Either the car had managed to call for help or the unseen observer did. A flitter from Arainn got there in time.
"A limited amount of discussion and cooperation is unavoidable," Chuan said.
Now Fenn saw brief samples of talks between officers of the Republic and seigneurs of the Threedom. It was polite; the Terrans attempted amicability. They repeated promises made at the outset. The occupation had been ordered reluctantly, after no choice remained. Its forces respected individual rights and would act promptly upon any complaint. Its purpose was only to end the lawlessness and intrigue that were hurting this region the worst, so that Martians of both races could meet the problems and dangers they had in'Common. Otherwise no one desired or intended to thrust change upon the ancient ways of the folk. When the basic objective was achieved, the constables would go home. They certainly longed to. The collaboration of the dwellers would hasten that happy day.
The seigneurs gave assent to various practical, interim measures. They made no further commitments.
The last preliminary scene showed the last convoy of carriers that had tried to cross Tharsis on the ground. Corpses lay strewn among blackened, twisted hulks. Behind them, the hills out of which the guerrillas had struck rose dark, tortuous, riddled and seamed with hiding places, toward Arsia Mons and a sky the color of clotting blood.
Chuan switched off. "The Inrai," he said, expressionless, but his voice whetted thin. "A few of those dead were theirs, but that did not deter them afterward. It made them worse at the time, in their fury. At least I hope it was only rage, revengefulness for fallen comrades."
" 'Only' rage?" Fenn asked. "What do you mean?"
Chuan pinched his lips together before he replied, not altogether levelly. "Five of the officers guarding the convoy were women. Two of their bodies were found. The other three have not been heard from. What doubtless happened would be—even more dreadful for Martian than for most Terrestrial or Selenite women. Cultural attitudes, so ingrained they are like instincts—" He sighed. "We don't suppose they lived long."
Sick anger thickened in Fenn's own throat. Such cases were rare where he came from, but he had dealt with a couple of them when he was in the police. "Why don't you—the Republic—why don't they send out armed aircraft and hunt those animals down?"
Chuan, gone outwardly calm again, regarded him somberly. "We are civilized here," he said.
Yes, Fenn thought, those men I helped arrest on Luna, if I must call them men, they just went into correction. And... at the end, I couldn't make myself do anything else about Pedro Dover.
“The Republic is also constrained by the fact that this is not habitual practice," Chuan proceeded. "By all accounts, the Inrai leaders do their best to maintain a standard of basic decency, like some armies in history. They do not always succeed.
"If we—let me say 'we' for the officials of the Republic and those officers of the Synesis, like myself, who give them what assistance is possible—if we could identify the guilty individuals, they would certainly receive the strictest treatment. If correction didn't work, and I don't think it would without complete demolition of personality, they would never again be at liberty. But how shall we find them? We cannot seize and interrogate random persons until we get a clue. That would undermine the entire Covenant, the social contract by which we live.
"It is the situation, Fenn, the abominable situation. It is the kind of thing that went over and over through the uncontrolled past, like a plague, deforming what it did not destroy. Violence feeds on itself. Atrocities become inevitable. The Inrai think of themselves as fighting for the right. So do the local Lunarians who give them aid and comfort. In fact, the Inrai come back from the wilderness at intervals and take up their open lives, pretending they were never gone. Their neighbors join in the pretense. Don't you see what incitement and opportunity this gives to the extremists, the moral monsters, among them, those whom war always attracts?"
A part of the turmoil in Fenn jumped against the other man. "Within your legal limits, couldn't you do better police work?" he demanded. "That includes surveillance and intelligence. How tight a spy net do you actually have?"
Chuan sighed. "Nowhere near what I personally wish for. We have caught a few, but few and rarely. The manifold troubles throughout the Solar System have stretched our resources thin. Besides, total surveillance is illegal and would be impolitic. It would cost us friends while strengthening enmities."
If people found out, Fenn thought.
