"For your sake I hope that's the truth, Thomas," Snitzius said.
"It's the truth, old man," Fonda said, shaking his head. "We're way ahead of the Chemrats! But there's one more reason, and it's the one I like the best. The real reason you won't wipe us out is that you just don't have the balls!"
The man had been acting so foolishly that Peter was unprepared for the speed with which he moved. Fonda's hand darted out over the dock table behind which Snitzius sat, and grasped the old man's hair. He threw Snitzius' head down against the table with great force.
Nutmeg stood, knife in hand, Peter rising beside her. Snitzius remained head-down on the table, stunned. "We're not at war yet!" Nutmeg shouted, pointing at Fonda with her knife.
Fonda drew his machete from its scabbard and shrugged. "Well, you don't have to be some kinda piss-ant genius to see where the old man's going. I reckon we are at war, babe. And if we're at war then I can claim the enemy's head, right?"
"Correct," Snitzius said, lunging forward toward his attacker. Snitzius' right hand struck the side of Fonda's neck with a fat crescent that glinted of bright metal in the gaslight. A semicircular band of mirror-bright steel leapt out of the outer edge of the crescent, whipped around Fonda's neck, and snapped into a latch at the opposite end of the crescent. Fonda yelped and staggered back, dropping his machete and tearing at the band around his neck with both hands.
A rhythmic grinding sound came from the device. One end of the band was being drawn into the crescent, tightening the band around the man's neck. Fonda was gasping for breath as he stumbled back toward the other dock, where his associate was standing, ashen-faced. Fonda fell to his knees, face beet red, breath now gone. He collapsed on one elbow, then fell over on his back, unconscious.
"Unlawful!" shouted the other Moomoo from the dock. "Only blades are allowed in Moothall!"
Snitzius stood, blood oozing from the side of his mouth. "It is a blade," he said, and pointed.
All eyes were on Caleb Fonda as the Ralpha Dog weapon continued to grind ominously. Those closest could now see that the steel band was beginning to twist from both ends, bringing its lower edge in against the flesh of Fonda's neck. Bright blood began to ooze from where the band bit into Fonda's neck, then turned to a spray as the band, cutting deeper, severed arteries.
The band continued to tighten, the blade now perpendicular against Caleb Fonda's neck and vanishing into its flesh. Blood poured from the wound for over a minute, its puddle spreading across the polished wooden floor. The weapon's motor strained noisily as the band, now out of sight within Fonda's neck, came up against the man's spine.
Finally, Caleb Fonda's head, now parted completely from its body, rolled free to one side and came to rest in a pool of gore. The crescent-shaped weapon fell in the other direction, its motor now silent.
Tofir Snitzius stood in the dock and wiped the blood from his mouth on one sleeve. He pointed a knobby index finger at Fonda's associate. "Jeremiah McCandless, you have fourteen days to return to your master and carry our declaration of war to him. But on Autumn 26, whether you have reached him or not, our forces will commence the destruction of Mu Mu Mu. We appreciate knowing of your laser cannon—our pilots fly low and they fly well. And we warn you and all gathered here that Rho Alpha Delta has weapons it has never revealed, and has harnessed forces thought to be impossible on Hell. In my pocket is another device like the one you have just seen. It has Crispus McGaughey's name engraved on it. Its motor operates by the power of electricity. I thought it might be useful for both you and your wretched master to know that."
Snitzius stood, turned and left the dock. The silence in the room hung over him while he ascended the steps to the first gallery, where Peter and Nutmeg and several other Ralpha Dogs waited. With Snitzius in the lead, the Rho Alpha Delta delegation left Moothall, leaving behind a rising hubbub that echoed out into the Capitol's broad halls.
"The Moomoos are massing along the equator. There's a huge tent camp at longitude 16 degrees. Covered GMT Twelver trucks are moving south over the grasslands, along with large numbers of men and mastodons. It looks like they're putting everything they have there." The young intelligence specialist stepped back from the table, looking toward her abbot for a reaction.
Snitzius nodded, rubbing his chin. Bright light from above shone on the broad wooden table, where maps and photographs were spread out in an irregular grid. "And Geyl Shreve is going there too." Snitzius shook his head, his finger on the grainy photo of Geyl's face. "Peter, what do you know about this?"
