The huge, bearlike subaltern shoved off the bed, stood to his full seven feet, and lumbered into the duster. The soothing powders cleansed away his sleep-fatigue and he emerged, blue pelt glistening, with bad dreams almost entirely dusted away. Almost. Entirely. He had a lingering feeling of having been . . . somewhat . . . larger . . .
The briefing colors washed across the walls, and Pinkh hurriedly attached his ribbons. It was informalwear today. Three yellows, three ochers, three whites and an ego blue.
He went downtunnel to the briefing section, and prayed. All around him his sortie partners were on their backs, staring up at the sky dome and the random (programmed) patterns of stars in their religious significances. Montag's Lord of Propriety had programmed success for today's mission. The stars swirled and shaped themselves and the portents were reassuring to Pinkh and his fellows.
The Montag–Thil War had been raging for almost one hundred years, and it seemed close to ending. The dark star Montag and the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy had thrown their might against each other for a century; the people themselves were weary of war. It would end soon. One or the other would make a mistake, the opponent would take the advantage, and the strike toward peace would follow immediately. It was merely a matter of time. The assault troops—especially Pinkh, a planetary hero—were suffused with a feeling of importance, a sense of the relevance of what they were doing. Out to kill, certainly, but with the sure knowledge that they were working toward a worthwhile goal. Through death, to life. The portents had told them again and again, these last months, that this was the case.
The sky dome turned golden and the stars vanished. The assault troops sat up on the floor, awaited their briefing.
It was Pinkh's fiftieth mission.
His great yellow eye looked around the briefing room. There were more young troopers this mission. In fact . . . he was the only veteran. It seemed strange.
Could Montag's Lord of Propriety have planned it this way? But where were Andakh and Melnakh and Gorekh? They'd been here yesterday.
Was it just yesterday?
He had a strange memory of having been—asleep?—away?—unconscious?—what?—something. As though more than one day had passed since his last mission. He leaned across to the young trooper on his right and placed a paw flat on the other's. "What day is today?" The trooper flexed palm and answered, with a note of curiosity in his voice, "It's Former. The ninth." Pinkh was startled. "What cycle?" he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
"Third," the young trooper said.
The briefing officer entered at that moment, and Pinkh had no time to marvel that it was not the next day, but a full cycle later. Where had the days gone? What had happened to him? Had Gorekh and the others been lost in sorties? Had he been wounded, sent to repair, and only now been remanded to duty? Had he been wounded and suffered amnesia? He remembered a Lance Corporal in the Throbbing Battalion who had been seared and lost his memory. They had sent him back to Montag, where he had been blessed by the Lord of Propriety himself. What had happened to him?
Strange memories—not his own, all the wrong colors, weights and tones wholly alien—kept pressing against the bones in his forehead.
He was listening to the briefing officer, but also hearing an undertone. Another voice entirely. Coming from some other place he could not locate.
You great ugly fur-thing, you! Wake up, look around you. One hundred years, slaughtering. Why can't you see what's being done to you? How dumb can you be? The Lords of Propriety; they set you up. Yeah, you, Pinkh! Listen to me. You can't block me out . . . you'll hear me. Bailey. You're the one, Pinkh, the special one. They trained you for what's coming up . . . no, don't block me out, you imbecile . . . don't blot me out I'll be here, you can't blot me out
The background noise went on, but he would not listen. It was sacrilegious. Saying things about the Lord of Propriety. Even the Thil Lord of Propriety was sacrosanct in Pinkh's mind. Even though they were at war, the two Lords were eternally locked together in holiness. To blaspheme even the enemy's Lord was unthinkable.
Yet he had thought it
He shuddered with the enormity of what had passed in his thoughts, and knew he could never go to release and speak of it. He would submerge the memory, and pay strict attention to the briefing officer who was
"This cycle's mission is a straightforward one. You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh, whose reputation is known to all of you."
Pinkh inclined with the humbleness movement.
