Sedon was the third Dancer into the ship. He flipped through one hundred eighty degrees as the ship's gravity grabbed him, came down crouched on fingers and toes in the dim reddish light. Four Shield dead at the entrance to the corridor, three by laser fire and the fourth at Trega's hands, and the two outside; it left them with ten Shield, possibly fewer if Mica had taken any of the Keeper's Shield into death with her. The forty crew who ran the ship Sedon did not consider for even a moment; if one picked up a weapon, he'd kill himself likely as anyone else.
Sedon straightened, glanced over at Trega.
Trega shook his head. "The Shield couldn't bring themselves to fire. They knew who we were."
Sedon nodded, inventoried the Dancers as they came through. Himself, Trega, Miertay and Dola, Lorien and Elemir. "We lost Ro."
Lorien said softly, "Aye. I sent him on."
Sedon stared at Lorien in the dim red light. "There are stasis bubbles aboard."
"I know, Sedon. It was a kindness; he would not have lasted. The bubbles are on Second Deck, four decks down."
Sedon turned away from Lorien without further word, accepted one of the lasers from Trega, and moved off down the corridor with the five Dancers following him.
The battle for the ship was the sort of combat at which Shield excelled; in corridors, lasers against lasers. The kitjan was a line of sight weapon; twice during the early combat, Shield who were able to give the Dancers a fight survived long enough to get shots off against the advancing Dancers. The first time the kitjan brushed Sedon himself, left him numb in his left arm; the second time, down on Fifth Deck, the kitjan caught Dola square on.
Sedon looked up from killing the Shield who had shot Dola; Dola lay spasming against the deck, arms and legs thrashing, screaming wildly. Lorien did not make the same mistake again; after a glance at Sedon, he pulled Dola up into a sling carry across his back, arms and legs pinned, and said grimly, "Second Deck. How fast do you think we can get there?"
Sedon glanced at Trega, made a circling gesture with one hand. The Dancers moved forward at speed onto the nearest Deck platform, and assembled themselves into the formation tradition called the Circle of Fire: Lorien, carrying Dola, at the center, and the other four surrounding him, on their knees with their backs to him.
The safest way to reach Second Deck would be to clear out the decks, one by one. But it meant Dola would die, and Sedon had no intention of losing any more of his comrades than he must.
The platform dropped straight down. As soon as the edge of the platform dropped into the open space of Fourth Deck, the Dancers brought their captured lasers alight, and descended into each Deck in the midst of a wash of laser light. Third Deck now, and Second--
There were crew, engineers and the like, in the corridors on Second Deck. Sedon barely noticed them; the crew threw itself to the ground as the Dancers descended into their midst, tried desperately to get down beneath the wash of laser light.
Dead or alive, Sedon paid them no attention; he ran down the length of the long corridor into which they had descended. Crew covered their heads at the Dancer's passage. They did not intrude on Sedon's consciousness, not even the one who moved too slowly; Sedon snapped the man's neck and continued. If this craft were like other ships he had been aboard, the equipment lockers would be--
--here. The door would not open at his touch; he set the laser to its highest setting, sliced the door with a cross-cut, sliced again all the way around the edges of the cross-cut, and then kicked at its center. The door folded inward, and Sedon kicked again, and went through into the equipment locker. Dark inside, and the lights did not come up as Sedon entered; Sedon turned his laser back on at its lowest intensity, kept the beam pointed up at the ceiling. He moved through the long rows of idle equipment, things he did not recognize--
Stasis bubbles, there. Someone in the crew had cut power to the equipment locker, precisely to prevent what Sedon was doing, but Sedon did not let it concern him; where there were fixed stasis bubbles, there would be bubbles designed for use in combat, use in the field, and there they were, half a dozen keys that would generate their own stasis fields. Sedon sliced open the case in which the keys were kept, pulled one free and turned and threw it the length of the equipment locker, to where the Dancer Trega stood; Trega plucked it out of the air, stepped back out into the corridor with it.
The screaming, a constant since the moment the kitjan had taken Dola, ceased abruptly.
