by David Drake
"Sure," said Cohen, "why should they be better off than everybody else?"
Then the circuits tripped, leaving the transfer chamber empty of what the other three men knew as Cohen: a guard, as they were, of the Citadel of Arborson.
"Been a long time since anybody's tried it," said Pauli—perhaps in regret, perhaps in hidden concern for the fact that he was next up on the rotation. Only one guard could be transferred at a time, while the number of intruders were in theory limited only by the population the Earth still managed to support . . . .
Of course, that theoretical number seemed still to be decreasing.
"Yeah," Elfen said, looser than the others because he was neither facing imminent duty nor closely bonded to Cohen—Singer had brought aboard and trained both the newer guards. "Back in my day, every full moon somebody'd get together a band to break into the Citadel of Arborson. Nobody's got any balls anymore."
"They've forgotten the trick of getting in," said Singer, rifling the cards and appearing to look at them. "Not a matter of guts, just knowledge. And maybe metal."
"We knew how to get in, right enough," responded Elfen with a laugh. "It was just how to get out that was the problem."
Pauli grimaced toward the transfer chamber. "Some things don't change, do they?" he said.
The guardroom in Singer's imagination was momentarily infinite and featureless, a bleak expanse of dull ochre like the walls—themselves an electronic construct, as were the cards and all the other seemingly-physical objects within. Singer's massive hands shuffled cards that were as useful as they would have been if 'real' in some more material sense. "I wonder what they think they're going to find here," he remarked to the cards. "They can't have any conception of what Arborson was doing . . . of what a scientist was, for god's sake. Nobody in his own day believed he was more than a crank. Our day, Cohen's and mine."
"Well, so far as that goes," Elfen objected, "what do any of us know about Arborson—except that he's dead?"
"Do we know that?" Singer rejoined, rapping the cards on the tabletop to bring the deck into alignment. He looked up. Neither of the other guards spoke under his lowering gaze. Singer was the leader of the guardroom, in fact, if not officially. Arborson—if he were alive, rather than being dust or an electronic memory somewhere—did not involve himself in the affairs of the guards who carried out the orders he had programmed long ago.
Singer's face relented. He raised the reshuffled cards and asked in a mild voice, "Shall we play a couple of rounds of three-handed, then?"
Pauli sucked his lips and turned away. "Why don't we just wait awhile," he said, "until Cohen comes back."
So they waited, the three of them, until the alarm sounded again to indicate that Cohen would never come back.
Pauli jumped up with a curse or a prayer, headed for the transfer chamber instinctively because his eyes were shattered by tears and emotions beyond sorrow.
Pauli had been a warrior just short of thirty years old when he entered the guardroom, an advanced age that bespoke skill and toughness as clearly as did the scars overlying his body's more formal pattern of tattoos. There was a difference between the circumstances of his former life and what he was called on now to accomplish, however; and it may have been that the process itself was more a cause for his fear than was what—in addition to Cohen's body—he expected to find outside.
Singer stopped Pauli as he had earlier blocked his attempt to check the poker hand. Pauli whirled to glare at the big veteran who rose from his chair gripping the other's wrist.
"Singer, this is none of yours!" Pauli shouted. Anger had given him back composure of a sort, the hair-trigger readiness to strike, even pointlessly, here in the guardroom. "Back off and leave me go!"
"Sure, you've got the next call up," Singer said, easing his hold enough to defuse the situation without giving the smaller man a chance to make a break for the transfer chamber. "You can handle it, just like you did those calls before—hell, I trained you, didn't I? But now will you let me take care of my job, which a follow-up alarm damned well is?"
"What's that?" said Elfen, who had been watching the others struggle with an expression that was more nearly sexual than professional—though he was very good, no question of that, everything Arborson could wish if Arborson had desires . . . .
"I'm senior," Singer explained, using the interruption as cover to maneuver between Pauli and the chamber. "Cohen'd go if I weren't here." And very likely Cohen would have made the same split-second decision, had it been Singer out there on the ground; though they had not been friends during their long association, not until this moment when the association was finally terminated.
"Elfen, you're next up if there's a third call," the veteran added, an embellishment to establish the truth of what had gone before. That detail was unnecessary since Singer was already entering the transfer chamber, but it was better not to leave Pauli with the notion that his skill and courage was in doubt. God knew—but there was no god—that the kid would need skill, courage, and all his confidence the next time he did go out.
Maybe Arborson knew, since god did not.
And Singer felt his consciousness pass through the transfer chamber in a series of pin-prick intersections that ended with the breeze on his face and the light of the quarter moon by which he saw as clearly as he could have in sunlight before he became a guard at the Citadel of Arborson.
Singer stood in the first of the four external transfer booths, screened and safe from immediate detection by the intruders—barring hugely bad luck. Bad luck of one sort or another had met Cohen, though; and in any case, the guards liked to be free of the booth's constraints well before intruders were able to penetrate as far as the Citadel itself in the midst of the sprawling grounds. Cohen's failure had cost the remainder of the guard force that edge of time.
