Krurix was at the other board in an instant and his fingers raced over the keys. “One message, short,” he said, “which probably means—”
The played back message crackled through the speaker. The voice was flat and expressionless. “Baegess, Egalitarian Republic, reporting. Zero-point energy plates locked up in main ship drive laser. Ship is in free fall toward Setepos. Unable to disable the emergency plate separator, hence engines will reactivate with probable catastrophic results. We are attempting-”
The message broke off.
The rumble through our feet had ceased, and when I looked outside the door, there was no longer a great light shining through the clouds; rather, it was becoming as dark as night, and a high wind was rising rapidly, sucking up dust and ripping thatch from roofs. I felt rather than saw Bepemm and Krurix come up behind me. “You were right,” Bepemm said softly to him. “You were completely right.”
“It sure doesn’t matter now,” he responded. “What are we going to do?”
“Well,” I said, “first question is what is it going to do out there. What I’d say is we try to work that out, then make some plans, and then see how many people we can get to follow the plans.”
“Back to basics,” Bepemm said. “So first the big laser cut off. What happened then?”
“The sea stopped boiling and the steam above it stopped superheating,” Krurix said. “Given how hot that was, it cooled very fast. Probably in almost no time at all you had a pretty good vacuum at the center—which might account for the booming noise we heard, just like the way the air rushes back together after a lightning stroke is over. Then the laser came back on when the emergency separator took hold—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “There was an interval there—while it wasn’t running—and in that time Setepos rotated. So when the laser came back on, the ship was not only much lower but also some distance to the west.”
Bepemm’s face grew pale. “That means almost for certain that instead of down into already-formed clouds, the laser fired abruptly with everything it had out of a clear sky and onto the sea. And from much lower down—”
“Probably it had fallen more than halfway to the surface,” Krurix said. “So four times the energy intensity at the surface. A lot of seawater blew up into steam, and the column of superheated air killed the ship. So we have a great big vacuum at one point, and an enormous load of steam at high pressure just west of it.”
“A hurricane,” I said. “It’s going to make a huge hurricane, within an eighth of a day at the outside. The wind’s about to get very high, and it is really going to rain. And we’re sitting in a river valley with a lot of high ground around us, and almost all our people are in flimsy shelters that are going to get knocked down by the wind. We’ve got to get to some solid shelter, on high ground, right away.”
“I can take you to a dry cave some distance up one of the mountains, anyway,” Diehrenn said, running up to us out of the rain. “What’s going on? Does the big thunder mean something happened to your ship? And what does your word ‘hurricane’ mean?”
“A big storm,” I said. “Probably bigger than anyone here can remember.” I explained the situation in a few short sentences.
“We probably have only an eighth of a day or so,” Krurix added. “Is there room for everyone in that cave?”
“There’s room for all the Nisuans,” Diehrenn said, “and that’s all who’re going. If your ship isn’t there to back you up anymore, we can’t afford to take care of the Seteposians anymore. And they’ll manage a lot better than we will in any case; they’re native here and we don’t belong. So, especially since your political officer isn’t here anymore, let’s not hear any more about what we ‘owe’ our Seteposian ‘brothers.’”
Rather than start an argument when it would have been pointless, I said, “We need to get going in as short a time as we can manage. Can you get everyone together—”
“Right here, as fast as I can. It won’t be long,” Diehrenn said, and ran back into the rain.
All of us grabbed our packs and rammed everything we could think of into them; as we were finishing that, the first Nisuans started to arrive. We had spare packs and bags, and all of these we loaded with emergency rations; any spare space in the packs of anyone just arriving got something vital or something edible. That was as much organization as we could manage.
Meanwhile, outside, the rain was picking up and the winds were rising. “We’ll need to get moving soon or we won’t be able to move,” Krurix was saying as Diehrenn returned with Prirox.
“We’ve gotten everyone who can walk or be carried together,” she said. “Prirox, the cave the Nim’s children used to play in is what I’ve got in mind. I think we’ll have to take the straight uphill trail because the easier one crosses two streams and that’s not going to be possible today.”
“Right,” Prirox said. “Are we ready to go?”
No one argued so we were. We let Diehrenn and Prirox lead, and we three assistants, weapons drawn, brought up the rear. When we stepped outside the building, the wind was howling and the cold rain blew in sheets; fortunately the high ground was downwind from town, so most of the two hundred and fifty or so refugees had their backs to the weather. Unfortunately for us, as the rearguard, we had to walk backwards and try to keep our eyes clear.
Hand masers are useless in the rain—the microwaves they put out in a tight beam are scattered and absorbed by the water drops—so we were carrying microslug guns. We had not gotten forty steps from headquarters before we saw Seteposians racing for it. Of course, by letting all the Nisuans in town know that we needed to leave, we had also let the Seteposians know that we were leaving—Diehrenn had to announce it in Real-People because so few of our people spoke their own language. You would think that might mean Seteposians would also flee to the hills, and for all I know some of them did. Most, however, decided to see what they could loot now that we were leaving.
