They had come out of the nothings onto high ground. They were in an alpine pass looking down at a long narrow valley with a small fast-flowing river running through it. The small valley town that was situated about halfway down its length was not much more than a collection of domes and flat-topped adobes. It was neoprimitive from the look of the surrounding cultivated fields, and the small, gray stone ziggurat beside the river at the far end of the town seemed to indicate that religion played a major part in the inhabitants' lives. They would most likely be pushovers, which was just as well — for this attack, the army had no air support. The air pirates who had been running with them for the past two months had decided that the valley was too narrow for them to operate in safely and had taken their dirigible and four small monoplanes and headed out for Elsewhere. Whether they would ever return was debatable. Baptiste had fumed, but he had no real control over the miniature air force.
The army of Vlad Baptiste had emerged from the nothings into a subjective early morning. A pseudosun was coming up from behind the blue mountains. The upper slopes were hidden by clouds; Reave, who had seen a hundred variations of that kind of insular stasis town, suspected that the clouds were probably a permanent fixture, hiding the fact that the mountains had no real peaks but simply faded into the upper extreme nothings. There was undoubtedly a spread feed generator buried somewhere under the town, maintaining the valley's cozy normality.
Baptiste had briefly halted the column at the head of the pass. For some minutes he had sat on the turret of the armored car, a hunched figure in a leather field coat with his white aviator scarf flying in the breeze. He had stared down at the town long and hard, as though savoring the carnage to come. Finally he had pulled down his goggles and waved the army forward. There was little doubt among his soldiers that their leader was mad. His taste for random and wanton destruction seemed to grow by the month. There was no reason to sack and burn the little mountain community beyond the simple fact that it was there and Baptiste had found it. Reave was becoming heartily sick of the whole bloody business. He would have liked just to leave and ride away on his own, but that was a good deal more difficult than it sounded. Lately Baptiste had started hanging deserters.
There had once been a time when the word "deserter" would have been quite meaningless. They had been a loose company of freebooters then. Admittedly, they had been a little wild and some of their number had definitely been psychopaths, but they had largely confined their activities to the Lanfranc Margins, where everything was pretty wild and woolly, and, if they messed with anyone, the victims were more than likely to give as good as they got. The normal thing was to ride into town, get drunk, raise a little hell, and move on. It was simple, and those who got hurt probably deserved it. At first the change was so gradual that nobody really noticed. The gang became larger, growing from a dozen to twenty and then to thirty. Baptiste seemed to be making most of the decisions. He even organized a kind of uniform. He somehow acquired a load of short, frogged hussar's jackets in federal gray, and everyone got to wear one. Each man made his own modifications. Not even Baptiste could expect regimentation among his motley, walleyed bunch. Reave wore his with a plumed hat and black thighboots. Menlo Welker, who rode beside him, had his hair in braids and sported a steel pot helmet with a bayonet blade welded to it, pointing straight up.
The turning point had come when they had burned Lovelock Springs after a protracted firefight with angry townspeople who did not particularly relish their rough brand of tourism. After that, Baptiste seemed to have had the taste in his mouth. They stopped being mere hell-raisers and became destroyers. Baptiste started talking about "his army," and instead of having fun, they went on "raids." The Margin towns began arming against them, hiring shootists from other nomad gangs as mercenaries to defend them against Baptiste and his constantly growing band of cutthroats. Their raids took them farther and farther afield, and soon they were regularly leaving their old stomping grounds in the Margins and making sweeps through the nothings, preying on unsuspecting and usually undefended stasis settlements like the one in front of them.
The town seemed to be slowly waking to the new day. Thin ribbons of smoke drifted up from a number of the buildings. They really did have to be neoprimitive if they insisted on using fires for cooking. At first nobody in the town seemed to notice the body of men coming down the road from the pass. A few figures came and went among the buildings, but their movements had the calm normalcy of any daily routine. Nobody seemed to have looked up at the mountain. Then the routine was abruptly shattered. It took only one to give the alarm. The one was walking across the small square in front of the ziggurat. He or she stopped dead in his or her tracks. It was impossible to see the face or even determine the sex, but the reaction was unmistakable. First the shock and then the response. The figure ran to the nearest building and quickly returned with four others. They were pointing.
Menlo grunted. 'Looks like we've been spotted.'
'We're kinda hard to miss.' Reave's mouth twisted.
Figures were spilling out of buildings all over. Some were running toward the far end of town, but one large group, emerging from a big, barnlike building near the ziggurat, was forming into orderly ranks. They wore what looked like green sleeveless tunics and were carrying weapons.
'They've got themselves some sort of militia, damn it.' The figures in green were reinforced by a number of regular townspeople.
'And they're planning to make a fight of it.'
'I don't think they know who they're dealing with.'
There was a dry stone wall, three or four feet high, around the perimeter. The defenders were running toward it, obviously planning to use it as cover from which to hold off the attackers. Reave knew that his own bunch was going to take casualties and that Baptiste's response would probably be the massacre of everyone in the town. He drew one of his two pistols from the holster on his saddle. It was a long-barreled flintlock, lavishly ornamented, a reproduction of an ancient Moorish design. The antiquity, however, was only on the outside. The weapon's operation was deadly state of the art. A subatomic pellet discharged a stream of lethal accelerated ions each time the trigger was pulled. He checked the pistol's charge, then replaced it and ran a check on its twin.
The pitch of the armored car's drive changed. It was revving and picking up speed. Its siren cut in. The captain shouted 'Charge!' and Reave put long roweled spurs to his charger. The advance was a practiced maneuver. The lead riders moved sideways until the whole mounted force was strung out, yelling like banshees, running line abreast while the foot soldiers sprinted behind them.
Despite their bulk, the marma lizards could cover ground at alarming speed. They ran with a high-stepping, roadrunner gait, their long, pointed tails ramrod-stiff behind them and level with the ground. The pounding of their clawed feet shook the earth. The defenders had reached the stone wall. Reave had to give them full credit for courage. It would have been quite understandable if they had fled in the face of the attackers' demented charge. There were flashes of green fire from along the wall's length. They had to be using some kind of crystal-based particle weapon. So they were not that neoprimitive; they were not fighting with bows and boomerangs. A marma was hit. It staggered headfirst into the ground and crashed on its back, crushing its rider. Reeve stuffed the reins of his mount into his mouth to free his hands to use both pistols.