CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Huang Gun, rejected, stood staring for a moment at the closed door of the elevator. Then the faint noise of the angry crowd outside, penetrating the walls of the Citadel, recalled him to his duty. The hostages … whether the president was willing to see him or not, they were still his responsibility. He could not take seriously the absurd suggestion that they be loaded on a ship and sent out to the enemy as a kind of sacrifice. No telling what might happen to them out there.
He acted on a sudden impulse, and half a minute later was slipping out into the street, through a small door in the side of the Citadel. Before he could be certain of what his duty was, he had to make sure how close the attacking enemy had actually come. He had told no one, not even the people on his own staff, where he was going, or why. The decision he would soon be forced to make regarding the young Huveans would be his, and his alone.
If the president refused to speak to him, so be it. If this attack had truly been launched by Huvea
But he must not judge until he was sure of the facts. He must make certain.
Timber’s defensive forcefields were still in place, maintaining what seemed a useless effort to defend the planet. All they seemed to be accomplishing was to blur and blot the sky, making it impossible to distinguish day from night. Having gone a moderate distance, the executioner saw some casualties being evacuated, robots and humans bearing improvised stretchers between them. Among the fallen being carried away, almost all of them in soldiers’ uniforms, Huang Gun noted several bodies that he was sure were dead.
Fascinated by the sight, he kept working his way closer and closer to where the fighting was going on. It seemed the army was not easily discouraged, and part of it was still here, exchanging fire with the invaders.
Something slammed, with incredible violence, into the wall a couple of stories above Huang Gun’s head. Reeling with the shock, he was half stunned by a cascade of falling rubble. He found himself crouched, head aching, body half lying on the sidewalk, with a slab of some lightweight building material weighing on his legs and back.
Moments, or perhaps it was minutes, later, dazed and bruised, he managed to pull himself free, but a little help was necessary before he could do that.
“Are you all right, sir?” The woman was almost shouting in his ear.
“Fine … please, there are things that I must do. A duty to accomplish.”
“You must evacuate this area! Get to a shelter!”
He nodded and mumbled something, getting to his feet. No one tried to detain him. There were plenty of other casualties in more need of help than he was.
Huang Gun moved on, feeling only slightly dazed. Somehow, on some inward, basic level, he seemed to know where he was going.
…resting, again somewhere on the fringe of a combat area, he could hear people discussing the latest rumor. It seemed that a new president, if he had heard that right, had issued an order setting the hostages free.
The news came as a stunning shock, but still Huang Gun could believe it. Not only had Belgola refused to see him, but authority might now be trying to strip him of his most important responsibility, really, of the only reason he still had for living.
He found it impossible to guess what might have driven the president to take such a position. That the man had wanted to rely more on machines than on people was understandable, even praiseworthy in the circumstances. But what business that he might have had with Gregor could be more important than the hostages?
It was clear to Huang Gun that Belgola had mismanaged the whole business of governing, turning authority over to Logos and the other computers … that might have worked at some point, but not now. What was not so plain to see was exactly what the president should have done.
Meanwhile, he had to keep reassuring himself that his own mind was clear, so possibly it really wasn’t. His head still ached from the impact of the falling debris. He had a vague memory of wandering across a parkway, littered with stopped vehicles and dead bodies, crossing the broad path one of the killing machines had cut through the city’s heart. So far, the attack on Timber was not an all-out slaughter, but more like exploratory surgery.
…so, the president had refused to see him. Very well. So be it. Belgola had started out on the right track, but for all his talk, all his bold announcements, his thinking had not been bold enough.
Particularly he had not been decisive enough in the matter of the executions. Huang Gun was profoundly disappointed about that. He had planned several versions of the procedure.
Some were rich with ceremony and others not, but all were imbued with dignity and a sense of the occasion’s ultimate importance. He had begun trying to consult other officials on the matter, but no one else had even wanted to discuss the details.
Very well, that left it up to him. Each individual death would be, would have been, finely crafted, there would have been no crude mangling and no mass slaughter. Probably intense neutron bombardment would have been the method finally chosen: painless, practically instantaneous, and doing no visible damage to the body, creating about as little mess as any process could that was connected with organic life.
Of course there were other questions to be dealt with, besides the method. Would there be human witnesses? On that matter his own feelings were divided. No more than one or two of his own staff in attendance, that would have been his preference, but on the question of witnesses, politics were sure to dominate.
The executioner’s problem, or one of his problems, was that he no longer knew whether the hostages were still in the Citadel or not. And there had been something about a new president….
A street communicator was working intermittently, putting out morsels of information between bursts of static, sheer white noise. What stopped the executioner in his tracks was what sounded like Gregor’s recorded voice, introduced as a proclamation from the new acting president. The gist of it was that the ten Huvean hostages were to be set free.
Gregor … president?….
The people who jostled the executioner in the street were paying him no attention, they had no idea he was a person of importance. It was possible that they were quite right, and no such thing existed….
