by Glen Cook
No one argued, though many sets of shoulders tightened in anger and resentment.
“Good. You know me well enough not to waste time arguing. You may begin by recalling those who have taken control of the stations and mirrors.”
The senior male replied, “They will not come. They have orders.”
“They will not come, mistress. Recall your upbringing. Annoy me again and you will enjoy a long life as my personal bond. I am not pleased with you meth. I am tempted to see that your lives are very long and extremely unpleasant.”
“They will not come, mistress. They have orders to remain where they are, no matter what they hear.”
“Very inventive. We shall have to convince them, then. Prepare a rocket. We will destroy the Hammer. Send the order. Give them one minute to respond. Then launch.”
The senior rogue started shaking.
Typical male fear fit. They had no choice but to entrust tasks to cowards. They were all cowards.
“I am watching you. While you work recall that I have spent years studying the ship on which this one was patterned. I will know what you are doing.” She stopped, flipped a ghost at a male doing something surreptitious. He screamed. “You see?” She ordered the bath to hang him from the overhead. “Your friend will sing songs of agony while you work. His screams will serve to remind you who rules and who obeys.”
She patted the senior’s shoulder. He shuddered. “This time you pushed too hard. You made the Communities beg me to deal with you. You sealed the doom of all brethren. Even those we silth think good, I suppose. You were given countless chances to learn and refused all of them. In the Ponath, where I was whelped, we destroyed an animal that threatened us. Immediately. Sentiment did not stand in the way. Life was too fragile, too difficult.” She patted his shoulder again. “Be of good cheer. You will participate in great events. You will see the end of an era. You may become the only brethren left alive. I might set you loose later, to wander the world and bear witness to the fury of silth aroused, to the fury of the All, when meth dare defy the natural order.”
Some of the males looked at her as though she were mad. Most tried to evade her attention. The senior started to rise, lips back in anger. Marika gestured. The hanging male shrieked. “Such is the fate of those who will not obey. Those who will will survive. Destroy the Hammer. The dome on Little Fang will be next.” She whispered to her senior bath, “I am leaving for a moment. Watch them.”
She stepped out of the control section, closed her eyes, opened to the weak touch she had felt a moment before.
The Redoriad Mistress had entered the home system.
III
What is it? Marika sent.
You may have sprung a trap.
I knew that when I came. But the males were here. How otherwise?
I came back too soon, too tired, hoping to be of aid. I dropped out of the Up-and-Over too soon, and askew from the ecliptic. Chance showed me three starships very like that which attacked the world. They are lying quietly out there.
Marika grunted, reflected a moment. So. Did they detect you?
I think not. I remained only a moment. Barely long enough to note them, probe them, and get out. They are not alert.
Interesting. Were they shielded?
No.
Stay where you are. It is dangerous here still.
Marika paced. A trap. With the deadly part awaiting a signal from in here. A signal already going out at the velocity of light. How far? She queried the Redoriad Mistress. Many, many hours. Too far for them. They had been too careful in hiding themselves.
The fools. She closed her eyes and summoned the system’s great black. It did not take long.
She returned to the control center afterward. “Have they been stalling?” The rocket had not launched.
“I think so, mistress.”
“So.” She waved a paw. “Like that. That easily. Your ships in hiding have been destroyed. They were not alert. They did not have their shields up. You gain nothing by trying to stall till they get here.” She faced the bath. “I want all the brethren aboard gathered here. I will give them the chance to die for their beliefs, or to make their peace.”
The senior male looked grim. Marika said, “I told you to destroy the Hammer. You have not done so.” She waved. The dangling male howled till the senior closed a circuit that launched a rocket.
“Now the dome on Little Fang. Orders to return here, then one minute, then launch. I want the orders sent on a frequency open to everyone.”
The senior growled, “You are enjoying this.”
“Very much.” And she was. She was free of restraint. There was no one whose opinion concerned her. This would be done her way entirely. She would shatter their power, and humiliate them in the process. And she would enjoy doing it.
There would be no mercy this time. This time she would redesign the world.
It took only four rockets to convince the brethren that their position was hopeless. Marika made it seem obvious that she was willing to sacrifice everyone in the stations.
A few hundred meth died. And the void around the homeworld was hers.
Once the brethren from the mirrors were safely away, inward bound, she loosed the great black and finished everyone who had held the stations.
The senior male protested.
“I promised them nothing. Only you who are here.” She stared down at the homeworld, at the place where Kublin cowered. He would not respond to the touch. But he never did.
She had a rocket carry a greeting down.
The explosion, half an hour later, was most gratifying. But it did not neutralize Kublin’s installation. She sent another.
A tendril of touch reached her. A fartoucher sister down below sent her the gratitude of the Communities. The message sounded terribly contrived. Marika responded, You are not yet saved. That from which you fled has overtaken you. That which you feared has befallen you. I have the rogue ship now. And there will be real changes before I abandon it. You had a choice. The brethren way or Marika’s. You chose mine as the lesser evil. Now you must live or die with it.
