With a jolt, the shuttle landed. Constance unstrapped herself from her seat and stood up, stepping carefully to reaccustom herself to the gravity. She led the way out of the shuttle. The other two shuttles were landing nearby, sending waves of dust and heat spreading out from their points of impact. Constance waited until they were down and then lifted a finger to check the air. There was a weighty breeze coming toward her, toward Isabellon, across the pocked landscape. Constance had lived long enough on Mars to recognize that iron smell on the air.
“What is it?” Milla asked, wrapping a scarf around her head to keep out the sand and dust, covering her white hair.
“Dust storm,” Constance said, and gestured to where the storm was little more than a smudge against the sky. “It’s a few hours away, but we don’t want to get caught out in the open.” The most powerful dust storms on Mars could tear skin from bone.
“Should we wait until it passes?”
That could be hours, and Isabellon was so near. “No,” Constance decided. “No, we go to Isabellon. If the storm arrives before our business is through, we’ll stay in the town until it passes.”
“Very well.”
“Rayet,” Constance said, and the soldier stood at attention. “Twenty men, with us. Milla and Marisol, you will come with me.” She arranged for the rest of the men to stand guard at the shuttles and keep in contact with Arawn and then set off across the sand. It was not a long walk. Constance thought about what the Isabellons would have to tell her: if the System was here, if it was threatening to detonate another one of its damned bombs. The biggest question was what Constance would do once she knew where the System was. She had driven them from Mars once, and she could drive them from it again, this time for good.
The town was quiet. The first person Constance saw was a little girl who crouched behind a parked land vehicle, watching them come.
“Hello!” Constance called to her. “I am the Mallt-y-Nos. Where is your family?”
The girl said nothing, only watched her. With a jolt, Constance recognized her. It was strange to see the girl out in the sunlight; the last time Constance had seen her, she had been hidden beneath a staircase, illuminated only by the distant light of the fires from her burning town. Constance had given the girl a gun to defend herself with if the System came. She had not seen the girl after the battle. She wondered where her gun had gone and if the girl had had to use it.
She did not have a chance to ask. When she came too near—the moment she passed through some unmarked and invisible boundary known only to the child—the little girl slipped away, darting silently on bare feet into the silent town.
The first few houses at the edge of town were spread out, with stretches of ragged grass between them, the grass growing close to the underground reservoir. Constance and her people had approached from the opposite side of the road that led to the airport and out to the next town, and so they stepped through the sedge.
Earth, Constance had been told, had been an urban planet before the end, nearly every inch of its surface colonized with gleaming and glowing cities and with nature limited to parks. Luna had been much the same, though there had never been plants or animals there. The inhabited portions of the outer planets were out of necessity the same; the System wouldn’t bother to build a greenhouse enclosure over a sparsely populated area, and so Constance’s people had always lived pressed together in unlivable proximity. Parts of Mars, Constance knew, were like Earth and Luna and the outer planets. But then there were the other parts, such as the scarp where she’d built her bar and the area that surrounded Isabellon, that were still wild and bare. She’d always liked those places, so different from the suffocating urban density in which she’d grown up. If she looked around herself here, except for the bright and gleaming shape that was Isabellon, there was nothing but red Martian stone and the darkening shape of the oncoming storm.
She spotted the little girl once more as she walked off the stone and onto the paved pathways of the city, darting between houses as silently as a ghost. But when Constance and her people came into the center of the city, the same wide-open space that Constance once had seen covered with corpses, she saw no other human being.
She halted there, by the well, and her people arranged themselves in a rough circle, looking warily at the tall houses with their dark windows. A wind stirred itself to drift through, carrying with it the smell of rust and the promise of more.
“I am the Mallt-y-Nos,” Constance said, pitching her voice to carry clear through the air and looking around for any movement. “I’ve come to you again.”
Had the System been here already? Was there no one left in this town? Were they dead, or had they fled to somewhere else?
There, something. Constance turned and found a few people standing nearly out of sight farther down the alleys leading away from the center of the city, watching her with wary eyes.
“I’ve just come to speak,” she said, and they came forward a little more. A door from one of the nearest houses opened, and a man came out with hair curling down over his ears and a scar on his cheek. Constance recognized him, too; she had seen him standing over the graves of his neighbors after the battle. She knew from his face that he remembered her. A woman came out after him with such similarity to him in her face that Constance knew she must be his sister. Something about the way they stood made Constance turn to face them, addressing her words to the crowd as a whole but to those two in particular.
“I’ve returned from Mercury and Venus victorious over the System,” Constance said so that all the people around her could hear. “The System is gone from those planets. But I heard that the System has returned here, to Mars, the planet that was my home for so many years. And so I’ve returned to send them back to hell, where they belong, and give you back the freedom they want to take. Isabellons—will you help me?”
For a time there was silence broken only by the rising rush of the wind.
Then the man with the curly hair said, “Yes, we’ve heard all about Venus.”