The veteran waited only a moment to be sure that there was some distance between the voices he heard and the alcove in which he was sheltered. The sounds were from far enough away that, though they were human, no words could be distinguished. Fair enough. He stepped through the black surface which was in reality an absence of light.
Singer moved quickly and, for a man of his size and bulk, very quietly; but just now, the rustle of oak leaves beneath his boots was not a matter of primary importance. He needed to learn as quickly as possible what had happened to Cohen.
Or rather, how it had happened.
The tell-tales in Singer's helmet indicated the external barrier had been breached almost in the center of its northern quadrant. He headed that way, knowing that Cohen would have acted to limit the incursion before he mopped it up.
He had been a rich man, Arborson, in his day, and the grounds of the Citadel were ample to sustain a population of rodents and the foxes that preyed upon them. There was not a great or as varied a number of birds as Singer would have liked, however; though god knew he'd not been a nature-boy before entering the guardroom. The migratory species were unable to leave after Arborson sealed the grounds behind the external barrier, so they died during the three years of brutal winter; and the change from parkland to increasingly dense forest had reduced the supply of seeds for the birds that required them.
There had been hummingbirds when Singer first met Dr. Arborson. Now the guard thought he missed those arrowing, hovering little forms more than anything else in life.
Since he was right-handed, Singer approached the breach clockwise to put the barrier on his left. Counterclockwise felt safer, though it was not: Singer knew and acted on that knowledge that nothing outside the barrier could harm him; but emotionally there was still a desire to keep his strong side to a world that was now beyond his conception.
There was a forest of sorts on the other side of the barrier. The germ plasm of plants is far more malleable than that of animal life, and the sleet of radiation had hammered the genes ancestral to the growth outside. The barrier, transparent from within, was hedged with a thousand forms that no botanist of Singer's day would ha
ve recognized.
Most of the vegetation was of stunted shapes gnarling across piles of rubble where steel reinforcements retained a dangerous level of atomic warmth even when their structural strength had been oxidized away. There was one tall tree: a pine perhaps and a conifer surely, for cones swelled at intervals from the trunk all the way from the ground to the tip three hundred feet in the air. That height was needless since the giant would have towered above its competitors for light and air at a quarter of its present majesty, but it made an ideal post from which to overlook the sprawling black dome of the Citadel's external barrier.
Perhaps that was why so many of the intrusions into the Citadel grounds were made near the giant trunk, as was this one.
The apparatus piercing the barrier was a wooden frame covered by a mesh of hand-drawn wire. It looked unbelievably crude to have been sufficient for the purpose.
Ages before, there had been men who could carry forward the equations Arborson had published—before he chose to isolate himself on an estate whose defenses were solely physical until the long morning of miniature suns vaporizing stone and steel and bodies all across the world. There were governments then, too, or their semblance, and the sophistication of even a shattered world was quite high when all its resources were marshaled. Arborson's method of withdrawal seemed to offer the one real hope that civilization could survive the holocaust it had brought on itself.
The first intrusion through the barrier had been made with a stressed-wire tube that modified the size and shape of its rhomboidal meshes. Engineers dialed-in the mesh armor so that the fourth man trying to enter was not incinerated in the heart of the barrier as his predecessors had been. He died instead with a bullet through the brain as he squirmed out of the tube. The last of that particular party had been a woman. While her body twitched on the pile of a dozen of her friends, Singer had dragged the tube completely inside the barrier, his ears ringing with the muzzle blasts of his gun.
But later attempts—some of them, at any rate—had the benefit of knowing from the beginning what size and alignment of wires would screen intruders through the barrier. The guards still had advantages over the intruders, among them the fact that ammunition from within the Citadel was trustworthy long after parties of intruders had ceased to carry firearms except for show. Even so, not all the guards had made it through the early days. Singer had, and Cohen; and Cohen's body now was sprawled with an arrow so far through the back of his neck that its barbed point must have been deep in the leaf mold against which his face was buried. His hand was outstretched toward the mesh shield that he had intended to destroy before he hunted down the intruders.
Cohen had always been one to underestimate the competition. He'd been very good, though, good enough to last this long . . . which meant that somewhere in the forest was someone even better.
The arrow itself gave the intruder away. It had slanted down from above when it struck and finished Cohen. Singer knelt, still as a stone, and quartered the treetops with his eyes the way Cohen should have done before assuming that the tube had been left unguarded. At last he found an oak trunk that was as thick above a major crotch as it was below, with a texture that was subtly wrong.
Singer peered carefully at the section of trunk, ten feet above the ground and twenty from the point at which Cohen lay. It was covered with inner bark, a robe woven of cambium and fastened artfully to conceal a human figure. The watcher had held his position after he made his kill instead of rushing down in a triumph that would have left him cold meat for an additional opponent.
