Test of Fire (1982)

by Ben Bova

  Jameson was the first to reach them, a carbine in one hand. Half a dozen other men pounded up right behind him.

  "What happened?"

  "I just killed two men who couldn't follow orders. Drag them out into the village square and leave them there."

  They were a quiet and subdued group when they left the village the next morning. The villagers stood mutely around the two corpses as Alec lined his men together and marched them out the gate, down the westward road. Angela rode on the captured wagon beside Alec. Douglas' man, unarmed, drove the horses.

  She still seemed dazed. "You're just going to . . . leave the bodies there?"

  Alec had not slept all night. His head throbbed.

  "Let the villagers bury them in the fields. Make good use of them."

  "Why . . .? You didn't have to kill them."

  He turned on the hard wooden seat to stare at her. She looked as bleak as he felt. "Did you want me to leave them with you?"

  "I . . ." Angela ran a hand through her blonde hair. "In some crazy way I feel like it's my fault. Partially, at least."

  "I shot them. They deserved it. If I had to do it all over again, I'd do it exactly the same way."

  She shuddered visibly. "Because it was me."

  "Because they were acting like scum!"

  "With me. If it had been one of the village women . . ."

  "I'd have done the same thing," Alec said coldly.

  "Don't flatter yourself."

  They rode in silence for most of the morning, heading for the hills that bordered the western edge of the valley, under a sky of rolling fat cumulus clouds that checkered the landscape with warm sunlight and sudden cool shadow.

  "Jameson found out last night that there's a relay station for the horses over the first row of hills," Alec said to her. "Is that true?"

  She hesitated, then nodded. "Yes. And it's built like a little fortress."

  "Can you talk the people there into giving us fresh horses peacefully, or will we have to fight ?"

  "Why should I help you?"

  "You've got a damned short memory."

  "No. A long one."

  "All right, be tough. We'll get the horses anyway."

  Which Alec did, by the simple expedient of threatening to shoot Angela if the men holding the station didn't give them all the horses in their fortified corral. Alec held Angela on a knoll, far enough from the station so that the men could see her plainly enough. Jameson did the negotiating.

  Angela fumed, "You're using me!"

  "That's right," Alec replied, smiling. "But that's better than killing people, isn't it?"

  She was too angry to answer.

  Toward sunset, as they rode together on the wagon, he asked her, "Still angry with me?"

  "Yes." But she looked more sullen than angry.

  "Are you in pain?"

  "No."

  "There's no soreness?"

  "Of course it's sore! But it hasn't bled anymore. And the bandage is still in place. Want to inspect it for yourself?"

  "Dammit, I didn't do it to you!"

  "You killed them. You shot that boy."

  "You ought to be glad that I did."

  "You're a murderer and you expect me to love you for it?"

  "You wanted me to leave you alone with them so they could carve you into little pieces?"

  "So it's my fault!"

  He knew he was red-faced; he could feel his cheeks burning. The driver kept his eyes strictly forward, not daring to show any expression at all on his face.

  Lowering his voice, Alec said, "Yes, it was your fault. You were right this morning. If it hadn't been you I wouldn't have killed them. I lost control. I couldn't stand to see them with their hands on you. I . . ."

  "All right," Angela said soothingly. "It's all right. I've been a terrible bitch. I'm sorry."

  They rode together in silence, Alec's mind whirling in confusion, until it grew too dark to ride further.

  Chapter 21

  Alec slept with her that night. Without a word of prearrangement they walked off together from the campfire and took their blankets from the back of the wagon. Side by side, still unspeaking, they moved off into the darkness.

  He made love to Angela gently, tenderly, trying to avoid hurting her. She held him, touched him, kissed him, moved with him until they both forgot about her injury.

  In the morning they bathed together in an excruciatingly cold lake that stretched several kilometers wide. Alec still could not feel at ease using water so lavishly. This world is so rich!

  By the time they were dressed and heading back to the camp again, Angela said, "You'll have to go back to the Moon, won't you?"

