Withûr We
Page 37
Oliver remained silent and Alistair shut the door behind him as he walked out.
Chapter 38
Alistair had not gone far when he heard the sound of jogging footsteps and Ryan Wellesley calling his name. Turning, he saw his companion and a tall, gaunt figure accompanying him. He felt a flicker of something he thought might be recognition, and then he realized he was looking at Eddy Davidson. His formerly fleshy body had melted down and his skin looked older and more weathered, but there was no doubt once Alistair made the connection. With a couple giant strides, he rushed to meet his brother-in-law and gripped him by the shoulders.
“Alistair,” said Eddy in a whisper and on his lips the ex marine saw a strained version of the affable smile he remembered from years ago.
“Greg recognized him,” Ryan said. “Found him in the prison… he said to take him to you.”
Eddy had always been corpulent. Just shy of emaciated now, he looked at Alistair with a haunted and distrusting look, a general distrust of the world around him. His thick brown locks were shorn so that he was almost bald, and when he attempted a smile Alistair noticed a handful of teeth were missing or severely chipped. His skin was rough and wrinkles made him look older than he was.
“Have you been here the whole time?” Alistair finally asked. Without precisely knowing what they might be, he felt like there were other things he should have said first, but he felt out of his element. He imagined Katherine scolding him for his awkwardness.
Eddy shook his head as if to say he didn’t know. “I’ve been transported all around but they never let me see where I was. I was drugged—” Eddy’s voice caught and his face darkened. “Where’s Katherine?” There was a longing in his voice that almost made it crack.
“She’s in Rendral.”
He let out a sigh of relief that only just stopped from turning into tears.
“She was chosen to work on an experiment for The Science Academy.”
A slight bulge in both temples told Alistair that Eddy was gritting his teeth. When he spoke it was an unsteady whisper. “They told me she was…” Swallowing once, Eddy dropped his gaze to the ground and exhaled slowly. “I want to see her.”
“I’m going there soon,” Alistair told him, making an extemporaneous change of plans and eliciting a sharp look from Wellesley. He patted Eddy’s shoulders. “I’ll take you down to see her. I’ll be taking my parents too.”
Looking back up at Alistair, Eddy managed a somewhat brighter smile this time. “My God, you’ve gotten big. How long has it been?”
“Too long. I was off on Kaldis with the army for… we’ll catch up when we have more time. Right now just go back to the infirmary and have a lie down. Get something to eat. I’m going to gather some supplies and see about where we can stay for the next couple days.”
Eddy nodded and, shuffling his feet, managed to turn around. “Great to see you, Alistair,” he said without looking back, almost too softly to hear.
Alistair watched him shuffle along for a moment and then turned to Wellesley. “What are your plans?”
Shrugging like it didn’t matter, Ryan said, “I’ll go with you.” When Alistair raised an eyebrow he continued, “The idiots running this show are just gonna get everybody killed. What the hell. Never been to Rendral. How we gonna get there?”
Alistair ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I may have taken on more than I can manage. With Eddy that weak and both my parents… I don’t know… I certainly can’t take my parents on the kind of cross country trek I had in mind.”
“Just getting off the island is going to be difficult.”
“I could do it if I were by myself.”
“If it were just the two of us,” Wellesley corrected.
Alistair curled up one side of his mouth in an apologetic smile. “We’ll cross that channel when we come to it. In the meantime let’s stock up on supplies.”
They had no problem finding and raiding one of the supply rooms, although it did not yield nearly what Alistair would have liked. Modestly armed, they returned to the infirmary to pick up Eddy. Greg was there waiting for them.
“Alistair, I need your help again. Can you escort a few of the patients to a small clinic on the north side of town?”
“I suppose.”
“I’d just feel safer if you were there. I got a hold of a bus we need to put them on. It’ll be here any moment.” Greg started to turn away and then added, “Henry’s driving.”
“Henry?”
“He came here looking for you. I asked him to drive the bus. I told him you’d be coming along.”
Gregory Lushington was circumspect to a fault when it came to his patients. Alistair had transported many a wounded comrade in arms from all manner of battlefield and knew the basics of stabilization, but he never imagined how meticulously cautious the young doctor could be. He stood around trying not to tap his feet while Gregory took precautions he considered excessive and all the while, like a tingle on the back of his neck, he could feel the inevitable invasion creeping towards them.
It was with great relief that he finally slammed shut the back door of the bus and took his place on the grimy, frozen floor at the back. Stripped of all seats, it now carried ten wounded men, Gregory, an old nurse from Gregory’s clinic, Wellesley, Eddy Davidson, Alistair and Henry, who from the driver’s seat was trying to catch Alistair’s eye.
Henry put the bus in motion and it rumbled over the snowy courtyard in front of the Palace, its one functioning headlight slicing through the dark of night in a lightless city. Wellesley and Alistair rocked back and forth with the rhythm of the bus while Gregory and the nurse were careful to monitor the patients. Eddy curled up with a blanket and was asleep before they went fifty yards. Leaning forward to reach for the window of the back door, Alistair cleared off some frost with a meaty hand, opening a small viewing portal.
