From behind, Owen mumbled; “Those old bastards didn’t miss a trick.”
Knecht nodded, checked the next instructions on the clipboard’s cover sheet.
LOCATE SQUARE GREEN BUTTON (“POWER UP”) AT THE BOTTOM OF THE CONTROL PANEL. DEPRESS BUTTON. IF BUTTON ILLUMINATES, RIVERINE HYDROTURBINE FUNCTION HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY INITIATED. IN THE EVENT THAT BUTTON DOES NOT ILLUMINATE, CONSULT ELECTRO-MAGNETIC GAUGE IMMEDIATELY TO THE RIGHT OF THE “POWER UP” BUTTON. IF THE NEEDLE SHOWS ANY ACTIVITY, HYDROTURBINE FUNCTION HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY INITIATED, BUT THE BULB WITHIN THE “POWER UP” BUTTON HAS FAILED. REPLACE AS PER MAINTENANCE ANNEX CODE X: 117-B3.
IN THE EVENT HYDROTURBINE FUNCTION IS NOT INITIATED, ALL EFFORTS SHOULD BE MADE TO RESTORE FULL FUNCTION TO THIS POWER GENERATION SYSTEM. AFOREMENTIONED RIVERINE HYDROTURBINES ARE LOCATED AT THE MOUTH OF THE WIDEBAY RIVER (MAP COORDINATES B17.6 X AA4.1; LOW-TIDE DEPTH OF 7 METERS).
Knecht looked up; the green button stared back at him. He raised his finger, stopped.
Owen came closer. “What’s wrong?”
Knecht kept the quaver out of his voice. “What if, after all these years--”
Janine interrupted. “Go ahead, Emmanuel. Just go ahead; it’ll work.”
Knecht depressed the button. A faint tremor went through the walls, the deck--and the green button illuminated. But only for a moment: with a sharp flash and a loud pop, the green glow vanished as rapidly as it had appeared.
Owen’s voice was calm. “Bulb gave out--but we’ve still got power.” He tapped the electromagnetic gauge. “Needle rising to nominal.”
But Knecht was already flipping greedily through the sheets on the clipboard, his eyes roving from one tantalizing extract to the next:
“TO RESTART MAIN FUSION PLANT, BRING L-HYD/LOX FUEL CELL BANKS TO 500 KILOWATTS OUTPUT AND--”
“IN THE EVENT THAT YOUR BASE REACTIVATION TEAM IS BEING PURSUED BY HOSTILE FORCES, A READY ARMORY IS AVAILABLE, LOCATED IN DRESSOUT LOCKERS A1-L3 AND A1-L4. READY WEAPONS HAVE BEEN INUNDATED WITH TLX MICROGRAIN POLYMER LUBRICANT AND SEALED IN READY-FOR-USE PLASTIC POUCHES. READY ARMORY CONSISTS OF: 15 M78 NEOVALMET SEMIAUTOMATIC RIFLES WITH 10 20-ROUND CLIPS PER WEAPON; 30 CT-T2 THERMITE GRENADES (6 SECOND FUSES); 1 M78A NEOVALMET AUTOMATIC SQUAD SUPPORT WEAPON WITH 10 100-ROUND LINKABLE BELTS; 30 NEOCOLT-BROWN ULTRA-POWER SEMIAUTOMATIC PISTOLS WITH 5 19-ROUND CLIPS PER WEAPON. MAIN ARMORY STORES ARE LOCATED IN HABITATION MODULE B2, AND HAVE BEEN FULLY DISASSEMBLED (AND IMMERSED IN LUBRICANTS) FOR LONG TERM STORAGE. MAIN ARMORY INVENTORY INCLUDES--” “EMERGENCY DEHYDRATED FOOD STORES ARE LOCATED IN WATER-TIGHT CANISTERS BOLTED TO THE FOUNDATION OF HABITATION MODULE AL (THIS MODULE) AT THOSE SITES INDICATED IN FIGURE 2.B, BELOW. AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF SURROUNDING WATER IS 4 DEGREES CENTIGRADE, ENSURING LONG-TERM PRESERVATION. EMERGENCY FOODSTUFFS ARE COMPRISED OF (BY MASS): 38% DRIED FRUITS, 42% ASSORTED GRAINS, 8% UNREFINED SUGAR, 12% PROTEIN/VITAMIN CONCENTRATES. DISTILLED WATER IS AVAILABLE IN RESERVE TANKS C3 THROUGH C14--”
The typewritten cornucopia of riches continued to flood past Emmanuel’s widening eyes; better than even he had dared to imagine. He let the welcome words of technological plenty jump out at him: medical supplies, machine shops, centrifuges, hydroponics, catalytic separators, laboratories, pressure suits--and of course, the founder’s own library.
