by Chris Walley
Something in Luke’s words disturbed Merral and set a train of thoughts in motion. Am I running away? Don’t I have a duty here? Hasn’t the envoy told me to stay near Isterrane? He considered that for some moments. Perhaps I misunderstood the message. Perhaps the envoy didn’t foresee this eventuality. Anyway, how can I refuse to help? Unless I lead some sort of intervention, they have no hope. Even with it, their chances are slim.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Luke. I’ll drop off these men, see them in place, and get back as soon as I can. Then, tomorrow, we can tackle Isterrane.”
A frown appeared on Luke’s weary face. “If you think that’s wise, yes. But can I come?”
“It’s fighters I need, Luke.”
“You have had some hard decisions to make. You may have more. I’d like to be there to help. Something tells me I need to stick close to you!”
“Very well, I’ll take you. Get your things.”
Merral walked to the strip, followed closely by Lloyd. I need to talk to Anya, he suddenly realized and was on the point of calling her when Colonel Lanier walked up to him.
“Colonel,” Merral said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Captain,” Lanier replied and the single word told Merral that the colonel had talked with Clemant.
“A moment.” The colonel dropped his voice. “I’ve been asked to arrest you and hold you until the police arrive.”
“Are you going to?”
The colonel chuckled softly. “Well, I said I would. But I’m going to have some breakfast first. I’m a leisurely man and I like an unrushed meal. Then I’m coming for you.”
“Thanks. Have a good breakfast.”
The colonel extended a hand. “I hope it works out at Ynysmant. And come back safe. We need you in Isterrane.”
As he walked through the darkness onto the strip where the fins of the vessels could be seen rising up against the lightening sky, Merral realized, with a surge of emotion, that his request had been heard. Dozens—no, scores—of soldiers with sleepy faces and armor and with guns slung over their shoulders had gathered.
Merral heard his name called and turned to see Anya.
She grabbed his arm. “Vero told me. I can’t believe it. Clemant’s gone mad.”
“So it seems. But my concern is Ynysmant.”
“What do you want me to do? I’ll come.”
“I’m sure you would, but no. I’m worried about you. Anyone linked to me could be in trouble now.”
“Vero’s suggesting that I take Azeras and head back by road to Isterrane and hide out in the foundations.”
“Yes. A good idea. All being well, I’ll be back soon, and we can try and sort out this mess.”
“Let’s hope so. There’s a lot to sort out. But please keep safe.” A look of deep and apparently overwhelming emotion crossed her face and then as if to avoid saying anything more, she turned and ran away.
Lights were on in the cockpit of the Emilia Kay.
Trying to ignore the memories of Perena in the same vessel, Merral stuck his head through the hatch that led to the pilot’s cabin. “Anyone here?”
“Hi, Commander,” a woman’s voice sang brightly from the top of the ladder. “Be with you now.”
In a moment Merral was shaking hands with a diminutive and animated woman with short black hair. “Captain Istana Nelder. Got in last night with supplies. I’m volunteering.”
“You do know you could get in trouble for this?”
“Don’t care. Mother’s got relatives in Ynysmant.”
Merral noted that Istana didn’t seem to care for full sentences. “Thanks. How many can you take?”
“Where do you want to land? Airport? At the top by Congregation Hall? Congregation Square means a vertical landing.”
“Give me the figures for both. Troops plus guns, armor, and ammo—no other gear.”
She closed her eyes. “Airport, I can do 170; the square, 150. But it will be tight.”
“We’ll take the square.”
She bent to look out of the doorway and then grinned at him. “Better do some filtering then. You got too many there.”
Merral turned round to see that lights had come on around the strip and, with a lump in his throat, realized that there were at least 300 soldiers there.
It took less than ten minutes to reduce the numbers by half, mostly by eliminating those people who were either the only children in their family, parents, or newly married. The majority of the volunteers he chose were men with swords and guns but, somewhat against his better judgment, Merral was persuaded by an insistent Karita to take her and twenty of her snipers.
