by Dean Koontz
He concentrated on steering the light, fast craft along the top of the snow. Its grav field was so strong that the thing could support itself on the crust without stirring a breath of air in passage. The only noise it made in the Demosian night was a soft, contented purring, like a cat who had been on prowl and has found what it's been looking for.
There were no hardships this time, and no moments when either of them thought they had seen their last breath of air drawn—except once, when a bull moose with spiderweb antlers (which were really antennae) loped across their path, directly in front of them. They had missed it by inches, and it had charged after them, its gossamer antlers rippling and swaying above its head; but it had been no match for the sled.
They reached the second fortress in five hours, never driving faster than fifty nor slower than thirty, weaving in and out of trees, hugging the sides of valleys and bucking crazily up over the ruggedest drifts they had ever seen. It was well before dawn that they found the mountain which housed their sanctuary and achieved the door in its base that led to a sled berth like the one they had departed from earlier in the night. It was structured much the same as the first stronghold, though it was far larger. When they had looked at only a small bit of it, they agreed that a full reconnaissance could wait until morning.
"One thing," he said, wearily, as they tumbled into bed.
"What's that?" she asked, sounding even sleepier than he.
"We can't stay here more than another day or two."
She sat up. "Why not?"
"Because, love, even though I tried to pull every trace of the other three fortresses from the library of the first, there is bound to be a reference hidden in one of the thousands of other spools of data. And you can be damn sure they're going to go over that library with a microscope—especially when they discover we've seen fit to deplete it of large sections of knowledge. They'll know, at once, that there is another place like the first, and they'll waste nothing to find it. It won't take them long at all. They can even use Fortress One's computer to scan Fortress One's library and save themselves a few thousand man hours."
"But what can we do?"
"Only one thing," he said. He yawned and rolled over.
"Wait just a damn minute!" she exploded, dragging him onto his back again. "What's the one thing?"
"It'll take a long time to explain. And it's going to require a very emotional and important decision on your part. Wait until you feel better, wait until you're rested."
"Now," she persisted.
He shrugged, sat up, scratched his head. "Now, eh? Well, you might not like this. You may even hate me for suggesting it. It's not going to be pretty, and we can't kid ourselves that it will be an easy thing to do. You still want to hear, now?"
"Go on," she said.
He did…
Chapter Fourteen
The general sat in the passenger seat of his private helicopter as the pilot brought it around Needlepoint, the mountain which contained Fortress Two. In his lap was a book about ancient mythology, a subject he explored with great interest whenever the duties of his command would permit. He fingered the leather-bound volume now as he watched troop copters settling into position as they had been commanded. One touched down at the base of Needlepoint, blocking exit from the concealed sled door. A blunder like that which had been perpetrated at the first stronghold would not occur here. Two other copters jockeyed for position near the observation deck near the top of the mountain, that cunningly crafted platform of stone that seemed such a natural part of the land.
The general picked up the microphone. "Go in, Explosives."
A team of three blue-suited Alliance soldiers jumped from the cargo bay side door of one of the copters, three feet to the ledge below. Two cases of tools were handed down, and in a moment, the trio was at work.
The general thought, sitting there above the night and watching the small drama being played out in the light of the copter lamps, that he was much like a god himself. The notion pleased him considerably. He picked up the mike and said, to the copter that had been carrying the explosives team, "Tell them to hurry it up!"
The three men, a moment later, responded to the order repeated to them by an unseen hand in the copter's cargo bay and stepped up the pace of their activities considerably. Within two minutes, they stepped back from the seemingly natural rock wall before them, looked at their watches, tensed a second before the explosion echoed and the stone flew inwards, away from them, and made an entrance into Fortress Two.
The general was about to issue orders to hold off until he could be landed to lead the party when a heavily armored protection robot, apparently part of the fortress's defense chain, opened fire through the blasted door.
The three men of the explosives team went down, rolled in agony, and fell from the ledge down the seven thousand feet to the first promontory that caught them with brutal finality.
The windowglass on the first cargo copter shattered, and the pilot inside screamed so loudly that the general could even hear him through his own pilot's headphones. The copter spiraled downward, bounced away from the mountain, burst into flame, and rolled through the trees and the snow, setting a few branches afire.
There was no need to order a pullback. Everyone had done that the moment the three men had collected the first blast of fire.
"Fire a grenade in there!" the general ordered the pilot of the other copter. His own craft had minimal weaponry, nothing heavy enough for the task at hand.