The last page differed from all the rest in that it was hand written; a brief note that read:
Welcome to Castalia.
It is our hope that this facility and its resources will never be needed again, and that therefore, this letter will go unread. However, those of us. who have maintained Castalia oven, the years- need only consult the annals of founder Jonathan Knecht to confirm that humankind’s periodic propensity for self-destruction is- a cyclic certainty.
Castalia can provide you with the means. whereby you may. endure this period of destruction. Use it’s- resources cautiously. and sparingly. Avoid all unnecessary contact with other. communities on Haven. You will be tempted to provide overt aid to distressed populations, but you ate counseled not to do so; although duck contact may save lives, your technological wealth is likely to foster, curiosity, envy, and geed in. those whom you, help.
Good luck.
Dagmar- Knecht, Caretaker
Dagmar Knecht: Emmanuel’s great-great-grandfather. Janine drew close, looked up briefly; Knecht was only vaguely aware of her as he continued to stare at his ancestor’s signature. “You were right, Emmanuel.” Janine’s voice sounded strangely distant--and soft. “You-- you’ve got a lot to be happy--to be proud--about.”
But the bliss that Emmanuel should have felt--standing at last in Castalia--refused to rise up. He put the clipboard down, underlined his great-great-grandfather’s name with a wet forefinger, and thought; I wish Vera could have seen it. I wish--
Emmanuel’s vision blurred. Drops began to spatter on the desiccated paper, the ink dissolving and running wherever it was touched by his tears.
“So the whole base is still operational?” The man’s voice rose to the marginally higher pitch that often accompanies incredulity.
“Hardly. Only the hydroturbines are producing any appreciable power levels.”
“The fusion reactor?”
Knecht shook his head. “Scrap metal. A century and a half of deterioration--even though it was literally in ‘cold storage’--is too much for us to refurbish. Same with the fuel cells.”
“What about the other systems--the labs and machine shops?”
“We’ve got about forty to fifty percent of the systems back on-line, but I don’t know if we’re ever going to do much better than that. Still, we’re averaging about ten kilos of cordite per week, and last year we produced our first batch of antibiotics.”
“I’m glad to hear it--but why are the two of us hearing about it at all?”
Knecht waited until the man met his eyes. “I’m telling you all this so that you’ll have to go there.”
The man blinked. “To Castalia?”
“Where else?”
“Listen; I don’t have to go anywhere.”
Knecht smiled at the man’s reflexive obstinance; it was surprising how many adults insisted upon behaving like overgrown adolescents. “Of course you have to go to Castalia--now that you know what I am, and that Castalia exists. Consider your other options. You can leave me here, but you’ll always wonder “What if the Magi didn’t talk? What if the Saurons didn’t learn enough from him to locate Castalia on their own?’ You think they’re simply going to stop looking for the place that I--and my revolver and aspirin--came from? No; the Saurons will follow, using the only clue they have:”--Knecht raised an accusing finger--”your trail. They’ll track the two of you for months, if necessary. And how are you going to evade them? They’ve got horses, firearms, and senses that are twice--even three times--as keen as yours”.
“Your other option is to kill me here and now. But unless you know of some way to prevent the Saurons from discovering my body--and your tracks--you’re still in the same predicament; they’ll come after you to discover who killed their outriders, and how it was done. Face it; if you want to survive, you’re going to have to disappear--and there’s only one way to do that: you have to go to Castalia.”
The woman’s voice broke the split second of silence that followed Knecht’s argument. “You mean ‘we’; we have to go to Castalia.”
Emmanuel smiled at her, which was the closest he could bring himself to expressing his gratitude. “No: I can’t make it--and you know that.”
“But--”
Knecht held up an admonishing finger. “You said-- both of you said--that you were prepared to do whatever was necessary in order for some of us to survive. Were you lying?”
The woman opened her mouth, then closed it and hung her head. The man kept looking at Knecht, his face betraying a strange collision of emotions: admiration, disorientation, and personal relief.