The second missile detonated over Kublin’s headquarters, highlighting her position of strength.
That weapon did not break through either. She ordered a third launched.
She reached with the touch. Kublin, this is only the beginning. The bombs will fall forever unless you surrender. There is no other way to save the brethren. Your trap has been broken. Your ships are destroyed. You are powerless. It is you, or all tradermales.
His response would reveal the extent of his commitment to his dream. If cowardice ruled him completely, he would stay down there till the bombs reached him. If he screwed up his courage and came forth, and surrendered, she might allow his followers life.
He would receive her message, of that she was certain.
She watched the senior tradermale closely as he released each of the missiles. The ship boasted a great many. The rogues must have found themselves a world rich in uranium, and must have developed the skills to manufacture them. She recalled those they had used to try destroying the mirror project. How primitive they had been!
After the twelfth bomb struck down into the molten fury left by its predecessors Marika received a touch. Enough, Marika. Stop. I am coming up. Full surrender. Just stop destroying the world.
A darkship will pick you up. She touched the Redoriad Mistress, instructed her to descend and collect Kublin.
It would be hours. She took the opportunity to rest.
IV
A touch from the Redoriad. I have him, Marika. In chains. He is cooperating. He seems shocked.
Bring him up. Touch me when you clear atmosphere.
When that touch came she resumed bombing the more stubborn brethren facilities. She expended all the remaining rockets, without much concern for whom they might harm. Installations across the world perished. The surviving tradermales would find themselves hammered back into the past century.
&nbs
p; That ought to convince all meth that she ruled the future, that she would accept no arguments.
The rogue senior reached his limit. He could not believe she had done what she had done. She asked, “You would not have employed the weapons against different targets? Is your thinking so parochial? If meth are to be changed, they must be convinced that they have suffered from the fury of the All itself.” She ordered him to prepare beam weapons for use against surface targets. “I wield that fury. Let the world placate me.”
He refused. Even in the face of unending shrieks from the hanging male, she refused. “String him up,” Marika ordered. Once he was up she made him scream too. She told his crew, “I need meth able to operate the beam weapons.”
They would not aid her. Killing some did not move them. They believed they would be slain anyway. Why help her?
A touch reached her. She told her bath, “Our guest is about to arrive. Meet him. Be careful. He is wehrlen.”
Kublin entered ten minutes later. Marika did not recognize the creature he had become. For an instant she feared she had been tricked. But on closer examination she found the feel of the pup well hidden behind the surface of this ragged, graying male.
“Marika, you broke your word. I surrendered. You sent bombs down anyway.”
“What would you have done differently? I gave you countless chances. You abused them all. Each time you made the reestablishment of order more costly.”
“You are destroying everything, Marika.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do not obliterate the memory of the good you have done, Marika.”
“The good has been forgotten. No one cares. I turned back the ice, and they fight for the power to control it. Meth care about me only because I represent power. They either want to take it from me or want to profit from my possessing it.”
“Then why do you fight those who would free the world from the old silth wickedness?”
“Some things are worse, Kublin. Some things go against nature.”
“It is too late for you, Marika. You are one meth trying to slow a flooding stream by bailing with a bucket. You cannot halt what has been set in motion. Silthdom is dying. And you are more to blame than I.”
Marika leveled her rifle.
“You initiated the mirror project, which required so many changes in society. You made it possible for those who share my beliefs to move freely, telling males and bonds that there is hope for a world not always crushed beneath silth paws.”
“It was you tradermales who made an unholy alliance with Serke and... “
“Perhaps. But we would not have won the hearts of millions without your contributions, Marika. Without you we would have been nothing but what those old ones planned to become: replacements for silth. New oppressors. You made us over into liberators.”
Marika slipped her weapon off safety. Her paws shook. Old memories from her early days at Akard howled in the back of her mind. Madness peeped out of its deeps. Ghosts of silth long gone muttered Jiana!
“Killing me will solve nothing, littermate.”
“I will not be betrayed by my softness toward you again, Kublin. If you counted on that when you surrendered... “
“I did not. I never have. You can kill every tradermale there is, Marika, but you will not stop it. Because you yourself have been the principal agent of the change. I have done nothing but channel it. You are the Jiana and you have reshaped the world already.”
“Do not call me Jiana!”
“Why not? Can’t you face the truth?”
“Do not!”
“You know the truth in your heart, Marika. Who but a doomstalker leaves all who cross her path dead upon her backtrail?”
Marika’s bullets ripped into him. Her aim climbed. Bullets hammered the control center, racketed around, cut brethren and silth down. Even she was grazed by a ricochet.
