Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (20 page)

“Ruan?” Zhao said, turning the bandit's name into a warning, with one word saying,
Do you
really
want to keep talking?

“Well,” Huang said with a defensive shrug, “I'm sure there's some use to which those things could be put. Doesn't the Aerie's air-filtration system need a new compressor?”

“That's as may be,” Jue put in, shaking his head sadly, lips pursed and scar showing white against his tanned skin. “But our system uses an entirely different gauge than the mines do, and I don't think these parts could be adapted to fit.” He gave a weary smile and added, “But
I
wouldn't mind a few dozen pairs of undergarments, myself. Would save on doing the wash.”

Ruan shot the scar-faced bandit a sharp look, then turned to glare at Huang once more.

“Well, Ruan?” Zhao asked, crossing his arms over his chest. “Is there something you'd like to say?”

The skeletal-faced bandit glared for another moment at Huang, and then his expression softened, fractionally, as he turned to the bandit chief and shook his head reluctantly. “No. No, I suppose there isn't.”

“Well, enough then.” Zhao nodded and turned to Huang. “In that case, Hummingbird, I don't see any reason not to put your plan in motion. You want to send word to the men down the line that we're ready to move into position?”

Huang nodded, casting a quick uneasy glance in Ruan's direction. Then he saw Jue's supportive grin and smiled in return. He paused for the briefest moment, contemplative, and then hurried off to relay Zhao's commands to the rest of the bandits arrayed up and down the line of the channel, their weapons primed and ready.

 

As he made his way up and down the line, giving the bandits their instructions, Huang could hear their voices following after him. None told him to his face what they thought of him and his position in the organization, but as soon as his back was turned they were much more forthcoming.

There was one, though, who was not shy about expressing his displeasure, especially when Zhao wasn't around.

“You don't fool me.”

Ruan blocked Huang's way, his skeletal face twisted in a sneer, his arms folded over his chest.

“I need to pass, Ruan,” Huang said, his voice low but level.

“What you
need
,” Ruan said, unfolding his arms to reach forward and prod Huang in the chest, “is to keep your rutting mouth shut.”

Huang narrowed his eyes. A few years before, he had been the bandits' disgruntled prisoner, and Ruan had been quick to argue for his speedy execution. Since then, he'd gone from being a reluctant pet to being a valued bandit and was now even something of a prized strategist, a close advisor to the chief. It seemed that Zhao held him in the same esteem as he did Ruan and Jue, and in recent months Huang had even begun to suspect that he might have eclipsed even them, as the bandit chief came more and more to value Huang's own advice over all others, even when contradicted by his longtime lieutenants.

Huang wasn't sure what he thought of the change in his status, but it was clear to him what Ruan thought of it.

“We aren't your personal army, boy,” Ruan said, poking Huang again in the chest, “and if it was up to me, you'd be shoving your advice up your bunghole. Just how you've turned the old man's head away from profit I'll never know, but don't think for a minute that you've fooled me.”

That the raids were more successful than ever, none could deny. With Huang's instincts at strategy and formal training in the use of weapons augmenting Zhao's tactics and more catch-as-catch-can alley-fighting style, the bandits had been gradually transformed from artless brawlers into formidable fighters, fierce and intelligent. But if the bandits' encounters were more successful, seldom suffering casualties in the course of their raids, the bandits found that they were bringing ever less profit back to the Aerie after each foray.

And worse, when they were back in the safety of the Aerie, the bandits had been forced to adapt to a much more frugal existence. No longer did they indulge in the feasts of former days, trenchers piled high with food and endless jars of wine. Now they ate rations of rice and salted fish, drinking their wine watered if at all, and only occasionally enjoying the luxury of duck, or pork, or that rarest of treasures, beef.

Many of the bandits felt they knew precisely what their problem was, and just who was the author of these troubles. The difficulty, they felt sure, was that they were no longer living like bandits; they were now living like soldiers.

And it was all the fault of the man they called Hummingbird.