  He couldn't take his eyes from her gold-framed face: lovely, troubled, serious.

  "Not without you," he said.

  Nodding, she answered, "I know. I'll have to leave him ..."

  "Who?"

  "Father."

  "You mean my father."

  She almost smiled. "Is there such a thing as foster-incest?"

  "Will you come with me?" Alec asked.

  She did not hesitate at all. "Yes," she answered.

  But her voice was so low that he could barely hear her.

  They reached the camp by the side of the rutted road. The men were milling through their morning routine, cooking eggs from the village, grooming the horses, cleaning guns.

  Alec said to Angela, "I'll need a power source for our radio. Not for very long, an hour or two."

  Angela thought for a moment. "You won't be able to get one without a fight. The closest power source I know of is at a perimeter firebase, about twenty klicks from here ... up in the hills, off the road."

  A horse neighed somewhere behind them. The Sun was up over the distant hills now, burning away the fog that hung over the lake. The valley floor was still lushly green, the wooded shoulders of the hills an unbelievable pallette of reds, golds, oranges, browns, set off here and there by the somber deep greens of pines and hemlocks.

  Angela said, "If I help you get a radio for a few hours, you'll go back to the Moon?"

  "With you?"

  "You'll give up the idea of trying to get the fissionables and go back?"

  He hesitated, then lied, "Yes. I will." She's only trying to protect him, he told himself, although a deeper voice insisted, She's trying to protect you!

  Reluctantly, as if she knew she was doing the wrong thing no matter what she did, Angela said, "All right, I'll show you where the firebase is. They have a radio there that can reach headquarters, and that's about fifty klicks away."

  "That should be plenty of power for our radio,"

  Alec said, trying to keep his voice even.

  "I don't like it," Jameson said, staring off into the distant hills, sniffing the air for danger.

  He and Alec stood at the edge of a gently rising meadow that ended in a thickly wooded hillside.

  The road they had travelled was farther down the slope. The Sun was high overhead but the wind was cold enough to make Jameson push his hands deep into the pockets of his worn, tattered trousers.

  "We're deep inside their territory. They've got to know we're here, they're not fools. Now we're going in even deeper."

  Alec disagreed. "You're missing the point, Ron. This is their territory, all right. But look how big it is. They don't have enough men to patrol every hectare. We can stay in the woods, keep on the move, until we rendezvous with the reinforcements."

  Still scanning the distances, Jameson countered, "And you think he's going to let a few shuttles land within fifty klicks of his home base without opposition?"

  "By the time he can get some opposition mounted we'll have seized enough territory so that the shuttles can land and take off safely. Before they can organize a big-enough counterattack we'll have reached his headquarters and found the fissionables."

  "Maybe," James said. "With a large scoop of luck."

  "Not luck! We don't need luck. Just enough men and good timing."

 
"Well . . ." Jameson looked at Alec at last, then stuck out his hand. "Good luck anyway. You're marching yourself right into the bear's cave."

  Alec let his hand be engulfed by Jameson's. "I'll be back tomorrow. And inside of a week or two we'll be home."

  "Yeah." Jameson's voice went dead flat, as if the word home was starting to take on a different meaning.

  Alec thought about that as he and Angela rode through the woods that afternoon, heading up the gentle slopes of the hills toward the firebase.

  Home is the settlement. The Moon. Where it's safe and clean. Where Mother is. But another part of his mind added, Where it's cramped and small.

  Where life is rigidly determined by the amount of air and water available. Where the colors are whites and grays or pastels. Where you speak with polite restraint and wait your turn in the hierarchy that governs all.

  Twisting around in his saddle, looking over the glorious autumn plumage of Mother Earth and the even wilder grandeur of the flaming sunset, Alec could understand why some of the men might be tempted to remain here. A flight of birds sped far overhead in a ragged vee formation and Alec's heart leaped at the sight of them. Their queer honking sounds drifted across the landscape.

  "Winter's coming," Angela said.