The first pilot obliged.
A moment later, the mouth of the entrance flared into brilliance, and the protection robot there shattered under the heat and concussion. With nothing but rock and steel to feed on, the fire died.
"Advance infantry," the general ordered.
Another copter hovering rather far out from the mountain sped toward the deck. Ten minutes later, a group of twenty Alliance soldiers dressed in power suits stood before the blackened entrance to Fortress Two.
"Take it," the general said.
They went in.
The captain of the advance infantry followed behind his two experts in power suit manuevers. He was amazed, as he always was in action, at the docility of men, the manner in which they so readily agreed to rush forward into what might be certain death. He shook his head inside his thickly armored helmet and grinned. Dumb, green kids, even if they were thirty years old and older.
To the right, a battery of armor-piercing guns sprang to life, and one of the power suit experts went down with half a dozen steel spines stabbed through his body despite the toughness of his metal shell. The second man was faster: he turned and lobbed an implosion missile into the offending weaponry, wiping it out of existence before it could realign its sights on him or anyone else.
"Three, forward!" the captain bellowed.
And Three marched up to take the place of the man who had just been killed.
The captain marveled at the rhythm of it. The Alliance knew how to train its men.
Make them think of themselves as cogs, he mused. That's what keeps them in line. If they start to think or have opinions, boot the bastards out of the service!
"First floor secured," he radioed back to the general a few minutes later. "One loss."
The general wondered who had been taken out, whether ft was anyone he might know. He doubted it. It was best to ignore the enlisted men, for they were nothing more than cogs in the great works of the army. The captain was a nice enough chap—but obviously an idiot. Often, the general marveled at the humility with which people like the captain obeyed their orders even when they knew death was likely. Brainless, the lot of them.
He debarked from his private copter and entered Fortress Two, prowled the battle-scarred first level while he waited for news that another floor had been cleared and designated peaceful.
He carried the book of mythology in his hand.
He stopped over the body of the dead, power-suited soldier who had been speared by the antiarmor unit.
He kicked the helmet until the man's face appeared.
It wasn't anyone he knew.
He wondered what he would have done if it had been someone he recognized.
Nothing.
A man had to be an idiot to agree to a position in the advance infantry.
And how could you feel sorry about the death of an idiot?
The Demosians, the captain learned, had not expected their fortresses to be found and breached, for they had not used great imagination in the placement of the defense weapons. Much of it was drearily predictable. Of course, there was that incident on the eighteenth level down when the gun implantations had been—for the first time—in the ceilings, and four men had been brought down before everyone had gotten back out of firing range. But that had, thus far, been the only disaster.
Even so, he had stationed himself to the side of the main body of men, as well as behind the front pair of power suits.
He looked back the line, to see that the rear guard was keeping in step and at ready. He couldn't understand what sort of man would take a rear guard position, just as he couldn't understand what kind of man would willingly lead the rest of them, placing his body in the path of the first shots fired. Both positions were open to general disaster.
The privates in the rear guard watched the captain with interest as the advance infantry squad moved down through Fortress Two. If they hadn't been in armor, they would have been trading whispered jokes about him.
After all, what sort of man refuses to walk midst the protection of other bodies when the bullets are flying?
The general was standing by the stairwell, waiting to go down when he got the word; reading a passage of his book, a paragraph from a chapter on Mars, the god of war. There was a drawing of the supernatural man-entity on the facing page. The general liked the look of the jaw, the almost mad gleam in the eye which he interpreted as the sign of a clever man.
Mars.
Yes, he was Mars, at least in a way. He was the top-ranking military official of an entire world. He could bring destruction or peace, as he so chose. He was chuckling over the story of a mythological prank Mars was supposed to have played on his fellow gods when the floor bucked, buckled, sent him sprawling, and a deafening roar swept out of the corridors below and through the other floors of the fortress, out into the Demosian night.
He grabbed his lapel communications mike. "What the devil's going on down there?"
There was no answer.
"Has the floor been secured?" he asked.
"Sir?" a thin voice asked from the other end.
"Who am I speaking to?" the general demanded.
"Rear Guard Position Three," the private said.
"Where's your captain?"
"Dead, sir."
"Dead?"
"We reached the end of the Demosian defense system. Explosives in the floor, triggered to a certain weight stress of pedestrians. Only five of us left, and two of those are badly in need of treatment, General. Sir."
"You're sure of the defense system? That was the last of it?"
