Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

A flash, a boom-Fralk froze in horror. Turning four eyestalks toward Oleg, he screamed, “lbu told me they didn’t have rifles!” He was too shaken to bother with the human language.

Oleg followed the Skarmer speech. “Not a rifle,” he answered in the same language. He also followed Fralk, literally: a guard jerked him along by a cord tied around him between his arms and head.

“What do you mean, not a rifle?” Fralk shouted, still frantic. Flash, boom-another shot punctuated his words. With the couple of eyes that weren’t on the human, he saw his males begin to waver. They hadn’t expected the Omalo to have a weapon to match theirs.

“Not a rifle,” Oleg repeated. “That is pistor’-a human word Fralk hadn’t heard before, but one Oleg went on to explain-“like rifle, but not as good. Not shoot so far, not shoot so fast. Not hurt us where we are here.”

“Oh.” That made Fralk feel a little better, but not much. Flash, boom-his warriors were definitely having second thoughts now. They didn’t know the pistol was too far away for its bullets to reach them. Fralk thought furiously. “Can I kill whoever has the pistol from here?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said.

That was all Fralk needed to hear. He pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Omalo had shot, set the change lever to full automatic, and fired a long, satisfying burst. Ice splashed from the Omalo barrier.

“Do you think I got him?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Oleg said again, this time in his own language.

“As for what I think, nichevo. Soon enough you will know. If he does not shoot back, you got him. If he does, you did not.”

Flash, boom-Fralk cursed.

Emmet Bragg was having fun, only slightly hampered by the fact that, as Irv had reminded him a. couple of days before, he couldn’t afford to do anything stupid. Had only his own neck been on the line, he would have worried a lot less. But four other people were depending on him to get them back to Earth. With Frank dead, he didn’t even have a well trained backup.

So he threw himself flat on his belly the second the Kalashnikov started barking and stayed there till well after the burst was done. The wisdom might have been forced on him, but it was wisdom nonetheless: a couple of rounds punched through the barrier to wound Minervans behind it. One might have got him, and he not hit the deck when he did-the snow and ice it kicked out froze the back of his neck.

More males fell from bullets that had clipped them above the level of the rampart. Still, Bragg thought, most of the rounds from the burst had gone high. That was bad shooting, worse than he had expected from the Russian. Maybe it was because Lopatin was KGB and hadn’t got proper training.

“Isn’t that too bad for him?” Bragg muttered. He was just glad Sergei Tolmasov was on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Tolmasov, he was grimly certain, would not have used the AKT4 like an amateur.

Staying low, Bragg scrambled twenty yard to his right, jumped up for a quick shot over the barrier, then dove onto his stomach again. A short burst chewed up the ice and snow almost at once, followed a few seconds later by a long one.

“Changed clips again, did you? Good,” Bragg said, as if he were playing poker, not soldier, against the man with the rifle. “Now how many do you have left?” That was a question, all right. Lopatin, he thought, was shooting as though he had brought along a truckload.

This time, Bragg crawled a couple of hundred feet to his left, almost to the trees anchoring that end of the line. He popped up for three shots at Fralk’s right wing. They might even have done some damage; the Minervans there weren’t much more than a hundred yards away now, and they made a big target. Bragg didn’t stay up long enough to look, which was just as well-the answering fusillade came hard on the heels of his last shot.

Reloading while on his belly was not a skill he had practiced much since basic training days, but he managed. Still down there, he pulled out his radio and called his wife. “You all ready there?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be.” Louise’s voice emerged tinnily.

“Is that that damn gun I hear, Emmett? Watch yourself, now.”

He chuckled. “I intend to, hon. Love you. Next time I call, I’ll really need you. Out.”

He started making his way back toward the center of the line and quickly forgot about Louise. He did love her, as he had said, but he loved what he was doing more. He had loved Carleen, too, come to that, but he had figured out early on he was never going to make it to Minerva married to a historian of ancient Rome.

Crazy, the stuff that goes through your mind, he thought. Carleen hadn’t, certainly not since Athena touched down. He dismissed the memory of her once more as he got back to Reatur.

The domain master said, “Well done. They’re still coming, but with arms and eyestalks pulled in partway. They don’t like being on the wrong side of your human noiseweapons any more than my warriors do.”

Bragg jabbed a thumb at himself. “Not like, either,” he said. Reatur’s eyestalks wiggled. Bragg went on, “Now try to kill their human male with noiseweapon. Then we win-Skarmer lose courage when that male fall.”

“A human does not have their noiseweapon,” Reatur said. “It is the eldest of eldest of the Skarmer domain master, the male called Fralk.”

“Is it?” Bragg wondered what the hell Lopatin was playing at. Whatever it was, it explained the bad shooting from the other side. The mission commander shrugged. Maybe it made his job easier. “Try to kill Fralk, then.”

“I want to tell you no,” Reatur said. Bragg looked at him in surprise. The domain master explained, “I want to kill him myself. But you are right, Emmett. Slay him now, if you can.” Reatur was a soldier like none America had known since the War Between the States, Bragg thought-he took his fighting personally. The pilot readied himself. He wished he had been a cop: some work with the popup targets the police used would have come in handy now.

He bounced up and shot with a two hand grip, one round after another, aiming at the Kalashnikov. His attention focused so completely on the rifle that he had fired several times before he even noticed Oleg Lopatin a few paces away, and twice after that before he saw the rope around the Russian’s neck. So things weren’t all going Lopatin’s way, he thought. Well, tough luck, Oleg Borisovich-serves you right.

The hammer clicked. The pistol was empty again. Bragg hit the dirt to reload. A moment after he did, the Kalashnikov started chewing away at the barrier in front of him. “Shit,” he said. He was just glad Fralk couldn’t shoot for beans.

Reatur’s guess was a good one: Fralk did not care at all for being shot at. A bullet kicked up snow and dirt at his feet. Another two zipped past him, closer than he ever wanted to think about. And two more struck a male close by Fralk. He did not even scream before he fell.

“Get back out of range, you idiot, before you get killed and get me killed with you!” Oleg yelled.

Fralk needed a moment to understand the human, another to figure out that he made good sense. “Back!” Fralk called. Several males in his small band had not waited for the order. He would deal with them later. “How far can that cursed pistol shoot?” he asked Oleg when they had retreated a good way.

“This should be far enough,” the human said, adding, “unless the man with the pistol there gets very lucky.”

Fralk thought about retreating some more, but enough males around him understood human speech to make that look like cowardice. He fired several rounds in the direction from which the shots had come but doubted they would do much good. The human on the other side of that frozen wall seemed to have a knack for surviving.