  Alec nodded. The birds were heading roughly southward. He took another look at them as they faded into the distant purple-reds of the dying day.

  It took an effort to force his thoughts back to the settlement. No winter there. No seasons at all.

  How is Mother holding out? Can she still handle Kobol? Is the Council still loyal to her?

  But as he asked himself these questions Alec found that he was watching Angela riding beside him, swaying softly and crooning to her horse as it plodded up the leaf-littered hillside.

  They reached the crest of the final hill and Alec saw the firebase. It was small; it couldn't hold more than twenty men. A wooden fence topped with metal spikes ringed it. The gate was open, but guarded by two alert youngsters with carbines slung over their shoulders.

  Even in the twilight, they recognized Angela as she rode up.

  "Angie! We thought you'd been taken prisoner down in the village. There's some raider scum in the area . . ."

  "I'm all right." She smiled at them as she got down off her horse. "The raiders have left the village. This is Alec . . . he's from the village. He came along with me, for protection."

  The two boys shook Alec's hand. They were boys, no more than fifteen. But they carried their guns well and eyed Alec carefully, despite Angela's lie.

  Inside the pallisade, two ancient artillery pieces stood mounted on wooden wheels, their heavy snouts poking skyward. Alec had such weapons on history tapes. They fired lumbering inert projectiles that contained high explosives. Sure enough, there was a neat pile of shells next to each piece. It must take a pair of men just to lift one of them, Alec thought. He also noted that there were only six shells per gun. They must be as ancient as the guns themselves, or damned difficult to manufacture properly. There were plenty of smaller weapons in sight: machine guns mounted on the wall, small rocket launchers, cannisters crudely marked FLAMMABLE with hoses that ended in pistol-grip nozzles.

  They unsaddled their horses and slung their bags over their shoulders. Alec's bag had the extra weight of the radio transceiver. One of the boys led the horses to a roofed shelter that was already stocked with hay.

  The other boy escorted them down narrow earthen steps that went into a complex of bunkers that honey-combed the ground under the firebase.

  The firebase commander was an older man, graying at the temples. "Your father's putting together dozens of search patrols to find you," he told Angela sternly, as if she were a little girl who had wandered off into the woods.

  "I'd better radio him right away and let him know I'm all right," she said.

  The commander nodded curtly and took them to the radio room. The equipment looked old and impossibly bulky to Alec. He stood at the doorway beside the glowering commander and looked over the power generator and its connections while Angela got the radio operator to put her in touch with headquarters.

  At last she pulled off the headphones and looked up to Alec and the commander. "He's already out in the field with Will Russo. They'll send a rider out to tell him that I'm okay."

  "Good," the commander said. "I suppose you'll be spending the night here." He made it sound like a cross between a challenge and a complaint.

  "Yes, I'd rather not travel in the dark."

  The commander gave Angela his own bunk, set into a curtained niche cut into one end of the bunker's main room. He showed Alec a cot among a dozen others in a separate room, connected to the main room by a low, narrow tunnel some two dozen paces long.

  They ate in the main room with the commander and six other men. Everyone seemed to know Angela well, but no one questioned her in the slightest about what had happened in the village.

  After the meal they went their separate ways. Alec stretched out on his bunk and actually fell asleep, almost at once. His last thought was that this bunker was like home, in the settlement.

  He awoke to the sound of snoring. The room was dark. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the faint glow coming from the tunnel entrance. Most of the cots were occupied now by sleeping men, and in the darkness Alec thought that the form next to him was the commander himself.

  Carefully, noiselessly, Alec got up and reached into the bag he had slipped under the cot. The radio felt solid and reassuring in his hands. He ducked into the tunnel and went slowly to the main room. It was empty and lit only by a single bare electric bulb hanging from a wire overhead.

  The power generator hummed softly, bringing a smile to Alec's lips. Pulling a wrinkled, weathered, hand-scribbled timetable from his shirt pocket, he checked the numbers carefully. Another half hour before the satellite could possibly be above the horizon.

