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“They’re treating us right,” Galloway continued. “I just had a big steak dinner. With sauce and steak fries. Still sputtering when they brought it to me on the plate. The . . . representative says that nobody else is going to die, provided we go back to work. I’m not reading a prepared statement or anything, just telling you like it is. Hope you come on out. Air must be getting pretty bad down there if Bleecher is eating nothing but beans and WHAM!”
• • •
I found this exchange humorous enough to record verbatim, but I do not remember the speakers: “We can’t just skulk in the mine like bats. If I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be in Number Four.”
“You know why it’s called Number Four, right?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Two number twos.”
• • •
“You need weapons? I get weapons,” I said, picking up an old tarp used by the mechanics to stay off the wet ground when working on the mine machinery.
I took a short, flat shovel I’d been sharpening at the edges and climbed up into the attic of the mine office to a chorus of creaking framing. I had to negotiate a weeping willow of phone and power wiring, none of it tacked down, just running from the roof peak down to the offices and so on. What a fire trap, but typical for the Kurian Order.
I found a ventilator, removed it, and climbed up onto the roof. From there it was a fairly easy jump onto the hillside. I climbed with the tarp over one arm and the short-handled shovel in the other.
If I was having trouble with Number Four, I’d post some people on the ridgeline above, just to make sure we had the place surrounded.
The footing on the hillside was bad, with many loose leaves and dirt. I found a solitary tree and, climbing it so that it was between me and the fire trucks blocking the road, I surveyed the hillside carefully.
Yes, there it was. They’d even bothered with sandbags.
It was a small gun emplacement, with a machine gun aimed so it was covering the area between the mine office and the underground entrance, plus the scattered vehicles parked on the flat. The soldiers wore trooper camouflage; they were probably mobilized off their regular patrol routes and put into battle dress until the crisis passed.
The gun itself had another two-man team covering it from the gunner’s blind side.
I descended the tree and unrolled the oily tarp. I covered it with some loose bits of bracken and grasses, then wormed under it. I inched my way up the hillside, crawling using my elbows, with legs limp.
It was exhausting work and I had to take frequent rests. The insects were noisy that night and covered the steady crunching—deafeningly loud even to my flat ears—of my crawl.
Grogs and humans have similar night vision in that we’re both more sensitive to motion when the light level is low. At last, I judged myself close enough for a rush. I surveyed the four-man detail one more time. The gun crew was still concentrating on the mine entrance and vehicle park below. The gunner must have seen something, because he was looking down the sights of the weapon, ready to tracer-snipe. As for the flank guards, they were sharing a tin
of tobacco and talking, too softly for me to pick up anything but the watermelon-watermelon-watermelon of background stage dialogue.
Behind a patch of bramble within a few meters of the troopers, I ever so slowly gathered myself into a ball, set my feet—
I rose up out of the grass and sent the tarp sailing at the flank guards. Ideally, a nervous trigger would fire at that rather than my own form rushing at them with sharpened shovel raised.
My appearance, rising from nowhere as though I’d been magically transported by a djinni, froze them both for the three seconds it took me to cover the distance. They reacted too late. I stuck one with the shovel just as he was raising his rifle to his shoulder and swept the other up in my arm like a long-lost friend.
Shovel-wound had a look of dull amazement in his eyes with his skull almost cut in two, the unicorn horn of the shovel handle sticking out and forward.
The one I’d swept up I raised over my head. I hurled him at the machine-gun crew.
I retrieved my shovel from the trooper’s head and waded into the trio, swinging.
One managed to draw a pistol and fire. The light and the noise of the shot startled me for a moment before I finished the three men.
Sloppy. I must be slowing in my age. Once I would have taken all four of these third-rate draftees before any could get a shot off.
I didn’t feel the bite of lead, but sometimes you don’t know you’ve been shot until you see the blood or after the fight.
I retrieved the tarp, spread it out, and tossed their guns and spare ammunition magazines on it. I listened uphill for sounds of investigation and heard nothing. With the extra moment allowed, I took the crew-served weapon off its tripod and laid it on the tarp, folded the tripod, and added the belt they’d loaded and extra ammunition cases. Now we would have a surprise for the besiegers if they tried to storm the mine in a rush.
I rolled the tarp up and carried it as carefully as the bearer who carried the rug-wrapped Cleopatra into Caesar’s Roman Alexandrian headquarters. I shouldered it and moved downhill.
