She gave a quick assenting jerk of her head, rummaged through a stack of supplies and snatched up black tubes with a neck strap (Binoculars? Serroi wonders), slung her weapon over her shoulder by its webbing strap and went quickly out of the warehouse and along the street. She climbed the sandhill and settled on her belly in the weeds, brought the binoculars to her eyes, fiddled with them a while, then settled to her tedious watch.
Inside the building the raiders continued unloading the big vehicle, strapping packets on the back of the two-wheelers. As soon as one was ready, a raider mounted it and roared off into the foggy dawn. Before the sun was fully up, all twelve two-wheelers were gone, Angel and his band were gone, spread out on separate routes so they could be sure at least some of their captured supplies would get through to their base.
Silence settled back over the ruins and the dunes. Liz lay quietly among her weeds, Georgia and the strongman strolled along the street, using an ancient broom and some brush to scratch out wheel and hoof marks, apparently relaxed but keeping a close eye on the sky. Dawn was fading, the fog was fading, there were few clouds in the sky, it promised to be a warm pleasant day. The two men went back inside the warehouse, muscled the sliding door along its rusted track, leaving a crack wide enough for a man to walk through.
The Mirror blinked.
The sun leaped toward zenith, settled at about an hour from noon. A loud whopping sound. A speck in the sky grew rapidly larger. Two men sitting in a bulging glass bubble in a lattice of metal, rotors whirling overhead. The thing swept low over the wrecked village, slowed until it was almost hovering, moved in a tight circle and swung away, moving south along the highway until it vanished into the blue.
The Mirror blinked.
The sun flashed past noon, slowed to its usual pace. Liz thrust her head through the crack. “Van’s coming. Far as I can tell, he’s loose. No copters.”
A short while later, a familiar muted purring-the van came down the street, stopped while Georgia shoved on the sliding door, then drove in beside the military vehicle and stopped.
The dark woman came out the back, one arm hanging useless, a wide patch of drying blood on the shoulder of her tailored shirt. As the rest piled out after her, she lifted the dangling arm with her other hand and hooked her thumb over her belt so the arm had some support. Walking slowly so she wouldn’t jar her shoulder, she crossed to stand beside Georgia.
“We had to fight loose,” she said. “We got Aguillar and Connelly out. Catlin’s dead. He couldn’t make it, too far gone, asked me to shoot him. Did. Ram’s got a bullet in him, a crease on his leg, bled a little but he could run and did. Rest of us, well, we’re mobile. As you see, we picked up a couple other prisoners. Connelly says he knows them both not just from the introg center, vouches for them. Woman’s a doctor. Orthopedic surgeon. Man’s a history professor at Loomis. Asked about Julia, says he knows her. Feisty dude for an academic type, saved my life just about. Hauled me up when the bullet knocked me off my feet, half-carried me till we reached the transport.” She grinned. “We jacked ourself a copcar. Bit of luck, got us in smooth enough. It was getting out the shit started flying. Took us awhile to get loose enough to connect with Det. Doc there did get the worst of the bleeding stopped with stuff in the copcar, but she didn’t have much to work with.”
“Liz says you’re clean.”
“Yeah, or I wouldn’t be standing here flapping my mouth.” There was sweat on her forehead and her rich brown had gone a dull mud-gray, but the spirit in her was a wine-glow in her light eyes.
Georgia touched her cheek, his stolid face deeply serious. “You go sit down before you fall down.” Then he grinned at her. “Picking up a medical doctor.” He looked over her shoulder at the battered, middle-aged woman bending over a wounded man, a medipac already open beside her. “Anoike’s luck.”
“Ain’ it de trut’.” Refusing Georgia’s arm, she went over to the military vehicle, sat down on the flat ledge that ran between the wheels, resting her head against its metal side, waiting her turn for treatment.
The Mirror blinked.
Night. Fog or low-hanging clouds. Trees swam in and out of the fog as the Mirror’s eye swept along. A creek cut through a small clearing. Condensation dripped off needles and leaves, off rocky overhangs. A man came from under the trees, another, two more, carrying a third on a stretcher-Ram, the doctor walking beside him. Another two, another stretcher, Anoike on it. A man in his fifties with thick unruly gray hair. Liz. More of the raiders, the strongman, finally Georgia. A soft whistle came from somewhere among the trees; he answered it without breaking stride.
As they moved into the trees again Serroi began seeing small camouflaged gardens, the plants growing haphazard in the grass and brush, then some lean-tos and crude pole corrals with horses in them, more shelters, tents huddled close in to trees, more and more of them, heavy canvas tops with walls and floors of rock or wattle and daub. Faces looked out of some, some men and women came out and watched the raiders pass, called softly to one or the other, getting soft answers. A whole little village under the trees, hidden from above, a portable community able to pick, up and move itself given a few hours warning, leaving only depressions and debris behind. Thick netting stretched overhead, open enough to let in some moonlight and certainly any rain. The Mirror’s eye swept up through the web and circled over it, showing her, showing them both, the hillside below them, empty except for vegetation and trees, the tent village wiped away as if it had been a dream, nothing more.
The Mirror blinked.
The sun shone with a pale watery light through a thinning layer of clouds. The Mirror’s eye roamed about the village, showing them children playing, laughing, chasing each, other among the trees and tents, others gathered around a young man, listening as he talked to them, writing in notebooks they held on their knees. Some women and men were washing clothing in the stream, others were cooking, working in the gardens, talking and laughing, some stretched out on mats, sleeping. There were sentries keeping a desultory watch on the approaches to the camp, young men and women, mostly in their teens, perched in trees or stretched out under brush. They weren’t exactly alert, but there were enough of them to make it very hard for any large group of men to catch the villagers off-guard.
A whup-whupping sound. Serroi remembered it and wasn’t surprised when the Mirror’s eye swept above the camouflage netting and focused on the sky. Huge and metallic, twice the size of the searcher she’d seen before (copter, Georgia had called it, she remembered that after a moment; copter, she said to herself as if by naming the thing she could draw some of the terror out of it), it slowed in the air, hovered over a slope some distance from the camp. Fire bloomed under it, it spat out darts so swift she guessed at them more than saw them until they hit the hillside and exploded, blew a hole in the rock with a loud crunch, a fountain of stone and shattered trees.
The copter hovered over its destruction until the reverberations of the explosion had died, then a loud voice boomed from it, a man’s voice, many times magnified. “Terrorists,” it trumpeted, metallic overtones and echoes close to defeating the effect of the volume, turning the words into barely understandable mush. “Surrender. Save your miserable necks. We coming after you, gonna burn these hills down around you. Defoliants, you scum, remember those? Napalm. Rockets. We gonna scrub these hills bare. Ever seen third-degree burns? Want your kids torched? Surrender, scum. You got no running room left.”
Before the last echoes died out, the copter was moving on along the range. Serroi held her breath as it passed over the village, but the men in the machine were blasting slopes at random intervals without any real hope of hitting anyone. They blew a chunk out of the next mountain over, repeated the message with a few added descriptions, and flew on, the whump-crump of their assault on stone and dirt and living wood fading gradually to silence.