‘Don’t preach anarchism to me!’ Jovain rasped. The world has seen, in the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Laska, the world has seen what that leads to. The time is ripe for ending it.’
‘Ah, so.’ Eygar laid hand around jaw. ‘In other words, you’ll not be content with dismantling Orion.’
‘Certainly not, after the lessons of the past several decades. The Northwest Union will be made into a civilized nation. The criminals who built and used forbidden weapons will be brought to justice.… Ah, I myself take for granted you were not a party to that, Dr. Dreng. Conduct yourself properly and I think a later investigation will clear you. I see no reason to penalize individuals who were simply misguided.’
‘Have you discussed these policies with the Maurai Federation?’
‘Only en passant. But I think their general intent is obvious. They do not propose to have a war every twenty years! And my government intends to participate in the peace conference.’
‘You’ve got the power to insist on that.’
‘Yes.’ Triumph: ‘Therefore, shall we arrange an armistice?’
‘No,’ said Eygar Dreng. ‘Orion hasn’t quit yet.’
‘You’re insane!’ yelled the voice at his ear.
‘Stubborn, yes. Insane, no. We’re well provisioned, heavily armored, and you don’t know exactly where to aim your shots at us. You’ll need weeks or months to reduce us, or the Maurai to ferry soldiers north. Meanwhile, anything could happen. I’ve read a fair amount of military history, Captain. Now and then it’s paid off for a garrison to hold out till the bitter end. But I hope you’ll allow our militia to go. That you won’t try using them to blackmail us.’
‘Oh, yes, oh yes. World opinion –’Jovain breathed heavily. ‘Do you imagine I’ll retreat? If I keep station till the Maurai troops come, my Domain will have disintegrated beyond retrieval. If I probe randomly for your launch sites, I will inflict dreadful harm on Gaea. Do you see me caught between those two horns?’
Eygar said nothing.
‘I will do whatever is necessary to crush your misbegotten society,’Jovain said. ‘And I have a third possibility open to me. Where I am, I command an enormous area, land inhabited by your people, waters plied by their ships. Furthermore, Skyholm is movable; it came to you, didn’t it? I can punish your whole nation until it rises and marches against you itself. Not its nature but its artifacts, cities, villages, farms, roads, mines, everything men have built, with surgical precision.
‘Across the Inlet from you is another peninsula, settled, prosperous-looking. Dreng, I tell you most solemnly, if you have not yielded by tomorrow noon when the cloud cover will be gone, by tomorrow night that will all lie a desert. Which will be the merest beginning.’
Eygar shook his head as if clubbed. ‘And you condemn us for using a few nukes,’ he said.
‘Enough!’ Jovain shrilled. ‘I’ll hear no more. You shall not desecrate Gaea –-’ For a space, his breathing shuddered, until he could finish flatly: ‘You are overwrought, Dr. Dreng. Let’s adjourn this. Think it over. Ask your personnel how they feel. Then – well, before noon I shall expect to hear from you. Do you follow me? Very well, goodnight.’
Click.
Eygar Dreng sat long by himself, staring into emptiness.
‘I suppose I should go,’ Plik said. ‘Even for me, it’s grown late.’
Lisba held him close. Her look flew around the cubicle that was hers, walls where a few pictures hung garish, cot, chair, dresser, clothes rack, tiny desk doubling as a washstand. The caverns mumbled around her.
‘No, please, don’t,’ she begged. ‘You can have the bed. I’ll throw my sleeping bag on the floor for a mattress.’
He stroked her hair. ‘I would never allow that,’ he said, ‘a lifelong gynolater like me. What on – what inside Earth prompted you? I admit this evening has been not only consoling but delightful, like its predecessors, for me at any rate. Nevertheless, your offer is the most undeserved honor that has yet come my way.’
She clung. ‘You’re company Those ghastly rumors, that thing in the sky, a general assembly after breakfast tomorrow – Do you want to lie awake alone?’
He flinched. ‘No. But you … you could easily invite someone who’s more handsome, less alcoholic, and not wistful about a barmaid afar in Uropa. Why me?’
