He ran to his own room, swept his framed photos and treasured books into his pack, thought for an instant, Wish I was the guy who could just toss the three pictures of Allie into a corner and leave them here, and shrugged. He’d try that kind of courage some other time.
Something heavy slammed against the outside wall, cracking plaster inside. Arnie grabbed his bag and went into the hall; the men’s and women’s bunkrooms were pouring people into their jobs. Trish and Arnie brought up the rear, urging people down the stairs. She had a moment to turn and whisper to him, “And now I know you’re right. Soon as we’re back in Pueblo we’ve got to plan what you’re going to say to Heather.”
Something else hit the outside wall, hard enough to be felt through their feet.
“Trebuchet,” Lieutenant Quentin announced loudly. “Like the Mongols used. Just a big lever and fifty tribals yanking a rope to throw a rock the size of a bowling ball.”
They all jumped at the loud clang; that one had hit steel shutters on the ground floor. “Keep moving,” Arnie said. The snipers in the attic began to fire, and he added, “It’s being taken care of. Do your job, and they’ll do theirs.”
Documents virtually flew into boxes, the boxes seemed almost to close and stack themselves. No more rocks arrived; a sniper called from above that the tribals had abandoned their trebuchet. “Okay, do the optional part of the list,” Arnie said.
Engineers and technicians scrambled to put the instruments and other hard-to-replaces into boxes. Trish said, “No response from the control bunker—”
A shutter broke inward through a window, tipping onto the floor inside with a crash; a moment later, an arrow quivered on the floor. The snipers in the attic were firing so fast it sounded like continuous volleys.
Everyone dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the central hallways. Good, they remembered something else from their drills, and this time without being told. At another window, the steel shutters rang, but held; this trebuchet crew must be more competent, closer, maybe both.
As Trish and Arnie took quick roll of the scientific staff in the hallway, Quentin rolled in a rack of rifles. “These are pre-loaded—Newberry Standards, same thing the troops are using. Who’s qualified on them?”
“Everyone,” Arnie said. “I insisted. Some of us don’t like it, though.”
“Some of us do,” Trish said, picking up a Newberry and five four-shot magazines. Arnie stepped forward, and then everyone else was forming a line, the more reluctant taking the rear.
“I’ll have other jobs than shooting for some of you,” Quentin said, “but it’s bad; I think you should all have a gun with you, all right?”
Ruth Odawa sighed. “I hate the things but I hate being clubbed or burned to death even more. I’ll carry it but I’ll be happy to do almost anything else.”
The front door opened and slammed shut in an instant; the sergeant outside said, “In the center hallway.”
Carton, a Ranger from Olympia, came in. “Lieutenant Quentin, the colonel says we’re going to be surrounded, and he’s ordering everyone who can to fall back here. Captain Piersall and Lieutenant Ayache were killed in the first attack. Colonel Streen has direct command of Charlie Company and he’s bringing them in here. He’s also got both platoons of Rangers. If any of the engineering and scientific party can shoot—”
“We just went over that,” Quentin said. “They’re armed and ready.”
“Armed anyway,” Odawa said; Trish shut her up with a glare.
“Where’re the TexICs?” Quentin asked.
“Trying to chase the tribals away from the windmills,” Carton said. “The tribals swarmed up onto the mota, hundreds of them, with grapnels on big pieces of piano wire that tangle around and wreck the hubs, and rocks on poles to smash up the rotors, and God knows what else. I was on a watchtower up there when it started. We’ve lost at least four windmills that I know of. A few guys with black-powder repeaters couldn’t even slow the bastards down; I don’t know how the Texans’ll do with lances, pistols, and sabers, but at least they’re on horseback.” He might have grimaced or laughed; his expression was strange. “Guess we’ll all have to stop making fun of our pony soldiers and their cowboy outfits.”
“Guess we will,” Quentin said. “All right, we don’t want to be—”
Bangs, pops, and roars stuttered above. One of the men above shouted something down the stairs; then the front door opened. “Everyone stay down!” Colonel Streen shouted. “Troops coming in!”
Suddenly the house was full of soldiers—over a hundred Temper infantry, in their “Rorschach jammies,” the gray wool camo-blotched with India ink that had replaced the rotted-away ACUs; around fifty of the President’s Own Rangers, in their black flannel shirts and jeans; a few TexICs, Texas Irregular Cavalry, who looked to Arnie like they’d escaped from a Nashville revue.
Colonel Streen, a tall black man who had never spoken much to Arnie before, came in. “Doctor Yang, if we can all meet in your office, I need to talk quickly with my officers and you.”
Arnie’s “office” was a walk-in closet, with barely room for the five of them to stand around Arnie’s tiny, battered old desk.
“It’s the worst.” Streen looked a thousand years old. “We’re out of touch with at least half the force; the tribal attack overran three blockhouses out on our main line right during rotation, they were inside before the blockhouse crews knew what was happening, and the reliefs coming up were hit out in the open—Captain, thank God your TexICs were on top of that or we’d have lost all those men too—”
“Glad to help,” Captain Tranh said, his Texas twang broad and harsh; something about him reminded Arnie of a silly movie he’d seen long ago, John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. “Wish we could’ve been more use on the windmills, though. I think you have to figure they’re all lost; we can run’em off any one windmill but they’re right back on it, or after a different one, as soon as we turn our backs. I’m real sorry about that, Doctor Yang.”
“It’s gear,” Arnie said, though his heart was sinking. “People are what matter.”
Streen nodded. “Right. All right, now when I was with General Grayson in the Yough, we found out there’s no real leadership on the battlefield, even if their plan is sophisticated. Each little tribe has a structured, conditional list of tasks, every single tribal has that list memorized, and they run down their decision tree till they’re killed, dispersed, or victorious. So right now out in the dark they’re all finding each other, getting the right people on their left and right, and then when they’re all in place, there’s gonna be one big human wave, like a banzai charge, focused here, coming from all sides.”
“That’s what the tribals did at Pend Oreille,” Goncalves, the Ranger major, agreed; with his chest-length graying beard and all-black uniform, he looked like the wrath of Jehovah. “Fighting them around Grant’s Pass we could screw them up with three-man teams intercepting their runners and picking off the guys carrying spirit sticks, because they guide off those. I have six three-man teams out doing that right now; that should buy us a few minutes to prepare.”
“Cavalry can probably disrupt even better,” Tranh said. “Anyone running between groups of tribals, and anyone carrying a spirit stick—”