Episode 08 Cataract of Combat

  Preston saw Smiley scurry from a knob of rock behind the curtain of the waterfall. From his perch above, Preston glimpsed a shadow of what looked like a shelf or step where Smiley was crouching, dry, in a narrow space between the back of the water and the face of the cliff.

  When the spline guns silently fired their deadly glass spears, Preston leaped from the cliff. The wind was fierce, and yanked him to one side as he plunged.

  More than a dozen of the gleaming transparent spears hurled through the air toward him with a crack of sound, spreading as they flew. In his mind's eye, he could see perfectly what would happen: each spline would shatter on impact into razor-sharp flying shrapnel, and anyone caught in the cloud of spinning glass would be cut to pieces.

  He struck and passed through the rushing, weightless mass of the waterfall's white surface. The water thrust him sharply downward with great force. The shelf where Smiley crouched was a set of wooden logs lashed together with rawhide fibers and held atop slanted posts driven into the rock. The edge of shelf struck Preston across the chest, and he bounced away back into the rushing stream of the waterfall. His breath was driven out of his body as neatly as if a baseball bat had struck his midriff. His fingers slipped from the wet and slippery surface without finding purchase.

  For a moment he was weightless, falling, and dazed. Black spots danced in his eyes. But then a sharp pain struck him sharply across the shoulders and waist.

  He heard the noise that was partly the sound of plate glass shattering, partly the sound of a grenade. It was the splines. The harquebusiers had not anticipated that their target would jump, nor had they corrected for the wind. The splines shattered against the rock cliff high above him and several yards downwind. He was not near the center of the exploding cloud of fragments. The curtain of falling water slowed the little darts, triangles and hooks of glass so that they rebounded from the shoulder and arm of his flightsuit without penetrating, or stabbed into his heavy gloves.

  Above the roar of the waterfall, Preston heard a breathless grunt from above him. He realized that the wiry little simian had grabbed him by the straps of his backpack. However, the monkeylike creature was no larger than a medium sized dog. He was small enough to ride on Preston's back. Despite Smiley's frantic, panting, scrabbling, jerks of resistance, Preston's weight was inexorably pulling the small creature inch by inch toward the edge of the shelf.

  Water was pounding on his head, and stabbing pains were pounding through his chest. His arms and legs were dangling down, and his magnificent, priceless Holland and Holland rifle was dangling below that. The strap had fallen from his shoulder, and even while dazed, his hand had automatically closed around the strap with vice-like firmness. Preston stared at his own hand as if it were an alien being clamped to the end of his arm, wondering how it had retained the presence of mind save his rifle, but also glad of it.

  But Smiley was slipping and Preston was about to fall: Preston kicked in midair, making his body rock. Smiley screamed and lost his grip on whatever anchor was holding him on the shelf. Preston swung. The posts beneath the shelf supporting it loomed in his view. He tossed the Holland & Holland lightly into the triangle made by the post, the cliff, and the shelf above. He snapped his wrist to turn the rifle sideways. The motion sent horrible pain through his chest.

  Smiley came flying over the edge just at that moment. Preston was in free fall. He hoped he did not have broken bones in his chest, because, if he did, this would hurt.

  It did hurt. He blacked out, or almost. When his vision cleared, he found himself hanging from his rifle strap by one hand, his arm almost pulled from his socket, pains in his chest like hot coals, and his legs dangling down. On his back was his pack. Dangling down by one strap was Smiley, holding on by one prehensile foot. The water had matted and flatting his hair, making him look like shrunken and miserable wraith.

  "You did not let go," Preston whispered, awed. The little beast had clung, trying to save him, and had not done the wise thing: release the strap to save himself.

  Preston looked up. Using his rifle like an anchor was blasphemy. Uttering a blasphemy, he grabbed the strap with his other hand. He tried to chin himself up, but the pain in his chest defeated him.

  There he hung, too weak and wounded to pull himself higher. His body swayed, sending more pains into his chest, when Smiley climbed atop the backpack. The flap of the backback slapped Preston in the back of the head. Smiley had opened the backback, no doubt looking for food.

  Preston shouted and swore at the idiotic monkey. The simian hissed at him impatiently.

  He swayed again as Smiley rummaged through the gear.

  Light glowed about him. It was the Cherenkov radiation glow from the flying disk. The saucer-shaped flying machine was approaching the cliff face. The curtain of water between them was white and translucent, so only light, not shapes, were visible beyond.

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  A shattering sound of splines exploding against the cliff smote Preston's ears. A volley struck the wet rocks below him, far enough away that no shrapnel reached him.

  A minute later, he heard a second volley crash against the cliff, this time closer. He felt tiny taps on the toes of his boots, but whether these were spent glass shards or water drops, he did not know.

  He then felt Smiley's damp cheeks pressed against his cheek, and then the creature put an arm and a leg around his neck, and a moment later, the little monster had wrapped his tail around Preston's neck and had flopped down, headforemost, across Preston's chest. This gave Preston a close and unobstructed view of Smiley's brightly colored hindquarters and genitalia he would have preferred to avoid.

  Preston saw what the Simian was doing. Smiley had looped a rope once and twice around Preston's chest. It was the bright orange parachute cord from his survival kit.

