TOBOGGAN-STYLE

1563 4D

The last slope, taken at a frantic charge, finished the van‘s motors in a trailing screech. Rion, a small man as dark-skinned as Ezzar, stood waiting as they coasted to a stop beside his battered autocart. “Where were you?”

They went to work. Sweating, Ezzar stuffed assault guns into long boxes, glancing up in haste and fear at the serrated ridges around her. The insurgency schedule loomed in her mind; ten lousy days was all they had, now, ten days to get all this and the medicine to the City. The chiefs had moved everything up from twenty. Impossible.

Rion pitched her the weapons from the rear hatchdoor of the corpo van, while big Rennie, pale as the bluish moonlight, took the heavier weapons and packed them separately. Polycushion grease covered their arms up to the elbows and flashed in the full night radiance. The stolen van gave off little death-spirals of smoke from its powercell vents, its corporate blazons dull in the uncolored night. The plumes drifted upward in long threads toward the moon-muted stars.

Ezzar‘s heart pounded against her throat. Underneath her energy she wanted to find a warm place and curl up with Rennie and sleep, before she too burned out.

Rion looked up and winced. “That’ll give us away. They’ve got to be looking now.” His uniform, carrying on its chest the same blazon as the van, hung loose on his slim body. The whites of his dark eyes glowed in the moonlight, and his teeth flashed white as he spoke. His hair, tied back in a knot, shone in near-black waves, wet from his exertions.

Ezzar shook sweat from her head. Rion fussed about everything. Why hadn’t Cortevail told her he was so nervous? “Come on, Rion, quit worrying. It’ll be another hour before they work it out. We hit them at just the right time.” She pointed to a full box. “Here, Rennie, I’ve finished this one.” Rennie took it and hefted it onto the flat bed of a large autocart. The thud echoed against the rocks of the hollow. She jumped.

Rion hissed, “Keep it quiet!” He scurried to the lip of the hollow and looked out and down the way they had come.

“Shut up!” Ezzar hissed back at him. She glanced at Rennie, trying to read his face. One corner of his mouth turned up briefly, and he hitched at the shoulder of his dark-gray coverall. Was he going to laugh, or would he stiffen and spit back, or worse, grab Rion with his broad hands? No ordinary andro came from the vats the way he was. Rennie acted just like the men she had known in Monford, almost like her dead husband Boren: brittle, polar with violence and tenderness.

Rennie let out a low chuckle, and she relaxed. All right. He was fine, this time. She worried a lot about him, maybe too much. She knew his quirks: his temper, his desperate need for open air, how he wanted his head cradled after loving her. But they always found themselves in such hard places. If only they had time to stop and just—

“And you better keep the damn ballistics out of the beamer boxes.” Rion pointed at the gun in her hand, cutting through her thoughts. He waved a hand at Rennie. “They’re too heavy. The first time Gojo over there tosses one, it’ll bust apart.” With a wiry arm scarified with Incarnastar Coll service marks, Rion reached over, plucked the ballistic rifle from a spot among the beam guns, and shoved it deep in the grease in a heavier container holding a few others like it.

Rennie seemed to savor the word. “Gojo. That’s not bad. I’ll use it on an ID some time.” He snorted, trying to clear his nose without coating it with greasy loops and threads.

“Sorry, Rion. I’m tired.” Ezzar rubbed her forehead against her upper arm, leaving a streak of sweat on her coverall.

“What’s this?” Rennie‘s voice rumbled. He stood up very tall, large shoulders and chest, his close-cut blond hair and paper-light skin silvered by moonlight, and brandished a long rifle-shaped weapon carrying two pairs of small rounded boxes on either side of the forward handgrip. A hemispherical clear jewel shone from the end of each box nearest a multiple muzzle.

“It’s a counterfire gun, military type,” Ezzar said. She wanted this weapon for herself; someone had paid a lot for it – or maybe someone was getting deep in debt for it. “They’ll miss this one, it’s really hot. Hide it under the other beamers.”

