Ring of Fire III(48)
At all.
Tom was starting to worry that she was going to come out of all this with a lot more scars—and a lot worse ones—than the one left on her arm by a splinter from an exploding door.
She hadn’t fired the first bullet. But she’d fired some of the ones that came after, including a gigantic bullet that had just taken out dozens of men and the whole village they’d been in.
* * *
“Look there!” said one of the Albatross’s crewmen. His first name was Luca, but Rita couldn’t remember his last name. It wasn’t Franchetti but she thought he was somehow related to the Franchettis. Like most up-time businesses had been in a small town like Grantville, seventeenth-century companies were usually family affairs. The families got pretty big, too.
Luca was leaving over the rail of the gondola, pointing at something on the ground ahead of them. Rita went over and looked herself.
At first she didn’t see anything. It was now getting dark down on the ground, if not up here where the last of the sun was still visible.
After a few seconds she spotted a flash of movement that drew her eyes. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing.
“It’s a woman, I think,” said Luca. “Hard to tell from here.”
Rita thought the figure on the ground was a woman herself. She didn’t know why, exactly. You really couldn’t distinguish body shapes from this far up, much less facial features. It was winter, too, when people wore bulky clothing.
But something, whatever subtlety of movement or posture, led her to think Luca was right.
He shook his head. “She might make it through the night, if she can find one of the abandoned villages and get inside. Probably not, though.”
Rita stared at him. Then, down at the woman below.
That was a woman, she was almost sure now. But even if it wasn’t, that person certainly wasn’t a Bavarian cavalryman.
“Fuck that,” she muttered. She turned to Franchetti. “Take the Albatross down, Filippo. All the way to the ground.” She pointed to the figure herself. “We’ll pick her up. We’ve got room and plenty of weight allowance, now that the bombs have all been dropped.”
“But...signora...”
“Oh, stop worrying! There’s nobody else down there. Not within half a mile, at the very least. We’ve got plenty of time to get down, pick her up, and get back in the air before anyone’ll be able to come at us.”
“But... signora...”
“Just fucking do it!”
She took a deep, ragged breath. “Please, Filippo.” She had tears in her eyes. “I am so sick of killing people.”
* * *
In the end, what saved Ursula’s life was her own despair.
She ran from the monster. Ran and ran for a while. But it kept pursuing her, coming closer and closer to the ground.
Eventually, partly from exhaustion but mostly from too many years of seeing her hopes all scraped away, she just stopped. Then, sat on the ground, holding her knees. Ignoring the cold seeping into her buttocks. Just waited for her death, the way prey run to the ground waits for the predator.
* * *
If she’d kept running, she could have escaped the Albatross. It was dark now and she could have slipped away into the shadows any number of times, if she’d been thinking clearly.
Rita had almost given up hope herself.
* * *
The monster had the face of a young woman. Ursula hadn’t expected that.
Quite a pretty one. Black hair, blue eyes. The color was very clear, even in twilight. A slender build, she thought, although it was hard to be sure. She was wearing a peculiar, puffy sort of jacket.
The monster extended her hand. “Come on, girl,” she said. “It’s time to go.”
* * *
Some time later, looking out at the moon from the gondola, Ursula finally spoke.
“I’m flying,” she said, wonderingly. “I’m really flying.”
A while later, she added, “Away.”
Chapter 17
On the fourth and final day, the Bavarian infantry made no effort to close with the Danube Regiment. In fact, by late morning they’d let the distance between the marching armies stretch to two miles. By mid-afternoon, to three miles.
Colonel von Schnetter’s couriers had come across several survivors of the bombing raid and two of them had been to see the village ruins themselves. So the infantry commander had a pretty good idea of what had happened.
The ever-growing distance between his forces and those of Major Simpson’s were no longer due to simple caution, but outright worry. His infantry was moving more slowly down the Danube because he needed to be sure, at all times, that he could get the men away from the river if the need arose. Airships that could destroy a village could also destroy a tightly-packed infantry column.