“Now, I see that you are carrying a—” Heinemann scowled as he noticed the particulars of the boy’s saber for the first time. “Where did you get that?” voice sharp.

“This?” the boy raised the saber a couple of inches, swinging the tip forward. “Fellow outside there said I could have it. At least, I think that’s what he said. It was kind of hard to understand him, what with the way he was gurgling and all.”

Almost, Heinemann shot him dead then and there and questions be damned. But his anger at this point was such that the mere pulling of a trigger would not be enough.

He wanted to feel the act in his arms and shoulders. He wanted to cut this bucolic to ribbons and watch him bleed out on the floor. Then he would haul the prisoners out and make the rest of their would-be rescuers watch as he cut them down one at a time to the last child. Untermenschen scum!

“Move those men aside,” he commanded the boy, voice hot. “Carefully, now.”

“Sir?” Jaeger whispered urgently.

“Shut up!” Heinemann hissed back. “Look at him! You think he will admit anything useful? He thinks himself invincible. The action will be over and his comrades moldering in their graves before he offers up a single useful word, and we haven’t the time. He must be humbled first. Then, when he is lying in a pool of his own blood... then I will ask my questions. And he will answer them.”

Dar was getting it now. The big pirate actually wanted to duel! With sabers! Who did he think he was? He dragged the bodies carefully aside, rolling them up against the outer walls of the room, under the long kitchen table.

Hearing an inquisitive noise from the cellar as he dragged one of them bumping across the floor, he answered, heedless of the man holding a pistol on him.

“It’s alright, Evie,” he called in as gentle a voice as he could manage that would still be heard. “It’s Darnan Palanna. I’ve come to get you out. Just sit tight for a little while longer and everything will be fine.” He ignored the amused snort from the flashy pirate.

Moving back to the center of the kitchen, he shifted the saber to his right hand for the first time, rotating his wrist this way and that without making a big show of it. He wasn’t precisely sure of the procedure he was supposed to apply here, as Av had never had him do anything of the like. He was more apprehensive about the form than about the coming contest.

The balance felt a little strange. More tip heavy than the American sabers he’d been training with. He could work with it, though. He’d had a number of excellent teachers over the years, and a number of years of practicing with that instruction.

Taking a stance in the center of the gore-washed floor, he scuffed his boot around, feeling for traction on the bloody hardwood. Not good, but not insurmountable. Av had put him onto worse footing for sparring often enough.

He put his left hand behind him, fingers straight, tucked into his belt at the small of his back. Blading his body, knees bent, he held his arm out to the fore and down around four o’clock, elbow slightly bent. The saber, he held blade forward and a bit down, following the plane of his arm, cutting edge down. Seconde. Sabers weren’t the same as foils or rapiers, he reminded himself. Good edges, lousy for giving point. He waited.

Heinemann eyed these movements carefully, head tilting slightly. Something about the boy wasn’t quite right, and that well beyond his apparent lack of concern over his situation. There was training there, obviously —far more than he’d have been willing to guess— but it wasn’t that, although that was worrisome enough.

Something... something was tugging at his memory, ringing alarm bells that yet wouldn’t fit with the time or place. A sense almost of deja vu took hold of him. Where had this happened before? When? A cold chill ran down his spine, tingling his extremities. The boy’s eyes looked dead calm.

“Cover him carefully,” he told the lieutenant. “Give him not the slightest chance if he moves before I’m ready.”

“Jawohl, Herr Kapitän!” the lieutenant clicked his heels, his pistol trained on the boy’s chest. He thought his commander insane, but he’d been taught to follow orders, and so he would.

Heinemann holstered his pistol and drew his own, more elaborate, slightly less curved saber, stepping forward and taking a few practice swipes, watching the way the boy reacted to the movements — the way he held his own blade. The itch at the back of his mind would not leave him alone, and his right eye twitched once.

“You sure you want to do this?” the boy asked him suddenly, breaking his stance and lowering his blade as he measured himself casually. “I mean, I don’t exactly know how many of you guys there are, but I think I’ve about got my bag limit already, and I’m pretty sure the others are way ahead of me by now.”

“What?” Heinemann paused, astonished that the boy would even try such a tack.

“You could always just haul your freight on outta here,” Dar offered. “They’d probably let you go if you’d just leave.

