The Shadow and Night

by Chris Walley

  When they all went to eat, Merral felt so preoccupied about his forthcoming speech that he found he had lost his appetite. After picking at the first course, he made an apology and went and stood outside the mess tent. His shoulder still ached.

  In the darkness above him he could glimpse patches of fierce stars where the clouds had been ripped open. The air was still moist from the rain. Just beyond him, in a dip in the ground illuminated by a delicate spiderweb of silver lights, stretched the accommodation tents. Seventy tents, Merral reflected, perhaps two hundred people in total. Over half preparing to fight, the rest to support. All puzzled, all uncertain, and all looking to him for decisions and wisdom.

  Merral watched the scene as he tried to rehearse his words, noting the tents with their eerie internal glow, the reflected glitter of the lights off the muddy pathways, and the shadowy figures padding to and fro. The sight in itself was not novel to him; he had camped a lot, but those campsites had never sounded like this. There were sounds aplenty here tonight, but there was no laughter and no noise of children, and all the voices he could make out were serious. Slowly, one by one, the men and women drifted toward a broad, level square that must once have been an extension of the runway.

  A tall figure came over to him from the tent; it was Frankie. “Sir, sorry to disturb you. But it’ll soon be time for you to say something. There are a few guys we’ve posted as what they call perimeter guards and a couple of guys in the Comms center, but otherwise everyone will be here soon and waiting to hear you. And we are recording it for posterity. If that’s all right?”

  Merral shook his head. “Why not, Frankie? Okay. Let’s go.”

  They had made him a low platform out of stacked containers and turned lights onto it. Merral went and stood silently to one side, just out of the arc of illumination, watching the company as it gathered and half wondering whether he should have arranged for amplification. The dazzle of the lighting was such that he knew he would be unable to make out more than silhouettes facing him. Perhaps it was best he could not see their faces; he was nervous enough already. He had spoken regularly at conferences and meetings, but never at anything like this. Indeed, it occurred to him with a tingle of strange excitement, the last person to do anything exactly like this was the man whose identity disk hung cold and light against his chest. And he had been dead for a hundred and twenty centuries. Perhaps, Merral suddenly thought, he should have found the famous clip of Lucas Ringell briefing his men before the attack on the Centauri station.

  Frankie nodded to him, teeth shining in the glare. “I’d say that they are about all here, sir. So whenever you are ready.”

  Merral clapped him on the back and walked up slowly onto the platform. There he paused briefly, tensing involuntarily, as an expectant silence fell on the crowd before him. He was uncomfortably aware that they were all staring at him. He paused. So, help me, God.

  “Ladies and gentlemen; troops and technicians; colleagues and comrades; above all, brothers and sisters in the Lord.” Merral paused, listening to his words die away in the silence, reassured that he was loud enough, that the words had come out at all. “I am unclear which of these titles I ought to address you with. So I address you with them all. I am Merral Stefan D’Avanos. Of Ynysmant, Menaya, Farholme.”

  Take your time. Don’t fumble it out of nerves, keep making pauses. “Until yesterday I was Forester D’Avanos. My present title, given to me by our representatives, is that of captain of the Farholme Defense Unit. It is my hope to return shortly to my former title.”

  Merral paused again, weighing his next words, relieved that nerves had not caused him to dry up. The stress was lifting; he felt more at ease. “Indeed, it is my real hope and prayer that all of us will shortly be able to return to our old professions. I would wish nothing more than that this extraordinary episode we have become drawn into be ended. I look forward to it being a footnote on one of the many pages of the history of the Assembly. However, our wishes are one thing and our duty is another.”

  He stopped, let the words register, and continued. “I want to say to you that I have not taken up this task lightly. Indeed, I refused the commission for two days while I returned to my hometown to think it over. But what I found there convinced me that, however great the many risks of this operation are, the risks of not confronting the intruders are greater. They must be faced. If they are not, then all that we are may perish.”

