I stretched out on a middle seat, with the sun still up. I would stand my watch from 2:00 A.M. to 5:30. At 5:30, everyone would be up and getting ready to roll out at first light.
It seemed like a long time away, and I didn’t think I could sleep that long, or at all, but I snugged the pillow under my head, undid a couple of shirt buttons so that I could move my chest freely, and had just a moment to notice that the warm sun on my face was pleasant, so perhaps I would enjoy it for a few minutes before pulling a coat over my head to get some darkness.
Sometimes when you think you couldn’t sleep to save your soul—perhaps because of a dreadful day like the one I had just been through, or when the future seems to be pure menace hidden by dark fog—you fall asleep so fast that it comes as a shock, as if a trapdoor opened in unpleasant reality and you fell down a dark well and plunged to somewhere else at the bottom. The exhaustion lurking behind my eyes leaped up and yanked me down the dark well of sleep, and it was seven hours later and Esmé was giving me a friendly shake. “Come on, we get to go climb a hill in the dark so we can sit on cold rocks and watch an empty road. You don’t want to be late for that!”
I sat up, stretched. Though it was the middle of the night, I was feeling pretty good. I checked my watch, and it was quarter till two; there was just time for a swallow of coffee from a thermos and a quick leak behind a rock, and then I was picking my way along behind Esmé, a pistol strapped awkwardly onto my belt most of the way behind my back, bumping me in a way I wasn’t used to. Esmé had cheerfully told me that in the event of trouble I was to keep it in my holster unless she was immediately killed, in which case I should fire it to alert the camp. “Or if you get a guy coming at you so close up that you could club him in the nose with the muzzle, try to do that. You might as well pull the trigger when you do.”
I managed to keep any wounded dignity out of my voice. “I did carry one of these, off and on, when I was in Her Majesty’s Navy. And I had to fire it a few times a year, on a range.”
“Well, good. Then you’ve had enough training not to shoot me by accident, or yourself in the foot. How good a shot were you?
“I was planning to use this thing as a club, if it came to that. Your suggestions weren’t wrong, but you were suggesting them because you thought I didn’t know anything. The reason they were good suggestions was not that I don’t know anything—they were good suggestions because I’m a shitty shot.”
The big woman chuckled in the darkness. “You’re different, Lyle Peripart. I might even get to like that.”
Now we were far enough up the hill to be staying quiet, at least until we got to the sentry post and found out how things were going. The boulders were middling big and pretty well jammed into place by the millennia, so that the footing and grips were much more secure than they looked; the trick was only to find a way to stay low while going over them, and there was enough light from a half-moon, still relatively low in the sky, to make it almost easy going. Ten minutes of sweaty scrambling on the dark hillside got us to the top, looking down over a little pit in the rocks, where we saw Helen and Jesús, both looking across the road, sitting crouched side by side in the space behind a large boulder.
“We’re up here,” Esmé said.
“We heard you coming,” Jesús said, softly but not bothering to whisper. “You can probably do better next time. But I don’t think it matters right now. There hasn’t been a breath of half a sound, and there’s no trace of anything moving out there. Paula and Roger had a very quiet watch as well. I think the bandits that fired on us probably just take a shot at everything going by, and don’t pursue anything they don’t hit hard enough to stop. And we’ve seen nothing and no one since.”
“Where do you think Iphwin’s helicopter came from?” I asked. “It showed up within five minutes.”
Helen snorted. “At a guess, a hidden base near the road, which he could probably have flown us to but didn’t, for some obscure reason of his own. Or possibly he had a hundred helicopters in a hundred different worlds do something or other to cause them to cross over to other worlds, and this is the one we got. Or maybe it jumped straight in from orbit using a technology none of us knows even exists. Or the most likely possibility— something completely different that none of us has thought of.”
“He is confusing to deal with. Did you really have to slap him around?”
“If I answer that question, we’ll spend an hour quibbling about the connotations of ‘have to.’ And I’m good and tired and headed down the hill for bed. Have a quiet watch,” she added, as she climbed up and over the rocks.
“You probably will,” Jesús added as he scrambled up to follow her. “The moonlight helps, and there’s a wide stretch without much cover; anyone who sneaks up on us from that side will have to be pretty good.” A moment later they crunched over the rocks beside us and were gone; I heard the faint scuff of their feet once or twice behind me, as we climbed down into the narrow space behind the big rock, and then nothing. We settled in, taking only a moment to agree that in general I would watch to the south and center, and Esmé would watch north and center.
I was surprised at how awake I felt. True, I had just had some very deep sleep and some strong coffee, but I felt rested, comfortable, ready to be up for a long time, and it was not yet three in the morning.
The landscape in front of me took a while to resolve to my unfamiliar eyes, but there wouldn’t have been any problem spotting anything moving. It was all dark curved shapes out there with patches of bright moonlight between them, and the shadows were small—the half-moon was already getting on toward halfway up the eastern sky, its light beginning to spill over the hill behind us. Further, there was a big swath of dune sand that splashed almost all the way across the road to the south, and though someone might have been able to lie hidden in its shadow, I didn’t see any pathway to that shadow that wasn’t exposed. The air was cool but not unpleasant; there should have been more wildlife out there making noise, I thought, but then big animals are scarce in that sort of country, and more than likely the quiet struggle between the predators and prey was going on all around us, in the little dark corners between rocks. No doubt it would become fiercer, and perhaps more audible, in the hours just before and after the sun came up.
“Whoever fired on us hasn’t been bandits long, or is very lazy, or isn’t very talented,” Esmé said, her voice barely above a whisper, a long time after we had settled in to watch.
“Why do you say that?” I tried to keep my voice lower than hers.
“Because this is twenty times as good a place for an ambush, and it’s not that far away. If they had just scouted up the road a little, they’d have found this. And there’s no place anyone in his right mind would stop, or turn off, between there and here. Any truck or car that went by there would go by here. Either they must have set up at the first convenient place and never bothered to move, or else they’re too stupid to see that from the rocks down below us, they could rake a vehicle from one end to the other with fire, and the vehicle could never get off the road because of the dunes to the side. If they held fire till the right moment, people in a vehicle would never be able to go either forward or back. They’d just be pinned down until enough rounds found enough vulnerable spots. I’d put the main force down by the road, and the lookout—geez, I’d put it right—”
She stopped and gestured for me to listen. I did, listening harder than I ever had in my life, as if I were throwing my mind into the surrounding rocks and desert, trying to pick up anything other than the soft susurrus of our breathing and the gentle creak of wood and leather as Esmé drew a knife from a sheath and wriggled through a shadow, out to the side, and down the hill. I thought about whether or not to draw my pistol, but I suspected that moving as quietly and carefully as Esmé was, she would be taking a long time getting down the hill to whatever sound she was checking out, and I knew I would be getting steadily more nervous the whole time. I didn’t want to be holding a pistol when she came back, if I was going to be jumpy; I couldn’t see any way that could be a good thing. At best, I’d be more worried about not shooting her accidentally than about identifying anyone else who might be approaching. And at worst, I might cost us a fighter and give away our position. I left the pistol where it was and tried to do nothing but watch very actively and very quietly for any sign of motion.