Edward Llewellyn

by Prelude to Chaos

  The first person to appear out of the darkness was Judith, the second was Barbara. “We’re the ones who know our way around!” whispered Judith.

  “Midge is moving Sea Eagle astern,” added Barbara. “Dad’s alongside now. Shall I scout the tunnel?”

  “You stay here and call the other boats in. I’ll scout the tunnel.”

  “I’ll follow as link-up. As I did last time,” said Judith. When we reached the dim light of the inspection station she stared at me. “What have you done to your nose?”

  I felt my face and found my hand covered with blood. A nosebleed is not a leader’s wound. “Rammed a container. Stay here. I’ll scout ahead.”

  The hall was the same dimly lit cavern we had visited months before, now crammed even more tightly with containers. I sidled between them to the door which would let us reach the Surveillance Center. I couldn’t open it Judith knew the code; I didn’t I went back to fetch her and found Enoch and his squad already assembled in the inspection station with Martha’s being guided up the tunnel by Barbara.

  Colonel Jewett would have approved of the silent and organized manner in which forty rifles were moving themselves from boats to wharf to inspection station, though he would have court-martialed somebody later for exceeding orders. As it was I could only watch the operation complete itself. These inshore fishermen could not only see in the dark, they must communicate by smell. All of them arrived without anybody dropping anything, treading on anyone, or cursing above a whisper.

  When they were all hidden in the shadows I hissed, “This time—wait here! Judy, come and help me open that door.” This time they did wait while Judith was attempting to open the door to the stairs. She succeeded in hitting the right combination on her fifth try, by which time I was about to send back for dynamite and risk blowing it in. We couldn’t go undetected much longer. “Thank Christ!” I muttered when it swung back to disclose the same deserted and dirty stairwell as before; the only foot marks in the dust were ours. “Now go and guide the rest here. Bring them in small groups.”

  “You’re laying a neat trail with that nose of yours!” she whispered, and disappeared.

  They arrived in twos and threes while I reconnoitered ahead. My chief fear now was that the guard had been beefed up or replaced by effectives. My goal was to reach the Surveillance Center and identify who and where they were. The occasional light still burned on the stairs and along the passageways, but there was no sign that anybody had used them since our visit. I reached the Surveillance Center and was again faced with a locked door. Again I went back to fetch Judith, threatening to strangle her if she didn’t remember the combination sooner this time.

  She opened the door on the third attempt and I burst into the room. Empty! All screens off. I moved quickly down the rows of switches, bringing up the cameras. I was still searching the matrix of images for signs of life when I realized that the whole team were crowding into the room and watching me with fascination. I swung around to curse them, remembered I hadn’t told them to wait, and turned back to the screens.

  “It doesn’t look as though there’s anybody here!” said Barbara, in a tone that suggested she had maintained from the start that the Pen was now deserted.

  “Can’t be sure of that yet!” I continued to study the banked images of rooms, cells, corridors, and stairs. “We’ll have to search the whole of the guards quarters. They may be using rooms that aren’t monitored.” I explained the general layout of the Pen, using the plan on the wall of the Surveillance Center, and then sent out groups to move cautiously through each area. And not to start anything if they did find anybody. While these Believers were giving thanks to the Light for having let them get into the Pen so easily, I could also sense a vague disappointment that our entry had lacked the promised drama. I myself was starting to feel a fool. We could have waited for daylight and simply walked ashore.

  By dawn I was fairly certain the place was deserted. It was packed with stores of various kinds, most of them still containerized, as though the rush had been to get as much as possible into the place before some deadline. There were also signs that the guard had only left during the past few days;

  half a carton of milk in one of the mess rooms had hardly had time to turn sour. And at daylight, when I went up onto the roof, I found a small chopper pad had been installed near the lucaplex dome. A pad which had recently been used. The area was no longer verboten to aircraft. If anyone came after us, they would probably come by air.