“Look, Ruan,” Huang said, keeping his voice low, “I don't want to fight you. I just don't see any point in wasting our lives in the pointless pursuit of plunder.”

“Pointless?” Ruan sneered. “Spoken like a true child of privilege who never worked a rutting day in his life.”

Huang's hand twitched for his saber's hilt, but he kept his arms at his sides. He couldn't really blame Ruan for how he felt. Huang
had
changed things in the Aerie, these last seasons. But it wasn't as if Huang had set out to make the bandits' lives more difficult. What he had set out to do was to make their lives more
meaningful
.

“What good is it to get a few coins in your pocket,” Huang said, “if the army can come along the next day and take them right back from you? We need to fight
smarter
.”

Under Huang's guidance, Zhao's bandits were no longer driven by profit but by the desire to harass their enemies. It was because of Huang that the bandits now attacked military targets virtually to the exclusion of all others; and those few nonmilitary targets that found themselves the subject of the bandits' attentions were those most closely allied with the military's master, the governor-general—mine owners, shipping concerns, and so on.

Such a target was the convoy that the bandits now prepared to attack.

“This convoy is carrying matériel from the Far Sight Outpost north to the White Plains Station,” Huang went on. “In case you've
forgotten
, it's White Plains that supplies the soldiers employed as strikebreakers all throughout the north. Without the supplies carried by this convoy, the garrison will be left unable to supply the necessary manpower, and the mine owners will be left without a shield of armed soldiers between themselves and the men and women whose lives are threatened every day by the unsafe working conditions down in the mines.”

“You may not have noticed it, boy,” Ruan sneered, “but we're not working in a mine here, are we? We climbed up out of the dirt and found a better life. Why can't we just leave the others to do the same?”

Huang regarded Ruan for a moment, then shook his head. “I wouldn't let Zhao hear you talk like that.”

“Yeah?” Ruan reached up and rubbed the sharp point of his jaw. “Well, seems to me there's a lot that Zhao won't, or can't, hear for himself. Like what a worthless waste you are, nor how you're mucking up our good thing here. Seems that Zhao thinks the sun rises and sets on his little pet, and damn anyone who doesn't agree.”

Huang shifted uneasily, not sure how to respond.

“Seems to me, though,” Ruan went on, “that Zhao won't always be around. And come to that, he won't live forever, will he? And if something
were
to happen to the chief, then . . . ?”

His lips drawn into a line, Huang shouldered past Ruan, shoving the skeletal bandit out of the way. “I don't have time for this,” he said.

“I'd watch out, if I were you,
Hummingbird
,” Ruan called after his retreating back. “Zhao won't be around forever, after all....”

 

When the main body of the convoy had drawn alongside the channel, Huang watched as a detachment of bandits surged over the rim, long knives flashing in the sunlight, bellowing at the top of their lungs. From entrenched positions along the edge of the channel, snipers opened fire with their long-barreled rifles.

That the sniper fire did little but
plink
off the light armor of the crawlers hardly mattered to Huang's plans, nor did the fact that the bandits on foot—for all that they shouted themselves hoarse and spent all their energy running and waving their swords overhead—could hardly do much damage on an individual basis against large vehicles in motion. The snipers and the knife-wielding bandits were, in Huang's carefully orchestrated plan, little more than distractions.

Even so, as distractions they fulfilled their tasks admirably. Faced with attackers on foot, the drivers of the convoy—as Huang had known they would—had slowed their crawlers' forward progression and maneuvered the large vehicles into a rough circle of protection. Then it was time for the next phase of Huang's plan to be put into action.

Huang remembered another convoy, another ring of crawlers, with himself in the role of defender. It seemed odd, though somehow fitting, to find himself now in the opposite role.

“They've moved the crawlers into position,” Jue said, sliding back down the wall of the channel from his lookout post at the ledge, “just as you said they would. They can't be more than a dozen paces off the mark.”

“Close enough.” Huang spared a nod, then motioned to Ruan. “Your men ready with the detonators?”

