Battlefield Earth Part 83

Five Brigantes rushed from a door in the compound and sent a hail of lead in his direction.

The Thompson he had used was jammed. It would not rec.o.c.k. He threw it down and picked up the other one.

Totally unmindful of the slugs ripping up the ground, running low and firing as he went, he raced forward toward the fallen Russian.

He knelt behind the body, turned the Thompson on its side, and fanned a storm of bullets into the five. They crashed back against the compound, bodies jerking as a second spray of slugs. .h.i.t them before they could even collapse.

Jonnie got the a.s.sault rifle off the Russian and yanked its slide to get a bullet in the chamber.

He was after the Brigante who had shot Bittie.

To his left and behind him eight mercenaries who had been lying in wait in the ravine rushed into view.

Jonnie whirled. Then he stood there braced until the last one was out of the ravine.

They came on firing. Jonnie raised the a.s.sault rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim. He shot the last in the line first so the others would not see him go down and then fanned a barrage of shots from there to the first one in the lead.

The squad came sprawling forward in an avalanche of dead men.

Down in the garage, Lars heard the firing. He sprinted up toward the plateau. Then he heard the a.s.sault rifle's sharper bark racketing against the compound. Instantly he knew that Jonnie was not dead. No Brigantes had a.s.sault rifles. This intermediate ammunition, halfway between a pistol and a rifle, was far more accurate than a Thompson. He knew. He had tried to get some and he could not. He halted.

There was another prolonged burst from the a.s.sault rifle. The heavier staccato thud of the submachine guns had dwindled. Lars suddenly hit upon a better course of action for himself.

He scuttled backward into the garage. He sprinted into its depths. He found an old wrecked car and he crawled under the heaps of damaged body plates stripped from it. A far-off hammer of the a.s.sault rifle again. He burrowed deeper, sobbing with terror.

Jonnie raced over to the side to get a view behind the boulder, still trying to nail the mercenary who had shot Bittie.

A group of Brigantes sprinted into sight on the other side of the compound, firing submachine guns as they came.

Jonnie braced himself on a rock, fired over its top, and riddled them.

Terl in his cage had dropped down below the parapet that held the upright bars, lying flat to be out of the path of bullets. He raised himself cautiously now. It was the animal! He ducked back. At any moment now he supposed the animal would charge over here and riddle him. It 's what Terl would have done. He wondered whether he could get to the hidden explosive charge in the cave and make a grenade out of it, and then he saw he would expose himself if he did so and abandoned the idea. He lay there, panting a little in fear.

Taking advantage of trees and boulders, running from one to the next with deadly purpose, Jonnie was still trying to get the Brigante who had shot Bittie.

The wind was rising. Thunder was sounding amid the gunfire. The slow-flying drone was very near overhead now.

Where, where was that Brigante?

Two mercenaries jumped into view in a door and bore down on him with Thompsons. A bullet flicked the side of his neck.

Jonnie pounded them into rolling b.a.l.l.s of dead flesh with the a.s.sault rifle.

He snapped in a fresh magazine from the bag. The ape he was looking for must have taken refuge back of a wrecked tractor. Jonnie probed it with bullets fired to ricochet behind it.

Running, he rushed it, firing as he went.

There he was!

The Brigante ran away. Jonnie sighted in on him. The Brigante turned and started to shoot.

Jonnie sliced him in two with the a.s.sault rifle.

The sound of the drone grew less. There was no thunder at the moment. Save for the moan of the wind it seemed strangely quiet.

Jonnie put another magazine in the a.s.sault rifle. He quickly walked over the ground, glancing at one or another of the strewn dead.

A mercenary was crawling, trying to get his hands on a Thompson. Jonnie put a burst into him.

He waited. There seemed to be no sound or movement in the area that would be dangerous.

Dancer had broken free in the firing and fled down the slope.

Jonnie held the a.s.sault rifle ready in the crook on his arm. His battle rage died.

He went down the slope to Bittie.

Chapter 9.

The little boy lay on the blood-stained ground, his head back and in the direction of the lower slope.

Jonnie had been certain he was dead. n.o.body could take that many submachine gun slugs in the middle of his body- and a small body- and live.

He felt awful. He knelt beside the torn boy. He was going to pick the body up and he put his hand under the head and lifted it slightly.

There was a light flutter of breath!

Bittie's eyes trembled open. They were glazed in shock but they saw Jonnie, knew him.

Bittie was moving his lips. A very faint whisper of a voice. Jonnie bent closer to hear.

"I...I wasn't a very good squire...was I...Sir Jonnie."

Then tears began to roll sideways from the boy's eyes.

Jonnie reacted, incredulous! The child thought he had failed.

Jonnie tried to get it out, tried to speak. He couldn't make his voice work. He was trying to tell Bittie, no, no, no, Bittie. You were a great squire.

You have just saved my life! But he couldn't speak.

The shock was wearing off in the boy; the numbness that had held back the pain vanished.

Bittie's hand, which had risen to clutch Jonnie's wrist, suddenly clenched bruisingly in a spasm of agony. The body did a wrenching twist. Bittie's head fell to the side.

He was dead. No heartbeat. No breath. No pulse.

Jonnie sat there for a long time, crying. He hadn't been able to speak, to tell Bittie how wrong he was. He was not a bad squire. Not Bittie. Never!

After a while, Jonnie picked the boy up in his arms and went down the hill. He laid the body very gently on the seat of the ground car.

He went back and picked up the dead body of the Russian and carried it to the car and put it in.

Windsplitter had seen him from a distance and came up, and the other horses, over their fright now, approached.

