Hal smiled back and nodded. It was true. They were less than six meters from the soldiers. Even Calas, probably, could not have missed, at this close distance. Hal pointed at the farther soldier, the one across the table from them and whose face was toward them.
Old Man smiled and nodded, aiming at the other man. They shot almost together. The soft twang of the bowstrings was loud enough to be heard by the two targets. Both men looked up from their gambling, startled, as the dart points went home, Hal's in the shoulder muscle of the man he had aimed at, Old Man's in the back of the neck of the soldier on his side.
Both the uniformed men reached with puzzled looks toward the points of irritation where the dart needles had entered, but the shafts had already dropped off the darts, clattering down and through the slats that made up the seats of the benches with which the tables were equipped. Old Man's target actually managed to close a couple of fingers weakly on the end of the dart which protruded from his neck, but Hal's never managed to touch his, before both men were failing backwards off the bench on to the ground.
Both Hal and Old Man broke off the ends of two more arrow shafts and shot another dart into each slumped body, a dart that would inject the atropinelike substance Tannaheh had equipped them with.
Now, for the first time, Hal took a second to look around the clearing. The soldiers in the sleeping sacks were still receiving dart-loaded arrows fired from the darkness beyond them. In the dazzling light from the overhead illumination, he saw Onete, knife in hand, on her way to cut Cee loose from the tree to which she had been tied.
The twang of a bowstring close to his right ear brought his attention abruptly back to Old Man. He was in time to see a dart-laden arrow penetrate the wall of the hutment in which the sleeping Liu was housed. "I believe that lodged in a safe body area," Old Man said, lowering the bow and looking mildly at Hal. "I thought you were going to wait until I could go and open one of the door flaps, so you could see what you were shooting at," said Hal. "I know you made that offer, back up on the ledge," said Old Man, still softly, "but as it turned out it wasn't necessary. The still pictures on the scope were good enough to show us where his cot stood and how he lay on it-you remember there was one that showed him taking a nap with one of the flaps open, so that we could see him there in the shadow on the cot?" "You're right," said Hal. He looked at the middle hutment. "We saw the inside of the Urk's hutment too, but without him on the cot. That's why you didn't put a dart through the wall of it into him?"
"According to my memory, his cot was almost completely surrounded by equipment of one kind or another." "I'll take care of it, then." Hal kicked off his boots. "I'll open a flap to let you see what you're shooting at, and if there's still no way you can get a clean shot at him, wave me on. I'll go in and place a dart in him by hand."
He glanced about, saw Onete busy now with the medical kit and Artur, stepped to the door of the middle hutment and pulled back the right-hand one of the two flaps that closed its entrance. Within, by the outside light of the clearing that was reflected inside through the open flap, it was possible to see a body in a sleeping sack on a cot between what looked like a temperaturecontrolled food storage box and a cooker. Hal was turning to check with Old Man when the soft twang of a bowstring was accompanied almost simultaneously by the passage of an arrow by him. It lodged its needle in what looked like the upper body of the form in the sack.
The body lifted its head and shoulders as if to begin to get up, then fell back and was still. "Here," said Old Man.
Hal turned to see the other beside him, the bow in one hand and the other holding Hal's boots, the top rims clutched together. Hal took the boots and put them on, as Old Man went forward, picked up the fallen shaft of the arrow, broke off its end and made the second injection into the drugged sleeper on the cot. "Indeed, it's the one Calas called the Urk," he said. The hand that was not carrying his bow now held the power pistol the Urk had worn earlier. "This was in its holster, on a belt with the rest of his clothes, on a chair beside the cot." "Thanks," said Hal, "you don't want to keep it yourself?" "It's a machine for killing - nothing more," said Old Man. "I've never killed, human or animal, and never will. These drugged darts are permissible."
Hal nodded and tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers.
He led the way back outside to the clearing. There, the other bow-people were injecting the follow-up, atropinelike drug, mostly by hand, as they bent over the still forms in the sleeping sacks. Hal shook his head and smiled a little. For once, to confound practice as opposed to theory, a tactical plan had worked out as it had been planned.
Hal turned to the darkness of the forest and whistled. The sound went out into obscurity, and another whistle distantly responded.
A few moments later, Calas and the other Guild members they had left a hundred meters back ran into the clearing, carrying the various parts of the stretcher that had been part of their responsibility. As Hal watched they began to fit it together and prepare Artur, now unconscious from a drug in the medical kit but otherwise still alive, to be lifted on to it and secured there for carrying.
The sight reminded Hal of Cee. He looked back toward the tree to which she had been tied and did not see her, only Onete, hastening toward him. He went to meet her. "Where's Cee?" he asked. "I don't know. I don't have any idea," answered Onete. She sounded distressed. "She can move so fast... I cut her loose and had her with me, coming to join all the rest of us, here, and something must have made me look away for a moment, because all at once she was gone. Maybe she ran off into the forest." "Is that likely?" Hal said. "With Artur still with us'?" "But I don't know where else she would go-"
Hal did not hear the rest of what Onete said, because his ear was suddenly caught by a faint, but undeniable noise, a wheep, wheep! sound. He started at a dead run in the direction from which the sound had come, which was either right beside or in Liu's hutment. The image of the two dead soldiers they had unearthed was starkly in his mind, suddenly connecting itself with a memory of the two he had seen fall on the screen as the Soldiers rushed Cee to capture her. He reached the hut and burst through the flaps, but he was too late.
Cee, holding one of Liu's socks in either hand, each sock with a heavy-looking lump in its toe, ducked under his arm and was out the flaps before he could turn around.
He did not wait to examine what he knew would be the corpse of Liu Hu Shen, but ran after Cee, almost catching her as she went in between the open flaps of the Urk's tent and actually catching her, a moment later, as she stood just inside the entrance swinging in her right hand a weighted sock that gave forth the same sort of noise that had attracted his attention a moment before.
He grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arms around both of her arms, pinning them to her body and lifting her clear of the ground.
She fought back fiercely, in utter silence and with incredible strength for one so young. She kicked back and up with her heels, but he had anticipated this, spreading his legs and holding her closely against him, so that those same heels, rock-hard after years of running unshod on all kinds of surfaces, could not reach his rom.
She tried to swing the weighted end of the sock up to smash his face or hit his head, but his grip was around her elbows and she did not have the freedom of movement and strength to rotate the heavy end through the air and upward to its point of aim. Meanwhile, continuously, she struggled to twist and turn in his arms, to win enough freedom from his grasp so that she could twist loose and escape.