Maybe a quarter mile ahead. Between the general and us.”
Neversmile swore silently. Just his luck. The general get’s a wild hair up his ass ... and the colonel chose him to deal with it. “Can you nail the bastards?”
“A shoulder-launched missile would handle it. assumin’ you ain’t too worried about due process or how big a hole I make.”
Neversmile remembered how many innocent females and cubs the Legion had accidentally slaughtered over the years and knew he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Not to mention the fact that he was supposed to maintain a low profile. “No, hold your fire. Feel free to close the distance, however—but don’t let the shitheads see you.”
It was a stupid order—Wilker thought so anyway—but knew better than to say so. Not to a sergeant—and not to this Sergeant. Gravel crunched under her weight, and the cyborg continued to climb.
Dimwit emerged from the rocks still buttoning his pants. It was the second time he had stopped to take a pee and the second time he had fallen behind. Nocount was irritated. “Hurry up! The human’s slow but not that slow. We’ll lose the furless bastard.”
“It ain’t my fault,” Dimwit complained. “I had to pee and it hurts.”
“Alt because you’ll screw anything with a pulse,” his companion replied unsympathetically. “Come on, let’s go.”
Dimwit mounted his dooth, kicked the animal onto the trail, and kicked it yet again. The animal groaned, sent plumes of lung-warmed air down toward the ground, and passed a prodigious amount of gas. The trek resumed.
If the mesa had a name, Booly didn’t know what it was. Only that it stood straight and tall, just as it had the last time he’d been there, camping with his mother.
It was she who showed him the narrow, often dangerous, path that circled the sheersided cliffs, pointed out the tool marks the ancients had left on the rock, and fired his imagination. “Who were they?” she asked. “And from whom were they hiding?” For surely some great evil had been upon the land, a threat that drove them up off the slowly rising plain, to make a home in the sky. Had they won? These hard-pressed Naa? And survived that which sought to hunt them down? Or had the group been decimated? And wiped from existence? There was no way to be sure. And there was another story, a more personal tale, which came back to Booly as his dooth labored toward the top. It had to do with his grandfather, William Booly I, a onetime sergeant major who was wounded during an ambush, taken prisoner, and nursed back to health by a Naa maiden, a beautiful maiden, named Windsweet.
His grandfather was smitten, very smitten, and soon fell in love. But the whole thing was wrong. Wrong according to the Legion, wrong according to the Naa, and wrong according to her father. Windsweet helped the legionnaire escape, bandits gave chase, and a patrol saved his life. Later, after returning to his unit, the soldier tried to forget the maiden and the way he felt about her, but found that impossible to do. That’s when Booly’s ancestor did something which Booly himself, as an officer, could never forgive: William Booly I went over the hill.
The dooth rounded a comer, rocks clattered away from its hooves and fell toward the scree below. They rattled, started a small slide, and tumbled down the mountain. The noise caused Nocount to jerk his animal to a halt. He turned to Dimwit. ‘The motherless alien is halfway to the lop.”
“So?” his friend inquired sarcastically. “If he can make it, so can we.”
“I know that you idiot,” Nocount responded impatiently.
“But why bother?”
Dimwit frowned, processed the words, and brightened.
“We could wait here!”
“Now there’s an idea,” Nocount replied sarcastically. “Let’s try it. No point in doin’ all that work if we don’t have to.”
Dimwit agreed, swung down from the saddle, and headed for some likely looking rocks. He needed to pee.
The trail wound through the site of an ancient rock slide, shelved upwards, passed through a rocky defile and ended on a windswept plateau. A crust of icy snow covered what remained of the ancient walls. Yes, Booly thought to himself, whatever roamed below must have been very unpleasant to force the old ones up here.
The officer dismounted, took the dooth by its reins, and led the animal toward a rocky spire. It was there if memory served him correctly that his mother and he had camped. Not on the surface, at the mercy of the groaning wind, but below, in chambers created by the ancients. He located the spiral stair without difficulty, pulled a torch out of his pack, checked to ensure that the underground common room remained habitable, and allowed the light to play over some empty ration boxes. Others had camped there since his childhood visit, but not for many years, judging from the dust on the containers.