Jonnie put the dead boy on his lap and drove very slowly toward the Academy. The horses, seeing him go at that pace, followed. The little cortege crossed the plain.

It took them a long time to make the trip. Jonnie stopped at last beside the trench where the sixty-seven cadets had fought the last battle so very long ago. He just sat there holding Bittie's body.

A cadet sentry had seen them approach. In a little while cadets started to come out of the buildings. Word spread further and more came.

The schoolmaster, from an upper window, saw the crowd gathering around the ground car and went out. Dunneldeen and Angus and Ker came up to the fringe of the crowd.

Jonnie got out, holding the dead boy. He wanted to talk to them and he couldn't speak.

Several truckloads of Russians suddenly roared up to a halt and they spilled out, joining the crowd.

Several cadets raced back to the armory and came out with a.s.sault rifles and shoulder bags of magazines and began to pa.s.s them around to men who were looking in the direction of the compound.

An angry mutter was rising higher and higher among them.

Several cadets raced back to their rooms to get personal side arms and came back, buckling on belts and loading magazines.

The thunder in the mountains reverberated now and then across the plain and an angry, cold wind whipped around the mob.

A truckload of Russians who had swung over by the compound arrived back and stopped in a geyser of dust. The Russians were shouting and pointing toward the compound, trying to say what was over there now. No one could understand them.

A small ground car raced up from the direction of Denver, spraying clods of dirt as it screeched to a stop. The pilot officer in charge of drones jumped out, a stream of drone printout pictures crackling in the wind as he forced his way into the crowd, trying to tell them it had all come through on a drone overfly, trying to show people what had happened. He had ripped the printouts and the discs out of the machines and come at once.

A Coordinator was finally able to make himself heard. He had gotten now what the single Russian truck had seen at the compound. "The Brigantes are all dead over there! A whole commando!"

"Is that Psychlo Terl still alive over there?" somebody shouted.

There was an angry roar from the crowd. Several surged forward to see whether Terl was visible in the pictures.

"He's still alive," shouted the Russians' Coordinator who had gotten the information from the truck.

The crowd surged and some started to climb into the Russian trucks. The Russians had been drawn up in a line by a Russian officer and they were checking their rifles on command.

Colonel Ivan, who had come to stand near Jonnie, was gazing, stricken with guilt, at the face of the dead boy. "The Psychlo dies!"

Jonnie had finally gotten a grip on himself. Still holding the boy he climbed to the top of the ground car. He looked down at them and they quieted to hear him.

"No," said Jonnie. "No, you must not do anything now. In the star systems of the universe around us there is a far greater danger than Brigantes. We are fighting a dangerous battle. A bigger battle. We have made a mistake and it has resulted in the death of this innocent boy. I killed his murderer. We cannot undo the mistake. But we must go on.

"In that trench there, sixty-seven cadets died, fighting the last battle of the Psychlo invasion over a thousand years ago. When I first saw that trench, it gave me my first hope. It was not that they lost, it was that they fought at all against hopeless odds. They did not die in vain. We are here. We are fighting again. You and your fellow pilots control the skies of Earth.

"I will make a request of one or another of you in times to come. Will you honor those requests?"

There was a ma.s.sed stare. Did he think they would not? Then there was a concerted roar of a.s.sent. It took minutes for it to quiet.

Jonnie said, "I am leaving you now. I am taking this boy to Scotland. To be buried by his own people."

Jonnie got down off the car.

The pilot whose ore carrier had been readied for the Russians was pointing it out to the Russian Coordinator.

They loaded Jonnie's horses. They found Stormalong's kit in the ground car and put it aboard.

The Russians took over the body of Dmitri Tomlov to take it home.

Jonnie climbed to the c.o.c.kpit of the big ore carrier, still holding Bittie.

Before he closed the door, he looked down at the crowd and said, slowly and clearly, "It is not the time for revenge." And then he added a bitter, grim "Yet!"

The crowd nodded. They understood. Later it would be an entirely different matter.

The huge plane rose and turned in the gray, storm-discolored sky. It dwindled and was gone.

Chapter 10.

A much more serious crisis awaited him in Scotland, one that threatened to wreck all his plans.

Pilots on the ground talked the ore plane down through the dark swirling mists of autumn. The Scots had begun to rebuild Castle Rock in Edinburgh, cleaning up and trying to restore the ancient buildings that two thousand years before had been the seat of Scottish nationalism and that was now being called its original Gaelic word: Dunedin, "the hill fort of edin." Jonnie landed in a park below the Rock, just in front of the ruins of the ancient National Gallery of Scotland.

Swarms of people had been there to meet him and gillies had been hard pressed to clear s.p.a.ce in the throng for the plane to land.

Unfortunately, the drone pictures of the compound fight had come in on the Cornwall minesite recorders, and they had been rushed by mine pa.s.senger plane to Scotland long before Jonnie's arrival. The Scots were making good use of the vast amounts of transport taken from the Psychlos, and flatbeds were being used as buses now that trainee machine operators were back home.

Bittie's mother and family were there and Jonnie gave over the corpse to them to dress and prepare for a funeral. Pipers were wailing a lament, drums beating its slow and doleful cadence. Women in the crowd were openly crying and men were beating their fists together as they dwelt on what they conceived to be the necessity of war.

It was nearly dark. An honor guard of kilted Highlanders approached and its officer courteously told Jonnie he was there to escort him through the crowds to a meeting of the Chiefs. They had not yet restored the parliament house on the Rock; the Chiefs, brought hastily in from the hills, were meeting in the nearby open park before the ruined Royal Scottish Academy.