by Brian Daley
She flattened a screen of frogwood saplings and slewed when she hit a mud hole but regained balance and headway thanks to her scores of strong bowed legs. Burning's battlesuit and Lod's trench coat were spattered with mud and rain and decked with blue tresses of hagmoss, lengths of lime-green popbead vine, and webbed flipper leaves.
Burning slipped into Flowstate calm, scanning the terrain, watching the tracking cursor on his visor display, and plying the armrest stick. The Weevil burst through a screen of dirk sticker vines that would have given even a battlesuit trouble and barreled on unscathed across a low meadow. The point where Lod had encountered the recce team was only seven hundred meters to the southwest.
Enemy positions came into view, seeming to bob insanely. There were spotlights everywhere, along with illumination banks the size of First Lands billboards. To the southeast a chemically lit trail laid down by remote on the assumption that Burning would arrive in a surface vehicle traced a safe ground route from the enemy lines to the area where Lod had left his jumpjeep.
Drawing a deep breath, he cut a course away from it and somewhat to the northwest, telling himself, Here's where we rind out how badly Renquald needs me alive.
Turncoat and Periapt elements had maneuvered into a meandering siege line around Anvil Tor. Heavily reinforced at the foot of the mountain's sloped side, the line looked like something out of a trench warfare stalemate. It was an extravagant show of force, and it had doubtless made the military commanders blanch to bunch up their units like that, even though the Exts had nothing big left to throw at them.
Armor was dug in: conventional and coilgun artillery, missiles, sensors, directed-energy weapons, and too many smaller firing positions for Burning to begin to count. The lines were already two deep at the bottom of the Tor, and there, as everywhere, more maneuver elements were being moved up by ground and air. Farther out on the plain remnants of what had been the Exts' main force were still sending smoke smudge into the sky.
A half kilometer behind the bristling gun pits and hastily made berms loomed the LAW mobile field headquarters. Air deployed in modules by heavy lifters when the enemy had achieved uncontested control of the sky, the modular HQ put Burning in mind of a luminous pile of burned-orange bubbles trying to float free. As well as being graceful and fragile-looking, the place was essentially assault proof.
The Weevil stunt notwithstanding, it occurred to him that he might be playing into Renquald's hands. After all, the commissioner had already proved himself a masterful political strategist. In the space of three years he had checkmated Concordance leaders with bewildering power plays that had dropped the planet into his hands like a vending machine fruit cup.
But Burning couldn't go back. Most of all it would have been unthinkable not to answer Romola's summons, even if it meant dying a little sooner.
The Weevil took a particularly high loft off a mossy brow, and Burning had a momentary vision of some itchy First Lands gunner blowing the annuloid and her riders clear out of the sky. But no shot came, even though there looked to be a lot of com-motion at the enemy perimeter. Searchlights slewed and came to bear, and loudhailers blared a threat his external helmet pickups did not catch.
Lod was waving frantically. "Hold your fire! The Wheelie and I want to live!"
Fifty meters in front of the ranks of lights silhouetted figures were finishing a snarewire fence, joining up the last accordion lengths. But off to the left a security lock gating arrangement was open in expectation of Burning's arrival on foot or in Lod's jumpjeep. Burning angled the control stick, leaned, and kicked the foot controls, and the Weevil changed course. Glare and commotion did not make her balk: her sensorium told her she wanted to go the way Burning was directing her.
A hot spot of intense heat from ultrasonics—the rain was too thick for lasers—turned a puddle blue with soniluminescence, then blew it up in a cloud of steam and mud. A burst of small-caliber tracers skewed across their path—brief orange hyphens that didn't miss by much.
"Hit the brakes; they're trying to kill us!" Lod yelled.
"No, they're not," Burning hollered back. "They're welcoming us."
He continued to steer for the closing gap in the fence, a ten-meter wall of graphite-epoxy snarewire. The last of it was paying off a roll mounted on the back of a tracked and waldo-equipped combat engineer vehicle. More engineering tracks were coming along behind to string additional layers of strand.
