Still, he did not lose forethought. “Don’t you have family who might worry about you?” he asked.
“Not on this continent. I’m from Westland. And unmarried. So if you don’t mind stepping out into the hall—”
He raised his brows. “While you make those cancellations?”
“ Aw, come on, sir, let the lady have her privacy. “ Deledda winked at me. Did he assume I had to break a passionate date?
Vosmaer hesitated.
“I’m sorry, I must insist,” I declared. “Else I can’t go with you.” And his cause would not have its advocate before the public.
He frowned but yielded. The wait was brief. I had kept a bag packed. Otherwise I needed only my omnigraph.
The men had left a car balanced on an upper parking flange. We got in and took off. For a little while the lights of Alison formed a multicolored galaxy over which other vehicles flitted like comets, then we were bound across the Sapphire Ocean. Traffic dwindled to fugitive glints in the night. Stars showed few, what with two moons hurtling nearly full and the vast, soft rainbow of the rings. The water shimmered beneath us. Vents let in air that even at this altitude was mild and moist. Bellegarde is, mostly, a wonderful planet for humans. That’s one reason its possessors are so strict with strangers. They want to keep it for themselves and their posterity.
We’d fallen into silence. I glanced at Deledda on my left.
His blocky head, half alien behind the breather snout, was silhouetted athwart the rings. He stared before him. I wondered what he was remembering.
It felt good, sad but good, to be in Amadror again. The atmosphere that would have driven an unadapted man into giddiness, craziness, and presently death was warm on his skin, musky-sweet in his nostrils, rich in his lungs and bloodstream. The great slow wind boomed gently, full of soughings from the forest, songs and cries of flying creatures whose wings passed vivid overhead, sounds from farther away, a low surf-pulse of sea. You never heard this clearly on the heights. The woods were a harmony of leaves brown, russet, golden, where rainflowers made startling counterparts of scarlet. The perpetual overcast was not gloomy but silvery, for those who had eyes to see. Lesser clouds made arabesques below it.
This day was sad, though, because now his good-bye began.
He and his partner, Lea Sikelianos, also a sergeant and, for years, his wife, walked slower than they needed to along the path from landing lot to factory. Their shared, unspoken wish was to enjoy it as long as might be. Of course, they could not have matched the pace and grace of Mertoutek in any event. Their kind had evolved in a gravity field only three-fourths of this.
It was the native who broke the muteness, and that was unusual enough to bespeak ix’s own pain. “You are truly leaving us forever?” ix trilled.
Deledda regarded ixen for a while and searched after words before he replied. How beautiful, in their own way, Procrusteans were. Not quite man-shape—too fluidly muscular—and the fur glowed like amethyst sprinkled with quartz and the head could almost have been a cat’s except that it was full-browed and sensor tendrils quivered above the great golden eyes. Mertoutek wore simply the kilt common to these parts, but at the belt hung a pouch for a calculator, and ix was a hell of a fine electronician.
“I’m afraid so,” was all that Deledda could find to say. He used his own language, knowing he would be understood, for at the moment he lacked the will to wrestle with Amadroran.
“But why, friend? After two lifetimes!”
Sikelianos used her transponder to answer in the vernacular; the little disc converted the noises a human can make into the lilt and music that belonged here. “The high command has decided it is no longer necessary or desirable to maintain our bases. We’ve broken the Faami and the Liberation Warriors; there are no bandits left in this part of space to harass commerce and loot worlds. At the same time, the fight against the Khalia is sharpening. It calls on every resource the Fleet can spare from other tasks.”
“But we, the Folk, we have supported you, we have supplied you. Never were we a drain on your strength. Now let us continue making weapons for you to use on these new enemies.”
“We mourn, Mertoutek, my mate and I mourn that that is not to be. We are told the distances are too great, the supply lines would be too long and precarious, for World-of-Yours to become part of the stellar munitions complex.” Sikelianos spread her hands, helplessly. “How can I judge? We are told that keeping us here does draw on the Fleet somewhat. Administrative costs—ships and guns and persons tied up when they could be employed elsewhere—”
How could you and me be, old girl? wondered Deledda. Aloud: “Well, we aren’t abandoning you flat, you know. We two, we’ve been sent to give you whatever advice we can, so you can convert your factory from making fire control systems to, uh, to something useful for your people.”
