Aisha Ghamal’s eyes widened. Then a look of utter, malicious delight transformed pain and fear and grief into an expression that sent chills down Kafari’s spine. Kafari set her guns down, needing both hands free. Aisha did the same. Dinny took charge of their arsenal, holding onto the shotgun he’d carried out of the collapsing cellar. Kafari motioned for Abe Lendan to stay where he was, then caught Aisha’s gaze and nodded.
They dove past the open doorway and hit the ground running. Something shot at them through the doorway. Heat tickled Kafari’s heels. Then Dinny’s shotgun roared. Kafari reached the nearest stack of boxes.
“Top two layers!” Aisha shouted.
Kafari nodded, grabbed the corners, and lifted. Aisha snatched up the opposite side and they ran awkwardly, toward the barn. The boxes had started to buzz. Angry honeybees were zipping out of the violated hive. Kafari felt a sting on one hand, another on her arm, a third on her neck.
Then the doorway was right beside them. “Now!”
Both women heaved. The beehive sailed in through the open barn door. Kafari didn’t wait to see what happened. She was running for the next-closest beehive. It took agonizing, eternal seconds to haul another beehive back and fling it into the barn. She lost count of the number of bees that had popped her bare skin, but the screams inside the barn told her the Deng were getting a far nastier welcome than she and Aisha had received.
Without warning, hairy black bodies started to stampede out of the bee-filled barn. Running aliens formed a black tide that poured out between Kafari and Aisha on one side and Dinny and Abe Lendan on the other. Lendan tossed rifles to Kafari and Aisha over the heads of the dog-sized, panic-stricken Deng. Kafari caught the guns midair, flipped one back to Aisha, and started shooting. Savage satisfaction blazed as she shot one after another, almost arcade-style, ten points for every ugly spodder that went down. Dinny’s shotgun blew off skinny legs. Abe Lendan’s finished them off with a load of buckshot through the resultant screaming and hairy central mass.
When a final mob of close-packed Deng emerged from the barn, pursued by a cloud of angry, swarming bees, Kafari shouted, “Inside, quick!” An outbound swarm meant there were no moving targets left to attack inside the barn. Aisha and Dinny led the way. They stumbled and crawled over dead cows and dying Deng troopers, some of them still twitching and howling under a mantle of dead honeybees. Aisha jerked open a door and flung herself down a stairway. Dinny followed. Kafari pushed Abe Lendan ahead of her and kept watch for trouble, shooting a Deng infantryman whose twitches looked like an attempt to use the energy weapon still clutched in one hideous appendange. Bits of Deng blew out under the cavitation caused by five high-speed rifle slugs passing through it, then it stopped moving altogether. Kafari bolted down the stairs, yanking the door shut behind her and scraping off a few determined bees crawling down her bare arms and legs.
Then she was safely down with the others, in a room half the size of the cellar that had just collapsed. Big rounds and blocks of cheese, ranging from deep gold to pale milk in hue, sat in cheese molds or stacked on shelves, in various stages of the aging process. The air smelled wonderful, particularly after the battlefield stink they’d just fought through.
Abe Lendan swept Kafari into a bear hug, shocking her speechless, then he hugged Aisha, too, and gasped out, “Brilliant! My God, that was brilliant! I would never have thought to use honeybees as a weapon!” His eyes were shining.
Kafari laughed, the sound rusty as last year’s fencing wire. “The best Asali honey on Jefferson comes out of this canyon,” she said with a tired grin. “And Asali bees take careful handling. They’re temperamental little insects, bred to displace native pollinators. When I saw those hives, I knew we could drive the spodders out without having to shoot our way in.”
Abe Lendan took her by the shoulders and just looked at her for a moment, then said very softly, “Kafari Camar, you just earned a battlefield commission as captain of the president’s guard.”
Kafari stared, struck dumb.
President Lendan turned to Dinny and shook the boy’s hand. “Young man, that was some of the finest, level-headed shooting I have ever seen. You kept the Deng pinned down long enough to get those bees inside with ’em. I don’t think any of us would’ve survived, if you hadn’t started shooting when you did.”
The boy gained two inches in stature, right before their eyes. Kafari’s eyes misted. Aisha’s overflowed, unashamedly.
“Son,” she said in a choked voice, “I am proud to be your mama.”
“And I am proud to’ve fought beside you,” the president said quietly, meeting Aisha’s wet-eyed gaze. “I’m just a politician, but folks like you are Jefferson’s real strength. That’s what makes this world worth fighting for.” He glanced at Kafari, then. “Well, Captain, what’s our next move?”
Kafari listened to the battle overhead for a moment. It was moving steadily away from them, deeper into the canyon. The Bolo was pushing the Deng back. She’d never heard anything more glorious.
“I think we’d better wait until that fighting gets a little farther away, then skedaddle into the hills. If that dam goes…” The others sobered at once, realizing the danger was far from past. “But right now, we need to catch our breath. Maybe this is a weird time for it,” she added with a faint smile, “but that cheese sure smells good. God knows when we’ll get another chance to eat anything and it’s been a long time since my dinner last night, on that freighter.”
She’d planned on eating a big breakfast in her mother’s kitchen. She couldn’t bear thinking about home, not after the multiple layers of horrible things she’d witnessed during the past hour.
Aisha was nodding. “Good idea. Can’t nobody fight a war on an empty stomach. And we burned up a hard day’s worth of energy, already.” She hunted through the tools stored in a cabinet near the door and came up with a big carving knife, since Kafari’s was covered with drying smears of Deng blood. “There’s plenty to choose from. We got four kinds of cheddar, some nice Colby, several soft cheeses. A couple of those don’t get made anywhere but right here, varieties we came up with, ourselves. They trade real well on Mali, where a cow’d need a pressure suit just to get herself milked twice a day.”
The image set Kafari to wheezing in helpless laughter. Dinny grinned. Abe Lendan frowned slightly, trying to find the funny in it. “I’m sorry,” Kafari gasped in apology, “but after you’ve milked a cow at four-thirty on a dead-of-winter morning, when the power’s gone down on the auto-milking machines and the pails have frozen solid to the floor and the cows are really pissed about it, the idea of putting a cow in a space suit to milk her…” She broke up again, wiping tears.
Abe smiled. “Clearly, I need to remedy a serious lack in my education.”
Aisha was pulling down big bricks of aged cheeses, some of them coated with a layer of wax. She pulled some of the smaller rounds, as well, similarly coated, and even scared up a box of crackers stored in a cupboard. “Product testing,” she smiled through sweat and blood and bee-stings and grime. President Lendan grinned.
There was water, too, which they poured into empty cheese molds, as makeshift drinking cups. Kafari had never tasted anything as heavenly as Aisha Ghamal’s cheese and crackers and tepid water. While she bolted down the food, she paid careful attention to the concussions of battle raging overhead. The sound continued to recede in the direction of the dam. She was just washing down the last couple of bites when the power went down. They were plunged into utter darkness.