Up on the wall, kapitän Heinemann heard the horn and blanched white. It had been a trick! Gunfire erupted from all along the tree line as rifles opened up from well back in the trees, peppering the wall with small arms. An explosion rent the night as a rifle grenade, fired woefully short, tore up sod twenty meters short of the wall.
Worse yet, the wall around him erupted in spraying clay and large caliber bullets fired from some sort of heavy machinegun out in the forest, its projectiles barely inconvenienced by the wall behind which he was sheltering!
“Schießt!” Heinemann screamed, waving his arm in the direction of the trees. “Alles schießen!”
Fifteen rifles along the wall commenced firing at the one target they could see for sure — the bright red Oshkosh truck.
Almost instantly, they were joined by a heavy gun of their own from up on the ship, this one trained further east, from whence the outsized bullets of the enemy’s heavy gun were streaming.
The old Oshkosh continued to accelerate, bouncing along the road as bullets shattered the rear glass and rained down upon the bed, tearing great chunks of hard-wood clear.
* * *
“Damnit!” Martin swore, caught halfway between the pig sheds and the bunkhouse. He hit the dirt, rolled over onto his back and opened up on the front wall with the Thompson, ignoring the goings on around the tractor shed. He fed them a full thirty round magazine, starting from the left and working right, nearly a third of his rounds going into the upper wall of the machine shop for his lack of a decent firing position.
Spinning around and surging to his feet, he sprinted for the near wall of the bunkhouse, hitting the dirt at the edge of its porch in a rolling dive and ducking into the eighteen inch slot beneath the building.
Up in the silo, with his superior vantage, Av had already settled in behind the Lewis gun by the time Entigh sounded the horn. At the first sliver of sound, he cut loose with the so-called light machinegun. Seeing Marty’s position and line of sight, he started at the right of the main group around the gate and swept left. If things worked out, he’d meet Marty in the middle like the blades of a scissors. At worst, they wouldn’t be wasting ammo, both of them shooting the same guys. He emptied the forty-seven round drum pan of .30-06 into them, then took up his Thompson and gave them a full stick while they were distracted. At something in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty yards, the range was pretty optimistic for a Tommy gun, but what the hell? Bullets raining from the sky was bullets raining from the sky, right?
Pops and pings erupted all around him as the guys on the north and east walls caught his muzzle flashes and started pegging shots at the silo. Hell with ‘em — they’d have to wait their turns.
Then something big opened up from above as the airship reminded everybody who was still the king of the battlefield. Av rolled aside, nearly tearing his arms out of their sockets in his haste to bring the ten pound Thompson around in time to save his own life, and to hell with worrying about the silo blowing up. But he didn’t have time to get a fresh magazine up the slot.
A figure plummeted from the deck to the dirt, landing bonelessly and very nearly in two pieces, followed a few seconds later by a deep, resonant thud! echoing across the stead yard, audible even over the staccato of rifle fire and a second heavy gun filling the stead yard.
Av laughed out loud. He knew that sound! Homer Parsons’ express rifle. That big .600/475 Express double had a music all its own. Somehow, Homer had gotten himself some elevation out there in the trees, and was introducing himself to the tourists. A second figure fell from the ship, this time on the far side, and the far off rifle sounded again.
Av forgot about the airship, stuck another drum onto the Lewis and concentrated on sweeping the stead yard clear.
* * *
Kapitän Heinemann had barely the time to aim his pistol over the top of the wall before he caught sight of his peril out of the corner of an eye. The airman at his far right had just pitched forward against the parapet and dropped to the walkway, the wall before him painted with his vital fluids. There were enemies inside the walls!
Spinning in place, he leapt from the wall, landing hard and rolling to his feet. He heard the bootsmann behind him and young Lieutenant Jaeger’s grunt as he, too hit the dirt.
“Alarm!” Heinemann cried. “Kehrtwende! Turn about! They are inside the walls!” He raced for the main farm house, his two companions in hot pursuit. If he could reach the hostages....
