“If we’ve jammed all the frequencies, then how do we keep in touch with our spybirds and choppers and things?”
“Ahh, good question. We have a very tricky technique—” I flinched as Byrne spread salve on my wounds, but I stayed focused on da and he kept talking. “—we break our signals into little bits and broadcast each little piece in the spaces of the jamming signal.” He spread the fingers of both hands and interleaved them to demonstrate. “And no, they can’t do the same thing, because without the same codes, their transmitters and receivers won’t know where to find the spaces in the signal. And Alex generates a new set of spacing codes every fifteen seconds. Our equipment has new chips, installed just for this mission, so our choppers and spybirds and other things all know how to track our code changes, and their equipment doesn’t. And even if they had the equipment to crack our codes, they couldn’t do it fast enough. Does that answer your question?”
I waited until Byrne finished giving me a pressure injection. “Maybe,” I said. “But I keep worrying that we’ve missed something.”
“Why, Kaer.”
“Because of what the old woman said. She said that people would die in the grass soon. And I didn’t know if she meant us—or the Hale-Stones. I got the feeling she didn’t much care who died or why. I don’t think she liked any of us.”
“Well, Kaer—we’ve all done our very best. And we’ve gotten to that point where we can’t really change our plans anymore. Because—because once you get on the roller coaster, you can’t get off until the train gets to the end. So we’ll all just have to do the best we can, and hope we’ve out-thought the Hale-Stones.” Byrne finished and moved away. Da took my hands in his. “I don’t think the Hale-Stones have equipment as good as ours. And I don’t think they have people as good as ours. We’ll get our Scouts back tonight. After that, we’ll see what happens next. Now, I need you to get some sleep—so I can too. You might not have noticed, but I didn’t get any sleep last night either. I stayed up all night watching over you on the monitors.”
“Thank you, da.”
“Thank you, sweetheart.” He bent over and kissed me gently. Then he pulled the curtain shut across my bunk.
As I drifted back to sleep, I could feel the heavy treads of the boulder crunching through the grass. It wasn’t a comforting sensation.
The New Plan
Da woke me up at dinnertime. At least, I thought it was dinnertime, because I was hungry again, I wasn’t sure because there were no windows to the outside, and the lighting inside the station was the same as when I had gone to sleep. But when I stumbled blearily forward and looked at the forward displays, I saw that the sun was nearing the western horizon and the boulder was still trundling through the near-black grass toward it.
“Go wash your face,” said da. “It’ll wake you up. We’ll eat first, then Byrne wants to talk to you. Come on upstairs.”
I did as he said, washing the rest of my dream out of my eyes, not really remembering the details, but still feeling the strange mood of it. Then I rode up the pole and found a place at the table. As soon as I sat down, da put a dinner tray in front of me. I poked at it, but didn’t lift the top yet. It smelled like spaghetti. He put a cold can of Coke next to the tray, it was beaded with condensation. Da looked disappointed that I wasn’t more excited, but he didn’t say anything.
“How do you feel?” asked Byrne, sitting down opposite me.
I shrugged. “Better.”
She reached across and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “Good. Some of the swelling has gone down. You don’t look quite so scary anymore. And the makeup will cover the rest.” She explained. “We’ve had to come up with a new plan. It’ll work, but you’ll need to learn your lines quickly. We’ve rigged a teleprompter, just in case.”
I nodded compliantly and opened my dinner tray. It was lasagna. Something else I hadn’t had in a long time. I began eating slowly, while Byrne kept talking.
“The rail-wagons had another breakdown. The same wheel. See—not all the bad luck happens to us. They’ve stopped for the day, and the demolition squad we sent out has broken the track behind them. And we know they’ve spotted the boffili. They couldn’t have missed the smell of the herd. And three cows and two calves crossed the track behind them about an hour ago. That woke them up.”
“What happened? What did they do?”
