Dirge

by Alan Dean Foster

  He wanted to look away, to stare at something else, to put what he was seeing out of his mind, but he could not. The mobile unit, following its programming, continued to focus on the grisly biopsies, following the horribly inevitable course of one after another. So stunned was Mallory’s system by what he was witnessing that the shock was sufficient to suppress even his nausea reflex. At least, it was until he saw one of the eviscerated women twitch and try to sit up. Not through any dint of empathy but operating strictly from efficiency, one of the patrolling armored figures noticed the movement and shot her before she could rise far enough to comprehend the gaping crater in her belly. She had been granted the mercy of indifference.

  Devoid of involvement beyond its unemotional programming, the mobile was relentless. It watched, it transmitted, it commented not. Pausing before the seventh helpless, prone figure, one of the alien exenteraters paused to adjust his protective gear. In the course of so doing it momentarily removed its helmet. Reacting to this action, a companion did likewise. Mallory stared. Humans. Other humans. Then he took note of the subtle differences, of the prismatically colored hair, the too-perfect posture, the sculpted countenances. Not human.

  Pitar.

  Why? he felt himself screaming silently. Why, why, why? What reason could there be for the Pitar to attack an inoffensive and harmless colony like Treetrunk without warning, without reason? It made no sense. Exultant madness ruled the day, and dementia had taken control of the plenum. And what were the invaders doing, what could they possibly want, with the preserved reproductive organs of human females?

  To these hopeless questions he could configure no rational answers. It made no sense, none whatsoever. Surely the Pitar knew the consequences of their actions! Not only humankind but sentience throughout the Arm would react with outrage, with anger, and then with retribution. Whatever they hoped to gain through the successful fulfillment of this atrocity would be infinitely transcended by the devastation a united and fully mobilized humankind would wreak on the perpetrators of the outrage.

  Which would only happen, he realized with abrupt, exquisite clarity, if the identity of the perpetrators became known.

  He was already moving when one of the body-armored Pitar finally took notice of the hovering mobile, turned directly toward it, raised a weapon, and fired. By the time the tridee image vanished, Mallory was out of the shed and racing back toward the house.

  There was no need for structures and facilities on Treetrunk to be camouflaged. Who would want to attack a colony with a restricted habitation zone, limited industry, and still underexploited resources? Only someone who wished to be avoided by his fellow settlers would seek to distance himself from them and to make an effort to conceal his abode. There were no true hermits on Argus V, but there were a number who cherished their privacy. Among these, only one had the skill and the wherewithal to render himself and his habitation semivisible.

  That wouldn’t save him, Mallory knew. It might keep him from discovery by the invading forces for a while, but eventually they would seek him out. They had to. The horrors they were committing demanded no one be left alive to speak of what had been done. The Pitar would scour the habitation zone for colonists and the cold wastes of the north and south for exploration parties. If they carried life detectors they would be able to track down and analyze even minor ambulatory patterns. On such instruments a human being left a signature as clear and sharp as a tridee paragon. Only a deep cave or oceanic environment could mask the individual autograph, and he didn’t doubt that the Pitar would search beneath the ground and sea as well.

  He couldn’t remember from the last time he had viewed the news if any KK-drive ships were currently in orbit. If they were, none were likely to be warships. Undoubtedly their unlucky crews had been among the first to fall victim to the Pitarian treachery. Vessels stopping at Argus could not continue to disappear without notice, but given recent shipping patterns he estimated it might be several months before another called at Treetrunk. Several months would give the Pitar more than enough time to search the length and breadth of the planet for possible survivors and then depart without notice.

  They would know where to look: what zones were being surveyed for minerals or development; what areas were under consideration for future expansion; where important communications, power-generating, and transportation facilities were situated. And why not? After the first several calls, their regular visits to Treetrunk had ceased to be restricted. Why circumscribe the movements of amiable, considerate, congenial friends? All the time they had been helping the colony to expand, they had been recording and consolidating data for the day of the attack.

  They might not immediately notice his home and shop, isolated and concealed as they were on the side of the mountain. But after securing the few cities they would methodically move on to the larger towns, then the smaller villages, and finally to outlying farms, infrastructure postings, and individual structures. Even the forest would be no refuge. It would be expected that some people would flee into the Argusian wilderness in search of safety. Ruthless and relentless, the well-prepared Pitar would have anticipated that and would have come prepared for it. Mallory’s expression tightened. After the cities and towns, there would be hunts. Human hunts.

  Any ships, satellites, or free-orbiting maintenance craft would already have been captured or destroyed. A competent attacking force would first secure the space around a world before turning its attention to the helpless surface. Shuttleports and airfields would be next in line for destruction or occupation, together with any craft capable of flight that happened to be on the ground. Once confident of having eliminated a target’s ability to fight or flee in atmosphere or free space, invaders could settle down to methodically exterminating the local population.

