by Chris Walley
“I am hardly going to disagree,” Merral said quietly, trusting that his lack of enthusiasm might go undetected.
To his surprise, Delastro clapped a skeletal hand tightly on his shoulder. “Commander, I saw you give your speech at Ynysmant. I knew you and I were kindred spirits. You demonstrated the very meaning of sacrifice.”
Merral squirmed inwardly.
“Your noble words of sacrifice showed me that you see the only road to victory is the hard one. We must make sacrifices.” Delastro stared into the distance. “We cannot be less than 100 percent committed. Does it not say in the Word ‘He that does not despise father, mother, children, family for my sake is not worthy of the Lord’?”
Despite being troubled, not just at a text that seemed to have come adrift from its moorings, but at the whole tone of the conversation, Merral simply nodded. This was not a man he wanted to argue with. He was wondering how he could walk away and tell Clemant and Corradon that there was no way he could work with this man when Delastro turned to him, tilted his head in his odd way, and gave him a sharp look. “I gather you want me to be chaplain-in-chief?”
Merral, suddenly wrong-footed, stuttered, “W-well . . . I certainly wanted to talk to you about the situation.”
Delastro looked away and Merral was reminded how much like a skull the fleshless face was. “It is the highest calling. The highest. I wouldn’t dare to accept it unless I felt that it was the will of the Most High. But now, on the verge of the hour of destiny, is not the time to prevaricate.” Delastro turned back to Merral. “Commander, I accept.”
Merral suddenly realized that he had been outmaneuvered. Just like with Isabella. The thought was bitter. Another thought came to him: the post of chaplain-in-chief might not be that critical. Luke was probably right in thinking that it would be a desk job and Delastro might not have a great deal of influence. But some things had to be made plain.
“Prebendant, you realize that this post would be under my authority?”
“Commander, I respect authority.”
“Good. And you know that the regimental chaplains would have a large measure of autonomy?”
“I understand the constraints. But I want to be part of the great battle of our age. I believe that all my life has been in preparation for this.”
It was impossible to argue with a man who felt so certain that God and destiny were on his side.
Suddenly Merral was aware of another sharp glance from the prebendant. “I have a question for you, Commander. I have heard you met with an angelic being—one of those who serve the Lord of the armies of heaven.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“How do you contact him?” Delastro’s green eyes flashed with inquiry and his voice was sharp.
“I don’t. The meetings have been at his bidding, not mine.”
“Had you fasted? devoted yourself to prayer? recited scripture? claimed promises?”
Merral stared at the prebendant. “Mostly, I failed.”
Delastro gave him a look of incomprehension. “I see. Do you know his name?”
“Is that important?”
“According to the old authorities, if we knew his name, we could make him back our cause.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“Commander, these beings are our servants, you know. They serve the elect.”
“I’m sure they do. But I don’t think we order them around.”
Delastro’s faint smile seemed condescending, as if Merral were a student who had given a very wrong answer. “A common misunderstanding. It’s not ‘ordering them around,’ it’s using our spiritual authority as the chosen of the Lord.”
“I see. But I don’t know his name.”
They had almost completed the circuit of the garden when the prebendant suddenly stopped. “Very well.” He sighed, a small gesture almost of impatience. “But do let me know when he turns up. I would like to meet him.”
As he folded his hands to his chest, Merral suddenly knew that the interview was over.
Later that evening, Perena came round to see Merral at his apartment. She took a look round it and then shook her head. “Merral, let’s get outside. I think there’s going to be a good sunset and I don’t want to miss it.”
As the evening light turned red, Lloyd drove them in a four-seater to a small cove that formed one of the minor indentations of the great curve of Isterrane Bay. There as Lloyd sat watchfully by the vehicle and the sun set in a flaming glow of reds and yellows, Merral and Perena walked together across the sands.
Perena seemed in a strange frame of mind. Much of the time she was pensive and her shoulders would sag as if under a burden of care and she would seem much older than she was. Yet there were moments when the burden would suddenly lift somehow and she would seem to be filled with an otherworldly and almost childlike joy. One minute they were talking about the problems of modifying the Emilia Kay to give it more armor and the next she was slipping her shoes off, throwing them to Merral to hold, and running off to paddle in the warm waters.
It was in one of those moments that she stopped in midstep, pirouetted in the sand, and then stood silently. Merral watched her gaze move from the forested cliffs to the waves that were tinged red by the sunset.
“Ah,” she sighed appreciatively. “It’s lovely. You know Merral, our crisis has many perils and vices, but I think that one of the most serious is that we have squeezed out the time to stand and stare at the creation.”
“I stand rebuked,” Merral said, feeling a new longing for home and woods. “The challenges I face seem to drive all this away.”
“Make time, Merral. Make time.” She looked up. “The first star!” she cried, with all the eagerness of a child.
“You have not lost your sense of wonder?” Merral said, puzzling again at how poet and pilot coexisted in the same person.
