"Somebody's got together," Link o' the Cragland muttered superfluously. "Think we can bypass them?"
Karlsarm squinted. The skyscraper poked above the cathedral, two blocks farther on. But whoever commanded this plaza would soon isolate the entire area, once enough men had rallied to him. "We'd better clean them out right away," he decided. "Quick, intelligencers!"
"Aye." Noach unslung the box on his shoulder, set it down, talked into its ventholes and opened the lid. Lithe little shapes jumped forth and ran soundlessly off among the shadows. They were soon back. Noach chittered with them and reported: "Two strong squads, one in the righthand street, one in the left. Doorways, walls, plenty of cover. Radiocoms, I think. The commanders talk at their own wrists, anyhow, and we can't jam short-range transmissions, can we? If we have to handle long-range ones too? Other men keep coming to join them. A team just brought what I suppose must be a tripod blastgun."
Karlsarm rephrased the information in bird language and sent messengers off, one to a chief of infantry, one to the monitors.
The latter arrived first, as proper tactics dictated. The beasts—half a dozen of them, scaled and scuted crocodilian shapes, each as big as two buffalo—were not proof against Imperial-type guns. Nothing was. And being stupid, they were inflexible; you gave them their orders and hoped you had aimed them right, because that was that. But they were hard to kill . . . and terrifying if you had never met them before. The blast-gunners unleashed a single ill-directed thunderbolt and fled. About half the group barricaded themselves in a warehouse. The monitors battered down the wall, and the defenders yielded.
Meanwhile the Upwoods infantry dealt with the opposition in the other street. Knifemen could not very well rush riflemen. However, bowmen could pin them down until the monitors got around to them, after which a melee occurred, and everyone fought hand-to-hand anyway. A more elegant solution existed but doctrine stood, to hold secret weapons in reserve. The monitors were expendable, there being no way to evacuate creatures that long and heavy.
Karlsarm himself had already proceeded to capture the skyscraper and establish headquarters. From the top floor, he had an overview of the entire town. It made him nervous to be enclosed in lifeless plastic, and he had a couple of the big windows knocked out. Grenades were needed to break the vitryl. So his technicians manning the communication panels, a few floors down, must endure being caged.
A messenger blew in from the night and fluted: "The field of dragons has been taken, likewise a fortress wherein our people were captive—"
Karlsarm's heart knocked. "Let Mistress Evagail come to me."
Waiting, he was greatly busied. Reports, queries, suggestions, crisis; directives, answers, decisions, actions. The streets were a phosphor web, out to the icy moonlands, but most of the buildings hulked lightless again, terror drawn back into itself. Sporadic fire flared, the brief sounds of clash drifted faintly to him. The air grew colder.
When Evagail entered, he needed an instant to disengage his mind and recognize her. They had stripped her. They had stripped off her buckskins and gold furs, swathed the supple height of her in a shapeless prison gown; and a bandage still hid most of the ruddy-coiled hair. But then she laughed at him, eyes and mouth alive with an old joy, and he leaped across a desk to seize her.
"Did they hurt you?" he finally got the courage to ask.
"No, except for this battle wound, and it isn't much," she said. "They did threaten us with a . . . what's the thing called? . . . a hypnoprobe, when we wouldn't talk. Just as well you came when you did, loveling."
His tone shook: "Better than well. If that horror isn't used exactly right, it cracks apart both reason and soul."
"You forget I have my Skill," she said grimly.
He nodded. That was one reason why he had launched his campaign earlier than planned: not only for her sake, but for fear that the Cities would learn what she was. She might not have succeeded in escaping or in forcing her guards to slay her, before the hypnoprobe vibrations took over her brain.
She should never have accompanied that raid on Falconsward Valley. It was nothing but a demonstration, a test . . . militarily speaking. Emotionally, though, it had been a lashing back at an outrage committed upon the land. Evagail had insisted on practicing the combat use of her Skill; but her true reason was that she wanted to avenge the flowers. Karlsarm wielded no authority to stop her. He was a friend, occasionally a lover, some day perhaps to father her children; but was not any woman as free as any man? He was the war chief of Upwoods; but was not any Mistress of a Skill necessarily independent of chiefs?