  A few companies and citizens operated aircraft of their own, he knew. But such craft, while they might preserve their owners for a while longer, could not escape the attentions of much faster, higher-flying, orbit-capable shuttle craft. Anything with the ability to reach orbit required the long runways and support facilities of a port, or in an emergency a spacious open field or dry lake. Nothing robust enough to escape the pull of the planet’s gravity could take off straight up. That would require a craft with a short, explosive propulsion system: one designed to generate a single sustained but brief burst of speed before its motive source gave out.

  In short, a lifeboat. Alwyn Mallory had a lifeboat. It was intact, more or less. It was internally equipped and provisioned, more or less.

  The question was, could it exceed orbital velocity, more or less?

  Having no options, he did not hesitate. If he remained where he was he would undoubtedly survive longer than the great majority of his unfortunate fellow colonists. It might be a matter of days, it might be a matter of weeks, but eventually the Pitar would come for him, as they would for everyone else. He did not intend to wait helplessly for that moment, like a rat chittering impotently at the back of its burrow.

  Without hesitation, he tore through his once orderly home, ripping into cabinets and storage lockers. Anything that might prove remotely useful he threw into the transport cart from his shop. Food, medical supplies, reading material, raw electronic components, clothing, small tools—all found their way into the bowels of the old lifeboat. There was plenty of room. Designed to carry and care for a dozen people, it would soon be serving as refuge for only one. He would be short of everything but space.

  It took him less than a day to scavenge his home of several years, the home where he had expected to live out a long and reasonably contented life. With luck he might see it again someday, but he did not stand around dwelling on distant possibilities. The lifeboat would be his home now. Or it would if he could escape the attention of the Pitar. When the last bar of sustenance had been thrown aboard, the last potentially useful tool stowed away, he rigged a line to fill the boat’s tanks with water. There was none aboard, just as the craft was devoid of food. It had been so when he had
purchased it, everything useful and portable having long since been salvaged by the previous owners.

  One tank leaked copiously before he noticed it. Despite the urgency and desperation of the moment he had to laugh at the idea of fleeing into the cold, heartless vacuum of space with water sloshing around his feet. It was a short, terse laugh. He had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge in any extended bouts of hilarity. Outside, down the mountain and beyond the woods, the beautiful, the glamorous, the estimable Pitar were slaughtering and eviscerating. The noble Pitar. The neighborly Pitar.

  He had to get away. Somehow he had to avoid the blanket of detection they must even now be expanding across the planet. It was possible that the spider’s web was not yet complete. All that was necessary was for one fly to get through. Throughout the night he slaved intently on readying his wings.

  Two hours before sunrise he was ready. As to whether the lifeboat was, the answer would come from the trying. The proof would be in the doing. If his preparations proved inadequate, if trouble arose that was beyond his power to amend, well then, he would die no slower than if he fell into the hands of the invaders.

  Settling himself into the cockpit he ran a final check. Those instruments that still functioned, many of which he had personally repaired or replaced, insisted that their respective components were functional. He found himself wishing he had spent more time with each and every one, that he had taken a little extra effort with each installation and connection. But it had all been a lark, a time killer, something to amuse himself with in his idle hours. Now his life would depend on the skill with which he had indulged in a hobby.

  Was there anything he had forgotten, anything that had been omitted? Once committed to the launch sequence he would not be able to change his mind, to remember something overlooked. He did not trust the old lifeboat, or for that matter his own skill at restoration, to recover from an abort sequence. Deciding to go, he would go, and devil take the consequences.

  Then he did remember something. Spending as much time as he did in the shop, and away from home attending to various work assignments, he tended to miss a good deal of live entertainment and news. When not watching the tridee, it was set to record. It would have recorded informational bulletins. It would have recorded presentations and sports from the capital and elsewhere throughout the colony. Unfortunately, the last transmissions it would have recorded were unwatchable garbage.

  But the images he had recently viewed on the lifeboat, the singular movements and images that had been transmitted by the orphaned media mobile, would have been recorded by its own built-in unit, and should be available for playback.

  He did not have time to check. Opening the console, he dug inside until he found what he was looking for. Removing the tiny mollysphere, he slipped incontrovertible proof of Pitarian perfidy into a pocket, shut himself into the lifeboat, force-sealed the reluctant lock, and settled into the pilot’s seat and harness. He was no qualified pilot, not of a craft the size of the lifeboat or of anything else. But the whole concept behind such a vessel, the notion that underlay its very design, was that it had to be able to be operated in a moment of emergency by utterly unqualified passengers. As an ex–ship’s engineer he was far better prepared than the average citizen to operate a lifeboat’s instrumentation, even a design as antiquated as the one that now enfolded him.

  The star Argus would soon be making its presence known above the eastern horizon. While the Pitar were certainly equipped with all manner of sophisticated tracking devices, he saw no reason to make their search any easier by providing the additional possibility of visual identification. He could do nothing about the lifeboat’s initial liftoff signature. It would be noisy and bright, but only until he reached escape velocity. At that point he would have to risk shutting it down.

  A preflight check of the weather indicated the presence of a small storm to the northwest. What he wanted was a hurricane, or some severe thunderstorms. Anything to help mask evidence of his liftoff. The modest rain event would have to do. Programming the shed’s roof and the boat’s navigation to the best of his ability, he tightened the harness as much as his body would tolerate, then waited.

