“Not match,” Emmett said sharply but quietly so the warriors close by would not hear. “Skarmer weapon shoot more, shoot farther.”
“Yes, I know that. You explained it before.” Reatur spoke as softly as the human. “But my males do not, so they will be braver. And the Skarmer do not, so they may take fright when you thunder at them.”
“Good plan,” Emmett agreed. That pleased Reatur; no matter how weird humans were, this one seemed to know a good deal about fighting. Now he was talking into the box that carried voices. Reatur wished he understood what Emmett was saying; he had only learned a few words of human speech. Now he had to ask, “Is all well, back beyond the castle?” “All well,” Emmett said. “They wait.”
“So do we,” Reatur said. Most times, he would sooner have acted than paused here to let the Skarmer descend on him. But if he attacked them in the open, he would be like a fat massi coming up to a male, too stupid to know it was about to be speared. The noiseweapon made that certain. Thus he waited, on ground of his own choosing.
His warriors’ babble changed tone. The eyestalk that was looking northwest over the barrier told him why. The males emerging from in back of some gentle high ground could only be the enemy.
Some of them stopped short when they saw the obstacle the Omalo had thrown up in their path. The Skarmer could not go around it: it stretched from one patch of woods to another. If they wanted to fight Reatur’s warriors, they would have to come straight at them.
More and more Skarmer came out. They began to deploy, forming into fighting clusters. The Omalo yelled abuse at them, though they did not understand the local tongue and were still too far away to hear much anyhow.
“Fralk has a funny way of arranging his warriors,” Reatur said, poking up another couple of eyestalks so he could take in the whole picture at once. “Why that gap in the center? More of his males should be there, to meet us where we are strongest. But there are only an eighteen or so.”
With one of the eyes that wasn’t looking out at the Skarmer army, the domain master saw Emmett looking over the rampart, too. The human had a gadget over his own eyes-not the noiseweapon, but something else. “Help me see farther,” Emmett explained, lowering the device. “I see human there in center.” Always deep and, to Reatur, fierce sounding, his voice was frighteningly grim now.
“A human.” After a moment’s thought, the domain master realized what that meant. “Oh. That is where the noiseweapon will be.”
“Yes.”
“And he doesn’t have his own males there so he won’t hit them with the stones or whatever it is that the noiseweapon spits.”
“Yes,” Emmett said again. He made his mouth twist into the shape humans used to show amusement. Now he had his weapon again. “We give Fralk new thing to think about, yes?”
“Yes.” The word felt good to Reatur. Fralk had been pulling him around by the eyestalks ever since the Skarmer forced their way out of Ervis Gorge. He had been reacting to what his enemy did. Let Fralk react for a change. “Go ahead, Emmett.”
The human aimed the noiseweapon over the rampart, made it roar. Having it go off next to Reatur was like taking up residence in the middle of a thunderstorm. The domain master did not care. “See how you like it coming your way, Fralk!” he yelled.
A flash, a boom-Fralk froze in horror. Turning four eyestalks toward Oleg, he screamed, “lbu told me they didn’t have rifles!” He was too shaken to bother with the human language.
Oleg followed the Skarmer speech. “Not a rifle,” he answered in the same language. He also followed Fralk, literally: a guard jerked him along by a cord tied around him between his arms and head.
“What do you mean, not a rifle?” Fralk shouted, still frantic. Flash, boom-another shot punctuated his words. With the couple of eyes that weren’t on the human, he saw his males begin to waver. They hadn’t expected the Omalo to have a weapon to match theirs.
“Not a rifle,” Oleg repeated. “That is pistor’-a human word Fralk hadn’t heard before, but one Oleg went on to explain-“like rifle, but not as good. Not shoot so far, not shoot so fast. Not hurt us where we are here.”
“Oh.” That made Fralk feel a little better, but not much. Flash, boom-his warriors were definitely having second thoughts now. They didn’t know the pistol was too far away for its bullets to reach them. Fralk thought furiously. “Can I kill whoever has the pistol from here?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Oleg said.
That was all Fralk needed to hear. He pointed his rifle in the direction from which the Omalo had shot, set the change lever to full automatic, and fired a long, satisfying burst. Ice splashed from the Omalo barrier.
“Do you think I got him?” he asked.
“Maybe,” Oleg said again, this time in his own language.
“As for what I think, nichevo. Soon enough you will know. If he does not shoot back, you got him. If he does, you did not.”
Flash, boom-Fralk cursed.
Emmet Bragg was having fun, only slightly hampered by the fact that, as Irv had reminded him a. couple of days before, he couldn’t afford to do anything stupid. Had only his own neck been on the line, he would have worried a lot less. But four other people were depending on him to get them back to Earth. With Frank dead, he didn’t even have a well trained backup.
So he threw himself flat on his belly the second the Kalashnikov started barking and stayed there till well after the burst was done. The wisdom might have been forced on him, but it was wisdom nonetheless: a couple of rounds punched through the barrier to wound Minervans behind it. One might have got him, and he not hit the deck when he did-the snow and ice it kicked out froze the back of his neck.
More males fell from bullets that had clipped them above the level of the rampart. Still, Bragg thought, most of the rounds from the burst had gone high. That was bad shooting, worse than he had expected from the Russian. Maybe it was because Lopatin was KGB and hadn’t got proper training.
“Isn’t that too bad for him?” Bragg muttered. He was just glad Sergei Tolmasov was on the far side of Jotun Canyon. Tolmasov, he was grimly certain, would not have used the AKT4 like an amateur.
Staying low, Bragg scrambled twenty yard to his right, jumped up for a quick shot over the barrier, then dove onto his stomach again. A short burst chewed up the ice and snow almost at once, followed a few seconds later by a long one.
“Changed clips again, did you? Good,” Bragg said, as if he were playing poker, not soldier, against the man with the rifle. “Now how many do you have left?” That was a question, all right. Lopatin, he thought, was shooting as though he had brought along a truckload.
This time, Bragg crawled a couple of hundred feet to his left, almost to the trees anchoring that end of the line. He popped up for three shots at Fralk’s right wing. They might even have done some damage; the Minervans there weren’t much more than a hundred yards away now, and they made a big target. Bragg didn’t stay up long enough to look, which was just as well-the answering fusillade came hard on the heels of his last shot.
Reloading while on his belly was not a skill he had practiced much since basic training days, but he managed. Still down there, he pulled out his radio and called his wife. “You all ready there?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be.” Louise’s voice emerged tinnily.
“Is that that damn gun I hear, Emmett? Watch yourself, now.”
He chuckled. “I intend to, hon. Love you. Next time I call, I’ll really need you. Out.”
He started making his way back toward the center of the line and quickly forgot about Louise. He did love her, as he had said, but he loved what he was doing more. He had loved Carleen, too, come to that, but he had figured out early on he was never going to make it to Minerva married to a historian of ancient Rome.