"You will drive directly into the Thil labyrinth, chivvy and harass a path to Groundworld, and there level as many targets-of-opportunity as you are able, before you're destroyed. After this briefing you will reassemble with your sortie leaders and fully familiarize yourselves with the target-cubes the Lord has commanded to be constructed."
He paused, and stared directly at Pinkh, his golden eye gone to pinkness with age and dissipation. But what he said was for all of the sappers. "There is one target you will not strike. It is the Maze of the Thil Lord of Propriety. This is irrevocable. You will not, repeat not strike near the Maze of the Lord."
Pinkh felt a leap of pleasure. This was the final strike. It was preamble to peace. A suicide mission; he ran eleven thankfulness prayers through his mind. It was the dawn of a new day for Montag and Thil. The Lords of Propriety were good. The Lords held all cupped in their holiness.
Yet he had thought the unthinkable.
"You will be under the direct linkage of Subaltern Pinkh," the briefing officer said again. Then, kneeling and passing down the rows of sappers, he palmed good death with honor to each of them. When he reached Pinkh, he stared at him balefully for a long instant, as though wanting to speak. But the moment passed, he rose, and left the chamber.
They went into small groups with the sortie leaders and examined the target-cubes. Pinkh went directly to the briefing officer's cubicle and waited patiently till the older Montagasque's prayers were completed.
When his eye cleared, he stared at Pinkh.
"A path through the labyrinth has been cleared."
"What will we be using?"
"Reclaimed sortie craft. They have all been outfitted with diversionary equipment."
"Linkage level?"
"They tell me a high six."
"They tell you?" He regretted the tone even as he spoke.
The briefing officer looked surprised. As if his desk had coughed. He did not speak, but stared at Pinkh with the same baleful stare the subaltern had seen before.
"Recite your catechism," the briefing officer said, finally.
Pinkh settled back slowly on his haunches, ponderous weight downdropping with grace. Then:
"Free flowing, free flowing, all flows
"From the Lords, all free, all fullness,
"Flowing from the Lords.
"What will I do
"What will I do
"What will I do without my Lords?
"Honor in the dying, rest in honor, all honor
"From the Lords, all rest, all honoring,
"To honor my Lords.
"This I will do
"This I will do
"I will live when I die for my Lords."
And it was between the First and Second Sacredness that the darkness came to Pinkh. He saw the briefing officer come toward him, reach a great palm toward him, and there was darkness . . . the same sort of darkness from which he had risen in his own cubicle before the briefing. Yet, not the same. That darkness had been total, endless, with the feeling that he was . . . somehow . . . larger . . . greater . . . as big as all space . . .
And this darkness was like being turned off. He could not think, could not even think that he was unthinking. He was cold, and not there. Simply: not there.
Then, as if it had not happened, he was back in the briefing officer's cubicle, the great bearlike shape was moving back from him, and he was reciting the Second Sacredness of his catechism.
What had happened . . .
he did not know.
"Here are your course coordinates," the briefing officer said. He extracted the spool from his pouch and gave it to Pinkh. The subaltern marveled again at how old the briefing officer must be: the hair of his chest pouch was almost gray.
"Sir," Pinkh began. Then stopped. The briefing officer raised a palm. "I understand, Subaltern. Even to the most reverent among us there come moments of confusion." Pinkh smiled. He did understand.
"Lords," Pinkh said, palming the briefing officer with fullness and propriety.
"Lords," he replied, palming honor in the dying.
Pinkh left the briefing officer's cubicle and went to his own place.
As soon as he was certain the subaltern was gone, the briefing officer, who was very old, linked-up with someone else, far away; and he told him things.
First, they melted the gelatin around him. It was hardly gelatin, but it had come to be called jell by the sappers, and the word had stuck. As the gelatin stuck. Face protected, he lay in the ten troughs, in sequence, getting the gelatinous substance melted around him. Finally, pincers that had been carefully padded lifted him from the tenth trough, and slid him along the track to his sortie craft. Once inside the pilot country, stretched out on his stomach, he felt the two hundred wires insert themselves into the jell, into the fur, into his body. The brain wires were the last to fix.