‘You, you sing songs, merry or crazy but songs, and you make a weird kind of sense out of everything –’
‘My dear,’ he sighed, ‘I am no prophet. Nothing is pledged us. Ofttimes the exiled Prince has returned too late, or merely to die. And at best, I tell you naught for your comfort. I feel the whole world dying, to be reborn in a shape altogether strange – and birth hurts worse than death, remember.’
‘I still want you here.’
‘Well, well,’ he said unsteadily. ‘If otherwise useless old Plik can share a little warmth.… Whatever happens, Sesi – Lisba, yonder gloriously rumpled cot shall be yours tonight. But let us try if we cannot both sleep there, together.’ He held her in his left arm while his right reached for the bottle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘Oh, no, no,’ Ronica moaned. ‘They can’t. You mustn’t.’
Eygar Dreng’s voice crawled out of the receiver: ‘We must. At least, we will. The vote was overwhelming to fight on. Maybe Jovain is bluffing. It’s not been the way of the Domain to make war on noncombatants, has it? Or if he isn’t – well, we hope the Free Folk will stand fast against him till we can raise Orion. We’ve warned them on the Kenai Peninsula to evacuate their homes, in case.’
‘But if they lose everything they have – Oh, I suppose the Maurai will send ships for them, but they’ll be destitute and – You can’t spend their hopes like, like money … for your own ends. You’re being a government!’
Bitterness lashed back: ‘Don’t you tell me what to do. We wouldn’t be in this fix if you hadn’t betrayed us.’
Ronica shrank into her seat and covered her face. From his pilot’s chair beside her, Iern heard breath raw in her mouth.
He gazed outward. The spacecraft was positioned to give a forward view of the planet she orbited at a height of some hundred and fifty kilometers. Beneath a sun close to noontide, Earth filled well-nigh half his vision. Directly before him, a cloud deck was falling from sight as he moved. Rifts in its whiteness revealed sea turquoisely aglimmer and land brown, ruddy, freshly green. Even as he watched, the gaps widened. Northward, skies were clear. He could see across forests and meadows of the Yukon basin and a silver vein which was the river, on to snowpeaks athwart an azure deepening to starful blackness.
Over the clouds hung a sphere of duller hue. At his remove it showed as a disc, about half the size of a full moon. Here and there, metal flung back light in fierce little sparks.
‘Calling Skyholm, calling Skyholm,’ Iern croaked into his own transmitter. ‘Jovain, come in, answer me. You can’t do this thing.
For the honor of the Aerogens – by the anims of the Ancestors –’
Surely they heard him in the rover globe. He was using a band to which a main receiver was always tuned. The Maurai high command, in response to his earlier call, had agreed to link him to its worldwide radio relay network while he circled. Its agents were listening in, of course, but so should the Captain have been, while Ronica called her old chief. But Jovain did not reply, he did not reply.
Orion Two swung north, on a near-polar track that would also take her above N’Zealann and, as Earth rotated, Franceterr. Soon the aerostat hunched above the rim, a shrunken, malignant lunar crescent. It dropped beneath. The ship hurried on toward night.
Ronica wept. Tears escaped from her fingers and bobbed about in microgravity. Rays of the lowering sun splintered into diamond shards against them. Iern’s own, unshed, thickened in his throat.
‘That is no bluff,’ he said heavily. ‘I don’t know Jovain well, but I do understand him – the whole Clan spirit – enough to realize how totally he is committed. One does not make a threat without meaning i
t. And then, I think, the personal element. He scorned to speak to me as part of his revenge. When I see him release his laser beams, that will be another part of it.’
‘Merciful Yasu,’ she, an unbeliever, implored.
‘The Wolves should surrender, and pick up their lives as best they can. What future has a corpse? But they seem to be fanatics, no saner than their enemies.’
She lifted her head. ‘Don’t say that!’ she exploded at him. ‘They are of the Free Folk!’ She slumped. ‘I belonged to them once.’
He gripped her shoulder. ‘You still do, darling. Dreng was … unjust… as hurt as he’s been.’ Sickly: ‘We did what we thought was right, in a swamp of lies and treacheries. It would have sucked everything down regardless.’