“We can’t tell yet. It seems to have started an argument between the magistrates and the soldiers. We have no idea how that will resolve. But it looks like the soldiers want to withdraw. I hope they do; they’ve got more than a hundred and twenty troops traveling with the wagons. Alex says it looks like they’ve begun preparations for just that, so maybe that part of our plan worked. We know this commander’s reputation; we don’t think it likely that he’ll risk the lives of his men for four religious prisoners.” She stopped for breath. “Lorrin, would you get me a Coke too please? Thanks.”
She turned back to me. “But the Hale-Stones have clearly influenced the magistrates’ planning. It looks like they intend to stay with the wagons, even if it means waiting until the herd passes. So even if the troops withdraw, we still have to deal with another forty-six armed Warriors of the Church. We’ve got too much wind to use gas. It’ll disperse too quickly. So we’ve come up with something else. I think you’ll like this. We do.”
I took a sip of my own Coke and waited.
“You still with me, Kaer?”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. And resumed eating. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I was hungry—and there was something else that I wanted to think about too. The dream that I’d been having when da woke me up. Something about the grass. Living in the grass. Living under the grass. I didn’t remember any of the details, nothing specific. Only a strange feeling of being . . . apart. A feeling of loneliness. Like the feelings I used to have when I was little. And it didn’t matter that I knew it was just a feeling—I could still feel it.
Byrne was still talking. “The Hale-Stones have stirred up enormous religious hysteria in Callo. The people have panicked and even though some have started returning to the city, others continue to leave. Everything we’ve seen out here suggests that the magistrates have succumbed to the same hysteria. The Hale-Stones told people to expect an important sighting. So everyone watches the skies, even the magistrates. So we’ve decided to give them a sighting. Right out here in the sea of grass. Where better?”
“What kind of a sighting?”
“An angel. Just like the Hale-Stones have described in the sightings they’ve created.” She paused to take a drink. “Have you ever seen a movie projected on smoke? Have you ever been to an amusement park where they make monsters appear in mid-air? Sometimes the roller coaster goes right into its mouth or something like that?”
“Yes, I know what you mean.” I put my fork down. I sat quietly with my hands in my lap and listened to what Byrne had to say.
“We’ve rigged up something like that. The demo-team will have everything in place as soon as darkness falls. We’ll start with spooky wind sounds. Maybe some distant slow booming noises, like the kind the ground would make if it yawned. Then we’ll have some of the spybirds drop some twinklies here and there—the techs call it Disney-dust. You’ll see why. We’ve got some very un-Linnean colors to use. And then we’ll start playing some ghost-music; a tuneless chorus, very faint, slightly discordant. Unresolved phrases. Very unsettling. And we’ve got some dead-body smells that we can give them a whiff of. Not boffili—human. Very unpleasant.
“We’ll keep everything just on the fringes of perceptibility—so some people will notice the manifestations, some won’t. We’ll keep that up for a while, that should unnerve them; then we’ll escalate. Strange blue glows on the horizon. Unseen things clattering overhead. Lights in the sky, all getting closer. You should see Smiller, Jake, Alex, and Jorge making their plans, coordinating all the details. I haven’t seen them having this much fun in a long time. This show will scare the yell out of the Linneans. D
o you like Halloween haunted houses? Tonight, we’ll show them the best spooks anyone has ever seen.
“Finally, the main event. Everything stops. Absolute silence. No lights. No noises. No more bad smells. We replace the bad smells with super-mint? You know that smell? It comes from a synthetic molecule, and it has a very unnerving effect because you can’t quite figure out where it comes from or what it means. Anyway. Then we set off the smoke, right in front of them on the tracks. A big pillar of it. But not real smoke. Cold smoke. So if they feel anything from it, they feel an unearthly cold chill. And then, something appears inside the pillar of smoke. A bright golden light—it stretches upward, twenty meters high. Maybe thirty. It depends on the wind, how big we can project. The golden light rises, unfolds like a pair of hands opening up and takes the form of a beautiful Angel with red and gold curls, a glittering robe, golden skin that shimmers with light—you, Kaer. Your image appears inside the pillar of smoke. Innocent. Gentle. A holy vision. A halo of golden light surrounds the Angel, coruscating with rippling veils of color. Enchanting. Hypnotic. Paralyzing.
