The clan’s forward cavalry had leapfrogged back all the way from in front of Las Lomas, half of them waiting or ambushing while the other half prepared the next ambush. Even now, the last group to be engaged passed through the next and, so Roderigo thought, the last decent ambush position before the bridge to home. These, too, he saw, led far too many riderless horses and wounded men.
Roderigo stepped out into the road and raised a hand to stop one of his sons.
“This is the last place, mi hijo,” he said. “Go all the way home now and report to Mamita.”
Exhausted, holding one hand tightly over an arm to stop the seepage of blood from a grazing wound, the son nodded weakly. Roderigo patted his boy’s thigh.
“Tell your mother that I love her, son,” he finished, “but that I might be a little late for supper.”
Digna tensed as she heard the faint clatter of hoofbeats on the road to the south. Was this her son’s extended family returning? Or were they all dead and butchered, the drumming sound coming from the massed feet of the invader?
As a horse rounded the bend Digna relaxed visibly. Thank God, she thought. Some, at least, still live.
She amended that thought to, Some, at least, live… for now, as she caught a closer look at the pale faces of her descendants. Her own horse reared as a change in wind brought the smell of mammalian blood to its nose. Digna reached out a calming hand to stroke and pet the horse back to relative calm.
“How far behind you?” she asked her grandson, without specifying whether she meant the enemy or the rest of the forward screen.
The grandson didn’t know or understand what she intended by her question. Slumped in the saddle, weakly he answered, “My father is about two miles out. The enemy not much farther.”
As if to punctuate this, a sudden crescendo of fire arose to the south.
With the rising dust clouds to east and west Roderigo knew he had made a mistake, quite possibly his last.
“Mis hijos,” he shouted, climbing back atop his horse, “mount up. Mount UP! We are — ”
There was a sudden sharp blow, passing through from one side to the other, blasting flesh, blood, heart and lungs and tearing Roderigo from his horse. Mouth still open with the unfinished command, the old man fell with an audible thump, dead even before he hit the ground.
Outraged, tactical sense forgotten, the remnants of the family still in the field opened fire on the point of the approaching Posleen column even though these were still too far away to make an ideal ambush target.
Posleen fell, of course, especially where the remaining machine gun stitched across their ranks. This time, however, precisely because the Posleen were too far away to be massacred before they had time to react, there was effective return fire, pinning the Mirandas in their ambush position.
Worse, at the sound of the first rounds the wide sweeping alien pincers turned inward, churning claws raising dust clouds on the humans’ horizon.
The horses broke, even though the men did not. As the animals stampeded, the enveloping Posleen swept them with fire. Thresh were not to be wasted and the animals were as good a threshform as any. Of the several dozen animals that broke all but one were chopped down by the alien fire. This one, never too bright to begin with and now mindless with fear, raced for what its tiny brain thought of as home and safety.
Meanwhile, the rest of Roderigo Miranda’s little command automatically pulled in their flanks and formed a tight circle. Perhaps… perhaps if they could hold on until nightfall they might manage to escape.
The Posleen, however, led and lashed on by their Kessentai, were having none of it. Heedless of losses they bore in, railguns and shotguns blazing, boma blades sweeping high overhead.
Though there was no one left in command of the trapped humans, they were a family and they did tend to think much alike. Determined to sell their lives as dearly as possible they fixed bayonets, except for a couple who drew their more familiar machetes, just before the crest of the alien wave hit them.
Let the actions of one speak for all. One of the last survivors, Emilio Miranda, twenty-seven year old grandson of Roderigo. Emilio had a drinking problem. His face and back still bore the marks of his great-grandmother’s riding crop as mute testimony to that problem.
Never mind that. A drunk Emilio might have been. He was not, however, a noticeably cowardly drunk.
As the Posleen galloped close, Emilio arose from his covered position and emptied his last magazine point blank and on full automatic at the enemy, sweeping his Kalashnikov from left to right. Three Posleen went down immediately, while a fourth, apparently hit on a knee joint, stumbled forward before falling. Gripping his rifle firmly in both hands the man lunged forward, frantically driving his bayonet into the wounded Posleen’s yellow eye. As the bayonet entered the eye the Posleen tossed its head in agony, ripping the rifle from the Emilio’s hands.
Heart racing, Emilio drew his machete and ducked under another alien’s swinging blade. He chopped at the alien’s forelegs, severing one and embedding the machete in the other. Shrieking, that alien fell to one side. The embedded machete was also wrenched from Emilio’s hand.
Ducking again under another awkward swing of a boma blade, Emilio leveraged himself onto another normal’s back as if it had been the horse it somewhat resembled. From there, he reached an arm around the alien’s throat, squeezing and twisting in an instinctive move that might well have killed a human — either by strangulation or by broken neck — but only succeeded in panicking the thicker necked Posleen.
The normal bucked and twisted, trying desperately to throw off the thresh whose encircling grip threatened to cut off its windpipe. As it did so its rear claws mauled another normal who had come to its rescue. This one, enraged at the undeserved wound slashed off the rear legs of the beleaguered Posleen with a single stroke.
That Posleen immediately fell on its dripping haunches and rolled, trapping Emilio underneath it.
Stunned, Emilio lay there momentarily with his lower torso trapped under several hundred pounds of quivering centauroid alien. This was perhaps fortunate as he never really saw or felt the descending blade that removed his head and ended his young life.
Digna’s heart sank as she watched a lone horse, mouth frothy with exertion, gallop across the bridge that led to her home. When the firing to the south ended with a whimper she crossed herself and said a prayer for her lost children.
“It is time,” she said to a boy serving as a runner. “Tell Señora Herrera that she can’t wait any longer for stragglers. She is to begin moving our people to Gualaca,” a small town to the north, “now.”
“Si, Mamita,” the boy answered, breathlessly, before racing off to find his own mount.
The foamy-mouthed horse passed by. Digna didn’t even try to hold it. This road led unavoidably to where the noncombatant part of the family had gathered. They could stop the horse, if it could be stopped. Most likely the animal would halt of its own accord once it saw the herd of Miranda clan horses loaded down for the trip north. They were herd animals, after all.
Digna turned her attention back to the road that led to the bridge along which the enemy must soon appear. They had to cross the bridge until they either gave up — an unlikely possibility, she knew — or found one of the fords north or east that led across the river. These she had covered with flanker parties under the command of one of her sons and Tomas Herrera.