Not that the last part was necessary, since Neversmile had served under the general during the mutiny and had a lot of respect for him. Good officers were hard to come by. A faint pink line marked the eastern horizon. Wilker followed the. trail, and the Naa continued to worry. The general was crazy, the colonel was pissy, and the problem was his. Dimwit Timewaster was standing there, pissing on a rock, when the rich pungent odor of dooth passed beneath his nostrils. Not his dooth, a mangy animal tethered to a withered bush, but a distinctly different beast. And there was something more, the tan, not altogether unpleasant smell which, along with plastic and ozone, he had learned to associate with humans. The clip clop of hooves combined with the clink of poorly secured equipment served to reinforce what the Naa already knew. A lone, presumably stupid human, was heading up into the hills. Not only that, but, judging from odors ranging from gun oil to aftershave he came bearing gifts! His mother had been right. The gods did smile on those in need. The Naa shook himself off, secured his trousers, and slipped through the rocks. The bedroll looked like a long lumpy tube. Nocount Quickknife jerked as a hand covered his mouth, went for his blade, and relaxed when he smelted who it was. Dimwit nodded toward the trail. His voice was little more than a whisper. “We got company. Easy pickin’s. Move your ass.”
Nocount yawned. Dimwit winced at the smell of his companion’s breath and started to gather his gear. There was no particular hurry, something neither of them liked to do, since every stride carried their victim further from the fort. An advantage if the idiot called for help. Not that it mattered . . . since he’d soon be dead.
Booly left the reins loose and allowed the doom to pick its own way up the rock-strewn trail. A good decision since the animal was native to Algeron and well equipped to survive there. It had been a long time since the officer had ridden anything more challenging than a command car, and his knees were starting to hurt. His butt would come next, followed by his lower back. The legionnaire had already started to regret the journey but was too stubborn to turn back.
The dooth completed one long stretch of trail, tried to snatch a bite of greenery from a likely looking bush, and took a kick to its barrel-shaped ribs. Dooms were never ones to suffer silently and were famous for the variety of sounds they could make. This particular animal produced something that bordered between a belch and a grunt.
Booly kicked the animal again and guided it up through still another hairpin turn. The gravelly trail stretched up toward the swiftly rising sun. It was then, as the dooth started to climb, that Booty detected, or thought he detected, a foreign scent. The officer’s hand went to his sidearm. He stood in the stirrups and took a long careful look around.
Weather-smoothed boulders littered the surrounding hillside. Many were the size of battle tanks. A full company of legionnaires could have hidden there, concealed among the rocks, and he wouldn’t have been able to spot them. Especially if they were Naa—and didn’t want to be seen. Uneasy now, but not sure why, the legionnaire climbed toward the sunrise. Everything was normal.. . except for the fur that ran the length of his spine. That stood on end. The Trooper IF rounded an outcropping of rock, “saw” a patch of green smear itself across the blue grid that overlaid her surroundings, and stopped dead in her tracks. Then, weapons ready, she backed around the corner. Numbers shifted in the lower right hand comer of the cyborg’s vision as the threat factor gradually decreased.
Neversmile, who had allowed himself to be lulled into a sort of half-conscious trance, came fully awake. He spoke into a wire-thin boom mike. It was jacked into a panel at the base of Wilker’s duraplast neck.
“What’s up?”
“Naa,” Wilker replied. “Two of them. Both mounted.
Maybe a quarter mile ahead. Between the general and us.”
Neversmile swore silently. Just his luck. The general get’s a wild hair up his ass ... and the colonel chose him to deal with it. “Can you nail the bastards?”
“A shoulder-launched missile would handle it. assumin’ you ain’t too worried about due process or how big a hole I make.”
Neversmile remembered how many innocent females and cubs the Legion had accidentally slaughtered over the years and knew he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Not to mention the fact that he was supposed to maintain a low profile. “No, hold your fire. Feel free to close the distance, however—but don’t let the shitheads see you.”
It was a stupid order—Wilker thought so anyway—but knew better than to say so. Not to a sergeant—and not to this Sergeant. Gravel crunched under her weight, and the cyborg continued to climb.
Dimwit emerged from the rocks still buttoning his pants. It was the second time he had stopped to take a pee and the second time he had fallen behind. Nocount was irritated. “Hurry up! The human’s slow but not that slow. We’ll lose the furless bastard.”
“It ain’t my fault,” Dimwit complained. “I had to pee and it hurts.”
“Alt because you’ll screw anything with a pulse,” his companion replied unsympathetically. “Come on, let’s go.”
Dimwit mounted his dooth, kicked the animal onto the trail, and kicked it yet again. The animal groaned, sent plumes of lung-warmed air down toward the ground, and passed a prodigious amount of gas. The trek resumed.
If the mesa had a name, Booly didn’t know what it was. Only that it stood straight and tall, just as it had the last time he’d been there, camping with his mother.
It was she who showed him the narrow, often dangerous, path that circled the sheersided cliffs, pointed out the tool marks the ancients had left on the rock, and fired his imagination. “Who were they?” she asked. “And from whom were they hiding?” For surely some great evil had been upon the land, a threat that drove them up off the slowly rising plain, to make a home in the sky. Had they won? These hard-pressed Naa? And survived that which sought to hunt them down? Or had the group been decimated? And wiped from existence? There was no way to be sure. And there was another story, a more personal tale, which came back to Booly as his dooth labored toward the top. It had to do with his grandfather, William Booly I, a onetime sergeant major who was wounded during an ambush, taken prisoner, and nursed back to health by a Naa maiden, a beautiful maiden, named Windsweet.
His grandfather was smitten, very smitten, and soon fell in love. But the whole thing was wrong. Wrong according to the Legion, wrong according to the Naa, and wrong according to her father. Windsweet helped the legionnaire escape, bandits gave chase, and a patrol saved his life. Later, after returning to his unit, the soldier tried to forget the maiden and the way he felt about her, but found that impossible to do. That’s when Booly’s ancestor did something which Booly himself, as an officer, could never forgive: William Booly I went over the hill.
The dooth rounded a comer, rocks clattered away from its hooves and fell toward the scree below. They rattled, started a small slide, and tumbled down the mountain. The noise caused Nocount to jerk his animal to a halt. He turned to Dimwit. ‘The motherless alien is halfway to the lop.”