Undaunted

35

Kris came awake slowly. This time she remembered a few things. She was in a hospital. She was in bad shape.

She still didn’t remember why.

She tried opening her eyes. They didn’t argue with her. There was Jack, sitting at her bedside. He was shaved now, his hair wet from a shower. His uniform looked slept in but tidy.

When he saw her eyes open, he said “Nurse,” and one came, not as part of a charge of the medical brigade like last time, but just one. She checked Kris’s pulse, fussed over instruments Kris couldn’t see, then asked, “How are you?”

Kris tried to mumble “Thirsty,” but what got out past the twelve-inch pipe stuck down her throat didn’t sound like anything to Kris.

The nurse removed the breathing tube. It not only felt a foot wide but about a mile long. Strange, under eyeball observation, it revealed itself to be neither.

“Water,” Kris croaked.

Jack grabbed a water bottle with a nozzle and sprayed a few drops into Kris’s mouth. Her throat felt like hell on a bad day. Course, the rest of her felt worse. Kris needed a whole new way of defining pain.

“More,” Kris gasped.

Jack held the nozzle to her lips. She got a lip-lock on it and sucked. Water flooded her mouth. Some got up her nose. She ended up sputtering and spraying the water all over Jack.

The nurse wiped away the mess and then held the bottle to Kris’s mouth. “Let’s take it easy, girl. Just a little bit to start with. Trust me, it’s not going anywhere.”

Kris trusted her. One small sip followed another. It tasted delicious.

Done for a moment, Kris got the words out that were pounding in her brain. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Jack asked.

“I was walking. Talking. Working with Nelly. Working with ...”

“Bobby DuVale,” Jack supplied.

“He . . . okay?”

“Yes. You threw yourself over him. Took most of the explosion. He looks a lot better than you do.”

Kris relaxed back into the bed. Good. Someone else had gotten too close to one of those damn Longknifes. At least he hadn’t paid for it with his life.

Then a whole lot of memories flooded back into her mind. Memories of an angry Jack not making it into an elevator.

Kris closed her eyes for a second, then leaned forward for another sip. “I’m sorry, Jack,” came out this time.

“For what?”

“Not waiting for you. Not letting you do your job.”

“If you had, I’d be in the next bed. Most of my Marines weren’t in armor. The bomb would have killed them.”

Kris leaned back into the bed to mull that idea over for a few seconds. After the next swig of water, she said, “We’ve got to get your Marines spider-silk armor.”

“Definitely,” Jack said.

“Who did it? Why?”

“We don’t know. But we think who did it is about to attack the ski lodge. They seem to want some kind of bloody event for something.”

“Don’t you hate it when people won’t just come out and say what they mean? Want,” Kris said, and found that about exhausted her.

“Jack, I think I’m falling back to sleep. Do you need anything from me?”

“No. We got things pretty much under control. Funny thing about this ops going down at the lodge, we were told twenty trucks were headed in. After the word got out about the attack on you, there were only thirteen. We’re kind of wondering if you took out a third of the attack from your surgery.”

Kris tried to laugh at the joke. It hurt too much. She closed her eyes and was asleep before she took the next breath.

Jack left her as soon as her breath was slow and steady. He would resume his bedside watch in an hour. Maybe two.

In the waiting room, Penny eyed the map imposed on the wall. “They are getting close, Colonel,” she said.

“I can see them now,” he reported. “The first truck is a three-to-five-ton beer truck. If they’ve rigged the bomb inside it, there’s going to be beer cans flying for miles around. What a way to die.”

“You ready for this?” Jack asked.

“Don’t worry, Jack. Your lieutenants have got their men dug in. We’re ready for this.”

“Who’s on the roadblock?”

“Lieutenant Troy has a shooter and a tech with him out to cover the truck.”

“Lieutenant Troy didn’t put one of his sergeants out there?”

“He didn’t even ask for a volunteer.”

“Wouldn’t have expected him to. Godspeed, folks.”

“I’m getting down. Don’t want to screw anything up. Out.”

Lieutenant Troy waved slowly to the approaching truck. It had been doing about thirty-five when it first came in sight, driving along the winding mountain road. Rather than accelerate on the kilometer of straight road in front of the roadblock, it began to downshift and brake.

Troy had hoped it would charge him. That would take the suspense out of the next five minutes . . . and Troy hated suspense.

Private Kann stood off to the left, right beside the deepest section of the ditch. His rifle was slung around his neck, pointed casually away from the truck. Private Nanda also had her rifle slung, but her attention was on a black box sniffing the air for nasties that the good mountain air should not have.

She shook her head in answer to her lieutenant’s unasked question. Nothing, yet.

The truck braked to a halt a good ten meters from Lieutenant Troy. The driver put it in neutral and surprised Troy by climbing out of the cab.

As Troy came toward him, the youngster in jeans and a T-shirt offered up a clipboard with a manifest. “This is all I’m carrying,” he said, almost insistently.

Troy glanced at the offered paper. He didn’t recognize any of the local beers, but some of the whiskeys were from off planet . . . and priced accordingly.

Then the kid bolted, leapt the tree, and raced down the road, away from his truck as if his life depended on it.

“Bomb,” shouted the tech.

“Hit the ditch,” Troy shouted, and dove for his own hidey-hole.

Nothing happened.

For what seemed like a very long time, nothing continued happening with deafening silence. The only sound was of a bird that had taken roost in a nearby tree and the rapid footsteps of the fleeing driver.

Then there was a click. A pop, and a roar.

For Lieutenant Troy, the next second felt like the world had ended.

Colonel Cortez had his head down, waiting for the reason the driver of that truck had taken off running. Up the road, a second truck edged slowly around the bend but showed no eagerness to close in on the roadblock.

