by John Love
Foord snapped open his wristcom.
“Yes?” Smithson said. “What do you want?”
“An update on the refit, please.”
“Scanners are done and tested. Minor systems await testing.”
“We may be delayed getting back.”
“You will be, Commander. Traffic’s got worse, it’s so tight you can’t…”
“No,” Foord said, not eager to hear Smithson complete the phrase, “it’s up here. There may be further delays in the highlands.”
“Why don’t we send one of the ship’s fliers for you? Or even better, get Swann to send a Blentport flier?”
“No. We’ve been through this before. I told you I wanted to make this journey by landchariot.”
The answering noise from Foord’s wristcom was moist and disgusting. In a gesture characteristic of his species Smithson had plunged his hand, and by symbolic extension Foord’s, into one of his lower abdominal orifices.
“Well, Commander, whenever and however you get here, we’ll have completed the refit, done the testing, got their people off and ours on, in four hours.”
“Four hours?” Foord and Thahl exchanged glances. Even Thahl looked surprised.
“Yes? Why not four hours? What’s wrong?”
“I expected eight at least.”
“Well. It’s four.”
Again, the ritual; Smithson left a gap into which Foord was supposed to put praise which Smithson could accept ungraciously. All the same, Foord couldn’t let it go unacknowledged.
“Last night at Hrissihr, I was thinking you’d need most of today to complete. I didn’t expect we might leave so soon. Thank you.”
“With the trouble we’ve had here, they might not let us leave.”
“Trouble?” Foord asked, carefully. “What trouble?”
“An incident in a bar with two of our crew. Cyr’s dealing with it. It’s always an incident in a bar, isn’t it?”
“Where is Cyr now?”
“She’s at Swann’s offices.”
“Tell me what you know, now.”
“Two of our crew got called names in a bar. There was a fight, the others got hurt, Cyr took our two aboard and isn’t releasing them. It does happen every time, doesn’t it, Commander?”
“Get Cyr to call the moment she returns from Swann. If I haven’t heard in thirty minutes I’ll check in again.”
A clattering and hissing and squealing as two more landchariots passed them going the other way. A sickening jolt as they crashed through a pothole. The driver swore, the whip flew and crackled electrically, and they hurtled on.
•
“Why have we stopped?”
It was an hour later. The road was wider, the gradient shallower, and Sakhran landchariots heading up into the Irsirrha were more frequent. The forest still towered over the road on both sides, however, and they had seen nobody except Sakhrans.
“Why have we…”
“The team have to be rested and watered, Commander.”
“Fine, then let’s get out.”
“We’ll only be here a few minutes.”
“Half an hour, you said earlier.”
“No, we’ll be going sooner than that.”
“Nevertheless, I’m getting out.”
“I wouldn’t advise it, Commander.”
“Why?”
“There may be trouble here.”
“Tell me about it outside.”
They stepped out into a large forest clearing where the road from the Irsirrha crossed two others. It was full of landchariots, of Sakhrans hissing and chimaera squealing; of wheels foundering in mud, smoke from damp wood fires, the sodden flapping of canvas and hammering of tent-pegs.
With a sudden vicious blow at the leader’s chest their driver smashed the harness from his team, whereupon they lumbered over to a pothole full of muddy water, drank, and settled; this, apparently, amounted to resting and watering. The driver had already turned his back, pointedly, and stalked off to sit alone on a dead tree-trunk some distance away. He unsheathed his claws at another Sakhran who was doing no more than amble past.
“What is this place, anyway?” Foord demanded.
“It’s the last gathering-place before the lowlands, Commander.”
“Gathering-place? Sakhrans, gathering?” Foord was surprised to hear himself speak so sourly. He put it down to discomfort from the journey: cramp, and a throbbing headache.
“These are hunting-parties, Commander, from Hrissihr and from some of those smaller places you saw on the way down. They come here to exchange news and trade carcases.”
“They appear to be doing little of either. They look like they hate each other. Their chimaera look like they hate each other.”
“Then perhaps they’ve just come together to reaffirm it, Commander.”
They walked across the sullen clearing, between groups of Sakhrans whose expressions were unreadable, past tents and fires, and around landchariots festooned with carcases, mostly of giant wild relatives of chimaera. Other carcases hung from poles, heads lolling, or sat in heaps in the mud ready for flensing. Many had throats cut. Some were partly eaten.
“Anything here remind you of the Charles Manson, Thahl?”
“I’m not sure I understand, Commander.”
“Oh, you know, this comradeship”—again, Foord was surprised at his own sourness—“this golden glow of social intercourse.”
Thahl glanced at him but did not reply.
They sat down on a tree-trunk, the wood of which was damp and rotten and teeming with white grubs. Foord’s throbbing headache was getting worse.
“So what’s about to happen here, Thahl? And why didn’t you warn me earlier?”
“I only suspected it as we drew in, Commander.”