“We’ve got six heli-birds rigged with projectors. Do you know how those work?” I nodded. Heli-birds had two sets of helicopter blades, one above the other, rotating in opposite directions so they cancelled out each other’s torque. The blades were mounted inside a circular rim, so the bird could bump sideways into a tree, bounce off, and just keep going. The rim could have lights on it, and at night people called them halo-birds. The birds could hover in one place for a stationary aerial view, or they could dart about, following something. They were a little louder than winged spybirds, so they had to be used carefully. Also, spybirds could function as gliders if they had to. Heli-birds didn’t glide very well, but they were great for controlled operations. Like this one.
“We’ll have the heli-birds lit up as bright as we can, so they’ll look like circling haloes,” Byrne said. “They’ll orbit in front of the pillar of smoke, projecting your image into it. Your image will hover in the air above the wagons, taller than a great-horse. Every Linnean in the caravan will have an unobstructed view. We’ve got this all worked out, Kaer. You’ll look down at them sadly. You’ll look a little to the left, then to the center, then a little to the right, then back to the center, back to the left—you’ll keep doing that the whole time, very slowly, so no matter where anyone stands, he’ll think you’ve looked directly at him.
“After a minute, you lift your arms to your heart, then you bring them forward to show your palms, and then spread your arms a little, like this, supplicating—you know what that means? Pleading. You say, ‘Let my people go!’ And we’ll hit a gentle musical note underneath it.”
She paused, waiting for my reaction.
“Will that work?”
“You don’t think it will.” A statement, not a question.
“No.”
“Neither do we. Do you know the theory of communication? You have to say things three times before people get it. First, you say it so they can hear that you’ve said something. Then you say it again, so they can hear what you’ve said—the words, the meaning. Then you say it a third time, so they can get it. Actually understand it. Well, we don’t think the Hale-Stones or the Magistrates will get it, no matter how many times you say it. But we’ll still have you say it three times. You’ll wait till we give you your cue. The second time, you’ll spread your hands out, very wide and then bring them around in a big circle, like this, bringing them forward again to the same position. Like this. And you say it a little stronger. This time, we’ll hit a much stronger note.”
“And. . . ?”
“And we don’t expect them to respond this time either. So the third time, you’ll bring your hands back to your heart, like this, but you close your fists as you do. Then you raise your hands high, like this, and you shout angrily, ‘Let my people go!’ At the same time you do that, your image will grow, it’ll turn red, and furious-looking, and we’ll hit them with a very strong musical note, with a lot of oomph on the bottom end. A lot of disturbing subsonics. The background behind you will flicker and flash angrily—at just the right frequency to trigger seizures. A furious light show. And some serious heavy-metal electric-guitar screeches. If that doesn’t soil their shorts, nothing will.”
“So what happens then? If they release the hostages—?”
You go down on one knee, as if to welcome them into your arms. You’ll lower your hands almost all the way to the ground, as if to pick them up. You’ll say, ‘Bring me my people,’ and you’ll wait that way until they do. Don’t worry, we’ll rehearse all this. When they bring the hostages out, you’ll say in English, ‘Jaxin, it’s Kaer. Walk forward. Walk through the smoke. Sykes, walk forward, walk through the smoke.’ And so on.”
“What happens if they can’t walk?”
“We’ll get to that. We don’t think that Magistrates have tortured our people to the point where they can’t walk. That won’t serve them well, when they deliver them to Mordren. Their superiors won’t like receiving prisoners in such bad condition. We hope. Anyway, when the Scouts walk through the smoke, they’ll disappear, but we’ll insert a synthetic image of them stepping up into your hands. As each one does, you’ll lift your hands up to your heart and the image will appear to join with you. So the Magistrates will see their prisoners taken up by an angel. Behind the smoke, we’ll have both the grass-rovers. We’ll have a roll-down path straight to the boulder. We’ll have corpsmen, blankets, litters, whatever we need. As soon as the last Scout comes through the smoke, we’ll start pulling the team back, rolling up the path, moving the vehicles back through the grass. If anyone comes through the smoke after the Scouts—and if we’ve done our job properly, more than a few of those warriors will want to crawl into your heart too—the vehicles will turn on their headlights. They’ll have bright red filters on them, so they’ll look like blazing eyes, and they’ll growl and roar like nothing on Linnea. They’ll look like monsters in the grass and we’ll probably end up creating a whole new mythology. But we’ll have gotten our people out with no casualties, and we’ll leave a lot of witnesses to tell what they’ve seen. If we do our jobs right, we’ll preempt the tales of Oerth as a place of demons. They’ll never again risk imprisoning an Oerth-person lest an Angel confront them.”