The pelt stood up on Mertoutek’s body. Ix’s tendrils shivered. “What will be useful save weapons, once our guardians have left us?” ix keened.
“That, yes, that may be—”
“But we make things for your spaceships. And we have no spaceships of our own. What help is a computer against the Northern buccaneers?”
Deledda swallowed. “That’s, uh, one of the things we’ll have to think about.” The words stumbled from him. “Convert to, uh, production of cannon or—or communication devices or—”
“We will strive for your well-being while time remains to us,” said Sikelianos’s transponder. “Remember, this was our home too.”
The island lay about a hundred kilometers off the coast of Windstead and belonged to that Landholding. From above, as we slanted down, I saw by the light of rings and moons that it was heavily wooded. A cluster of glitter at the east end bespoke a small town; otherwise I caught no sign of habitation. When I remarked on that, Vosmaer said, “Recreational preserve. Under the direct governance of the Landholder.”
I nodded. The choice was shrewd. People who wanted to meet without risk of eavesdroppers—and the Council of Magnates was getting quite annoyed with the Procrustean veterans—could arrive here little noticed, by ones and twos and threes, on public conveyances. Doubtless an automatic rail from the harbor made a circuit of secluded spots inland. Such a ground could have been reserved, ostensibly for a large picnic, in the name of a fictitious organization. Any local person who got suspicious would naturally contact the bailiff’s office, and that man could have been instructed beforehand to do nothing except reassure.
Not that I imagined the Landholder himself had issued orders. He shared the attitude of his fellows on the Council, that the evacuees were a nuisance which might develop into a. trouble. True, Bellegarde was the nearest human planet inward from Procrustes; and the Fleet did maintain a replacement depot on it, to the profit of local businesses; and the marines had been taken off in available transport, swagbellies unequipped for the long haul to Tau Ceti; and several thousand people were too many for the depot barracks, so perforce the Fleet paid them an allowance to cover the cost of cheap food and lodging in the poorer districts of Alison; therefore it behooved the rulers of Bellegarde to permit this. But they didn’t have to like the influx. They were free to long for the day when proper troopships could be spared from the operations around Target and dispatched here to carry away these bothersome, querulous, often unsightly outsiders. How long? Surely not much longer! It had been three months already.
So, I thought, did Mattes Torskov think. But his younger son Jerik had for years been fascinated by Procrustes and its garrison, had visited there more than once, now hobnobbed with officers and ranks alike. Jerik could have arranged this rendezvous for them.
Vosmaer directed our car to a meadow near the middle of the island. Tall pale trees walled it in. Lamps in front of them illuminated greensward, tables, benches, fireplaces, a stage for dance performances such as amateurs like to put on in Windstead, and a dark, roiling crowd of people whose n
umber I guessed at five hundred. Are that many of them rebellious? I marveled. Well, it should be a reassuring sight for the authorities, if they have observed in spite of precautions taken. Five hundred can’t be conspirators. Any secret would escape faster than air from a missile-struck hull. Besides, these are the Old Crusties—underneath the military discipline, rambunctious individualists. The planet made them that, for survival’s sake.
We landed offside among several other vehicles and got out.
The early night was cool, with a pungency of eucalyptus in it. Not many worlds are so hospitable to the descendants of Mother Earth. Most are honestly lethal. It is the marginal ones like Procrustes that are cruel and treacherous to us; but a few we have nevertheless turned into homes for our kind.