Knecht tried to smile. “It’s just as well, you know. The Saurons are going to need a scapegoat, a
body. They’ve lost two of their outriders, so they’re going to insist on finding--and punishing--the responsible party. If we all disappeared without a trace, they wouldn’t leave this area. They’d keep searching. Eventually, they might find some telltale sign of Castalia--a bootprint, a spent cartridge casing; something. And that would be the beginning of Castalia’s end. The Saurons would come back with a larger search party, and then an even larger assault team--whatever it would take to wipe us out.”
Knecht drew the revolver from under his travelling cloak, held it out to the woman. “Take this. Give me the rifle.” She complied silently. Knecht checked the assault rifle’s magazine; nine rounds left. Enough to give a good account of himself, to compel the Saurons to shoot to kill. He turned out the many hidden pockets lining his dark garments, gathering the small, significant arcana that marked him as a Castalian Magi: waterproof matches, vials of aspirin, chloroform, antibiotics, several dozen rounds for the revolver, flash paper, a cigar-length roll of cordite, a small surgical kit, a palm-sized abacus, a mirror-backed compass, and several small handbooks cluttered with chemical and physical equations. He motioned the woman forward and deposited this strange collection in her hands. Then he reached into his last un-emptied pocket and produced a small parabolic reflector with a foldable tripod. He handed it to the man. “Inside the compass cover, you’ll find a number of phosphor fuses; they’ll fit into a groove at the center of this reflector. That’s how you’ll signal the people at home-- at Castalia.” Knecht felt the darkness close in again, realized that the pain in his shoulder had stopped; in its place there was a strange, spreading cold.
The man cleared his throat. “Where should we--”
“Follow the river east. To the coast. Then follow the shore south. Two kilometers. Set the reflector on the beach and--and light a phosphor fuse. Then wait.”
“How long?”
“Until they come. They’ll come. They always do. Tell them”--Knecht looked at the woman, thought that her eyes reminded him of Vera’s--”tell them that I sent you. Tell them--how it was.”
The woman rose, a liquid glitter in her eyes. “I’ll tell them--everything.” She bent down and her lips grazed his cheek. Then she rose, turned, and headed for the river. The man lowered his eyes, nodded awkwardly, and stumbled after the woman.
Emmanuel checked the assault rifle, snapped the safety into the “off position and waited, thinking of Vera.
They had been sitting under the cover of a frond-like bush for two hours when she saw the trail of bubbles approaching the shore. The faint, effervescent line advanced toward the small headland where they had placed the glowing reflector and had watched it beam its pinpoint message of light out over the dark waters. The woman rose and began walking down to the ocean’s edge. As if in response to her movement, a head and torso emerged from the grey-black swells; instead of a human face, a pressure suit’s broad, gleaming visor stared back at her.
As her companion bundled their packs together, a wave stretched its frothy length upon the scree, sighing slowly into silence. Before the next swell began curling over upon itself--burbling and rushing as it came--there was a moment of almost perfect stillness.
In that moment, she heard a distant tattoo of small-calibre rifle fire--which was quickly drowned out by a sustained sputtering of heavier weapons. Then silence. She felt a tear ran down her cheek, brushed it sharply away, willed the next wave to obliterate the silence.
Before it could, the stobors began to howl.
Assault Leader Mav was that rarity among Saurons; a man with no discernible sense of humor.
Mav took everything with deadly seriousness; one of the reasons, he was fond of telling his men, why he was not dead. To which his men invariably replied: “How can you tell?”
At which point Assault Leader Mav would run them through another training exercise designed to reduce Saurons to sweating masses of cramping, quivering muscles and bruised bones. Or, to put it another way, to kill anybody else.
But Mav only did that when he couldn’t exact his favorite revenge on his squad: Patrol duty. Today, Mav had got his first choice. Mav had volunteered the squad for a special pacification mission as conceived by the Survey Ranks.
And it was a beaut, his men had agreed.
Lancer Dolman carried his squad’s support weapon, usually requiring him to engage the enemy at a distance. This morning, however, he sat on a rock with the rest of his fireteam, he and each of the other eight Saurons looking into their pack mirrors and grimacing.
“Argh.” Dolman said. No, that wasn’t right. He tried again. “Aragh.” He turned his head to one side, tried a snarl. “Argh-arrh . . . Arh.” He finished with very little confidence in his acting ability.
Around the circle described by Dolman and the other members of the squad, Assault Leader Mav stalked like a panther held at bay only by a campfire’s feeble glow.
