“They’re just porters then.”
She started to shake her head and then said: “In effect, yes. Just porters.”
The crowd was drawing nearer. Patriots or porters, whatever they were, Cade saw clearly that there were no Armsmen among them. They were farmers, miners, clerks from the city. They walked easily as you’d expect Mars-born people to, and clearly had no difficulty with Mars air. Their clothes were lighter than the furs he and Jocelyn wore against the chill. And they all carried uncouth sacks over their shoulders. Cade thought of the guns jostled and scraping together in the sacks and set his teeth obstinately—a gun was just a killing-tool the way a saw was just a cutting-tool.
There were boys in their teens and not a few women among the mob; it numbered some nine hundred to carry about fifty thousand guns.
How, he wondered, could this rabble keep a secret? And then he thought of Harrow, the dead Gunner: “A man likes to be among his own people—It’s newer on Mars—I don’t suppose you know anything about your eight-times great-grandfather—” If all these people shared that feeling—With the crowd came noise, the undisciplined chatter of nine hundred excited people.
A tall, lean-faced fellow in his middle years turned to the rest and yelled sharply through the thin air: “Just shut up, all of you! Shut up and stand where you are!” A few lieutenants repeated the crude command. After a minute the shipward drift of the crowd halted and there was silence.
The man said to Cade: “Pm Tucker. There wasn’t anything said about a woman. Who’s she?”
The Lady Jocelyn said dramatically: “A daughter of Mars.” If there was the faintest tinge of mockery in her voice, only Cade thought he heard it.
The lean-faced man said, feelingly: “Mars blesses you, Sister.”
“Mars blesses us all, from the highest to the lowest.” It seemed to be password and countersign.
Tucker said: “We’re glad to have a high-born Lady among us, Sister. I was told the flier of the ship wouldn’t be a Brother?”
“Not yet. He will be. He is an Earth-born Gunner who will train Marsmen for the day of liberty.”
“It’s growing,” said Tucker rapturously. “Nothing can stop it!” It was beginning to sound more like the mystic nonsense of the Cairo gang than businesslike military identification procedure.
The mob was getting noisy again and military procedure took another body-blow. Tucker turned and bawled at them: “You all shut up now! Get into some kind of a line and get your sacks open. And don’t take all day!”’ Cade watched them milling and groaned at the thought of turning such a mob into Armsmen. But he swallowed his disgust; what she wanted of him, he would do.
They did get whipped into line eventually by roaring non-coms. Cade couldn’t make out whether these were merely ad hoc self-appointed leaders or whether there was any organization in this gang. But somehow a dozen Marsmen got busy sorting out sixty-gun piles from the heap and dumping them into waiting sacks. The guns couldn’t have been carried under Earth gravity, but their weight on Mars constituted no more than a good working load. Cade was very glad that guns of the Order had two centimeters of six-kilogram trigger pull before you hit a five-gram pull and firing contact. There were no accidents.
Jocelyn told him busily: “We won’t need the ship and I don’t want to leave it here for a monument. Shoot it off to somewhere on automatic take-off.”
It was sound doctrine. By the time the empty flier roared off, its ultimate destination an aimless orbit in space, the tail-end of the line of porters was snaking past a melting pile of guns. Tucker, the lean-faced “patriot” leader, was yelling again, trying to make himself heard over the combined noise of rockets and rabble, to get them to form a new line of march heaving out of the valley.
As the noise of the vanishing flier was lost in the distant sky, the man’s shouts were drowned out again by the terrifying crescendo of jets. Not one ship this time, but a fleet. An instant later a hundred or more space-recon fliers roared low over the hill-rimmed basin.
They fanned out beautifully to land beyond the crags in, a perfectly-executed envelopment on the largest scale Cade had ever seen. He wondered numbly whether the brilliant maneuver had been performed on individual piloting or slave-circuit control.