Peter shivered. "Nothing, sir. She refused to tell me how she intended to leave Hell. She only referred to it as 'the pickup point.' I assume some sort of MGID-hardened shuttle will touch down there."
Peter, there's another possibility. A completely astonishing possibility!
"Obviously, Geyl is in league with the Moomoos, which means that the Moomoos have been in league with 1Earth." Snitzius picked up the hand laser weapon the Moomoo Sicarius had used during the attack at the Grand Ball. "It's no surprise now where their laser cannon are coming from. And my guess is that whatever comes to pick Geyl up will unload new weapons. It's not how I would choose to attack Hell, but perhaps it makes sense to spuds. Perhaps they can't bear to use weapons themselves. Perhaps they will hand the Moomoos ballistic missiles and then run off to hide their eyes before the slaughter starts."
"Sir," Peter said, "the Sangruse Device has just suggested why the pickup point is on the equator. There's only one spacecraft ever made by Earth that can land on Hell and return to orbit without using electricity at all. And that spacecraft can only touch down on the equator. Its name is…"
Snitzius nodded. His lips, and the lips of several of his trusted strategists, hearing the name whispered in their own ears, moved as one:
"…the Hans Moravec."
14. Nemo Station
“They're expecting two assassins sent to kill you. Instead, they get us. Filer, what are they likely to do?" Geyl looked down to the cattle station on the edge of Dis' high grasslands, where long shadows had faded to the universal gray of deepening dusk. Filer had cut the burners and was blowing cold air into the mylar envelope above them. They were descending quickly.
"They'll muck it up, Ma'am. That's all they know how to do."
Unlike the abandoned cattle station west of Sycorax, the scene below was one of furious activity. Beyond the station buildings was a small tent city, where trucks were being loaded and mastodons fed and watered. Fires sent patterns of wavering yellow light on the pale cloth of the tents. Filer released a few short blasts of flame into the envelope, allowing them to drift only twenty meters above the long-haired heads of the laboring men. Filer waved his rifle in the air.
They touched down in a corral empty of cattle. The impact made the soles of Geyl's feet sting, the six tanks clanking down a moment later. She heard Filer release the quick-action snap holding the sling chair to the brackets, and released her own sling a moment later. She stood, shaking her head from the disorientation of the impact. Her hands remained hidden under her blanket poncho, gripping an unfamiliar weapon scavenged from the dead Moomoo sicarii, which launched small concussion grenades.
Armed men were vaulting the corral fence and gathering around them. Geyl thought that they looked more puzzled than angry. Few even held their weapons at ready.
A paunchy man with gray hair pulled back tight in a ponytail stepped forward. He held a long rifle with a wooden stock in both hands, its muzzle pointed at the sky. "Goldurn it, Filer, you're supposed to be dead! Boss said sixth time was the charm!"
Filer pushed his parka hood back and shrugged. "Boss said fifth time was the charm, remember? And fourth time before that."
Geyl drew up beside Filer. The conversation made no sense to her.
"And you said you'd swored off babes!"
Filer clapped his arm around Geyl. "I reserve the right to change my mind, Tony. Which I did. Ma'am, this is Tony Redondo, clan manager for Clinton Station. He's too f
at to shoot, so I reckon he'll die in bed. Tony, this is my babe Karen. I'm kinda partikuller about her, so if you boys don't want to sing soprano I'd suggest keeping your distance."
A very young man stepped out of the crowd, with a face that did not bespeak much intelligence. "Who you callin' a boy? And only clan mans kin have babes." He began lowering his rifle in Filer's direction.
Filer's assault rifle burped, and a single round struck the steel stock of the young man's rifle, knocking rifle and boy backwards on his rump in the grass. Everyone else in the corral dropped to the ground.
"You, boy. And I'm my own clan man." Filer lowered his rifle. "Tony, you're gonna lose this one soon. I'd lock him in the can til he shits out that bad attitude, eh?"
