Short Fiction Algis Budrys (best large ereader TXT) 📖

and settled down to maintain them, he went along the coast, perhaps as far as Philadelphia or Hartford.

Geoffrey had always had a lively interest in strange surroundings. He had regretted the day his journeyings came to an end⁠—not that he hadn’t regretted his father’s passing even more. Now, as dawn came up behind them, he could not help turning his head from side to side and looking at the strangely humped land, seeing for the first time a horizon which was not flat. He found himself intrigued by the thought that he had no way of knowing what lay beyond the next hill⁠—that he would have to travel, and keep traveling, to satisfy a perpetually renewed curiosity.

All this occupied one part of his mind. Simultaneously, he wondered how much farther they’d travel in this vehicle. The huge sixteen-cylinder in-line engine was by now delivering about one-fourth of its rated fifty horsepower, with a good half of its spark plugs hopelessly fouled and the carburetor choked by the dust of yesterday’s battle.

They were very low on shot and powder charges for the two-pounder turret cannon, as well. The tankette had of course never been serviced after the battle. There was one good thing⁠—neither had their pursuers’. Looking back, Geoffrey could see no sign of them. But he could also see the plain imprint of the tankette’s steel cleats stretched out behind them in a betraying line. The rigid, unsprung track left its mark on hard stone as easily as it did in soft earth. The wonder was that the tracks had not quite worn themselves out as yet, though all the rivets were badly strained and the tankette sounded like a barrel of stones tumbling downhill.

The Barbarian had spent the night with one arm thrown over the cannon barrel and the fingers of his other hand hooked over the edge of the turret hatch. In spite of the tankette’s vicious jouncing, he had not moved or changed his position. Now he raised one hand to comb the shaggy hair away from his forehead, and there were faint bloody marks on the hatch.

“How much farther until we’re over the mountains?” Geoffrey asked him.

“Over the⁠—lad, we haven’t even come to the beginning of them yet.”

Geoffrey grimaced. “Then we’ll never make it. Not in this vehicle.”

“I didn’t expect to. We’ll walk until we reach the pass. I’ve got a support camp set up there.”

“Walk? This is impossible country for people on foot. There are intransigent tribesmen all through this territory.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? Why, everybody knows about them!”

The Barbarian looked at him thoughtfully, and with just the faintest trace of amusement. “Well, if everybody knows they’re intransigent, I guess they are. I guess we’ll just have to hope they don’t spot us.”

Geoffrey was a little nettled by the Barbarian’s manner. It wasn’t, after all, as if anybody claimed there were dragons or monsters or any other such oceanic thing living here. This was good, solid fact⁠—people had actually come up here, tried to bring civilization to the tribes, and failed completely. They were, by all reports, hairy, dirty people equipped with accurate rifles. No one had bothered to press the issue, because obviously it was hardly worth it. Geoffrey had expected to have trouble with them⁠—but he had expected to meet it in an armored vehicle. But now that the mountains had turned out to be so far away, the situation might grow quite serious. And the Barbarian didn’t seem to care very much.

“Well, now, lad,” he was saying, “if the tribesmen’re that bad, maybe your friends the nobles won’t dare follow us up here.”

“They’ll follow us,” Geoffrey answered flatly. “I slapped Dugald’s face.”

“Oh. Oh, I didn’t understand that. Code of honor⁠—that sort of thing. All the civilized appurtenances.”

“It’s hardly funny.”

“No, I suppose not. I don’t suppose it occurred to you to kill him on the spot?”

“Kill a noble in hot blood?”

“Sorry. Code of honor again. Forget I mentioned it.”

Geoffrey rankled under the Barbarian’s barely concealed amusement. To avoid any more of this kind of thing, he pointedly turned and looked at the terrain behind them⁠—something he ought to have done a little earlier. Three tankettes were in sight, only a few miles behind them, laboring down the slope of a hill.

And at that moment, as though rivetted iron had a dramatic sense of its own, their tankette coughed, spun lazily on one track as the crankshaft paused with a cam squarely between positions, and burned up the last drops of oil and alcohol in its fuel tank.

Geoffrey and Myka crouched down in a brushy hollow. The Barbarian had crawled up to the lip of the depression, and was peering through a clump of weeds at the oncoming trio. “That seems to be all of them,” he said with a turn of his head. “It’s possible they kept their speed down and nursed themselves along to save fuel. They might even have a fuel wagon coming up behind them. That’s the way I’d do it. It would mean these three are all we can expect for a few hours, anyway, but that they’ll be heavily reinforced some time later.”

“That will hardly matter,” Geoffrey muttered. Myka had found Dugald’s personal rifle inside the tankette. Geoffrey was rolling cartridges quickly and expertly, using torn up charges from the turret cannon. He had made the choice between a round or two for the now immobile heavy weapon and a plentiful supply for the rifle, and would have been greatly surprised at anyone’s choosing differently. The Barbarian had not even questioned it, and Myka was skillfully casting bullets with the help of the hissing alcohol stove and the bullet mold included in the rifle kit. There was plenty of finely ground priming powder, and even though Geoffrey was neither weighing the charges of cannon powder nor measuring the diameter of the cartridges he was rolling, no young noble of any pretensions whatsoever could not have done the same.

The rub lay in the fact that none