The Colonel had seen people die in some of the damnedest ways. God knew he had.
He checked himself over. He didn’t seem to have broken any bones. His left elbow had taken a knock, but it bent and straightened all right. His ribs felt like there was a white-hot sword in his side every time he took a breath, but there was no blood in the phlegm when he cleared dust and soot from his lungs in a wracking cough. Pain had never kept the Colonel from moving when his life depended on it. His life certainly depended on moving now.
There’d been a box of six reloads along with the ion guns; five remained after the Colonel tested the weapon. He thrust one of the silvery tubes into the receiver now and turned the safety back to single shot. The Colonel had taken all the reloads himself since he hadn’t been with his troops long enough to know which men might be trusted with extra ammo.
Probably none of them. Christ, what a mess. Ten klicks into hostile territory with twenty farmers, no commo, and no transport but their own feet. The Telugus—Krishnamurtri included—didn’t even have boots.
The Brahmin sat weeping. He seemed healthy enough except for scrapes.
Rao lay on his back, whimpering as he tried unsuccessfully to breathe. The pilot had separated from the air sled only moments after the Colonel did, but a blow from the joystick had crushed his ribs. Rao’s chest quivered, but without the rib cage for an anchor his diaphragm couldn’t suck air into his flailing lungs.
The Colonel shook Krishnamurtri. When that didn’t rouse him, the Colonel slapped him hard. “Get the men together,” he ordered. “Tell them we’re hiking back to base. Anybody who can’t march gets to make his own peace with the Enemy, but I haven’t seen much sign of heavenly mercy in the past.”
Krishnamurtri looked at the Colonel in sick amazement. The Brahmin’s teeth had cut his upper lip in two places, either during the crash or when the Colonel slapped him.
“Look,” the Colonel said in a soft voice. He slid out the double-edged knife he wore in a sheath sewn to his right boot. “If you can’t talk to these people, you’re no good to me at all.”
Krishnamurtri crawled backward in a sitting position, his eyes on the Colonel. He shouted orders in high-pitched Telugu.
The Colonel half walked, half slid, the twenty feet down to Rao. The Telugu watched in sick desperation. His lips moved, but he had no breath to form words. He couldn’t have spoken a language the Colonel could understand anyway.
The Colonel had heard the words often enough, in at least a score of languages. God knew he had.
The Colonel thrust the bootknife behind Rao’s left mastoid and drew it expertly around to the right, severing the Telugu’s throat to the spine. He stepped back, clear of the spurting blood, and tugged the pilot’s dhoti off to wipe his blade while the body was still thrashing.
It wasn’t the kind of help Rao had wanted, but it’s all the help there could be: a quick death in place of the slower one of suffocation.
Krishnamurtri was on his feet, calling orders with increasing confidence. Men were moving among the trees and brush. At the bottom of the gorge, vegetation burned with an occasional blue electrical splutter to mark where the air sled had come to rest.
That fire and the one the Colonel had lit with his ion gun would mark his unit for the Enemy, too. They didn’t have a prayer of getting out of this goatfuck. Not a prayer.
The Colonel smiled at his joke. He sheathed his knife as he waited for his surviving men to gather.
There were thirteen of them left, twelve Telugus and the Colonel himself. Four of the troops hadn’t showed up after the crash; three more had been too badly injured to march. And there was Rao, of course.
Only eight Telugus were armed. Ion guns had gone skidding off into the night when the sled tumbled. Unlike the men, the weapons hadn’t walked back up the slope looking battered and worried. The Colonel didn’t have time to waste searching for guns in the moonlight.