by Paul Kenyon
"Those mothers need another lesson!" Paul rasped. He fired off another rocket. It was close enough for them all to see it go up the aircraft's tailpipe. The plane blew apart.
"Now that's what I call giving them the shaft!" Skytop said admiringly.
The other two jets scooted off. Up ahead, the outer edges of Amar's forces and the harka had begun to merge. The jets hung back, keeping their distance. Their effectiveness was over, and they were nervous about the SAMs. They'd hang around until their fuel gauges read low, then go limping back to their airstrip on the coast.
Skytop suddenly whimpered.
"I'm scared, Baroness," he said.
She looked at him, shocked. Joe Skytop had never been afraid of anything in his life.
"Help me," he sobbed.
Now she could feel it too. A crawling sensation up her spine. Her mouth went dry. She fought to control her trembling.
Behind her, she could hear Paul's teeth chattering. "Oh, Lord," he moaned.
It was Le Sourd's ultrasonic vibrations. He'd managed to get his computer warmed up at last.
She fought the unreasoning panic. The next stage was the wide swath of the phonon beam, stirring an entire army into jelly.
"Hang in there, children," she said through clenched teeth. "It's just the bad vibes, that's all."
She had to hand it to Skytop. The big Cherokee was gripping the wheel, his knuckles white, but he was keeping them on a course right toward Le Sourd's vehicle.
The Baroness looked around her. The Land Rover, with Wharton at the wheel, was bounding right along after her. Wharton was driving one-handed, the other wielding his oversize 9mm Browning automatic, picking off any of the Emir's people who tried to get too close to Sumo and the three gleaming kettledrums. His face had a look on it she'd never seen before; it was a tense mask, covered with beads of sweat, but he was keeping his gun hand steady with a herculean effort. On the far side of the Land Rover, riding shotgun for Wharton and Sumo, Eric and the two girls were keeping pace. They looked dreadful. Through her own irrational terror, the Baroness felt a warm stab of pride. They were good people, all of them.
"Oh Jesus, I think I'm going to wet my pants!" Skytop said.
Up ahead, Penelope could see the effect the wide-beam phonon vibrations were having. The forward movement of Amar's army had been slowed. The camels and horses were in a panic, their riders struggling with them. There was a boiling unease among the Emir's own forces, too, but they were handling it better. They were used to it, and Le Sourd had probably supplied them with some ameliorating device. They could hold on until their enemies jelled into a collection of shiny puddings.
The Baroness turned a despairing face toward the Land Rover. "Tommy," she pleaded out loud, "what's wrong?"
And then everything went silent.
It was as if an enormous radio had suddenly been turned off. One moment there had been explosions, gunfire, the roar of the jeep's engine, the rush of wind past her ears.
Now there was nothing. A profound hush had settled over the universe. It was like nothing she'd ever experienced before. There wasn't a whisper of sound. It was like being totally deaf. There was a strange sensation in her head. She felt giddy and a little disoriented.
But the panic was gone. An enormous pall had been lifted from her chest. There was a strange unearthly peace bathing the cosmos.
Skytop turned his cliffside of a face toward her. The fear was gone from his craggy features. He was moving his lips. She couldn't hear a word he was saying. She mouthed a reply for him.
Tommy made it work. We're yelling back at he Sourd.
It was peculiar. She could feel the vibrations of her throat, but she couldn't hear the faintest tone of what she was saying.
Skytop nodded and went back to his driving. She looked around at Paul and he was back to his normal self, sorting out his explosives again.
The battle raged around her in an eerie silence. Amar's men had been told to expect a miracle. They were simple men of the desert. If Allah had chosen to send them silence, then by the Prophet, they'd do their butchery in silence.
Guns flashed without noise. Wounded horses screamed silently. There was the sudden blossoming smoke of an explosion, given a false innocence because of the lack of thunder. A tank lurched by; the ground shook with its passage, but there was no corresponding rumble.