The selection made, Merral ordered the hull doors open and the soldiers to line up.
“Stop!” A tall man with blond hair pushed through the line and stood in front of Merral. Zak. Six men elbowed their way to stand behind him. Merral remembered having seen them with Zak before.
“Good morning, Colonel Larraine,” Merral said, hearing murmurs among the crowd and wishing desperately that he might have avoided this encounter.
“Captain D’Avanos, I order you to stop this.”
The murmuring among the soldiers grew. Merral saw Lloyd edge menacingly over to Zak and motioned him back.
“Sorry, Zak. I’m just not standing by when people are about to be massacred. Whether it’s my town or any town, I don’t care. That’s not what the Assembly is about.”
“It’s an order!” Zak snapped in such an unyielding tone that Merral realized why the soldiers feared him.
“Oh, quit it, Zak!” someone from the back shouted in a tone of weary disgust. There was a low rumble of agreement.
Zak’s followers glanced around with uneasy looks.
“Step back from the ship,” Zak ordered.
“I won’t,” Merral said. “I’m on an errand of mercy.”
“Mercy?” came a cry out of the shadows. “Better spell that out for our Zak!”
There was a chorus of “Yes!” “You tell him!” “Exactly!”
Zak’s face flushed.
“Zak’d throw his mum to the goblins!” someone else shouted. There were hoots of laughter.
Merral raised a hand to stop the cries, but they continued. I should intervene. But Zak needs to hear the verdict of the men.
“She was one!” yelled someone else. The laughter grew.
“Nah, he’s Krallen on his dad’s side!”
There were more guffaws and beneath them Merral heard hatred.
“D’Avanos, get away from that ship!” Zak said.
“Lost our temper, have we, Zak?” cried another voice. There was a new ripple of laughter.
Merral decided that it was now time to firmly end this confrontation. “Colonel, listen to me. I have a job to do. I’m getting on this ship now and the soldiers are following me. And if you stand there, you might get crushed.”
There was a moment charged with tension; then Zak looked around. Behind him his friends were sliding away into the darkness. He quivered, swung on his heels, and amid taunting cheers and laughter, stormed away.
Ten minutes later as the Emilia Kay prepared for takeoff, Vero turned to Merral with a wry look on his face. “My friend, at the rate you and I are making enemies, we soon won’t need Krallen.”
They took off as the sun rose, the brilliant colors of the sunrise heightened by the dust and smoke still in the air. Fearful of any sort of missile or artillery attack from the Dominion forces east of Halmacent, Merral and Istana agreed on a high-altitude course that curved north almost to the edge of the Great Northern Forest and then east toward Ynysmant.
“What I’d like,” said Istana, as they flew north, “is a big bomb.”
“I know another woman who would like something similar,” Merral said and as he did, he wondered where Gerry Habbentz was now. The moment he raised the question, he realized with a start that the woman he had seen on the images from the captured Dove had to be her. It made sense. She was a top physicist and worked with Clema
nt’s office and she had presumably been sent to look at the propulsion systems. Yet, in a way he couldn’t pin down, the idea of Gerry being involved with Clemant and the Dove made him uneasy.
Half an hour into the flight, a message came in from Clemant with an order for Merral to turn back to Isterrane. Merral simply ignored the message and instead called Ynysmant and arranged for Congregation Square to be cleared for a landing.
“We’re glad you’re coming,” said a woman at air control. “We’ve heard what’s on the way.”
As they flew on, gray stacked masses of clouds gathered below them reminding Merral of another fateful flight, just a few months earlier, when he had flown to the FDU training base at Tanaris Island just before the battle at Fallambet. How much has changed; how distant that time now appears. When he looked toward the pilot’s seat, he found himself longing for the slim and thoughtful form of Perena instead of the diminutive, extroverted Istana.
He pushed the thought away. Perena has played her part. I must play mine. I have to keep going. I must be like a machine. How strange. I almost find myself envying the Krallen their lack of emotions.
