Even on the simple raid of the liftwing factory, the rebel technician had kept the hole moving around to where it was most useful. It didn’t seem right that the kuduks wouldn’t know enough to use the same trick.

A rustling of branches took him by surprise. Whirling around with his coil gun leading, Kupe caught himself short. “Charsi!” he whispered fiercely. He wrapped his arms around her and held her for too brief a moment.

“Thrum’s down,” Charsi whispered back. “They tossed his grenade back at him.”

Kupe winced. “How many left?”

“Dunno,” she replied. “Not the easiest place to take a count. We’ve gotta get that hole closed. I know we’re supposed to save one to keep from getting taken—”