* * *
Dar leaned against the wall in the mud room, face pressed to the plaster, listening. Two voices in the kitchen, speaking. By the sound, it seemed to be the same language as old man Entigh had been using on the way here. The words were different, but the sound was there.
Tilting his head this way and that, he tried to figure out just where they’d be. He’d never been invited to Evie Pascal’s house before, so he hadn’t much of an idea of the layout. The plans had told him about walls, windows, and doors, but he wouldn’t be tripping over those as he rushed in. Crashing into a chair or step stool, though, could trip him up just as hard
He had them placed, he thought. One voice wasn’t moving. He’d be sitting in a chair, probably by the table. The other was moving back and forth, so there would be clear space, probably.
He started going through the motions he’d have to use to engage them, tensing the muscles he’d be using in turn as he went through the actions in his head. The walking man would be first.
The Nagant was up at eye level, aimed at the ceiling, the saber in his left hand, down and to the side. He was sweating like a pig. He wanted to brush the sweat from his forehead, but he remembered all too well the painful lessons he’d learned.
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There was an exaggerated sniffing sound, and one of the voices made a comment in a mirthful sounding voice. The commentary continued as the voice drew closer. Dar cursed silently, remembering the allox stink that his own nose had started to ignore. He didn’t move.
The voice was at the open doorway between the big kitchen and the mud room now, making some sort of laughing statement. Dar leveled the Nagant.
The pirate whose voice had been commenting on the smell didn’t even have time to register his peril as he turned the corner into the mud room. Dar shoved the end of the suppressor into his eye and pulled the trigger, painting the doorway with his brains.
Without pause, he stepped forward and around the kitchen door, pushing the body out of the way with the silencer barrel, thumbing back the hammer and taking half a step to the right to bring the muzzle around. There — he caught the second man in the cheek as he was lunging out of his chair and turning, but it was solid enough, even with the marginal little .30 caliber bullet the Nagant spit out.
His shoulders had only begun to slump with relief when he heard the clunk of chair legs hitting the floorboards and caught movement out the corner of his left eye. Somebody yelled “ALARM!” right in his freaking ear, overriding the sound of the Oshkosh’s horn outside, and he saw a dark shape coming straight at his face!
There’d been three of them! He jerked his head away, curling his back into a reverse ‘C’ and letting his legs buckle while twisting at the waist. The rifle butt glanced off his cheek hard, blurring his vision and tearing the skin, but his left hand was lashing out with the saber, and the cry of alarm morphed into a cry of pain as the heavy blade bit into the pirate’s leg above the knee. They both went down together.
Dar hit the ground on his back, thumping his head painfully against the floorboards. Then he was twisting around, driving the tip of the saber up into the screaming pirate’s ribs. The man went quiet.
Thundering boots echoed in the hallway, and Dar lunged to his feet in time to see somebody round the corner from the back hallway, leading with some sort of automatic pistol. He’d lost the Nagant in his fall, so he ducked back into the kitchen just far enough for the guy to lose him. Then he spun in place and lunged back out again, catching the onrushing pirate coming in — running him through clean up to the saber’s bell guard. The dying pirate coughed up a gob of blood onto Dar’s shirt, his face close enough to count nose hairs, before Dar twisted the blade and pushed him off with his knee.
Sagging against the wall, gasping for breath, the iron stink of blood filling his nostrils and drowning out even the allox stench, Dar looked blearily around for the Nagant. The time for quiet was well past, but he was thinking, somewhat groggily, that Av would have his hide if he lost that revolver.
He’d just managed to retrieve it from under the big kitchen table when he heard the front double doors bounce off their flanking walls and the thundering of yet more boots upon the floorboards.
A huge figure in blood red filled the dining room doorway, and Dar pegged a quick shot at it. The bullet smashed into the refrigerator, well clear of his target. He pulled the heavy trigger again and paled at the hollow click of the firing pin dropping on open air. The old man had been carrying the revolver with the hammer down on an empty chamber! Six rounds, not seven.