The pain restored her sanity. She flung her weapon away, leaped to a silth she had injured, tried to help her. Her fury was spent. She became businesslike, shouting orders. The other bath eyed her warily. “Do not stand around! Help these meth.”
She was disgusted with herself. In a moment anger returned, but it was a cold, reasoning anger that had little to do with hatred, that was turned inward.
Jiana, yes. At least on this small scale. Many meth had been injured needlessly.
To escape her shame she ducked through her loophole, into the peace of the otherworld. After a time she grabbed a ghost and raced through the dark, flitting from station to station, mirror to mirror. The crews there had begun to recover. Electronic chatter filled the ether.
Electronic communications. How things had changed during her lifetime. In her young years, at Akard, telecommunications had been a rarity, a carefully kept secret. There had been little of anything technical or mechanical in silth life. The whole world had been, in a way, a restricted technological zone. Roaming the world now, she found new technology everywhere, affecting every life, brought on by the demands of the long winter and the mirror project.
Electrical, petroleum, or gas heating had replaced coal and wood in the homes of many meth. Agriculture and mining had become mechanized. Once even the vast cloister farms had been worked by methods little different than those the Degnan had used in the Ponath. Only wealthy orders had possessed draft animals. Industry did not at all resemble what she recalled. She had to look long and hard to find a true dirigible airship. The great sausages had been retired from all but the most remote enterprises.
She should have paid more heed during her rare visits home. A drop to Ruhaack, on the borders of civilization, and a monomaniacal hunt for rogues beyond those borders had not been enough to show her the broader picture.
All that. All her fault, in a way.
The past was gone. And the past was silth.
Kublin might be right. Unless in her madness she had destabilized the new civilization so far that it would collapse.
She returned to her self, surveyed the control center briefly, stared at Kublin’s still, mutilated form. That, at least, she had accomplished. The future would not be his. Down on the homeworld the rogues were on the run. This time the silth would show little mercy. They had learned. They would finish the job before returning to their feuds and their fear of her.
She no longer cared. Let them go on. Let them hunt her. It did not matter now, and once she was gone it would not matter ever.
She reached down to the world with the touch and announced that she was returning to the starship.
She sabotaged the brethren ship so it could not use its weapons and left the males alive as promised. She took to her darkship and the stars. But her heart kept swinging back to Kublin and she knew that dead he would haunt her more virulently than ever he had alive.
Chapter Forty-Four
I
Years came and went and were lonely. Marika grew older, and was all too conscious of aging. Contrary to her expectations, darkships continued visiting the alien. Few had permission from home.
In the quiet following the horror on the homeworld all voidfaring silth turned outward, away from yesterday. A new era of exploration began. Silth soon probed far beyond limits reached in older times. Marika herself occasionally ventured out, guiding favored Mistresses through the cloud to see the shoals of stars beyond.
She undertook no new explorations. She did not stray far. Starstalker remained unconquered. But she listened to others avidly, and insisted explorers maintain meticulous records.
Many who visited came to learn. She taught, if less than eagerly. These were young silth, of a new generation, less shaped by ancient thinking, more flexible and less afraid.
They wanted to pick her brain for what she had discovered about those-who-dwell, about the dark side, about undertaking extended journies through the void. Many wanted to serve her as bath, for she continued growing stronger as she aged. Those who served with her could expect to grow stronger themselves. Somehow she opened new paths in their minds.
“We must cease to be narrow,” she preached. “Narrowness nearly brought us to destruction. We must know the tradermale mentality as we know our own. We must eschew contempt, for others have skills of their own that are as wonderful and mysterious as our own.” Her use of old-fashioned backcountry words like tradermale amused the new silth. Such language was an anachronism. The ice had devoured those who had used it.
Marika had become a bridge to a vanished culture, last of her kind. The far frontiers of civilization, the low-tech zones, were gone forever.
She had peace, but there was no Bagnel, no Grauel, no Barlog with whom to share it. There was no friend to help cushion the future.
She retreated increasingly into ritualistic patterns set by her foresisters. The young silth were baffled by the paradox: Marika proselytized new ways while devoting herself privately to rituals and mysteries already old at the beginning of history. There were whole days she spent open to the All, alone in celebrating traditional mysteries.
Old ways banished the troubles of the spirit haunting her. She now understood the old sisters who had tried to force her into certain shapes when she was young.
There were times, too, when she took the wooden darkship out alone and drifted through the system contemplating the void. She could not believe that, had it not been for the endless winter and the fury of the nomad, she would now be among the oldest of the Degnan Wise. The Marika within did not feel old. Only the flesh did.
She was waiting too. Marking time. She knew the All had not finished with her yet.
II
A Mistress named Henahpla, a footloose explorer such as Marika once had hoped to become, brought the word. Aliens in the cloud. Far down the heartstream of the dust and gas, where it was densest, giving birth to new stars.