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“Do you have a shot?” Deed MacTierney asked.
I had a Moondagger who was issuing orders to the others in the sights of my long gun. His beard was cut into a sharp triangular shape, giving me a nice sighting post at the center of his chest. “Do you want me to take it?” I asked.
“No,” MacTierney said. “They’ll just take it out on the locals. We’ll have to think this through.”
• • •
We learned a good deal about the Moondaggers that terrible October. We learned that they didn’t care for women, except as mobile, laundry-scrubbing uteruses ready to produce the next generation. They saw themselves as favored by the NUC and the Kurians, and therefore it was their duty to reproduce themselves with increased numbers by whatever method available.
Even worse than the murders in these hills were the outrages against women. They would not touch virginal girls; everyone else was reservation game.
The families started hiding their daughters if they happened to be in Moondagger territory. This led to further outrages, for if there were no women about, the men made do with whatever they could get their hands on, “whatever” being teenage boys.
These outrages only heightened the rebellion. We had more and more Coal Country troopers acting as informants about Moondagger patrols and operations. The main fireman armory in Charleston was opened and looted in an overnight operation that netted our rebellion hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, explosives, and machine guns fresh from the factories of the Georgia Control. For the first time, we were able to fight on something like equal terms.
ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
The Moondagger patrol died well.
We caught them in the crossfire of two captured machine guns after simple wire-control charges took out the first and last vehicles in a five-car column moving into the mountains out of Charleston.
I cut the machine-gun fire and picked up my heavy “Grog gun.” One Moondagger had taken cover behind the armored side door of the gray-green-painted transport. I put a shell through the door and the gunner.
We called on them to surrender, but they roared defiance out of their barrel chests and heavy beards. We held the high ground and the fire lanes. They fell one by one to single shots.
We laid them out in a neat row together and covered their faces with plastic sheeting and packing material. The Dreadcoats and a few part-time guerillas divided weapons and ammunition into “carry off” and “destroy” piles.
There was a recoilless rifle tube in one of the transports, and three wooden boxes of .75 mm shells with close-quarter and enclosed space charging. It could destroy anything short of a freight train or tank, or open an access point in a fortified building. I tested the weight and wondered if I could rig it for fire from the shoulder. It did not seem like a difficult job; here was already a shoulder-pad notch for the gunner aiming the weapon.
“Wait! Wait!”
I paused.
“Thank you. You have no idea how expensive these interfaces are to replace, especially since that purge in Ohio.”*
“You misunderstand the position of the Maynes family. It’s bread and circuses in these hills, my Golden One. The Maynes clan forms a convenient locus of interest and discontent.
“That’s one of the reasons we tolerated Joshua’s erratic behavior. It made for hot gossip. If the people were busy hating him, wondering how he could get away with all he did, they weren’t thinking at the level above the Maynes clan.”
“You’re from outside. You don’t care about the people here.”
“You do? A Kurian?”
“I don’t see why a Kurian couldn’t become fond of a particular people. It may surprise you to know, however, that I was once as human as . . . the next fellow. I was about to say you, strangely. Talking to you, it is easy to forget your species. You sound like a very large man, probably a bass baritone singer, with a bit of a head cold.”
“You’re the elder Maynes.”
“Give that ape a Kewpie doll! What gave it away? Me giving it away? Are all your kind so slow?”
“This is not the most pleasant conversation I’ve ever had.”
“I’m smart, not pleasant. The two have nothing to do with each other. The pleasant ones most all died in ’twenty-two.”
“May I make a modest proposal?”
“If you can do it without twitching so much as a claw.”
“We could arrange for a truce, of sorts. Between you people and the legitimate government of the Coal Country. I don’t care for the Tarheel Rangers crawling all over the mines, looking for excuses to send miners off to the Control, and the Moondaggers the Ordnance has introduced are even more loathsome.”