From his tone, lies had reached him. “What have you heard?”
“We’ve heard you kept fighting on Venus after the System was gone and started a war against the Venereans,” the man said. “We heard that they weren’t doing what you wanted them to do, and so you burned their cities down.”
“You have heard lies,” Constance said. “The System was still on Venus and trying to take the planet by deceit. I made sure that could never happen.”
“We had some Venerean refugees come here to get away from what you were doing to Venus,” the man said. “That’s not what they told us happened.”
A nervous whisper went through the crowd. Constance could feel her own people growing tense at her back. The sister of the man with the curly hair stood at his back, silent but in total support. If she shot the man, Constance thought, she’d have to shoot the sister, too, or her problem wouldn’t be solved.
A moment later the thought disturbed her. She had not come here to shoot Martians, and these people were not System.
“You’ve heard a wrong account of what happened on Venus,” she said. “You know me from before. You know that I only want to free the solar system from the System.”
“Yes, we know you,” the man agreed. “And we are loyal to you, Huntress. All the same, we’d rather you took your army and found another town to help you. We’re tired of war here.”
Her army? Constance’s army was up in orbit. She had not come to Isabellon with an army.
No, she realized. But she had come to Isabellon with a militant aspect. Twenty armed men, herself also armed—the only person in her party who was not openly armed was Milla Ivanov. Twenty armed men, and she’d marched into this little town without a second thought.
“I came to you because I trust you, because I know that the people of Isabellon are brave and know the evil of the System,” Constance said to all those silent and watchful eyes. “If you say that you are loyal to me, then you have to support
me or else it is nothing but words, the same kind of cowardice that allowed the System to do the evil it did—useless words, and not enough action.”
Still silence.
“Would you rather allow the System to return?” Constance asked. “Would you rather be my enemy?”
The dust storm was looming large in the distance. It would not be long before it overtook the shuttles where they had landed a mile away. The shadow of the storm already was falling on them.
“I’ll stay here this evening until the storm has passed,” Constance said. “Use that time to consider well what you want to do. If you wish to join me, come to where I am staying, and I will welcome you. If not—”
If not, they would no longer be her friends. Constance would leave their town behind, and they could never again call upon her for protection. She considered it a fitting return: to abandon those who would abandon her.
The man with the curly hair looked as if he would like to speak, but he said nothing. No one spoke as she walked past; no one spoke as her armed men followed. The storm was near enough to be heard now, a low rumble and a high wind, but the Isabellons all were silent.
—
The little old landlady who’d let Constance and her people shelter in her inn on the outskirts of Isabellon had the most peculiarly straight and perfect teeth. She was so old that Constance knew those teeth must be false. Their perfection suggested that they were the result of System dental care, and so Constance sat in the room the woman had offered her and wondered if the woman had been System once as she fixated on those strange and perfect teeth.
The storm had passed. The little old woman had come in once to warn them that the generator might go out and leave them in darkness but that it would unfailingly go back on again once the storm had passed. Then the storm had come, and Constance had closed the window in her second-floor room to block out the fine dust, and she and Milla and Marisol had sat together in silence while the storm had rattled and howled outside.
The generator had not gone out, but the sound of its rumbling and whining had grown ever louder, as if it were close to death. Constance suspected that sand had gotten into its machinery and was slowly setting it awry.
Now the storm was gone but Martian night had come; Constance opened the window again to look out at the town. Isabellon was a collection of little lights and the vague shapes of buildings between them. Through the inn’s window, Constance could not see well enough to spot any people between the houses, but she thought there might be movement down there.
The inn was very small. There were scarcely two rooms to be taken, and it stood just beyond the city limits. But it had been the only inn to offer space to her, and Constance had not wished to force a welcome for herself or her troops, and so she had taken it. She had the room that looked out over Isabellon, and Marisol and Milla waited with her. She’d sent the rest of her followers to distribute themselves between the second room and the first floor, as they pleased, while she waited.
“We heard more from Europa, you know,” Marisol said. The girl hadn’t liked the dust storm very much; she’d never been in one. She had stood in the back of the room, as close to the center of the house as she could get, and listened to the rattling of sand with wide eyes.
Constance did not reply. All her attention was focused on the darkness outside. She’d dragged her chair to sit beneath the window so that she could watch uninterrupted. The townspeople should come, she thought. The storm was over; they could leave their houses. She was still waiting. They would come to offer her their help, and they would have to come soon.
Marisol said, “They say the System’s fighting some Europan resistance groups but that it’s winning. They say the System’s definitely there.”
“Do you want to go to Europa, Marisol?” Constance asked.
“I’ll go wherever you tell me to go, Huntress. But I don’t want to stay here.”
“She may have a point,” Milla said quietly. She had brought a chair to sit across from Constance, beside the same window. Milla was not looking out the window, though. She was watching Constance.
“Does she,” said Constance, and returned her attention to the place from which the townspeople would come, but Milla did not let her escape the conversation.
