He began to shiver, catching a moving dot of light among all the others. Shirug. The regul shuttles were too far and too small to see now. It had to be regul Shirug, catching the sun.
“NAS-12, come on in,” Saber-com said. “Shuttle NAS-12, come on in.”
He kicked the vessel into slow life and eased onward, resisting the temptation to close the interval with a wasteful burst of power. There was time. The bay was all his.
“Priority, NAS-12.”
They gave him leave to move. His heart started thudding with a heavier and heavier weight of premonition. His hands moved, throwing the little ship over into rightwise alignment and hurtling it at Saber with furious haste.
* * *
“Sir,” the intercom announced, “Lt. Comdr. James Galey.”
Adm. Koch scribbled a note on the screen, hit FILE and disposed of one piece of business, touched the intercom key in silent affirmative. A second screen showed the busy command center: Capt. Zahadi was taking care of matters there at least; and Comdr. Silverman in Santiago was currently linked to Zahadi, keeping a wary eye over the world’s horizon. Details were all Zahadi’s, until they touched policy. Policy began here, in this office.
Galey arrived, a sandy-haired, freckled man who had begun to have lines in his face. Galey looked distressed—ought to be, summoned directly to this office for debriefing. The eyes flicked to the corner, where a high-ranking regul had lately died; Koch did not miss it, returning the offered courtesies.
“Sir,” Galey said.
“You set SurTac Duncan downworld in good order?”
“Yes, sir. No trouble.”
“You volunteered for that flight.”
Galey was masked in courtesies. The face failed to react to that probe, only the eyes, and that but slightly, betraying nothing.
“Want you to sit down,” Koch said. “Relax. Do it.”
The man looked about him, found the only chair available, drew it over and sat on the edge of it. Koch waited. Galey dutifully eased himself back and positioned his arms. Sweet was standing on Galey’s face, which might be from change of temperature and might not. Careers rose and fell in this office.
“Why?” Koch pursued him. “The man walks into this office wearing mri robes, asks for a cease-fire, then guns down a ranking regul ally. Security says he’s gone entirely mri, inside and out. Science department agrees. You imagined some long-ago acquaintance, is that it? You volunteered to ferry him back—why? To talk with him? To satisfy yourself of something? What?”
“I—worked with him once. And I’d flown guide for Flower’s landing, sir; I happened to know the route.”
“So do others.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You worked with him—on Kesrith.”
“One mission, sir.”
“Know him well?”
“No, sir. No one did. He’s SurTac.”
The specials, the Surface Tactical operatives, were remote from the regul military, in all ways remote: peculiar rank, peculiar authorities, the habit of independence and irreverence for protocol. Koch shook his head, frowned, wondering if that was, even years ago, sufficient explanation for Sten Duncan. Governor Stavros, back in Kesrith Zone, had trusted this wildness, enough to hand Duncan two mri prisoners and their captured navigational records. It had paid the dividend Stavros had reckoned: they were here, at the mri home world; and Duncan, with the mri contacts no one had ever been able to establish, came suing for peace . . . .
Then shot a regul in the same interview, bai Sharn, commander of Shirug, lieutenant to humanity’s highest placed ally among regul, and all plans were off.
I have done an execution, Duncan had said. The regul know what I am. They will not be surprised. You know this. I can give you peace with Kutath now.
Mri arrogance. Duncan had been acutely uncomfortable, asked for a moment to drop the veil with which he covered his face.
“You worked with the man,” Koch said, regarding Galey steadily. “You had time to exchange a few words with him in getting him back to Kutath. Impressions? Do you know him at all now?”
“Yes,” Galey said. “It’s what he was, back on Kesrith. Only it wasn’t—wasn’t all the same. Now and again it’s there, the way he was; and then . . . not. But—”
“But you think you know him. —You . . . were in the desert together back at Kesrith, recovered the records out of that shrine . . . had a little regul trouble then on the way back, all true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hate the regul?”
“No love for them, sir.”
