The Road of Danger-ARC (35 page)

The car fishtailed as it rose onto the dike, but the rebel leader kept it under control. They could travel faster on compacted earth than they had in the paddies where Grant kept their speed down to avoid spraying themselves with the liquid muck. The surface was narrow, even for so small a car, but they sped along it without difficulty even where a spiky native tree grew from the side and required a twitch of the yoke to avoid.

Hogg leaned sideways so that his head was between those of the others. “I could spell you on the driving, y’know,” he said.

Not for the first time, of course; and perhaps not for the twenty-first thus far on the ride. Hogg’s enthusiasm for driving wouldn’t have been as much of a problem if he hadn’t also been a really terrible driver.

Daniel didn’t reply. Grant said, “We’ll be coming to a farm shortly. I think we should overnight there. We have another hundred kilometers ahead of us, but it’s nearly dusk now and it’s unwise to try to enter Saal after dark.”

They bumped up onto the right-of-way for the Grain Web. It was a magnetic levitation system; the current-carrying rails had been buried in a smooth pavement of stabilized earth. Even after four years of disuse and damage, it seemed a real thoroughfare.

“There’s a curfew?” Daniel said, glad for a change of subject.

He deliberately hadn’t questioned Grant about how he was going to enter the fortified capital. The fellow was an excellent driver, but he had a tendency to look toward the person he was speaking to and wave his hand. That had already led to some near misses as a result of this broken terrain and the fact that the overloaded vehicle didn’t handle the way he expected it to.

“There’s no regulation,” Grant said. “My identification would be checked, the same as any other time. My concern is that it would be checked in the morning, when they sent out a patrol to investigate the wreckage. The troops in the bunkers at night don’t like to see vehicles driving toward them.”

He slowed. “We should see a track leading to the left soon,” he said, scanning the brush on that side. Interspersed with spiky bushes were hollows which were covered with flat circles of leaves. Vivid yellow spikes shot up to knee height from the middle of each green splotch.

“How is it you gallivant all over this bloody mudhole however you please?” Hogg said, sounding accusatory. Not only was he wedged into the back of the car, he really had wanted to drive—almost as much as Daniel didn’t want him to drive.

“I’m responsible for Saal’s water supply,” Grant said, twisting to look back at Hogg. “I make inspections every—”

“Is that the road?” Daniel said, stretching his arm past the driver to indicate the wallow of mud angling into the hills to the left.

“The devil!” Grant said, turning sharply and lifting the outer edge—Daniel’s side—of the car as though they were on a banked track. Even so they skidded through brush that slapped the car’s body and occasionally twanged from the fans before the vehicle looped back to the mud path.

“They’ve been using heavy trucks,” Grant added in a doubtful voice. He was looking over the side of the car at the crushed vegetation.

“I think that tracked vehicles have come this way,” Daniel said, looking out his own side. “See the way the heavier stems are chewed, not just broken?”

He hadn’t brought a weapon himself, a decision for which he now felt a vagrant regret. Still, if this was what he thought it was, a pistol—or even a stocked impeller—wouldn’t make a great deal of difference.

“Tractors, I suppose,” Grant said. He spoke more loudly than he needed to. “They must have gotten heavy tractors instead of using the ground-effect transport.”

“There’s smoke, young master,” said Hogg, his lips close to Daniel’s ear but his hoarse voice loud enough that Grant must have heard him. The smell was obvious regardless; not just the sharp, sneezing tickle of wood smoke but also the rasp of electrical insulation and the sludgy black stench of paint and rubber.

“Grant, perhaps you should wait here while Hogg and I—” Daniel said, but the driver had thumbed forward the verniers on the yoke. One switch controlled the fan speed, the other the blade angle.

Grant was holding the car low, but they quickly accelerated to a speed faster than even Hogg would have been willing to drive on a track punctuated with stumps and branches standing upright from toppled boles. Daniel gripped the side of the open car with one hand and the edge of his seat with the other, smiling pleasantly.

“There’s a watchtower,” Grant shouted. He had to compete with the throaty howl of the fans, of course. “Herrero’s Farm is very well defended!”