A wild face appeared beside her: one of the Emir's cavalrymen on a plunging stallion. He swung a sword at her head. She ducked, tore the Browning automatic from its dashboard clip and fired in one movement. The big pistol bucked in her hand, but there was no sound to go with it. A hole bloomed in the horseman's forehead and he fell from the saddle. His foot caught in the stirrup and the horse dragged the body, running beside Penelope's jeep. It was like watching a silent movie.
They were surrounded by a milling throng, fighting with weapons spanning thousands of years, from swords to submachine guns. The swords didn't clink, the guns didn't bang. An armored vehicle was blown apart only a hundred yards away. The explosion made her eardrums ache, but she didn't hear it.
They couldn't seem to get any closer to Le Sourd's vehicle. There was a sea of silent struggle all around them, and there was a ring of vehicles and foot soldiers keeping Amar's troops at bay. But it didn't matter much at the moment. They were close enough. Le Sourd's sound machine was out of commission.
There was an honor guard around Wharton's Land Rover, too — a phalanx of Amar's troops who'd been told to look for it. The lieutenant recognized Penelope and waved to her. They took over the job of keeping the cluster of kettledrums safe.
Her jeep was bogged down now. It couldn't move with the press of bodies and stalled vehicles on every side. The Baroness leaped to the ground, taking the Browning automatic and a knife for close-in work. Joe Skytop was already climbing out on his own side, a shotgun cradled in his arms and a knife between his teeth. Paul was disappearing into the crowd, carrying a huge pack of his plastic bombs. He was going to leave a trail of shattered tanks and armored cars behind him.
She prowled through the quiet battle, a tawny lioness in her body suit, green eyes narrowed over those magnificent wide cheekbones. The gun in her hand spat mutely from time to time, and the steel claw flashed, cutting throats, slipping expertly between ribs. It was like stalking her way through the bottom of the ocean, this strangely hushed world where men died around her without screaming.
Was she getting any closer to Le Sourd? The long shiny boom with its bouquet of metallic flowers loomed above the struggling heads, only a couple of hundred yards away. She could see a slender figure in khakis perched in the saddle, stabbing frantically at the controls. Le Sourd! He'd figured out what had happened, and was trying to change frequencies. But the microscopic silicon flecks in the stretch bra hooked into her own ultrasound generator were able to match his frequency changes instantly. The brass kettledrums rolled out their unheard rumble without skipping a nanosecond.
She fired once at him, knowing the range was too great. His head jerked, as though he had heard the bullet whistle by. But it must have been a coincidence. Even Le Sourd couldn't hear in this dreamlike hush. The phonon waves, at trillions of beats per second, were as far above his own ultrasonic range as they were hers.
She pulled the trigger again, and knew by the lack of a kick that the clip was empty. Before she could reload, there was a flurry of white at the edge of her vision, and something made her turn around.
It was El Fahda!
The magnificent white stallion was caparisoned in tooled leather and gold brocade. His nostrils flared and his mouth foamed with excitement. The Emir was trying to stay on his back, a pudgy figure in white robes. He brought the horse under control and waved his sword, shouting orders that no one could hear. A monkeylike diapered figure rode beside him, trying to keep a crimson parasol over his master's head — the magnetic dwarf.
Penelope lowered her head between her shoulders and plunged like a football player through the crowd, bowling
over startled soldiers. One of them reached for her and she extended a foot sideways, like a ballet dancer, and caught him in the belly. She ran on without missing a step.
The magnetic dwarf saw her first. The little pinched features screwed up in recognition. He sent his horse rearing at her. It was a big, barrel-bodied horse that looked like a Percheron, and the little man was hardly more than a pommel on its back. She ducked past the slashing hooves and grasped the dwarf by the ankle.
The little mouth opened in fright. She pulled him from the saddle and swung him round and round in a circle, like a circus whip. He held frantically onto the parasol, making a red blur around her head. She let go and the dwarf flew straight up, a crimson frisbee against the blue sky.
She bounded to the back of the Percheron, and using him as a launching platform, hurtled through the air at the Emir. Her head caught him in the midriff and they both fell dazed to the ground.