  Even if he was detected lifting off, nothing but a shuttle that happened to be in the immediate vicinity stood a chance of intercepting the vertically ascending lifeboat. Not that it mattered. Once out in space, drifting free, he could be tracked down and eliminated by an orbiting shuttle. Or, if he was extremely lucky, a warship might actually have to bestir itself for a moment or two to chase him down. If nothing else, he might at least inconvenience a few of the invaders.

  Or having analyzed his craft and realizing it had no space-plus capability, they might simply decide to ignore him, letting him float aimlessly in the vastness of space until his supplies and atmosphere ran out. He suspected that was a forlorn hope. Having already witnessed evidence of their thoroughness, he did not expect that the Pitar would leave anyone alive, not even a lone soul adrift between worlds without any hope of returning to one. He might be found, and that they could not permit.

  He had to try, though. Anything was better than sitting and waiting for death to come knocking. Better to kick back and keep on kicking for as long as was possible.

  A pleasant feminine voice announced that departure was imminent. He had taken special care with reprogramming the boat’s methodical, businesslike tone. Now he was glad that he had. It might be the last voice besides his own he ever heard. A loud whine permeated the air, and the cockpit began to vibrate around him. There was no port, but the forward viewscreen showed the roof of the shed parting like a pair of flat, featureless hands. Beyond, black sky and scattered stars became visible in the lucent night of Treetrunk. The whine became an irritation, the vibration in his seat and harness almost soothing. A final massage, he mused. The solicitous attentions of a mechanical undertaker.

  Something shoved him hard in the chest, and he gasped sharply. The receded roof panels disappeared, and the stars rotated wildly. In minutes he had punctured roiling cloud—the storm that was drenching the forest to the northwest. Minutes later he burst free, like a fist punching through stuffing, to find that the stars had multiplied beyond counting. The pressure on his chest lessened; the hand that had shoved him gradually withdrew. Small unstowed objects began floating about the cockpit. His stomach churned, and his inner ear insisted he was falling. And so he was—falling up.

  Free of Treetrunk’s gravity, he was still alive, the embracing lifeboat still intact around him. Loosening his restraints, he hastened to check the readouts. Designed to locate and skew a vector for any nearby ship, the lifeboat was already searching for presumptive help. Prior to liftoff he had thoroughly disabled the automatic beacon designed to signal the lifeboat’s presence to other vessels. There was no help to be found here, and he did not want any nearby craft to pick him up. He would blow the lock first and die cleanly in the emptiness of the void.

  The relevant readouts made no sense. Testing for malfunctions, he found none. There were no ships within detection range, which meant that it was possible there was nothing to detect him as he raced, silent and small, away from the surface of Argus V. That was impossible. Where were the Pitarian starships, their transports and shuttles? They could only be one place, he realized.

  On the other side of the planet. For the moment, Treetrunk was screening him from detection.

  It was not how he would have conducted an invasion. But the more he thought about it, and he had time for nothing else, the more he realized that his extraordinary luck was the product not of alien stupidity but of a quite understandable succession of factors. Having destroyed or captured everything in orbit around Treetrunk before commencing the actual physical invasion, the Pitar had no doubt already secured or rendered useless all three of the colony’s shuttleports and any orbit-capable craft located on the ground. That and the two space-minus interstellar communications facilities would have been their first ground-based targets.

&nb
sp; With the ports and their complement of vessels accounted for in the first stages of the attack, there was no reason to suppose anything like a rogue lifeboat might be present elsewhere on the planet, much less anything in operable condition. In the first flush of what surely must look to be a complete and unqualified triumph, they might relax their surveillance just a little—just enough for a single minuscule, almost undetectable craft to make its escape ridiculously perpendicular from the planet’s surface on the opposite side of the world from the attacking armada. No shuttle craft would lift off at the angle he had taken.

  He wanted badly to record the size and strength of that invading force, but even if he had possessed the maneuvering capability necessary to sufficiently alter the lifeboat’s course he would not have done it. If he tried to move into a position to observe them, then surely the far more sophisticated instrumentation on board a modern warship would detect his presence first.

  So he continued to speed outward from the devastated surface, leaving warmth and atmosphere and ongoing horror behind, heading for the only destination the lifeboat had a chance of reaching before its limited supplies began to run out. He had programmed the boat to aim for the inner moon. Not because it was closer, but because it was far smaller than its more distant relative. It was a less likely place to hide, a much more modest potential refuge. As such, if the Pitar thought to consider such possibilities, there was the chance they might conduct a cursory survey of the more accommodating satellite while passing over its relatively insignificant cousin.

  The inner moon of Argus V generated barely enough gravity to hold itself together, let alone affix anything to its surface. Maneuvering the lifeboat as delicately as his limited skills and the remaining propulsive capability allowed, he dropped the craft into lower and lower orbit until eventually it was hovering only a short distance above the floor of a suitable impact crater. With the boat’s motive power all but exhausted, he ran multiple checks of the restored vessel’s status.