Ruan scowled but responded with a curt nod. “Just waiting for the chief's word, is all.”

Huang felt the barb in Ruan's words, even if no one else did.
Zhao is still in charge here,
the skeletal bandit was saying.
He gives our orders, Hummingbird, not you.

Biting back the impulse to respond in kind, if perhaps less subtly, Huang turned from Ruan to Zhao, who stood with his eyes just above the lip of the channel wall, watching the bandits herd the crawlers into position. “The convoy is in place, Chief,” Huang said in clipped tones. “Waiting on your orders.”

Zhao allowed himself a grin and slid back down the channel wall to join the others at the base of the gulley. “Well done, Hummingbird.” He turned to Jue. “Call the men to their fallback positions.” Then to Ruan. “When the others are clear, order the detonators hit.”

Needing no further instruction, the two lieutenants nodded and hurried off to carry out Zhao's orders.

“If this works, Ruan might never forgive you,” Zhao said in a low voice to Huang, smiling slightly. Huang raised an eyebrow, concerned, and Zhao explained. “He always did like getting his hands a bit dirty, if you take my meaning, and this plan of yours leaves him with little to do but conduct traffic. If we can take out an armed convoy with a few well-placed explosives and a bit of theater, Ruan might find himself without an opportunity to slake that damned bloodthirst of his.”

“Ruan's not bloodthirsty,” Huang objected, feeling the need to come to his rival's defense despite what Ruan thought of him. “He just sees it as doing the job properly, and saving us the trouble of having to do it all over again later.”

Zhao nodded slightly, clearly unconvinced. “Perhaps. But you might try to remember that
your
neck was once a job Ruan wanted to do properly, and you might want to wonder whether he thinks it still needs doing, at that.”

Huang grinned. “I'll try to remember that.”

The last of the bandits who'd harried the crawlers on foot was now leaping down into the channel, and to safety. The snipers continued to
plink
their shots against the crawlers' armor, but even they were retreating one by one from their entrenched positions to the safety of the gully's floor.

“That's the last of them,” Zhao said in a voice scarcely above a whisper. Perhaps he, too, was afraid that the convoy might overhear, and spoil the surprise that awaited them. “Won't be long now.”

As if in response, there came a low hissing sound from the direction of the ring of crawlers, as the first of the detonators began to strike alight.

“Get down,” Huang said urgently, sliding back down the cliff wall, motioning to the few bandits on either side who had chanced a peek over the ledge.

Zhao hunched down beside him and covered his ears. Huang, remembering Zhao's long experience with these kinds of explosives down in the mine shafts, followed suit, squeezing his eyes to narrow slits for good measure.

They
felt
the explosions as much as heard them.

And then it was over.

 

Even at this distance, the bandits were pelted with a rain of red sand and shards of rock, even splinters of metal sheared from the crawlers themselves. Luckily few of those in the shelter of the channel received any noticeable injuries from the shrapnel, and these were bandaged easily enough. Huang just tried not to think too long about those who had been inside the crawlers and the risks to
them
.

When the rain of dust and debris slowed, and the cloud kicked up by the half dozen explosions cleared, Zhao and Huang chanced a look back over the channel's edge to see how well the plan had worked.

Huang's plan, it transpired, had outperformed anyone's expectations. It was just as well that there wasn't much of a market for the goods and materiel carried by the convoy, because little of it survived the blast. For that matter, the crawlers themselves scarcely survived the blast, with only twisted shapes of blackened metal and smoking ruin remaining where the sickly yellowish green crawlers had been only moments before.

The explosives had been plunder the bandits had won from another convoy some time before, but Zhao and the others had seen little use for the stuff before now. They had worked in mines, after all, and having been miners, they would always
be
miners in some matters. To them, explosives were of use in clearing rock, in blasting passages in the skin of the planet itself, and little else besides. Of course any number of them had lost fingers or limbs, or fidelity of hearing, or even loved ones to unintentional blasts, but they still did not think of explosives as potential weapons.