by David Brin
With the poker Macklin reached out and touched a sheet of paper on the desk. A pen and ink pot lay next to it. Gordon well knew what the man expected of him.
If all he had to do was agree to the scheme, Gordon would have done so at once. He would have played along until he had a chance to make a break for it.
But Macklin was too canny. He wanted Gordon to write to the Council in Corvallis, convincing them to surrender several key towns as an act of good faith before he would be released.
Of course he had only the General’s say-so that he would be made “Baron of Corvallis” after that. He doubted Macklin’s word was any better than his own.
“Perhaps you don’t think we’re strong enough to take your pathetic ‘Army of the Willamette’ without your help?” Macklin laughed. He turned to the door.
“Shawn!”
Macklin’s burly bodyguard was in the room so swiftly and smoothly it seemed almost a blur. He closed the door and marched up to the General, snapping stiffly to attention.
“I’m going to let you in on something, Krantz. Shawn and I, and that mean cat who captured you, are the last of our kind.”
Macklin confided. “It was really hush-hush stuff, but you might have heard some of the rumors. The experiments led to some special fighting units, unlike any ever known before.”
Gordon blinked. Suddenly it all made sense, the General’s uncanny speed, the tracery of scars under his skin and his two aides’.
“Augments!”
Macklin nodded. “Smart boy. You paid attention good, for a college kid weakening his mind with psychology and ethics.”
“But we all thought they were only rumors! You mean they really took soldiers and modified them so—”
He stopped, looking at the strangely knotted muscles along Shawn’s bare arms. As impossible as it seemed, the story had to be true. There was no other rational explanation.
“They tried us out for the first time in Kenya. And the government did like the results in combat. But I guess they weren’t too happy with what happened after peace broke out and they brought us home.”
Gordon stared as Macklin held out the poker to his bodyguard, who took one end—not in his massive fist but between two fingers and a thumb. Macklin took the other end in a similar grip.
They pulled. Without even breathing hard, Macklin kept talking. “The experiment went on through the late eighties and early nineties. Special Forces, mostly. They chose gung ho types like us. Naturals, in other words.”
The steel poker did not rock or shake. Almost totally rigid, it began to stretch.
“Oh we tore up those Cubans good,” Macklin chuckled, looking only at Gordon. “But the Army didn’t like how some of the vets acted when the action ended and we all went home.
“They were afraid of Nate Holn, you see, even then. He appealed to the strong, and they knew it. The augmentation program was cut off.”
The poker turned dull red in the middle. It had stretched to half again its former length when it began to neck and shred like pulled taffy. Gordon glanced quickly at Charles Bezoar, standing beyond the two augments. The Holnist colonel licked his lips nervously, unhappily. Gordon could tell what he was thinking.
Here was strength he could never hope for. The scientists and the hospitals where the work had been done were long gone. According to Bezoar’s religion, these men had to be his masters.
The tips of the torn poker separated with a loud report, giving off friction heat that could be felt some distance away. Neither of the enhanced soldiers even rocked.
“That’ll be all, Shawn.” Macklin threw the pieces into the fireplace as his aide swiveled smartly and marched out of the room. The General looked at Gordon archly.
“Do you doubt any longer we’ll be in Corvallis by May? With or without you? Any of the unaugmented boys in my army are equal to twenty of your fumblebum farmers—or your zany women soldiers.”
Gordon looked up quickly, but Macklin only talked on.
“But even if the sides were more equal, you still wouldn’t have a chance! You think we few augments couldn’t slip into any of your strong points and level them at will? We could tear your silly defenses to pieces with our bare hands. Don’t you hesitate to believe it for even a second.”
He pushed forward the writing paper and rolled the pen toward Gordon.
Gordon stared at the yellowed sheet. What did it matter? In the midst of all these revelations, he felt he knew where things stood. He met Macklin’s eyes.
“I’m impressed. Really. That was a convincing demonstration.
“Tell me though, General, if you’re so good, why aren’t you in Roseburg right now?”
As Macklin reddened, Gordon gave the Holnist chieftain a faint smile.
“And while we’re on the topic, who is it who’s chasing you out of your own domain? I should have guessed before why you’re pushing this war so hard and fast. Why your people are staging their serfs and worldly possessions to move north, en masse. Most barbarian invasions used to start that way, back in history, like dominoes toppled by other dominoes.
“Tell me, General. Who’s kicking your ass so bad you have to get out of the Rogue?”
Macklin’s face was a storm. His knotted hands flexed and made white-hard fists. At any moment Gordon expected to pay the ultimate price for his deeply satisfying outburst.
Barely in control, Macklin’s eyes never left Gordon. “Get him out of here!” he snapped at Bezoar.
Gordon shrugged and turned away from the seething augment.
“And when you get back I want to look into this, Bezoar! I want to find out who broke security!” Macklin’s voice pursued his intelligence chief out onto the steps, where the guards fell in behind them.
Bezoar’s hand on Gordon’s elbow shook all the way back to the jail pen.
“Who put this man here!” The Holnist Colonel shouted as he saw the dying prisoner on the straw tick between Johnny and the wide-eyed woman.