There was an approaching noise, that of many angry human voices. The jostling had become a panicked rush of bodies. Huang Gun was swept up in a mob, but this one with a different flavor to it.
These people were terrorized, fleeing the last incremental advance of the monstrous conquering machines.
Terror, as contagious as the plague, welled up in the executioner. He ran until he could run no longer, fleeing the mob itself, not the terror that had set the mob in motion. And then he fell, welcoming the plunge into unconsciousness.
The light of another early morning fell on a broad section of ruin, in the midst of what had been a mighty city. One of a flock of crows descended to peck and tear at something in the street, and a moment later the bird itself convulsed and died.
Another figure appeared, walking on two much bigger legs. This man’s clothing was beginning to hang upon him loosely. His hair was dirty and disheveled, and his beard had a good start on rank untended growth.
He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, a dull reflection in a dim screen on the side of a building, half of which had been very recently demolished. The man had one arm braced against the remaining fragment of a wall, and held himself propped there as if trying to summon up the energy to go on, but go on where? To what?
Somewhere, the ten Huveans were all getting away. And there was nothing he could do about it
He was gazing into a surface that had once glowed and flowed with bright images, and thought: Who is that? What does that man look like? Why, he looks like the professional apostle of some end-of-the-world cult that had of late been losing membership.
Having been deprived of several meals, his body seemed to be laboring under the impression that he was starving. Slightly injured, he feared, but no, fear was not really the right
word, that he would soon be dead.
His lips were growing dry and cracked, again. Every time he looked at water, he thought for some reason that it must be poisoned. But soon he drank it anyway. Drank from puddles, and once something gushing from a broken pipe. Nothing happened to him, though, except that his suffering went on.
People noticed him again, despite the fact that he was trying not to notice them. He was pressed into service, carrying living casualties, then almost killed in a blast that mangled whatever human he had been trying to carry to safety….
Reinforcements for the enemy expeditionary force were coming down again on Timber, some landing just before the sunset line, on a day of smoke-filled, lurid sky … a shape that had once been tall, a man, staggering through burning wreckage, came stumbling out from behind a ruined building. What was left of the man’s ragged garments suggested that he had once worn impressive clothes.
The figure emerged from smoke in full sight of a new machine, itself only roughly human in size and shape, its surfaces still unscarred, untarnished by battle, that had just emerged from one of the house-sized landers.
The man had a vague memory of having been, several hours ago, down in a deep shelter, from which it had somehow been necessary to escape.
He had been in a second shelter very recently, and had escaped from that one only just in time, when the walls began to crack and molten metal started to pour in, an effect readily attributed to the pacification of a ground battery only a few kilometers away.
…Huang Gun’s thoughts kept coming back to the memory of Belgola and his machines. Refusing to let the executioner come in. A horror, yes. But the horror had only been because Belgola had not fully understood…. The late president had been heading in the right direction, but somehow he had not gone far enough. Gregor, if he had really become the leader, was going to be worse.
He, Huang Gun, had once been a close and trusted counselor to the president of the Twin Worlds. But then the president had gone wrong. Not in any of the ways that most people failed, no. But quite wrong all the same.
The real answer, the real truth, was that…
The executioner who had never killed had the feeling of having very recently been reborn, into a world of terror and glory. Before that he had been living another life, and there had been much in that old life that he now detested
One incident, toward the very end, was especially unsatisfying, a business, a duty that involved some necessary killing, that had not been satisfactorily carried out.
…the machine that blocked the street was speaking to him, in a cracked and querulous voice that was not at all like the voice of Logos. It sounded odd, but the man could easily understand what it was saying.
After moving closer to the watching conqueror by a couple of staggering steps, the man threw himself down, almost at the machine’s feet, his knees crunching on the surface of a street littered with building fragments and fine debris.
His clothing hung on him in shreds. His hands were bleeding from clawing his way through wreckage. When he tried to respond to what the machine was saying to him, it seemed almost that he was mocking it, so strange did his own voice sound. He had been shouting, screaming until he was hoarse and his throat was raw. But now he had no words left to shout, no energy left to scream.
…he was struck by the beauty of the machine before him, the inorganic cleanness and the purity of its design. Weapons tended to be like that. Before him was the most beautiful weapon that he had ever seen!
He knelt there on the littered pavement, gasping, while lenses turned toward him. Then he waited a little longer, holding his breath, for the jolt of death that did not come. At last, with a feeling something like relief, he let out his breath as he saw a thing that must be the muzzle of some kind of gun smoothly turning in his direction.
It took the kneeling man a few more long, disappointing moments to be sure that he was not going to be killed, not just at once, anyway.
He could manage to endure his own existence a while longer. What really mattered was that he had come at last to a place where a kind of path, a kind of purpose, was visible before him. Something in the world had meaning, after all. Something, even if it was only Death.