“Unless,” he added, tucking his chin, “unless you’ve murdered somebody. You murdered anybody here on the island yet, Mr. Pirate?”

In answer, Heinemann lunged, face predatory. The boy dropped hastily back into a stance not quite his former stance, but almost naturally in answer to the attack. Heinemann’s blade swept in and around the boy’s blade for the—

Dar blinked. He was back four or five paces from where he’d been and he didn’t exactly understand how that had happened. The pirate had moved forward too, and now there was dark red blood on his arm, showing even through the crimson of the uniform, dripping thickly onto the floor.

Heinemann stood momentarily frozen, shocked to his core. As yet, he felt no pain, but he knew he’d been cut. By a farmer! Growling, he took a step back, glancing down to assess the damage, trying to replay the engagement over in his mind. He looked up at the boy and something clicked in his mind.

The new stance was low, knees bent rather more deeply than normal. The off hand was up near the face, and the saber was held out straight and just above eye level, cutting edge up, tip down, as though readying for a cavalry charge. Gott im Himmel!

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Finally, the uniform fell into its proper niche, so long empty, and he knew who —or at least what— he faced. But no! This was not—! He was too young! Roter Finn would be almost seventy years old! But that face... that uniform... that stance...! Like history brought to unnatural life.

“You are not he!” he spat, voice going up an octave, as though he were trying to convince himself. “You are not Red Finn! You are not!

“You are not,” he repeated more softly, getting firmer hold on himself. “But you are Group, are you not? You must be. What in the darkest hell are you doing here? You were destroyed. Disbanded.”

Dar had no idea what the man was talking about. Roaterfeen? Gruppe? He tilted his head quizzically, then shook it. Just at this moment, he didn’t really care. There were more important things going on, and he’d already screwed up more than his fair share in one lump without wasting even more time working at puzzles.

Straightening his legs slightly, he slid his lead foot forward, pulling his hind foot up to regain his stance just a little bit closer to his opponent, arcing the rear of his saber just a bit higher and closer in, tilting the cutting edge of the blade slowly and smoothly, just a touch outward, more to draw the eye than for any advantage in the next cut.

He could still hear gunfire from outside, and that was very bad. Well he knew how hungry the Thompsons were, and well he knew how much ammo Av and Pop had had at their disposal.

By this point, he was already supposed to have released the prisoners and been out there helping them with his own guns. And instead, here he was in here playing Captain Blood with some crazy pirate.

They had meant to wrap this up quickly, and it was looking bad for that. Of course, it also looked very much like the man before him was the prize. If only he could survive the wrapping.

“You could still leave,” he offered with a con-trivedly wry smile, though he knew that the man wouldn’t. The casual taunting was part of the technique that had been drilled into him over the long years, and was as natural now as the feel of the grip in his hand.

Heinemann’s eyes had gone narrow, and his own stance had changed. He’d no more need for questions. He knew what he was fighting now, and it was no longer about drawing things out and humbling a farm boy. Nor was he any longer afraid of the past. Here was no ghost, only a boy with an over-exaggerated view of his own talents and a higher than average level of training.

He would kill the verdammt Grouper quickly and be done. Then he would retake command of his men outside. If they were dealing with Group rather than Island militia, the battle’s outcome was by no means certain. Time enough later to learn why such a force still existed.

Had he been slightly less angry, he might simply have had the lieutenant shoot the boy and be done, but Dar’s taunts had done their work, and Heinemann’s thoughts lay only along the blade in his hand.

Suddenly, Dar lunged in, feinted, feinted again, and slashed. When he drew back, it was his turn to wonder what had happened.

“You are perhaps a bit overconfident?” Heinemann sneered.

Dar looked down at the blood flowing from beneath his tunic and tried not to gasp. Looking up, he put on a light face. “Seems you might be right,” he smiled. “Thanks for the tip, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

He drew back, taking shallow breaths. His stomach didn’t hurt yet —more the itchy burn of a bad paper cut— but it was coming. He couldn’t feel anything moving that shouldn’t be, and he hoped that it was shallow. Av said that flesh wounds tended to bleed more than deep ones — at least where you could see the blood. He rolled his torso side to side and couldn’t feel the meat scraping back and forth, so there was at least that.

* * *

Martin pegged a burst towards the feet of the fleeing officers, but didn’t have much time for them. He couldn’t really see them through the narrow crawlspace, and was starting to take fire from both the front wall and the area around the tractor shed. That’s where his full concentration needed to be.