  The electric silence continued. “We do not know entirely what we face; all we know is that the intruders are from beyond the Assembly and are hostile to us. As some of you have apparently heard, Sentinel Enand and I have encountered them and were forced, reluctantly, to fight them for our lives. I plan to have a full briefing with the leaders on everything we know about them tomorrow. Now I will only say that they are strange and frightening and hostile, but also vulnerable. By the grace of God, our first contact resulted in substantial losses to them. I should warn you, though, that this may simply have been because they were caught unawares. They demonstrated the possession of weapons that we do not have. I have since learned that they have tried, and to some extent succeeded, in entering our data files in the Library at Isterrane. It is also almost certain that it was they who caused the destruction of the Gate.”

  He heard someone say, “Told you so,” and a ripple of angry whispering ran through the crowd. Merral paused, letting everyone quiet down. An almost tangible silence returned. “Above all, I should warn you that there is a good deal of evidence that they are evil . . . and that they can transmit evil.” Merral felt hundreds of eyes staring at him. “If I may speak of something which is almost beyond my understanding, I want to warn you all that we may be moving into a spiritual atmosphere that is like nothing any of us has ever known. Or that anyone in the entire history of the Assembly has known since the Rebellion was ended.”

  There were mutterings of agreement here and there, and Merral wondered if others had felt it. “All I can say,” he said, “is that of late I have been reading those parts of the Old and New Covenant writings that deal with the struggles against evil with a greater interest and a greater sense of reality and relevance than ever before. In the past when I read them, I, like you, always saw them largely as a sobering history. They recorded a time that we could rejoice was behind us. I have now come to realize that they may not represent just our past, but also our future. To every one of you I say this: watch; be mindful of your thoughts and words.”

  He stopped for a moment. There was total silence. In the western distance, where a faint purple glow marked the remains of sunset, a fork of lightning flashed. He had planned to end here, but for some reason, he found himself continuing.

  “In this present conflict, we have all been given a part to play. Some of us may find we dislike the part we have been given. Yet that is irrelevant. I, and you, must play the part we have been given as best we can.”

  Merral caught his breath, aware of the tension all around him, and continued. “According to the present plan, we have just under eighty hours before contact. We need to make the most of every minute between now and then. I’ll take no questions now. I’m going to hand over to the chaplain to lead us now in prayer and a hymn.” He hesitated, suddenly overawed almost beyond bearing by the situation. “God be with you. With us. With the Assembly,” he said, his voice suddenly thickening with emotion.

  As his words died away, Merral had no idea what reaction he would get: neither clapping nor prayers would have surprised him. Then a voice sang out, shaky at first but growing in strength:

  “Lord of all worlds, whose mighty power

  “Sustains your people hour by hour . . .”

  One by one, others joined the voice until everybody was singing the great anthem, and the air seemed to vibrate with the words as if they were a challenge flung at the darkness.

  Along the horizon, silver lightning flickered again. In support or in defiance? wondered Merral.

  37

  Over the next two da
ys, Merral found that he had very little time to reflect on how things were going. It was not for want of trying. As a matter of the highest priority, he endeavored to make time to be alone and to evaluate progress. Yet, no matter how carefully he scheduled events, he found it impossible to make the space. Something else always seemed to seize any time slot he left vacant. Although he delegated as much as he dared, he felt obliged to keep something of a personal eye on what was happening. Everything was so new that he felt it essential to participate to some extent in order to learn what the tasks involved. So he took part on the firing range with the modified XM2s, or “cutter guns” as the soldiers now called them. He strapped himself into the sleds with their newly added boosters and was buffeted with the teams over the waves of the nearby lagoon that they used to simulate Fallambet Lake Five. If he wasn’t the fastest out and up the beach from the sled, he was up there with the leaders. He flew with the reserve team in the hold of the Emilia Kay and rappelled with them out of the open doors and down the swaying thirty-meter-long ropes to the ground while the hot engine thrust bellowed and roared just meters away from his kicking legs.