  After a moment's hesitation, Alec quickly climbed the earthen steps and poked his head out of the bunker's only entrance. Four men were standing by the pallisade, slumped with boredom or hunched against the cold, looking outward into the night. Two more sat by the fire, talking to each other in low, serious tones.

  Alec ducked back inside. Angela was sleeping behind the curtain that partitioned off the commander's cubicle. He nodded. Everything's as good as it's going to be.

  He went swiftly to the unattended radio room and jammed the makeshift wooden door shut, as tightly as he could. There was no way to lock it. He put the transceiver down on the operator's desk and spent the next few minutes connecting it properly to the antiquated power supply. Then he sat at the desk, slipped the single earphone over his head and swung the tiny microphone next to his lips. He waited an eternity to hear the satellite's automatic beacon beep out against the steady hiss and sputter of cosmic static.

  The eternity ended at last.

  "Hello, hello," he called as loudly as he dared.

  "Come in satellite station. Answer. This is Alec Douglas."

  Another eternity, seconds long, and then, "Alec . . . Alec! Is it really you?"

  "Yes. Can you hear me all right?"

  "Faint but clear. Go ahead."

  Alec gave his approximate position, then said, "Get the Council to send the strongest force they can put together down here as soon as possible. Within the week, at most. We can locate the fissionables and take them if we move quickly. Tell my mother that one quick, decisive stroke can win everything for us. Airdrop me electric power supplies, weapons and ammunition. I'll find it if you can drop it within ten kilometers of me."

  "All right, but . . ."

  "No buts! I want a strong force down here as fast as the Council can put it together. Men, weapons, trucks . . ."

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you!" said the voice from the satellite. "Kobol's already landed a force of a hundred men—almost two weeks ago. Trucks, lasers, rockets, everything. It took five shuttle flights to get them all on the ground!"

  "Kobol! Two weeks ago?
Where? Where did he land?"

  "Far south of you . . ."

  "Oak Ridge?"

  "No, further south. Someplace called Florida, I think."

  Alec sat in the harsh light of the overhead bulb, stunned.

  "Hey, Alec . . . you still there?"

  He nodded, then realized that it was a meaningless gesture. "Yes . . . Listen. Get this message through to my mother. Tell her I'm within a few hours' striking distance of Douglas' headquarters and the fissionables. Tell her to shuttle Kobol's forces here. Order him here! Remind him that I'm still the commander of this mission, by order of the Council."

  "Yes sir." The voice went formal.

  "All right. And get a power supply to me right away. Tear one out of the bulkheads up there if you have to; but it's vital that I re-establish communications within twenty-four hours and I can't do it without a power supply."

  "Will do!"

  Alec signed off. For many long minutes he sat there, his mind whirling, wondering what Kobol was doing and why. But he was too tired to think straight. Slowly he disconnected the transceiver, then stealthily edged the door back to its open position and stepped into the bunker's main room.

  Douglas was sitting at the table in the center of the room, making the bunker look crowded with his bulk. Angela stood beside him, staring at Alec in cold fury.

  "You made it through the summer, I see,"

  Douglas said. He was smiling, but there was no humor in his voice.

  Chapter 22

  For a stunned moment Alec didn't know what to say or do.

  Douglas seemed to enjoy his surprise. "Do you really think you've been out of my sight for one minute since you landed on Earth?" He spread his massive hands in an all-inclusive gesture. "From the minute you touched down at Oak Ridge you've been under surveillance. I've been impressed. You learn very quickly. There were only three or four times when I was tempted to step in and help you."

  "You haven't lifted a finger," Alec snapped. "We fought our way here on our own."

  "That's right," Douglas agreed. "You spent the summer working out an experiment—in survival.

  The experiment was a success. You survived. You even helped us to polish off some of those raider bands." He laughed, and the underground bunker seemed to shake with it. "Lord, they'd get their attention all focused on your pitiful little gang and start licking their chops. Then Will would swoop in and clobber them. It was sweet."