As each wire hissed from its spool and locked onto the skull contacts, Pinkh felt himself go a little more to integration with the craft. At last, the final wire tipped on icily and so Pinkh was metalflesh, bulkheadskin, eyescanners, bonerivets, plasticartilege, artery / ventricle / capacitors / molecules / transistors,
all of him as one, totality, metal-man, furred-vessel, essence of mechanism, soul of inanimate, life in force-drive, linkage of mind with power plant. Pinkh the ship. Sortie Craft 90 named Pinkh.
And the others: linked to him.
Seventy sappers, each encased in jell, each wired up, each a mind to its sortie craft. Seventy, linked in telepathically with Pinkh, and Pinkh linked into his own craft, and all of them instrumentalities of the Lord of Propriety.
The great carrier wing that bore them made escape orbit and winked out of normal space.
Here▪Not Here.
In an instant gone.
(Gone where!?!)
Inverspace.
Through the gully of inverspace to wink into existence once again at the outermost edge of the Thil labyrinth.
Not Here•Here.
Confronting a fortified tundra of space crisscrossed by deadly lines of force. A cosmic fireworks display. A cat's cradle of vanishing, appearing and disappearing threads of a million colors; each one receptive to all the others. Cross one, break one, interpose... and suddenly uncountable others home in. Deadly ones. Seeking ones. Stunners and drainers and leakers and burners. The Thil labyrinth.
Seventy-one sortie craft hung quivering—the last of the inverspace coronas trembling off and gone. Through the tracery of force-lines the million stars of the Thil Galaxy burned with the quiet reserve of ice crystals. And there, in the center, the Nebula Cluster. And there, in the center of the Cluster, Groundworld.
"Link in with me."
Pinkh's command fled and found them. Seventy beastcraft tastes, sounds, scents, touches came back to Pinkh. His sappers were linked in.
"A path has been cleared through the labyrinth for us. Follow. And trust. Honor."
"In the dying," came back the response, from seventy minds of flesh-and-metal.
They moved forward. Strung out like fish of metal with minds linked by thought, they surged forward following the lead craft. Into the labyrinth. Color burned and boiled past, silently sizzling in the vacuum. Pinkh detected murmurs of panics, quelled them with a damping thought of his own. Images of the still pools of Dusnadare, of deep sighs after a full meal, of Lord-worship during the days of First Fullness. Trembling back to him, their minds quieted. And the color beams whipped past on all sides, without up or down or distance. But never touching them.
Time had no meaning. Fused into flesh/metal, the sortie craft followed the secret path that had been cleared for them through the impenetrable labyrinth.
Pinkh had one vagrant thought: Who cleared this for us?
And a voice from somewhere far away, a voice that was his own, yet someone else's—the voice of a someone who called himself a bailey—said, That's it! Keep thinking what they don't want you to think
But he put the thoughts from him, and time wearied itself and succumbed, and finally they were there. In the exact heart of the Nebula Cluster in Thil Galaxy.
Groundworld lay fifth from the source star, the home sun that had nurtured the powerful Thil race till it could explode outward.
"Link in to the sixth power," Pinkh commanded.
They linked. He spent some moments reinforcing his command splices, making the interties foolproof and trigger-responsive. Then he made a prayer, and they went in.
Why am I locking them in so close, Pinkh wondered, damping the thought before it could pass along the lines to his sappers. What am I trying to conceal? Why do I need such repressive control? What am I trying to avert?
Pinkh's skull thundered with sudden pain. Two minds were at war inside him, he knew that. He SUDDENLY knew it.
Who is that?
It's me, you clown!