She stiffened and shivered beneath his hand. ‘But, yes, they are my people, they are,’ she grieved. ‘And all that was theirs will go down in wreck, and they will go into slavery.’
Exaggerated, he thought. Subjection, not slavery; and the Maurai will be gentle masters.
Masters nonetheless.
Plik.
Now why should I remember Plik, out beyond his heaven?
That night in Seattle. ‘In this rainy land I have seen the old Merican spirit rising huge from where it lay centuries buried, and the foundations of the world are atremble –’ Yes, that is why my beloved mourns, the true reason, for the soul that her people will lose.
Her people who yearned for the stars.
It cracked through his head: What soul remains to Skyholm? The darkness into which he was entering flooded him; he hung alone in it and could not breathe.
Ronica caught at his arm. He saw her countenance close to his, anguish thrust away by love and concern, and heard, ‘Darling Iern, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’
‘I – yes –’ He struggled for self-command. ‘Yes, I just had a, a rather frightful idea.’
She braced herself. ‘What?’
He looked from her, gathering resolve. Never would he have a task more cruel than the speaking of his mind, here in this quietly hurtling heaven-farer. The Arctic Ocean sheened vast, wrinkled, white-swirled. Icebergs and a northern cloudbank flung light back over the waves; the blueness within them was like swords unsheathed.
Finally he said, his eyes aimed past her, his tone level: ‘We may be able to save them. Your kin and even, perhaps, Orion. For your sake.’
Air whistled in between her teeth.
‘Of course, we may well fail,’ he added. ‘And whichever way that goes, if we make the attempt we will probably die.’
2
‘Your Dignity,’ said the voice of Ashcroft Lorens Mayn, ‘the hour is past noon, your ultimatum has expired, and the weather is currently favorable. We can commence bombardment anytime.’
‘Prepare,’Jovain replied, ‘but hold fire until I reach the central control compartment.’
He switched off the intercom and sagged at his desk. Why? he wondered. My presence isn’t necessary. I could stay where I am, issue my orders, and not witness what happens.
I must, he knew. I need the torture. I believed I kept silence before Iern to make him writhe, but no, it was because I dared not respond.
Silence closed in on him, save for the endless susurrations of his stronghold. He imagined words in them, which he was glad he couldn’t quite hear. He rose in haste. His calves slammed against the chair bottom. No more dithering! he instructed himself. Do what you have decided and go on to your destiny.
For a minute, though, he lingered in his office. His glance searched among the relics, passed over the Declaration, reached the portrait of Charles, and saw how after all the centuries it had no face. He turned and walked out with long strides.
Through the hollownesses and among the ribs he passed, to the chamber of controls, instruments, and images. The foreign technicians poised at their panels. The atmosphere seemed charged and cold. Faylis’ brother was absent, overseeing his Guardsmen, but Mattas, Rewi, and Yago were present, for reasons Jovain suspected were obscure to themselves. Maurai and Espaynian gave him the salute due from their rank to his. Mattas brooded over a screen. It showed a milky edge of cloud and, below, ranges, valleys, shoreline, channel, a smudge that was Kenai.
‘Start by flaming the town,’ the ucheny said. ‘Next give them a respite, a chance to agree we are in earnest, before we hit the villages and farmsteads.’
Irrational anger stirred in Jovain. Who is the Captain? Who gives orders here? Terror: Nobody?
He suppressed it, but could not refrain from: ‘Suppose they hold out after that second stage, what should the third be?’
Mattas lowered at him. ‘Before we go elsewhere, we burn the entire hinterland, as we did that valley across the Inlet yesterday. Give them an object lesson right next door.’
‘Gaea –’
‘We are Gaea.’
Jovain ran tongue across lips. They were dry, cracked. ‘Very well,’ he said to the boss technician. ‘Bring your units to bear, and fire when ready.’