For a long couple of seconds, the day stayed as beautiful and peaceful as it had since sunrise.

Then the truck blew.

Some part of the front grill took the driver’s head off, sending it and his body in different directions. Around the truck, beer cans, some intact, some still in their sixpacks, others in jagged-edged chunks, headed up, out and down. The smell of explosives mingled with that of hops.

The drinker in Colonel Cortez could not help but remark upon the waste.

The soldier part of him waited to see what would develop next.

The Marines, good troopers that they were, kept their heads down. There wasn’t so much as a twitch from any of them in the colonel’s line of sight.

Of the three at the roadblock, the colonel could see nothing. He didn’t hear even a click on the radio. He didn’t like that, but there was nothing he could do about them just now.

Up the road, a full dozen trucks made the turn and edged closer.

At about five hundred meters, the lead truck came to a halt.

Willy Stone signaled the driver to a halt some five hundred yards from where the wreck of the beer truck blocked the road.

“Damn it,” Anderson grumbled, “you told that kid not to block the road. To pull off to the side. How will we get past that wreck?”

“The kid didn’t do too bad,” Willy said. “He delivered the bomb. How many people do you think would have done that?”

“He was pretty dumb to believe that cock-and-bull story about the bomb only going off sideways,” the driver of Willy’s own truck observed.

That story, and the promise of an extra $10,000, had been enough to get one stupid fool to drive the bomb truck. Willy was not surprised that anyone that dumb had forgotten the rest of his instructions.

But that did leave him with a problem.

Should he drive up to the wreck and push it aside, or was that too optimistic? Would Wardhaven Marines have put out a roadblock and not bothered to back it up?

Willy had read the Wardhaven manual on small-unit action. He knew what was in it. Would the Marines that palled around with Princess Kristine Longknife be sloppy about such things?

Not bloody likely.

“Anderson, get your cowboys and street thugs out of their trucks. It’s time for a little walk in the woods.”

“You think there are Marines out there?”

“A few, I suspect. What do you say we ambush their ambush?”

“Great idea,” the eternal optimist said with glee and followed Willy as he stepped down from the truck.

Willy did his best to suppress a shake of the head. His money was already deposited in a bank on New Geneva. If there’d been anyone smart enough to honcho this, he’d already be headed there. As it was, he’d have to pull this off before he got to withdraw a dime. Well, so far, so good. His biggest payday was worth a little extra risk. How many died between now and that payday was no skin off his nose.

That people died seemed to be Anderson’s prime desire. The more the better for getting Wardhaven involved on Texarkana. The who didn’t seem a concern, either.

Assuming it was not Mrs. Anderson’s little boy.

Willy had little respect for that kind of optimism.

Ten minutes later, two hundred cowboys and street thugs were spread out, half uphill of the road, half on the flats between the road and river. With a lot of shouting and cursing, Anderson got them moving.

It wasn’t a bad morning walk through the trees. The sun wasn’t too warm yet. There wasn’t a lot of brush. There was a bit of fun when a four-legged critter broke cover and a couple of the boys started shooting at it. If that was an example of their marksmanship, Willy now knew why Anderson figured he needed three hundred gunslingers to take on less than a hundred Marines.

Any Marine these guys hit would be shot by a bullet addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” not a bullet with his name on it.

Willy made sure he was a couple of paces behind the line of shooters when they crossed within four hundred yards of the wreck. Wardhaven Marines had a rep. Supposedly, Marines only qualified if they could hit a man-size target at four hundred meters.

Nothing happened. Not a shot was fired.

Maybe the Marines’ street rep was all hot air.

Or the red and blues around the princess were more for show.

At three hundred yards, Willy hollered for the gunslingers to shoot at anything that moved or looked like a target.

For maybe five more paces, the woods stayed quiet. Then someone fired a pistol. A rifle shot next; its bullet ricocheted off a rock.

The fire got more intense, even with Anderson and others shouting to conserve their ammunition. Not shoot themselves empty. Big .44s and .45s, smaller .38s fired away. Rifles added to the din: .30-06s, along with a deeper-voiced Winchester from Earth.

Ahead of them, the ground erupted where it was hit. A small tree fell over. They were well within two hundred yards of the wreck when their fire was answered with a scream.

Just a scream, cut off quickly. No man got up to run through the woods drawing their fire. No shout for “medic.” Maybe it was just an animal with a near-human cry of pain.

Maybe.

The sound of shooting grew more intense after that. Here and there, a gunslinger paused to reload.

Nothing answered their fire, leaving Willy to puzzle over it all. Were there no Marines? Could anyone be so disciplined as to take all this shooting at them without so much as a single return shot?

This didn’t add up. Or if it did, Willy didn’t like what it added up to.

He paused, careful to make it look like he was reloading his .45 automatic as he actually let the noisy line of shooters get farther ahead of him.

Something about the way the hairs were standing up on the back of his neck made him glance up, so he not only heard but saw when it happened.

The rifle and pistol fire was going on in its usual desultory way when a roar came at him.

One, solid roar. It lasted only a fraction of a second, but it was there, of that he was sure.

The noise was there . . . and then he saw the result.

Around him, men collapsed. One second they were standing there, the next they were falling down. Fifty or sixty men, all at one time. Their knees gave way, and they went down in a heap.

It wasn’t as if they’d been shot. Willy knew what a man looked like as his body absorbed a bullet in his gut, got his head blown off. It was nothing like that.

They weren’t blown back; they just fell down.

In the blink of an eye, they were down. And then the roar came again, and another fifty or sixty went down.

Willy didn’t wait for the next roar. He spun on his heels and started running.

When the next roar came, he found out what it was all about. He felt something slice into his back. A heartbeat later, his legs quit working. He fell, sliding facedown in a tangle of fallen leaves and small bushes.

Then he fell asleep.