As Henry drove and the Palace receded, Alistair contemplated its dark form. The flags at the summit of the mammoth edifice had been struck and the flagpoles torn down. A symbolic gesture he has time for, he thought. But God forbid he should find some personnel to run the power generators. Suddenly, his body tensed and he sat upright.
“It’s started.”
Over the hum of the engine and the clunk of the vehicle bouncing, Alistair’s soft voice carried only far enough for Wellesley to hear him. His comrade in arms looked up sharply from the floor. Squinting, he could not detect all the details which were plain to Alistair, but he did see points of light hovering over the Palace and slowly descending towards it. Alistair saw the hovering platforms themselves and even the armed soldiers they carried, many taking up positions around the edges.
The platforms descended unimpeded for a time. The Palace was so still, Alistair suspected there was indeed some central command being exerted in restraint. Then, the resistors in the Palace opened fire, causing the force shields protecting the platforms’ underbellies to flicker furiously with each projectile turned aside.
Not every bullet was deflected. Sparks and small explosions of light erupted until the space about the Palace resembled a fireworks display and one platform burned. The hovering troop carriers withdrew to a safer distance, save the one on fire. Not rapidly, but in a timely enough manner for a ragtag band of rebels, all fire from the Palace was directed at the damaged platform. It was motionless for a while until, in a single instant, it went from hovering troop carrier to dead weight hurtling towards the earth. It landed with a cacophonous crash and lay burning on the ground.
By now all the conscious occupants of the bus were alerted to the battle. Save for Gregory, who continued his monitoring unperturbed, and Henry, who was forced to mind his driving, the able passengers hastily cleared the nearly opaque frost from the windows of the bus to get a better look at what was transpiring.
“Good heavens,” breathed the nurse.
“They’re taking it to ‘em,” said Wellesley with approval. “We’re taking it,” he quickly amended.
“It’s not a bad plan,” Alistair grudgingly conceded.
“The army doesn’t dare destroy the Mayor’s Palace,” said Wellesley. “And Oliver knows it.”
“They didn’t come to destroy it, but they will as soon as they decide it isn’t worth the trouble Oliver’s giving them. At that point they’ll fire a missile from a satellite and build a new Palace later. Our boys had better be out before then.”
By this point the bus had put some distance between them and the battle and, as it wandered through empty neighborhoods, their view of the fight was increasingly disturbed by houses and other buildings. At one point they could clearly see a second platform crashing down but soon after their view was permanently cut off, though when the nurse cracked open one of the windows they could still hear the battle. They could also hear fighting by the harbor.
Eventually, the bus crawled out of the city proper and into the north foothills. Alistair chafed at the pace but was impotent to do anything about it. The heater finally managed to bring some warmth to the vehicle such that they could no longer see their breath and the frost on the windows melted. The city below, as their ascent slowly revealed it to them, was a display of pinpoints of light. A couple dozen troop transport platforms were in transit above the city. Lines of tracer fire described great arcs in the night sky while the occasional flash of cannon and turret fire mixed with a handful of explosions in the southern part. Like an implacable glacier, the light show moved slowly yet steadily north, pushing rebel resistance back when it did not overtake and surround tiny pockets of it.
“How long until they overtake us, I wonder?” mused Wellesley out loud.
“One way or another we’ll be gone before it does,” said Alistair. “I’m more concerned about any troops already in the north to trap fleeing rebels.”
“We can always ditch our weapons and wait it out in the city.”
“That option is not available to me.”
When the bus finally pulled into the clinic’s parking lot, they were surprised to discover it filled with distraught people. The headlight swept over the crowd as the bus turned in. Many of them were walking wounded, their arms in slings or their heads bandaged, while others were uninjured but wandering aimlessly, perhaps there with a friend or relative or maybe recently made homeless. Several metal barrels held fires around which the cold and weary gathered, and a few munched on some meager rations while a stray snowflake or two floated to the ground.
When Alistair popped open the back door and hopped out, followed closely by Ryan Wellesley, he heard whispers run through the crowd.
“Are the Civil Guard coming back?” asked a voice.
“There’s some fighting in the south,” Ryan acknowledged while Alistair ducked his head and went to help Gregory unload the injured.
“How soon will they be here?” asked another.
Ryan shrugged while shaking his head and went to assist with the wounded. With the same maddeningly slow pace, Gregory directed them as they carried the injured into the warmth and relative protection of the clinic. When a few of the staff ventured outside to help, the process was accomplished with greater alacrity. After Alistair passed the last stretcher through the entrance, he let out a breath he felt he had been holding since agreeing to help Greg. His relief lasted only until he turned around.
Standing a couple feet away was a slight young woman, her filthy face and gnarled hair lit by the soft glow of the lights at the front entrance. Her nose was red and running, and red streaks crisscrossed over the whites of her eyes. Her mouth was parted as she stared at Alistair. It was Louise Downing.
“Alistair?” she asked as if not comprehending what she was seeing. Her gaze rested for a moment on the many weapons packed around Alistair’s person and then her surprise turned to anger.
