Ring of Fire II(221)

Except it wasn't a cavalryman and it wasn't a he.



"Jesus H. Christ!" Denise exploded. "We just bombed Noelle and Eddie!"



"Huh?" said Lannie, his mouth gaping.



"Well, shit!" screeched Keenan from the back. "Well, shit!"





"I'll kill 'em," Noelle hissed, as she went back to tending Eddie. Luckily—by now, she'd unfastened the cuirass—he didn't seem to have been wounded by the bomb itself or any of the splinters it had sent flying from the wagon when it exploded. At least, she couldn't see any blood anywhere, that she thought was any of Eddie's own. He did have some blood on one of his trouser legs, but she was pretty sure that came from his horse. One of the splinters or maybe a part of the bomb casing had torn a huge wound in the horse's belly. It had thrown Eddie when it fell to the ground. Kicked him in the head, too, in the course of thrashing about afterward, judging from the condition of his helmet.



At least, she didn't think that big a dent in a sturdy helmet could have been caused by his fall. The meadow had hardly any rocks in it.



Eddie's eyes were open, but he seemed dazed. Might have a concussion. And a broken left arm, from the looks of things.



Gingerly, she started unfastening his sleeve. Eddie moaned a little, but she got it peeled back enough to check its condition.



A broken forearm, sure enough. Noelle had broken her own forearm as a kid, falling out of a tree. She could remember insisting to her mother all the way to the hospital that the arm wasn't really broken. Just bent a little, that's all.



But it wasn't a compound fracture, and the break was obviously well below the elbow. Give it a few weeks, properly splinted, and it would heal as good as new.



The relief allowed her fury to resurge. She looked up, tracking the plane from its sound, so she could shake her fist at them again. The stupid bastards!



But when she spotted the plane, the gesture turned into a frantic wave.



"You stupid bastards! Watch out!"





The cramped interior of the cockpit seemed like bedlam to Denise.



"Jesus, Lannie, you bombed my sister! You bombed my sister!" Keenan kept screeching, in blithe disregard for the fact that he'd been the one who'd actually released the weapon.



Naturally, Lannie's response was to shift the blame himself. "She told me to do it! She told me to do it!" was his contribution.



"Shut up, both of you!" was Denise's own, trying to settle them down.



In retrospect, she'd admit to her best friend Minnie—nobody else—that she probably should have kept concentrating on the "navigating" side of the business.



Eventually, it did occur to her that she ought to see where they were going.



"Lannie!" she screeched.





"Fascinating," murmured Janos. He'd always wondered how fragile the devices were. Now, seeing one of the plane's wings partly-shredded by its impact with a mere tree limb—a large tree, granted—his longstanding guess was confirmed.



As was his determination to remain a cavalryman. Say what you would about the stupid beasts, horses were rather sturdy. Nor did they move at ridiculous speeds, nor did they keep a rider more than a few feet from the ground.





"Jesus, Lannie, you wrecked the plane! You wrecked the plane!" was Keenan's current contribution, even more useless than the last.



"Shut the fuck up!" Denise hollered. "Just concentrate, Lannie. You can do it."



Fortunately, Lannie had left off his own shouting. Now that he was in a crisis, his pilot's instincts had taken over.



"We're going in, guys," he said. "Can't do anything else."



Even to Denise, it was obvious from the damage suffered by the wing on her side that he was right. "You can do it, Lannie," she said calmly. "And we got a big wide meadow here."



Lannie's grin was as thin as a grin could get, but she was relieved to see it. "Just better hope we don't hit a gopher hole. Got no way to retract the landing gear."



"There aren't any gophers in Europe," she said, in as reassuring a tone as she could manage.



"Yeah, that's right," chimed in Keenan from the back. "No ground hogs, neither." Thankfully, he'd left off the screeching.



Denise saw no reason to voice aloud her firm conviction that there were probable umpteen thousand things that could produce holes in a meadow. All but two of which did exist in Europe.



They'd be coming down in a few seconds. Lannie did have the plane more or less under control. Hopefully it'd be a crash landing they could walk away from, if nothing caught fire or—



"Drop the other bomb, Keenan!"



"Huh?"