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Valentine backed up a step, opening his stance and setting the sword behind, ready to uncoil his whole body in a sweeping cut when it leaped.
It sprang, taking off like a rocket.
BLAM! BLAM!
Shotgun blasts struck it, sent it spinning away as unexpectedly as a jack-in-the-box yanked back into its box as Valentine's sword sweep cut the air where it would have been.
Bee rose from some brush clinging to the small gravel swell the tracks ran along, other shotgun now held forward while she broke open the one she'd just fired with her long, strong fingers.
Valentine heard crashing in the brush as the shot-struck Reaper ran away. Valentine's instinct was to pursue. If it was running away, it was damaged and disadvantaged. He forced himself back to his senses and his men, sheathed the unblooded sword.
"Good work, Bee," Valentine said.
"Beee!" Bee agreed.
Officers' whistles cut through the darkness somewhere down the tracks that led toward the pursuing Quislings. Valentine located the sound. It came from the middle of a trio of tall robed figures in the center of the columns. Valentine saw movement all around them in the dim light.
Someone-Glass probably-had the sense to fire an illumination flare. The firework burst high, lighting up the steep-sided cut as it wobbled down.
The railroad cut was full of troops walking their bicycles uphill in two open-order lines up either side of the tracks, carrying their rifles at the ready so that the muzzles were pointed toward their open flanks rather than at their comrades.
Valentine backed up a few steps, fired another flare with his own gun as he retreated toward his line, more to highlight himself to his men. He drew a shot and then another from scouts the Quislings had sent forward. Luckily these troops didn't have nightscopes.
"Check fire, check fire. It's the major," someone shouted.
Valentine made sure Bee was following-she was backing through the brush like a living fortification between him and the advancing troops-and came up to his men. They'd stripped the boxcars of bed frames, thin mattresses, and water barrels and improvised a breastwork, shielding it with cut brush.
"Fire on my order. Single shots only, and take your time," Valentine said. "Pass the word.
Single shots only. We're guerrillas, remember. All we've got are deer rifles and bird guns.
Sergeants on up, have your pistols out with Quickwood magazines in."
Valentine trotted to the other side of the tracks, passed the word to the troops in the opposite of the cut. As he was about to climb into the caboose, Valentine heard something skip and bounce through the dirt toward the fortification.
"Grenade," he shouted, embracing gravel like it was his mother.
It blew on the far side of the breastwork. The men began to shoot back, placing careful single shots. The machine guns from the caboose opened up and drew fire in return.
Did the Reapers know they were chasing nothing but sheep and goats yet?
More whistles, and the Quislings came forward at a rush, bright flowers of shotgun blasts cutting through the brush as the assault began.
He fired another flare and saw them coming, heads bobbing as they advanced, the foremost less than twenty yards away, covering each other with bursts of fire that pinged off the caboose or thwacked into the bed-frame breastworks. If they could be turned now . . .
"Fire at will!" Valentine shouted.
Gunfire roared into the night. Grenades bloomed and died, each one exploding more softly as the ears became overwhelmed by the noise. Valentine saw figures falling or diving for cover.
A Reaper ran toward them straight up the rail line, a satchel held in each hand. The Kurian animating the Reapers must have been either desperate or determined to overwhelm them in an all-or-nothing gambit. Bee fired and missed, and then tore up its robes with her second barrel. Valentine didn't need to wonder what was in the satchels, or see the digital seconds ticking down. God, his pistol was out there somewhere-
A sergeant, Troust-though the men nicknamed him Surf, as he combed his thick blonde hair into a wave on his forehead-appeared beside Valentine and rested his 9mm on a step of the caboose, firing steadily, aiming with each shot. Valentine duly noted his coolness as though already composing the report.
The Reaper stiffened, leaning oddly, and started a throw, but the blood drinker's fingers refused to release. The momentum of the satchel toppled it, and Valentine saw the astonishment in its eyes.
Valentine saw heads rise as the Quisling soldiers scrambled out of the way of what was coming.
"Down!"
