Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11

by Gordon R Dickson; David W Wixon

  "Up!" he heard a voice yell; but he and Toni had already untangled themselves and begun to rise. They ran, crouching and gasping, to where Dahno lay, reaching him even as several soldiers came running up behind them.

  "Get him inside!" Bleys heard the lieutenant order; and hands reached from behind him to take hold of Dahno's body. Toni stood up, and backed away.

  "I think there's someone down in the doorway," Bleys yelled.

  "Clear the doorway, Stanton," the lieutenant ordered. A soldier looked into the doorway, while the others lifted Dahno from the mud.

  "Hurry!" the lieutenant yelled. Whistling noises punctuated his order, and two power rifle blasts could be heard from behind. Someone screamed shrilly—and then Bleys was at the doorway, Toni disappearing into it ahead of him.

  He ducked his head to get under the wooden beam that formed the top of the entrance—and immediately found he had to take an unexpected long step downward just inside the doorway, only to be immediately faced with a wall of sandbags shaped by a timber frame. He turned right, to take two more deep downward steps into what appeared to be some sort of dugout bunker.

  The bunker's roof was made of crudely cut logs of varying sizes, and the wall nearest the trench had been reinforced with stones and sandbags. The ceiling was uncomfortably close over his head, and his hair brushed against the widely spaced perpetual lightstrips that were providing their illumination—apparently no one had thought them worth scavenging after the local war had moved on.

  The wounded soldier he had helped earlier was already lying on the floor halfway across the room, now with blood staining her uniform in several new places, and Toni was hurrying to kneel beside her. Two unwounded soldiers were coming back toward him, and he found himself virtually pushed into them as the party carrying Dahno managed, with a good deal of cursing, to guide his large frame through the doorway and the turn. Bleys stepped aside, and the soldiers, four of them, carried Dahno over near where Toni was checking on the wounded woman; and put him down gently. Bleys could see portions of several needles lodged in the fabric of the blast jacket Dahno was still wearing over his suit jacket, as well as bloodstains on his shirt, underneath both jackets.

  The two other soldiers had gone back past Bleys and out the doorway, from which he could now hear some yelling mixed in with the whistles and roars of a skirmish apparently beginning to draw closer down the length of the trench. The four soldiers who had carried Dahno quickly passed by Bleys and went back through the doorway, but within seconds more soldiers were coming back into the bunker.

  The first two were half-dragging a body, which was carried across the room and, as before, deposited near where the young woman was lying. Toni had left her and moved over to check on Dahno.

  "Does anyone have any medical supplies?" Toni yelled. One of the soldiers, already moving back toward the doorway, checked long enough to uncouple a portion of his harness, from which depended several sealed pouches. He handed the entire harness to Toni, and she grabbed it and began to open the pouches, while the soldier headed back to the doorway.

  Before he got there, more figures filled the entrance, again carrying a body. They carried the wounded man, this time, past Toni, putting him down, gently, in the far corner. As they turned away more figures entered, also carrying a body—and this time, the body was that of the young lieutenant.

  Bleys felt a headache coming on.

  CHAPTER 10

  "Dahno's going to be all right," Toni said now, apparently still trying to give Bleys a better understanding of what had happened during his blackout. She shifted position slightly as she knelt beside one of the wounded soldiers, perhaps trying to ease the strain on her knees while she bent over to pry up the edge of an adhesive bandage and lean close, peering. Pushing herself back up, she nodded to the side and back, to indicate another body Bleys had not seen clearly up to this point. Bleys rose and stepped past her, to kneel beside his older half-brother.

  "How're you doing, brother?" Bleys said.

  "You heard Toni!" Dahno snapped testily. His face was pale and haggard, tired and sweaty and dirty. His white shirt was open down the front, with a bandage showing underneath; there was blood on the shirt. His brown jacket was rolled up under his head.

  Bleys was reminded of a moment, years in the past, when he had come upon his brother, asleep, during a particularly stressful episode in their lives, and had seen the normally smiling, cheerful face showing deep exhaustion and worry.

  "Two needles," Toni said, looking over her shoulder at them. "One's still inside his chest, where I think it was stopped by a rib, but I've controlled the bleeding."

  "Don't worry," Bleys said to his brother. "I had worse than this on Newton."

  "Maybe," said Dahno. "That doesn't help."

  "We ran out of pain-blocks," Toni said. After a pause to adjust whatever she was working on, she spoke again: "My wristpad was damaged when I fell outside, but if you can try again to get through to Henry, he can bring more blocks with him when he gets here

  with the Soldiers." She was referring, he knew, to his bodyguards, rather than any military forces.

  He also knew she was prompting him again, still trying to get him up to speed.

  "I'll try again." He nodded at her. He didn't remember trying before, but her words told him he must have done so.

  Bringing his left arm up as he moved across the room, he slid back the wide cuff of his dark gray jacket—now smeared with drying yellow mud—and looked at the control pad on his wrist. It was currently in a map-display mode; apparently he had been trying to determine their exact location. He did not remember doing that, either.