Brilliance hunted the sun out of sight. The Wolf Lodge hall burst asunder and collapsed in a pyre. House after house kindled along streets where wooden blocks turned to coals and asphalt bubbled. Smoke off the docks blew thick, swart, pungent as its blazing tar. Boats lay aflame at their moorages. Water steamed around them. The roar of conflagration rolled back from mountainsides.
The attack ceased. Inhabitants beheld, afar, their dwellings a pillar of blackness above a crimson tarantella. Some of them sobbed, some cursed, most stood mute in the wet grass while their children keened, a few tried to keep alive patients carried from the hospital.
There was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Then the bolts struck again, again, again, from end to end of that land.
In the computation cabin, Iern leaned back from his terminal and flexed stiffened fingers. Ronica, at hers, had finished before him. ‘Done,’ he said. She nodded and pressed the final keys. Numbers and graphic displays flashed onto screens. Printout clacked.
Iern studied the results and turned toward her. ‘Everything checks,’ he said. ‘We do it on our second pass from now. First, of course, I have to modify our orbit, but not immediately.’
She smiled the least bit. ‘Good,’ she answered. ‘We’ll have that much time for our own.’
He unbuckled to seek her. She met him midway. They floated together between machines, hands joined. She had not braided her hair today but simply tucked it down the back of her coverall. The motion pulled it loose and it streamed from her headband, awave in the ventilator breeze like a field of ripening wheat. Her eyes were sea-green, her skin earth-tawny, and she smelled of sunlight.
‘Oh, Deu, this is wrong,’ he said. ‘That you should go.’
‘We’ve been over the same ground before,’ she replied. ‘If I go, it’ll be along with you, and who says it has to happen, anyway? A pilot of your caliber –’
‘But under those conditions? And … and my own feelings about it. I’m not certain but what I’ll fail at the reentry itself –’
Once more tears broke from her to make tiny planets, but they were few and they were for him ‘I do see, my most beloved. Come.’
She led him to the cargo space, and there she comforted him, only held him, comforted him, gave him of her strength.
3
Mountains reared blue, gray, agleam with snows and glaciers; haze blurred their mightiness, but they were bones of the planet, they would endure. Below them, dark-green forest yielded, westward, to openness and lighter hues of growth, until the peninsula met the firth. Beyond that troubled glimmer uprose further heights. A rainstorm was approaching from the south. Its murk loomed over the sun, so that dimness had fallen upon the earth. Wind whistled chill in its vanguard, soughed through trees, strewed flame off burning Kenai and tattered the smoke of farmsteads. It fanned the blaze which gnawed at a stretch of woods, but the quenching rain followed on its heels.
In such a half-light, Skyholm stood pale and gigantic. Tricked by
the weather, it no longer sent its bolts probing slowly and carefully, but sought to wreak every harm it was able. No buildings were left to ravage. The energy stabbed in arcs outward from the townsite. Perhaps the gunners were not searching for humans, perhaps their vision was mist-blurred. Surely, though, they cared little where anyone might be underneath them. Their intent was to bring down, speedily and forever, that nation which had rekindled the torch of the Judgment.
The Kenai folk fled east on galloping horses, in wildly jouncing wagons, or running their hearts out afoot. Many a one who rode carried an infant thrust upward by a mother. None could find shelter before the lasers overtook.
Light flared on high.
Those who cast a glance thither saw a wink and a wink, star-small but sun-bright. Afterimages wavered before them. Brilliance echoed from cloudbanks.
‘What in Nan’s deepest hell?’ exclaimed Rewi.
‘An electronic spasm of some kind, that flash,’ suggested the head technician.
‘In every screen?’ Jovain scoffed. The wakened anger of Gaea, flitted through him. No! That is us.
The glare returned. Overloaded systems blanked out.
As images wavered back onto them, the meteor appeared. Its fieriness waxed. Mattas screamed, flopped, groveled.
‘Hold fast!’ Jovain shouted.
An instant afterward, he knew what this was. Faylis, Faylis. The noise struck him. It turned his skull into a bell, which roared as hot as the meteor. The deck pitched underfoot. He toppled and rolled. He struck against something that did not yield, but gouged and hammered. Stunned, barely aware, he felt how everything fell, down and down forever.
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