Then, “Where’s the watchtower? We should be—”

They came over the ridge at speed. Grant tilted his yoke to raise the bow, using the car’s underside to brake their rush. They mushed down onto the track instead of slamming. The maneuver must have been instinctive, because his eyes and surely his mind were on the ruin ahead.

The watchtower of coarse red limestone was still there, the base at least, but the upper portion had been shot away. Daniel couldn’t be sure how much was missing but he guessed about ten feet, judging from the gravel which slugs from automatic impellers had sprayed around and beyond the remnant.

There had probably been a watchman, given the enthusiasm with which Sunbright’s skin-winged “birds” fluttered over and dug into the gravel. They were tracking the scent. The stone had been crushed too thoroughly to make a good cairn.

“You really need sensors that give you warning at a greater distance,” Daniel said as the car slowed to a walk. “If they knew where the tower was, and I suppose they did, then they were shooting as soon as they came in sight of it. No matter how good the watchman’s reflexes were, he didn’t have a chance.”

“I’d have had a chance,” said Hogg in a voice like rocks in a tumbler. He was looking at the farmstead itself and imagining Bantry in the place of these smoldering buildings. “
I’d
have had a bloody chance!”

“Easy, friend,” Daniel said, reaching back to put a hand on his servant’s shoulder. “We’ll take care of what we can.”

The older buildings were stone; the rest were of structural plastic. The latter seemed to have been placed on tracts between the stone ones or around the farmstead’s original perimeter. The square, peak-roofed house in the center and the barn attached to it must have been ancient.

A dozen plump black-and-tan dogs had been penned behind orange plastic fencing to the west of the main house. About a dozen; Daniel couldn’t be sure, since the burst from an automatic impeller had shredded them thoroughly.

“There was no call for that,” Hogg said, swinging out of the car with a lithe grace that belied his cramped seating for the past two hours. He held his pistol along his right leg where from a distance it was hidden by the baggy fabric of his trousers. “Maybe some day I’ll meet this dog-shooter and discuss it with him.”

“Dogs fatten on rice, and the wet doesn’t rot their paws,” Grant said, sounding as though he were talking in his sleep. He shut off the fans in the courtyard formed by a U of ruined buildings. “All over Sunbright, they’re eaten as often as chicken or pork. It took me years to get used to that.”

At least two automatic impellers had raked the farm. One shooter had simply sprayed slugs across the buildings, rarely holding below shoulder level on an adult man. The other, though, had kept his bursts at knee-height. He had brought down the front and sides of every stone building and probably killed most of those who had thrown themselves to the floor when the shooting started.

The plastic buildings fared better: small punctures at six-inch intervals dimpled the sheeting, but the plastic didn’t absorb all the energy of the hypersonic slugs and shatter to dust and gravel as stone did. It wouldn’t have made much difference to the people inside, of course.

“Get out of here!” a cracked voice screamed. “Get out! There’s nothing left to steal!”

Hogg had vanished; Daniel hadn’t seen him go. Grant whispered, “May the gods forgive me.”

A man tottered out of a shed covering three carts—their drawbars canted up so that they nested—and a winnowing machine. The equipment had been riddled, but the rubber tires on the carts were the only things which could have burned, and the slugs hadn’t ignited them.

“Get out!” the man screamed. He walked with two sticks, one of them a recent makeshift cut from a wooden pole. Age might have been enough to explain his feebleness, but blood stained the bandage around his head.

He tried to wave a cane, but it slipped from his grip. He slumped sideways. Daniel strode toward him, but a woman ran more quickly from the plastic barn nearby and caught the old man before he fell to the mud.

“Here,” Daniel said, reaching out. “I’ll—”

“Don’t touch me!” the man wheezed, though he dropped his remaining cane when he waggled it toward Daniel.

The woman was younger than he’d first thought—younger that him, in fact—and would be attractive when her swollen face recovered from bruises and crying. She said, “I have—”

She gasped and doubled up, clasping her belly.
One thing at a time
, thought Daniel as he lifted the old man. He carried him at a trot to the barn the woman had come from.

As he had expected, there were shakedowns of bedding in the emptied rice storage bins. Eyes stared at him around posts but vanished when he turned toward them; nearby a child began crying.