Though a failure, the attack had not been a fiasco. Going into action for the first time, and meeting a cruel surprise, the outbackers had nonetheless conducted themselves well and retreated in good order. It was sheer evil fortune that Evagail was knocked out by a grazing bullet before she had summoned her powers.
"Well, we got you here in time," Karlsarm said. "I'm glad." Later he would make a ballad about his gladness.
"How stands your enterprise?"
"We grip the place, barring a few holdouts. I don't know if we managed to jam every outgoing message. Mistress Persa's buzzerwave bugs could have missed a transmitter or two. And surely our folk now handling the comcenter can't long maintain the pretense of being ordinary, undisturbed Domkirkers. No aircraft have showed thus far. Better not delay any more than we must, though. So we ought to clear out the population—and nobody's stirred from their miserable dens!"
"Um-m, what are you doing to call them forth?"
"An all-phones announcement."
Evagail laughed anew. "I can imagine that scene, loveling! A poor, terrified family, whose idea of a wilderness trip is a picnic in Gallows Wood. Suddenly their town is occupied by hairy, skinclad savages—the same terrible people who burned the Moon Garnet camp and bushwhacked three punitive expeditions in succession and don't pay taxes or send their children to school or support the Arulian war or do anything civilized—but were supposed to be safe, cozy hundreds of kilometers to the west and never a match for regular troops on open ground—suddenly, here they are! They have taken Domkirk! They whoop and wave their tomahawks in the very streets! What can our families do but hide in their . . . apartment, is that the word? . . . the apartment, with furniture piled across the door? They can't even phone anywhere, the phone is dead, they can't call for help, can't learn what's become of Uncle Enry. Until the thing chimes. Hope leaps in Father's breast. Surely the Imperials, or the Nordyke militia, or somebody has come to the rescue! With shaking hand, he turns the instruments on. In the screen he sees—who'd you assign? Wolf, I'll wager. He sees a long-haired stone-jawed wild man, who barks in an alien dialect: 'Come out of hiding. We mean to demolish your city.' "
Evagail clicked her tongue. "Did you learn nothing about civilization while you were there, Karlsarm?" she finished.
"I was too busy learning something about its machines," he said. "I couldn't wait to be done and depart. What would you do here?"
"Let a more soothing image make reassuring noises for a while. Best a woman; may as well be me." Karlsarm's eyes widened before his head nodded agreement. "Meanwhile," Evagail continued, "you find the mayor. Have him issue the actual order to evacuate." She looked down at her dress, grimaced, pulled it off and threw it in a corner with a violent motion. "Can't stand that rag another heartbeat. Synthetic . . . dead. Which way is the telephone central?"
Karlsarm told her. Obviously she had already discovered how to use gravshifts and slideways. She departed, striding like a leontine, and he dispatched men on a search for city officialdom.
That didn't take long. Apparently the mayor had been trying to find the enemy leader. Toms led him and another in at the point of a captured blaster. The weapon was held so carelessly that Karlsarm took it and pitched it out the window. But then, Toms was from the Trollspike region—as could be told from his breechclout and painted skin—and had probably never seen a gun before he enlisted.
Karlsarm d
ismissed him and stood behind the desk, arms folded, against the dark broken pane, letting the prisoners assess him while he studied them. One looked almost comical, short, pot-bellied, red-faced and pop-eyed, as if the doom of his city were a personal insult. The fellow with him was more interesting, tall, yellow-haired, sharp-featured, neither his hastily donned clothes nor his bearing nor even his looks typical of any place on Freehold that Karlsarm had heard of.
"Who are you?" the little man sputtered. "What's the meaning of this? Do you realize what you have done?"
"I expect he does," said his companion dryly. "Permit introductions. The mayor, Honorable Rikard Uriason; myself, John Ridenour, from Terra."
An Imperialist! Karlsarm must fight to keep face impassive and muscles relaxed. He tried to match Ridenour's bow. "Welcome, sirs. May I ask why you, distinguished outworlder, are here?"
