Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11

by Gordon R Dickson; David W Wixon

  No longer burdened by those materials, the Command had been set free to vanish into the rugged countryside, finally evading the Militia pressing them. After that, they had been able to re-form and use those materials to badly damage the great Core Tap project near the city of Ahruma.

  She had not seen Hal Mayne since he left the Command, but she had learned that his actions, in saving both her Command and the explosives, had caused him to be captured and imprisoned.

  She had carried out the Lord's mission, though; and afterward found out that Hal had been able to escape from the Militia. She did not know where he had gone.

  The enemy had apparently been taken aback by the bombing, and the Command had been granted a much needed period of rest and recuperation, which allowed many of its sick and wounded to recover in hiding.

  But that respite had ended, less than a Standard year ago, as the same Militia officer who had once harried them nearly to their destruction returned to the field, armed with higher rank and more soldiers and resources.

  The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, she thought, wryly. For just as Hal Mayne had rescued her Command and her mission, so he had somehow been the factor that caused the officer Barbage to hound them. Barbage had a past history with the young Earthman, that apparently energized him far beyond any Militia officer the Command had faced in the past.

  One resource Barbage had been given, that past Militia pursuers had lacked, was aerial reconnaissance. Satellites capable of close-resolution viewing, and aircraft capable of similar tasks, were exceedingly rare on the Younger Worlds; they were too expensive, in terms of metal, fuel and manufacturing capability, to be easily purchased. Most Younger World military establishments were not willing to spend their scarce resources on a tool so little needed and so easily destroyed by anyone with access to any of a variety of cheap, easy-to-obtain anti-aircraft weapons.

  But Barbage had a few aircraft, and she believed that if the Command tried to move on through this freshly fallen snow, its tracks might be easily spotted from above, setting the pursuit back on their trail.

  So they would rest, waiting out their enemy, who might become distracted or confused, or shift his attentions elsewhere.

  The Command was in much better condition sixteen days later, when it reached the head of Esther's Valley, a broad reach of stony soil whose farmer inhabitants were largely sympathetic to the idea of rebellion. The Command intended to split into small, harmless-appearing groups that, traveling openly, could filter down to the valley's lower end, where they would rendezvous briefly before splitting up once more, to head out across the plains toward their intended target, the Militia arsenal at Gracegiven.

  But even before the Command reached a likely place in which to stop and sort itself into smaller units, one of the scouts returned from the valley, to report there were two white shirts and a gray shirt—the latter with a large triangular burn mark on it—drying on a clothesline outside the first house they had come to. It was a signal known among the Commands: there was important news to be had.

  "Two weeks without a sign of the Accursed," the youngster Mose Palomares said. "I knew it couldn't last."

  Behind him, Joralmon Troy, one of Rukh's veterans, did not even try to suppress a laugh. Mose had proclaimed, just last night, that this time they had well and truly shaken the Militia off their trail. Mose was more than a little mercurial in temperament, Joralmon knew, but in action he became cool and steady; so his comrades accepted his other vagaries for their entertainment value.

  Inside the farmhouse, Avila Cotter, an older woman with a burn scar on the left side of her face, told Rukh that the news had been spread throughout the land, in hopes it would get to Rukh soon; for she was the one most concerned with it, because it involved the Core Tap in Ahruma, the one her people had damaged so badly: the Accursed of God had completed their repairs to the Tap's infrastructure.

  Work on the Tap itself would soon resume.

  "It's likely a trap," Tommy Molson said that evening, the serious expression on his normally cheerful face displaying the lines of his age. He had only recently been made the Command's Lieutenant, Rukh's second-in-command. It was a position of trust, and the promotion was an impressive achievement for one who had been with the Command for such a short time.

  Tommy Molson had shown up two months after the successful sabotage mission, asking to be accepted into the Command. Reluctance, on the part of Rukh's veterans, to accept a newcomer was only to be expected; and yet Tommy was known to them by reputation as the canny leader of a very small Command that had operated far to the north of Rukh's usual range. Moreover, he had brought with him a half-score of his own warriors, bringing them to a Command whose veterans were acutely aware their own numbers had been significantly diminished in their last campaign.

  Tommy had eased possible frictions by joining the Command as an unranked member, and his experience and leadership abilities, along with his willingness to work and good nature, had won him steady movement toward greater responsibility.

  No one criticized his movement up the Command's somewhat informal rank structure; the stress of life in a Command could teach a Warrior of God more about his fellows in one month than most people would be able to learn in a lifetime.

  Tommy was quite aware, as the Command's senior leadership gathered about the communal fire to discuss the news, that none of the veterans here could hear his voice without remembering the nearly legendary James Child-of-God, who had been Lieutenant until shortly before the sabotage. But Tommy would not let that stop him from doing his duty; all here knew that, having seen that he had proceeded about his new job in a quiet and humble fashion. It had not led his new comrades to forget James, but it nonetheless earned him their respect.

  "It may well be so, Tommy," Rukh replied. "All places are possible traps for us, you know that."

  There were quiet nods among the veterans.

  "First of all, what do we know of this Avila Cotter?" Tommy asked. "Are you sure we can trust what she says?"

