He crept forward, belly to the earth, tail straight back to balance his weight and hands touching down occasionally to guide it. Ready for the sudden overwhelming rush, the final leap; he needed no weapon for this. Excitement folded his ears back into knots and drew lips back from teeth, brought the claws sliding out on all eight digits. Almost, he was reluctant to end it; Tyra-human moved very quietly, for a monkey, and he might have had trouble following her if the breeze had not been with him. Eagerness brought him forward faster, but with only a little more noise; a pebble displaced, a thorn snagging his fur and snapping. Then he went rigid with shock.
“Quiet,” she said, turning and calling softly. “They’re moving up the valley.”
She looked directly at him, with the bulbous shape of nightsight glasses hiding her eyes. She spoke in the Hero’s Tongue, as closely as a monkey could come to pronouncing it; in the Warning Tense. He nearly screamed and leapt then; only caution at the sight of her magrifle gave him pause. Then the sense of the words sank home.
They? he thought. Quickly he came level with her and followed her pointing hand. Motion, over a kilometer away; he took the glasses from his belt and looked. Humans on horseback, leading other horses. Octal to the second of them, all heavily armed, and he recognized the shapes of knock-down beamers on the lead horses.
“Who?” he breathed. I lay my fur flat in shame. Claw your own nose and roll in sthondat excrement, Spotted Fool! We should have kept lookouts.
“Don’t know,” she replied. Even now a thought flickered, how easy it would be to reach out-only arm’s reach-and slash her throat open.
No. Not with an unknown factor… unless she led them to us? His lips went further back in rage, but it was unlikely.
“Could be the Provisional Gendarmerie,” she said softly. “Or it could be bandits. Either way, bad news for us. They’ll be here by dawn at that rate. Can’t miss the trail and the water-furrow.”
Us, Spots thought mournfully. Us expands to too many monkeys. The Fanged God would have his jokes on those so lost to honor that they surrendered.
I will rip your throat yet, he thought, staring resentfully up into the sky for a second. The God appreciated a good fight.
“I will wake the others,” he went on aloud.
“Well, they’ve got Provisional Gendarmerie armbands,” Jonah said, lowering the magnifier.
“Cloth’s cheap,” Hans replied.
Jonah nodded, mind busy. “All right. Spots, you take your beamer and dig in behind those rocks over there. Hans, get the mules back into the diggings and then set up on the hill over the entrance.”
Hans was the best shot of all of them; it was difficult to be a bad shot with a military magrifle, but he was superb.
“I’ll take the center, here.”
“What about me?” Tyra Nordbo said.
I with to Finagle you were far, far away, Jonah thought. Aloud: “Ever used that rifle?”
“Yes.”
The reply was bitten off, and from the expression she hadn’t enjoyed it. All to the good; he’d known people in the UN Navy who enjoyed combat, and none of them were types he’d like to have backing him up. They tended to fly off the handle like… like kzinti, come to think of it.
“You get about ten meters to the east of me and take that little knoll.” He turned to eye the two kzin. “And nobody fires unless they open up, or I give the order. Understood?”
Bigs looked skeptical. “What if they flank us?” Spots asked. “There are enough of them.”
“Then we’ll retreat,” Jonah said. “And someone else will have the headache of what to do with that.” He jerked a thumb towards the entrance to the diggings.
The mounted column wove over the ridge opposite and down into the morning shadow of the valley, disappearing into the dense vegetation along the streambed. Jonah burrowed deeper into cover, showing nothing but the lenses of his field glasses, their systems keyed to passive receptors only. IR would show their locations, of course; a good deal depended on how much the whatever-they-were had in the way of detection systems. Quite a bit if they really were Provisionals, anything from the Eyeball Mark I to military issue if they were bandits. The dawn was coming up in the east, to his right; the snowpeaks and clouds around the summits of the Jotuns turned red as blood, while Beta was a point of white fire overhead. The waterfall toned and thundered to his right, mist rising out of darkness into light.
He pulled the audio jack on his field glasses out and put it in his ear. The instrument clicked, sorting out sound not in the human-voice frequencies. Then:
“…boot some head…”
“Shut up, scheisskopf! Turn it on!”
A crackling hiss filled his ear, Wonders of modern technology, he reflected sourly; it was always easier to make things not happen than to make them happen, so countermeasures generally ran ahead of detection. The rustle of boots and the clink of equipment came more dearly, and the tock… tock… of synthetic horseshoes on firm ground or rock. The strangers were in no hurry They stopped to water their horses and picket them, to set up a firing line along the edge of the brush, before two walked out from under the trees and began climbing the bill.
“Everybody stay calm,” Jonah warned again, as the pair halted and looked upslope.
They looked tough, shabby and a little hungry; or at least the rat-faced thin one did. The leader had a beer belly that hung over his gunbelt, and even in the cool morning sweat stains marked his armpits. He carried a strakkaker at his belt and a magrifle in his hands; his companion had the chunky shape of a jazzer slung from an assault sling. That fired miniature molecular-distortion batteries set to discharge into any living tissue they met. An unpleasant weapon.
The big-bellied leader smiled, a false grin creasing his stubbled face. His Wunderlander had a thick accent, maybe regional, or he might have come from one of the many ethnic enclaves that dotted the planet:
“Hey, you up there? Why you hiding?”
“Why are you here?” Jonah replied. “Ride on. We’ll mind our business, you mind yours.”
“Hey, we can’t do that, man!” the other man said. “We’re the Provisional Gendarmerie-you know, the mounted police? We’re inspecting the area for illegal weapons. New order, to confiscate all illegal weapons, peace and order, you know?”
“What’s illegal?” Jonah asked.
“Just military stuff, man. You know, magrifles, jazzers, beamers-hunting rifles, they are fine.
“Let’s see some ID, then.”
“ID? We got plenty of ID. Here, I show you.”
The fat man pulled something out of a leg-pocket on his stained pants and handed it to the smaller figure beside him. He murmured an order, which the other seemed to resent; then he took off his hat and began thrashing the little man over the head and shoulders.
“Ja, boss, Ja, I’ll take it,” the small man with the big nose said.
“Here!” he called out, climbing towards Jonah’s position.
“Toss it over that rock and get back down,” Jonah shouted.
Ratface scuttled to obey, and Jonah signed to Tyra. She leopard-crawled with her rifle across her elbows, over to the plastic card and examined it with a frown of puzzlement; then she ran it past the scanner of her beltcomp. That brought another frown, and she kept crawling to within arm’s length of him to pass the ID. He glanced down at it; a holo of the fat man’s face, looking indecent without its stubble. Serial number, and Leuenant Edward Gruederman, Provizional Staatspolezi.
“My comp recognizes the codes, and I updated about a month ago, but…”
“But?” Jonah bit out. If he had stood off a real Gendarmerie Leuenant, they were all in serious trouble. Wunderland was under martial law, and out here a mounted police officer could be judge, jury and executioner all in one. Staging a shoot-out with the police would be absolute suicide, even if he won. Jonah Matthieson’s ambiguous status would harden into “desperate criminal” quite quickly, then.