Daniel laid down the now-quiet man and turned to get the woman. She had followed him into the barn. She walked haltingly while pressing a hand to her abdomen, but she waved away his unspoken offer to help.

She seated herself on an upturned basket. “I suppose I’m bleeding again,” she said bitterly. “Well, it could be worse, couldn’t it?”

Daniel stood erect with his feet slightly apart and his hands crossed behind his back as though he were facing a superior officer. He said, “My servant and I are both countrymen. We can help with first aid.”

Then he added, “I’m Captain Daniel Leary, RCN. That is, I’m from Cinnabar.”

“If you’d come two days ago,” the woman said, “you could have helped dig graves. In the evening, I mean. If you’d showed up any sooner, you’d just have been three more to bury. I decided we had to bury them, you know. But it didn’t help with the smell. I don’t think the smell will ever go away.”

“Coming through!” Hogg called from outside. “Coming through!”

“Clear!” said Daniel. He wasn’t the sort to blaze away at sudden movements. For that matter, he didn’t have a gun at present, though he supposed he might have found one. Anyway, Hogg was being careful in a difficult situation, which wasn’t something to complain about.

“There’s thirty-odd more in another barn,” said Hogg as he entered. He’d concealed his pistol, but he carried a shotgun in the crook of his elbow. “Kids and women, mostly.”

He nodded toward the seated woman. “No others as young as her, though. And some men, but they’re shot up pretty bad.”

“They thought I was dead, I suppose,” the woman said. “Maybe they were right.”

Turning to Daniel and sitting straighter, she said, “My name is Floria Post. Emmanuel Herrero, whom you carried in, is my grandfather. Thank you.”

She gestured to the barn’s interior; several small children had appeared out of the bins. She said, “I brought the younger orphans here.”

Grant entered the barn, looking stunned. “It was Captain Kinsmill’s force,” he said. Daniel wasn’t sure who he was talking to, or if he was really talking to anyone outside his own mind. “Two of the women in the Seed Barn said they heard men call their leader ‘King.’ That’s Kinsmill’s nickname.”

“A blond man with moustaches?” Floria said, using both to mime a moustache that curved into sideburns. Her voice lilted as though she were about to break into peals of laughter. “Men offered him a turn with me, but he said he didn’t want sloppy thirds. More like sixth, I think, though I lost track eventually. The King took my niece instead. She was ten.”

The lilt turned to sobbing. The woman bent over, her face in her hands. Daniel was afraid that she was going to sag onto the floor, but he thought better of putting an arm around her for support.

A pair of middle-aged women must have been standing near the doorway but out of Daniel’s sight. They entered silently. One held Floria’s shoulders; the other touched her companion’s elbow in frightened support.

“Kinsmill’s a cultured man!” Grant said. “He’s from Bryce, he was educated in the Academic Collections there!”

I wonder if he was Adele’s classmate?
Daniel thought.
I’m sure she would have something to discuss with him now. Briefly
.

Floria had stopped crying. She raised her eyes to Daniel and said, “Captain? What do we do now? What can we
do
?”

Daniel nodded twice, giving himself time to consider the question. The elements were simple enough; and if he didn’t particularly like the answer, that didn’t change reality. A ship’s captain frequently arrived at answers he didn’t like, and the captain of a warship did so more often yet.

“Go to Saal,” he said. “You’ll have to walk, but you have carts to carry invalids and enough food for the journey. I’m sorry that we won’t be able to accompany you, but we have our own duties.”

One of the older women said, “We supported the revolt. We always sold our rice through the Provisional Government. Always!”

Until Captain Kinsmill decided there would be more profit if he cut out the middleman
, Daniel thought. Which was true, in the short term.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “We have to be going now.”

They would sleep rough tonight rather than shelter in the remains of Herrero’s Farm. They would get far enough away that no vagrant breeze would bring a reminder of the smoke and death of this tomb.

The old man’s eyes opened. They were blank for a moment; then he focused on Tomas Grant and sat bolt upright.

“You!” he said, pointing a frail hand. “You did this! It’s all your doing!”

The rebel leader turned and stumbled out of the barn. He didn’t speak.

Daniel cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well. We need to be going also. Come along, Hogg.”