She picked herself up. The Emir was ten feet away, swinging a sporting rifle at her. He must have snatched it from its scabbard as he fell. His sword was lying in the sand to her left. She dived for it, knowing it was no use, knowing that the Emir would have her lined up with the barrel, his finger pulling the trigger, before her hand touched the hilt.
And then the dwarf came parachuting down from the sky, his tiny hands clutching the parasol handle for dear life. The miniature bare feet landed on the rifle barrel, deflecting it downward. The rifle spat noiselessly into the sand. And in the same instant, Penelope snatched up the sword and flung it point first at the Emir.
The blade pierced his belly and stuck there, quivering. He opened his mouth in a silent scream.
The Emir sank to his knees, staring stupidly at the broad steel shaft that impaled him. The dwarf danced around him, wringing his hands in anguish.
The Baroness walked over to him and grasped the hilt like a windup key. She twisted it before pulling it out. The Emir stared up at her, rolling his eyes. The blade pulled free. His guts spilled out after it. His sour lips contorted in agony. She was glad she couldn't hear the sounds he must be making.
He toppled forward. His forehead hit the ground. The body was still on its knees, its rump in the air, but there was no doubt that he was dead.
The Baroness turned to the magnetic dwarf. His tiny prune face swiveled from the Emir and lighted on her.
She knew he couldn't hear what she was saying, but she spoke to him anyway. "I hope he was facing Mecca," she said.
Le Sourd turned from the console. It was no use. He'd tried everything, even telling the computer to wander at random through the megahertz range, switching frequencies every millisecond. The devilish thing that was broadcasting an interference pattern matched him, wave by wave, forming a succession of nulls and canceling out his vibrations.
It was all over here in Ghazal. He'd have to take his generator elsewhere, start over again. He opened the breach of the phonon projector and began to remove the basic cryogenic unit and the quartz crystal that triggered it. He paused to look around at the field of battle.
The insurgents were mopping up the last remnants of the Emir's army. They fought like demons, those primitive tribesmen and the olive-clad rebels with their ragtag military equipment.
It was eerie, watching that still battle raging around him. The mouths opened, and there were no voices. The guns splattered flame, and there were no explosions. The horses reared and pawed the earth, but nothing reached his ears. The very sky was silent, the sky that had always been filled with the twitterings and chirpings of invisible creatures that only he could hear. He turned off the hearing aids completely and strained to listen. Nothing, not a single whisper, from the low twenty-cycle level that normal humans could detect at the bottom of their range all the way up to the rarified one hundred and fifty thousand cycle that he shared with the moths and the bats.
It was the first time in his life, since the age of six, that he'd been totally deaf.
Another one of the soldiers who were guarding the phonon cannon fell over, shot. There weren't many of them left.
He finished unscrewing the cryogenic unit and the quartz timer and stuffed them into his pocket. With a lithe movement, he vaulted from the truckbed and threaded his way through the confusion.
* * *
The sound went back on with a roar. All of a sudden the air was filled with clamor. There were shots and the screams of the dying and the thump of explosions and that indefinable background presence that you're never quite aware of, but which is there all the same.
The Baroness jerked her head around. She understood instantly what had happened.
Skytop was wading through a crowd of the Emir's soldiers toward her, clubbing them as he went with the butt of his shotgun. He fired both barrels at a man who made the mistake of pointing a machine gun at him. He reached her side, looking happy.
"Beautiful!" he said. "It's been beautiful!"
She tried to see over the jumbled throng of horses and vehicles and men.
"Le Sourd!" she said. "He's getting away!"
"We've got his cannon," Skytop said.
"He's got his head and what's in it. And probably the trigger mechanism. We can't let him peddle them to some other would-be Napoleon!"
She gestured, and Skytop cupped his hands to form a stirrup. She sprang to his broad shoulders and scanned the battlefield. She caught sight of Le Sourd. He was already a quarter-mile off, and he was riding a racing camel.
