The attack wave crested, then receded. But the defense was wearing ever more rapidly. If it were outflanked, or grenaded from above, the end would come too soon.
I tugged out a box of wooden kitchen matches and crept to the bunched fuses. I had test-burned some back at the camp and figured these would burn through in ninety seconds.
Two hundred yards away, down the ledge, the first scout’s helmet peeked above the ledge.
I struck my match, but it broke in my numbed fingers. I grabbed for it and spilled the rest of the box, the tiny sticks floating down the eight hundred feet to the canyon floor like dandelion seed.
Spang. A scout’s bullet exploded granite six feet above my head, then sang away into the distance.
I peered into the matchbox. One left.
My unpracticed fingers shook as I struck the match once, twice without result. I cursed my smoke-free lifestyle, then tried again. The match burst into yellow flame, and I cupped it with my other hand around it, then lit the fuses.
They spat and crackled as they burned toward the dynamite.
Another scout bullet struck the ledge, in front of me.
I spent a remaining round to keep the scouts’ heads down while I begged the fuses to burn faster.
The count in my head reached ninety seconds.
Nothing.
I counted ten seconds more, then peeked out to see whether the fuses were burning.
Spang.
I earned a near-miss and a stone chip through my cheek for my curiosity.
Boom!
Boom! Boom! Booomm!
The explosions lifted me off the ledge, then belly-flopped me on the stone.
Granite flew.
Acrid smoke billowed.
The noise level returned to the background sizzle of small arms and the drum of mortars.
As I got to my feet, head lowered, and turned to pick my way north away from the battle, I muttered, “You cut that too close.”
I glanced back.
The smoke cleared. Jagged gaps had been torn in the granite.
But the ledge was still there.
SIXTY-TWO
“CRAP! CRAP, CRAP, CRAP.”
I swayed there on the ledge. I had no more dynamite, five more bullets, and no plan. The rational thing to do was escape before the scouts noticed. And leave Aud Planck’s shopkeepers hung out to dry.
I ran to the narrow ledge span, smoke still curling from its crevasses, up between my boots. I jumped up and down on the ledge but it remained as immovable as, well, granite.
“Goddamit!” I reversed my rifle in my hands and jammed the stock into a smoking crevasse, as if I could pry the mountain apart.
A bullet struck between my feet, and I looked up. A scout charged toward me along the ledge, screaming and firing. The sniper’s scope on my rifle probably earned me no love. Behind him four more scouts single-filed toward me.
I had wedged my rifle immovably in the crevasse, but I still had Ord’s pistol, albeit bundled beneath layers of clothing. I needed to buy time.
I released the rifle and raised my hands.
The scout slowed and shuffled toward me, rifle trained on me from the hip.
He stopped fifteen feet away, panting steam. He didn’t look like a Nazi. He looked like a thousand other soldiers I had known, a kid who needed nothing in this world but a shave and a three-day pass.
It would never work, and this kid didn’t deserve it, but I was out of options. I lowered one hand slowly toward my jacket lapel, toward the pistol, while I sighed and cast my eyes to the sky. I said, “Crap,” as my plan became irrelevant.
SIXTY-THREE
THE DESCENDING MORTAR ROUND plummeted across my vision in less than a blink, silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky, then scraped the edge of the ledge behind the kid, and alongside one of the other four scouts, so hard that its steel sparked orange against the granite. Out of sight below the ledge, the round burst.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the kid’s eyes widened as they met mine. The ledge beneath him and the other four scouts sank like an elevator’s floor.
He dropped his rifle and stretched out his hand.
I reached for it, but he was gone, tumbling and flailing, staring up at the sky, along with the other four scouts and, all around them, the spinning shards and blocks of granite that had been the ledge, eight hundred feet to the canyon floor below.
The rock beneath my feet sloughed away, too, and I fell on my back, scrabbling and grasping. Finally, I lay staring up past the canyon rim, sucking air and shaking.
When my heart slowed a fraction, I rolled onto hands and knees and peered over the edge of the ledge that was now severed by the impassable gap completed by the mortar round’s explosion.
Below, Aud’s former soldiers and his new ones struggled hand-to-hand atop the overturned sledges. He strode, chest out, dragging one bandaged leg behind him, along the makeshift battlement while shells burst around him, until he reached an object that protruded from beneath a new-fallen boulder.
Aud Planck tugged my splintered sniper’s rifle from beneath the boulder, then turned and looked up, shading his eyes with one hand. He pointed the rifle north, in the direction I was supposed to go, then saluted with his other hand.
I leaned out above the battle, returned his salute, then turned and started down the ledge.
We stared at each other through the smoke, then we both turned away from one another for what we both knew would be the last time.
I reached the junction where the down trail’s northern end joined the plain at sunset. From the canyon, the rumble of battle continued, without me. Unflanked, what remained of the unlikely three hundred fought on. I couldn’t save the shopkeepers who remained alive. But maybe I could help to make their sacrifice count for something.
Blood trickled from one ear, an eardrum burst by the mortar round’s concussion, and from my cheek. A granite splinter had torn through my sleeve and lodged in my birth-equipment forearm. I hadn’t eaten in four days, nor drunk anything but melted snow. What wasn’t bruised, ached. I began walking north into the frigid darkness, on feet I could no longer feel, then shifted gears to an air-borne shuffle trot that would get me back to the camp by sunup.
As I shuffled, I snorted to myself, “Some retirement.”
In fact, at four a.m. I arrived at the southern wire that demarcated the camp. It had been visible for miles across the plain, as oil lanterns carried by meteorite pickers crisscrossed the snow like fireflies.
A shopkeeper sentry saved my life by firing at me high and wide while intending anything but.
It took until five a.m. before I reached Jude and Celline, who pored over a camp map penciled with a search grid.
I reported the battle results like Pheidippides returning from the plain of Marathon, then asked, “How close are you?”
Celline ran her fingers down a tally sheet as she handed me back my ’Puter. “Close enough. Call your vessel down now. We need every second.”
I nodded. Before the Forty-fifth Infantry and the burned-out oil supply had entered the picture, our plan had been to deliver the Cavorite, then return the survivors on the commandeered ice train as far south as possible, then abandon it. The newly numerous Iridian resistance would melt into the population and become, like Mao’s guerillas, fish in the sea.
Jude unrolled another of the camp commandant’s maps. Now, with no transportation, and the pass south blocked by an advancing army, the survivors’ only hope was to outrun the Forty-fifth Infantry, east across the Arctic, until they reached the eastern end of the mountains, where they could turn south and make for the more hospitable climate of the north Iridian coast.