  He reset the wristpad for communications, but found the usual channels jammed. He programmed the pad to run a continuous scan of the local channels, looking for an open one; and as he watched the rapidly shifting displays, he silently reviewed what he had learned about their situation.

  Always, when he had emerged from a blackout, his memory of events leading up to it had been sharp and clear, right up to the point where he went blank—and while he had never recovered a memory of anything that occurred during a blackout, he had always awakened from them with his mind once more sharp and clear.

  This time, his memory seemed sluggish, as if some part of his mind was unwilling to expend the energy required to drive the focal point of his consciousness through the murky haze that obscured events of—of how long? He could not even pin down where the hazy part of his memories began; he had a feeling it went back into a time before the actual blackout had begun.

  Now, why did he think that? More accurately, why did he feel as if that was the case?

  Willing his mind to focus on the problem, rather than give in to its apparent inclination to blend with the fog about it, he found there was a hidden part of himself that believed this particular blackout had begun very recently. But it seemed to have cast confusion over a longer stretch of his memory.

  Kaj Menowsky, his personal medician, had told him that stress could not only retard his body's continuing efforts to heal itself from the effects of the Newtonians' attack on his DNA, but also trigger a blackout. And Kaj had warned him that any such retardation of his body's healing process would increase the period of time in which he would continue to be subject to such blackouts.

  Kaj had also told him he could heal himself faster if he could find a way to harness his own creative powers, somehow—and in fact he had done so once, in the worst part of his bout with the DNA antagonist, working his way through a series of dreams that seemed to have somehow taught his body what needed to be done; at least, Kaj had been pleased with his progress after those dreams.

  Could it be that his subconscious mind, unaffected by the blackouts, was trying to send messages to his conscious mind? Was this some new manifestation of those same creative powers Kaj had prompted him to work with? It occurred to him, for the first time, that the creative powers he had used might have been simply his subconscious mind at work.

 
It was clear he had been under a lot of stress, in the events— whatever they were—that had led to his current situation; he wondered now whether that same stress might have become so great that his subconscious mind could deal with it only by putting his consciousness back in charge. That might explain his unprecedented act of coming out of the blackout while awake, for instance. But if so, there was likely a price to be paid—Kaj would happily tell him so, if he were here—and possibly his current confusion was that price.

  In that case, his subconscious mind had left him in a bad spot. It was going to be very hard for him to pull them all out of this when his memory was foggy about whatever had happened before his awakening. He needed information above all. So far he seemed unable to remember the recent past with any depth; he could only pull up particular memories when something triggered an association.

  It seemed clear his party was under siege in something that appeared to be a primitive military fortification. The soldiers with them were certainly a military escort, so it was likely they had been on another visit to a unit of Friendly troops. But where were Henry and his Soldiers? Toni's words had suggested she thought they might be nearby—and with that thought, the memory of the events following their visit to Will's grave came back to him, suddenly and clearly.

  Henry had realized, as soon as the local military officials had stepped in following the bombing, that military people were not likely to allow a group of armed civilians to convoy through their midst. So he had taken his Soldiers undercover, hoping to find some way to protect Bleys and his party from a distance, in the event the local military could not manage that.

  The fact that the military had said Henry's people could not come along did not mean they weren't around somewhere.

  Henry had never been one for obeying orders like some wide-eyed child; in fact, he had spent a portion of his earlier life fighting against the Militia on Association. He still had a low opinion of them, which he sometimes seemed to extend to all other formal military forces.

  The question was how to make contact with Henry and his Soldiers. Bleys turned his attention back to his wristpad; Toni's had been damaged, and he guessed that Dahno's had been also; his appeared to be all right—

  Abruptly, he noticed a small blue light on his pad's display face, one he had never seen there before. He queried the pad and—

  "—me," a voice said.

  The voice was female and seemed very soft, and Bleys realized that the pad's HUSH mode had somehow come on.

  He tried to use the SEND control, but it seemed inoperable. Even as he tried it the voice resumed: "Eleven minutes and thirty seconds." It paused; then: "Do you hear me?"

  The voice sounded familiar, with some of the Friendly intonations most of his Soldiers had. His Soldiers came from a variety of worlds, but most were from the Friendlies; and while none of those used the archaic-sounding canting speech of the ultra-religious, they generally had the distinct Friendly accent he was used to. He himself had taken voice training that, among other things, rid him of the few tinges of that accent he had picked up while spending his teenage years on Henry's farm.

  In a few seconds the voice spoke again:

  "Eleven minutes and twenty seconds. Do you hear me?"

  As the voice continued to count down, Bleys tried to locate the channel the message was coming in on; but all the remainder of his communications system seemed to be cut out of whatever circuit this message was coming in on . . . and even as he futilely clicked SEND for the third time, the voice stopped at the ten-minute mark. A new voice spoke—Henry's voice.

  "Bleys," Henry said, "I don't know if you can hear this or not. Don't try to respond to this message. You can't; I'm using an emergency channel on a gravity band. Your pad can only receive, because a gravity transmitter is too bulky for any wristpad."

