Unknown - The_Growing_589064

“That one of yours?” Maggie asks Koda with a grin.

“Mine or Tacoma’s. They—“

“They’re going off road,” Kirsten interrupts.

Maggie shoots Koda a questioning look and she answers, “They can’t go overland in this terrain, Colonel. They’ll have to get back on the highway. Not that it matters.”

A second muffled explosion follows, and a third.

“Off-road mines?”

Koda nods, focusing the binoculars, searching for smoke. There is none this time. “Military droids?” she asks Kirsten.

Kirsten holds up her hand for quiet. After a moment she says, “They’re going to stay on the road. They figure we can’t have mined the whole stretch of highway. . .. They’re sorting their troops out. . .. humans in front. . . regular droids off to the side. . . .their armor . . .heavy-duty metalheads last and further out.”

“They’ve sure as hell got their priorities sorted out,” Maggie snorts. “You know, I keep forgetting they’re machines. I keep hating the bastards.”

“I keep hating Westerhaus,” Kirsten bites the words off. “I keep hoping he’s alive.”

Koda opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it abruptly. She still remembers the sharp crack of Kirsten’s hand against General Hart’s cheek upon her arrival at Ellsworth, the sense of contained rage coming off the woman’s skin like heat. Instead she turns her attention back toward the road. It is a matter of minutes before she hears yet another explosion, this one slightly louder, slightly nearer. A second follows, and a third. Then nothing. She says, “They’re through the first stretch of mines. They’ll come on the next in about a mile.”

“Gods, I hope the fog holds,” Maggie mutters. “They’re what, about an hour away?”

“At regular marching pace, yes. They can go faster if they get all the humans and regular droids up onto vehicles, but from what I’m picking up they don’t have the wheels to do that.” Kirsten pauses, listening. “They know there’s a bridge here. They’re sending out a couple of scouts in a truck.”

“Damn,” Maggie says quietly. “Can you fake their signals, Dr. King? Like all clear, come on?”

“I don’t have the codes for that, Colonel. ”

“All right, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Rivers. Tell Dietrich to get half a dozen men down under the bridge. We’re gonna play Billy Goat Gruff when the fuckers show up.”

Koda raises the Major again. “Wichasha sakpe kuta ceyakto. Numpa toka.”

There is a pause, then the double click they have arranged as a signal for “say again.” Koda repeats herself, more slowly. There is a long pause, and the sound of paper rustling. Just as she has resigned herself to English, the Major says. “Hau. Washte,” and the line goes dead.

A moment or two later, she can just see the squad, moving shapes of solid white darting through the fog toward the bridge. As they scramble down the bank to position themselves beneath the span, a Jeep painted in incongruous tropical camo, all deep green and blood-brown, comes to a sudden halt at the other end . Two forms, rifles at the ready, begin to work their way down its length, pausing to look over the railing at ten or twelve feet intervals.

Maggie, like Koda, has her binoculars up. “Can you tell what they are?”

“I’m not getting any signal off them, Colonel,” says Kirsten. “If they’re droids, they’re not talking to each other.”

In the distance, a mine goes off, and a thin curl of smoke rises. The column is closer now, and the sound echoes against the rocks. The two figures on the bridge pause, turning their heads in the direction of the blast. Then they resume their inspection, slowly working their way toward the end where ambush awaits them.

“Come on, come on,” Maggie urges.

The scouts reach the southeast bank and step onto the road. One gestures back toward the river, pointing downward. Then both begin the descent, disappearing into the fog.

The sounds of the struggle come clearly over the water, little muffled by the fog. It is brief, and in when it is over, five men in white camo emerge from beneath the bridge. One breaks away from the others, sprinting for the other side of the river. He picks up a com unit and speaks into it, then drives the jeep off the road and down the sloping bank., to park it somewhere beneath the first pair of pylons. When he reappears he is running flat out, making for the single approach on the southeast side that has been left free of mines.

After that, there is little time to wait. A couple thousand yards from the bridge, the sun catches a glint of metal. Maggie sees it as the same time Koda does. “They’re here.”

Koda smiles slowly, her blood beginning to sing as it slips along her veins. “Hoka hey,” she says “It is a good day to fight.”

“Here they come.”

It is not a sound so much as it is a vibration, a wave propagating through earth and rock. There is a rhythm to it, of booted feet, human and not, tramping up the thin strip of highway, of metal treads crunching their way through snow and biting into the tarmac. From somewhere just out of sight around a basalt outcropping, the sun catches a glint of steel, then another and another as the enemy column winds its way through the maze of low rock walls and shallow gullies.

Koda swings her binoculars back up to try to catch first sight of the approaching force. They emerge between a pair of buttes, foot soldiers in uneven ranks, carrying an assortment of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired LAAWS rockets. Some are in uniform, some not. “Conscripts?”

Beside her, Maggie scans the oncoming ranks, her mouth tightening. “Can’t tell. We’ll spare them if we can, as long as we can. But we don’t take risks. The first one that fires a shot, we take ‘em out.”

Koda’s com unit crackles to life. She listens briefly, then reports, “Tacoma says the column is about halfway past his position. They have a couple mobile SAM missile launchers and some heavy guns, three howitzers. About fifteen percent of the enemy are the heavy military droids, pretty much what we figured. The rest are half-and-half humans and various domestic models—firedroids, Maid Marians, a few nannydroids. He says there’s one in an old-fashioned parlor-maids uniform, toting an M-16.” She listens again. “They’ve lost what appears to be about a third of their armored vehicles. They still have four tanks that Tacoma can see and a dozen APC’s.”

Maggie nods. “Could be better, but that cuts them down some. Good work with those mines, Rivers.” She turns back to watching the enemy advance. “Tell that cousin of yours to start his engines and stand by. As soon as they get about half the heavy stuff out in the open, they’re all his.”

Koda relays the message swiftly. Like the Colonel, she never takes her eyes from the oncoming troops.

“Dakota?” The voice is Kirsten’s a surprising hint of laughter in it.

“Yeah?”

“How the hell do you say ‘parlor maid’s uniform’ in Lakota?”

Koda smiles in answer. “Simple. ‘Silly-ass black and white dress with a frilly apron and ribbons.’”

Kirsten laughs briefly, then turns back to her com set. “Okay. An order is going up the line. They’re going to go straight across the bridge. They bought the fake all-clear.”

The human contingent is fully in the open now, strung out along the highway between the bridge and the point where the road emerges from the foothills. A band of general-use droids follows, a few outliers of the military type ranging to the sides of the column. Koda spots the parlor maid, incongruous in its curly blonde doll’s wig and beribboned cap. Another wears a firefighter’s uniform, its blue shirt stained dark brown along its sleeves. Koda’s own blood sounds like a drum in her ears, and she struggles for control of her anger. Fight cold, dammit.