The Martian rabble broke its uneven ranks. Nine hundred of them milled pointedlessly about asking each other frightened, stupid questions; the total effect was a thought-shattering roar. The Lady Jocelyn’s hand gripped Cade’s arm through the wadded sleeve of his furs. Her face was deathly pale. He must have radar stations on Deimos and Phobos, Cade thought, to pin-point us like this—
Then there was a voice—the kind of voice nine-year-old Cade, Gunner-to-be, had thought the Emperor spoke with. It roared like thunder through the basin of rock, breaking against the rim and rebounding in echoes. It was the voice of the Power Master, the voice Cade would never fail to know whether it spoke cynically across a room, commandingly over the radio or as now coldly into the thin air of Mars.
“Marsmen, my Gunners are taking up positions surrounding you. You will drop your bags of weapons and walk to the foot of the hills to surrender. I want only the two persons who landed by flier. They must be held but the rest of you will be released after a search. You have fifteen minutes to do this. If you do not, my Gunners will advance firing.” Silence from the hills and a growing mutter from the crowd.
“Who are they?”
“Who’s the man from the flier?”
“They said he’s no Brother!”
“Get rid of the guns!”
“They’ll burn us down where we stand.”
“What will we do?”
“What will we do?”
Cade shook his head dazedly; Tucker was glaring at him.
“He’s lying!” shrilled a clear voice—Jocelyn’s. “He’s lying! Do you think he’ll let you go when you’re helpless? He’ll kill you all!”
Her warning was lost in the roar, except to Tucker and Cade. The leanfaced Marsman said to her slowly: “When we’re helpless? We’re helpless now. We’ve drilled some, but we don’t know guns.”
With the brutal mob-noise for a background, Jocelyn spoke again, softly and almost to herself. “Two hundred years,” she said emotionlessly. “Two hundred years of planning, two hundred years of waiting, two hundred years of terror waiting for a traitor or a fool to talk, but nobody did. One gun, two guns, a dozen guns a year at last, waiting—” She was swaying as she stood; Cade braced her with his arm.
“What a dream it was—and we came so close. Mars in rebellion, the Klin Philosophy shaken, Armsmen split, the Power Master defied! Men on Mars—men everywhere—thinking for themselves, challenging the traditions that tied them down. Thinking and. Challenging!” A blaze that had kindled briefly in her eyes seemed to die.
“We underestimated,” she said flatly. Now she was talking to Cade, “We didn’t allow for the dead weight of things as they are. Two hundred years—I hope my uncle will not suffer when he dies.”
Her uncle. Cade hung onto that; he knew at last. “The Emperor,” he said slowly, “the Emperor knows of all this?”
“Yes, of course.” There were tears behind her voice. “The Emperor—the last five Emperors, powerless in everything except knowledge. They and a few others in the family, a handful of men and women. Three generations ago the reigning Emperor saw that Mars was the key, that the Mars rulers would rebel and the Mars populace would be with them. The Emperor-Mars pact was concluded fifty-five years ago. My uncle wrote the Star of Mars’ petition. What a great dream it was! But what difference does it make now?”
I hope my uncle will not suffer when he dies. But he would; the Emperor would suffer and so would she. The Power Master would not let them die until he had wrung every bit of information from them that they held.
Abruptly the voice of thunder said: “Eight minutes!” and the Mars rabble flowed around them, scared, angry and confused, demanding to be told what to do and what it meant.
Tu
cker had been listening, bespelled. “If we could fight,” he said hoarsely, working his hands. “If only we could fight!”
“Thinking and challenging,” echoed Cade. “Thinking and challenging.” Five years to make a Novice. Ten for an Armiger. Fifteen for a Gunner. “To face Gunners with anything less than Gunners was like opposing guns of the Order with wooden clubs. Tucker knew that, and still dared to think: if we could fight.
They were patriots, Cade thought; now he knew what it meant. They were frightened now but still they held their sacks of guns. They weren’t ready to give in yet.
Cade said the impossible: “We can fight them.”
“Armsmen?” said the girl.
But there was wild hope on Tucker’s face. “They’re trained,” he said foolishly. “They’ve had three years.”
“There’s no other way,” Cade said to Jocelyn, ignoring the Mars leader. “It’s a cleaner death, and—you taught me to challenge the rules.”
He fired his own gun straight up in a three-second burst at full aperture and a stunned silence fell on the crowd.