Trega met Sedon at the door as Sedon left. A single Dancer moved down the length of the corridor, securing it in the simplest possible manner, laser bursts to the skulls of the prone crewmen; neither Trega nor Sedon took notice of the task. "Take what we can carry?"
"Aye. Don't weight yourself down too much." Sedon brushed by him, had to squeeze past the bulk of the stasis bubble.
"Where are you going?"
"Her quarters."
"She's dead."
"I'm going for the courier."
"Why?" Trega demanded.
Sedon locked eyes with the older Dancer. "It's probably Anton."
Trega started to say something else, obviously changed his mind. "Very well. Meet us at the float on Sixth Deck."
They could not operate the ship, nor keep it, Sedon knew, against an assault led by the Sentinel; Marah would not make the mistake of bringing his men into personal combat with the Dancers. He would hold his pair of floats well off the ship, and shell it with the grenades.
Since they could not keep the ship, they scuttled it.
It was not difficult; the engineer Sura had told them how. A single grenade, placed against the casing of the gravity ball and activated on a timed count-down. Not knowing the actual size of the gravity ball, Sura could not tell them whether the gravity ball would implode or explode; a small gravity ball would explode, a large one would implode. An implosion would be less powerful than an explosion, but either way it would not matter much; when the anti-matter missiles on Sixth Deck went, the explosion would dwarf the trivial energies of the ruptured gravity ball.
Sedon reached Sixth Deck, the bay where the floats were kept, as the other Dancers were loading Dola's stasis bubble aboard.
Trega sat at the pilot's controls; Sedon sank down into the seat next to his, and the float lifted up from the deck, hung motionless for a moment. "Who placed the grenade?"
"Elemir."
"What did he use? Anti-matter, or a pinched explosion?"
"Elemir!"
Elemir's voice came from the rear of the float. "Anti-matter."
The float lifted then, surged forward into open night air. For a brief moment, as they left the ship's sphere, the world wavered around them. Trega was no pilot; the float rocked wildly as it found vertical. When the float had stabilized again, they were well away from the ship, and moving south at top acceleration.
Sedon's head was pressed back into his seat. He fought to speak against the overwhelming acceleration. "How much...longer?"
Elemir said, "Soon."
Trega's voice was so quiet it could not be heard by the other Dancers. "I think we should have...given First Town...some warning."
Sedon could barely draw in air. Spots danced in front of his eyes. "The warning...would have made its way...to the Keeper."
"We could have warned them...after our assault began."
Sedon took a deep breath. "They could not have gotten away in time."
Trega's voice was ragged. "You don't know--"
The night sky behind them lit with an awful glare. The wave front of the explosion chased the speeding float, caught it and enveloped it; the float rocked and shuddered as it rode out the explosion. Sedon closed his eyes, sat wondering if he would ever see another morning. When he thought it had subsided it abruptly grew worse, the missiles going; a sudden blistering glare made spots dance in front of Sedon's eyes even though they were closed, and then a random current in the wave front of the explosion momentarily lifted the float, holding it in free fall, and then slammed it back down toward the ground as t
hough a great fist had smashed down atop the vehicle.
It went on, and on, and on, the wave front of the explosion chasing the fleeing vehicle.
Eventually Sedon came to be aware that he was still alive, and likely to stay so; that the acceleration had lessened. He opened his eyes, saw Trega sitting and watching him.
"None of us saw Dvan aboard the ship. Did you?" Sedon shook his head no, and Trega nodded. "Was it Anton?"
For a brief moment Sedon had no idea what Trega meant. "Oh. Aye, it was."
"Did he say anything before you killed him?"
Sedon was silent for a long moment, as the vehicle flew on into the night, and then shook his head and said, "Nothing interesting."
"Pity."
When the towering mushroom cloud, of the largest single explosion human beings would ever release upon the surface of Earth, appeared on the distant horizon, all conversation within the floats full of Shield ceased. Dvan watched the cloud climb into the sky, and climb and climb, with a complete lack of emotion, a numbness so huge, so complete, he did not know what to do with it.