She told Skytop. He shook his big head.
"You can't catch him. By the time you break through this mess, he'll be miles away."
"Like hell I can't!" She sprinted over to where El Fahda was standing. He'd backed away from the Emir's body, and the dwarf was hanging onto the bridle, trying to keep him under control.
She took the reins from the little man and leaped into the saddle. The splendid white stallion whinnied with pleasure when he recognized her.
She leaned across his neck and spoke into his ear.
"Come on, beautiful," she said. "We're going to win a race."
18
The tracks disappeared into the field of burial mounds to the northeast. The Baroness reined in El Fahda and looked over the incredible prehistoric landscape that stretched before her.
The round hillocks covered the gravel plain like goosebumps, some of them forty feet high. It went on for miles. They were thousands of years old, and every single one of them was the work of man. Each one of those bumps contained a stone crypt and a corpse.
She spurred the white horse forward at a walk. Le Sourd could be hiding anywhere.
She came upon the racing camel a few minutes later, next to one of the smaller ten-foot tombs. It was sprawled in a litter of gravel and broken pottery, its long neck stretched serpentlike across the ground. Le Sourd had ridden it too hard. Its heart had burst.
Cautiously she dismounted and pegged El Fahda's reins. She patted him on the rump and whispered, "Stay here and keep quiet, boy."
All she had was the knife. The rifle she'd snatched from a startled soldier had turned out to be empty.
She dropped to one knee and looked for tracks. The pebbled ground here didn't take footprints, but she thought she could detect where a pottery fragment had been disturbed here and there. There was a shard lying convex side up, when its immediate fellows were showing their concave surfaces, as though a toe had flipped it. There were more, leading toward a mound. Of course, someone could just as easily have stepped on it seven thousand years ago, but she didn't think so.
The knife in her hand, she followed the faint trail. The mounds crowded one another, base to base, sometimes overlapping. It was like threading her way through a maze.
She rounded the corner. Nothing. She blinked in the harsh sunlight and found more disturbed potsherds leading between two grave mounds. She flowed like a great tan cat through the narrow alley, her crepe soles placed meticulously between pottery bits that might tinkle or shatter.
She crept through the ancient gravey
ard, pausing to listen from time to time. Once something caught her eye. A tiny splat, dark and sticky, plastered to a wedge of broken pottery. A bat dropping. Fresh.
She held her breath. When she resumed breathing, it was the shallow, soundless inhalation of a yoga exercise. She glided forward on her crepe pads.
"Stay where you are, Baroness," a very soft voice said somewhere above her.
She looked up. Le Sourd was standing there on top of a grave mound, a large pistol in his hand.
"It's been very amusing, listening to you try to stalk me," he said. "You may have thought you were being quiet, but it sounded like an elephant crashing through a junkyard to me. Every step you took sent a hundred potsherds chiming in the ultrasonic range. The sound of your thighs brushing together in that nylon was like the scraping of a cello. I followed your progress as if you were drawing a map."
She studied the situation. The pistol was aimed directly at her. He was thirty feet above her, on a steep slope of loose shale and gravel. He'd fire before she could get ten feet up the side of the mound. The knife in her hand was no good. It wasn't a throwing knife. It would just tumble through the air and strike harmlessly. Chances are she'd be dead before it reached him.
"What are you going to do, Octave?" she said.
He hesitated. "I'm going to leave you here and take your horse. I can get to the Gulf and buy passage aboard a dhow. There are other candidates for the caliphate besides the Emir. Ambitious men with vision. I think they might listen to me in Baghdad or Damascus."
"Why don't you shoot me now?"
He hesitated again.
She looked at him. The twin hearing aids were gone. He'd lost them somehow on his mad dash through the desert.
"It's because you can't, isn't it?" she said. "You can't filter out the loud noises any more. If you fired that gun, you'd probably go into shock."
She took a step forward.
"Stop," he said.
She stopped. The gun had followed her. She'd seen his knuckles whiten on the trigger guard.