I picked up my fork and took another bite of lasagna. It had gotten cold. “And what if it doesn’t work?” I asked. “What if the Linnean Magistrates decide to fight?”
“Who will they fight?” asked Byrne. “What will they attack? Smoke? We’ll have heli-birds and spybirds everywhere, monitoring all of them. We think some of the warriors of the church might get a little adventurous and might try shooting a bolt through the pillar of smoke. If that happens, the heli-birds all have flash-blinder charges on them. If anything penetrates the pillar of smoke, we’ll trigger the charges and give them all a very bright flash and a boom of thunder. When they can see again, your image will have gotten taller, darker, redder, angrier. The music will have changed. Everything. We’ll give them a blast of dead-body smells, subsonics, and we’ll strafe them with a wing of three choppers, all lit up in red and screaming like banshees.”
“And what if they still don’t release our Scouts?”
“Then . . . we send in the assault team. We’ll have them waiting behind the pillar of smoke. We’ll cue you, you’ll get angry, you’ll lower your hands, but this time, we’ll project a vortex of fire in the smoke, right where your hands touch the ground. We’ll shoot lasers out from behind, and the team will come through in illuminated jumpsuits, they’ll glow in the dark. The simulation looked terrifying. If the warriors of the church don’t run from that, then we’ll shoot them with taser-beams. Do you know how those work?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure.
“You aim with an invisible laser beam. When you squeeze the trigger, the taser-rifle fires a needle dart, trailing a length of mono-filament wire. As soon as the needle hits the target, the rifle shoots a 10,000 vol
t charge of electricity down the wire. The target is stunned, the wire and the needle vaporize, and it looks like you’ve struck the victim with lightning. No permanent damage, but he won’t get up again for awhile either. We have a dozen heli-birds with taser-projectors on them too, so the remote team can hunt for snipers and take them out. We’ll move them in too. We’ll sweep the team down the row of wagons, breaking each one open with a jet of liquid nitrogen on the locks and doors. We’ll have corpsmen following with blankets—and litters, if necessary. We’ll have our people back on the buggies in fifteen minutes. We’ll proceed as before.
“As soon as everyone gets through the smoke. You look up, you lift your hands to the sky, as if thanking the Mother. They’ll look up too. We’ll have a chopper up there, flashing some lights, probably the God-Chopper, if it gets here on time. As your image starts to elongate, we’ll fire a single firework into the sky. It’ll rise toward the chopper and explode in a flash of golden sparks. The God-Chopper turns all the rest of its lights on, plays some heavenly music, and flies off over the horizon. It’ll look like you ascended to heaven with the hostages. End of performance. The vehicles turn off the smoke and wind up the hoses. The spybirds and the heli-birds return to the boulder. We drive north a few klicks and call for evac. In six hours, the boulder is gone and the Linneans have their first crop circles to investigate. If they dare to. You have a look on your face, Kaer. What?”
“All this noise and all these strange lights—won’t it trigger a boffili stampede?”
“It could, yes. We have to take that risk. Right now, we measure the fringes of the herd twenty klicks west and eleven klicks north. In two hours, that margin will shrink at least another two klicks. Close, but not impossible.”
“We do this tonight?”
Byrne looked at her watch. “In ninety minutes, Angel. We’ve rigged the broadcast studio in the boulder. We’ve got your costume and makeup waiting.” She looked at me oddly. “If you don’t feel well—if you can’t do it for any reason, we’ll have Beck stand in for you.”
Child of Grass: Sea of Grass, Book Two Page 24