"Commissioner's envoy!" Lod proclaimed. "Renquald's envoy!" He sounded steadier than Burning would have expected.
Too late, Burning wondered if there was already a charge in the fencing. The strand was sealing from the ground up, but Artemis shot through the gap, scattering people and machines. There was some juice in the strand: power arced and crackled, but the annuloid insulated the cockpit and its riders from electrocution.
People in LAW exoarmor and other Periapt mufti dodged and yelled. The Weevil ran over and bent a trailer hitch, tilting a small coilgun and its tow motor. Something heavy grazed
Burning's helmet and rocked him but didn't penetrate—a crowd control bumpgun or nonlethal whapbag round. He saw bright spheres circling in front of his eyes for a few seconds but managed to hold on.
They rolled up and over a revetment. Burning spied the glowing egg mass that was the field HQ and cut a course for it. He felt his suit's sound-antiphasing gear tingling and knew it was canceling a sonics wave that had barely brushed past.
The next difficulty bore a crumpled Bastion Orman insignia: a tractor and water trailer rig crushed under the treads of a First Lander tank or field piece. The wreckage looked like a safer bet than swinging left toward the quad-mount autocannon or right in the direction of the tank traps. As the Weevil rotomoted onto and across the flattened water rig, Burning caught a glimpse of a pale, mangled hand hanging from the collapsed cab.
Then Artemis was suddenly in among the observation posts, gun pits, and weapons platoon nests, gutterballing between various obstacles the Weevil couldn't conveniently jump or circumvent. Spotlights quartered the area, sometimes stabbing directly at one another in mass confusion. Commo transmissions crackled, and loudhailers reverberated. Men and women shouted to each other, trying to make themselves heard in the rain.
The air blast of an oncoming surface-effect scout car came at the Weevil as the vehicle made straight for her. Artemis couldn't answer the primitive control system fast enough to dodge, so Burning goosed her with a stim impulse. She spun straight up the nose of the car, causing the vehicle commander to duck into his cupola and the blowcar to ground in the mud, jamming its fans. Down off the scout's stern—Burning howling in delight—the annuloid whirled on through the slop and swung onto a new heading.
Air spotters were aloft with high-candlepower spots that cut through the gloom and downpour. Troops that far back hadn't figured out what was going on, so most of them simply froze when they saw the Weevil churn through their midst, then got on the tactical and command pushes to add their voices to the welter. A big guy—Burning couldn't see what rank—tried to leap for the cockpit from a truck bed. Miscalculating, he bounced off Artemis's bony hide and flopped back to hit the mudguard of a self-propelled missile launcher.
Nobody was shooting anymore, not even warning rounds; a cease-fire order had to have come down the commo nets. More troops were arriving from one direction, so Burning took the other, even though it meant going down the side of a steep wooded ravine in near free fall. Trees were bent aside, and brush was flattened. It was deep and dark down there, with good upper-canopy cover.
Artemis's strength couldn't take her all the way up the opposite incline, and so Burning banked her downstream along the drainage, bouncing off rocks and deadfall. Nearing exhaustion, the Weevil was slowing. Burning knew that if he didn't end the ride soon, she'd "melt her tallow," as the paddock old-timers would have said.
When Artemis broke into the clear, he headed her directly for the mobile HQ. Seeing her vector, Periapt and turncoat spotter craft maintai
ned their distance and followed the Wheelie in.
Chapter
Six
Watching Burning's staunch but foolish Wheel Weevil charge through enemy lines in answer to her summons, Romola thought of something she had read back at Bastion Orman in one of his treasured Utopian books.
It had been an Old Earth treatise by a man named Frank Mallei, who had made a sad but canny observation: Futurists, mystics, philosophers, and Utopian schemers who set out to reason, to predict and recommend, all too often ended up wishing.
And Burning? He'd set out wishing the world were a better place. Small wonder that when the arrival of LAW disillusioned him and the war stripped him of virtually all he knew, he became a man who didn't care whether he lived or died.
She gazed down at the disorder the annuloid had created in the conquerors' lines. She had spotted the Weevil only once or twice after it had crashed the perimeter; the rest of the time she had followed Burning's progress by looking for strange attrac-tors in the chaos.
