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"It's still a steep hill. It'll look a lot steeper with bullets coming down."
"I know a way to get up it."
* * * *
Valentine got a report from the artillery spotters. The height of the bluff made it impossible to accurately spot fire, so Valentine told them to save their fireworks.
"Infantry strength?"
"All we can see is perhaps platoon strength on this side. They're right at the top."
"Right at the top?"
"Yes, sir. I don't think they can see jack at the base of that hill."
They really didn't know how to fight. Or they just liked the view. No matter, Valentine had to take advantage of the error quickly, before a more experienced Moondagger arrived and corrected the matter.
The hardest part was getting one of the Bulletproof to agree to ride the legworm.
"Up that?" Swill, the Bulletproof veep in charge of their contingent, said. "If the footing's poor, you could roll a worm right over on you, especially if men are hanging on it in fighting order."
"I'll take mine up that hill," Tikka said, stepping forward. "I'm the best trick rider in the clan."
"There's trick riding and there's getting shot at. You don't know enough about the other,"
Swill said. "I'm not risking our senior veep's sister."
"So you told me. You're afraid to take your worms across under this shell fire. Watch this."
They did watch as she hurried to her worm grazing in some brush farther downstream.
Digging her hook into its hide and using the spurs on the inner ankle of her boot, she mounted her worm and prodded it toward the bridge.
Swill ran in front of her worm and tried to divert it, looking a little like a rabbit trying to stop a bus. The worm nosed him aside, off his feet, and Swill threw off his hat in frustration.
"Watch those shells!" Swill yelled. "It'll rear back if one comes too close!" He turned back on Valentine. "The exec told me to keep her from doing anything stupid. Lookit me now. I'm going to have to go back and admit I couldn't keep a rein on one little female."
"Not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the fight in the dog," a handsome Guard sergeant detailed to the Bulletproof said. He rubbed his jaw ruefully. "That gal has her own mind about things."
Valentine sent a field-radio message to Gamecock to move his Bears toward the bluff, and then trotted up and joined his company, waiting for their chance to fix the bridge. They had all the tools and materials resting in the ditch next to the road.
"How's the shell fire, Rand?"
"Poor, if they're trying to kill us. I think they're just trying to keep us off that bridge. The fire's slackening, so I think they're running out of shells. Excuse me, sir, but is that worm rider crazy?"
"Feisty, more like," Valentine said, watching the legworm glide up the road on its multitude of black, clawlike legs, ripples running the length of its thirty-yard body as it covered ground. "Someone suggested she couldn't handle her worm."
Valentine watched Tikka fiddle with the gear on her saddle. She extracted another pole with a sharp hook, this one with a curve to the shaft.
"What's that for?"
"Legworms aren't very sensitive anywhere but the underside. She gives it a poke now and then to keep it moving."
Tikka aimed her mount straight for the hole. A shell landed near her and the legworm froze for a second. She goaded it forward again.
When it came to the hole in the pavement, she gripped the reins in her teeth, used one pole to goad her beast forward, and swung the other under what might be called its snout. It was where the food went in, anyway.
She poked it good at the front and it reared up, twisting this way and that. Tikka clung as another shell whistled down. It must have dropped straight through the hole in the pavement, because it exploded in the water beneath the bridge.