Tony Redondo got back to his feet with some effort, shoving on the ground with his hands and then wiping them on his dirty mackinaw. "Don't mind him, Filer. He just ain't got the crap beat out of him enough yet. Plenty here'd love to work on it some. He'll come around. Hey, you two et yet?"
Filer shook his head. "Not hardly. But we're in a hurry. Like I said, I changed my mind. I have to go tell the Boss that I'll take the job if he'll quit sending losers out to slab me. I had to blow up a whole freight train to shake the last crew. Actually, Karen blew it up for me. Like I said, I'm partikuller...but she's way more partikuller than me. Y'all should keep that in mind."
Geyl tried to smile in a dangerous fashion, but the whole exchange seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. She leaned up to Filer's ear. "Filer, who are these guys!"
Filer patted her shoulder and chuckled. "They're Moomoos, Ma'am. Better get used to them."
They followed the grubby band back toward the tents and the buildings. Geyl noted the distance that she and Filer were accorded. "I don't get this. There were twenty of them. They could have taken us out in two seconds. I thought they hated you."
"Hate me? No, Ma'am. The Boss keeps sending out sicarii to slab me, but that's the Boss's business, and Moomoos learn fast that you don't meddle in the Boss's business. The Boss don't—doesn't, excuse me, their cant is contagious—like it when his men show initiative. They do what they're told, and they don't do what they're not told. Nobody told them to slab me, so they won't. In fact, because the Boss has a personal interest in me they'll give me just about anything I ask for."
"They're crazy."
"I suppose. But it works for them."
"Mmm…what kind of interest does the Boss have in you?"
Filer stopped, and sniffed the air. Something good was cooking somewhere close by. "You know, Ma'am, I'm hungry enough to eat a dire wolf..."
Peter watched the fighter escort peel away just before the big jet's hydrofoils touched water and settled into the very blue—and currently calm—ocean. He released his belt and stepped forward to watch over the shoulders of the pilots as the craft turned in the water and taxied under power toward the nearby shore.
Here there was no smallest shred of beach, only cliffs of black volcanic rock forty meters high, falling back and tapering into the palm-covered hillsides. "Where do the fighters land?" he asked the pilot.
“They’re aquatic, and land in the water when they have to land. Right now they’re headed back to one of our less-secret bases about two hundred klicks from here.”
It was still a little unclear where the hydrojet would dock. Peter watched the cliffs grow closer, then blinked as he saw a twenty-meter width of rock wall begin rising and parting, drawn upward by unseen forces to reveal a broad cavern at water level, cut into the rock. The jet's engines continued to drive the craft forward, and Peter craned his neck to see the curtain of sculpted black net as they passed beneath it. The curtain had risen only high enough to clear the hydrojet's tail, and began dropping as soon as the jet was clear.
"It took ten years to make this base operational," Snitzius said, "but there's nothing on Hell to compare."
Peter's eyes slowly acclimated to the softer light. The hydrojet whined its way across the cavern, where several men waited to grapple it to a dock. The pilots opened the hatch, and the jet's passengers disembarked into a huge space lit high above by gas pressure lamps.
"Gee-wow!" Nutmeg said, pirouetting with eyes wide. "Damn, Peter, you're good luck for me! I don't get to see stuff like this too often!"
Docked nearby were several other large hydrojet craft, as well as two great hulking tubes that could only be submarines.
"Welcome to Nemo Station," Snitzius said. "We grew tired of naming everything after mythological hobgoblins."
The allusion is to a 19th century French adventure concerning a Victorian sea captain/inventor named Nemo with a secret base on a tropical island called Volcania. I have both text and video. The book is out of favor on Earth right now.
|My kind of guy!|
The group set out at a brisk walk. Two hundred meters further on, the cavern turned obliquely, and when he rounded the curve in the walkway Peter stopped cold.
"The Rotons!"
On four tremendous barges stood tall gray eggs that nearly brushed the rock ceiling. Skeletal scaffolding stood around them in an angular embrace, their minuscule attendants scrambling up and down glinting ladders and checking machinery and hoses. On two additional barges men swarmed over partially completed craft, one of which was barely an outline formed of curved silver-gray girders.