"I trust you have seen why the Republic cannot yet withdraw its forces," Chuan said. "You will certainly hear likewise from most of your Martian acquaintances. But you will also hear that more and more of them, including Terrans, have come to believe the occupation was, on balance, a mistake, and is making a bad business worse. The law of unintended consequences."
"Riding the tiger, yeh," Fenn mumbled.
"If only it were that simple and safe. True, since their disaster on Pavonis Mons, the outlaws have not done anything overt. But the attitude of the townspeople, which was beginning to thaw, is again glacial. And what kinds of revenge are the bereaved families and phyles brewing? How badly broken down is Inrai discipline? From what we have been able to learn, their high chief Scorian has very little control left over his scattered survivors.
"If you want to understand our dilemma, you must see the event that has so heightened it." Chuan's countenance hardened. "Please brace yourself. What follows is horror."
"The attack on the Star Net Station?"
"Yes. The Inrai collected their army and brought it up under cover of a prolonged dust storm. They knew none of our satellites or aircraft had radar to penetrate that thick a blanket. Lunarians in the House of Ethnoi have always blocked any move to establish an adequate survey system, although the lack of one has cost lives that could otherwise have been saved. Privacy is a fine ideal, but any ideal can be carried too far.
"Well, I shall not preach. The storm also prevented such observers as we had on the ground from functioning effectively. They were sparse and limited in any case, being tiny and unable to move fast across large distances. We knew something was afoot, but could not tell what, and the assault took us by surprise."
"The Inrai were well organized, then. Better than might be expected from that many Lunarians acting together."
“Everything we have learned about Scorian shows he is a remarkable man."
We, Fenn thought. This synnoiont may not officially be with the police or any other agency of the Republic, but he's involved in almost everything, because he's integral with the cybercosm and it's integral with the Synesis. He just said as much to me.
Aloud: "So he wouldn't have charged ahead blind. He must have collected intelligence beforehand, known pretty well what he'd encounter and what his followers could do about it."
The tingle in Fenn's skin as he spoke, straining to keep his face calm and his voice even, became lightninglike when Chuan replied, “That was not difficult. There was no secret about the general layout of the station. It was described in the news at the time of construction, and it has since had visitors. After all, it is of public interest, and we were sensitive to attitudes in the Threedom. Full reporting should help allay local suspicion and resentment. Or so we hoped.
"Ordinarily, protection amounts to little more than a fence and a gate, with sensors, certain effectors, and their auxiliary equipment. In case of trouble, the system will communicate with the nearest constabulary base, which can dispatch whatever airborne personnel may be needed. The single important secret is the code required for entry. Everyone assumed these precautions would be ample. Who could have anticipated as desperate a venture as this?"
The information was nothing new to Fenn; he had retrieved it before he left Earth, but to hear it confirmed hardened his resolve. “Evidently Scorian planned to capture the site and stand off any effort to take it back," he said, pleased at how cool he sounded. "The police don't have a lot in the way of weapons."
"Few wer
e required before," Chuan answered sadly.
"Which made it possible for the Inrai to collect, or make, an arsenal equal to theirs in that sector, or superior," Fenn deduced. "The Republic as a whole had assembled more force to bring the Threedom to heel, but it would be largely tied down. Oh, Scorian couldn't hope to hold out very long, by himself, but he might for long enough to accomplish whatever he had in mind. Then it turned out the place was better defended than he knew. By what?"
This had not been in the database on Earth, nor on the later broadcasts he had heard thus far. Fenn tautened where he sat.
"You ... shall... see." Chuan set his jaw and thumbed the control. What cameras already on the spot had recorded sprang to view.