One guard blinked. “Isterman, I think. He just got in from the Salmon River front—”
… the Salmon River front … Gordon recognized the name of a stream in northern California. “Shut up!” Bezoar nearly screamed. But Gordon had his confirmation. There was more to this war than they had known before this evening.
“Get him out of here! Then go bring Isterman to the big house at once!”
The guards moved quickly. “Hey, take it easy with him!” Johnny cried as they grabbed up the unconscious man like a potato sack. Bezoar favored him with a withering glare. The Holnist colonel took out his anger by kicking at the drudge woman, but her instincts were well-honed. She was out the door before he connected.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Bezoar told Gordon. “I think you’d better reconsider writing that letter to Corvallis in the meantime. What you did tonight wasn’t wise.”
Gordon looked casually through the man, as if he barely merited notice. “What passes between the General and myself is of no concern to you,” he told Bezoar. “Only peers have the right to exchange threats, or challenges.”
The quote from Nathan Holn seemed to rock Bezoar back as if he had been struck. He stared as Gordon sat down on the straw and put his arms behind his head, ignoring the former lawyer altogether.
Only after Bezoar had departed, when the gloomy shed had quieted again, did Gordon get up and hurry over to Johnny.
“Did the bear-flag soldier ever speak?”
Johnny shook his head. “He never regained consciousness, Gordon.”
“What about the woman? Did she say anything?”
Johnny looked left and right. The other prisoners were in their corners, facing the wall as they had for weeks.
“Not a word. But she did slip me this.”
Gordon took the tattered envelope. He recognized the papers as soon as he pulled them out.
It was Dena’s letter—the one he had received from George Powhatan’s hand, back on Sugarloaf Mountain. It must have been in his pants pocket wh
en the woman took his clothes away to be cleaned. She must have kept it.
No wonder Macklin and Bezoar never mentioned it!
Gordon was determined the General would never get his hands on the letter. However crazy Dena and her friends were, they deserved their chance. He began tearing it up, prior to eating the pieces, but Johnny reached out and stopped him. “No, Gordon! She wrote something on the last page.”
“Who? Who wrote …” Gordon shifted the paper in the faint moonlight that slipped between the slats. At last he saw scrawled pencil scratchings, rude block letters that contrasted starkly under Dena’s flowing script.
is true?
are woman so free north?
are some man both good and strong?
will she die for you?
Gordon sat for a long time looking at the sad, simple words. Everywhere his ghosts followed him, in spite of his newfound resignation. What George Powhatan had said about Dena’s motives still gnawed within him.
The Big Things would not let go.
He ate the letter slowly. He would not let Johnny share this particular meal, but made a penance, a sacrament, of every piece.
About an hour later there was a commotion outside—a ceremony of sorts. Out across the clearing, at the old Agness General Store, a double column of Holnist soldiers marched to the slow beat of muffled drums. In their midst walked a tall, blond man. Gordon recognized him as one of the camouflaged fighters who had dumped the dying prisoner into their midst earlier that day.
“Must be Isterman,” Johnny commented, fascinated. “This’ll teach him not to come back without reporting in to G-2 first thing.”
Gordon noted that Johnny must have watched too many old World War Two movies, back at the video library in Corvallis.
At the end of the line of escorts he recognized Roger Septien. Even in the dark he could tell that the former mountain robber was trembling, barely able to hold on to his rifle.
Charles Bezoar’s barrister voice sounded nervous, too, as he read the charges. Isterman stood with his back to a large tree, his face impassive. His trophy string lay across his chest like a bandolier … like a sash of grisly merit badges.
Bezoar stood aside and General Macklin stepped up to speak to the condemned man. Macklin shook hands with Isterman, kissed him on both cheeks, then moved over beside his aide to watch the conclusion. A two-earringed sergeant snapped sharp orders. The executioners knelt, raised their rifles, and fired as one.
Except for Roger Septien. Who fainted dead away.
The tall blond Holnist officer now lay crumpled in a pool of blood at the foot of the tree. Gordon thought of the dying prisoner who had shared their captivity for so short a time, and who had told them so much without ever opening his eyes.
“Sleep well, Californian,” he whispered. “You’ve taken one more of them with you.
“The rest of us should only do so well.”
14
That night Gordon dreamed he was watching Benjamin Franklin play chess with a boxy iron stove.
“The problem is one of balance,” the graying statesman-scientist said to his invention, ignoring Gordon as he contemplated the chessboard. “I’ve put some thought to it. How can we set up a system which encourages individuals to strive and excel, and yet which shows some compassion to the weak, and weeds out madmen and tyrants?”
Flames licked behind the stove’s glowing grille, like dancing rows of lights. In words more seen than heard, it inquired:
“… Who will take responsibility …?”
Franklin moved a white knight. “Good question,” he said as he leaned back. “A very good question.
“Of course we can establish constitutional checks and balances, but those won’t mean a thing unless citizens make sure the safeguards are taken seriously. The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.”
The flames flicked out, and somehow in the process a red pawn had moved.