“I am Gunner Cade of the Order of Armsmen,” he shouted into the thin air. “You have guns—many more guns than the Armsmen in the hills. I will tell you how to use them.”
XXI.
Thoughts blazed through his mind. The complex gun; the thing no Commoner could master: First Study of the Primary Circuits of the Gun, Ceremonial of the Gun, Order of Recharging, After-charging Checklist, Malfunctions of the Booster Circuit, the Sighting Picture, the Gun’s Inner Meaning in Klin, Aperture and Band Settings for Various Actions. In studied sequence they flashed across his mind, and one by one he threw them out.
“The way to use your gun,” he shouted, “is to point it and pull the trigger. If it stops firing, throw it away and grab another.” To Tucker he said swiftly: “Have you a dozen men the others will listen to?”
The lean-faced man nodded. “Get them here,” Cade said. While the names were being shouted he turned to scan the encircling hills. Against the sky he could see the slender rods of radionic grids faintly discernible—ten or so, spaced around the rim of hills. What contempt they must hold him in to expose command posts like that!
Where to attack with his rabble? Straight ahead there was a nice little pass in the hills. Standard doctrine was for the defenders to command such a pass by plunging fire. Standard doctrine in the attack was to draw fire from the defenders, pin down the defenders exposed by their fire and storm the pass. The Marsmen had no training to prepare themselves for such an encounter. But off to the right was an ugly little cliff—a cliff nobody in his right mind would bother to attack or defend. It would be covered by a Gunner or so, no matter how unlikely it was. But was it so unlikely to be scaled by Marsmen to whom the air and gravity were normal—?
“Here are the men.” Cade looked over the dozen lieutenants Tucker had called up and proceeded to instruct them. A long line of his teachers would have cringed at his instruction. He showed them only the triggers, the band and aperture sets and the charge gauges. They didn’t need to know how to recharge; there were guns to spare. They didn’t need to know the care of guns, the circuits, the ritual, the inner meanings—all they needed was to know how to shoot. As he showed them, his wonder almost equalled theirs at the simplicity of it all.
“We will head for that cliff,” he said, pointing. “Try to show your men what I showed you before we get there. Don’t try to keep order on the march. The worse it looks, the better for us. That’s all.”
He gave them a minute and then stepped oh for the rim of hills. He yelled a command which he dimly realized was more ancient than the Order itself and exactly as old as History:
“Follow me!”
“For Mars! For the Star of Mars!” someone shrieked insanely, and others took up the howl. Cade didn’t look behind him. If he had them all, good. If he didn’t, there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps some would start with him and others hesitate and then follow—so much the better. To the ring of steady-eyed Armsmen watching from the hills, this charge across the plain would seem a panic flight. Even if they had picked up the gist of his orders to the mob with a three-meter directional mike trained on him, or seen the scattered efforts of lieutenants to instruct their groups it would seem inconceivable to them that Commoners would fight.
Not that they would; Cade knew it well enough. They’d balk at the first blast of well-aimed fire. They’d shriek and run like—Commoners. Mars or Earth, a Commoner’s a Commoner; sluggish, overstuffed, stupid, soft. Point your guns and pull the trigger. Fine words, he mocked himself, fine words! They were supposed to have had three years of “training”—form-fours on the village square, no doubt, an hour a week. Even that didn’t show. None of them had seen a gun before.
Thinking and challenging, he mocked. Thinking indeed, that challenged the one bedrock truth he knew: that Armsmen were Armsmen, fighters, gun-handlers, the only fighters there were.
It was insanity; that truth he knew, and the other truth that made insanity his only course. If the fight was lost, he was already dead, and so was she.
She was running alongside, keeping pace with his strides. “Do you think—?” she asked wildly. “Cade, it’s the Power Master’s Guard! They can defeat any force of Armsmen in the Realm.”
“We’re not Armsmen,” he growled. “We’re a mob of crazy patriots. We don’t know how to fight, but we seem to have something to fight for. Now fall back. Get into the middle of this gang and leave yourself room to run when they stampede.”
“I won’t!”
“You—will!”
