Tung.
This time the head of the bolt was only six feet from the target. It flashed into the bear’s open mouth and he could hear the bone crunch as it drove into the palate. The huge animal toppled backward and struck with an earthshaking thud, paws outstretched and belly up. Now he could see the head of his first bolt, the tip just showing; it must have traversed the whole width of the animal’s body.
When he reloaded and reached for his water-bottle his hands really were shaking, enough to spill water over his face. Cole stopped for a moment to just think himself steady, while he made doubly sure that the great limp furry form below him really wasn’t breathing anymore. He suspected that the vision of the bear’s face as it seemed to be right on the other end of the scope was going to come back to him at night for a long time.
One of the instructors who’d taught his class was a grizzled old coot who looked like he’d been carved out of ancient roots, and he’d been a Ranger back when the old General was a pup before the Change. He’d told them adventure meant someone else in deep shit, far away. Cole was beginning to appreciate what the man had meant.
Getting down from the ledge was a lot harder than going up had been, and his body felt like strong men had worked it over with baseball bats and bicycle chains from toe to chin. Each movement revealed some new bruise or nick or scrape, none of which had seemed important with Old Eph at his heels and all of which hurt like hell now. He walked back upslope towards the wrecked glider, keeping carefully alert and limping a little where the claws had taken the heel off his boot and wrenched the leg. Bears usually didn’t travel in pairs, but you never knew. He’d do a quick fix on the footwear when he had some time.
When he arrived the pilot had managed to get herself out of the glider and down to the ground, probably by cutting herself free with the knife and falling. Her left arm looked to be out of commission, and her face was a mask of blood from a pressure cut on the forehead and a nose that was swelling after being smacked into something hard.
Curly leaf-brown hair peeked out from beneath a leather flying helmet with goggles pushed up on her brow; her eyes were light blue-green, but what he could see of her skin was a sort of pale toast color, save for a little bluish scar between her brows. The whole ensemble was probably exotically pretty in a pixie sort of way when she wasn’t bleeding and beat-up. And, he judged by the way she’d been facing that bear, she was fully capable of chewing nails and spitting out rivets.
She’d just managed to get up on her feet when he arrived and stopped a couple of yards away, and she dropped into a fighter’s crouch with the knife held in an expert grip. Cole started to laugh. She was also about a thumb’s width over five feet, and skinny with it, confronting his five-ten and hundred and eighty pounds, not to mention his crossbow and hatchet and bowie and sword. Her scowl got more ferocious at his mirth, but she wasn’t any more daunted by him than she had been by the bear that had been about to scoop her out of the cockpit like a nut out of its shell.
“You are one tough scrappy little bitch, I’ll give you that,” he said admiringly.
He was also careful to stay out of reach. Nobody was safe if they had a knife and were determined to use it.
“That’s Pilot Officer Bitch to you, soldier,” she said.
Briefings and rumor had it that westerners talked funny, but apart from the effects of her nose swelling shut she sounded pretty much like people from his part of the world, maybe a little rounder on the vowels. He looked at the glider caught in the rocks and trees, at the pilot, and thought hard. While he did he also looked at his left hand; one of the fingernails was standing up from the quick, mostly torn away. He absently stripped it loose with his teeth and spat it aside.
“Dang, that smarts,” he said mildly. “Look, girl. . Pilot Officer. . what say we call a short-term truce while we fix ourselves up? That bear near enough got a piece of me and I don’t think he meant you any good at all, likewise. I’d feel sort of stupid if I had to kill you now after going to all that trouble.”
“You’re Boise, aren’t you?” she said; it wasn’t really a question. “Not a Cutter.”
“Yup, US Army,” he said. “I’m a Methodist, more or less, if that matters to you.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly.
There was a spring seeping out of the rock not far away. He ended up donating some material from his medical kit, and then slitting the sleeve of the leather flying suit she wore along the seam to examine her left forearm. It was thin, though the slight muscles on it were like wire cords, and he couldn’t feel any gross break. She hissed as he touched one spot.
“Ulna,” he said. “Not a compound, and the elbow isn’t dislocated. Nightstick fracture, I’d say, right about midway. Doesn’t feel bad.”
“Doesn’t feel bad to you,” she said. Then: “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
He trimmed some deadwood branches into a set of immobilizing splints, bound them on, and arranged a sling. After that she sat sullenly brooding while he used his climbing rope and a half hitch around a tree to pull the glider down, breaking off the other wing in the process. The cockpit was disappointingly bare of anything useful; there was a map, but the only things marked on it were the suspected locations of his side’s troops. Two that he knew about were pretty accurate.
Cole wasn’t surprised at the lack of data, since whoever was in charge of enemy glider doctrine would have anticipated something exactly like this. If the enemy were stupid they wouldn’t be winning. There wasn’t anything in the way of emergency gear, either. Every single ounce of weight was precious in these things.
“Look. .” he paused to give his name and rank.
“Pilot Officer Alyssa Larsson, on the A-List of the Bearkiller Outfit, flying for the High Kingdom of Montival,” she said.
“OK,” he said, organizing his thoughts. “Name, rank and serial number, right? You’re not one of the castle freaks.”
“A PPA Associate? I should hope not.”
He nodded. “We’ve got two options here. I can just let you go, in which case you’ll starve or get et by something or die of exposure. Unless your base is close-”
He lifted an enquiring eyebrow, and she laughed sourly at the invitation to fall into an elementary trick.
“OK, or you can surrender and I’ll take you back to my base.”
“How far, and in what direction?”
He snorted a chuckle. “I’m not an idiot either,” he said, then nodded when she just smiled.
It was a wry expression, but then, it had to hurt with those injuries. He went on:
“Right. If you come with me, I want your word you won’t try to backstab me or give me away to your people.”
“I’m not going anywhere near the Cutters,” she said flatly. “I’ll take my chances with the wolves and bears and tigers first.”
He kept his face neutral; his impulse was to say well, of course, the Cutters are fucking mad weasel lunatic neobarbs, but it wasn’t something you could say to the other side about your sort-of allies. For that matter most of the westerners were officially neobarbs too. Instead he thought hard, and went on slowly: “My CO. . Captain Wellman. . ah,” Hates the Cutters like poison, he didn’t say.
They’d tried to put a Church Universal and Triumphant chaplain in with Battalion about three months ago, now that Boise didn’t have a President to keep them at bay. The man had just disappeared two days after he arrived, and nobody had known a thing. He suspected that Wellman and the sergeant-major had taken care of it personally and buried the body in a latrine about to be filled in.
“. . ah, the CO is an absolute stickler for the rules.”
Which had the advantage of being true; scuttlebutt said it was the reason Wellman hadn’t switched sides, which some of the men thought he should do. Cole hadn’t wanted to believe the stories about Martin Thurston, but with his own mother and his wife, for God’s sake, defecting to the enemy and screaming that they were true. . and he was dead now anyway, which left Fred Thurston as the old General’s only living son, and he was on Montival’s side.