Ammonite (45 page)

The sled was heading due south, and moving fast.

“Hoi!” Marghe shouted and waved her arms. The canopied sled turned in a wide hissing curve that flattened the grass. It did not slow down. Marghe and Thenike leapt out of the way.

The sled slammed to a halt and a Mirror leapt out, eyes wild, face smeared with dirt. Marghe crouched. This was not right. She rolled to her left and something thudded into the turf by her feet. A piece of wood. Like an arrow.

The Mirror was sobbing, trying to fit another quarrel to her crossbow.

Marghe came back to her feet, arms spread, ready to roll again. A Mirror with a crossbow? She did not have time to wonder at it: the Mirror was raising the bow to her shoulder again, shouting and crying. “Don’t move, you bitches. Just don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t—”

“Chauhan!” Another Minor stepped carefully from the sled. Her hair was gray.

One arm hung loose; one pointed a weapon steadily at Marghe.

Chauhan looked confused. The crossbow wavered.

“Chauhan, lower your weapon.” The older Mirror came closer. Marghe could see how much that arm hurt. “Identify yourselves.”

This Mirror seemed in reasonable command of her faculties. Marghe lifted both arms, spread her legs slightly, waited for Thenike to copy her. The Mirrors were nervous, and hurt. She and Thenike looked like natives. Better act like one, until they calmed down a little. “We have no weapons except a small knife each. I am Marghe Amun, a viajera out of Ollfoss, come to speak with Acting Commander Hannah Danner.” The older Mirror nodded. The other one, the crazy one, was staring at the ground, crossbow dangling from her hand. “You might recognize my other name more readily. I’m Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC representative.” She was surprised at how steady her voice was. “And you are…?”

“Twissel.” She pointed her weapon at Thenike. “And this?”

“I am Thenike. We bear soestre.”

“What?” Chauhan said. “Is that a weapon?” Her crossbow was back at her shoulder.

“Chauhan!” Then, more quietly, “Chauhan, go tend to Dogias.”

“Dogias?” Marghe dropped her arms; Twissel motioned for her to put them up again. “Letitia Dogias?”

Twissel studied them both a moment, then nodded once.

“Was it the storm? Did she have a… I mean, did she… Is she all right?”

“No,” Twissel said bluntly. “I think she’s dying.”

“Dying? Letitia? What happened?”

“Natives. Ten killed. No, keep still until I say different.”

Marghe stopped in midstride and made an effort to not shout at the Mirror. “And Lu Wai?”

“The lieutenant wasn’t with us.”

“But you do have a medic?”

“Dead.”

“Then let us see her, Twissel. Thenike here might be able to help. Please.”

“I’ll need your knives first. Take them from your belts, two fingers only. Drop them on the grass.” Marghe felt a flash of anger and realized this reminded her of the way Aoife had treated her. But this was not Tehuantepec. She tossed down her knife. “Good. Kick them over here.”

The sled, all alloys and plastics, felt hard and strange to Marghe. It was air-conditioned and cool, but the smells were still there: alien, manufactured materials mingling with blood and excretia and rank sweat. Chauhan was crouched in the cab, blank-faced. They squeezed past her and into the covered flatbed.

Two women lay side by side on inflated medical pallets. Thenike immediately knelt by the nearest, a blond-haired woman in partial armor.

If Marghe had not known that the other was Letitia Dogias, she was not sure she would have recognized her. Her memory insisted that the communications technician was vibrant, alive, full of irreverence and crackling energy; she was not this, this thing breathing stertorously through an open mouth with a hole in her stomach that oozed dark, dark blood. She smelled terrible.

“She’s dead.”

For one hanging moment, Marghe thought Thenike meant Dogias, then realized she was talking about the other one, the Mirror. The viajera folded the woman’s hands on her breast, closed her eyes, had to use both hands to lift her jaw and close her mouth.

“What was your companion’s name?” Thenike asked Twissel.

“Foster. Alice Foster.”

“Then we should bury Alice Foster.”

“No. We have to take her back.”

“The heat…”

“We have a bag.”

Thenike looked at Marghe, who nodded. “Then put her in a bag.” She motioned Marghe away from Dogias and knelt.