  Enoch joined me on the roof. “There’re ten boats with another eighty rifles coming from Fairhaven. Should arrive around noon.” He looked at the fog swirling across the Point. “It’ll be clear by then. Breeze picking up. Blow this lot away.” He filled his pipe. “Looks like you’ve done it. We’ve got a safe place to stay awhile.”

  “It won’t be safe until we can close the gates. Put all hands to work moving those containers out of the tunnel.”

  Enoch nodded and left. I stayed on the roof, trying to think like a commander planning consolidation, while feeling more like an escaped con who has been caught and brought back to prison. And the place was a mess! The lucaplex dome was intact but, looking down through it, I could see only a jungle of tangled greenery. Climatic control had been allowed to run wild, and so had the plants we had tended so carefully. I felt the anger of a man who returns to his summer cottage and finds it has been used by hunters who have left the toilets blocked, the kitchen filthy, and the yard full of trash.

  But the fusion generator was still pouring out power. We had heat and light. The hydride converter could probably be made operational and would give us fuel for the boats. I stood on the roof, looking around as the sun started to break through. A fresh breeze was sweeping the fog away. Soon it would be as Enoch had forecast: one of those sparkling days when Fundy shows a wild beauty.

  It had already cleared sufficiently for me to see the rocks and scrub around the Pen. At the tip of the Point, about nine hundred meters away, the outline of a large chopper pad began to appear with a road running from it to the wharf; they’d been bringing stuff in by air as well as by sea. I began to pick out sites from which launchers and automatics could cover the pad, the road, and the wharf. There might be such weapons packed away in some of the unopened containers. I hoped we’d have time to find them before somebody found us. It would have made defense of the Pen easier if the Charged Particle Beam projectors had still been in position, but even in our need I could not wish they were.

  “Gavin!” Judith was climbing up through the hatch onto the roof. Her expression said that her news was bad. “Captain Rideout’s calling—”

  “He hasn’t left Fairhaven, has he?”

  “No.” She caught her breath. “He says that his radar has just picked up six choppers. Four large and two small. A hundred clicks down the coast. And they’re heading our way!”

  XIX

  They came low out of the south, two gunships and four transports. They came closed up and without evasive action, circling the Point as if supremely confident or else unsuspicious. Either they didn’t know we were here or they knew we were armed with nothing better than rifles. And that we had not been able to clear the tunnel of containers in the forty minutes which was all the time we had had to get ready for their arrival.

  I had done what I could. There were eight of us on the roof, Judith in the Surveillance Center, and the rest under Enoch covering the main hall and the entrance tunnel. We might gain an initial instant of surprise if they thought the Pen was deserted. After they got over that it would be fighting container to container, corridor to corridor, stairway to stairway. If there were green troops in those choppers then we stood a small chance of driving them off. If they were experienced fighters we stood no chance at all. The only tactics I had been able to tell the team was to stay behind cover and shoot straight when the shooting started.

  Banks of fog were still driving across the Point but it had cleared enough for me to be able to see the landing p
ad at its tip. The four transports were going down to land, one by one. The two gunships were circling above them. I picked up my binoculars and watched the first transport down. I watched the hatches snap open and the lead section jump out. And my guts cramped. This was the end. Those were Troopers!

  But they didn’t act like Troopers making an assault landing. The first men out moved almost casually to the edge of the pad, hardly glancing toward the Pen as they stood waiting for the rest of the squad to deplane. There was a flash of color in the open door. Sam, beside me, gripped my arm. “Women!” he hissed. “Women—by the Light!”

  And not ladies being helped down from the hatch. Women being pushed through it, to be rounded up by the waiting Troopers and herded off the pad and into the scrub. Captive women! Three more Troopers followed the last woman pushed out, then the turbines of the transport picked up speed and it lifted off, women and Troopers crouching together against the blast from its rotors.