“They’re not coming,” she said in her crisp, clear Terran accent. The accent of a dead and gone world. “We have waited long enough. They’re not coming.”
“I’ll wait a little longer,” Constance said.
“Your people are growing restless.”
The conversation below had been growing steadily in volume, a low rumble more melodious than the generator outside and a good indication that her troops were indeed becoming restless. “Send the others on ahead,” Constance said to Marisol. “Tell them to ready the ship for flight. I will join them shortly.”
“You intend to wait alone?” Milla asked.
“I will join them shortly.”
“I do not think that is wise.”
Milla did not flinch beneath her forbidding look, but Ivan never had done so either, and he had always given way to her regardless.
Milla said, “Keep Rayet here.”
“Fine,” Constance said.
Milla turned to Marisol, who was standing just outside their conversation like a child seeing her parents fight. “Marisol, send Rayet in here to join the Mallt-y-Nos and myself. Then take the rest back to the ship and make ready for departure.”
“Go with Marisol,” Constance said.
“No,” Milla said calmly.
“Go with Marisol,” Constance said again.
“No,” said Milla, and folded her hands in her lap, immobile as stone.
It was not worth the struggle. Constance said to Marisol, who was hovering uncertainly near the door, “Do as she said. And send the landlady up.” She might as well leave behind one Isabellon who did not loathe her.
Marisol left. Constance resumed staring out the window.
Marisol came back up before long, her light steps shadowed by the heavier tread of those following her.
“The landlady isn’t here,” she said, leaning into the room. Rayet came up behind her and entered the room in silence to stand at attention. “No one’s seen her for an hour.”
“Then leave it,” Constance said. The landlady probably had gone out for supplies or perhaps to meet with the rest of the town. “Take the rest back to the shuttles, Marisol.”
The inn was quieter once they’d gone. There was no sound but the rumble of the generator and the softer breaths of Milla Ivanov and Constance’s bodyguard.
Constance waited. She waited longer than she’d meant to, longer than she’d told Marisol she would. But her waiting bore fruit, because at last the lights in the town began to move. At first Constance did not believe what she saw, and then, as she watched, she was sure. With lanterns, torches, and lights, the townspeople were moving, heading toward the inn where she waited.
“They’re coming,” she said, and felt elation rise in her chest. They were coming; they were coming to her.
But the elation was coupled with something else, a queasy certainty that there was something wrong. Milla rose and moved beside her to see out the window better. For a time she did nothing but watch. Then her cool fingers landed on Constance’s arm.
Quietly, in scarcely more than a whisper, Milla said, “We should go.”
“Go?” Constance said. “Why go?” She ignored the instinctive sense that Milla was right, that they should leave before the crowd of people reached their little inn.
Milla’s thin lips thinned even further, but before she could reply, a door opened below and there were light footsteps coming with surprising speed up the stairs. Marisol—had Marisol come back? Why would she come back alone? Rayet had his gun out and was half in front of Constance by the time the door opened.
It was the tiny, ancient proprietor of the inn. She was out of breath, her sunken chest heaving and air wheezing out through her perfect teeth.
<
br /> When she saw them, she halted, her hands creeping up. Rayet smoothly reholstered his weapon but stepped out of Constance’s way more slowly.
The old woman’s eyes found Constance’s. She said, “I don’t want any more bloodshed any more than they do.”
Was Constance imagining that trace of Terran in the woman’s accent, coming out through those perfect teeth? She thought she could almost hear it, the imprint of the System in the old woman’s voice.
“Explain,” Constance said, turning her back to the window and the moving lights to face the woman squarely.
The woman took another heaving breath, then said, “They’re coming here to kill you.”
Why? Constance almost asked, but stopped herself. She did not need to know why. She was afraid to know why. She already knew why.
She said, “I’ll speak to them.”
“They will kill you,” Milla said.
Constance shook off Milla’s hand and started to walk to the door, intending to brush past the little old woman and stride out into Isabellon alone. Milla grabbed her again.
“I have seen one revolution die before me,” Milla said very quietly. “I will not see another.”
The force behind her words stopped Constance better than the tightness of her grip ever could. And looking down at Milla, Constance understood and faced the knowledge that if she went out there, she would die, without question.
Outside, the crowd came closer. At first Constance could only hear them shout, a muffled roar like the roar of the storm had been, but soon she could distinguish words. They were shouting for her, the Mallt-y-Nos. They were shouting for her, but not with praise; they were shouting for her with hate and hunger. They would tear her apart.
They were not System, but they hated her.
Constance said, “Let’s go.”
The old woman led the way down the steps. She moved very quickly for someone her age. System medical care, Constance thought in the part of her mind that never ceased to think of such things; this little old woman surely had been System once. Rayet went first, between Constance and whatever danger might come from below. Constance wondered if Milla’s insistence that Rayet stay had been habit or if she had suspected this all along.
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