"This one says he come t' fight the tax men with us, Lord Salles," called the guard stumbling down the trail behind Hansen. "But I don't know."
The response lag of servos in the guard's battlesuit was so long that the fellow was lucky not to fall on his face. If he'd survived even a single battle in armor so shoddy, he was either lucky or improbably skillful.
"He knows," said Hansen as he dismounted in the center of the neat bivouac, "that I'm carrying the best battlesuit he's ever seen in his life. And he hasn't figured out that a man who owns armor like mine might just be more use to rebels like yourselves than his hardware is."
"This man's a friend of mine, Bosey," Salles said, exaggerating a brief meeting in Venkatna's audience hall. He clasped the newcomer, forearm to forearm. "Glad to have you with us, Lord Hansen. We'll need all the help we can get to defend our ancestral rights."
You'll need more than that, with an imperial battalion on its way. You'll need a bloody miracle. . . .
Wood smoke drifted through the roofs of the stick-built hutments and hung in a vaguely-sickening layer above the cold ground. A dozen warriors were at battle practice behind the circle of dwellings. About a hundred other folk could be seen in the small camp; some of them probably warriors, but the bulk freemen and slaves.
Salles released Hansen's arm and stepped to the side to view the trio of ponies which were the newcomer's only companions. "Where are your servants?" he asked in surprise.
Hansen smiled wryly. "Just me," he said. "I never much cared for folks poking around me when I'm trying to get dressed, and I figured I could dip my own stew out of the dinner pot if I had to."
"He could still be a spy," Bosey objected. His battlesuit was a black-and-green plaid. The paint was fresh but it had been applied by an amateur, probably Bosey himself. Even an expert would have been hard put to conceal the ragged welds which joined the portions of Bosey's battlesuit into a wretched whole.
"Bosey, get back to your position," Salles ordered sharply. To Hansen he added apologetically, "From high ground, suit sensors—even Bosey's suit sensors—can give us three kilometers' warning of any force approaching from the east. Assuming they move with a least a few guards suited up in live armor, that is."
"I'll give you more warning than that," Hansen said coldly as he surveyed the encampment. "Venkatna's troops are about two days out. Less if they push, but they won't bother to."
Salles swallowed, then nodded crisply. "How many?" he asked in a nonchalant tone.
Hansen stretched his head backward and kneaded his buttocks with his fingertips. Not a lot of fat there, which was as it should be; but not a lot of padding for a pony's saddle, either.
"A battalion," he said, looking toward the tops of the pine trees. The latest snowfall had slipped from the upper branches. There were collars of half ice, half crusted snow, on the shadowed needles partway down the trunk.
Before the next snow fell, most of the people in this camp would be dead.
"About a hundred battlesuits," Hansen continued to the sky. "The co-commanders are named Ashley and D'Auber, I'm told."
"D'Auber's a butcher," Bosey said. The cracking of his voice was accentuated by the bad reproduction in his battlesuit amplifiers. "He'll kill every damned thing down t' the rats in the garbage, he will."
Hansen turned like a hawk stooping. "If you're not back to your post in two minutes," he shouted at Bosey, "I'll stuff your head up your worthless asshole and save D'Auber the trouble! Move, you scut!"
Bosey stumbled back a step, turned, and made off toward his vantage point at the best speed his battlesuit could manage. Warriors playing chess in front of the nearest hut jumped to their feet. The freemen leading away Hansen's ponies stopped; one of them dropped the reins in his hand. A woman, very possibly a noble from the quality of her fur-trimmed cloak, watched Hansen with particular intensity.
Hansen knelt, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips and kneading his cheeks hard with his thumbs. From a great distance he heard Salles say gently, "He's loyal, you know. He didn't leave my service when he realized we were going to fight the tyrant in Frekka."
Hansen's arc cuts off the warrior's head and the man's outstretched left forearm. The legs and brown-mottled torso of the battlesuit fall front down, away from the surprise attack.
The men at the back of the enemy line do not expect close-quarters battle. They cannot survive more than a few seconds when battle finds them. Warriors in red and green and an ill-painted pattern of silver stars try to turn. Their battlesuits, like that of the first victim, are scarred by frequent repairs. Each sequence of damage and repair further degrades the armor's capabilities.
Hansen slices through both men at chest level. He doesn't have time to pick weak points for his arc, nor is there any need to do so with this caliber of opponent. The sectioned battlesuits topple into the mud, sparking modestly. The victims' armor does not carry enough power to create an impressive display, even when it is vented in a dead short. . . .
"All they're good for is to die," Hansen muttered. The pressure of his hands on his cheeks slurred his voice. "T' say that they're warriors, 'n' t' die the first time they happen t' get in the way of somebody with a real suit."
"Bosey can keep watch for us," Salles said. "Him and Aldo and a couple of the others. And they can keep Venkatna's freemen out of our camp while, while the battle's still going on."