  Smiley now ran up Preston's arm, and leaped neatly to the post holding up the shelf, trailing the cord after him. He spun around the post acrobatically and scampered back down Preston's arm.

  Whether by luck or Smiley's wit, the cord was passing through the center of the rifle strap, which meant that even when he let go of the rifle strap, the rifle would not fall. Preston shifted his grip carefully to the orange cord. He swayed and swung, but the cord held. The pain in his chest was too great for him to haul himself up the rope, but he could brace his feet against the wet cliff, and let the rope play out, and lower himself.

  He glanced over his shoulder, and would have laughed, had he breath for it. Next to him was a wooden ladder, also lashed with rawhide, and below him was another shelf made of wooden logs.

  He played out the ropes rapidly: perhaps too rapidly. Smiley clung to his back and screamed in fear. Preston fell to the second shelf below, but scrambled beneath it to cling to its supporting posts. Smiley imitated him, and crouched atop the other support. The next volley of splines struck, shattered against the damp rock wall above. Glass splinters embedded themselves into the wooden logs shielding him. One or two fragments spun through the cracks between the logs, striking him in the cheek and shoulder, drawing blood.

  "My turn," Preston muttered. The pain his chest did not prevent him from worming his way back up onto the shard-strewn shelf. He relaxed his grip on the orange cord he held. The cord passed over the posts holding the shelf above, and through the strap of the rifle, which he lowered into his hands. He reloaded, knelt, and raised the weapon toward the source of the blue light shining as an oval shadow through the white curtain of water.

  He fired twice. Shrill screams and hoarse calls issued from the source of the light, which was now canted over on its side. Preston saw shadows falling, as men thrown from the disk passed between his eyes and the source of light. The light shrank suddenly. The disk was moving away.

  Smiley now scampered to the next ladder. Voices rang from above, deeper than human. from above. A horn blast rent the air.

  Preston drew the line in, looped it around the supports, tied the cord into a proper bowline below his hips, and lowered himself so quickly to the next shelf below that Smiley, who was sprinting down the ladder head-downward like a squirrel, look at him in surprise when he passed him.

  Smiley shrugged a human shrug, leaped, and landed on Preston's back. He chattered in a commanding voice. An order. He pointed a finger over the edge. Down!

  Down Preston went, past two more shelves.

  The third platform below was larger than the others, and partly caught in the spray. Because of the noise of the falling water, the gargantuan man standing on this platform did not see Preston approaching. His skin was black as pitch, but his hands and feet were albino-white. He wore a leather coat with exaggerated shoulders and flared hips. In his hand was an amber-colored wand. A cap adorned with antlers shaded his head.

  Around his knees were half a dozen little red simians, twins to Smiley, except that they wore embroidered vests of blue and silver.

  The cliff face before the shelf was cut with many small, square marks, exposing a layer of white substance beneath. Someone was here mining or digging for something. For what?

  One of the simians looked up, saw Preston descending, and raised a cry. Another simian raised a weapon shaped like a sea-shell, which spat a dark buzzing shape through the air toward Preston. It struck him in the glove. It was a wasp larger than his thumb, digging into the leather frenetically.

  The gargantuan looked up, and Preston shot him twice in the chest and once in the face. The momentum of the rope swing carried him down. He kicked the huge shape in the neck and shoulders. The twelve foot tall man seemed to take a long, lingering moment to topple and disappear into the rushing water.

  The man's six foot tall wand fell among the simians, and struck two of them. The simians jumped and danced in spasms of agony, and fell from the platform. The other simians raised sea-shell weapons and sent wasps like bullets winging through the air. Preston noted their positions, kicked off the rock face, and found himself swinging on a long arc through the open air on the far side of the waterfall curtain. The wasps lost velocity coming through the water, and missed him. Preston returned fire. Thunderclaps of his barking Mauser echoed from the cliff wall.

  The wasps circled for a second pass, but Smiley opened wide his jaws and uttered a long, loud burp. A smell came from Smiley's muzzle. It was comical, but the wasps veered away.

  The pendulum of the rope carried Preston back in through the curtain of water. Four simians were prone, two were standing, but only one was armed with a wasp-thrower. Preston's bullet entered the eye and shattered the rear hemisphere of the creature's skull. The remaining simian bared fangs and lunged. Preston kicked it unceremoniously from the platform. The scream diminished with distance.

  He landed and gathered in his rope. Victory. Preston hefted the Mauser in his hand. One round was left in his pistol. No replacements.

  He looked around. The mining had been more thorough here, for the rock was peeled away like a cave mouth, but the mouth was blocked by the white substance beneath. He heard the noise of voices from below, calling, and answers from above. Through the curtain of water, the light from the flying disk was visible. There was no escape in any direction.

  He cocked an eye at Smiley. "Time for a talk. You are clearly intelligent. How come you carry no tools? Second, why lead us into this dead end — Hey! what are you — Yikes! What in the flaming blue blazes is that?"

  For Smiley had daubed some of the blood from Preston's cheek onto a handkerchief and tossed it lightly against the white substance the mining efforts had exposed.

  Like a visage glimpsed emerging from a fog stepping into the circle of light shed by a streetlamp, a face was forming in the substance.