Marghe marveled at her calm poise; she took Dogias’s pulse, listened to her breathing, lifted the tunic away from the awful wound in her stomach, pinched some skin and sniffed it, all as matter-of-factly as tuning a musical instrument. “I’ll need to get her outside in the light and air. Then I want water, and clean cloths, bandages if you have any. And I’ll need my knife back.”

Twissel must have been as impressed as Marghe with Thenike’s examination; the Mirror handed Thenike her knife without comment, then picked up one end of the pallet.

When they had Letitia outside, Thenike motioned Marghe over to the pallet lying on the grass. Letitia looked even worse in natural light. “I’ll do what I can here, but you must help the other one. Chauhan. She needs to be busy.” She opened the medical roll Twissel had found and picked out a swab. “She needs to stop thinking about what happened, just for a little while.”

Foster was already stiffening. It took three of them to strip her armor and clothes, her dog tag and wristcom, and get her inside the body bag. Twissel, with her injured arm, could not do much.

It was Foster’s left hand Marghe would always remember. It stuck out awkwardly, and Marghe had to wrestle it into the slick black plastic bag: she noticed that two fingernails were broken, that Foster had chewed her cuticles, that there was a pale band of skin around the wrist where she had worn her wristcom.
The mark of
civilization
, Marghe thought, then looked at her own, evenly tanned wrist,
and how
easily it is lost
.

With the motor off, the sled began to warm. The smell got worse. Marghe left the Mirrors scrubbing at the flatbed with bundles of spare uniform dipped in water and alcohol and went outside.

Thenike was squatting on her heels, running her hands, palm down, through the air an inch or so above Dogias’s body. She had stripped Letitia’s stained clothing, all of it, and washed her down. The wound was clean, still leaking a little blood, but Dogias looked… better. She seemed to be breathing more easily. Marghe crouched down next to the pallet; when Thenike’s hands passed near her, she felt as though someone had run a powerful magnet over her skin.

“She’s stable now,” Thenike said. She sounded shockingly tired. Whatever she had done to help Dogias had taken a great deal of energy. “Help me get a compress on her wound.”

Marghe lifted Dogias enough for Thenike to pass the roll of bandage under her ribs. The technician seemed heavier than the last time, when Marghe had dangled her over the rock edge and lowered her into Lu Wai’s arms, and her skin felt different: slack, clammy. “Will she be all right?”

Thenike nodded tiredly, tied the bandage, and tested the tightness of the compress.

Chauhan took the stick. The others stayed in the back where it was once again cool and dry. The body bag was tucked out of the way in an overhead storage bin.

Thenike checked Dogias’s pulse, then motioned for Twissel to come and sit by her. Marghe helped to get the Mirror’s armor off. Thenike examined the swollen forearm and frowned. “Lean forward.” She probed at the back of Twissel’s head.

The Mirror winced, and Thenike’s fingers came away with dark flecks of dry blood on the tips. “There’s nothing wrong with your head. But the bones in this arm are broken.”

Twissel just nodded. “Thought they might be.” She watched Thenike clip on splints and start to make a sling. “My own fault, this broken arm,” she said to Marghe. “Fell on it, when I got hit by the stone that bloodied my head. I know how to fall. Should have managed not to break my own damned arm.”

“You were probably half conscious.”

“Still, I know better.”

“Shouldn’t the suit have protected you?”

“It would have, if it was turned on. If I’d been all armored up. I wasn’t. None of us were, not fully. You just don’t expect to need full armor on a backward world like this. Anyone wants to play rough and all you have to do is pull one of these.” She pointed with her left hand at the weapon on her hip.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t really know. Danner sent us, Sergeant Leap’s squad, out under Captain White Moon. We were escorting Dogias and that other technician to the relay. To check it over. So we were lounging around, keeping an eye out, you know, while the two did their checking. Though I don’t know why they both—it was just a pile of slag. Useless. So anyway, they were doing that, we were talking, some of us playing a game of chicken with the crossbows—”

“When did Mirrors start using crossbows?”

“One of Danner’s ideas. A morale thing. Though now I’m not sure… Anyway, we were relaxed, but still keeping an eye open. You know. I mean, we weren’t worried, but you never can tell, not on a world like this. And we’d been told there were hostiles in the area.”

The tribes. Marghe nodded.