Finally the Sentinel's voice came across the still-open circuit, a voice so bone-tired Dvan did even not recognize it at first. "Bring it down, Baresst. We'll spend the night here."
"But--we have to--"
"Put it down, lad. Second Town is embers, and First Town is less than that, and there's no place on this whole Rikhall-tainted planet any better than this one we're flying over."
It came to Dvan that the Keeper, that Saliya, was dead; that Sedon, who he admired and loved, had killed Her.
He knew that one was not supposed to love a Keeper; that if he had proclaimed his feelings to Her it would have led to Demolition. He knew with crystal clarity that She had never loved him, had perhaps, due to Her sex, been incapable.
In that moment, as the floats descended to the dark plains of grass, as silent tears tracked his cheeks, and the pain of betrayal throbbed in his heart, Gi'Tbad'Eovad'Dvan swore on Her memory that he would send Sedon to join Her.
The floats touched ground in the moment that the hot wind of death washed across them.
* * *
36.
The next morning, as the sun rose over twenty cold Shield who had slept poorly and eaten less well than that, the Sentinel called Assembly.
They were one hundred and eight Shield shy of the number traditionally required for an Assembly; nobody felt the need to point that out, as no Shield there could be unaware of it.
They gathered in the open space between the two floats, cleared away a space in the tall grass, and seated themselves in a circle.
Marah opened it, said quietly, "We come here today in Dedication, in service of the Flame. Is there anyone here who doubts his Dedication?"
If there were, the Shield felt it prudent to keep it to themselves; they made the circle, one by one, no followed by no followed by no, twenty times around.
Marah continued: "We are born broken, and live by mending. You and I are Shield, servants of the living Flame. Dedicate yourselves with me, renew with me the vows of your childhood: Will you live in the service of the Flame?"
The whisper moved around the circle; aye, and aye, and aye, twenty times.
"Will you kill if you must?"
Aye, and aye, and aye, twenty times.
"Will you die if needed; will you live when you no longer wish to, if the service is required of you?"
Dvan's voice, deep and assured, led the chorus: "Aye."
Perhaps it was his imagination; it seemed to Dvan that, for a moment, the living Flame hovered around them when they were done.
Marah took a deep breath. "Well, then. So far as we know, we're marooned here. The Aneda may or may not send another ship out for us. We must decide now what we will do."
"We will fulfill our duty," Dvan said swiftly. "Find the Dancers, if they survive, and destroy them to a man."
Marah nodded, unsurprised, and said, "One at a time. Tell us what you think, as truly as you can, and then we will decide."
It was never in doubt; though some of the Shield spoke at length, and the sun climbed high into the sky before they had done, before mid-day a consensus had been hammered out.
Not even during the rebellion had Sedon dared harm a Keeper; Her loss raised an anger in the Shield that, had Sedon been there to see it, might have given even him pause.
"We shall have war, then," said Marah when they were done, and the assembled Shield echoed him; war, and war, and war, twenty times.
* * *
37.
Denice sat at the edge of the bed, watching the huge man talk. Stars wheeled slowly by in the window at her feet.
Finally she said, "They were supposed to come for you."
He stopped for a moment. "A ship should have come eventually. Yes."
"It never happened."
Dvan said dryly, "Clearly. Perhaps the sleem had something to do with it; perhaps they found the spacelace tunnel leading to the World. Whether the Flame People survive today I have no way of knowing; but the sleem survive. The craft shown in the video sent back by the Unification's Tau Ceti probe, back in '69, are sleem craft. It was a difficult thing to map the spacelace tunnels, and I doubt the sleem were any better at it than we; but if they found the World, then the World is no more."
It obviously angered Dvan when Robert spoke; but Robert did not let that stop him. "So you were stuck here, and you fought."