As Perena looked at him, he sensed pain in her eyes. “Not yet,” she said. “Amid all this talk of wars and armies, I have to struggle to keep joy and wonder—and praise—in my own life. Daily.”
They walked on and Merral described as much as he felt was relevant of his encounter with the envoy at Ynysmant. Perena, who had slipped back into her introspective mode, listened attentively.
“I asked him,” Merral said, “about defending Farholme from an attack from space and he said, ‘At such a time you will find a way of defense offered to you. But be warned. It will be a costly way, one that only the very bravest will take.’”
Perena repeated the words to herself in a low, almost fearful, voice and then fell into a deep silence.
After a minute or so, Merral asked, “Do his words help you?”
“Yes and no. I find them an encouragement against a fear that has troubled me. There is reassurance. It is not hopeless: ‘you will find a way.’ But they are dark words, Merral. And the challenge they make scares me.” Silence engulfed her again.
“I have an appointment with Gerry tomorrow,” Merral said after some time. “I’ll see if she has any ideas.”
“She may. She works on her own and has not shared her thoughts with me. We’re very different people and this crisis seems to heighten such differences.”
Her mood seemed to lift and she bounced along, making patterns with her bare feet and stopping to snatch up shells.
Suddenly she turned to Merral. “What do you most fear?”
“I fear . . .” The words came slowly. “I fear what Corradon fears: more deaths, more suffering. I saw Lorrin Venn die. I don’t want to see others.”
“Do you fear your own death?”
“Six months ago, I would have smiled at that question, as we all would. Now . . .” Merral paused. “I’m less sure. But no. Not yet.” He turned to her. “And you? What do you fear?”
Perena’s answer was long in coming. “I fear doing the wrong thing.”
They walked back across the darkening sands to the vehicle in silence.
The next morning Professor Gerry Habbentz swep
t into Merral’s office on a wave of energy.
“Hey, Commander,” she said, tossing her wavy black hair over her shoulders. “It’s great to see you. I’ve been following all your exploits.”
Merral, who had been working his way through an interminable list of supplies to be requisitioned, grinned. Simply being in the presence of Gerry was invigorating.
She asked him for some details of the battle at Fallambet and as Merral recounted something of what had happened, he sensed a deep anger in her dark brown eyes. The hatred of the intruders who had separated her from the man she loved still seemed to burn as fiercely as ever.
“So, Gerry, any progress on how the intruders got here?”
She scratched a dark eyebrow. “Yeah. Team opinion is hardening that they used some sort of autonomous Below-Space system. You have a ship that can inject itself into Below-Space, travel in it at many times light-speed and then reemerge into Normal-Space. Technically feasible. Give me five years and a lot of resources and we might be able to do it.”
“Five years? That’s bad news. What about weapons? You come up with anything?”
“We kicked around the theory of using the few nukes we have sitting out near the asteroid belt for mining, but we can’t get excited.”
“Why not?”
“No delivery system. And they’d be too little to destroy a fleet. Probably just make them mad, like wasps. See, Merral, what we really need is something big enough to take them all out in an instant. A one-shot destruction of a fleet.”
“What about a polyvalent fusion bomb—the sort that ended the Rebellion?”
“We looked at that, too. But there’s a string of problems. Technically, it’s hard to make, and even one of those might not be big enough if an incoming fleet was dispersed. And you’d have to deliver it a long way out in order not to soak Farholme with hard X-rays. And they’d see it coming.”
She pointed at Merral with a long finger. “The really neat weapon I reckon would be to use a Below-Space delivery system to put a polyvalent fusion bomb in the middle of them. That’d be the trick. It would just appear from nowhere. Nothing and then boom!”
Something about her excitement troubled Merral, but he was more struck by the practical problems. “So, you want a bomb we can’t make, mounted on a delivery system we can’t imagine?”
“Okay, okay. A lady can dream, right?”
“How long to make the bomb on its own?”
“Eighteen months.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have that time.”
Gerry suddenly leaned forward. “You know something, don’t you? What?”
“This is confidential. Three days ago, I had a visit from a being—an angelic being we call the envoy.”
“You’re serious?” Gerry said, incredulity stamped on every syllable. “I’d heard rumors, but I’d assumed it was, well . . . nerves.”
“No. There have been four known appearances. The first to Perena Lewitz. The rest to me.”
Gerry rose and paced the length of the office, her large but graceful form full of barely suppressed agitation. “The captain, huh? No kidding?”
“Not at all.”
“Weird. You specially favored or something?”
“No. I seem to need his advice more than most.”
As she stood in a corner looking at him, her gaze seemed skeptical. “I find all this hard to believe.”
“Is it really so improbable? We’re seeing the return of evil. Is it improbable that good may respond in a similar way?”
“Weeelllll . . .” The word was drawn out to an almost impossible length. Gerry shrugged. “Okay, let me buy in on that for the moment. So what did this angel say?”