Vosmaer and Deledda conducted me toward the stage. Persons who saw us stared and muttered. A sense as of a gathering thunderstorm prickled through me. They were weirdly mixed, these folk—in uniform or, mostly, disreputable civvies that showed sign of having been worn for days on end; male, female; Caucasoid, Negroid, Australoid, Celestoid, half-breed; tall, short, stocky, rangy; young, middle-aged, grown old in the service; everybody marked, changed, shaped by it, whether the biotechs had been at work or merely the planet on which they were stationed, but no two in just the same way. I spied some as black as Vosmaer and I spied albinos who had been in the foglands; several individuals needed mechanical help to breathe the air of Bellegarde, like Deledda; two were entirely encased in flexsuits, because local germs would attack the fungoids that kept at bay the azuria they had inevitably contracted in the swamps of Hirhavo; scars on faces marked where skin cancers had been removed that the ultraviolet blazing over the highlands had evoked—and more, and more, and more.
It was no horror show. These were basically healthy people; the Fleet takes its invalids straight home. It was simply that most of them needed treatment of one kind or another, in certain cases prolonged and highly specialized treatment, to make them fit again for an Earthlike environment. GNC 43376 III held too many different environments. Once the Fleet had established a support base there, the name “Procrustes” inevitably supplanted “Walsing’s.” Eventually it became official.
“You can shoot from the platform, next to the speakers,” Deledda told me, gesturing ahead.
“I expect I’ll want to get down and circulate, take close-up views of individuals,” I said. The omnigraph was a small, oddly comforting weight in my left hand.
“While discussion is going on?” asked Vosmaer. “Well, don’t be intrusive about it.” His look reminded me that I was here on sufferance.
We reached the dais. Vosmaer mounted it and beckoned me to follow. Deledda stayed below in a cluster of enlisted persons from his regiment. Vosmaer saluted the man who stood near the edge, erect in uniform. I knew those harsh, pocked features well. Brigadier Jiao greeted me with the same clipped courtesy as at our previous encounters. “Have you met the honorable Jerik Torskov?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said, and clasped hands with the big, blond-bearded young fellow at his side: Iridescent, fur-trimmed tunic, silver tights, upward-curling toes on shoes flashed almost grotesquely amidst the plainness everywhere around. Nevertheless Torskov looked anything but effete, and tales of his explorations on strange worlds had entered Bellegardean folklore.
“Welcome,” he boomed. “So you’re who’s to tell the Alliance about the Crusties and their plight. Think you can?”
“I can try,” I answered.
He frowned. “You can describe past hardships and heroisms in danger of being forgotten. But the story may turn out to be less simple than that. You may find yourself asked to explain demands, or outright actions, that provoke resentment. Are you willing to try?”
Yes, he was no mere adventurer; he thought about things, and underneath the joviality he displayed to the universe, he felt them more keenly than most of us do. “I’m a reporter, sir,” I said. “I’ll do my best to picture the truth, regardless of my own opinions.”
“Good enough. We may well be in great need of that.”
“Shall we commence’?” snapped Jiao.
I grew conscious, as he must have been, of the silence that was falling. It wasn’t total; it buzzed and mumbled. But those sufficiently close to the stage to hear us talk were listening as avidly as they watched, and the word passed back through the crowd and stirred it as a grass field is stirred by the first breath of wind before a storm.
Torskov nodded. “We shouldn’t tax their patience any further,” he agreed. “This miserable situation has worn it thin. “
I chanced to be looking in Vosmaer’s direction, and saw a brief, slight writhing pass through his lips and over his face. What he for that instant remembered must be strong indeed to crack his control that much.
In the pitiless white sunlight, flames danced pale where they devoured the village; but smoke rose in a pillar of night until the turbulences aloft strewed it across blue. Land reached golden with ripeness, from a distance-dimmed sierra to the dropoff of the plateau and the cloud deck like a sea of snow beneath. The barbarians had left a gash of devastation upon it.
Having sacked and torched Arakoum, they were departing for their next victim when the aircraft snarled into sight. Vosmaer perforce admired their courage and discipline. They didn’t scatter in panic; they put spurs to their zateks and raced for a tree-grown hill where they could perhaps make a stand. Helmets and lanceheads shone, danced like sparks. Pennons streamed with the haste.
“Give ‘em a missile, sir?” asked Captain Layard. “A kiloton ought to do for them.”