“And then the storm hit. The noise, the wind, it… It’s different out here, not the same as being safe in Port Central while the, wind tries to rip the grass out by the roots and the thunder rolls the hills flat. It was like the sky opened its mouth and roared. And out of the dust and roar, the flash of light, came those natives on horses. Like devils.” She shook her head.“We were disoriented, deaf, blind, surrounded by women like demons yelling, riding at us. Still, it takes more than hostiles and a bit of weather. We’re professionals. I’d seen worse. I pulled out my weapon. I wasn’t the only one. I fired.”

Twissel raised her free arm, reliving it.

“I fired, but nothing happened. Nothing. I thought it was a damaged power pack.

I had it stripped out and replaced in three seconds.” Marghe tried to imagine managing that in the middle of an attack and a storm, failed. “It still didn’t work. I couldn’t believe it. I just kept pointing that thing and pressing the stud. Nothing.

Nothing from anyone else’s, either. We all stood there, pointing weapons that wouldn’t work. Like a nightmare. The only guess I can come up with is that the storm somehow shorted them. Then I remembered my crossbow. I ran to get it out of the sled, yelled for the others to do the same. They didn’t.”

She winced as Thenike lifted her arm into position.

“Captain White Moon, Sergeant Leap, all of them, they were shaking their weapons, stripping them down, staring at them unbelievingly. I understood how they felt; weapons don’t just stop working. They just don’t. Only they did. They couldn’t get over that. I mean, it just doesn’t happen. And meanwhile they were on us, waving their spears, whirling slings around their heads. Seemed like hundreds of them, coming out of the teeth of the storm, yelling. And you know what, all I could think as they came at us was: they stink. Like rancid grease. That’s when I realized they were real. They might not be wearing armor, they might not have beam weapons, but they were armed and they were coming for us, and those funny-looking spears and stones could kill.”

Twissel paused. Marghe handed her the water bottle. The old Mirror took a deep swig, wiped her mouth. “I was just about at the sled when I got hit. A stone, from a sling. Fell on my damn arm. A stone, goddammit, a stone! When I was wearing state-of-the-art gear and carrying a weapon that could kill half-a-thousand crazies at two hundred yards. A stone.” She shook her head, “But I got up again, and I got into that sled and I managed to carry out two bows. I threw one to Chauhan. And all the time I was yelling, yelling at those people to get their bows, get their bows. They just wouldn’t. You know what I saw? Women using their weapons as clubs. Clubs.

Do you believe that?”

Marghe shook her head.

“It’s hard, winding up a bow and fitting a quarrel with one hand. But I did. And Chauhan did, too. She sort of follows me around, does what I do. Bit like a kid sister. Lucky. So we started firing. Then one or two others got the idea, Foster, Leap… and Dogias. She was yelling and laughing fit to bust, but she could fire that bow. And she had a knife. Don’t know where that came from.” Twissel looked at Thenike. “Most of that blood you washed off her wasn’t hers. But then she came up against the maddest native of all, long red hair, weird eyes, walked her horse slow as you please through the mess, leaned sideways out of her saddle, and shoved her spear into Dogias’s stomach cool as if it were target practice. I lifted my bow, but then she was gone, off into the wind. They were wrecking one of the sleds, didn’t seem bothered with us anymore. Then they whirled off. Gone.”

Again, she was quiet.

“It took maybe ten minutes. One minute, it was a quiet evening, the next I was standing there with my arm broken, wind howling and lightning crashing, looking at dead bodies. The only ones alive were Chauhan, me, Dogias, and—” She looked at the body bag, and was quiet. “I don’t really remember how I got us all into the sled.

But I do remember stopping in the middle of the night and feeling this laughter, this hysteria, trying to crawl up out of my throat, and I knew that if I let it, I’d go mad.

So I climbed down out of the cab with my weapon and shot it at the stones and the trees, anything. This time it worked. So it must have been the storm.” She shook her head again. “But I don’t think Chauhan will ever trust anything but her crossbow again.”

Thenike finished with the sling and leaned back.

“Captain White Moon, Leap, the others,” Twissel said, “they were my friends. I found Leap, she’d been gutted. Never did find Captain White Moon.” She frowned briefly, shook her head, went on. “They’re all dead. And I don’t know why. There wasn’t any
reason
behind any of this. I could maybe accept it if there were. If we’d been defending something important. But they just attacked us because they wanted to.”

Marghe did not know how to begin to go about explaining Uaithne, and the legend, and the Echraidhe woman’s charismatic madness.