He opened his mouth to speak, but I could not hear what he said over the sound of the shotgun blast. The shot tore up the concrete in front of him, ripped small holes through his legs, and threw him backwards. He lay on the ground, his legs a pulpy mass, bleeding heavily, screaming.
I yelled over the screams. “You’ll only suffer for a while, Jim. The aliens will fix you up; they’ve done it before. And when they’re done, they’ll take you away, because they can’t afford to have anyone working on this stuff on Earth anymore. They may be back with this technology, but that’s tomorrow’s problem, and we’ll have time to prepare.” Shock was clearly setting in, and Jim had stopped screaming and was now whimpering in pain. “You’ll be working for them for a very long time.”
I grabbed a couple of vials from the rack, retrieved the gym bag from under the basket, wrapped the vials in the sweat towels, and put them and the shotgun in the bag. Our best hope was that the alien guild rules would keep this technology away long enough that we could figure out how to deal with it. I knew some researchers, some former colleagues of Jim’s, whom I thought might be trustworthy enough to try. It wasn’t a great chance, but it was a chance.
Greg was lying facedown on the ground beside the car, all of his arms spread, R.C. standing over him and holding a very large shotgun against his neck. Both of the disk weapons were on the ground behind R.C.
“Feel better?” I said to him.
R.C. smiled. “Much.”
“Good. Now let him go.”
R.C. raised an eyebrow.
“He and I have a deal. Don’t we, Greg?”
“Yes,” Greg said.
R.C. backed away, and Greg righted himself.
“Jim is inside. Call your people now, because he’s hurt and you’ll need to repair him.”
“What about our materials?” Greg asked.
“Everything is inside.”
“Did he succeed?”
“No. He said he still hadn’t made it work. There’s a dead man in there whose body is proof that Jim’s telling the truth. You need to get rid of that body, too.”
“Did James Peterson tell you what he was doing for us?”
“No,” I said. I handed him the weapons. “Now, keep your part of the deal and get him out of here.”
Greg put the weapons back in his suit and went silent for a moment. “A small ship is on the way and should be here momentarily. Though we dislike landings, we must conclude this affair quickly. You are done. You should leave.”
“You’ll take him away? You can take him anywhere you want, as long as it’s not on this planet, but you will repair him and take him away?”
“Yes,” Greg said. “We have found humans useful in many situations. Even though we cannot use him on this planet to continue his work, I am confident we will find a use for him elsewhere for a very long time.”
I nodded and turned to R.C. Greg headed toward the building where Jim lay bleeding, and R.C. and I walked off to his truck. I felt the disturbance in the air before I heard the ship’s very quiet approach, but I didn’t look back to watch it land. I’d done what I could and what I should, and for now that had to be enough.
THE THREE WALLS—32nd CAMPAIGN
S. M. Stirling
“Sir,” Gnaeus Clodius Afer said. “Exactly which bunch of these fucking wogs are we supposed to be fighting, anyway?”
Gaius Vibulenus squeezed his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of the man who commanded the Tenth Cohort. Clodius Afer wore a red transverse crest across his helmet; he carried a staff of hard twisted wood rather than the two javelins the enlisted men bore, and his short stabbing sword was slung on the right from a baldric rather than the left side of his military belt: a centurion’s gear. Gaius Vibulenus’s Attic helmet had a white plume, and he wore a back-and-breast armor of cast bronze hinged at the shoulders. The Hellenic-style outfit marked him as an officer, a military tribune.
At least, it had when the legion sailed out of Brundisium to join Crassus’s glorious conquest of Parthia. He’d been able to wear it because his family were wealthy landowners in Campania and politically well-connected; one more gentry sprig gaining a little military experience to help him with the cursus honorum to office, and hopefully a share of the plunder. Militarily he’d been a joke. The actual work of the unit was done by men like Clodius Afer. Since then, things had changed.