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"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.
Tikka clung, shifted the forward pole down the legworm's belly, and then poked it again. It reared up, and she released the painful spur. It came down again, a good thirty legs on the other side of the hole. The legs over the gap twitched uncertainly, like the shifting fingers of sea anemones Valentine had seen in the Jamaican reefs.
"I didn't know they could do that," Rand said.
"I expect they can't, usually."
Tikka hurried her worm forward, a living bridge over the hole in the pavement. As she passed across, the beast's rear dropped into the hole, but with the rest of it pulling, it got its tail up and out.
Valentine checked his pack ot signal gear again. How long until the Moondaggers got here?
"Preville, you've just been attached to headquarters," Valentine said. "You get to come on an assault with the Bears. Bring your radio."
"Er-yes, sir," Preville said, blinking.
"Red, then blue if we clear the hill. Understand?"
"Red, then blue," Rand repeated. "Got it, sir."
"Every minute counts. The opposition is on its way."
"They picked a good time to turn on us."
"I'm not so sure they picked it. The Kurians have long tendrils."
Valentine slapped his lieutenant on the shoulder and then ran up the extreme right of the bridge, Preville trailing, trying to run while folded in half. Another shell fell into the water.
Valentine marked the glimmer offish bellies bobbing in the current.