“… Who …?”
Franklin took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Would-be tyrants, that’s who … they have an age-old panoply of methods—manipulating the common man, lying to him, or crushing his belief in himself.
“It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.”
“ … foolish children …” the flames flickered.
“Yes,” Franklin nodded, wiping his bifocals. “Still, I believe that certain innovations might help. The right myths, for instance.
“And then, if Good is willing to make sacrifices …” He reached out, picking up his queen, hesitated for a moment, and then moved the delicate ivory piece all the way across the board, almost under the glowing hot grille.
Gordon wanted to cry out a warning. The queen’s position was completely exposed. Not even a pawn was nearby to protect her.
His worst fears were borne out almost at once. The flames licked forth. In a blur, a red king stood on a pile of ashes where the slender white figure had been only a moment before.
“Oh lord, no,” Gordon moaned. Even in the half-critical dream state, he knew what was happening, and what it symbolized.
“ … Who will take responsibility …?” the stove asked again.
Franklin did not answer. Instead, he shifted and pushed back in his chair. It squeaked as he turned around. Over the rims of his bifocals, he looked directly at Gordon.
You too? Gordon quailed. What do you all want from me!
The rippling red. And Franklin smiled.
He startled awake, staring until he saw Johnny Stevens crouching over him, about to touch his shoulder.
“Gordon, I think you’d better take a look. Something’s the matter with the guards.”
He sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Show me.”
Johnny led him over to the east wall of the shed, near the door. It took a moment to adjust to the moonlight. Then Gordon made out the two survivalist soldiers who had been assigned to watch them.
One lay back against a log bench, his mouth hanging open as he stared blank-eyed up at the low, growling clouds.
The other Holnist still gurgled. He clawed at the ground, trying to crawl toward his rifle. In one hand he held his burnished sheath knife, glinting in the low firelight. By his knees lay a toppled ale stein, a brown stain spreading from its broken lip.
Seconds after they had begun to watch, the last guard’s head slumped. His struggles died away in a faint rattle.
Johnny and Gordon looked at each other. As one, they rushed to test the door, but the lock was firmly in place. Johnny stretched his arm through a gap in the planks, trying to grab any part of the guard’s uniform. The keys … “Damn! He’s just too far!”
Gordon began prying at the boards. The shack certainly was flimsy enough to take apart by hand. But when he pulled, the rusty nails creaked and sent the hair rising up the back of his neck.
“What do we do?” Johnny asked. “If we yank hard, all at once, we might be able to crash out real fast, and dash down the trail to the canoes.…”
“Shhh!” Gordon motioned for silence. Out there in the darkness he had seen a figure move.
Tentatively, nervously, a small, shabby shape scuttled toward the moonlit clearing just outside the shack, where the fallen guards lay.
“It’s her!” Johnny whispered. Gordon also recognized the dark-haired drudge, the one who had written the pathetic little addendum to Dena’s letter. He watched as she overcame her terror and conditioning to approach each of the guards in turn, checking for breath and life.
Her whole body shook and low moans escaped her as she sought the ring of keys under the second man’s belt. To get at them she had to push her fingers through his line of gruesome trophies, but she closed her eyes and brought them forth, clinking s
oftly.
Each second was an agony as she fumbled with the lock. Their releaser ducked back out of the way as the two men pushed outside and ran to each of the guards, stripping them of knives, ammo belts, rifles. They dragged the bodies back into the shed and closed and locked the door.
“What is your name?” Gordon asked the crouched woman, squatting before her. Her eyes were closed as she answered. “H-Heather.”
“Heather. Why did you help us?”
Her eyes opened. They were a startling green. “Your … your woman wrote …”
She made a visible effort to gather herself. “I never kenned what th’ old women said about th’ old days.… But then some of th’ new prisoners talked about things up north … and there you was … Y-you won’t beat me too hard for readin’ yer letter, will you?”
She cringed as Gordon put his hand out to touch the side of her face, so he withdrew it. Tenderness was too alien to her. All sorts of reassurances came to mind, but he kept to the simplest—one she would understand. “I won’t beat you at all,” he told her. “Not ever.”
Johnny appeared beside him. “Only one guard down by the canoes, Gordon. I think I see a way we can get up within range. He may be a Rogue, but he won’t be expecting anything. We can take him.”
Gordon nodded. “We’ll have to bring her with us,” he said.
Johnny looked torn between compassion and practicality. He clearly considered his first duty to get Gordon away from this place. “But …”
“They’ll know who poisoned the guards. She’s crucified if she stays.”
Johnny blinked, then nodded, apparently glad to have the dilemma resolved so straightforwardly. “Okay. Let’s go, though!”
They started to rise, but Heather took Gordon’s sleeve. “I have a friend,” she said, and turned to wave into the darkness.
From the shadow of the trees there stepped a slender figure in pants and shirt several sizes too large, bunched up and cinched tight by a large belt. In spite of that, the second woman’s figure was unmistakable. Charles Bezoar’s mistress had her blond hair tied back and she carried a small package. If anything, she seemed more nervous than Heather.