  A gravity band would be unlikely to be cither blocked or monitored, Bleys thought as Henry's voice continued softly. Leave it to Henry to have one more backup behind the backups. For a brief moment he felt a lightening of his spirit.

  Maybe that's where Dahno gets it.

  "This message is going to repeat at every one-minute mark of the countdown, from here on," Henry was continuing, his tempo speeding up, "because I can't stay here to keep talking. We know where you are, and we're behind the people who have you surrounded. There're a lot of them, but if we can take them by surprise we've got a good chance of getting you out of there."

  Bleys found himself nodding as he listened, following Henry's thought. He glanced up, and found that everyone in the bunker— everyone who was conscious—was watching him. They probably couldn't hear anything with the HUSH setting activated, but he had their full attention anyway.

  Toni was smiling broadly—of course! Henry couldn't have added the gravity receiver to my pad without her knowledge.

  Not only was she generally in charge of Bleys' communications, but she and Henry had a bond of their own, and would likely have worked together on something like this.

  "I have to ask you," Henry was continuing, "to try to find a way to attract the enemy's attention on the zero mark. Getting their attention could make all the difference, by letting us get right in on them before they notice us. Any sort of demonstration would help, and the louder the better." He paused.

  "Bleys, anything you in there can do might save more than one of our lives."

  The words reminded Bleys of the Soldiers who had died helping him escape from Newton. Toni had counseled him to find a way to say something to Henry about those men and women, but he never had ... he just couldn't find the words.

  The first voice he had heard resumed its countdown: "Nine minutes fifteen seconds," it said. Then: "Nine minutes ten seconds "

  At the nine-minute mark Henry's words repeated themselves. Bleys, thinking furiously, listened through Henry's message again, and then set the pad to give him a visual countdown only. He looked about.

  Everyone—except for the two wounded soldiers, who were unconscious—was still looking at him. He turned to face the soldiers grouped near the door, and then raised both arms, bringing his hands up to the level of his eyes, where they acted as a frame for his face. The soldiers seemed to cluster together about their sergeant, their eyes now all on his face.

  Bleys faced them for a moment, silent and dramatic, with feet slightly apart; and then he paced—smoothly, with short, slow steps—toward them. Inside, he was wishing he had worn the black half-cape he used on public occasions, with its red, shiny lining intended to attract attention. Still, the situation had focused their attention on him in a way he had never experienced before—and certainly his need to be persuasive had never been stronger....

  "Now is the moment," he said. And he put into those words all the training he had used to make his voice strong and comforting, sure and mellow. "Now is our moment!"

  He focused on the eyes of the shortest of the soldiers, a dark-skinned youth who had picked up a cut on his left cheek that left a thin dried ribbon of blood down the side of his face. The youth's eyes widened slightly as Bleys tried to pour his certainty down the channel between them.

  "You've performed well," Bleys said, "all of you! No one would have expected you to hold off those people out there." Bleys' eyes moved to those of the tall man off to the side of the group; and that young man's eyes widened in turn, staring into Bleys' eyes. Bleys, his own vision focused tightly down, could see the pupils of the young soldier's eyes as they dilated slightly.

  Bleys spoke on, capturing each soldier in turn with his eyes while he spoke of their bravery and worth, of the task that lay ahead, and of how their deeds would look to those who were coming to find them.

  Their sergeant, he saw, had broken loose from the spell, and was now looking with a puzzled expression at the rapt faces of his men.

  "Gather together," Bleys told the men, "and feel the trust of your companions. Each of them trusts you, as do I." He broke off, and gestured the sergeant forward with a short wave of his arm. As the man move
d forward, Bleys extended the arm to drape it lightly on the man's shoulder, pulling him in toward Bleys' own body; and as he did so, Bleys himself pivoted, the action serving to pull the sergeant away from his men, who, oblivious, were gathering in a circle and speaking quietly and warmly to each other, joy on their faces.

  "Sergeant," Bleys said, now stepping to the side, away from the man, "I know this seems strange to you." For the first time Bleys saw that the man was himself hurt, a red stain showing on his left side, just above hip level. The stain seemed large, but had been crudely-bandaged and was hidden from normal view by the man's battle jacket. Now that he was paying attention, he also saw that the man seemed to be holding his left shoulder slightly hunched, as if it, too, had been injured.

  "It did," the man said, in reply to Bleys' question. "Not now. Now I recognize what you're doing. You're one of those New People who can go around persuading people to do whatever you want."

  A Dorsai!

  It seemed strange to see a soldier from that planet, so renowned for the military7 abilities of its people, working as a simple non-commissioned officer in some little brushfire war.

  That shows how bad things have become for them—they have to take any little job they can get.

  "Some people call us that," Bleys said. "Or Others. Whatever the name, I am that. But you seem hostile; do you feel as if I've persuaded you—as you put it—against your will?"

  "You tried," the sergeant said. "But you did it to my men!"

  "Your men are needed, Sergeant," Bleys said. "There's a mission they have to carry out—one that will save our lives. I'm only trying to get them ready for it."

  "You're going to send them out there? They'll be slaughtered! The enemy can fire down the length of the trench and there's no cover at all!"