S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

I should have just bugged out when I found where the glider crashed but no, I had to be a hotshot.

Soldier and captive were both well-hidden, in a hollow covered by a hundred-foot lodgepole pine that had fallen across the mountainside sometime in the winter just over, surrounded by a thick scrum of blue lupine taking advantage of the light let in by the gap in the canopy. The root-ball wasn’t totally broken off, and the needles had mostly stayed on the branches as the wounded tree struggled for life. He could smell his own sour sweat under the sweet pine and flower scents, and hers-though he had to admit she was a lot less rank even now. You had to be borderline insane to be a military glider pilot and the last chaotic tumbling smashing crushing moments of your short terrifying life were likely to suck bigtime, but until then you lived better than a foot soldier, with cooked food and hot water available every night.

The soil in the declivity was shaded and damp, and the wet had soaked through the mottled green-brown-gray linsey-woolsey of his battle-smock and pants, chilly and uncomfortable. Summer came late and reluctantly to these heights. The forest was open here, big old-growth conifers widely spaced, with thickets and aspens around the occasional clearing where fire or geology had kept the climax vegetation at bay. Fortunately the wind that bore the sound of the dogs wouldn’t be carrying their scent back to the animals.

Unfortunately, good hunting hounds can follow a ground trail regardless of the breeze, once they’ve cut across it.

And while he was confident he could outrun men, even without an injured prisoner he couldn’t outpace dogs; over short to medium distances four legs just plain beat two. But there was a mountain stream running strong and cold with melted snow downslope. If he could just get there and use it to break trail. .

But I’m tasked with getting Ms. “That’s Pilot Officer Bitch to You, Soldier” back to our lines. And I’m doing it alone because we’re losing the war and everybody’s trying to do three men’s work so I can’t fight even if it’s a small patrol. The enemy don’t have to send their men out alone.

She won’t run away or shout, she gave her parole and I think she’ll keep it, but I can’t make her move. . not all-out, and anything else would be a waste of time if there’s a pursuit. To be fair, that arm has to hurt if she moves fast.

He still felt like he’d fought a grizzly himself.

Mainly because I did.

It wouldn’t stop him from moving fast or fighting hard, he hadn’t actually cracked bones or torn ligaments, but it would make it a lot more painful. He wasn’t at quite ten tenths of capacity.

And if I just cut her loose, then her parole is over and she can shout her lungs out with a clear conscience and then I am so fucked. Unless I just kill her, which isn’t going to happen. Shit. Maybe trying to get her back to base wasn’t such a good idea even if she’d be a valuable intel source.

He had a good view through a little gap in the branches of the open forest across the broad slope. He brought his crossbow to his shoulder and peered through the telescopic sight, careful to move slowly and keep the lens well back; he might be just out of the accelerated SF training course, but he had done well in it, and he’d been a hunter since he was old enough to take a slingshot out after rabbits to help fill the family stewpot and guard the truck garden. The downside of a scope was that it narrowed the field of view but that was all right if you kept switching back between the scope and naked eyeball.

Two shaggy gray-brown dogs bounded into sight, big ones-as big as he’d ever seen, and looking to have mastiff and Great Dane and deerhound and a bit of timber wolf in their ancestry. Or possibly a donkey in the woodpile, if you concentrated on the size alone. They wore leather collars with steel studs, and they quartered the ground in an efficient-looking pattern. Fortunately there weren’t any tracks for them to find right there; he’d come in from the north, trying to loop around the latest known enemy activity. . which was now evidently much closer than anyone had thought.

Alyssa Larsson had just smiled every time he asked her where the base was. Now he knew why: he’d been headed straight towards it all by himself.

I was giving her an armed escort home!

One of the dogs bayed again, a deep-chested sound. That was a signal, it wasn’t just making noise because it liked to hear the sound of its own voice. Four minutes later a human figure came loping through the woods. Doll-tiny at this distance, around three hundred yards, but the scope brought him close enough to see the knee-length kilt and the long yellow yew bow in the left hand with an arrow held on the string.

Shit. Clan warrior.

They weren’t exactly the enemy’s equivalent of the Special Forces. Those were the Dúnedain Rangers who were supposed to be even weirder . But the Clan Mackenzie were rumored to be neobarb headhunters and they were most definitely and by hard objective evidence very bad news. He’d talked to men who’d made it back from the battle at the Horse Heaven Hills. Sometimes in conversations that carefully excluded officers. They’d all featured profanely emphatic warnings about the reach and punch of those arrows and the uncanny rate of fire.

They’re sneaky, too, had been common.

Closer, and he-

No. It’s a she. Christ, aren’t there any normal women out west, looking after babies and working in the fields and fighting off bandits while the men are away at war?

— leapt easily onto a jut of rock that stood out from the slope and stood with arrow half-drawn. That was close enough that her face filled the scope. A young woman, early twenties like Cole.

It took him a moment to see the details, because the face was painted . Not makeup, real lines of black and white like a mask of dark wings starting on the forehead and sweeping over eyes and cheeks and then curving in along the jaw to the chin. It gave the countenance an eerie alien aspect, like something you saw in a dream.

OK, the briefing said Mackenzies wear war paint. Nice to know we get information right sometimes.

She wasn’t wearing a helmet, which was good practice doing a scout in the woods; the protection wasn’t worth the way it restricted your hearing and peripheral vision. Instead she had on a sort of beret-like thing, with a clasp that held a spray of raven feathers standing up above her left eye. Brown hair hung in plaits at the front down either side of her face, and then the scalp was shaven above the ears to leave a braided roach falling down her back with a length of cord wrapped around it.

He shifted the scope slightly. Pleated kilt and plaid over the shoulder in a green and brown tartan with slivers of dull orange, a broad leather belt, buckled ankle boots and knee-hose. A short sword a lot like the one he carried except that it was on the left hip and not the right, with a green-painted steel buckler the size and shape of a soup-plate clipped to the scabbard; a long dirk; a smaller knife tucked into her hose; and a green brigandine over her torso. On it in dark outline was a crescent moon cradled between antlers, and a big war-quiver stuffed with gray-fletched arrows jutted up over her right shoulder.

Eyes scanned back and forth, patiently, not hurrying or narrowing in on any one spot yet, instead sinking into the landscape and looking for the break in the pattern. He recognized the technique, and was thankful he’d taken the time to break up the outline of his crossbow with scrim and little bits of vegetation. Straight lines and too-regular curves drew the gaze in the wilderness.