If all of them were that good, then Pauli was going to get a chance to try his skills on them after all.
There were two choices, one of them a crossbow bolt of Singer's own into the intruder: a clout shot at twenty yards, but risky if the target were armored—and wasteful if it were not. Singer backed away, even more cautious than he had been when he made his final approach to the site of the intrusion. When he was well beyond risk of alarming the watcher in the tree by casual noise, he sped back toward the Citadel proper at a gliding lope.
Besides the watchman at the point they had entered—and hoped to leave—the Citadel grounds, the intruders had separated only two men as outliers. It was a pity that they had not guarded their backtrail closely, so that Singer could have eliminated more of their strength before dealing with the main body.
There were something less than a dozen intruders at the Citadel, their numbers confused by the way they crowded around the door they were attacking. That portal had never been satisfactorily repaired since the afternoon that a new recruit and Spannisky, one of the original guards, had both died before Cohen mopped up the party of intruders.
The outliers stood twenty yards deeper in the forest, out of sight of each other and the main body. The obvious danger of their position was lessened by the dog each man led, huge animals with the drooping stance of scent hunters. The hounds' noses were intended to do what the eyes of the men could not, warn of dangers in the darkness which moonlight could only emphasize in patches through the canopy. There was little undergrowth within the Citadel grounds this late in the summer, because the overspreading oaks absorbed most of the sunlight that could have nourished lesser vegetation.
One of the outliers stood with his back to a tree bole, stationary but too twitchingly nervous to remain unnoticed even if his hound were not casting between a pair of vole runs at the length of its short lead. The other man was pacing something less formal than a proper guard beat. He seemed to be of a mind that the dog was better able to give warning if it were allowed to roam—albeit in a twenty-yard circuit or less. The pacing man was as nervous as his fellow. He twisted his whole torso back and forth at rapid intervals, obviously terrified that something was creeping up behind him as he followed the hound.
Singer crept carefully into a position from which his exceptional night vision allowed him to see both outliers and the group battering at the Citadel with wedges and hammers besides. The leader of the intruders was huge, taller than Singer and perhaps as solidly muscular in the shoulders and chest. He wore a bark-cloth cape and over it a headdress of black fur. As Singer watched, the man turned from the doorway to the forest and called to the outliers. His fur covering was the pelt of something descended from a domestic cat, a beast that must have weighed twenty-five pounds in life. Now, its eyes replaced by bits of red glass and its jaw gaping—the skull had been retained as support—the cat glared angrily above the harsh face of the man who wore it.
The outlier with his back to the tree glowered as he shouted in reply. His fellow, the man starting at shadows as he paced behind his hound, did not respond to the leader's summons—save by spinning in almost a complete circle at the sound. Neither outlier left his post, so the call must have been meant as encouragement rather than summons. The intruders' speech was too alien for Singer to guess at the language, much less understand it.
This gang would almost certainly be able to gain entrance through the already-weakened section. That, and the way the attacking party kept itself together, gave Singer a workable strategy—though he wished, and not for the first time, that he could have a partner during operations.
But two hands would achieve what four could have made simpler. Singer circled silently through the light brush toward the outlier who kept in motion.
The dog made Singer's task easier because of the false security it gave its master. The outlier passed close to a huge oak as he made his rounds. Singer simply positioned himself behind that tree and waited with his crossbow cocked and poised in his left hand.
As the dog preceded its master down the track they had worn on previous circuits, its big head swung from side to side like a derrick loading freight. Singer, still as the trunk against which he waited, felt the dog's warm breath on his ankle as the animal moved on without taking notice.
The man himself walked by, left wrist wrapped with the end of a five-foot leash and the short spear in his right hand poised to stab. He twisted his hea
d around to be certain there was no bogey approaching—nervousness and not expectation, so that he did not actually see the veteran guard looming behind him. Singer smiled and cut the outlier's throat with a knife whose blade the present age could not have sharpened, much less forged.
The dog turned when its master jerked the lead reflexively. The crossbow bolt broke both spine and windpipe before the animal could bay a warning.
Beast and man collapsed, thrashing at opposite ends of the leash that still connected them. To Singer, the bang of the bow-cord releasing was stunningly loud; but no one else within the Citadel enclosure remarked it.
Singer had to work very quickly now, though the door—even in its present damaged state—should give him some margin. He wiped the blade of his knife carefully before sheathing it, but he ignored the blood which oozed in a bubbling seam from the outlier's throat when Singer lifted him in a fireman's carry. With the corpse's torso across the veteran's broad shoulders, one wrist and ankle gripped to keep the burden anchored, Singer set off at a lope that would bring him to another of the Citadel's entrances without being seen by the main body of intruders. The weight of the dead man made Singer more awkward, but it did not slow him significantly. He liked to feel the play of his muscles under stress.