In an hour, they began their descent and through gaps in the clouds Merral glimpsed Ynysmere Lake. Soon he saw, silhouetted against the liquid silver of the lake, the spires and towers of his home.
Much to Vero’s dismay, Istana chose to descend in a series of tight spirals and as she did Merral was able to glimpse his town through the porthole, seeing the parks, the winding streets, the different levels of roofs, towers, and spires. But he now saw it in a new way. It is now not just a home, but a fortress.
Congregation Square was cluttered with vehicles and equipment and Istana had to make a careful landing.
As the dust and fumes dispersed, Merral looked out of the window to see that his town had changed. There had once been almost uninterrupted views from the square. Now a high wall, three to four meters high, had been erected all around its perimeter. It was only broken by a gateway at the northern end that led to Island Road.
The soldiers disembarked and Merral ordered them into the shadow of the vast bulk of Congregation Hall to await orders.
“I barely recognize my town,” he murmured, shocked by all the evidence of war.
It was not just the new walls, which were incomplete in places; it was the presence of all the paraphernalia of conflict: the boxes of ammunition, the fire tenders, the medical tents, and the shutters covering the windows of the hall. This new and dreadful transformation had affected the people too. Soldiers in the pale brown jerkins and berets of the irregs were everywhere, carrying boxes or weapons or giving orders. Even those out of uniform seemed to have a purpose to their actions that was remarkable for Ynysmant. And there were no children.
Merral turned to Vero. “I must find Enatus.”
“Yes and I need to find a Balancal Marrat.”
“Balancal? I think I’ve played Team-Ball against him. Why?”
“He heads the irregs here. And I need to arrange for Betafor to be set up somewhere.” Then with an urgent pace, Vero strode toward the gateway where a cluster of irregs stood.
A few moments later a man in a green armored jacket led Merral and Lloyd to a small new sandbagged structure near the hall. Inside, a ladder led down to a series of corridors that Merral recognized as forming the rear of the main Ynysmant administrative building.
At the end of one corridor, Merral was ushered through double doors while Lloyd took a seat outside. Beyond the second door was a large, well-lit room full of desks, screens, and people, many of whom wore armor. Merral instantly sensed the now-familiar atmosphere of agitation and controlled fear.
As he entered, everyone looked up and in the smiles of welcome, he sensed a hunger for reassurance. They see me as their deliverer. In that they hope for too much.
At the far end of the room, Warden Enatus stood in conference with a number of people, all of whom were taller than him. The warden, dressed in a green armored jacket rather too tight for his ample stomach, bore a sheathed sword at his belt that heightened his rather ludicrous figure. He brushed free of his entourage and walked over, his rolling gait exaggerated by the jacket.
“Delighted to see you,” Enatus said, beaming. “Delighted. We need all the help we can get, really.”
“I brought only 150 soldiers,” Merral said.
“Hmm.” There was no hiding the spasm of disappointment that crossed the warden’s face. Then he brightened. “Better than nothing, though. I gather you are all we can expect?”
“I’m afraid so. And I’m unauthorized.”
“Hmm.” The warden wiped his brow. “Well, take a seat, Commander. We need to talk. . . . Coffee, tea?”
“No, thanks. Oh, and technically, Warden, I’m now a captain.” In fact, I’m probably not even that by now.
“Oh, nonsense. I heard about that from Isterrane. Clemant’s a fool. That man has spent far too long staring at screens. You are a commander—commander in chief of Ynysmant defenses, if nothing else.”
Enatus lowered himself carefully onto a chair and grimaced. “To tell you the whole truth, I can’t get used to sitting down in this jacket,” he confided with an apologetic look. “And it’s so hot. And I keep tripping up over the sword.”
Merral smiled. For all Enatus’s ridiculousness, his genial and self-deprecating openness was rather likable.