The looks on the faces of the AlphaLAW leaders and Concordance quislings around her in the mobile HQ would have been hilarious if not for the setting—the charnel house battlefield where one more massacre was pending.
Romola was high up in an observation gallery outside a palatial situation room away from the functionary cogs, staffers, and support personnel with their equipment and their frenetic comings and goings. She was aware that some were stealing a glance at her now and again, but she was used to that.
A trim, fine-boned woman who struck men as both fragile and sensual, she looked like a sachem's beautiful young daughter, though in fact she was related to a bastion bloodline only via an older sister's marriage.
She had made the most of a nice figure by working hard on it, had acquired a patrician bearing through strict imposition of will, had cultivated social graces through self-discipline, and had developed a sense of classic chic that bastion dowagers praised as avoir du chien—style, in spades. During her mandatory active military duty she'd been tagged with the field name Tonguetide by squadmates but had shed it in civilian life by various showings of disapproval.
Hussar Plaits long gone, her amber hair fell in massed Pre-Raphaelite curls. She no longer even owned a battlesuit and currently wore a tastefully revealing, equestrian-skirted azure suit that made the most of her delicate looks and brought out the delft blue of her eyes.
She had accepted an arranged marriage with Burning because it had promised a bastion life in which she could pursue her flair for Old Earth-inspired jewelry design and raise children she could groom for better things. She wasn't smitten with him, but she appreciated his humility, his lack of interest in traditional Ext gambling and carousing, and the conscientiousness that gave him an aura of strength, to which he was largely oblivious.
All that had been prewar. Attached to the Gilead contingent that had accepted a cease-fire with LAW, she had made herself useful in interbastion coordination, then in peace talks, and lately in LAW oversight planning. By having served the survival and other interests of the Exts, she had advanced her status and discovered where her true gifts lay.
The display holos showed the Weevil emerging from a heavily wooded ravine and making straight for the field headquarters. Romola was certain that Burning's diminishing speed had as much to do with the animal's survival as with his having made his point.
Sharpshooters were posted inside and outside the HQ. Periapts in exoarmor had their steadiguns ready, and platoons of engeneered Manipulants—as big and inhuman-looking as storybook trolls—had been brought in. Even so, Romola saw with secret amusement that Tonne-Head was tense and distracted as Burning drew near.
Every so often the clan sachem of the Gileads would let out a whistling, unhappy breath through his nose. Taller than Burning, Tonne-Head was ferocious enough in unarmed Skillsfighting that the Allgrave wouldn't have had much of a chance against him. That didn't change the fact that Tonne-Head^—fist clenching and unclenching near his sidearm—looked apprehensive.
While Romola watched, he reached up to resettle the jeweled, platinum-knobbed torque that encircled his bull neck; it was a magnificent piece, though its significance was likely to make Burning even more NoMan than he already was.
Soon it was nearly as easy to make out Burning and Lod through the gallery viewpane as it was to see them on the screens. As it entered a muddy area that fronted the HQ, the annuloid slowed like a runaway Ferris wheel, losing momentum and stability. At Burning's stim signal to her sen-sorium, the Weevil churned and backed oars in the slop until she came to a stop; then she unwound herself from the ring cockpit, lay down next to it contentedly, and evacuated her bowels. Romola let out a throb of laughter as she saw, through borrowed photo-enhancers, Lod's put-upon look as soldiers closed in around him and Burning.
A few among the VIP group joined her in chuckling, but not Renquald, and so the jollity died away quickly. The AlphaLAW commissioner was wearing his usual probing hard-to-read expression.
"We'll meet them in Receiving One," he announced to the observation gallery.
Romola had come to admire the understated way the Periapt gave orders that people leaped to obey and was beginning to get the hang of it herself. Time for roles to be acted out, she thought.
More urgent than possessive, Tonne-Head stepped forward to take her arm after she had handed the enhancers back. But it was Renquald who led the way, paying her no further attention.