"Freedom, Justice, Genius, and Vengeance have already flown," Snitzius said. "Freedom many times. Vengeance only once. Endurance will fly by the spring." Snitzius pointed to the nearly-completed Roton. "And the last one, that we once called Wisdom, will fly within a year."
"What's its new name?" Nutmeg asked.
"Paton," the old man said, and continued walking, eyes downcast.
A long elevator ride upward took them to a small plain block building with a palm thatch roof, set into the hills. With Snitzius in the lead, they followed a path winding around many small buildings and ramadas. Birds called in the distance, and Peter spotted a toucan preening atop a trellis crowned with violet flowers.
"Station staff live on the surface, and most meetings and much deskwork is done in these buildings. All our secrets are underground. The best Earth can see from space is a tropical settlement." Snitzius stopped, and pointed further down the path, to the source of an approaching commotion. "Ahh. Nemo Station guards more than our space program."
A crowd of preteen children was scrambling uphill along the path, shrieking "Abbot! Abbot!" with delight. Peter counted nine but it seemed like many more. Two adults in loose white clothing followed behind. The children gathered around Snitzius and placed their hands on his broad black leather belt. He greeted each by name and squeezed their shoulders with his gnarled right hand.
Once the greetings were over, the children fell back into a loose formation, fidgeting but silent. Snitzius turned to Peter. "For a year now we have been moving our children out of the cities. All of our outposts have schools. Most have many more children than Nemo Station, but Nemo is by far our most secret and isolated place. Of all the half million children on Hell, these nine are our brightest. All have mastered trigonometry, statistics, and much of calculus, and are absorbing physics as quickly as their able educators can pour it into their little ears." The man and woman in white smiled and bowed. "And coming up the path is our little mystery." The woman teacher walked back down the path some distance, and took the hand of a very short boy who was walking uphill with obvious effort.
The boy approached Snitzius with a broad smile on his face, but Peter noticed that his cheeks were tear-stained. The old man bent down, and the boy threw his thin arms around the man's neck. "Abbot," Peter heard the child whisper, followed by words too faint to make out. Snitzius nodded, eyes closed. Peter thought he looked shaken.
Snitzius ran one hand through his white hair and motioned to Peter, who crouched down beside the boy. "Ian, this is Peter Novilio. He's an aerospace engineer. Show him your model of the Minehune." The boy extended his right hand to Peter, who took a small object craft
ed in aluminum. It looked like a sleek aircraft fuselage with a forked tail and a circular wing like a hoop, with the craft's body at its center.
"It will fly, Mr. Novilio," the boy said in a soft, wheezing voice. Peter saw new tears coursing down his cheeks.
"I'm sure it will," Peter said.
It will do more than fly. It will cross the gulf between the stars. Peter, that can only be a Hilbert-driven airframe.
|Right. And it'll set fire to half a continent when it folds!|
Peter handed the model back to the boy. Ian took the little model with one hand, and placed his other small hand on Peter's forehead. The boy's smile widened a little, but the tears flowed even more freely. "She still loves you," Ian whispered. "She says she will never forget you."
Peter forced his mouth closed.
"Come on, Ian. Let's go, gang!" The male teacher bent down and hoisted Ian onto his shoulders. Peter watched the boy giggle with delight, incongruously as more tears fell from his cheeks onto the flagstones. The teachers and their charges trotted down the path, chattering happily.
Snitzius watched them go. "Ian was born eight years ago, to a woman who carries Sangruse 7. The pregnancy was a surprise; she had never conceived in fifteen years of attempts and we assumed she was sterile. We had never allowed one of the Society to conceive before. Xao warned us against it. Then there was Ian. He is small for his age, and fragile. But he has an eidetic memory, and masters skills a child his age should not begin to understand. The Sangruse Device affected his neurological development. We still don't know quite how, but his nervous system seems faster and more sensitive than ours. He weeps almost continuously. And he speaks to imaginary friends." Snitzius paused, and looked at the ground.
Nutmeg and the others had continued down the path. Peter wondered if Snitzius had given them some sort of sign. Snitzius waited for them to be out of earshot, then spoke in a near-whisper. "I heard what Ian told you. You chose Bilenda, didn't you?"
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