Read Online By Force of Arms by William C. Dietz - Free Book Online

another hairpin turn. The gravelly trail stretched up toward the swiftly rising sun. It was then, as the dooth started to climb, that Booty detected, or thought he detected, a foreign scent. The officer’s hand went to his sidearm. He stood in the stirrups and took a long careful look around.
    Weather-smoothed boulders littered the surrounding hillside. Many were the size of battle tanks. A full company of legionnaires could have hidden there, concealed among the rocks, and he wouldn’t have been able to spot them. Especially if they were Naa—and didn’t want to be seen.
    Uneasy now, but not sure why, the legionnaire climbed toward the sunrise. Everything was normal… except for the fur that ran the length of his spine. That stood on end.
    The Trooper IF rounded an outcropping of rock, “saw” a patch of green smear itself across the blue grid that overlaid her surroundings, and stopped dead in her tracks. Then, weapons ready, she backed around the corner. Numbers shifted in the lower right hand comer of the cyborg’s vision as the threat factor gradually decreased.
    Neversmile, who had allowed himself to be lulled into a sort of half-conscious trance, came fully awake. He spoke into a wire-thin boom mike. It was jacked into a panel at the base of Wilker’s duraplast neck. “What’s up?”
    “Naa,” Wilker replied. “Two of them. Both mounted.
    Maybe a quarter mile ahead. Between the general and us.”
    Neversmile swore silently. Just his luck. The general get’s a wild hair up his ass … and the colonel chose him to deal with it. “Can you nail the bastards?”
    “A shoulder-launched missile would handle it. assumin’ you ain’t too worried about due process or how big a hole I make.”
    Neversmile remembered how many innocent females and cubs the Legion had accidentally slaughtered over the years and knew he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Not to mention the fact that he was supposed to maintain a low profile. “No, hold your fire. Feel free to close the distance, however—but don’t let the shitheads see you.”
    It was a stupid order—Wilker thought so anyway—but knew better than to say so. Not to a sergeant—and not to this Sergeant. Gravel crunched under her weight, and the cyborg continued to climb.
    Dimwit emerged from the rocks still buttoning his pants. It was the second time he had stopped to take a pee and the second time he had fallen behind. Nocount was irritated. “Hurry up! The human’s slow but not that slow. We’ll lose the furless bastard.”
    “It ain’t my fault,” Dimwit complained. “I had to pee and it hurts.”
    “Alt because you’ll screw anything with a pulse,” his companion replied unsympathetically. “Come on, let’s go.”
    Dimwit mounted his dooth, kicked the animal onto the trail, and kicked it yet again. The animal groaned, sent plumes of lung-warmed air down toward the ground, and passed a prodigious amount of gas. The trek resumed.
    If the mesa had a name, Booly didn’t know what it was. Only that it stood straight and tall, just as it had the last time he’d been there, camping with his mother.
    It was she who showed him the narrow, often dangerous, path that circled the sheersided cliffs, pointed out the tool marks the ancients had left on the rock, and fired his imagination. “Who were they?” she asked. “And from whom were they hiding?” For surely some great evil had been upon the land, a threat that drove them up off the slowly rising plain, to make a home in the sky.
    Had they won? These hard-pressed Naa? And survived that which sought to hunt them down? Or had the group been decimated? And wiped from existence? There was no way to be sure.
    And there was another story, a more personal tale, which came back to Booly as his dooth labored toward the top. It had to do with his grandfather, William Booly I, a onetime sergeant major who was wounded during an ambush, taken prisoner, and nursed back to health by a Naa maiden, a beautiful