LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I FEED HIM, thought Sergeant Bruce. He kept one hand on the trigger of his weapon. With the other, he pulled the string on the ration sack. Several biscuits escaped to fall in the dirt at his feet, but he still held a handful. Those he tossed at the kid.
The kid went for the food with both hands, fumbled the catch, then grabbed for them as they fell to the ground. He ended up with one in his mouth and two in each hand. That left him in a poor situation to continue the bargaining.
Sergeant Bruce took the opportunity to jack up his voice via Chesty’s speaker. “I am a Royal Wardhaven Marine. I can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. My king considers Kaskatos as neutral territory, claimed by no one but the folks who work the land. Word is that you’ve come on hard times. The Red Cross, Red Star, and Red Crescent have loaded a lot of food on our ship and asked us to distribute it to those in need.” He paused for a moment to look up and down the line facing him.
“I think they include you folks.” He turned to Kris. “Princess Kristine, would you roll the food carts out here, please?”
The local laborers looked terrified at the thought of going any closer to the armed thugs, but Mr. Annam motioned to them, and they stepped forward. Each of the carts had two handles. It took two people on each to get the carts moving. Kris considered ordering Marines to do the work but dropped the idea as the carts trundled past her.
For the rest of her life, Kris would wonder why she didn’t listen to her first instinct.
The eight laborers pushed the carts and their load of famine rations out into the no-man’s-land between the Marines and the townspeople. The laborers were exhausted by the work they’d done already today. The road was rutted and made for hard going.
It jostled the cart.
Someone with the best of intentions had piled sacks of rations as high as they could reach.
About the time the carts reached Sergeant Bruce, all the good intentions came apart.
First a single sack fell off to burst in the dust of the road. Then a couple of dozen bags tumbled as one whole side of the pile gave way.
For a long moment you could hear the sound of sacks sliding, bouncing off the carts’ wheels, plopping onto the dusty trail.
Then there were shouts from the milling mob across the way. Shouts and screams. Like a stampeding herd of desperate animals, they broke ranks and charged for the food.
“Bruce, get out of there,” Kris ordered on net. “Get the locals and get out of there.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m moving.”
The sergeant didn’t need to say a word to the locals. They could see what was headed their way and bolted for safety before the Marine could even turn around.
Starved and exhausted they might be, but if Kris had had a timer, she suspected the record for the mad hundred-meter dash would have fallen that afternoon.
The laborers didn’t stop running when they hit the Marine line but kept right on going. Kris hoped they remembered to stop when they hit the plantation, but she wouldn’t bet on that.
Kris had no time to follow them; her eyes were on the on-rushing mob. Sergeant Bruce backpedaled fifteen or twenty meters past the food carts, then, rifle at the ready, stood his ground.
The kid who’d given the speech took the opportunity to load up on five or six sacks, and made a run back to the truck line. Of course, to do that, he had to pass through the onrushing mob.
One guy swinging a machete took his head off.
Four or five of the closest people grabbed for the blood-spattered sacks and ripped into them. They didn’t bother reading the instructions, so it took them longer to get at the ration biscuits than it should have.
The scene when the mob hit the carts was just as bad. They bowled them over. People went down, screaming as they were trampled. Clubs swung, machetes hacked.
It was a bloodbath.
Sergeant Bruce was closest. He saw it all. He and Chesty transmitted none of it. But he did risk a quick turn back to Kris. His plaintive shrug said it all. What do we do now?
Doing nothing had seemed like a good idea. Now, doing something seemed like a much better one.
“Jack, advance two squads of Marines to reinforce Sergeant Bruce.”
“Yes, I think we better,” he said, and the orders were quickly given.
Twenty Marines rose from cover behind the paddy dike and, rifles ready, moved quickly to support the sergeant. Kris reached for her automatic, and announced on general net, “I am about to fire one shot in the air. Be prepared for any reaction.”
Beside Kris, Penny made a sour face but said nothing. Jack moved to put his body between Kris and the opposing forces.
Kris fired three shots straight into the air. “Everybody calm down,” she shouted. Nelly enhanced her voice, causing Jack and Penny to do a bit of a jump. Behind Kris, Mr. Annam and his wife hit the ground.
“Calm down, everyone. We’ve got food enough for all of you,” Kris repeated.
For a long moment, it looked like it might work.
The slaughter around the food carts stopped as people looked up to see where the noise was coming from. Maybe some even understood the words Kris shouted. For a long moment, Kris could hear the moans of the injured.
But the decision for what would happen next depended on those who carried the machine pistols and rifles. Most of them still lay prone on the flanks of the line and in its dead center. Those 140 or so gunslingers hadn’t moved.
Yet.
Among the seven to eight hundred club and machete swingers who had broken for the food carts were maybe fifty gunmen, say the precinct bosses who had produced the cannon fodder. They held back when the rabble broke. Now they looked for instructions from the boss man on his perch on the central truck.
Then the undecided silence was shattered.
Someone let loose on full rock and roll.
Kris thought it came from the far right of the opposing line, but a quick glance in that direction showed no stream of bullets knocking people down like tenpins. And one quick glance was all the time Kris had. A roar of fire, single-shot and fully automatic, swept the battlefield.
One of them, probably an old-fashioned .30 caliber, took Kris right in the chest, almost knocking her down. If she hadn’t been wearing a spider-silk bodysuit, it would have drilled her through the heart.
As it was, the force of it left Kris struggling to keep her footing even with the cane’s extra help. Around her, screams came as first a few, then more of the milling rabble around the overturned carts were hit by small-arms fire.
Then Jack hit Kris with a football tackle, and she went solidly down . . . taking Penny with her. They ended up in a pile, Jack with his back to the firefight, Kris sandwiched between him and Penny.
Penny was talking to herself . . . or someone on net more likely . . . but she interrupted herself to complain. “Hey, you two could have given me some warning.”
“You work for a Longknife,” Jack snapped. “Consider yourself permanently warned.”
Kris found herself staring at the Annams. Husband and wife clutched each other . . . but they clutched the ground even more as they stared wide-eyed at Kris.
“Stay behind me, bullets can’t get through me,” Kris said.
“Of course,” the husband told her wife. “She is a Longknife and cannot be killed.”
“She can be killed,” Jack spat, and used his hand to force Kris’s head back down even as she twisted around and tried to sneak a quick look at the developing battle. “You aren’t wearing an armored wig, are you?”
Jack was right, Kris wasn’t. And now Kris knew why the Marine’s usual high-and-tight haircut had looked a bit shaggy this morning. He was wearing an armored hairpiece.
“First platoon has not fired,” came from Lieutenant Stubben, “but we are taking fire.”