The throbbing had become louder and more pronounced, almost loud enough to be an external noise.
Thahl stood up. So did most of the other Sakhrans. They looked like they were smelling the air, but Foord recognised it as their posture for listening.
He suddenly realised there was an external noise.
“Thahl, what’s going on? What’s that…”
Thahl had relaxed slightly; he turned an expressionless gaze on Foord.
“I know what it is now, Commander. But it’s too late to leave, and it could still be dangerous. Please stay close by me.”
Three military groundcars entered the clearing. They settled with a low whine and disgorged twenty soldiers who set about moving Sakhrans away from the centre of the glade. They carried only light sidearms and behaved with impeccable courtesy. Their demeanour was carefully low key, and although well drilled, they seemed to have been chosen for their non-threatening appearance; they were of average build with regular features, definitely not Special Forces like those Foord had seen in Blentport.
At the edge of the clearing, coming up the road from the lowlands, loomed the source of the throbbing background noise: three tracked military lowloaders carrying enough equipment to erect a large scanner emplacement and several particle beam and missile units. The throbbing was due to the heavy muffling of their engines, which were now idling as they waited—Foord gasped when he realised this—to move into the centre of the clearing.
“Thahl! I thought you said the military never came into the highlands. There’s going to be murder here.”
“I don’t think so, Commander. But please stay close.”
Slowly, carefully, the soldiers made a space for themselves in the centre of the clearing. Their patience and diplomacy were remarkable; they persuaded the Sakhrans back, easing their way with smiles and thanks, requesting space with gestures carefully drained of sudden movement, speaking softly and politely, treading as if on broken glass. There were only twenty of them; any one Sakhran, armed or unarmed, could easily have killed five or six, and there were nearly seventy Sakhrans. But Sakhrans together were less than Sakhrans individually. Foord had often read about it, but this was the first time he had ever seen it demonstrated, and he was astoni
shed. He glanced at Thahl and thought, Is this is what you lost? Did a book make you like this?
It was over in a few minutes. Twenty men, chosen by someone very cleverly, had persuaded seventy Sakhrans to move aside and allow the Commonwealth to make its first military entry into the Sakhran highlands in two hundred years.
The Sakhrans stood singly, or in twos and threes, and watched the lowloaders lurch into the clearing. Foord let out a breath and walked back to the landchariot with Thahl, who gestured to the driver. By the time they were inside, the main scanner emplacement had been mostly erected and the particle beam and missile units were being unloaded. Smithson could not have done it much better.
“They were very good,” Foord said.
“Yes, Commander. I was afraid you might be endangered, but they handled it well.”
Foord looked askance at Thahl, a gesture he had learnt from Thahl himself.
“You’re more Worrier than Warrior.”
“It keeps you alive, Commander…and I think we’ll see more of this as we get closer to the lowlands. I think I know what these rumours of evacuations are about.”
“Well?”
“We’ll see more military incursions into the highlands. Later, we’ll see some of the outlying civilian populations being moved into the lowlands.”
“I don’t understand.”
Thahl waited politely until he did.
“You mean they’re gambling that if She defeats us, and comes for Sakhra, She won’t attack the cities if they’ve been turned into civilian targets?”
“Yes, Commander.”
Foord swore to himself.
“I think,” Thahl added, unnecessarily, “this may not be a pleasant journey.”
The driver’s whip exploded and the landchariot clattered out of the clearing and down towards the lowlands.
3
The landchariot hurtled on, now a dark wheeled box full of so many varieties of brooding that even the chimaera fell silent and ran faster as if merely to get away from it.
They passed their first roadsign. It was crooked and untended and read, in blue letters on a rustpocked white background, BOWL BLENTPORT (Pindar, Framsden, Cromer, Meddon). As it flashed past the landchariot, Foord leaned out of the window to look back at it. The reverse side was blank.
The road was wider now and verged with grey-green tussocky grass, the terrain more level and less heavily wooded; they were in the vaguely-defined border between the end of the lower Irsirrha and the start of the foothills, which would eventually slope down and level out at the rim of the Great Lowland Bowl. They were making good time; but all around them, the details which it was Foord’s lifelong habit to note and store were mounting.
It began when they left the clearing. As the road sloped gently downhill and they got closer to the foothills, the forest gradually thinned out, becoming the exception rather than the rule. Fields predominated, with trees—usually smaller varieties, like cloudclaw and armourfern—making borders between them. The fields, of course, were not Sakhran; Sakhrans didn’t farm, though a few did work on the human-owned farms which characterised the foothills and the edges of the Bowl. But Foord had noticed these fields on the way up to Hrissihr, along with occasional farmhouses; there were people and vehicles around them, smoke from chimneys, the sound of engines running. Now they were deserted; the farmhouses showed streams of furniture and possessions vomited out of open windows and doors, and churned tracks in the mud.