Get out! I'm on a mission . . . it's import—
It's a fraud! They've prog—
Get out of my head listen to me you idiot I'm trying to tell you something you need to know I won't listen I'll override you I'll block you I'll damp you no listen don't do that I've been someplace you haven't been and I can tell you about the Lords oh this can't be happening to me not to me I'm a devout man fuck that garbage listen to me they lost you man they lost you to a soul stealer and they had to get you back because you were their specially programmed killer they want you to Lord oh Lord of Propriety hear me now hear me your most devout worshipper forgive these blasphemous thoughts I can't control you any more you idiot I'm fading fading fading Lord oh Lord hear me I wish only to serve you. Only to suffer the honor in the dying.
Peace through death. I am the instrumentality of the Lords. I know what I must do.
That's what I'm trying to tell you. . . .
And then he was gone in the mire at the bottom of Pinkh's mind. They were going in.
They came down, straight down past the seven moons, broke through the cloud cover, leveled out in a delta wing formation and streaked toward the larger of the two continents that formed ninety percent of Groundworld's land mass: Pinkh kept them at supersonic speed, blurring, and drove a thought out to his sappers: "We'll drop straight down below a thousand feet and give them the shock wave. Hold till I tell you to level off."
They were passing over a string of islands—causeway-linked beads in a pea-green sea—each one covered from shore to shore with teeming housing dorms that commuted their residents to the main continents and the complexes of high-rise bureaucratic towers.
"Dive!" Pinkh ordered.
The formation angled sharply forward, as though it was hung on puppet strings, then fell straight down.
The metalflesh of Pinkh's ship-hide began to heat. Overlapping armadillo plates groaned; Pinkh pushed their speed; force-bead mountings lubricated themselves, went dry, lubricated again; they dropped down; follicle-thin fissures were grooved in the bubble surfaces; sappers began to register fear, Pinkh locked them tighter; instruments coded off the far right and refused to register; the island-chain flew up toward them; pressure in the gelatin trough flattened them with g's; now there was enough atmosphere to scream past their sortie craft and it whistled, shrilled, howled, built and climbed; gimbal-tracks rasped in their mountings; down and down they plunged, seemingly bent on thundering into the islands of Groundworld; "Sir! Sir!"; "Hold steady, not yet . . . not yet . . . I'll tell you when . . . not yet . . ."
Pushing an enormous bubble of pressurized air before them, the delta wing formation wa
iled straight down toward the specks of islands that became dots, became buttons, became masses, became everything as they rushed up and filled the bubble sights from side to side—
"Level out! Now! Do it, do it, level now!"
And they pulled out, leveled off and shot away. The bubble of air, enormous, solid as an asteroid, thundering down unchecked . . . hit struck burst broke with devastating results. Pinkh's sortie craft plunged away, and in their wake they left exploding cities, great structures erupting, others trembling, shuddering, then caving in on themselves. The shock wave hit and spread outward from shore to shore. Mountains of plasteel and lathite volcano'd in blossoms of flame and flesh. The blast-pit created by the air bubble struck to the core of the island-chain. A tidal wave rose like some prehistoric leviathan and boiled over one entire spot of land. Another island broke up and sank almost at once. Fire and walls of plasteel crushed and destroyed after the shock wave.
The residence islands were leveled as Pinkh's sortie craft vanished over the horizon, still traveling at supersonic speed.
They passed beyond the island-chain, leaving in their wake dust and death, death and ruin, ruin and fire.
"Through death to peace," Pinkh sent.
"Honor," they responded, as one.
(Far away on Groundwork!, a traitor smiled.)
(In a Maze, a Lord sat with antennae twined, waiting.)
(Flesh and metal eased.)
(In ruins, a baby whose exoskeleton had been crushed, crawled toward the pulsing innards of its mother.)
(Seven moons swung in their orbits.)
(A briefing officer on Montag knew it was full, golden.)
Oh, Lords, what I have done, I have done for you.
Wake up. Will you wake up, Pinkh! The mission is—
The other thing, the bailey, was wrenching at him, poking its head up out of the slime. He thrust it back down firmly. And made a prayer.
"Sir," the thought of one of his sappers came back along the intertie line, "did you say something?"
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