He forced himself not to think about how it was Dar they were racing headlong for. He’d have to trust in Av’s training to see his son through. Good as you were, Av had said. Maybe better. He hoped that was true.

Squirming around behind a support post, he reached down to his belt and withdrew two of the six hand grenades he carried. He hesitated for a moment before pulling the first pin, but he wasn’t here to protect Pascal’s tractors, was he?

Coiling himself around until he was feet first to the enemy, he waited for a lull before rolling back out from beneath the building and hurling the grenade towards the tractor shed. While the first was still in the air, he threw a second, this one even harder.

The distance was something in the neighborhood of thirty yards —far too close for comfort— so he was already rolling back for the shelter of the bunkhouse when the first grenade bounced off the dirt in front of the shed.

He heard a cry as someone recognized the olive drab lump bouncing across the yard towards them and dove for cover. The explosion directly in front of the building rocked the vehicles beneath the shed roof on their springs, peppering them with racing iron fragments. Not so much as the second grenade, though, which bounced off the front axle of a combine harvester and exploded in mid-air inside the enclosure. The carnage from this one was substantial.

Martin was already back under the bunkhouse and halfway to the far side, well back from the building’s edge. This whole exercise was about terror, not body count. The goal was to make the enemy think that they were all going to die rather than actually having to kill them each and every one.

The men along the front wall had all found safer climes in the interim, taking cover behind the machine shop walls. They’d figured out about where he was, though they wouldn’t be able to place him directly until he fired again. They made up for it with searching fire — one helluva lot of searching fire.

Did they all have those fancy automatic rifles he and Av had pulled off of the scouts? In any case, he needed to get the hell out of there pronto.

He faded back to the south side of the bunkhouse and levered himself up onto the porch, flinching as bullets tore at the wall as he passed. The one-by-four pine walls wouldn’t really protect him against those rifles, but they were more protection than blowing dust.

Slithering up against the edge of the building, keeping as low as he could and breathing like an overworked racehorse, he skinned his third grenade out, pulling the pin with the hand clutching the Thompson and waiting, the lever gripped tight against the body of the little bomb.

There was the minutest lessening of incoming fire as Av distracted them from up at the silo’s peak, and Martin rolled left, jabbing his leg out to steady himself half on and half off of the narrow porch. He let fly with the grenade and vaulted back up onto the porch without bothering to watch it go, scrabbling across to the far side like a mud crab crossing a rocky beach.

The grenade arced out, caromed off of a dragon stake, landed in the yard five yards short of the machine shed, and bounced. The men hiding inside the doorway were left with a choice between riding the explosion out be-hind a sheet of twenty-four gauge tin or taking their chances on a sprint across the open yard. They broke.

Up in the silo, Av did his best to keep the shooters at the front wall off of Marty, but it wasn’t easy. It was getting pretty dark, and nobody had yet bothered to turn on the yard lights, so they had decent cover from his direction. It didn’t help that he had to take time out every couple of minutes to keep the guys on the near walls honest.

This whole operation was going to hell fast. The Lewis gun choked on an empty chamber and he fed it another drum, hearing Homer’s big gun boom off in the distance as somebody up on the ship tried to take advantage of the lull.

Taking in a deep, gasping breath of silo dust and powder fumes, he cranked the charging handle back and peered down into the darkness and shadows. They had Marty pinned against the back porch of the bunk house and were laying it on pretty thick. How much ammo did these guys have on them, anyway?

Hunkering down, he squinted and laid a stream of thirty caliber right along the bunk house roof, peppering the machine shed’s thin wall with holes. He could almost hear the jacketed bullets bouncing around inside the building, having been slowed hardly at all by the thin metal skin.

“Whoop!” He had their attention now! He ducked down behind the concrete as bullets started to dance around the silo. Wasn’t this a pickle? Did one of them get lucky and find a line, the thin concrete skin of the silo wouldn’t stop the bullet much more than the metal of the machine shop wall.

Then Marty swung out and pitched something. Av laughed out loud. Two seconds later, a string of red-clad figures burst from the shed door, hauling their freight away from what they knew was coming. He gave them a couple of steps to see how many could he get out in the open before he touched off the Lewis to play shooting gallery.