“Hate the mri?”
“No love there either, sir.”
“And SurTac Duncan?”
“Friend, sir.”
Koch nodded slowly. “You know the pack he was given has a tracer.”
“I don’t think that will last long.”
“You warned him?”
“No, sir, didn’t know. But he’s not anxious to have us find the mri at all; I don’t think he’ll let it happen.”
“Maybe he won’t. But then maybe his mri don’t want him speaking for them. Maybe he told the truth and maybe he didn’t. There are weapons on that world worth reckoning with.”
“Wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Your first run down there, you took damage.”
“Some. Shaken about. What I hear, it’s old stuff. I didn’t see anything to say different; no fields, no life, no ships. Nothing, either time. Only ruins. That’s what I hear it was.”
“Less than that down there now.”
“Yes, sir.”
A dying world, cities decayed and empty, machines drawing solar power to live: armaments returning fire with mechanical lack of passion; and the mri themselves . . . .
Rock and sand, Duncan had said, dune and flats. The mri will not be easy to find.
If it’s true, Koch thought. If—there are no ships in their control, and if all the cities are machine life only.
“You think they pose no threat to us,” Koch said.
“Wouldn’t know that either, sir.”
There was a feeling of cold at Koch’s gut. It lived there, sometimes small, sometimes—when he thought of the voyage behind them—larger. It grew when he thought of the hundred twenty-odd worlds at their backs, a swath which marked the trail mri had followed out from Kutath to Kesrith, a trail eons old at the beginning and recent at the farther end, in human space, where the mri had been massacred. Before that, along that strip—all worlds were scoured of life . . . more than desert: dead.
Mri hired themselves for mercenaries. Presumably they had done so more than once, until the regul turned on them and ended them.
Ended a progress across the galaxy which left no life in its wake, a hundred twenty-odd systems which by all statistical process should have held life, which might have supported intelligent species.
Void, if they had ever been there . . . gone, without memory, even to know what they had been, why the mri had passed there, or what they had sought in passing.
Only Kesrith survived, trail’s end.
I have done an execution, Duncan had said, black-robed, mri to the heart of him. And: The regul know what I am.
“Bai Sharn,” Koch said, “is being transported back to her ship. There is no regul authority with us now; the rest are only younglings. They can probably handle Shirug competently enough, but nothing more, without some adult to direct them. That puts things wholly into our laps. We deal with the mri, if Duncan can get their holy she’pan to come in and talk peace. We run operations up here. And if we misread signals, we don’t get any second chance. If we get ourselves ambushed, if we die here—then the next thing human space and regul may know is more mri arriving, to take up the track the others left at Kesrith, and this time, this time with a grudge. The thing we’ve seen . . . continued. Is that understood, out among the crew?”
“Yes, sir,” Galey said hoarsely. “Don’t know whether they know about the regul, but the other, yes, it’s something
I think everybody reckons.”
“You don’t want to make a mistake in judgment, do you? You don’t want to make a mistake on the side of friendship and botch a report. You wouldn’t hold back information you could get out of SurTac Duncan. You understand how high the stakes are . . . and what an error could do down there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sending Flower and the science staff back down. Dr. Luiz and Boaz are friends of his. He’ll talk with them, trust them, as far as he likely trusts any human now. I have need of someone else, potentially. What we want is a substitute for a SurTac, someone who can operate in that kind of terrain.” He watched the apprehension grow, and a twinge of pity came on him. “Our options are limited. We have pilots we could better risk. You’re rated for Santiago, and you know your value . . . don’t have to tell you that. But it’s not a matter of skill in that department. It’s the land, and a sense of things—you understand what I’m saying.”
“Sir—”
“I want you first of all reserved. Just prep. We keep our options open. Maybe things will work out with mri contact. If not . . . you have a good rapport with the civs, don’t you?”
“I’ve been in and out of the ship more than most, maybe.”
“They know you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In some things down there, that could be valuable; and you’ve been in the desert.”