His voice was thinner than before and had an artificial lilt. Salles had been badly shaken by Hansen's news.
What the hell had he expected was going to happen? That Venkatna would ignore a rebellion just because the rebel warriors had moved out of their keeps?
Hansen got to his feet. His back was to Salles. He didn't turn. A warrior in a black battlesuit had left the practice field and was walking toward Salles and the newcomer.
"Got any more troops than these?" Hansen asked mildly.
"About this many more, three kilometers west with Lord Richtig," Salles replied. "Thirty-one all told. Thirty-two with—if you join us."
"I've joined," Hansen said. "I'm fucking here, aren't I?"
On bivouac Salles wore rough garments, homespun wool without embroidered designs. They suited him much better than court clothes. He moved well, too. Hansen didn't doubt that he'd be a tough opponent with anything like parity of equipment.
"I rather thought . . . ," Salles said. "That perhaps they'd send a smaller force initially, and we could overwhelm it. Of course, there'd be a battalion the next time. . . ."
Hansen turned. "What are you going to do now?" he demanded harshly. "Surrender?"
Salles met his glare. "If we surrendered," said the Lord of Peace Rock, "they'd execute us anyway. It won't make any difference to the civilians back at the keeps, since they'll be enslaved in either event."
"As they would have been in any case when the district was unable to meet its autumn tribute," said the woman in the fur-trimmed cloak. She had walked up behind Hansen. "As I well know."
"Lucille is my cousin," Salles said without looking at the woman. "She was married to the Lord of Thrasey . . . who failed to pay his tribute last year. I thought she'd been killed when the keep was sacked, until she escaped to me last month."
"What are you going to do?" Hansen repeated.
"Fight," Salles said flatly. "Die in battle if that's the will of North . . . but battles have been won against the odds before."
Hansen snorted.
"Why are you here, then, Lord Hansen?" Salles said sharply. "This isn't your fight, and you've obviously formed an opinion about our chances of establishing our rights against Frekka."
"What do you think your chances are, b-b—milord?" Hansen retorted.
He grimaced. Before the Lord of Peace Rock could snap out the dismissal that the barely-swallowed 'boyo' demanded, Hansen knelt and said, "Sorry, Lord Salles. The injustice of the situation bothers me, and I, I'm taking it out on the victims."
"For the gods' sweet sake," said Lucille calmly, "get out of that mud, milord. We have better use for you than that you should catch your death of cold."
She touched Salles' forearm. "This is the man who bought me out of the labor gang, cousin. The usher who carried the bribe said the money came from a warrior named Hansen, a stranger."
Which explained Lucille's pallor. Quite an attractive woman, if you liked them thin and with hair colored something between brown and blond.
It didn't explain the game North was playing; but you could never be sure about that. . . .
"Gods, I'm sorry!" blurted Salles, clasping Hansen's arm again. "I didn't realize! I—"
"You thought I was some prick come to laugh at you when you were about to die," Hansen said wryly. "Reasonable guess, the way I was acting."
His face sobered. "I knew some folk from this district a long time since," he added. About a hundred years ago, as time runs in the Open Lands. "Nobody you'd know, but—I figure they wouldn't want me to walk away from this fight if they were still around."
Aubray wears armor decorated with black-and-cream rosettes. Hansen doesn't remember the sideman's features. The Colimore arc shears off the front of Aubray's helmet, igniting Aubray's hair and beard in an orange frame for the warrior's screaming face.
The blow was meant for Hansen. . . .
"Hansen?" Lucille said from very close by. "Milord?"
Hansen shook himself. "I'm all right," he said before his eyes had focused again. Lucille stood beside him, ready to grab him if he started to fall.
"Maybe the gods will slay Venkatna," muttered the Lord of Peace Rock. "His exactions are an affront to them, surely."
"The gods don't interfere that way," said the warrior in black armor who had finally reached them from the practice ground. "Events have a balance. Trying to bend them by brute force means that they'll snap back in a way you won't much like."
"Let me introduce you to our other new recruit," Salles said. "Like you, he says he used to have friends in this area. Lord Hansen, this is—"
The warrior gripped the latch of the battlesuit and pulled open the frontal plate.
"—Lord Kriton."
Even though her hair is cropped short and she wears a quilted jacket, how could they think Krita was a man? But they saw only the hard eyes, and skill with a battlesuit that not even Salles himself could overmatch.
"I've met Kriton before, Lord Salles," Hansen said. "With warriors of his quality and yours—and mine . . . I think maybe we can survive the present problem. Then we can reach the Mirala District in time to do some real good."
Hansen offered his arm for Krita to grip as she got out of her battlesuit. She swayed against him. Breasts as firm as apples, with dark nipples extending as he kissed them. . . .
"I'm glad to see you here also, Lord Hansen," the Searcher said as she met her lover's eyes.