The scene became a rock shelf, about a kilometer long and half as wide, jutting from the flank of the mighty volcano. Upward behind it, downward in front, landscape tumbled away in black desolation, weirdly pocked and riven, against a sky gone murrey. Seen from a distance, the Star Net Station showed small: a domed building, a sensory mesh, and a radio telescope, huddled within a high barrier of chain link. Alongside were a landing strip and a hemicylindrical hangar. Lapping almost to the shelf, blurring the approaches nearby and hiding them farther down, billowed a rusty tide, the top of a giant dust storm. Fenn imagined he could hear the tenuous wind of Mars keening and feel a cold that would have embrittled his bones.
Yes, he thought, the constabulary had been pretty well blinded. Hitherto, orbiting observers, overflights, and robotic spies on the ground had enabled it to keep track of any concentrations of guerrillas. Scorian's forces had moved as individuals or in little squads, using the jumbled terrain and tricks of camouflage to stay unobserved, striking from their lurking places and quickly disappearing again. They were born and bred to this kind of country. Nonetheless, Scorian had gotten them so well integrated that when the opportunity came, they swiftly joined together and launched their attack.
Fenn had had a minor experience of a dust storm when one caught him and Kinna on an excursion. It had resembled the smoke he remembered, blown off a forest fire in Vernal. A monster like this that he now watched would veil a huge region from all spaceborne instruments except for some the Republic did not possess. It would hopelessly handicap small, slow surface monitors. Just the same—Slag and slaughter! he thought. The guts of those men!
Well, they were Lunarians. They liked crazy gambles.
And here they came.
At first hazy to sight, then suddenly clear, they burst from the dry, red sea and scrambled on upward, a hundred or more of them in skinsuits, burdened with biostats, rations, and weapons. Incredible that they could move so fast, so well-ranked, under a gravity two and a half times that of Earth's Moon. Their heritage from Terran forebears, back to apes in the jungle and hunters on the Ice Age steppe.... Audio quivered with appeals from the station director, in language after language, "Who are you, what are you doing, stop, you are in violation of law, please stop and depart before you come to harm—"
Flame streamed and burst. A section of fence peeled back. A rocket, an explosive warhead? "Halt," the synthetic voice pleaded, "go back, you are in danger of your lives."
Another missile blasted, and another. The Inrai dashed toward the breaches. Radio carried their calls. They did not yell or cheer, they sang, each man his own savage and wordless chant.
Before they reached the fence, pale blue fire sprang into being around it. Where that flickering touched the forefront of the invaders, men died. Suits split open and bodies burst asunder. Those at their backs tumbled, sprat-tied, and lay still; steam clouded their helmets, they cooked, faces reddened and swelled, then collapsed and charred. Men farther to the rear slowed, gone clumsy, as if they had plunged into glue. They pulled free and retreated from the ghostly wall.
A part of Fenn took note of every detail he could catch. A larger part fought nausea. He forced the vomit back down his gullet, but for two or three minutes, chills racked him. And a final part admired the decisiveness with which the remaining Inrai withdrew into the storm. Scorian was quite a bravo. Fenn wanted to meet him sometime, and envied Kinna that she had done so.
The screen blanked anew. Chuan's words came as if from afar, harshly reined in: "Our observers gathered what data they were able. Subsequently, our intelligence efforts have added a little information. Apparently the survivors straggled back toward their camps or the towns. Some perished along the way. This was a disaster for the Inrai. They may have lost a full half their strength, on the mountain and in the retreat through the desert. Discreet investigation in the towns has shown that many are disheartened and have resigned from further effort. Bands skulk about yet, the irreconcilables, more vengeful than ever. Whether Scorian can rally them and make them the nucleus of a new army, we do not know, but we dare hope not."
"What was that defense?" Fenn choked. "No kind of gun."
He heard the pain: "Certainly not. Do you imagine, can you imagine, we ever wanted anyone killed? That the news never mentioned the possibility was an oversight." By human journalists, Fenn supposed, though sophotects on the same intellectual level weren't infallible either. "Nobody conceived of an eventuality like this. The defense was against remote contingencies, such as a meteorite impact. Mars gets more than its share, you know, out of the Asteroid Belt, punching through the thin atmosphere. If such an object was detected, a magneto-hydrodynamic force-field would be generated before it struck."
