The Caryatids

“You didn’t even bring a gun, woman.”

“Give me a clear line of sight at them. I will put Red Sonja’s evil eye on these bandit cult sons of bitches, and I have no care for their numbers.

“They swore to sweep the foe away with no care for their own lives;
Five thousand rode out in their sables and brocades.
Their piteous bones litter the banks of dry ravines,
Five thousand ghosts dreamt of in ladies’ bedchambers.”

The Badaulet mulled this recitation over. “They gave you the Assassin’s Mace.”

“Yes. No. Not that. Something else like that. There are many things like that in China.”

“So you truly killed the ‘five great generals,’ Sonja? And you killed all their troops as well?”

“It never works the way it gets told in those stories.”

The people of the tent village had no vehicles. They seemed to have knocked their camp down, thrown it on horseback, and instantly thun­dered off in all directions.

Yet their scattered swarm must surely have regrouped somewhere, somehow… With radios, telephones… or maybe with nothing more technical than drums, bugles, and tall flags on sticks. Genghis Khan had never gotten lost, and he’d ridden over the biggest empire on Earth.

The Badaulet removed his face net, pulled his visored cap over his eyes, and stared at the barren soil. He scowled.

“I can see a track,” she offered.

“That thing is not a track, woman. That is a hole in the ground.”

“Well, I saw another hole much like it. Back there.”

The strange holes were violent gouges in the desert soil, spaced ten meters, eleven meters apart. Pierced holes, like the jabbing of javelins.

Some two-legged thing was running across the steppe, bounding with tremendous strides. And not just one of them, either. Suddenly there were many more such holes. A herd of the violent jumping things, a rambling horde of them.

“These are not the grass people of the camp,” he told her, “these are running machines.”

Sonja gazed around the abandoned vacuity of the desert. One single tiny bird chirped, breaking the silence like a brick through glass. “It’s getting crowded out here.”

They followed the jumping machine tracks, for this group had some clear purpose and their tracks were easy to spot.

These new marauders were like giant Gobi jerboas. They bounced their way for kilometers.

Eventually, the javelin-footed things clustered into a gang and scam­pered together up a steep, flat-topped hill.

Closely guiding the pack robot, the Badaulet circled the hill with great caution.

“Do we climb up there?” she asked him at last.

“They might be waiting there in ambush,” he said. “They ran up there, each on his own two legs, and they did not come back down.”

“It’s getting late. I wouldn’t want to meet these things in the dark.”

“Wego up,” he decided.

The top of the hill, barren, chilly, nameless, was scabbed all over with the milling pockmarks, and there were helicopter skids.

“They all flew off,” said Sonja. “It’s some covert insertion team. Not Chinese. These people have robots that jump on two legs.”

As if in sympathy, their own pack robot emitted a loud metallic grunt. Sonja stared at its crude prow, a blunt shelf like an ugly bumper. There was a fresh, new, round hole pierced in the bare metal there.

There was a second mournful bang and a second hole appeared, a palm’s width away from the first.

“Don’t move,” said the Badaulet, standing, “it is trying to shoot us in the head,” and he shouldered his rifle and fired. “I hit it,” he reported, “but I should have sighted-in this target system properly,” and he fired again, again, again, three discreet sniper gunshots not much louder than three clapping hands.

A thing in the twilit sky like a distant child’s kite went tumbling into straw pieces.

“That plane was much bigger than the flying bomb they sent to kill us,” he said. “It had a gun on board, and not a very good gun.”

Sonja looked at the two neat holes piercing the robot’s prow. The air­craft had an excellent gun; it just had poor programming. It didn’t know what to do with their unusual target silhouette.

“I can see others now,” he said, pointing, “over there, that is a cloud of them.”

Her eyes could not match his. “I think I see some black dots in the sky. Are they flying in circles? They look like birds to me.”

“No,” he said, “those are not vultures eating the dead. Someone is standing there and fighting those planes. Someone brave, or stupid. Or else they may have armor.”

“We have to leave this hilltop right away. We’re exposed.”

“My rifle here on the ground has a better control of trajectory than an airborne rifle,” he said crisply. “I will extend my bipod, taking advantage of my clear line of sight, and pick off a few of those planes. The enemy of these evil planes should be our friend. Also, I admire his gallantry.”

“That is gallant. It is also a good way to get killed.”

Lucky stared at her and shrugged. “That is true. So: Get out of this robot. Put on your woman’s black cloak. Run down this hill, find a hole in the ground, get inside it, hide. When I am done here, I will find you.”

That was a speech Sonja had heard from men before. Not in Lucky’s own words, but with the same tone and intent. Men who talked that way died.

Sonja put on the black water cloak, she left the robot, she scrambled down the hill, and she looked for a place to survive.

Given that the sky was full of airborne death, there were only a few hiding places near the hill that made any sense. One miserable little gully here, over there a rugged, stony half overhang… The hanging rocks were a better bet for survival, for she might pile up some loose rub­ble to build a wall.

Sonja picked her way to that wretched excuse for a shelter, and there was a dead man in it.

He had died inside the device that allowed him to run like the wind.

It was a humanoid exoskeleton with long, gazelle-like stilts extending from his shins. The skeletal machine hugged his flesh so intimately that it looked grafted onto him. His skull was socketed into its big white hel­met like the filling in a pitted olive.

Apparently the rest of his party had fled safely to their rendezvous, while Skeleton Man had suffered some malfunction, shown up too late… Likely it was the weight of all the loot he was carrying, for he had a frame pack that latched and snapped with obscene design precision into his exposed skeleton ribs. The pack was bulging like he’d stolen the family silverware. His loot was heavy and jumbled and awkward…

His treasure stank. It smelled to high heaven, a burned-plastic smell. Like a factory fire.

At first she’d imagined that the stench must be coming from his flesh or his peculiar hardware, but no. He was freshly dead, and he had been a professional… Not a soldier exactly, not her kind of soldier, but some global tech-support cadre. He wore charcoal-black civilian utility gear and no shoes at all-for he seemed to live entirely in the skeleton—and he didn’t have one speck of ID on him, not a badge, not a pip, not a shoulder patch.

With that black mustache, with those skin tones, he might have been from the wreckage of India, or the wreckage of Pakistan maybe—but he was Acquis. He was definitely Acquis, for he was exactly the kind of young gung-ho global fool that some Acquis net committee could hus­tle up in fifteen minutes. Speed and lightness, the Acquis. They were al­ways good at speed and lightness.

The pursuing harpy had shot at him repeatedly, because its small­caliber rounds kept bouncing off his exoskeletal ribs, but its efforts had finally put a dispassionately calculated entry hole through the left side of his