Whatever the thing was standing before him, he could see, he could feel, that it ruled the world.
This overwhelming and brutal force had nothing human about it, and nothing accidental.
Huang Gun was ready to accept it as his god.
…the thing that had suddenly come to rule his life was barking orders at him. It sent a lesser machine, man-sized and almost man-shaped, to grip and search him.
A moment later it tore his clothing off entirely, so that he stood quite naked in the autumn wind. His rags concealed no firearms, no explosives. He relaxed, slumped, willing to let the metal arm support him. Just now, standing up straight was more than flesh and blood were able to accomplish.
It spoke to him again, and only now did he become fully aware of the peculiarities of its voice. “Tell me who you are.”
It was very strange, but for a moment his own name escaped him. But before anything else could happen, he had found an even better answer: “I was appointed Executioner.”
“That word means one who kills.”
“Yes.” He felt a pang of guilt, and hoped he would not be forced to admit to the machine that never in his whole life had he killed anyone. “That was to be my task. But then, when all this started” He made a gesture of futility.
As far as he could tell, the machine was paying his answers close attention. When it learned of Huang Gun’s most recent position in the government, it came to a quick decision.
A metal limb jerked in a brisk gesture, summoning. A voice said to Huang Gun: “Come, and in a little while you will be one with death.”
The machine then hastily loaded Huang Gun onto a shuttle, led and pushed him into a space that had no seats, obviously intended for freight, not passengers. Not live ones anyway. The main cargo, the only cargo really, was human corpses. Many were in uniform, some in civilian dress, a few as naked as the executioner himself.
Here were dead men, women, children, at least a hundred, Huang Gun thought. It seemed the surgeons doing the exploratory on Timber’s body might be collecting cells for close examination. Most of the bodies were still warm, and soon he realized that some might be not quite dead. One still living specimen among those already dead, or nearly dead, would probably not make much difference.
“I’m not dead yet!” It was a confession of guilt, rather than a complaint. He did not want to accept this honor under false pretenses. Were they headed for a mass cremation, or a burial?
If any component of his new god heard him, it ignored the outburst.
The shuttle did not seem to have been designed for human comfort, or even by human brains, unless perhaps they were the brains of torturers. It was good for nothing better than sheer survival. The only live brain functioning aboard was left blinded in darkness, deafened by noise, jammed in with other bodies both clothed and naked, half choked by strange smells, at least half of them poisonous.
Just when he had begun to think there would be no artificial gravity, it came on with a jolt, seemingly as an afterthought, and just in time to counteract a swiftly mounting g-force of acceleration that if uncushioned would soon have begun to do serious damage to living and dead alike. Even the counteracting field was a bit too strong to be comfortable, and oriented in such a way that dumped half the organic cargo randomly on top of the other half.
It seemed to Huang Gun that hours were going by. If this kept on much longer, he was sure that he would die. But almost as soon as he came to that conclusion, the end of the trip arrived, unmistakably, in the form of a jarring docking.
Moments later, Huang Gun was part of the parade of bodies being carried by machines. Helpless cargo indeed, only here and there a muffled scream or groan, carried through mated hatches, leaving the small cargo ship, going aboard, something.
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nbsp; Then a metal clamp closed on his arm, and he was carefully separated from the dead and dying. He might have thought himself forgotten, but he knew somehow that the power that was doing this did not forget. Dumped in a place where, for a time, absolute darkness ruled. The air was breathable, but suddenly so cold that he thought death might be only minutes away.
Resting, even as his body shivered, Huang Gun found the beginnings of a strange and final peace gradually stealing over him. His breathing quieted. The ongoing noise and the other discomforts no longer mattered. Soon, very soon (though time had become another distraction that did not matter much), the machine would decide to make an end of him, and grant him the peace for which he so desperately yearned.
But it was not to be. Not yet. He could hear voices again, human voices muttering and whispering, as if in fear.
A machine came to clutch him by the arm again and drag him to his feet.
“What is it? are you putting me with other prisoners?”
“Not now. Maybe not ever. Come.”
It guided him into a room where there was light, and began his processing. There was also running water, and he drank his fill, something smelled vaguely like food, and he put some of it into his stomach.
A little later, he was taken to another room, where holes had been drilled in one wall. His guide brought him to stand where he could look through one of the openings at eye level.
He could see, beyond the barrier, another chamber, larger and brighter than his own, and inhabited by what were certainly Earth-descended people. They were not dead, not dying, except perhaps for one man who was stretched out on the deck, and seemed to be wounded somewhere about the eyes. The rest were just sitting and lying about in attitudes of dejection and defeat.
But the last thing Huang Gun had ever expected to meet in this environment was people wearing the distinctive uniforms of Twin Worlds military cadets.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Huang Gun had slept soundly in his strange, new environment, so soundly that upon awakening he wondered if he had been given some kind of sleeping potion. He felt curiously at peace.
Berserker Prime Page 20