“You’re a rebel!” said the normally diffident girl. “We let you into our lab. You killed the mayor!”
Any argument or protest Alistair might have formed was lost in the furious throbbing in his head. Speechless, he tried to move into the crowd but found that all the stragglers in the parking lot moved swiftly out of his way, denying him refuge. As he went to the parking lot’s edge, and to the hillside leading down to the city, Louise followed, relentless in her tirade.
“You murdering bastard!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “We trusted you and you attacked us. You killed the mayor!” She slugged Alistair in the back and for her efforts received a sprained wrist that made her hiss in pain and cradle the injured part against her chest.
Alistair stepped over the bank of snow created when the parking lot was plowed and, feeling less scrutinized in the dark edge of the crowd, turned on Louise and said, “I didn’t know they were going to kill him. In fact I insisted they not do it and I was betrayed.”
“You were betrayed!?”
“A lot more people than just the mayor were killed,” Alistair sternly said, having recovered his composure enough to mount a defense. “A lot more people who deserved it a lot less than he did.”
Louise’s shoulders dropped. The anguish on her face communicated everything.
“My only fault was to trust some people who didn’t deserve it. You are not going to shame me, Louise. I tricked you and everyone else to do what had to be done. Rebellion isn’t an act a man commits lightly. Rather than cry for the mayor, ask to what extent he was complicit in the rape of Aldra. How did things get to the point that a rebellion actually became a possibility?”
Louise shook her head and, still cradling her wrist, turned on her heel and left Alistair to stand in the snow. He was so shaken from the unexpected and public scene that he did not notice Gregory follow him as he went to the edge of the hill to stand next to a pine tree and, observing the dark expanse of the city before him, calm himself. He didn’t hear Gregory’s footsteps in the snow and nearly jumped when the young doctor laid a hand on his shoulder.
“You know her?”
Nodding, Alistair swallowed and said, “At the Transportation Bureau. We were lab assistants.”
Gregory handed Alistair a cup of some steaming hot beverage. “She feels betrayed.”
“She was betrayed.”
“Quite a price to pay. For you and her.”
Alistair looked sharply at Gregory, then lifted the cup to his lips and tasted some hot but dilute coffee.
“Thank you for helping with the wounded. I’ve been told you were itching to go.”
Alistair shrugged and took another sip.
They observed what they could of the city. A chill wind blew into them and brought an increasing number of snowflakes. Gregory could see little, but they could both hear violence below, and see occasional flames or flashes of gunfire. Sight and sound, both impeded by darkness and wind and snow, together combined to sketch a vague outline of a city plagued by fighting.
“You were off at the time,” Gregory began to say. “I had just started at the hospital. A young woman came in. Pregnant with her first child. And then all of a sudden she takes a bad turn and no one can figure out why. Just inexplicable. The baby died in her womb. She was unconscious when we delivered it, and she never came back. Next day a young man, no older than we are now, had a child and a wife to bury. Just forty hours earlier he was preparing to celebrate the birth of his first born.”
Gregory paused to swallow once. “That was three cycles ago, and a not a day has passed since when I haven’t thought of it. I don’t understand why things like that have to happen, but I’m here to do something about it. They’re tragic, but they’re mindless and purposeless. With study and work we can overcome them so they never happen again.” With a nod of his head Gregory indicated the grumbling city below. “But this nonsense… this is deliberate. How many young men and women are going to be dead whe
n the sun comes up tomorrow? Dead not because some virus got in their system, but dead because someone else, human just like them, decided they wanted them that way.”
“I don’t have the answer to that, Gregory.”
“Is it worth it to you?”
Alistair afforded Gregory a sidelong glance. “When you were starting at the hospital, I was off on Kaldis. I was stationed for a long time in Mar Profundo. It’s a gigantic city. On one side is the sea, on the other thousands of miles of rolling hills and dry plains.
“I spent a three or four month stretch out in the drylands to the east. I met a woman there… she was beautiful. I think she liked me… I believe I was falling in love with her. I don’t know… I didn’t know her long. I still think back and try to sort out what I really felt.
“Anyway, you can imagine how fucked up the whole operation is. Forty systems, almost the entire colonized galaxy, have about twelve millions troops with no clear chain of command. We were never sure from one day to the next who was our enemy and who we would be ordered to fight. Out in the drylands we kind of settled down into a peacekeeping unit and waited for someone else to make a move. Before our commanders got around to noticing our position and deciding what to do with us, a real enemy emerged. I say enemy only because they aimed their guns at us, not because I didn’t secretly agree with their goal.”
“Which was?”
“Independence. But this group that emerged almost out of nowhere was radical. The Goyistas. They were sweeping through the countryside attacking all offworlders and any Kaldisian who had ever conspired with or might have conspired with offworlders. My unit was only two hundred strong and other units nearby were pulling out. Finally we were ordered out. And then she came to me and begged me to stay, to help her and her family escape. They were going to be slaughtered and they knew it. We weren’t allowed to take civilians with us. A few had posed as refugees and managed to bring down some transports, so transporting civilians was strictly forbidden. I would have had to stay and lead them on foot.