Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

Holloway shifted his weight, and crossed his left foot over his right knee. He knocked out his pipe on his boot heel, blew through the stem, and put the pipe in his pocket. He unslung his rifle.

Stagwell signaled his engineer sergeant. Floodlight portables illuminated the scene with a blue-white light from about sixty feet overhead, where theircontragravity sleds bobbed at the end of umbilical tethers.

"Uh-Major," Miller said from his location behind the nearby vehicle, "hadn't you two better find cover? You're awfully easy to shoot at out there."

"What?" Stagwell said, grinning."And let them think we take them seriously?"

ZNPF Captain Joe Holderman stood looking out the window of the headquarters and smoothed his flawlessly groomed mutton-chop whiskers. Outside, in the barracks quadrangle, the floodlights reflected garishly off the vitrilite paving of the drill yard. A few hours ago, the yard had been swarming with men as George Lunt assembled forty constables and led them off in patrol jeeps toward fuzzy Valley. Behind him, he heard footsteps as someone entered the room. That would be Jordan Nunez, coming in a half-hour ahead of the watch-change to get up-to-date on what was happening before he relieved Holderman and took the new watch.

Nunez sat down and started scrolling incident-log items up the readout screen.

He let out a whistle and muttered something when he ran onto the entry about Fuzzy Valley.

Holderman didn 't turn around."Too many rats in the box, Jordy," he said.

Nunez stopped the scrolling. "Rats? Whattaya mean, rats, Joe? You know there's no rats around here."

Holderman turned and looked at him. "Too many rats in the box, Jordy," he said again. "In Mallorysport. You get too many rats in a box, they start to eat their way out."

The mob was milling around. Holloway could see Hugo Ingermann in the forefront. Poor, crazy Ingermann. Sunstones had finally done it for

him-unhinged his mind.

"It's your territory, Mr. Commissioner," Stagwell said, and handed Holloway the audio pickup.

The mob swirled aimlessly for a few minutes, humming and buzzing with the conversation of anger and indecision, as Ingermann harangued them from the open cargo floor of a work scow. There were periodic shouts and curses from individuals, unintellible at this distance, and a good deal of fist-shaking.

Presently the crowd turned and began to surge like a thick lava flow toward the Marines' positions on the line.

Holloway had earlier had reservations about the overhead lighting, but now he saw why Stagwell did it. Misdirection; it gave the mob a focal point to keep their attention in more or less one place-the place Stagwell wanted them positioned. Good thing they had sent all the Fuzzies down into the woods at the south end of the valley. This could turn pretty ugly before it was over.

The vanguard of the mob moved forward perhaps thirty meters, still being swelled by people from among the grounded vehicles, before Holloway stopped them. There appeared to be close to a thousand of them.

Holloway raised the audio pickup to his mouth.

The mob moved another ten meters, their pace punctuated with muted shouts and muttered curses.

"HOLD IT!" Holloway's voice boomed and reverberated as it was amplified over the loudspeakers of a dozen or so of the Marine vehicles strung across the valley. "This is Jack Holloway," the amplified voice said, "Commissioner of Native Affairs. This is a legally established Fuzzy Reservation." His words made ghostly echoes as the sound of the amplified voice coming from different locations reached the listeners' ears at slightly different times. "Your presence here is a violation of law," he said. "/ order you to disperse."

"Nifflheim with you, Holloway!" Ingermann yelled. "We came for sunstones! Suns tones that belong to the people!"

"Yeah! We want what's ours!"

"You got no right ..."

"Gonna keep 'em for yourself?"

"This for your reservation!"

Ingermann turned to the mob. "You see?" Ingermann hooted. "Why should we starve while they get rich from sunstones?"

The mob was rumbling viciously, like an angry volcano. Weapons were being brandished in the air.

"/ warn you!" Holloway said into the pickup. "We will use force. GO HOME!1'

Ingermann turned back toward Holloway and made a derisive gesture. "You can bully your Fuzzies and your flunkies, old man," Ingermann jeered, "but you can't bully us!"

More clamor from the mob. "What're we waitin' for?" "We can take "em." "Come on!" "Sunstones, SUNSTONES!" In the front of the mob, a few knots of people

took two or three steps forward.

"You'll be the first to get it, Ingermann," Holloway said. The rolling, amplified voice made it plain that he meant it. Just to punctuate his point, Holloway clipped the pickup onto his pocket, twisted his feet to dig his boots in, and levelled his rifle from the offhand position-taking a sight picture on Ingermann's chest.

"Okay, okay," Sergeant Major Miller said into his pocket radio. "Take your line of sight. Let's put the volley shot about two feet over their heads. If that doesn't stop 'em, pick your targets and go for it. On my mark, now-ready-ready."

Ingermann turned pale, but he was a desperate man, now, and he had already come this far. If Holloway broke up his mob, he would very likely be arrested on the spot before he could get away. Surely they, too, must know he was wanted for attempted murder in Mallorysport. He grabbed a rifle from someone, raised it to his shoulder, and fired.

Standing where he was, Holloway was a slightly higher elevation than the mob.

The shot took him from below, in the upper left arm. The impact spun him. When he felt the slap of the bullet hitting him, he tried to get off his shot on Ingermann, but he was already in motion and only succeeded in dropping the man next to Ingermann.

Holloway spun halfway around and went down. Ingermann raised the rifle triumphantly over his head and waved the mob forward.

There was a roaring, deafening noise, drowning out the screaming mob, as all the Marines fired a single shot at the same time, sending a sheet of bullets shrieking over the mob's head. They hesitated and ducked, then began running forward, firing as they came.

Rows of people in the front began falling. The charge slowed, faltered, and then broke, as the mob turned and ran back to take cover in the maze of grounded vehicles. From there, they began shooting again. Buried in the rabbit warren of vehicles, as they were now, it was going to be Nifflheim's own job to root them out.

Stagwell got down on one knee and lifted Hollo way's head. "You get elected, Jack?" he asked.

Holloway coughed through colorless lips. "No, but I got nominated pretty good," he whispered. "Are you okay?" Stagwell asked. "I'm going to be fine,"

Jack said. "The thing damned near bounced off me. Get me out of mis draft."

Bullets were whining through the air around them.

"Hey, Roy," Stagwell shouted to his sergeant major. "Bear a hand, here."

Miller came over in a short, crouching run. Stagwell stood up. There were flat, splatting sounds and little geysers of dirt shot up around his feet.

They picked up Holloway and carried him over behind the vehicle where Miller had been. Stagwell still had his pipe in his mouth. "Better get a medic over here," Stagwell said to Miller. Miller was already talking into his pocket net radio.

Blood was soaking Jack's left sleeve. Stagwell reached into his hip pocket and got out a wireman's clasp knife. He slit the sleeve from wrist to shoulder and pulled the fabric away. "Hold your arm over your head, Jack, "he said. "It'll slow up the bleeding."

"I can't move it," Jack said.

Stagwell wiped the knife blade on his pants leg and folded it up. "Mmmmm," he said. "It's probably busted, then."