Merral noticed on a large wallscreen map of the area an angry red line heading from the Camolgi Hills toward Ynysmant. It needed no explanation. “So, Warden, can you give me an update on the defenses?”
Enatus paused before saying, “There are three facts you need to know.” He ticked off a stubby finger. “One, we predict the first Dominion units will reach the causeway by three or four this afternoon. That is in five or six hours’ time. However, they seem to have these mobile artillery units—cannon insects, I believe the intelligence people call them—so we could get fired on sooner.” He ticked off another finger. “We had thirty thousand people here at dawn. We’re getting as many vulnerable people as we can out by boat from Vanulet Pier and by road and will continue to do so until it is too risky. There are three freighters at the airport being emptied as we speak and we hope to fly out a thousand or so children and old people on them in an hour’s time. They’ll be the last flights out. The best guess is that will still leave us with twenty thousand people by the time we close the gates.”
He paused, frowned, and touched a third finger. “And third, with your people and the irregulars we have only a little over twelve hundred defenders. Most of the irregulars have no armor.”
He stared at the map and then looked up, pain apparent in his blue eyes. “In short, Commander, we have the makings of a disaster. Any comments?”
“No,” Merral answered, impressed by the succinctness of Enatus’s assessment of the situation. Perhaps I have misjudged this man. “Tell me about the defenses.”
Enatus motioned for a projector system to be brought over from the next table and switched it on. A three-dimensional model of Ynysmant appeared above the table, and as Merral stared at it, he saw the new walls.
“Of course, you know the town as well as me. Yes, well, we have a big defensive wall at the Gate House with some rather experimental artillery. The causeway has been mined. . . . I think that’s the word.” Enatus frowned and muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “I hope you’ve mastered all this military language. I haven’t.” He pointed at the causeway. “This has been mined—that is the word—by your uncle, Barrand. Anyway, that’s the first line of defense. There are firing points on the streets up and then the next defensive line is at the third circle.”
“Makes sense.”
“I’m glad you think so. And the final defensive line is around the square and the main refuge. What do you think?”
Merral stared at the model of Ynysmant. “The hospital?” He asked, suddenly realizing how vulnerable it was so close to the lake.
“We have already flown the mo
st seriously ill patients out. The medical supplies and movable equipment are being relocated higher up.”
“Good. Warden, I will have a look around, but I think you’ve made the best of an impossible task.”
“Thank you. All advice will be accepted.”
Merral was suddenly aware that his low opinion of Enatus was being replaced by a new respect. And why not? If this crisis might be the breaking of some, might it not also be the making of others? “I have only praise.”
“Thank you. I am honored. Incidentally, I have sent Clemant’s police to supervise the evacuation. It gets them out of the way. I also had the jail opened.”
“The jail? I had no idea we had one. Who was in it?”
“Only the Hanston Road gang. I let them out this morning on the condition that they offer to help the irregulars. I gave them a pardon.” He looked embarrassed. “I hope you don’t object?”
“Hardly.”
“Good. Now, what do you want to do with your soldiers?”
“What do you suggest?”
“Me? Well, I’d say put them all down by the Gate House. After all, if that’s breached, we’re in really big trouble.”
“I agree.”
“You do? Very well. Take them down there. But talk to Balancal first. He’s probably in his office two doors down.”
Some people hovered nearby with pieces of paper.
“Do excuse me,” Enatus said as he stood up and signed a few sheets. “Do you know,” he said in a low aside to Merral, “I’m completely out of my depth here? I’m having to make it up as I go along. Isn’t that a terrible admission?”
Warmed by the warden’s frankness and gritty determination, Merral felt his last resistance to Enatus fade away. “Warden, that’s the policy I’ve been operating on ever since the first crisis occurred.”
“I am so very glad to hear that. I was tempted to resign when I heard we were going to be attacked, but I felt that that would be cowardice and a lack of faith.”
“Warden,” said Merral, standing up, “thank you. I need to send my soldiers down to the Gate House. Then I must talk with Balancal.”
