moans and delirium of others. We had formed a ragged skirmish line, ninety in all, forty-five on each side of Aud and me, and had come within twenty yards of the guards when I saw the first prisoner, stumbling forward, ten yards to my right, raise his pistol.
For these novices, the range remained too great. I had drawn Ord’s pistol and carried it muzzle-down at my side in my unmittened hand. I waved it at the guy as I stage whispered, “Not yet! Crap! No, no, no!”
Even a blind pig finds an occasional acorn. The first shot of the prisoner’s life, and the first shot of the Battle of the Northern Terminus, struck the last guard in line in the nape of his neck, between the skirt of his helmet and his jacket collar. He went down noiselessly, like a flour sack, so that his buddies noticed neither his loss nor the pistol shot amid the skeet shoot ahead of them.
Within two heartbeats, nervous pistols crackled like popping corn, as the prisoners fired at will into a massed target too big for even novices to miss.
By the time the guards realized what was happening and stopped, the gap between prisoners and guards had closed to ten yards. Forty guards lay in the snow.
By the time the guards unslung rifles, the gap was five yards, and just a hundred of them remained standing. I, Jude, and Aud spent our effort running back and forth behind our skirmish line, screaming and tugging our shooters, trying to keep any from getting out ahead or from falling behind, so that no one would be shot by a buddy. I lunged for one man too late, and he took a round in the back of his thigh from another prisoner.
More guards fell, shot point-blank.
The remaining guards, blinded by the sun at our backs, reflexively standing and fighting when they should have run, were overrun before they could get off more than wild shots.
Prisoners fell on their tormentors three or four against one, firing pistols into screaming mouths, beating and kicking, pummeling guards with their own rifle butts, until guards’ heads cracked like dropped melons.
Then there was no sound but wind howl and the crying of wounded.
Two minutes had passed since the first shot.
I stood panting, hands on hips, facing back at the litter of bodies in the reddening snow.
Aud limped up alongside me. “I think we lost four.”
A prisoner beside me aimed his pistol ahead of us, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The hammer clacked on a spent cartridge. “Dammit!”
I turned and looked where the pistol’s muzzle pointed. A lone guard ran, bareheaded, coat flapping, toward the distant fence and the barracks beyond.
It was barely possible that with the wind, the oncoming darkness, the cover provided by the guards’ rowdy firing, and the sloppy state of this garrison that the troops remaining in the barracks complex could be surprised. In fact, we had half planned on it.
But not if the runner got to the garrison before we did.
I knelt in the snow, swung Ord’s pistol up, and sighted on the runner. In the fading light, he looked back over his shoulder as he ran. It was the broad-nosed boxcar guard who had killed the physician.
A decent shot with a service.45 can bring down a man at forty yards. An expert might stretch that to seventy- five yards. Liars claim one hundred.
Ord always claimed that, if I practiced more, I could be the best shot he had ever trained. He also claimed that his personally gunsmithed pistol was the most accurate.45 ever built.
I made the range ninety yards and growing.
More Slug Warriors had died beneath my hand than I could count, but they were, according to the Spooks, mere organic automatons. Human beings had died beneath my hand, too, when, as a soldier, lawful orders had required it.
But this was my decision. Like Ord had said, I was on my own.
The range opened to one hundred yards. I breathed, exhaled, paused, and fired.
The broad-nosed guard ran for his life. Toward, perhaps, a wife, children, a place in the church choir.
His arms spread wide, as if he was trying to fly like Puck the Fairy. His head snapped back so that his face turned toward the darkening sky. Then his body arced forward, fell in an explosion of snow, skidded, and stopped.
The wind in my face pricked gun smoke into my eyes, and I holstered the.45, then wiped them.
The prisoner with the dead pistol clapped my shoulder. “That was good!”
Aud limped past me. “We must press our attack! But so far, so good.”
The two of them left me standing alone, staring at the distant, dead soldier, facedown in the snow, then staring at the bodies all around me. So no one heard me say, “Goodness has nothing to do with us.”
FIFTY-FIVE
IN THE LONG DUSK OF ARCTIC AUTUMN, our accidental army redistributed ammunition, cannibalized rifles and clothing from the guards’ corpses, and moved out toward the garrison’s barracks with Aud Planck on the lead, as always. Or, as his troops had said of Erwin Rommel,
The flat buildings’ smoking chimneys and yellow-lit windows, promising warmth and life, drew not only our minutes-old veterans, but the rest of the prisoners who could walk or crawl. A ragged human wave rolled toward the barracks, its only sound the creak of thousands of numb hands and feet against dry snow.
Aud’s point group reached the gate that led outside the twelve-foot-tall barbed-wire fence, to the barracks complex fifty yards beyond, before a clang like iron against a hung iron triangle alarmed the garrison.
The gate, untended and unlocked, was swung aside as soldiers, pulling up suspenders and fumbling with rifles, tumbled out of barracks doors. The lucky ones were cut down by bullets poorly aimed but as numerous as hornets.
The second engagement of the Battle of the Northern Terminus was no more a fair fight and no less a massacre than the first. In all, fourteen prisoners died of wounds sustained in the fighting, but mercy was an uncommon commodity among their peers. None of the five-hundred-man Interior Guard garrison survived.
An hour later, Jude, Celline, and I walked the plain in the darkness beyond the barracks. The oil tanks that fueled the sledge trains and the barracks stoves, set alight in the fighting, painted the snow flickering orange. We plowed the drifts with shuffling feet. My foot struck an object that gave way easily, and I grunted.
Jude said, “Another ration can?”
I bent, felt for my boot toe, then grasped the object and stood. “Gotcha!”
I turned the apple-sized meteorite in my hand, lit by the oil tanks’ flame. The rock felt as light as cork. “Doesn’t glow like a Stone Hills nugget. But it isn’t supposed to.”
Celline said, “I know the next step is vital. But these people are half dead.”
I said, “Some of them will bounce back by the morning. We should have plenty of hands to harvest in a couple days.”
Jude said, “We’re ahead of schedule.”
So far, the plan, horrible and bloody as it was, had exceeded even optimistic expectations.
We had neutralized the hostile force that had sat atop Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite. We had moved a motivated workforce of nearly a thousand people above the Arctic Circle of Tressel by the only transport that existed to move them there. We had a week left before the Duck’s deadline, during which we would gather the meteorites together, then call down pickup.
The call itself would be as easy as sending out for pizza on my wrist ’Puter.
Cruisers that had visited Tressel over the years had quietly left behind geosynchronous-orbiting surveillance and communications satellites. CommSats were, as Howard put it, surprisingly affordable if you didn’t have to ground-launch them or opt for encryption. Since the Tressens had barely invented the telegraph, encryption for eavesdropping protection seemed a safe option to cheap out on.
We weren’t allowed to ring up the Spooks from my ’Puter until we were ready to have the Cavorite picked up. But by the week from now when the Ferrents would first notice that the return train from the Northern Terminus