They blocked and dogged down the loaded crates of weapons and ammunition on the autocart flatbed. They bolted a larger box down over the crates. On both sides the box read MERITRAN AGRIPOWER SOIL ENRICHMENT SYSTEM — THIS SIDE UP. Rion pulled a farmer’s coverall on over his corp uniform; Ezzar climbed onto the flatbed just behind the autocart‘s narrow closed cab. She wrapped her fingers around a retaining bar at the front edge of the flatbed, put her back against the cab, and braced her feet against the large concealing box.

“Come on, Rennie, get in here and keep me company.”

“Looks too tight for me.” He stood just outside the narrow space ahead of the load.

“No, look, you’ve got open sky and a place to stick your legs, around me. See?” This way she could turn, look up and see his face.

Rennie craned his neck. “Yeah, I guess so.” He clambered in behind Ezzar so that they sat facing to one side, with her in front of him, toboggan-style.

Ezzar looked ahead through the cab. Rion‘s head and shoulders silhouetted themselves against a sky that bloomed with dim stars. Rion said to the autocart, “Out to the road. Medium speed. Stop at the edge of this depression.”

Ezzar looked up. The tiny Visitor, the far-distant second moon, echoed in its minuscule and brilliant orange disk the fat marbled sphere of Lulith, its looming, much-nearer rival. Lulith would soon occult the Visitor, signaling the coll month’s end. Almost time for the Encircle ceremonies. Ezzar was glad to be away from home for them.

“Sounds good,” the cart responded. Its motors growled, then complained their way up to a high whine. “Ouch, heavy load.” It rocked slowly forward, up over the lip of the hollow, where it paused. Below them a stonefluid-paved track trailed away, scored and pitted by rocks, weather and wheel blows, barely wide enough to span the bulky load they carried.

“Clear. Take us to Drevill, no road-visible lights,” he said.

“All right,” the cart replied. Ezzar tightened her grip. Its load groaning and popping against the restraints they had jammed in on the flatbed, the cart eased its way down the rocky slope to the twisting road, sending a few chunks of rock skidding and chattering down ahead to the paved surface, bouncing across and out into the silent gulf of mountain air below.

At the road, they leveled out, the cart’s motors settling down to a slowly-undulating hum. Ezzar looked at her braided forearm inscription. Thrazandar, that was the name of the first of her family’s assassins. She’d been stuck trying to remember that.

Her lips said the name slowly as the autocart joggled ahead. She massaged the writing on her arm. Fights and dies, born and fights and dies, yes, that seemed better. Now Rennie‘s chest warmed her; he drowsed, his head tilted aside. She turned her face toward the cab. “Rion, do Incarnastar women fight?”

“Like you? No woman fights like you. Grendel told me some stories about you.”

“No, I mean like any of us. Wait. What did he say about me?” Piqued, she nudged Rennie. He appeared to be sleeping, but a corner of his mouth rose slightly. Maybe it was just a bounce of the cart.

“Not that much. But he told the knife story, you and the two men and the hunter dogs.” Rion chuckled.

To fry her hair! Why did Rennie have to keep spreading that one around? “Oh. That. So answer my question.”

“First answer one for me.”

“Fair enough.”

“You like kids?” His voice carried simple curiosity, nothing more, but the words went into her like an arrow.

“What a question. It’s off limits. Now answer mine.” Anger rushed to her head with the blood. She had never told Rion anything about herself. Why would he throw this at her?

“What’s the matter? Simple question.” Rion sounded hurt.

“Drop it, I said. Why don’t you get Rennie to tell you some other stories about me?” Ruin this clown andro of hers. She rammed Rennie with an elbow. He glared at her. “Look, Rion, all I wanted to know was whether your women fight alongside men.”

“They do sometimes,” Rion said. “Don’t really want to talk more, not for a while.” His voice shook a little.

Ezzar watched the passing distant mountainsides. Rennie muttered to her; she said only, “Shut up.” He put a large arm around her and drew her closer; she resisted for a moment, then curled into his warmth.

This she could count on, at least for now. She would question her big man later, when she could wrap her legs tight around his middle and squeeze him inside and out.