“Right you are. Forbye we can use Bearkiller pilots and ground crew, and Mackenzies to guard and skirmish down towards the lowlands, if you supply the transport. With luck we can draw some of the Cutter cavalry off, too, and make them fight us in terrain that gives us the advantage.”
Edain stirred from where he’d been holding his glass between two palms and listening silently.
“And you’d be wanting to go up and supervise yourself, Chief,” he said wearily. “Not leaving it to those whose proper business it is. That’s the ill news you had for me.”
“How well you know me!” Rudi said. “Get the Archers ready. I’ll not try to go alone, lest you sicken with worry and do yourself an injury.”
“Or put the toe of me boot to the stony arse of you, that being the way to get sense into your thinking parts, Chief,” Edain said. “Now you’ve eaten, I suggest you seek your tent, unless you’ve decided to do without sleep as well. Something is making your judgment worse than it might be.”
Rudi nodded good-bye to Fred and rose. “You try presiding at meetin’s and reading reports all day, Edain, and see if you don’t seize any excuse to get away!”
More soberly, and looking out into the fire-starred darkness beyond the tent: “And I’ll be sending those pilots into peril. They can at least see the face of the man who’s asking them to do it.”
CHAPTER TWO
Seven Devils Mountains
(Formerly western Idaho)
High Kingdom of Montival
(Formerly western North America)
June 12th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
Private Cole Salander (1st Special Forces Battalion, Army of the United States) suppressed an impulse to dive for cover as the glider whipped by close overhead, just beyond the tips of the firs. He hadn’t had any warning; walking in tall conifer woods meant the only sky he could see was right overhead and the flying machines were as quiet as a ghost.
Instead of moving he froze, just turning his head down towards the ground to hide his face. Jumping for concealment made you more conspicuous. He’d had that well enough drilled in during the last couple of years for it to be reflex; he was a solidly built and broad-shouldered young man, with a snub-nosed face, pale eyes and sandy hair cropped in the Army’s high-and-tight, now still as a statue.
In the old General’s day you had to spend several years in the ranks with superior fitness reports and then qualify for the Rangers before they let you volunteer for the Special Forces, and they washed out most of the applicants even so. He knew standards had probably slipped and training had certainly gotten compressed since the war against the western powers started, and over the last eight months since President-General Martin Thurston was killed at the great and bloody cluster-fuck known as the Battle of the Horse Heaven Hills everything had started unraveling for sure.
I wouldn’t be pulling this mission on my own otherwise, and me just out of training. This is a job for a four-man team with at least an experienced leader.
But he was stubbornly determined to prove that he was as good as any of the old-timers.
Once the glider was out of sight he dropped his field pack, slung his crossbow so that it lay right down his back and deployed his climbing rope in a loop around the rough barked trunk of a big column-straight pine that must have been growing here when his great-grandfather left Värmland still in his mother’s womb. That and a scramble from branch to branch above the clear section got him sixty feet up in less than a minute, amid a spicy sweet sap-scent.
From there he had a magnificent view through his binoculars, though he made a note to rub the sticky residue off his fingerless gloves before touching his crossbow again. Forest, a slice of green meadow starred with red Indian paintbrush, even a herd of elk grouping together on a ridgeline against the menace of wolf-packs. What he couldn’t see was the glider, which meant. .
Which means it crashed, and probably pretty hard.
He grinned as he half-slid and half-fell down the big tree and hit the ground with a grunt and a squat. There wasn’t much in the way of landing sites around here; mountains had lots of updrafts, but not many flat smooth places. Gliders were useful, but they had short working lives. So did their pilots.
Cole had noted the bearing of the aircraft against three landmarks, one of them a high snow-topped peak to the west. He got out his compass, checked against the map and his memory of how the terrain lay, and started through the woods at a trot.
• • •
“Bearkiller is sort of symbolic. There’s no need to take it personally,” Alyssa Larsson said, her voice a feeble rasp in her ears. “It was a black bear Uncle Mike killed, anyway. I’ve seen the head on the Bear Helm. Big, but not a grizzly like you, no sir.”
The bear beneath her didn’t respond, except to sniff more energetically. She reached for the clasp of the seat belt and whimpered slightly at the jagged rasp of pain through her left forearm. Then she shook her head-which itself hurt badly enough to notice any other time-and decided that would have been a lousy idea anyway. This wasn’t the time to operate on pure reflex, no matter how bad the hurting was or how dizzy and nauseous she felt.
The glider had snapped off one wing and come to rest more or less upside-down, twisted to the side just enough to make her position the most awkward possible. The bubble canopy was about seven or eight feet above the ground, and spotted with the blood that was still dripping from cuts and a squashed nose. She didn’t think that was broken, and none of her teeth felt loose despite the way her lips had been mashed against them, but it was unfortunate that she was bleeding. The boar grizzly sniffing around under the crashed aircraft probably found the scent far, far too appetizing.
They had a very keen sense of smell.
It was young but fully adult and big even for a silvertip. About the size of a medium horse, say nine hundred to a thousand pounds. One of the many wandering down into all their old range now that humans were scarce and didn’t have guns, following in the pawprints of the faster-breeding wolves. It was sniffing the ground carefully; their eyesight was bad, and the glider probably too strange to assimilate readily into its mental vocabulary of shapes and smells. Then it realized where the blood-scent was coming from and reared. Suddenly the gaping roaring red mouth and white fangs were far far too close, only an arm’s reach from the canopy.
Skrreeeetch.
A massive paw tipped with five long claws swiped across the tough synthetic. The whole fabric of the glider bucked and twisted; the bear outweighed it by a considerable margin, machine and pilot together. Alyssa smothered a scream of pain as her battered body was flung back and forth against the buckled metal of the cockpit like the clapper of a monastery bell with a mad monk hauling on the end of the rope.
Slap-slap-slap, and the bear’s giant paws were working like pistons in a water-powered factory, tossing the glider back and forth the way a piñata at a posada party in Larsdalen swung under the sticks of shrieking blindfolded children. She’d done that herself as a kid.
The image wasn’t as pleasant with herself as a meaty treat inside instead of hard candy and dried fruit and nuts. Metal buckled and tore with screeching sounds. Suddenly cold air and the rank scent of the bear flooded in as the canopy came off, torn from its hinges by a massive blow.
Alyssa snarled back at the animal, fumbling out the utility knife from its sheath on the leg of her leather flying suit and using her teeth to open the blade. The important time to show sisukas was when it was hard, which made this the absolutely ideal moment.