Meekly she fell back and Cade strode on. Admit it, fool! he raged. Admit it! You’re playing a game, a child’s farce—the way you used to play Superior and Novice back in Denver. They’ve forged a ring of fire around you and you’re charging into death: solitary death, because that mob will break and run and well you know it.
A farce? Very well; play it out as well as you can. Gunner Cade, he told himself savagely, trained Armsman, master of fighting that you are—fight!
He swung on grimly and the worn, ancient cliffs loomed ahead, grotesque engravings of wind and sand and centuries on deathless stone. If the Armsmen opened fire now, he was lost with his half-trained rabble. They’d never know enough to spread; they’d bunch like sheep and die in a crushed mob. If they reached the dead area under the cliff, there might be a momentary postponement of the butchery.
The Armsmen would have fired before now if they expected trouble. They must be looking for a desperate attempt to push through the nice little pass and escape.
The attack of the Marsmen would have to be swift and deadly. They might take the hill! It was a thing that would rock the foundations of the Order.
“For the Star! For the Star of Mars!” he heard them howling behind him, and grinned coldly. Patriots! Perhaps patriots were what you needed for a murderous, suicidal assault.
His feet slipped once on rubble and the shadow of a crag was on his face. “Give me two of your guns, Brother,” he said to a boy with bulging eyes and a fixed grin on his face. “Up the cliff i” he shouted over his shoulder at the rabble. “Follow me—charge!” He broke into a run and noted coldly that the thin air roughly canceled the advantage of the lesser Mars gravity. The youth at his side, still breathing easily, pushed ahead—and fell a moment later with the fixed grin still on his face and both legs charred away by a long-range blast.
Automatically Cade blasted the crag from which the fire had come. The fire-fight had been joined.
Make it or break it now, he thought. Face your death, fire a counterblast or two to let them know you were there, to make them pause a bit and wonder a bit and perhaps fear a bit before your Commoners broke and ran.
“Follow me! Up!”
The lean-faced Tucker raced past Cade screaming: “For the Star of Mars!” His sack of guns flapped and bobbed as he began to scramble up the cliff. There were others—wild-eyed men, a panting youth, a leathery woman—w
ho passed Cade.
Behind him there were yells and the blast of guns. He hoped he wouldn’t be burned in the back by one of the Marsmen’s ill-aimed guns after coming this far—
The fire-fight grew severe as he pantingly climbed the cliff. From the hills it was rapid and deadly. From the Marsmen it was a torrent whose effect he couldn’t guess at. The noise the guns made was a senseless blend of small-aperture buzz and wide-aperture roar. Cade scrambled grimly up and hoisted himself over the jagged cliff edge into the racket of a first-class battle. A rudimentary squad of Marsmen was blasting Armsmen across a windrow of fallen comrades. They had learned about aperture by now, Cade saw with bleak satisfaction, and they were learning how to rush from crag to crag to take isolated Armsmen in pockets of the eroded rock by flanking fire. Incredibly, in spite of the numbers of their dead, they were gaining ground. Armsmen were falling.
They didn’t need his gun. Cade turned from the shooting and stationed himself at the cliff head, splitting the steady stream of Marsmen as they gained the peak, sending half to the right and half into the fighting to the left.
“Tucker!” he yelled.
The lean-faced Marsman who had led the assault up the cliff was still alive. “Tucker, take this gang on the right and work them through the hills. Keep them moving, keep them firing, keep them yelling. I’ll work the rest around the left. If you see any sign of them withdrawing to re-group, keep your men moving but come and check with me. That’s all.”
“Yes, Brother.” Like old times, thought Cade—except that he was fighting now to overthrow all he had once fought for and for Jocelyn.
He dared not think of that. He had not seen her once since the beginning. Now he had a job to do and was doing well. It had occurred to him at last that they might win.
The cliff-top fighters’ insanely extravagant fire had done its work. This immediate arc of the hills was cleared of Armsmen. He saw that the Marsmen were sorted out into elementary squads and platoons—a lesson of battle, or fruit of their crude training? Whichever it was, it gave him leaders.
Collected Short Fiction Page 155