  As a point of principle, he took part in the training drills with the explosive charges and the expanding wedges and, amid cheers, personally felled an isolated and ailing palm tree—standing in for a landing leg—with a circlet of planar explosives. He even took part on one of the cross-country runs carrying gear after a hint that some people were finding it tough. In the course of all these activities, which had left him bruised and tired, he had become better acquainted with the men. Now, after two days, he knew most of them by name, and they all knew him and seemed to respect him. And, as far as he could tell from his reading of that long-dead world where war had been a way of life, these were all good things for a military leader.

  Yet Merral’s time was not just eaten away in activities; it was also taken up by the need for discussions and decisions. There was also a lot of debate over strategy, and the plans for the assault were slowly refined. After consultation with Vero, it was decided that Merral would go with Frankie’s team, which was approaching from the west. From the western side of the lake, he ought to have a good view of the intruder ship and—critically—be able to observe firsthand the response that the diplomatic team received.

  The decisions Merral had to make seemed endless. Everything was so new that the team leaders were always coming to him to clarify some point of protocol, a safety ruling, or an issue of discipline. Strangely, the one leader who bothered him least was Vero. He was now almost permanently surrounded by three young men of his “intelligence group,” and the four of them were often closeted together in an isolated tent where animated discussions could frequently be heard.

  One of Vero’s contributions was, however, a disappointment. On the afternoon of the second day, the sentinel had announced that the progress of Felicity had been slower than expected and that the horse was still ten kilometers away from the lake. Privately, Merral wondered whether they would be at the lake before she was.

  Urgent and unpredictable incidents took up time. Despite a reduction of the battery power on the cutter guns to 5 percent strength, a persisting habit of firing before aiming had resulted in an unacceptable level of minor burns. More seriously, two men broke limbs because of overzealous assaults out of the Emilia Kay. Following consultation with Dr. Felix Azhadi, the grizzled veteran trauma-care surgeon who had been persuaded to be the medical officer, they reviewed procedures and sent a message to Isterrane, asking for a dozen extra men to be sent. In one of the personnel shifts that resulted, Lorrin Venn found himself shifted from the reserves to Frankie’s team. When Merral saw him hours later, he was whistling through a broad grin.

  In the end, after two days of hectic busyness, Merral decided that he had to make time to think. Noting that he was exactly forty-eight hours away from the planned contact, he set his alarm for just before dawn and, after a quarter of an hour in prayer and Bible reading, put on running gear. He briefed a bleary-eyed Frankie, yawning apologetically over his cup of coffee, and then, as the first rays of the sun struck the craggy rocks, set off jogging up to the rocky crest of the ridge that dominated Tanaris. He ran slowly, aware that, even by Farholme’s low standards, the island’s bare and rocky landscape was unforgiving.

  Twenty minutes later, Merral gasped his way past a sentry onto the summit ridge.

  Regaining his breath, he slowed to a labored walk and strolled out onto an overhanging rock slab that formed a viewing point. Here, with the emphasis granted by the low-angle sun, he could see the Emilia Kay at the southern end of the runway, the tents where lines of people were assembling for breakfast, and the lagoon where they practiced to the north. So, tomorrow evening we fly, and this make-believe practice world of Tanaris gets replaced by the reality of Fallambet Lake Five. Are we prepared?

  It was, he realized, an unanswerable question. Prepared for what? How could anyone make any prediction when faced with something as totally unknown as this? Warfare, he knew, had always been a reckless and uncertain business. Yet even in the endless wars of the far past, men had always known that they faced other men or the machines of men. Now, though, we do not even know what we face.

  Merral sighed. Realistically, he knew, all they could aim to do was the best possible. With regard to the men of the assault teams, he sensed everywhere a rising confidence coupled with a growing discipline and skill. But were any—or all of them together—enough to outweigh the total lack of experience?