  "I never met her before," Rukh said. She looked about the circle. "Anyone?"

  There was no reply.

  Nonetheless, it was not unusual for the Command to obtain information from someone they did not know—or supplies, or shelter. Avila, however, was in fact known—by location and description although not by name—to many senior Command leaders, for she functioned as part of the informational network the Commands had no choice but to rely on.

  They all knew that Avila Cotter and her kind lived in as much danger as any active Command member—but without the option of being able to move about and lose themselves in the countryside. It was vital to the Commands, as they roamed, to be able to check in with known, and trusted, local contacts, but those contacts themselves were always in grave danger of being detected by the government; they could not perform their self-appointed tasks if they went elsewhere.

  So where the active members of a Command enjoyed nearly hero status among the faithful, their stationary contacts had to try to maintain as much anonymity as possible.

  "It makes little difference whether her information is trustworthy, or not," Rukh said. "I believe it is, but it remains our responsibility to verify it."

  "What about our plans for Gracegiven?" Tommy asked. "We have need of the ammunition and other supplies we can get there."

  "Gracegiven is a ripe plum," Rukh said. "Go and pluck it."

  "You're leaving us, then?" There were shiftings among the veterans.

  "I shall go to Ahruma and look into the report," Rukh said. "If it's true, I'll send word to you, and wait for you to come. The supplies you get in Gracegiven will help us with this new mission, if mission it is."

  "By yourself?" The protest came from Tallah, the Command's chief cook, treasured by all for her versatility and common sense. Other voices echoed her protest.

  "Tallah, you must realize that if this news is indeed a trap, they'll be looking for us to come in a body," Rukh said. "Traveling alone, I'm muc
h less likely to be noticed." She looked at the faces about her.

  "Nor can I depend on others for confirmation," she added, more softly, but with a steel they recognized in her voice. "I must see this for myself. Moreover, it may take some time to come up with a plan of action, and the danger of detection will be much higher for a large group than for one person."

  Fourteen days later Rukh stepped out of a patch of brush as a man she recognized left his little house to begin the day's chores. She had worked with him in the past, and knew him as a station-keeper, one of those who functioned much as Avila Cotter did.

  Bernard Farmer was a tall, thin, brown-skinned man in his late middle years; and also the Shepherd of a small temple that served a rural community. He was thrilled to see her.

  "The work of Rukh Tamani in Ahruma is known to all," he said, smiling. "Not only among the Faithful, in joy, but among the Accursed—although to them the knowledge brings a vastly different emotion."

  "All of us work equally to confound God's betrayers," Rukh said. "I do no more than He bids me, as do all of us."

  "Forgive me," Farmer said. "It was no more than my enthusiasm speaking. The news from the Core Tap has saddened all of us here. To have one of God's Captains return to afflict the ungodly gives us heart."

  He smiled.

  "Of course, a Shepherd should not need to be told that our belief in our God gives us heart if we are true, regardless of whether a Commander comes by, or not," he went on. "Nonetheless, I hope you won't be embarrassed."

  "There is no embarrassment in doing the Lord's work," Rukh said.

  The Shepherd nodded.

  "Some of the Old Prophets would have little good to say about such human weaknesses," he said. "I honor those men and women for their strength. But in our little community, we are not Old Prophets, but only human beings who seek to serve the Lord despite our weaknesses."

  His words brought back Rukh's memories of James Child-of-God, who had died not far from this area. The old man had raised her after her parents had been killed; and she knew in her heart that he had loved her as if she were his own daughter... and yet even that love, as everything else about him, had been of the implacable sort that marked the true example of those stalwart souls the Friendly culture called Old Prophets.

  She turned the conversation back to the subject of the Core Tap; and within moments Farmer was able to give her leads to other people who might be able to provide more information.

  CHAPTER 28

  The tone that sounded in the meeting room was quiet but rich, a mellow sound that evoked a fruity ripeness, as if a gong had been sounded that was made of a softer metal than most. Until its sounding, this room, the informal meeting place of the Laboratories Review Council that ran Newton, had been silent as a tomb.

  Five Council members were present, scattered about the large room as if wary of each other. At the tone the Council President, a slim, elderly man named Half-Thunder, reflexively reached to the control pad on the arm of his float chair. His hand stopped, however, before actually touching the controls, and after a moment another hand activated other controls.

  The surface of the gigantic mural that dominated the wall behind Half-Thunder shimmered, its depiction of the major events in the life of Sir Isaac Newton resolving into a complicated three-dimensional schematic that flickered with continuous minute changes. Every eye in the room ignored those, focusing only on the bright red bars that slashed across the display in six places.

  Those eyes were practiced, and it took only seconds for the body language of four of those present to change.

  "It's clear," an inhuman voice said. The voice emanated from one of the seated Council members, and its mechanical, sexless quality was a result of the same disguising effect that caused the figure's head to appear as a blur of pale blue light.

  "Perhaps," Din Su said. "Perhaps not."