“Yes, sir,” the answer came faintly.
“I want you available, whenever and wherever SurTac Duncan comes into contact with us; I want you available—if he doesn’t. Willing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll have some semblance of an office, whatever scan materials we come up with, original and interpreted. Whatever you think you need.” Koch delayed a moment more, pursed his lips in thought. “It took Duncan some few days to get from the mri to groundbase; allow—ten, eleven days. That’s the margin. Understood?”
It was; it very much was, Koch reckoned. He had a sour taste in his mouth for the necessity.
One covered all the possibilities.
* * *
A private office: that was status. Someone had put a card on the door, the temporary sort: LT COMDR JAMES R GALEY, RECON & OPERATIONS. Galey keyed open the lock, turned on the light, finding a bare efficiency setup, barren walls, down to the rivets; and a desk and a comp terminal. He settled in behind the desk, shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar chair, keyed in library.
ORDERS: the machine interrupted him with its own program. He signaled acceptance. SELECT COMPATIBLE CREW OF THREE AND RESERVE CREW, GROUND OPERATIONS, REPORT CHOICE ADM SOONEST.
He leaned back, hands sweating. He little liked the prospect of taking himself down there; the matter of selecting others for a high-risk operation was even less to his taste.
He made up a demanding qualifications list and started search through personnel. Comp denied having any personnel with dry-lands experience. He erased that requirement and started through the others, erased yet another requirement and ran it again, with the sense of desperation he began to understand that Koch shared.
They were Haveners on this mission, and for all the several world-patches on his sleeve, won on this ship, there was nothing they had met like this save Kesrith itself; there was no time at which they had relied on themselves and not on their machines. Saber had not been chosen for this mission: it had gone because it was available. As for experience with mri—none of them had had that, save at long range.
Devastation from orbit: that had been their function until now. Now there was the barest hope this would not be the case. He was not given to personal enthusiasm in his assignments; but this one—a means of avoiding slaughter—that possibility occurred to him.
Or the possibility of being the one to call down holocaust: that was the other face of the matter.
He did not sleep well. He sat by day and pored over what data they could give him, the scan their orbiting eyes could gather, the monotone reports of comp that no contact had been made.
Flower descended to the surface. Data returned from that source. Day by day, there was no reply from Duncan, no sighting of mri.
He received word from the admiral’s office: SELECTIONS RATIFIED. SHIBO, KADARIN, LANE: MAIN MISSION. HARRIS, NORTH, BRIGHT, MAGEE: BACKUP. PROCEED.
The days crawled past, measured in the piecing of maps and vexing lapses in ground-space communication as Na’i’in’s storms crept like plague across its sickly face. He took what information Saber’s mapping department would give him, prowled Supply, thinking.
The office became papered with charts, a composite of the world, overlaid in plastics, red-inked at those sites identified in scan, mri cities, potential targets.
He talked with the crew, gave them warning. There was still the chance that the whole project would be scrubbed, that by some miracle Flower would call up contact, declaring peace a reality, the matter solved, the mri willing to deal.
The hope ebbed, hourly.
Chapter Two
Windshift had begun, that which each evening attended the cooling of the land, and Hlil tucked his black robes the more closely about him as he rested on his heels, scanning the dunes, taking breath after his long walking.
The tribe was not far now, tucked down just over the slope by the rim, where the land fell away in days’ marches of terraces and cliffs, and the sea chasms gaped, empty in this last age of the world. Sen-caste said that even that void would fill, ultimately, the sands off the high flats drifting as they did in sandfalls and curtains off the windy edges, to the far, hazy depths. Somewhere out there was the bottom of the world, where all motion stopped, forever; and that null-place grew, yearly, eating away at the world. The chasms girdled the earth; but they were finite, and there were no more mountains, for they had all worn away to nubs. It was a place, this site near the rims, where one could look into time, and back from it; it quieted the soul, reminded one of eternity, in this moment that one could not look into the skies without dreading some movement, or reckoning with alien presence.