“No!” Vosmaer exclaimed. He barely kept from adding, “You fool!” That would have been unfair. Layard didn’t know. He was newly transferred from Kazir, which Gloria’s Own also held, and it was quite unlike Ure’I. “Those are Cho-Lengn. They’ll have prisoners. They mean to send them back to their slave markets, such as survive the trip. That’s why I’ve brought troops. We’ll have to take them on the ground.”
He wished he could have brought more. That might have awed the raiders into surrender. As it was, they were naturally shaken by the appearance of his detachment. If they’d known that every chieftain hereabouts now had a radio with which to call Fort Hirayama, they wouldn’t have left home—at least, not in the direction of civilization. But that distribution was a recent thing, and news traveled slowly in the uplands.
Which gave another reason not to annihilate them. Leave some alive to straggle back, carrying the word. Vosmaer’s command was too small to do more than guard a few key points and come to the aid of friendlies elsewhere, if news of need arrived in time. His basic strategy must be to convince the nomads that attacks on the settled tribes weren’t worth the risk; and his basic problem was that that frequently was not true.
He issued his orders. The carrier dropped to a bone-jarring landing and disgorged marines. His pursuit craft hovered while he observed. The magnifying viewer let him examine single pieces of the action that looked as though they might teach him something. After nearly a hundred years on Procrustes, humans still knew deadly little.
It wasn’t pleasant duty. He saw a band of lancers charge straight into ripgun fire. They were stocky and barrel-chested, like all natives of these heights where the air was as thin as above the seas of Earth; but they shared the feline beauty of lowlanders—and God, they were brave! The slugs struck, exploded, scattered them in splinters of bone, gobbets of flesh, fountains of purple blood. Worse, in a way, were the zateks. Those poor animals hadn’t killed or pillaged anybody, but they died just the same. Many took a while to do it, threshing and hooting in agony they could not understand.
A couple of barbarians who had been herding the captives along jumped from their saddles and drew sword. Dogs in the manger, Vosmaer thought sickly; and then, No. Their concept of honor says you must not leave anything for the enemy if you can help it. A prisoner tried to evade, but the r
ope connecting the ix’ s neck to the one ahead and the one behind brought the first ixen up short. The nearer nomad swept yi’s blade through a short, efficient curve. At least yi killed ixen instantly.
“Wow, great!” whooped Layard. A squad of humans had broken through the swirling mass of the foe. Their rifles put a stop to the slaughter. But a boy took an arrow in his eye, and yet he, like the zateks, needed minutes to become quiet, in the arms of a comrade while battle ramped around them. There’d be no reviving him after that kind of brain damage. There’d only be the burial at the fort, a volley, Taps, and the letter to write to his parents.
Vosmaer honestly wished he could be in combat himself; and he had no romantic illusions about it. But he couldn’t any longer, of course. He’d been raised to colonel; his duty was to direct the men so that they got the job done with minimal loss.
This operation proved rather neat, considering what a tiny force he had. Soon the last Cho-Lengn found the escape routes he’d directed be kept for them and were fleeing back east. His men cut the prisoners loose from the comes, gave first aid to the wounded and brought them back into the carrier, took formation behind Vosmaer after he landed and debarked. Dwellers were swarming toward them from ruined Arakoum.
The survivors were more than he had expected, about a hundred. Their chieftain had led them into a temple built of stone, which they had managed to hold. The barbarians didn’t persist in assaulting it, being in a hurry to push onward. Now the defenders came to meet their redeemed kindred, embrace and jubilate or go quietly aside and mourn.
The chieftain, a grizzled being of grave dignity, made a deep salutation, then drew Vosmaer aside. “Our souls forever thank you,” ix said.
“Your words reward us,” the man replied through his transponder. “How I wish we could have come sooner. Had you no warning?”
A movement of negation rippled the violet robe. “A cloud stream blew over Fallen Star Pass. They must have taken advantage of it to surprise and overrun the garrison there, then followed it on across the plateau. When the midmorning sun burned it off, they were at our door.”
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