Strangely, this time Dvan did not seem to realize who the question had come from. "There is no religion I know of that does not have myths and legends of the days when the gods warred. As is often true, there are fragments of truth in the midst of idiocy. Yes, night face, we fought. We waged war." His eyes were unfocused, vague and distant. "For eons. Towns rose up, villages, and we smashed them down. If they used tools we assumed they were Sedon's folk, and we killed them. In time we decided that if they spoke they were Sedon's folk, and we slew them. Doubtless we were the greatest murderers in the history of this world. We hunted them across the surface of Earth, the Dancers and their people. I could tell you for days of the progression of that war, tell you how the Dancers killed Shield one after the other. It went slowly, so slowly; spread out, as they and we were, across the surface of northern Africa and southern Eurasia, without proper equipment to search for one another. We rousted them from the caves they had hidden in, and killed most of the folk there; but the Dancers were not there. In that very first attack we destroyed the float they had stolen from the ship; they had buried it deep in the caves to prevent our scanners from finding it. A tactical mistake no Shield would have made; when we found them at last, they could not move the craft quickly, and the float was lost to them. Over the course of the years we recovered or destroyed most of the hardware they had taken with them from the ship.
"We lost Shield one by one, sometimes to misadventure, sometimes to Dancers; one party of four simply vanished, and we never did learn what had happened to them. We learned later that the Dancer Ro had died taking the ship, and that the Dancer Dola had been taken by the kitjan as well; over a thousand years later we came across his stasis bubble, carefully hidden until his fellows could get him to medical attention." Dvan's voice was dreamy, drifting. "We loosed the bubble and watched him kick himself to death, and that was the second Dancer. Perhaps five thousand years passed before we got the third, that was Miertay. He had ventured out into the world alone, without the protection of his fellows, to check on the bubble holding Dola. We had regenerated Dola's bubble, but somehow he knew that it was not as they had left it; instead of heading back the way he had come, he continued on until he was sure he was being followed, and then he attacked us. He took four Shield with him, but I snapped his spine with my own hands."
"And then you found the Dancers."
The improbably black eyes gazed at Denice without expression. "Yes. Thirty-seven thousand years ago. It had been, oh, some thousands of years since we had last come upon a group of humans who spoke. The Dancers r
emained, somewhere, we knew that; but the exiles, and their children, we had hunted them into extinction. What was left could hardly be called human; the roaming tribes of savages who exterminated the Neanderthal. And we continued the hunt for the Dancers, but we no longer expected to find them, for such a great time had passed with no sign. We knew they had taken slowtime keys from the ship before destroying it; we thought that perhaps they had enclosed themselves in a stasis bubble somewhere, all the Dancers together, to await a better day.
"And then one of our search parties came across Indo.
"He was living among a tribe of the natives, living as one of them. He had done something to age himself, to make himself appear one of them; his hair was half gone, and his skin had grown wrinkles like theirs. Neither of the Shield in the party recognized him; they could not have hidden their recognition from the likes of Indo. The memory retrieval skills taught the Shield are slow, particularly with older data, and by the time of which I tell you, no Shield had seen Indo in twelve or thirteen thousand years. But though slow, our memories work well; much later, after leaving the tribe behind, it came to one of the Shield that Indo had been among the tribesmen, living as one of them.
"We were more careful this time."
* * *
38.
The floats sat two hundred meters back from the edge of the great ocean.
Their names were an irony; they had not floated for better than five thousand years. The aft jets were cracked and so radioactive it was not safe to spend much time near them. The rockets had not been fired even once in those five thousand years; the lifeplants were dead and neither of the floats were airtight, even supposing they could be made to attain low orbit.
In another of the ironies it seemed to Dvan the universe delighted in, not three years after the floats had settled down for the last time, the courier ship in which Anton had arrived came tumbling down from the sky, and burned up in a brilliant fireball on re-entry.
It was no surprise; the Shield had known for centuries that the orbit of the craft was decaying. But it was another sign of their increasing isolation. Even if a ship were sent for them, there would be no sign of their existence. They had no beacon. The radios still functioned, but they were strictly local in nature; the stranded Shield had as much chance of reaching a ship in orbit with them as by shouting from a mountaintop.
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