We had locked the doors behind us, but that wasn’t going to keep the mob out for long; they were quite capable of pulling the building down with their bare hands. And since so much of the equipment we would need if we survived the storm was still in there, we couldn’t let them loot and burn. Perhaps the winds or the flood would destroy the building—we could do nothing about those—but we could at least try to make sure that the would-be looters didn’t.
We fired short bursts into the crowd; the front rank wavered, then broke and ran. In the heavy rain we could barely see what we were firing at, but we could see shapes moving so we kept shooting until we couldn’t see any more. Krurix chanced a shot with his hand maser; it couldn’t get through the rain, but it did make an impressive rumbling boom as the rain it hit exploded into steam and then recondensed.
“Not a bad trick!” I shouted over the rain. “Bet it scares them!” We all fired a few maser shots, and as the headquarters building faded into the rain, we stopped for a moment, letting the refugees gain a little distance from us, and then sprayed the area with microslugs. The screams were gratifying. “I guess some people just can’t grasp an idea,” I said. “And at least in this weather they can’t get much use out of those bow-and-arrow contraptions. I think we’ve done all we can and now we might as well catch up with the group.”
As we went over the first ridge outside of town, water and wind lashing us further, we looked back; it looked like flames were leaping up from Real People Town. “Probably getting a little carried away about the end of the world,” Bepemm shouted. “Nothing we can do about it right now!”
“How far is the cave?” I asked, shouting to Krurix.
“One more ridge and then a mountainside, I think,” he shouted back. “At least after this next valley we’re up above the flood level—I think.”
It wasn’t long before we were between the two ridges, but even then water ran over the tops of our feet and we had to go carefully; a dry wash was about to become a raging river and there was an obvious danger of flash flood. Still, we ma
de it to the top of the second ridge without much incident, except of course that almost everyone was tired and cold, and since we were following the ridgeline from there on, we were more exposed to the wind. Rain was falling so thick that I never noticed when the ridge joined the low mountain. It all seemed to be up, up, and more up until finally, staggering and gasping, I found myself stumbling into a dark place where it wasn’t raining. “Here we are,” Diehrenn said next to me, but it was so dark I couldn’t see her. “I think we all made it.”
I turned back and looked; very dim gray light came into the cave through curtains of windblown rain. The cave smelled of clay and bodies.
“I think I can make a fire under the overhang,” Krurix said, “if we’ve got any fuel.”
There was a big pile of wood that Prirox and Diehrenn had left for the trips up here that the Nim’s children and grandchildren liked to make, and that was quickly passed forward to Krurix. He stacked the logs into a neat pile, then stepped back and shot them several times with his hand maser. Flames leaped up from where he pointed, and after about twenty shots he had the beginnings of a comfortable fire. Some of the smoke went into the cave, and because it was acrid, now and then when the wind blew the wrong way it would start people coughing. All the same, we all packed up around it, enjoying the warmth (even though perhaps more of that came from each other), the light, and the sense of being out of immediate danger.
As the day grew dimmer and the wind more fierce, we banked the fire and everyone piled together in groups in the cave to sleep. Outside the wind howled louder and harder and rain came down thicker; the hurricane itself had hit.
It had been an exhausting day. I was sound asleep as soon as I lay down. When I woke in the morning, I was already beginning to understand that we might very well be on this planet for good. Nothing helps the acceptance of hard facts as much as sleeping on them.
When two hundred and fifty people sleep together in about twenty communal piles, it doesn’t take much to get everyone awake on a cold summer morning outdoors; for one thing, if you try to remain asleep, your “blankets” get up and walk away, and your “pillows” crawl out from under you. Thus everyone was up and about the next morning at about the same time. Daylight showed us a mountainside redecorated with mudslides and a scoured landscape below partially buried in deep clay mud.
The artificial hurricane, though fierce, had not been long lived. Probably it would have done little damage if it had happened in a normal season. But the rain that fell out from the plume of steam that Egalitarian Republic had formed, after forty days, had so saturated the ground that there was no place for any of the water that fell except as runoff. As it had poured fiercely down the mountainside, the weakened and rotting brush, dying from soaked roots and lack of sun, ripped out by howling winds, had not done much to hold it. Water, mud, brush, and all had washed down between the ridges and into the rivers, forming temporary dams of rubble here and there. The lakes behind those dams had filled and spilled within sixteenths of days, sending huge waves cascading down onto the flood-plains.
We made our way back slowly, keeping a good guard ahead and behind, because we had no idea how many Seteposians might have survived, but we knew for certain who they would blame for this, and they might well think that with the ship gone our power was gone as well. In fact, we saw only three of them, and they broke and ran as soon as they saw the company of us. Diehrenn said she thought they were escaped slaves, not Real People. Probably they had been afraid that we were still working for the Real People.
