“Hang a handicap sign on your back,” Lyle agreed. “Get prime parking.”
“Tell it, Brother Lyle!” said Angel. They tossed the thoughtless jape from one to the other.
“Satellite recon is a wonderful thing; but even the up-and-down can’t see through trees or overhangs or pick fine details from a shadow-black canyon. Natalie led me the last part of the way. Took me down game paths, along a creek bed, through stands of Douglas fir that looked like they’d been there since God spread his tarp. She knew her horses, that Natalie. Couldn’t have been more’n nineteen, twenty; but she sat in the saddle like she’d been born there. Well, in that country, maybe she had. She never said more’n two dozen words to me the whole trip; and those were mostly ‘this way’ or ‘over there.’
“Finally, we come to the base of a sheer cliff. There was three canyons cut into it. No, not even canyons. More like cracks. Recon barely showed ’em, but Badger Stoltz and his daughter swore there was one of ’em led to the top. Natalie rode along the base of the mountain and ducked a little ways into each. Then she come out and said, ‘The right one. It slopes up real sharp, then goes vertical into a chimney that opens out on the high tundra. From there, your GPS should show you the way.’ ”
“Wasn’t she going with you?” asked Angel.
I snorted. “Weren’t you listening? Take a horse up a fissure like that?”
Jimmy rubbed his palms together. “I said, ‘Wish me luck?’ and she just yanked on her horse’s reins. ‘You don’t need luck when you’ve got that,’ she said. I knew she meant the walker, so I come back and said, ‘I ain’t no Imperial Storm Trooper and Wild Bob ain’t the Rebel Alliance. I’m on your side. We’re the good guys.’
“ ‘The good guys,’ she said. And, oh, she was pissed. Angry and afraid all at once. ‘Was your government ragged on folks until bandits like your Wild Bob could play the hero? And now my daddy has to ride out and maybe take a splash of flechettes in his belly, ‘steada ticketing speeders along the state road.’
“ ‘He ain’t my Wild Bob,’ I said. ‘I come to take him down.’
“Her lips curled. Full, soft lips. Oh, they were lips for kissing. And here I was a young suit louie going off to do battle. I deserved a kiss. But I was suited up, teeping a walker, and there was more than telemetry and digital screens between us. Instead of a kiss, I got a kiss-off. ‘You come to take him down?’ she said, and she leaned forward over her horse’s head and pointed a finger into my optics. ‘You listen to me, mister “suit louie.” If my daddy even gets wounded bad, you’ll have one more militia in the high country to worry about, and that’ll be me!’
“Hoo!” said Angel. “And she’d be a bad un, too.”
“She was just worried about her Pa,” I suggested. Jimmy looked at me, then shrugged.
“Maybe. I couldn’t let it bother me, though. I had a job to do; and if I didn’t get up that cut, her daddy probably would take a slug. Without me, the possemen were outnumbered and outgunned.”
“So how’d you do it?” Lyle asked. “Sounds like you’d be out of line o’ sight in that fissure.”
“Oh, I had an aerostat hovering at the relay point, and Lieutenant Serena kept it on station. But you’re right. Inside that chimney, the microwave beam would be blocked. So I asked Natalie to handle the little dish. You know, stake a repeater at the entrance, then crawl after me with the parabolic until I got up to where I could bounce sky again.”
“Helluva thing to ask a girl,” said Angel.
“Did you trust her?” I asked.
“You don’t get it, Angel,” Jimmy said. “She was a posseman, not just the Badger’s daughter. She packed a nine and a railgun and there was a street sweeper in her saddle scabbard. Oh, mano a mano, any one of us could have taken her down; but we’d be walking funny for a long time after.
“Well, I took that walker into the cleft and it was like someone drew a window shade, you know what I mean? All the I/O was juiced into the walker’s receptors by that little, handheld parabolic that Natalie Stoltz held. All she had to do was toss it aside, or even drop it accidentally, and that walker would be nothing but a pile of armor and circuitry stuck inside some rocks.
“I can’t say I didn’t think about that while I climbed that chimney; and what the colonel would say if I got stuck while I was on an unofficial outing. What I didn’t think about until later was Natalie. My walker depended on the power beam she was aiming, and the farther up the cleft I climbed, the harder it was to keep the beam targeted. She had to stand right underneath the walker and aim straight up. So if anything happened, that’d be a couple tons of composite armor and metalocene plastic come tumbling down on her head.”
“Takes balls,” Angel agreed. “I wouldn’t care to do it.”
“Almost made me wish the walker was self-powered.”
Lyle hooted. “Yeah, right. Carry a honking fuel cell around.”
“Said ‘almost,’ ” Jimmy told him. “The climb was the sort of workaround any good suit louie could pull off. Maybe a little closer to the edge, is all. Took me maybe half an hour to reach the top. I looked down over the edge to maybe wave Natalie my thanks, but all I seen was her riding off a-horseback without so much as a glance back.”
“Not very grateful for your help, was she?” Angel said.
“Found out later she went ’round the long way to hook up with her dad. Can’t fault her—her place was with him. Got there too late for the action, but then old Badger might’ve have that in mind when he assigned her to guide me.”
“That must have been some climb,” I said, “teep shadow, and all.” I tried to keep my voice professional; but some of the envy must have come through, because Jimmy winced and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Yeah, some climb,” he said, and gave no more details.
Lyle leaned forward. “But once you were out of the cleft, you could bounce…”
“Yeah. Got my bearings from the GPS, shook hands again with the aerostat, checked in with Serena and Stoltz. Gauged the distance and told Stoltz I’d call him when it was time to open the dance. Serena said there was no movement on the up-and-down; but hell, those bandits know how to get around without smiling for the sat’-cams. Anything worth noticing would have been under trees or camo overhangs or down in the bunkers. You know how it is.”
Lyle and Angel said they knew how it was. I chimed in, too; but for me it was more a theoretical knowledge, cadged from recon photos, official briefings, or picking the brains of Insiders. I’d written about it in “The Ambush.” People tell me how my stories make everything come alive for them—a funny expression to use about stories of combat—but only I knew how dead the words felt under my fingertips.
“There was this one building, though, seemed to have a lot of in-and-out. The Artificial Stupid thought it was either a headquarters, an entrance to the bunker system, a whorehouse, or a public library.”
Angel shook his head. “Jesus. No wonder they call ’em Stupids—”
“You put up any bumblebees?” asked Lyle.