  In quick succession the other three transports landed, discharged their prisoners, and took off as soon as they were empty. Each in turn went lifting into the overcast, heading east, as if each was trying to get away as quickly as possible from something of which it was ashamed. Fifteen minutes after the aircraft had arrived there were only the two gunships circling overhead and some sixty women being herded along the road toward the Pen by twenty Troopers.

  “What’s going on?” asked Sam from beside me.

  “Evil in action!” came Judith’s voice in our earplugs. She must have slewed a wharf camera round and watched the landing. Her voice was thick with fury. “Those are women taken from looted Settlements. Brought here—”

  I cut her off. “Cool it! There are only twenty guards. We can take twenty easily if we keep our heads.” I wasn’t at all certain we could, not twenty Troopers. The Force might have lost its honor; it still had its lethal skills.

  “There’ll soon be more!” muttered Sam. The two gunships were now landing and their occupants disembarking. I looked through my binoculars. “Civilians!” I said, then I caught the flash of insignia on braided uniforms. “Civilians and brass!”

  So that’s why the Pen had been filled with stores, why the guard had been withdrawn! That’s what the Administration had been planning when it decommissioned the Federal Penitentiary! This was to be one of the refuges, the “safe houses,” which it had been preparing for itself and its friends. The ’same kind of place that Sherando had become. Only here they had had to bring their own girls. Or rather, somebody else’s girls.

  There were more people disembarking, among them women who were being helped out, not pushed out. Those would be wives, daughters, and female politicians who had played along with Futrell. ITiat bastard—

  “Easy, Mister Gavin,” said Sam, touching my arm. “Cool it, you said!”

  I drove from my mind the face of the man I hated and stared at the evil spread out below me. As the captives were driven nearer the Pen I could see that they were young, some little more than children. Staring at the wildness around them, at the wilderness of rocks, sea, and scrub. At the Pen looming ahead. The Troopers were too occupied with turning back girls trying to escape or urge forward others hanging back to look toward us. This was the ultimate shame. American women being herded like captured cattle. Or like the captives from some defeated Greek city: women being driven toward enslavement by the soldiers of democratic Athens.

  The civilians and the brass were still grouped near the gun-'ships, talking together as if trying to dissociate themselves from the infamous scene taking place in front of them. Some were glancing at the sky as if expecting the arrival of more transports or gunships. If we were to take them we must take them soon. But we could not fire into that mixture of guards and captives. Sam, the best marksman in the settlement, was cursing his frustration. “Couldn’t knock off any of them soldiers yet. Not without a chance of hitting a girl.”

  The girls were putting up the kind of fight you don’t usually get from prisoners. Groups of them kept breaking away to ran back toward the civilians on the pad or into the underbrush. Troopers were chasing them, dragging the ones they caught back to the main herd. Hitting them to keep them moving, but not hard enough to damage them. Usually any group of prisoners can be subdued by killing the first who disobeys orders. But these were prisoners who must not be killed or seriously injured, and now the frustrated guards were trying to persuade rather than force their captives to keep moving. They too were starting to glance at the sky.

  A couple of fast-running girls got back among the civilians, dodging between them with two Troopers on their heels. The brass and civilians scattered, some of them obviously protesting to the Troopers. Men and women who perhaps only now had realized what was going on. A couple of civilians were knocked down, a General lost his hat, the girls dodged round the choppers, were grabbed by the crew, and dragged fighting back along the road. The officer in charge of the guards halted his squad just short of the wharf to let the two be brought in and other escapers be rounded up. His curses, threats, and entreaties floated up to us watching from the roof.

  My com pinged and I heard Midge’s voice. “Mister Ga-

  vin—I’m offshore. I’ve just picked up another chopper. Twenty clicks southeast and coming fast”

  Only one ship; so there was still hope.

  “Also, Mister Gavin, those boats from Fairhaven. They know what’s happening and they’re coming full speed. Should be here by eleven.”

  “Midge—you stay offshore. And if we’ve gone under by then, tell those boats to high tail it back to Fairhaven. You go back there too!”

