“I’ll take the center, here.”
“What about me?” Tyra Nordbo said.
I wish 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 Lieutenant 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 Lieutenant, 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.
“But if that lot are Provisional’s, I’m a kzinrett.” She bit her lip; even then it was interesting… “Look, herr Matthieson—up until two months ago, I was in the Provisional Gendarmerie. My brother Ib’s a captain. I spent six months riding with them. That lot down there smell wrong, completely.”
Jonah met her eyes, a changeable sea-blue; tinted with gray this morning, desperately sincere. Tanj, why couldn’t she be a middle-aged battleaxe of eighty?
“All right,” he said. “I’ll play it safe.” Because if we do give up our guns, there’s our options gone right there. “You get over there east of the Brothers Kzinamaratsov; they might come up the gully.”
To his surprise, he heard her chuckle—he had only taken up ancient literature in the last year himself; data was free, if nothing else—and she touched a finger to her brow before heading off east with an expert’s use of cover.
“If this ID is genuine,” Jonah called down to the man halfway up the slope, “then you won’t mind me calling in to München for confirmation. Lieutenant Gruederman.”
Gruederman began a snarl, and forced it back into a smile. Docking contact, Jonah told himself. Tyra was right.
“Hey, man, we don’t want to steal your guns—it’s the law, you know. Here—” he shoved the other man “—we’ll give you compensation.”
“See,” the little man said, rummaging in his knapsack. “This is worth three, maybe four hundred krona!” He held up a briefcase sized box, an obsolete model of musicomp and library. “Good stuff, pre-war!”
Stolen from some farmer you bushwhacked, Jonah thought grimly. He took up the slack on his trigger and put the aiming point on the musicomp. Whack. The casing exploded and the little bandit went howling and whirling away, face slashed by the fragments. The sharp sound of the high-velocity round went echoing off down the valley in a whack-whackkkkk of fading repetitions.
“Get moving,” Jonah called flatly.
The bandit chief’s face convulsed, going from a broad grin to an expression that was worthy of a kzin. Spittle flecked out as he screamed:
“You can’t do this to Ed Gruederman! I will boot your head!”
The smaller bandit had recovered enough to unlimber his jazzer. A round cracked over Jonah’s head; by reflex he shifted aim and sent a short burst into the man’s torso. It blossomed out in a mist of sliced bone and flesh as the prefrag bullets punched in and disintegrated, a thousand crystalline buzzsaws of adamantine strength. By the time he shifted back it was too late. Gruederman threw himself backward in a desperate flip, somersaulting and rolling down the short distance to cover. Bullets pecked at his shadow, and then the whole treeline opened up. Magrifle bullets chewed at the stone, and a boulder exploded as a tripod-mounted beamer punched megajoules of energy into its brittle structure. Thunder rolled back from the cliffs.