Korval's Game (32 page)

“Ah, I sell it to buy a watch for m’wife, but you know what? Bitch leave me anyway.” He laughed—a roar that belonged to a man twice his height—grabbed her forearms and squeezed—gently, because Roscoe was stronger than he looked. “Lizzie, you lookin’ damnfine. I get relief in two hour. You stick aroun’ an’ we do a mattress test, eh? I book you in second wave.” He dropped her arms and bent to the computer. “Tell me who you got.”

“I don’t have anyone,” Liz said quietly.

“We wish to hire,” Nova yos’Galan added from her side. Roscoe looked up, blinking his hard little eyes.

“You want to hire? You got to wait. Suzuki’s hiring everything got a gun.” He made a shooing motion with his hands. “Come back two, three day, we maybe got a couple ’prentices lef’ for you to hire.”

Nova shook her head. “My business is urgent and I
will
hire soldiers,” she said, firm, but not with the blaze of temper Liz had expected. “Please let it be known that I will double the payout on Suzuki’s contracts.”

Roscoe stared at her for a beat of three before he looked over to Liz.

“Who the hell this?”

“I will pay,” Nova stated, cutting Liz off before she could answer, “in cantra.”

Roscoe pursed his lips. “She crazy?” he asked Liz.

“You could say.”

“Fine.” Roscoe looked back to Nova. “You crazy. You gotta hire. You pay in cantra. Nothin’ I can do. You talk to Suzuki, cut you own deal. Then I make it OK wit’ the ’puter.
Ichi
?”

“
Su bei
,” Nova said surprisingly. “Where may I find Suzuki?”

“You stay put. I bring her here. No way I miss this one.” He grinned and flipped a toggle on the board. “Suzuki, you come front Dispatch,” he said into the mike. “Somebody you gotta meet.”

***

She had expected another such as Angela Lizardi—rangy, tough, and tall. But the woman for whom the crowd parted minutes later was no taller than herself, sturdy and efficient. Her hair was very short and very black. Her eyes were chips of blue ice, set at a slant in a composed, determined face.

Nova straightened, for if Val Con himself had named Angela Lizardi first speaker, then the woman who came now was surely a delm.

The woman stopped at the edge of the crowd with a nod.

“Liz,” she said and her voice was quiet and clear. “We can use you.”

“So Roscoe said,” Angela Lizardi replied in her laconic way. “But I’m here with her.” She jerked her head and Nova found herself caught by those slanting blue eyes.

The owner of the eyes bowed, not a generic, Terran, surrogate handshake bow, but something that recognizably approached the proper mode between strangers of unknown rank.

“Suzuki Rialto, Senior Commander, Gyrfalks Unit.”

Nova bowed as between equals and saw interest move in the blue eyes. “Nova yos’Galan, Clan Korval,” she returned. It was perhaps not best wise to give her true name within this crowd of unknowns, but one wished to deal honorably with honorable persons. She straightened.

“You may know us as Tree-and-Dragon Family.”

The other woman’s interest intensified. “Indeed, the unit has done business with Tree-and-Dragon in the past. What may I be honored to do for you, ma’am?”

Good. A person of integrity and quick wit. Nova inclined her head. “I have need of soldiers, Commander. Many soldiers, and at once. I am informed by this person here,” she used her chin to point at Roscoe, “that you are hiring everything that has a gun. I submit that my need is at least as great as your own and ask that we work equally toward equal ground.”

She heard Angela Lizardi snort, but did not deign to look at her. Suzuki Rialto’s face betrayed slight interest, and a tinge of regret.

“It must of course pain me to deny Tree-and-Dragon Family this consideration,” she said, most properly. “However, my need overrides every other conceivable need in this galaxy or the next. I am blunt with you, ma’am. You will forgive me when I say that I have people trapped upon a world under Yxtrang attack.” She swept a small, square hand out, indicating the now-silent crowd.

“What you see here is a rescue force. You may outbid me—in fact, I don’t doubt that you can. But I do not believe you will hire one soldier until we have rescued our own.”

But Nova was staring at her, feeling a certain sense of wonder unfolding within her and tasting,
tasting
the tang of the luck, Korval’s curse and Korval’s blessing.