* * * *
Renquald gazed out under the dome of Receiving One, a multiuse space that had served as everything from execution room to literary salon. The vaulted chamber was set in Periapt-noir, with massage-nap carpeting, varimorph conforming furniture, and a few magnificent pieces of Concordance art A prodigious buffet had been laid out, and a string quartet from a First Lands military band was playing Vivaldi. The sharpshooters around and above were the only reminders that the place was a conquest command center.
Renquald had a lean, handsome face that was even more versatile than Receiving One. He was more comfortable in magisterial robes with brassards of rank and badges of office—as now—than in lounging clothes. Concordancers thought themselves fairly egalitarian, but in fact they were unconsciously intimidated by the trappings of eminence, and so, if only to further confound them, Renquald frequently confronted them with the aloofness and severity of a medieval Pope.
At Renquald's right hand stood Field Marshal Vukmirovic, ranking military officer of the AlphaLAW Concordance mission and now of the planet as well. A pile of muscle going to fat, he had salt-and-pepper eyebrows that looked as if he combed them the wrong way. The string quartet drew an unquiet sneer from him; a quartet of steadigunners, waiting in that exact spot to open up on Emmett Orman, would have made Vukmirovic far more festive.
Well, let him stew, Renquald decided. It would get Vukmirovic accustomed to the fact that the time of the military solution had drawn to a close and that Renquald had advanced to a new agenda.
* * * *
In due course Burning was escorted into Receiving One. He entered on foot and was stripped of all equipment, his helmet included. The fact that he had been allowed inside was bonded proof that he was not armed—no hidey gun, no fukumijutsu spit needle hidden in his cheek, no explosives in his marrow.
But even Receiving One's excellent aircirc system and costly mood-aroma propagators were powerless against the stench of death and putrefaction on him and the stink of months in the field. He was like the war itself walking in.
Lod followed, moving with the energy and grace Burning had had drained from him. Burning's little kinsman had gotten rid of the trench coat, rinsed his face and hair of mud, mustered his savoir faire, and put his fine blond locks back in order. He was busy reading faces in the room and was ecstatic, Romola could see, to be back in the comfort and safety of the HQ. A fetching female junior officer in the Periapt liaison branch made especially warm eye contact with him.
Burning spotted Romola almost at once and did an impe
rceptible change step, as if he were going to throw his arms around her. Out of undue concern for safety, perhaps, he checked the impulse and instead looked around the room, not missing Tonne-Head. Romola was startled at his stare and considered what it must have taken to cauterize the wonky openness of the prewar Burning.
She understood that he still thought of her as his fiancee and as the secret heroine of Santeria Corners as well. She felt a pang for him but suppressed it. Either she steeled herself, or tonight would bring the Exts' annihilation and the Broken Country years more misery and affliction.
Burning continued to stand fast, searching the room for the assassin, sharpshooter, or armed remote who was to cut him down. There were guards but no headsman in evidence. Finally he cut his eyes back to her.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
It took no effort to make her answer sound wooden; indeed, it was Romola's easiest out. "Yes, I am, Burning," she told him. "And you?"
* * * *
As Emmett Orman nodded, Renquald inspected the young man—just twenty-three baseline years old—who had become, by chance of birth and a degree of unassuming ableness, All-grave of the Exts.
The intel-reported changes were quite apparent: every gram of peacetime softness had been rendered down by campaigning and privation, his nose was crooked from a fracture, and the inner layers of his hair were braided with twists of aligned carbon-nitrite fibers to form Hussar Plaits. Even though the partially flattened nose had been sustained after he had tripped over an antenna guywire during a nighttime artillery barrage, the injury had qualified as a combat wound, entitling Orman to a Red Shield. Renquald had been interested to learn that Orman had refused the decoration in embarrassment at the ignominious way he'd been hurt
Orman's ungainliness had been replaced by that body-aware sureness of movement common to those who had cultivated and gained a facility for those damnable Flowstate Skills. Some hint of animation had come into Orman's eyes at the sight of Romola and Tonne-Head, but the excitement was soon engulfed by the seared NoMan stare.