  As Merral thought about the probable conflict, he was aware of something that tugged at a corner of his mind, something outstanding that he had to do. While he was attempting to pursue the thought, he heard a call of “Sir!”

  The sentry approached, clutching a low-power short-range communicator.

  “Yes, Lennis. What is it?”

  “A message, sir. The freighter Henrietta Pollard is coming in to land. In fact, I reckon you can see it.” He pointed at a small black dot low above the western skyline.

  In addition to bearing the remaining supplies, the flight carried the dozen replacement men as well as the pair who were to try diplomacy with the intruders. Was there to be no chance of escaping his responsibilities?

  “Thanks, Lennis,” he sighed. “I’d better go on down.”

  Merral had barely had time to shower and change before two visitors were shown into his office and the fabric flap lowered behind them. They were a man and woman, both of late middle age, and the first thing that struck Merral was how elegant they looked. Perhaps, he thought as they shook hands, the smartness was especially marked because of the new world of sweating, uniformed men that he seemed to now dwell in.

  “I’m Erika Nateen,” the lady said with a polite, tired smile. Her accent was not quite that of Farholme.

  “Van Denern. Louis Van Denern,” the man added in a rather precise way as he looked around the tent with cool, evaluative gray eyes. He had a rather pale complexion, and Merral wondered if, like Vero, he was a bad flyer.

  “Welcome,” Merral answered, uncomfortably aware that, despite the shower, he was still sweating from his run. “Merral D’Avanos, recently forester, now—by an act of Providence—captain. And yet hoping to be forester again very shortly. Please take a seat. You had a good flight?”

  As they sat on the chairs, they looked at each other as if for reassurance. “Yes,” Erika answered. “An early start but otherwise fine. Representative Corradon—who sends you his greetings—was anxious not to obviously disrupt the flying schedule. The best way of doing that was to squeeze in the early morning flight for us on the—whatever it was called.”

  “Henrietta Pollard,” Louis added in a tone that suggested he liked accuracy.

  Merral realized he was overlooking hospitality. “Can I order you a drink? or breakfast?”

  “Just a coffee, please,” Erika said with a formal smile that reminded Merral of one of the teachers at his junior school.

  “Water,” Louis said firml
y. “Just water. I presume it is sterile?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Merral gave an order to one of the guards and then sat back down in his chair. “So,” he said, looking at his guests, “you are our diplomatic team?”

  The visitors looked at each other and Erika seemed to sigh slightly.

  “Yes,” she answered with what Merral felt was a lack of enthusiasm. He stared at both of the newcomers again, feeling slightly puzzled. Somehow, they were not what he had expected.

  “Can I ask something?” Merral said. “Why did you volunteer for this? You do realize that this is likely to be risky?”

  Again, he caught a shared, confiding look passing between them. It was almost as if they were married to each other, something that he knew wasn’t the case. Erika gestured for Louis to speak.

  “I am a language teacher,” he replied in his rather stiff way. “Isterrane University. Grammar is my specialty. I have five historic languages, plus Communal and Farholmen, of course. And I am an old friend of Anwar Corradon.”

  “I see,” answered Merral, wondering whether he would answer the second question.

  Louis put his head slightly on one side for a moment. “Now, as for the risk . . . I am sixty-five, a widower, and I am—I suppose—one of the few medical casualties of the loss of the Gate. Other than those on the Schütz.”

  “I was not aware there were any.”

  Louis nodded in a slight but precise way. “Oh yes. I have a degenerative liver disease coupled with an oversensitive immune system. A tailored prosthetic liver was on order. My hepatic specialist assures me that if we have a new Gate in fifty years, it will be around forty-eight too late. More or less.”

  That, thought Merral, is as elegant a circumlocution as I have ever heard for saying “I have two years to live.”

  “We are honored to have you with us,” he said.