"I was in Domkirk to interview, ah, your people," Ridenour said. "In the hope of getting an understanding, with the aim of eventual reconciliation. As a house guest of Mayor Uriason, I felt perhaps I could assist him—and you—to make terms."
"Well, maybe." Karlsarm didn't bother to sound skeptical. The Empire wasn't going to like what the outbackers intended. He turned to Uriason. "I need your help quite urgently, Mayor. This city will be destroyed. Please tell everyone to move out immediately."
Uriason staggered. Ridenour saved him from falling. His cheeks went gray beneath a puce webwork. "What?" he strangled. "No. You are insane. Insane, I tell you. You cannot. Impossible."
"Can and will, Mayor. We hold your arsenal, your missile emplacement—nuclear weapons, which some of us know how to touch off. At most, we have only a few hours till a large force arrives from another town or an Imperial garrison. Maybe less time than that, if word got out. We want to be gone before then; and so must your folk; and so must the city."
Uriason collapsed in a lounger and gasped for air. Ridenour seemed equally appalled, but controlled it better. "For your own sakes, don't," the Terran said in a voice that wavered. "I know a good bit of human history. I know what sort of revenge is provoked by wanton destruction."
"Not wanton," Karlsarm answered. "I'm quite sorry to lose the cathedral. A work of art. And museums, libraries, laboratories—But we haven't time for selective demolition." He drove sympathy out of his body and said like one of the machines he hated: "Nor do we have the foolishness to let this place continue as a base for military operations against us and civilian operations against our land. Whatever happens, it goes up before daybreak. Do you or do you not want the people spared? If you do, get busy and talk to them!"
Evacuation took longer than he had expected. Obedience was swift enough after Uriason's announcement. Citizens moved like cattle, streamed down the streets and out onto the airport expanse, where they milled and muttered, wept and whimpered under the bleak light of waning setting Selene. (With less luminescence to oppose, more stars had appeared, the stars of Empire, but one looked and understood how the gulf gaped between here and them, and shuddered in the pre-dawn wind.) Nevertheless people got in each other's way, didn't grasp the commands of their herders, shuffled, fainted, stalled the procession while they tried to find their kin. Besides, Karlsarm had forgotten there would be a hospital, with some patients who must be carried out and provided for in an outlying latifundium.
But, one by one, the aircraft filled with humans, and ran fifty kilometers upwind, and deposited their cargoes, and returned for more: until at last, when the first eastern paleness began to strengthen, Domkirk stood empty of everything save the wind.
Now the Upwoods army boarded and was flown west. Most of their pilots were city men, knives near to throats. Karlsarm and his few technicians saw the last shuttling vehicle off. It would return for them after they were through. (He was not unaware of the incongruity: skin-clad woodsrunners with dirks at their belts, proposing to sunder the atom!) Meanwhile it held Evagail, Wolf and Noach—his cadre—together with Uriason and Ridenour, who were helping control the crowds.
The mayor seemed to have crumpled after the pressure was off him. "You can't do this," he kept mumbling. "You can't do this." He was led up the gangway into the belly of the flyer.
Ridenour paused, a shadow in the door, and looked down. Was his glance quizzical? "I must admit to puzzlement about your method," he said. "How will you explode the town without exploding yourselves? I gather your followers have only the sketchiest notion of gadgetry. It isn't simple to jury-rig a timing device."
"No," Karlsarm said, "but it's simple to launch a missile at any angle you choose." He waved to unseen Evagail. "We'll join you shortly."
The bus took off and dwindled among the last stars. Karlsarm directed his crew in making preparations, then returned outside to watch the first part of the spectacle. Beyond the squat turret at his back, the airfield stretched barren gray to the ruined barracks. How hideous were the works of the Machine People!
But when the missiles departed, that was a heart-stopping sight.
They were solid-fuel rockets. There had been no reason to give expensive gravitic jobs to a minor colonial town so far from the battlefront that the Arulians couldn't possibly attack it in force. The weapons lifted out of their three launchers some distance away . . . with slow majesty, spouting sun-fire and white clouds, roaring their thundersong that clutched at the throat until Karlsarm gripped his crossbow and glared in defiance of the terror they roused . . . faster, though, streaking off at a steep slant, rising and rising until the flames flickered out . . . still rising, beyond his eyes, but drawing to a halt, caught now by the upper winds that twisted their noses downward, by the very rotation of the planet that aimed them at the place they should have defended—
And heavenward flew the second trio. And the third. Karlsarm judged he had better get into shelter.