We reached Real People Town just after noon, delayed by the problems of mud, flooding, and having to take so many of the old, weak, sick, and very young with us. Still, so far as we could determine, more by luck than by skill, we had gotten the whole surviving Nisuan population of Setepos out of town and back with no deaths or even serious injuries. I mentioned that to Krurix, and he grinned at me. “Well, if I were a review board, I’d give us all medals,” he said. “Unfortunately, those wouldn’t do us any more good than not getting them, which I think is more likely.”
I laughed; maybe I was getting used to his sense of humor. “Well, I’ll take anything that’ll make me feel better right now,” I said. “And there’s not much to feel good about.”
We had rigged a line from a piece of rubble to a broken tree across the river; now our little band was crossing, clinging to the line, with able bodies between anyone who might have trouble keeping a grip. The water was only waist high on an adult anyway, so it was more a case of being careful than of any great danger. Now the last of our group, escorted by Prirox and Weruz, were coming up on the bank, and we were forming up for a cautious advance into Real People Town. To judge from the mud and rubble in front of us, the flood had been deep enough to sweep right through the town, but probably not to cover it. What we had seen from the ridge had looked like many buildings still standing, but there had been nothing moving and no signs of life.
The main track to the front gate was no longer visible as such; it had been cut through with gullies, buried by rubble in other places, and mostly had just reverted to mud, its deeply worn spots filled in with silt.
We picked our way along carefully, past drowned goats and piles of brush, till we reached the remains of the wooden palisade. Probably the huge holes we had knocked into it had helped keep the rest up; it was in surprisingly good shape where it still stood. Much of the wreckage from the town had washed up against it: logs, thatch, bits of garments. There was a dead infant Seteposian in one pile as well.
“Nothing of use to us, and it’s a sanitation hazard,” Bepemm said. “Once we’ve scouted the whole works, probably we should burn the larger piles.”
“Looks like someone beat us to it,” Krurix said. “There are fire scars on all the standing hut walls.”
He was right; a little distance further into the ruins showed us many that were more fire-damaged still. We found more bodies of very young and very old Seteposians, and at least one young female whose body had been battered severely, though whether by other Seteposians or by the water and storm was impossible for us to tell.
“There wasn’t much lightning to start a fire—at least not up on the mountain—and it’s hard to see how a fire could have spread in all that rain,” I said. “And most of it didn’t burn much. I think they probably fired every building they could. It looks like at least one of the old ones died of knife wounds, not drowning. I wonder what happened here?”
Diehrenn raised her shoulders and let them drop, a gesture the Nisuans here had learned from the Seteposians. It could mean a lot of things: complete indifference, lack of knowledge, contemptuous dismissal, sometimes only that an answer was too obvious to bother with. Bepemm, who was the best of us at speaking Real-People, had begun to do it as well. When there was no answer for a few more steps, I finally said, “Er, my question was serious. Do you think you know what happened?”
Bepemm answered. “I would guess they were panicked. It looked like something bad had happened which only the gods knew about. Probably they heard Diehrenn and Prirox summoning people to the palace and figured that whatever was going to get us might get them as well. And so . . .”
“But why would they panic and burn their own town down?” Krurix asked.
“Because they’re savages,” Diehrenn said flatly. “The bulk of the population were slaves who just wanted to go back to their conquered villages, and all they knew was that the Nim’s army came and took them and made them work here. So when they got the chance they ran for it; a lot of them set fires to cover their tracks. And besides, many of the Real People themselves were children of mothers taken captive in war, and they didn’t have much idea what was going on either. The Nim didn’t spread a lot of knowledge around, so they had only a vague knowledge of what was going on. After we took over, they were hanging around here because we fed them and helped them rebuild and they didn’t have anywhere else to be anyway. So when it looked like everything was falling apart, there was nothin
g much to keep them here, and their first thought was that something a lot bigger than themselves was angry. And once someone got the idea that the town was what the gods hated, well, in practically every religion around here, you purify things by burning them. They had to get rid of the bad town. The smart ones ran up into the hills and are probably still running. The dumb ones just ran until the flood caught them. And that’s the end of the Real People, which is a fine thing if you ask me.”
We had come to the ruin of the old stone gate for the inner wall of the city: a crude affair, formed with a lintel with stones piled on top of it, rather than any sort of arch. We had blown it up, along with the tower, because it was a symbol of the old Nim’s power. Now it was blocked; the heaps of stones had furnished solid objects for junk to catch on. It took us some time, even with lots of people helping, to clear out the rubble.
The stone part of town showed just as many signs of fire damage, especially inside the buildings; probably, since it was a little higher up, the water had gotten there later. It looked as if the flood had crested about a bodylength high on most walls.
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