  Her voice was soft, and would have seemed gentle had it not carried an edge of clinical rationality that contrasted sharply with her plump, grandmotherly appearance. As she spoke she touched a control on her chair, and it glided across the room to a position midwaybetween Half-Thunder and the figure with the blurred face, and halted in that position. She lifted a hand, to hold it poised over the arm of her chair, index finger extended as if awaiting an order to push a button, and looked expectantly at Half-Thunder.

  As he watched her actions, the President's face lost its bleak look, and he moved his own chair closer to hers. At the same time there was movement in the far corner of the room, where Iban, a woman with a fine-boned face who had been standing alone near an interior door, seemed to gather herself, lifting a hand to pat at the black hair held tightly in place by colorful combs. Her austere clothing seemed almost an affront to her elegant, delicate beauty, but her movements were precise and firm as she walked across the room to take the vacant seat near Half-Thunder.

  "Georges?" Din Su said, looking over her shoulder at the transparent door that opened onto the balcony, where another figure slouched against the glass, crushing the filmy drapes that obscured any view from outside. It was dark out there, and a heavy rain was falling, one that had been required by climatic considerations despite the weather-control fields that normally shielded the entire city of Woolsthorpe.

  For a moment Georges Lemair seemed to ignore Din Su's words. His expression was sour and truculent under his overly long red hair, and his rumpled, casual clothing appeared badly out of place amid the sophisticated dress of the room's other occupants. But after a moment he shrugged, the movement of his shoulders seeming to push him away from the window; and he moved forward to take a vacant chair near the disguised figure.

  As he seated himself, Din Su touched the arm of her chair, and a transparent blue bubble blossomed from the end of that arm, growing until it surrounded all of the Council members.

  "What's the point of using the security bubble?" the blur-headed figure asked in its machine-like voice. "The election results we just saw show that three of you have been voted out of office, by margins far too wide for any challenge to be feasible. Until your successors arrive—along with the newly elected replacements for Ahmed Bahadur and the late Anita delle Santos—this Council has no quorum, and no business to discuss."

  "The power's in our hands," Din Su said, "until we voluntarily yield it. And there are things we can do."

  "Illegal things," the disguised voice responded. "Illegality is what we say it is—" she said.

  "That's easy for you to say, Gentleman!" Half-Thunder's voice cut across Din Su's words, shrill and angry, as if the gates of a dam holding back his anger had broken open, to pour it all into their midst. "You never have to stand for re-election, and no one even knows who you are! In fact—" He produced a void pistol, smaller than the usual run of such weapons, and pointed it at the disguised figure he had just named. "—in fact, I think we have no further need of you!"

  Georges Lemair started at the sight of the pistol; but then subsided, saying nothing. Half-Thunder raked the other Council members with his gaze, his face flushed.

  "You all know it!" he said loudly. "He talked us into an alliance with that Bleys Ahrens, telling us without it we'd lose our influence with New Earth—telling us it was necessary for us to stay in office, and necessary to keep Newton on top of the rest of the Younger Worlds—but it was a mistake!"

  "Mister President—" Iban began; but she stopped as he glared at her, his pistol swinging wildly in her direction for a moment.

  "What kind of fools have we become!" he said loudly; but no one took the words as a question. "We were set to be the supreme voice in the Younger Worlds, until we let this—this—" He stopped, almost incoherent with the rage he had seemed to stoke with his own words, and waved the pistol once more at the disguised figure.

  "Half-Thunder," Din Su said softly. The President subsided, his glare losing focus, as if he were looking inward to wonder at his anger.

  "Half-Thunder," she said again, more firmly," control yourself!"

/>   His face reflected an effort to gather himself, and his eyes refocused on her face.

  "You know we never got rid of the Gentleman before only because he represents elements of the population that didn't have the vote but were necessary for the planet's functioning," Din Su continued. "Our predecessors chose him as a way to gain the necessary cooperation of those elements."

  She smiled.

  "Of course, now that we've consolidated power in our own hands, those elements need no longer concern us." She turned to look at the Gentleman.

  "Kill him," she said to Half-Thunder, watching the target of her command.

  Her eyes were still on the Gentleman, so she did not realize that Half-Thunder had fallen back in his chair, the hand that had been holding the pistol now on his lap, and sliding from it—until gravity pulled it down and the pistol dropped to the floor.

  She turned at the sound of the pistol hitting the carpeted surface, and saw Half-Thunder's head lolling backward, empty gaze directed at the ceiling. Her eyes went quickly to Iban, now holding another small pistol pointed at Din Su.

  "So," Din Su said; and looked away from Iban, at the Gentleman. But she checked her next words, and in a moment turned back to look at Iban.

  "Go ahead then," she said.

  Iban did.

  Despite the initial delegation of many administrative responsibilities to members of the Others' top leadership, Bleys had found, over the year that followed the reorganization, that his workload was steadily increasing. With Dahno gone, responsibility for the program that trained newly recruited Others had been taken up by Bleys— largely because he did not feel he could trust someone else with it.

  That fact finally brought home to him a realization of how much the entire Others' organization—and therefore his whole plan—was dependent on the individual Others' loyalties to each other, and most of all to him. Always, when the idea had come to him in the past, he had pushed it aside, telling himself he would deal with it when the need arose. But now his mind was telling him that that time was almost here.