He was at the bottom of the bunker with his men—tons of steel, concrete, force-screen generator shutting away the sky—when the rockets fell; and even so, he felt the room tremble around him.
Afterward, emerging, he saw a kilometers-high tree of dust and vapor. The command aircraft landed, hastily took on his group and fled the radioactivity. From the air he saw no church, no Domkirk, nothing but a wide, black, vitrified crater ringed in with burning fields.
He shook, as the bombproof had shaken, and said to no one and everyone: "This is what they would do to us!"
Running from the morning, they returned to a dusk before dawn. The other raiders were already there. This was in the eastern edge of wilderness, where hills lifted sharply toward the Windhoek Mountains.
Ridenour walked some distance off. He didn't actually wish to be alone; if anything, he wanted a companion for a shield between him and the knowledge that two hundred light-years reached from here to Lissa and the children, their home and Terra. But he must escape Uriason or commit violence. The man had babbled, gobbled, orated and gibbered through their entire time in the air. You couldn't blame him, maybe. His birthplace as well as his job had gone up in lethal smoke. But Ridenour's job was to gather information; and that big auburn-haired Evagail woman, whom he'd met not unamicably while she was still captive, had appeared willing to talk if she ever got a chance.
No one stopped Ridenour. Where could he flee? He climbed onto a crest and looked around.
The valley floor beneath him held only a few trees and they small, probably the result of a forest fire, though nature—incredibly vigorous when civilization has not sucked her dry—had covered all scars with a thick blanket of silvery-green trilobed "grass" and sapphire blossoms. No doubt this was why the area had been set for a rendezvous. Aircraft landed easily. Hundreds of assorted tools must have been stacked here beforehand or stolen from the city, for men were attacking the vehicles like ants. Clang, clatter, hails, cheerful oaths profaned the night's death-hush.
Otherwise there was great beauty in the scene. Eastward, the first color stole across a leaf-roof that ran oceanic to the edge of sight, moving and murmuring in the breeze. Westward, the la
st few stars glistened in a plum-dark sky, above the purity of Windhoek's snowpeaks. Everywhere dew sparkled.
Ridenour took out pipe and tobacco and lit up. It made him hiccough a bit, on an empty stomach, but comforted him in his chilled weariness. And in his dismay. He had not imagined the outbackers were such threats. Neither had anyone else, apparently. He recalled remarks made about them in Nordyke and (only yesterday?) Domkirk. "Impoverished wretches . . . Well, yes, I'm told they eat well with little effort. But otherwise, just think, no fixed abodes, no books, no schools, no connection with the human mainstream, hardly any metal, hardly any energy source other than brute muscle. Wouldn't you call that an impoverished existence? Culturally as well as materially?"
"Surly, treacherous, arrogant. I tell you, I've dealt with them. In trading posts on the wilderness fringe. They do bring in furs, wild fruits, that sort of thing, to swap, mostly for steel tools—but only when they feel like taking the trouble, which isn't often, and then they treat you like dirt."
But a much younger man had had another story. "Sure, if one of us looks down on the woodsrunners, they'll look down right back at him. But I was interested and acted friendly, and they invited me to overnight in their camp. . . . Their songs are plain caterwauling, but I've never seen better dancing, not even on Imperial Ballet Corps tapes, and afterward, the girls—! I think I might get me some trade goods and return some day.
"Swinish. Lazy. Dangerous also, I agree. Look what they've done every time someone tried to start a real outpost of civilization in the mid-wilderness. We'll have to clean them out before we can expand. Once this damned Arulian war is over—No, don't get me wrong, I'm not vindictive. Let's treat them like any other criminal: rehabilitation, re-integration into society. I'll go further; I'll admit this is a case of cultural conflict rather than ordinary lawbreaking. So why not let the irreconcilables live out their lives peacefully on a reservation somewhere? As long as their children get raised civilized—
Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire Page 4