“He said, in effect, that we have barely three months before we have a visit—”
“Three months?” There was alarm on her face. “We can’t do a thing in that time! We’d be an open target!”
“I asked him about defending ourselves from orbiting vessels.”
“And?”
“His response was this: ‘At such a time, you will find a way of defense offered to you. But be warned. It will be a costly way, one that only the very bravest will take.’”
“That’s all?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s awful vague. No magic formula for a big, bad bomb?”
“No.”
“‘A costly way, one that only the very bravest will take.’ The exact words, right?”
Merral nodded and looked up at the clock. He had another meeting. He always did.
Gerry stared at him. “And what does it mean?”
“I’m hoping you can find out. You have under eighty days to find out.”
Gerry gave a loud theatrical sigh. “Okay, we’ll work on it. But don’t hold out too much hope.”
Merral had not seen Vero for two days and was relieved when, that afternoon, he had a message from him saying that he would meet him that night at the apartment.
Just after nine, the mirror in the corridor opened and Vero appeared. He gave an exaggerated bow. “Like Alice through the looking glass.” Seeing the blank stares, he shrugged. “Oh, never mind. Lloyd, can you fix me a coffee? Long and strong?”
After the coffee had been made, Merral and Vero pulled up chairs in the warm dark seclusion of the courtyard and shared news.
Vero frowned at Merral’s assessment of Delastro. “I hope he can do no harm,” he muttered. “I try—desperately hard—to manage things but it’s like herding cats—”
“Herding cats?”
“Meaning, I think, nothing quite goes to plan. Look, give Delastro paperwork. Get him to write speeches. Have him produce a working paper on the nature of evil. But let me know if he causes trouble. Now there are other issues.” Vero took a large sip of coffee. “My friend, we have a problem. We are developing an army of sorts, but we can’t keep anything secret.”
“We can’t?”
“No. Everything we do is filed on the Admin-Net. Everything we research is recorded by the Library. If an intruder logged on to the Admin-Net, they could find out what the factories had made and where they had shipped the supplies. They could find out where every vehicle, every sea or space vessel is. If they logged on to the Library, they could see who consulted what files, where, and when. Any secrecy, and hence any defense, is almost impossible.”
“I see. Assembly transparency works against us. So what do you propose?”
“A drastic but simple solution. Encrypt the entire Library and Admin-Net with a molecular key and whenever the intruders appear, we switch off the decryption. They couldn’t be used without the key. The computer theorists tell me that it could take a thousand years with the fastest computers to crack such a code.”
“Close both the Admin-Net and the Library? Could we survive?”
“With the Library, yes—if people were told to download what they needed in advance. And with the Admin-Net? Probably. You’d have to create a separate subnetwork of basic data on such things as power, electricity, and water. You’d migrate users to that before locking it down.”
“Is it feasible?”
“I have some people working on that. We think so. But I wanted to warn you this is what we’re thinking of.”
“I would be interested in what Corradon and Clemant would say.”
Vero shook his head. “Please don’t. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Vero looked away. “I’m saying that they don’t need to know yet. We have to be cautious.”
“With both of them? But aren’t we answerable to them?”
“Ultimately, but . . . ‘Be careful who you trust,’ the envoy said.”
“But if we can’t trust them . . .” Merral let the words trail off.
“I don’t mistrust them. I-it’s just that Clemant has his own agenda. And Corradon is so weak that when trouble comes, he may crumble.”
With a rueful shrug, he downed the last of his coffee and left Merral alone with his troubled thoughts.
The three regiments acquired bases, recruitment grew, and training programs began. Some weapons and equipment were already being made and others tested. As far as Merral could tell, Vero was making progress with the irregulars, but was rarely seen. When he appeared, he volunteered little information.
The Urban Defense Planning Team came up with their suggestions: all settlements should make the most of natural attributes such as rivers or cliffs to create defensive barriers. Where these did not exist, plans should be drawn up so that, within days, excavators could create encircling pairs of ditches and ramparts. Every settlement should prepare designs for walls and gateways to make attacks harder.
The team also made recommendations on the issue of refuges. As part of standard Made World practice, all Farholme settlements had one or more refuges designed to give protection from volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, ice storms, hurricanes, and the like. The team advocated the expansion and restocking of all refuges and suggested an ominous novelty: a way of sealing the refuge doors shut from the inside.
After a long meeting on the eve of the Lord’s Day the plans were approved, and confidential guidelines for every warden and community leader prepared. Every settlement was to prepare a defensive strategy that could be implemented in no more than forty-eight hours. Refuges were to be checked, restocked, and made secure from the inside. All earthmoving machinery, both robotic and manned, was to be overhauled and placed at locations for rapid deployment. Where defense was deemed impractical, plans for evacuation were to be drawn up.
Merral read the guidelines through one last time and then gave orders for their distribution to every settlement at the start of the working week.