“Fierce!” Mav exhorted the men of his squad. “Make sure they see you. Get in their faces with a snarl that’ll freeze their blood. The Survey Ranks have established that these Havener indigs are especially tough. Their bush fighters are tougher still, but they’ll be depending on support from what’s left of the cities. The survivors of our invasion who are still in those cities will, therefore, be the weak link in the resistance. Our job is to impress each and every one of them that we can be more savage than anything they’ve ever seen on this mudball moon they call a home.”
Mav reached out and grabbed Dolman’s chin and turned the young Soldier’s face up to him. “You call that a snarl?” Mav jerked Dolman’s jaw around to point it at a line of animal corpses laid out on the rocks. Each beast’s head was facing the members of Mav’s squad; each beast had been killed by Mav personally since yesterday, and each beast was as savage an example of Haven fauna as Mav could locate in one night’s hunting. Dolman thought it was a pretty good cross-section of things to avoid.
“Look over there, Dolman; the locals call that thing a tamerlane. See those teeth? You should have seen its eyes in the light of Byers’ Star. And that one’s a cragspider-- you’ve all seen what they’ll do to a muskylope--has an almost human face, hasn’t it? Those ‘borers with the shiny teeth are the worst, though; they chew through stone. They don’t even notice when a man’s guts get in the way. Think about that, all of you. Use that, and let’s put the fear of God into the next batch of cattle we find cowering in the ruins of their cities; ruins we made!”
Dolman sighed. It was tough enough trying to follow the Survey Ranks’ orders to present a “fierce face” to the Haveners without Mav’s biology primers and amateurish exhortations to non-existent Sauron “primal instincts.”
The biggest problem was that Dolman, like almost all other Saurons, simply did not have any idea of how to be “fierce” in battle. Human norm propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, Saurons were not killing machines; they were civilized men and women who were the very best at what man, as a species, excelled at. They made war, and “making war” was a function of intellect and intelligently applied force.
“Ferocity,” on the other hand, was a function of ego, and Saurons had long since perfected a concept unique among all human civilizations: The subjugation of the ego to the battle plan. A Sauron at war was a perfect Soldier executing his training in as ideal a manner as could be hoped for in an environment of chaos. Exhibiting “ferocity” in such a situation was, by definition, a waste of energy and a detriment to concentration. It was, therefore, counter-productive to the mission. Other, lesser peoples needed some outside impetus to charge themselves with adrenalin; Saurons were born with the conscious ability to control such combat-enhancing glands.
The Survey Ranks, therefore, weren’t trying to tap into some lost capability of the Sauron psyche; they were trying to get blood from a stone
Dolman caught a look on Mav’s face that was very like despair. He felt badly for the Assault Leader, he really did. But Mav should have known that his men were incapable of endangering the missio
n by “play-acting” at children’s games when they were working....
Surprised at his own thoughts, Dolman blinked. “Assault Leader Mav,” he called out.
“What is it, Dolman?”
“What’s our mission, Assault Leader?”
Mav put his hands on his hips and stared at him. “What?”
“The mission’s objective, Assault Leader; what is it?”
Now Mav blinked; after a moment’s consideration, during which Dolman realized that Mav himself had simply accepted the Survey Ranks’ imperatives without analyzing them, the Assault Leader spoke: “To impress upon the cattle of this world that Saurons, as a race, are the most utterly ruthless and dangerous opponents they have ever encountered.”
There was a nearly imperceptible susurration as the squad exuded a collective sigh of comprehension.
“Terror tactics, then, Assault Leader?” one of the other Soldiers asked. “Pointless cruelty, occasional decimation of captives; the odd atrocity?”
Mav thought a moment, and Dolman could see his mind working in the expression on his face, which said: Could that be what the Survey Ranks meant? Why hadn’t they just said so?
Mav looked up. “Yes,” he said. He sounded as if it were a revelation. Satisfied to at last receive comprehensible instructions, the squad went back to their mirrors.
Dolman looked into his own, and snarled.
“Whoa,” he said, taken aback. He’d actually startled himself. The tamerlane and the cragspider looked positively cuddly compared to the visage that stared back at him.
Not bad, he decided. Not bad at all.
A LITTLE BEASTLINESS, Edward P. Hughes
Summer on the Haven steppe is little more than a state of mind. The ambient temperature rises minimally. The permafrost softens. The ice sheets shift a verst or two polewards. And, for a few hours around noon in sheltered spots, hardy characters may discard outer garments.
War World IV: Invasion Page 21