"It had to be, sir. They couldn't risk any explosions like that further down, for fear of burying themselves. It had the feel of the last obstacle. They would probably defend with handguns from now on."
"Be prepared to escort me to the last chambers, Private. You and the other two men still capable of fighting."
"Yes, sir."
"They're in there, sir," the private said, coming into the corridor from the last chamber in the fortress. "With the genetic engineering equipment."
"Well, bring them along," the general said.
"They're rather—Well, there just isn't much to bring, sir."
The general frowned, closed the mythology book. "Eh?"
"They killed themselves. Set fire to the room, then shot themselves in the heads with two high-powered pistols. It's messy."
The general blanched. "You're sure it's them?"
"Absolutely. A winged girl and boy." He paused, then: "There's enough of one side of her face left to tell she was the pretty one we were after."
The general walked back down the hallway without visually confirming the private's report. He signaled his copter pilot with his lapel mike.
"Sir?"
"Patch me through to the representative."
"Yes, sir."
He leaned against the wall, reading about Zeus. It would be nice to be all powerful, to be more than a general (though that was nice). It would be delightful to pull strings and see nations jump instead of just a squadron or two of men. He closed the book and pondered a thought that had been cropping up in his mind more and more: why not run for a political office. Now there was the Demos rep, a former military man. Now he was in a position of power where… No. No, that was a bad thought. A rep's job wasn't worth it. You were just a cog in a wheel, if you were a rep, mouthing the orders of those above you, never your own man. No, the only place for individuals was here, as army officers.
"The rep, sir," the pilot said, interrupting his line of thought.
"General?"
"They're dead."
"You're certain of that. Once before you said they couldn't have survived—"
"I've got the bodies. Or what's left of them. Set the room on fire and then shot themselves through the head."
"Really? Did they really do that? Both things?"
"Yes," the general said.
"They had four days," the rep mused. "Four days before we located Fortress Two. They must have known we were coming. I wonder why they didn't use the time to get out of there?"
"Maybe they were tired of running. They just cooperated for a change."
"Yes," the rep said. "A man of Stauffer Davis's past would surely, eventually, see the madness of fighting us. Cooperation. That's exactly what it was, General. Good night."
The general said goodnight, switched off his lapel mike, opened his book and began waiting for the elevator which was working now that the technicians had repaired the sabotage to it.
Zeus. Yes, it would be marvelous. But how did you get to the top, an individualist and all? Could it be done. He read on while the lift descended to gather him up.
As the last of the copters lifted away from the ruined fortress and turned into the blackness toward homebase, two birds nestled together in the branches of a large tree halfway down the side of Needlepoint, looking up into the underbellies of the brutish troop carriers. They were as large as a six-year-old child, each, and covered by thick, downish feathers the color of yil tree leaves, yellow and lovely. Their faces were incredibly soft and gentle. On the end of each long wing, a rudimentary hand with four fingers and two thumbs was concealed in a pocket which feathers crossed over.
"Are they really gone?" she asked.
"They won't be back. Even if they suspect some trick, they won't know what they're looking for."
"How do you feel?"
"Still some shock," he said. "We should have had more time, before they came, to get used to ourselves, to what we've made of ourselves. But now we have years for that."
She was silent a while. Then: "Can we really have others like us?"
"In two days I learned every single piece of data and procedure having to do with the Artificial Wombs. I took two more days to structure these bodies because I wanted to be careful, sure—when I could have made them in hours. We can have children. They will be whole and healthy, children like us, birdmen. They'll be intelligent. Your people had gone further than they realized in conquering the secrets of the genes. If they had not been so set onto the single track of creating soldiers, they could have done marvelous things. They might even had come up with a plan like this to save themselves from the last ravages of the battle with the Alliance."
"How long will it take? For babies?"
"I think—five months. You'll have them naturally, not through eggs, of course."
"When?" she asked.
"Now?" he asked.
It would be perfect to concei
ve their first child on this night, the first night of their residence in the new bodies, the night the Alliance thought them dead and forgotten.
"It's going to seem silly—the mechanics of lovemaking," she said, a touch of embarrassment in her voice.
"No, no!" he said. "You're beautiful. And your children will be too."
Tonight, the first child, the first of the secret, unseen, unsuspected warriors conceived in the dark of the woods, the warriors that would one day reclaim the land of their forefathers, reclaim Demos for people of the air… Tonight, love and conception and an effort to overcome awkwardness at not being human. Tonight, celebration. Tomorrow: going to come the revolution…