The ruins of An-ehon lay just over the horizon to the north, to remind them of that power, which had made them fugitives in their own land, robbed of tents, of belongings, of every least thing but what they had worn the morning of the calamity. There was the bitterness of looking about the camp, and missing so many, so very many, so that at every turn, one would think of one of the lost as if that one were in camp, and then realize, and shiver. He was kel’en, of the warrior caste; death was his province, and it was permitted him to grieve, but he did not. There was a dull bewilderment in that part of him which ought by rights to be touched. In recent days he felt outnumbered by the dead, as if all the countless who had gone into the Dark in the slow ages of the sea’s dying ought rather to mourn the living. He did not comprehend the causes of things. Being kel’en, he neither read nor wrote, held nothing of the wisdom of sen-caste, which sat at the feet of a she’pan alien to this world and learned. He knew only the use of his weapons, and the kel-law, those things which were proper for a kel’en to know.
It had become appropriate to know things beyond Kutath; he tried, at least. The Kel was the caste which veiled, the Face that Looked Outward. That Outward had become more than the next rising of the land; it was outsiders and ships and a manner of fighting which the ages had made only memory on Kutath, and pride and the Holy the Kel defended forbade that he should flinch from facing it, since it came.
They had a kel’anth, the gods defend them! who had come out of that Dark; they had a she’pan who had taken them from the gentle she’pan who had Mothered the tribe before her . . . young and scarred with the kel-scars on her face; fit, he thought, that the she’pan of this age should bear kel-marks, which testified she once had been of Kel-caste, had once attained skill with weapons. A she’pan of a colder, fiercer stamp, this Melein s’Intel; no Mother to play with the children of the Kath as their own Sochil had done, to spend more time with the gentle Kath than with Sen-caste, to
love rather than to be wise. Melein was a chill wind, a breath out of the Dark; and as for her kel’anth, her warrior-leader . . . .
Him, Hlil almost hated, not for the dead in An-ehon, which might be just; but for the kel’anth he had killed to take the tribe. It was a selfish hate, and Hlil resisted it; such resentments demeaned Merai, who had lost challenge to this Niun s’Intel. Merai had died, in fact, because gentle Sochil had turned fierce when challenged: fear, perhaps; or a mother’s bewildered rage, that a stranger-she’pan demanded her children of her, to lead them where she did not know.
So Merai was dead; and Sochil, dead. Of Merai’s kinship there was only his sister left; of his tribe there was a fugitive remnant; and the Honors which Merai had won in this life, a stranger possessed.
Even Hlil . . . this stranger had gained, for kel-law set the victor in the stead of the vanquished, to the last of his kin debts and blood debts and place debts. Hlil was second to Niun s’Intel as he had been second to Merai. He sat by this stranger in the Kel, tolerated proximity to the strange beast which was Niun’s shadow, bore with the grief which haunted the kel’anth’s acts . . . which could not, he was persuaded, be distraction for the slaughter of a People the kel’anth had not had time to know—but which more attended the disappearance of the kel’anth’s other alien shadow, which walked on two feet.
That the kel’anth at least grieved . . . it was a mortality which bridged one alienness between them, him and his new kel’anth. They shared something, at least; if not love . . . loss.
Hlil gathered up a sandy pebble from the crumbling ridge on which he rested, cast it at a tiny pattern in the sands downslope. It hit true, and a nest of spiny arms whipped up to enfold the suspected prey. Sand-star. He had suspected so. His hunting was not so desperate that he must bring that to the women and children of Kath. It wriggled away, a disturbance through the sand, and he let it. A pair of serpents, a fat darter, a stone’s weight of game; he had no cause to be ashamed of his day’s effort, and there was a stand of pipe growing within the camp, so that they had no desperate need of moisture, certainly not the bitter fluid of the star. It nestled into safety next to some rocks, spread its arms wide again, a pattern of depressions in the sand. He did not torment it further; it was off the track so, and offered no threat. Kel-law forbade excess.
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