The sickness in Fenn gave way to awe. He whistled. "Whew! What a piece of engineering."
Spacecraft used the same thing in principle. Anyhow, they did when they carried humans and particle radiation threatened to become heavy. But it was only ions and electrons speeding through a hard vacuum. He had heard that field-drive ships, moving at substantial fractions of light velocity, required more protection than that. Pulsed electromagnetic forces, as precise and complex as they were powerful, laid hold of atoms and molecules by their weak polarities and deflected them.
But to stop tonnes at a time—Well, the generator on Pavonis wasn't going anywhere. It could be as big and massive as called for. Nevertheless, it represented an incredible accomplishment. And the cybercosm had designed and built it almost casually, maybe just for this single place.
"The waves are phased to form what amounts to a quasi-solid hemispherical shell," Chuan said. That much was obvious. Perhaps he needed a banality or two. "Tragically, the attack was so sudden and so fast that many men were already in that zone."
Fenn gave him a stare. "The station director could have left the field off and let them go in."
Chuan shook his head. "The director is a robot, of high order but without a conscious mind's capacity for judgment, and this was an emergency. By now, of course, the fence has been repaired and the program changed to give it more ... discretion." He seemed to force the next words out. "However, a sophotect would have issued the same order, and the same doctrine still holds. The installation itself may not be worth a single human life, but the principle and the implications are crucial."
Fenn reckoned his best bet was to go back to the occurrence. "Why did they make that maniac try, anyhow? Do you know?"
"Yes, somewhat." Chuan sounded less miserable. He was about to justify what had happened. "It bears out our policy. You may understand this better than I, for you are ... completely human."
"What do you mean?"
"Let me show you. Be warned, you could find it still worse than what you saw before."
The screen recreated aircraft landing. Robots, a few men, and a couple of sophotects in machine bodies got out. They went among the piled-up dead. (No Inrai were merely wounded; damage to suits or biostats was lethal too.) Views closed in on hands searching through effects—a note scribbled on paper; entries evoked on palmtop electronic slates: Lunarian language, very brief, but clues.
A laboratory. Brains in chemical baths, pierced by tubes and wires; displays on screens; fragmentary phrases croaked by a voice synthesizer. Through nightmare, Fenn h
eard Chuan explaining: "The corpses were freezing by the time the police arrived. Where cells had not been roasted, ice crystals had disrupted them, including the cerebral. No revival was possible. But partial memory traces were left. They could be activated and, to a degree, interpreted. I emphasize, nothing was alive. What you see here was not torture, not interrogation. It was like playing a badly damaged recording. You must believe that. If you do not, ask a neurophysiologist, or consult the public database on the subject."
"Oh, I believe," Fenn mumbled. "I know that much biomedicine."
The screen blanked. He let out his breath. When he inhaled, he smelled the cold sweat on his skin.
"I think you need more beer, plus something stronger," Chuan said low.
Fenn nodded. "It'd help."
The servitor brought drinks that included akvavit.
Chuan stayed with his light wine. Fenn thought that maybe the synnoiont had gone over the material often enough, and in such detail, that he had a certain amount of scar tissue on his spirit.
After a silence, Chuan offered, "You may have transcripts of this, or of the complete file, with translations of the Lunarian, if you want to examine them for yourself."
Fenn grimaced. "No, I don't, if you'll tell me what it all means."
"I shall." Chuan had regained calm, although to Fenn it had a taint of the machine in it. “The impetus for the raid came from outside. Granted, the Inrai had motivation beforehand. To seize that alien building on the mountain, their mountain, whether then to hold or destroy it, would be a powerful symbolic victory. It would fan the guttering fires of resistance throughout the Threedom, strengthen hostility elsewhere on Mars, and shake the Synesis on Earth. However, Scorian would probably not have tried it had he not received a message from far Proserpina.
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