“Under Yxtrang attack?” she repeated, to gain the time she required to assimilate it and then shook her head as her mother had often done, not to express negation so much as baffled amaze.

“Commander Rialto, it may be we have a common goal.”

Suzuki Rialto tipped her head. “Please explain.”

“My brother is on that planet—local name Lytaxin. And the lifemate of my brother, as well.”

“That’s Redhead she’s talking about there,” Angela Lizardi put in and the other woman looked at her sharply.

“She says,” Liz added. “I don’t put much stock in that side, myself. Last I knew, she was calling him her partner.” She pointed her finger and Nova raised an eyebrow. “Show Suzuki your picture there, Goldie.”

She reached into her sleeve pocket for the folder, opened it and offered it to Suzuki Rialto, who took one quick look and laughed.

“Him? Last
I
saw them, she was as likely to kill him as kiss him.”

Nova felt her lips twitch, all at once in sympathy with her new and unknown sister. “It is a common dilemma, when one deals closely with my brother,” she said solemnly, closing the folder and slipping it away.

Suzuki grinned, then let the expression fade to one of calculation. “It seems our goal is the same, ma’am, as you have pointed out. I suggest that I am skilled in the hiring and outfitting of soldiers, as is Commander Lizardi. You are yourself perhaps skilled in an area where my expertise has currently fallen short.”

Nova inclined her head politely, acknowledging the truth of the other woman’s words and her own willingness to hear more.

“In what manner might I assist you toward attaining our common goal, Commander?”

The blue eyes met her straightly—the look of a delm, in truth.

“We need ships,” said Suzuki Rialto.

Nova truly smiled, then, and bowed.

“As it happens, I can locate ships.”

“I thought you could,” Suzuki said gravely and offered her arm. “Let us retire and discuss particulars.” She looked over to Miri Robertson’s first speaker. “Liz? Are you in?”

“Couldn’t keep me out with a battalion.”

EROB’S BOUNDARY:
Quarry War Zone

There had been
opportunity to kill more Yxtrang, on the way from the pocket of brush to the quarry entrance. Dustin had accounted for two and Shan three—one of those a lucky shot into the impenetrable treetops, prompted by the very faintest of out-of-place leaf rustle.

But the quarry. The quarry was where the heavy action centered.

“Looks like they’re after your boat, sir.” Dustin whispered, as they crouched behind a conveniently placed boulder. The lifeboat was precisely where he had left it, upright in the entrance to the quarry, closer to the mercenaries’ line than the Yxtrang.

“Indeed it does, Corporal, but why? It has no fuel. It has no weapons. It has a radio, but surely the Yxtrang have their own radios?”

Dustin looked at him oddly. “Hard to tell why ’trang’ll do anything. Maybe they want it for a war prize. Important thing is, if they think it’s worth arguing over, we gotta be sure they don’t win the argument.”

At the moment, it appeared that Sub-Commander Kritoulkas’ regulars were holding their own in the argument. The Yxtrang liberally sprinkled throughout the trees opposite were actively involved in the dispute, but had made no push to advance their position. Shan sank a little lower behind the shielding boulder, thinking about that.

“Are we seeing a diversion, Corporal?” he asked finally. “Or are they waiting for friends?”

“Hard to say, sir.” Dustin was moving, inching his rifle into position. Shan looked, saw the target, looked again and chose his own mark.

The argument continued, and all at once the Yxtrang began to move, pushing their line grimly forward. Behind them, deeper into the opposite wood, Shan’s sharpened hearing registered the sound of heavy equipment, distinct even in the fury of the firefight. He flicked a look at Dustin.

“There’s something big moving in the woods.”

The corporal nodded, face pale except for the thread of blood down one cheek, where a chip off the boulder had cut him.

“I feel it,” he said, mouth tightening. “Get ready to fall back, sir. They were waiting for the armor to catch up with them.”

Around him, then, he felt a—withdrawing—as, one squad at a time, the mercenaries melted back from their positions. Across, the Yxtrang pushed forward, and the sound of the armor moving was thunder in the ground, rattling through his chest and into his head.

“Now,” Dustin said. “Fall back.” Shan nodded and heard the other man leave, even as he tried to recall if he had seen anything like anti-armor, in his brief and all-too-incomplete tour of the mercenary encampment.

Where
, he wondered,
are they withdrawing to that will stand safe against a tank?