Av had once told him that the loudest sound in the world was a click when you were expecting a BANG! Dar had actually laughed at the idea. It wasn’t so funny now.
He tossed the empty revolver onto the table, his hand diving for the Colt under his left arm with the same, sweeping motion. But the figure was back, and there were two more with him, all of them with leveled pistols of unfamiliar design, their gaping muzzles showing full bore to the young islander. Dar froze.
Heinemann glared at the figure of the strange young soldier standing amid the bloody carnage of the kitchen. He glanced at the table, recognizing the Nagant for the specialist’s weapon that it was, and then back at the soldier. “How many of you are there?” he demanded.
“Of me?” the boy asked, not moving, struggling to catch his breath. “Why, just the one, I guess.”
“Don’t be flip with me, boy!” Heinemann grated. I’ll have your head! How many troops have you?”
Dar, for his own part, was taking in the sight of his adversary very carefully. The pirate was duded up like he was on his way to attend a fancy dress party. Dar had never seen clothes that slick before. His uniform was even more elaborate than the guy Dar had gotten the saber from.
The man himself, though, had a square, brutish face completely at odds with his apparel. That face was dominated by piercing blue eyes and a longish scar bisecting his left cheek. His orange hair was shorn nearly to his scalp in military fashion, and he wore a short, brush mustache.
“You sure dress pretty for a pirate,” Dar said.
“Bootsmann,” Heinemann turned his head, though his eyes remained riveted on the young man in the room’s center. “See to the defenses. I suspect there are not so many of them, or they’d have sent more than a single boy to secure the prisoners. I will see if I can manage some reasonable answers from this one before I finish him. There is something about that uniform that I do not like.”
Dar squared his shoulders, but didn’t speak. He didn’t understand much of what the men were saying, but he could guess what yoongeh meant. Then he saw the big one turn to leave, and re-evaluated his chances, which were now a full thirty-three percent and change better than they’d been a second ago. Maybe better than that, since the older pirate who was leaving looked like a pretty hard case all by himself, and one of the two who remained looked like a scared high school kid.
Heinemann was angry. Very angry. He’d been angry for eight days now, and growing moreso by the minute. And now, this boy, standing in the middle of four dead men —four of Heinemann’s men— this boy, suddenly, with his casual disdain for his own position, became the single focus of all that anger.
“Pistols out, please,” he said tightly, ignoring the staccato of gunfire and explosions from outside the house. He had more than fifty men out there —professional raiders, for all that nearly a quarter of them had only been at it for a short time— they’d take care of whatever ragtag security force this backwater island had managed to gather.
“Put them on the table,” he told the boy. “Carefully now. I am prepared to give you a chance, but I won’t insist upon it if you act foolishly.”
Dar carefully drew the Colt from beneath his left armpit, holding it delicately with thumb and forefinger by its grip. He could, he knew, flip it, grab the grip and have it working in about the time it took the big pirate to realize he was no longer complying. He’d practiced the move until his wrists ached often enough.
It was the intelligent thing to do. He should be doing it. But curiosity had him. It was a major failing, Av had always insisted. Killed the cat or some such. Av had never specified which cat, nor why the beast had been so important, but there it was. So he held the pistol and waited.
The pirate was angry and showing it. He was also acting stupidly, for all that he was obviously some sort of high ranking officer, or Dar would already have a couple of bullet holes in him. There would be another chance once he’d figured out what the man was up to.
Still, he could almost hear Av screaming into his ear. Shoot the bastard! Don’t mess around with a diving roc, Boy, just shoot!
“On the table, now, beside your assassin’s toy.” Heinemann motioned with his pistol.
Dar laid the Colt down.
“Now the other.”
The second Colt followed. Stupid, stupid, stupid — even as he was setting it down — even as he was thinking about how stupid the pirate was acting, he knew that he was no better. He should just plug the guy and his scared-looking buddy and be done. All of his training told him to do just that.
“The maschinenpistole — the submachine gun, now, please,” motioning with his pistol.
Dar loosened the sling strap and shrugged the Thompson off over his head, laying it beside the other weapons.