He looked to his left, along that part of the upper ridge he had not yet observed, and saw that, a short distance beyond, it tilted abruptly downward, as if aiming itself at a joining with the lower ridge, but thinning out to plain mountainside some fifty meters from that meeting. He stared at this part of the mountainside for some moments before he was able to pick out, among the sparse trees of its slope, the movements he was looking for. But at last he found them. Rukh's frontal assault up the slope directly above her was obviously intended primarily to hold the attention of the Militia while she sent another force around the front end of the upper ridge to attack that way.
It was the only response possible to her; and with that thought, Hal turned sharply back to look down at the standing Militiaman with the white chevron on his sleeve. This Captain must be the Militia officer in charge; and he would be ineffective in the extreme if he had set up this ambush without giving some thought to his left flank.
Hal turned and began to move onward, above that left flank. Shortly, he found himself looking down on a wider spot of the ridge, a slight hollow, fenced with not only a natural stand of trees, but by a rough log barricade, facing in the direction up which Rukh's flank attackers would come. In the hollow were more than twenty of the armed Militiamen, waiting.
Hal squatted on the mountainside above the whole scene, the needle gun across his knees. He felt a tightness in his chest. The only hope he had had for the flank attackers had been destroyed by the sight of those twenty black uniforms. He came back to his position above the four men with the standing officer.
Hal thought for a moment, then went back to his position above the first group he had discovered. Below him as he watched, one of the three raised his rifle, fired; then laughed and pointed. One of the others patted him on the shoulder.
Something old and grim moved in Hal. He sank to his knees, rested the barrel of the needle gun on the half-buried boulder behind which he crouched, and fired three bursts. The needles whispered, lightly as the piping of birds on the mountain air. He lay, listening in the silence that had followed their sound; but there was no reaction from the other Militia positions to indicate that anyone there had heard. He got to his feet again and went softly down the slope.
The forms of the three, when he reached them, lay still in the sunlight. He looked at them, feeling an emptiness in his middle body, like that following some heavy blow or wound, the pain of which was still being held at bay by shock. He gathered up the three cone rifles, carefully, so that their metal parts should not knock noisily together, and carried them with him up the mountainside, high enough so that he could see the slopes up which both attacking groups from the Command were working.
Rukh's group was making slow progress, but the group coming up on the flank was moving swiftly. They should be within point-blank range of the Militiamen waiting in the hollow in another five minutes.
Hal sat down, and took the butt plate off one of the cone rifles to get at the tools in the compartment underneath. Cone rifles were designed to be self-cleaning as they were fired, so that something more than filling the barrels with dirt was called for. He unscrewed the locking gate on the magazine tube underneath the barrel and pried off the last of the cones from the rod of them packed in there. Then, keeping the cone he had pried off, he replaced and rescrewed the locking gate.
He picked up the single cone carefully between thumb and middle finger, being careful not to touch the narrow red rim around the wide upper edge of the cone. The red marked the molding of the propellant, triggered by the rifle's mechanism to drive these self-propelled missiles. Setting the cone gently between his close-held knees, so that the rim touched nothing, he unbreached the firing chamber, opened it, and put the cone into the breach - but facing the rear of the chamber instead of forward into the barrel. Gently, he closed the breach upon it. He performed the same operation with one of the other cone rifles.
Closing the breach of the second rifle, he grinned a trifle bitterly, internally. Some of the Command members, at least, would have a great deal to say, if they knew about his wasting two perfectly good military firearms in this fashion - when they were so short of them. And they would be justified.
He got up, picked up his extra weapons, and moved on until he was at a midpoint above the cliff edge occupied by the other two nests of Militiamen, who were continuing to fire over the edge of the ledge on which they sat, unaware of what he had done to the men in the positions to their right. Here, he built himself a rough barricade of the heavier rocks in the immediate area. Then, kneeling behind this barricade, he took aim at the three black-clad figures in the second nest.
The soft piping of the needles that had cut down the three in the first group had not carried to alarm their fellow soldiers. But the heavier whistlings of the cones Hal now fired brought further heads around to stare in the direction of the second nest, even as the three there fell.
They were not looking up at the slope above them, having no immediate reason to think that whoever had fired from so close was not one of the attackers from the Command who had just achieved the level of the upper ridge. In a second they might think to look up as well as sideways, but in that moment Hal got to his feet; and, swinging the first of the rigged cone rifles around his head, he sent it wheeling to drop into the last manned nest to the right of the one with the Captain, following it with the other rifle among the four men in the other nest, just as the officer was stepping out of it to go in the direction from which he had plainly assumed Hal must be firing.
The first cone rifle hit and the jar set off the reversed cone in its breach. There was the soft whump of an explosion and an upward flare of flame as the heat and shock of the reversed cone trying to get out of the breach the wrong way set off the rod of other cones in the magazine - followed by another explosion, which was the second cone rifle, a moment later in the nest from which the officer had just stepped.
For less than a minute dust and air-borne debris hid the scene in both nests, and then the gentle mountain breeze blew it aside to show all the human figures in both nests fallen. Either the shock of the explosion or the shrapnel from the exploding rifles had put them, at least temporarily, out of the fight.
Hal's aim had been to attract the attention of the Militia in the hollow away from the attackers coming up the slope. Following the two explosions there was a moment of appalled silence on the upper ridge and then a babble of shouting voices. Some, at least, of the watchers in the hollow began to run back toward the center of the Militia line. Hastily, Hal went sliding down the slope from the position of his exposed barricade. If he had been seen up there, the small rock shield he had built would have been useful. But since he had not been, there was more safety for him, now, below among the trees and vegetation of the upper slope.
The Militiamen hurrying back from the hollow could not see his descent, but they heard him. Shouts went up - and were echoed unexpectedly by those still in the hollow. The attackers from the Command coming up the ridge had reached the defenders at the tree-trunk barricade.
Lying flat behind a tree on the lower ridge, less than ten meters from the officer who had fallen - and who was now beginning to stir again - outside his nest, Hal traded shots with those Militia who had come back toward him following the explosions.
The cone rifle was warm against his cheek, warm from the sunlight through the trees upon it, as he watched through its sights for movement among the trees before him. The movements became less frequent. The shots coming back at him diminished, and ceased.