A pellet struck his boulder, spraying his face with gravel. Shan ducked, found the range and fired. An Yxtrang soldier crumpled out from behind a bush that was too meager to shelter him and didn’t move again.

He was alone on what had been the mercenary line, Shan realized, and about to be overrun by Yxtrang. Yet, why should he fall back, when the means to kill the oncoming tank was right here?

The lifeboat’s coils still functioned, after all. It was but the work of a moment to set them to overload.

Decision taken, Shan began at last to move from cover to carefully chosen cover, angling toward the lifeboat.

***

Beautiful
was two steps behind her, armed like an officer, and almost totally silent, which was more than she could say for the rest of the unit.

There’d been a kind of constant crunch as the Irregulars moved through the woods—nothing to be done about it at this point—and then a single distant boom, as if something really big had blown up.

That one was a puzzle. It wasn’t the sound a shell made being fired, or the sound it made hitting something, usually. And it sure couldn’t have been an ammo-dump because Miri knew Kritoulkas had been running mostly with carry-it-yourselves.

Her people did pretty good at not stopping when the guns started chattering.

There was a lot of gun noise she didn’t recognize right off and that made her nervous, because if she didn’t know the sound it was likely to be Yxtrang caliber stuff.

The battle-flag was about twenty steps ahead of her, wrapped tight around its staff. The squad that had it was moving out. Likely they thought they’d show up, unroll the flag, and scare Yxtrang back into space without a ship.

Not bloody likely.

The key here was going to be showing up at all. The Yxtrang, even if there were a lot of them, probably had their hands pretty full because Kritoulkas was bossing a near-pure Gyrfalks crew.

The communit in her pocket hadn’t buzzed, which was good news—it meant Jase and the house guard were still holding a quiet fort. Be bad if the Irregulars didn’t have a place to go home to, once the party was over.

She signaled a stop, waved her three lieutenants in. One of them hunted out this way, regular.

Beautiful was there, back to her. He was carrying his field pack and two extra ammo boxes for the automatic weapon carried by the flag-bearing unit, no complaint, no slowdown. At halt he’d dropped the boxes and instantly gone on alert.

Miri saw how he watched: lower level of trees, mid-level on rock-piles and such, eyes long enough on each spot to catch color or movement. The greenies either stared hard at one spot and waited for it to grow wings or swiveled their heads around so fast they’d get themselves whiplash.

She took her time deciding on the next phase of the march. The sounds were heavier to the west, which the local looie thought meant they were centered on an old quarry on the south side of the merc camp. That could be good if it meant Kritoulkas had the Yxtrang pinned down. The firing was getting pretty heavy . . .

She nodded, reluctantly broke the squads into two groups. The smaller group, four squads under the local, would take the uphill side. As they closed into the quarry they’d follow some path he knew.

Her main group of six squads would waltz right on down the main trail, trusting that the sub-commander was still holding up her end of the bargain with the mercs.

She felt eyes on her, turned to see Beautiful looking at her.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing is up, Captain. No air cover. No sign of ambush in the trees. No listening devices.”

Inwardly, Miri sighed. “I meant, what’s bugging you? What should I know?”

“Captain, only the single large explosion. By now if there was artillery it would be in use. We have here one hundred. Probably the unit we will face has more.”

“Great. Even odds.”

She wasn’t sure if he got the sarcasm; he simply nodded and asked permission for a drink from his canteen, since action might come upon them anytime.

The distant shooting went almost quiet for a moment or two and then became insistent and rushed.

She knew the sound of that—one side had managed to mass a bit of a charge. The heavy, nearly steady beat of a Paradis 88 made her suppose the Yxtrang were on the move against a well defended spot.

She waited while the lieutenants carried her news to the sergeants, and then they moved on, the crunch of boots not nearly as loud as the growing noise of battle.

***

The four squads
under the local lieutenant melted away as best they could. The main body continued ahead, with the sound of firing heavy and the acrid smell of battle permeating the air. Forward motion halted abruptly. Soldiers dropped, taking cover. Ahead, the woods were noisy, like whoever was there didn’t care if they were heard.

Miri dropped, felt the presence that was Nelirikk, positioned like a bodyguard, protecting her back, while his height still allowed him to see beyond her.