  I didn’t get any answer and was still repeating my order when out of the west came a command ship, flying at full speed. It swept over us, banked, and then hung above the wharf. The officer in charge of the guards was looking up toward it, obviously receiving orders. “Their boss is in that chopper,” I muttered. “If only there was some way to nail him.”

  I was studying the machine through binoculars when Sam’s rifle cracked. I swung on him in fury, there was no way to down a command ship with a rifle. I choked back my curses and spoke on my com. “They know we’re here! Fire at will!” Then I looked back at the chopper.

  The chances of hitting an aircraft with rifle fire are remote. A miracle however appeared to have happened. The command ship was in difficulty; Sam’s shot had hit something vital. From his smile something he had aimed at. We watched it pass across the point, its rotors stabilizing wildly. Then it disappeared into the mist off the Point, fluttering out to sea and still losing height. “Reckon that’s taken their boss out of things!” said Sam.

  It had also thrown the Troopers into the action mode. All of them were out of sight, leaving their charges huddled together at the edge of the wharf. Abandoning a task they disliked for one they knew and enjoyed. The crack of Sam’s rifle had been like the call of a bugle; they had faded into the underbrush as one man.

  “What the hell are they doing?” asked Sam, perplexed at the loss of his targets. He looked over the edge of the roof.

  A burst of fire whistled past his head and he dropped flat, his face suddenly white, looking at me.

  “They’re good, Sam,” I said, in mixed pride and sadness. “Keep your head down!” A grenade arced up from the scrub to burst just short of the roof. “Now they know we’re up here. We’ve got to get out—fast.” I sent him and the rest of the group scrambling back through the hatch and down the ladder. I moved along the roof, waited until I saw the flash of another grenade being launched, and fired at the spot. A man half rose, then dropped at the same moment that his missile exploded farther along the roof. I crouched as the fragments sprayed over me, then ran for the hatch as half-a-dozen grenades came arcing up. I dropped through it as they began to go off, sweeping the roof with shrapnel. Well, that one shot had been worthwhile. They’d know they were up against real riflemen and they wouldn’t rush things.

  In the Surveillance Center Judith was bent over the displays. S
he had slewed every external camera she could bring to bear toward the wharf and the Point. “Good shooting, Gavin!” she said as I arrived, panting, from the roof. “That one you hit looks as though he’s dead. And the rest are moving with great caution!” She laughed, with a cold pleasure that made my skin crawl. I glimpsed how faith can convert the kindest of men and women into killers. These Believers, these peaceful people, had been driven into a comer and were now intent on fighting their way out. For them this was just another of the fitness tests their Light used to try them out while on Earth, so It could decide whether they would be useful in Heaven. Good is no match for Evil unless it is ready to defend itself.

  I moved beside her to study the screens. The fog had been swept away and in the bright sunshine the viewing was excellent. I could see nothing of the Troopers, only an occasional flash as they exchanged fire with our group covering the approach of the wharf. The girls were crouching together showing both strong nerves and good sense. The civilians were clustered around the ships, trying to persuade the crews to lift them out. I couldn’t see any brass among them, so the Troopers had probably been reenforced by three Generals and one Admiral.

  “The girls are the threat,” I muttered.

  “How do you mean?”

  “As soon as the guards get formed up they’ll drive those girls toward the entrance. Use them as mobile cover.”

  “That’s too horrible! How could they?”

  “It’s standard practice.” I was too concerned with the situation to worry about whitewashing. “I wish to hell I could get a message to them.”

  “What message?” Barbara had appeared at my elbow.

  “I’d like to tell ’em to either scatter into the bush and accept a few casualties. Or to move back to the pad in one body and mingle with that gang of civilians. So they’ll be clear of grabs by the guard and out of our line of fire.”

  “I’ll tell ’em to move back to the pad.” And Barbara was gone before I could stop her.