The Brahmin nodded several times as though he understood, but he didn’t say anything to Rao. “Well, tell him!” the Colonel said, wishing he spoke Telugu.
But why stop with a little wish like that? He could wish that he had a team of Special Forces instead of Third World farm boys qualified as soldiers by the fact that they wouldn’t fall over if you leaned a rifle against them. He could even wish that he’d lived his previous life in a fashion that didn’t have him now commanding troops on the side of Hell in Armageddon.
The Colonel smiled. “Tell him,” he repeated. His voice was no longer harsh, but Krishnamurtri looked even more frightened than before. Maybe it was the smile.
Krishnamurtri spoke to the pilot without his usual hectoring violence. Rao looked at the Colonel with a desperate expression. The Colonel put his hand over Rao’s and gently forced the joystick forward.
“Tell him he can slow down if he has to,” the Colonel said to Krishnamurtri. “But not too much. Remember, if we don’t do this fast, they’re going to do us.”
He smiled. “Just as sure as Hell.”
* * *
It was mostly bad luck.
The Colonel had a phenomenal talent for correlating maps with real terrain at ground level; practice had honed an innate skill. Nevertheless he had to concentrate to guide them along the route he’d planned after ten minutes with an aerial photograph, and he wasn’t paying much attention to the Telugus. After the fact, he wished that he’d remembered to warn Rao that the gorge they were following took a hard jog to the left, but there was only so much you could do.
Rao tried to go over the sudden barrier instead of banking with it. That might have been all right if the sled hadn’t been so heavily loaded; as it was, they were going to clear the rock but not the thorny trees growing on the creviced top.
The Colonel acted in a combination of reflex and instinct, two of the supports that had kept him alive longer than even he could credit when he looked back on his life. He thumbed the ion gun’s safety to position three, rock and roll, and triggered the weapon.
The ion gun’s discharge dazzled the night. Trees vanished and the limestone slope beyond glowed white under the lash of the beam. The air sled sailed through a momentary Hell of furnace-hot air. The troops were screaming.
Ash flew into the Colonel’s eyes when he opened them after shooting. He blinked furiously to clear them so he could see again.
Rao fought the sled under control, then clapped the Colonel on the shoulder with a cry of delight. The Telugu was thrilled to still be alive.
“Watch your—” the Colonel said, unable to see clearly himself but aware that this was no time for the pilot to be thinking about dangers already past.
Rao curved back over the lip of the gorge they’d been following. The air sled dropped precipitately as it left the updraft from rock heated by the ion blast. The back end ticked the ground hard enough to throw the rearmost Telugus overboard. Without their weight, the nose tilted sharply down.
Rao screamed; the Colonel hauled his hand fiercely back on the joystick. Neither man’s action made any useful difference. The sled scraped along the rocky soil, disintegrating as it threw its passengers off to either side.
The Colonel bailed out at the first hop, before the sled started to tumble. He curled into a ball and hit rolling; there wasn’t a good way to smack the ground at forty knots, but he’d done it before and survived.
He clamped the ion gun to his belly. The barrel was searingly hot from firing, but the Colonel’s instinct to cling to his weapon was stronger than any pain.
He skidded to a halt well down the slope and paused a moment before he got to his feet. He’d once seen a man leap from a C-47 as it bellied in on a grass strip. The fellow would probably have been all right if he hadn’t tried to stand up before he’d come to a complete stop. Momentum flipped him in an unexpected cartwheel; he broke his neck when he came down again.