S. Stirling - Shadows of Falling Night

“ Mierda ! Do I look completely loco? You have to love to suffer and have a suicide complex to even apply for the teams.” A snort. “Actually I did apply, but I met my own personal IED before I could try for the qualifying course.”

Cheba and Ellen looked at each other and shrugged; the Mexican girl tapped a finger on her temple and wiggled the others. They formed a chain and handed the gear down into the boat; it didn’t take long, since they were carrying only essentials, mostly in knapsacks. Hopefully they could pass for backpacking tourists.

“Okay, ladies…hey, boss!” Eric called. “Ready to go?”

Adrian shook his head, a little as if he were emerging from deep water. “Very tangled…” he sighed. “There are too many powerful adepts gathering, too many already near. They…step on each other’s Sight, confuse the inner eye.”

He handed down the children, and Eric started the motor as he slipped easily into the boat. The engine burbled, and water foamed up behind the stern; spray came over the bows, cold in Ellen’s face. She put a hand on the cooler full of bagged blood that was her special responsibility; in its way it was as much ammunition as the half-moon clips of silver bullets in her pockets.

It’s odd, she thought. This is dangerous and uncomfortable, but there’s something comfortable about it…well, Adrian’s here, but…you know, I’m with all my best friends. Well, not exactly all my friends, there’s Giselle back in Santa Fe, but we’re all close somehow. It’s…not comfortable, it’s comforting.

Peter killed the throttle some distance from the land; the boat slid onto the shore with a shrrrussh sound as the fabric rasped over the gravel of the beach. Ellen braced herself against the forward surge. Eric hopped out and grabbed one of the loops at the bow, bracing himself against the greasy sideways motion of the flat bottom on the muddy gravel. Everyone else followed, and the adults all grabbed on and pulled the craft forward beyond the wet dirt. Then the backpacks and duffels were handed out and distributed. Eric and Adrian bent to examine the drag marks near Harvey’s beached ship.

“Yeah, you were right, they had some sort of rig with a winch,” Eric said. “See, that’s a spade jack’s mark where they planted it to brace the vehicle. Looks like they used a chain saw to crack the structural members from the inside, cut through on the top and most of the way on the bottom, then put a loop of the cable around one of the strakes and pulled. Then they switched the cable to drag the load out of the hold onto the section of hull, refastened it to that timber there and dragged the whole thing up like a sled, then switched the cable onto the container again and pulled it up onto the bed of the truck up a standard double ramp. Looks like a two-axle job to me, military from the treads, but not ours. Big but not huge, six-tonner maybe.”

“Agreed,” Adrian said. “They probably…yes, several local helpers. They would be hired, no knowledge of what the cargo is.”

He knelt by the track and extended a hand, closing his eyes and touching the ground lightly.

“You are right…I can See the truck before they loaded it…a GAZ model. Old, battered, the engine is knocking.”

“Yeah, not much doubt about that around here.”

“And a local…his interior dialogue is in Georgian…nervous, afraid…he sees Harvey laughing…then the shield generator comes too close.”

“We can follow the tracks with the Eyeball Mark One,” Eric said. “That’ll get us to a road, at least.”

They trudged on up towards a narrow, overgrown lane with puddles standing in the ruts of the truck that had born the bomb. Leila took her hand and swung it as they walked. That led through the orchard, which turned out to be an orange grove, which from the look of it hadn’t been tended or harvested in a while, and the ground was dotted with the rotted remains of fruit, filling the air with an over-sweet scent. The field beyond was equally scruffy, though comely enough in a disheveled way, looking like neglected pasture; it was bordered and dotted with trees, and her art-student eyes identified oak, ash and hornbeam. There were a lot of birds, including a flock of a big finch with spectacular rose-red plumage and a group of pheasants that burst out of some bushes as they passed, skimming off across the landscape in a thrumming clatter of wings.

The overgrown lane from the water fed into a slightly less overgrown dirt road bordered by big plane trees. Adrian took a stance and murmured, the whining, grating syllables of Mhabrogast.

“There will be cars down this road, the first in about twenty minutes,” he said. “Even on local roads we could be in Tbilisi in a few hours. If we are not on the right side of the border, that could make for complications.”

“Can we get them to stop? They might not want to pick up so many hitchhikers,” Peter asked, then held up a hand. “Okay, okay, don’t laugh at me!”

None of the others did, though there was amusement in Eric’s voice as he said: “One way or another we will, professor.”

“Wait,” Adrian said. “There is something else…a Wreaking, it’s familiar but I can’t quite place…”

“ Cover! Cover! ” Eric shouted.

Ellen promptly dove for the ditch at the edge of the road, ignoring the mud and water, landing with an ooof! mainly because Leila came down on top of her. She got her revolver out and the girl arranged beside her first, not least because while the twins were on the whole well-mannered children they had an instinctive tendency to snap when startled or frightened. Then she saw what Eric had seen-or what he had heard before they were visible. Two armored vehicles were coming out of the tree line to the northeast, crackling through saplings and brushes, the heavy wheels humming as the diesel engines burbled. They were low-slung boxy shapes with wedge fronts and eight big wheels, the weapons in the skeletal remote-operated turrets probing as the operators within turned their joysticks and watched the screens.

“Fuck! BTR-90s!” Eric said, some piece of military acronym-ese she didn’t recognize.

They were all armed, but they were armed with things like coach guns and revolvers full of silvered shot, or knives and Cheba’s machete; weapons designed to fight nightwalker adepts. Against soldiers with modern weapons, they didn’t seem like much.

Plus I don’t think any of us want to hurt ordinary human type people. Not that there’s much choice now.

“ Jefe , over to you,” Eric called. Then: “Shit!” as something went by overhead and a crackle of explosions came from behind their position. “Grenade launcher and heavy machine gun on each of those APCs. Do something!”

Adrian came up to one knee, began a pass with his hands…then stopped and toppled forward, clutching at his head. Something like a flush of liquid nitrogen seemed to run through Ellen’s chest and belly as she saw the contorted agony on his face, and the twin trickles of blood from his nostrils.

She crawled along the ditch, hauling the cooler of blood. The grenade launcher chattered again, a series of dull thumpthumpthump sounds, and the next line of explosions was much closer. Something slashed through the leafless branches of the tree above her, showering her with bits of twig.

“Adrian! What’s going on?” she asked sharply.

He looked up; his eyes were bloodshot too, and he grated around a hissing snarl: “Old Wreakings…childhood…like hooks in my head… damn Harvey! I will not let them harm you and the children, I will not-”

Then he screamed; it was an instant before she realized it was in Mhabrogast. He slumped backward as the last syllable sounded, his body arching and then going limp. Eric cast a glance over his shoulder: we’re all going to die now was plain in the frustrated anger of his expression.