There were other figures, however. Every quarter-mile or so there would be a military vehicle, usually a small groundcar, with a couple of soldiers. This seemed to be the message: evacuate to the lowlands now, leave your possessions, go now, this is an emergency, and if you go now, we’ll post guards against looting; an easy task, since no humans would be left to do any looting, and the remaining Sakhrans would be in the highlands.
Sakhra’s diameter is about 1.5 times that of Earth, large for an Earth-type planet. Its atmosphere and gravity, and the length of its day, are all close to Earth normal. Its topography is unusual. The largest continent, Shaloom, covers most of one hemisphere; its main feature, taking up sixty percent of its land area, is the Great Lowland Bowl.
The Bowl was thought to be an ancient impact crater, but that theory is discounted now; anything making a crater that size would have destroyed the planet.
The Bowl’s cross-section is irregular, sometimes deep and sometimes shallow. Most of the Commonwealth settlers on Sakhra live there. Some Sakhrans also work and live there, but most remain in the traditional hillcastles in the mountains and highlands.
Sakhra’s other hemisphere consists of oceans and archipelagos, and has huge natural resources: mineral deposits offshore, and precious metals and precious stones in the mountains of the larger islands. (There may be similar finds in the mountains of Shaloom, but for obvious political reasons these are not prospected.) The Commonwealth’s main economic activity is the extraction and processing of these commodities, and their transport to, and distribution from, Blentport.
Landchariots hurtled past them every few minutes, in the direction of the highlands. And, also heading for the highlands and also every few minutes, they encountered more military traffic: low-slung groundcars with opaque windows, light armoured vehicles, and, so far, five more convoys of tracked lowloaders taking scanner and missile and beam installations up into the Irsirrha.
Then, when they started to pass the farms, they saw the other half of the evacuation: the civilian traffic from outlying farms and villages, mostly pickups and trucks and offroaders, laden with people and packing cases. The traffic had not yet reached crisis proportions because the human population in the foothill areas was quite sparse, but further down, when it met the normal lowland traffic, it would be unimaginable. And then there was the roadblock. Or rather, there wasn’t.
“Are you a local resident, sir?”
“No. Do you want to see my papers?”
“Are you going to the lowlands, sir?”
“Yes. My papers?”
“Not necessary, sir, if you’re going to the lowlands.”
The soldier paused as a couple of freighters roared overhead, on their way down to Blentport. The sky—a grey inverted bowl shot with high trailing clouds, like the roof of a giant mouth streaked with mucus—had again started to be full of them, like it was last night.
“Are you sure you don’t need to see my papers?”
“Yes, sir, as long as you’re going to the lowlands.” He was already losing what little interest he had in Foord. “Safe journey.”
Across the road, on the side leading up into the highlands, where they had seen a stream of landchariots and military vehicles, but no civilian traffic, there was not merely one soldier but nine or ten, all heavily armed, and a large armoured sixwheel. Both its gun turrets were pointing down the road in the direction of traffic from the lowlands, but that may have been coincidence.
Foord’s wristcom buzzed. He snapped it open.
“This is me,” Smithson said. “Is that you?”
“Smithson, where is Cyr? Why hasn’t she called?”
“She’s still with Swann. And it’s forty minutes since you said you’d call in thirty minutes.”
“I know, we were delayed… The traffic is getting heavier, but we’re still aiming to be back in about two hours.”
On Foord’s wristcom, either a toilet flushed or Smithson laughed. “I don’t think so, Commander. It’ll get worse as you get closer. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like now, down here.”
“Is the refit still on target?”
“Yes, be done in three hours. I’ve got total priority. At least nine ships, including three Class 097s, are stuck down here and can’t join the cordon, because of me,” he said proudly. “It’s going well. But whether we leave in three hours, or wait twelve for a post-mortem on that alehouse brawl, is Cyr’s problem. And yours.”
“Post-mortem?”
“Nobody’s dead, Commander, it was just an expre
ssion.”
An expression, thought Foord, which he had used deliberately. “Smithson, if we’re ready to leave in three hours we’ll leave! Do you understand?”
Smithson hated being asked Do You Understand; he took it as a personal insult, a fact of which Foord was aware. “Call Cyr, please,” he went on quickly, “and tell her I want the details of that incident. And she’s not to hand our people over to Swann. And even if Horus doesn’t set tonight, two things are certain: we leave when the refit is done, and we leave with all our crew.”
Foord felt like adding another Do You Understand, but decided it would be ill-judged. He snapped the wristcom shut.
•
At Pindar the evacuation really started to show itself. Foord looked out of the landchariot as it turned a bend into the main street, and swore.
Coming here from the highlands was like jumping from air into treacle. Pindar was the last Commonwealth settlement he had passed on his way up to Hrissihr yesterday, and the first on their way down today: a small market town with a longish narrow main street lined with houses and shops and civic buildings, all slightly uncared-for and all built on the same modest scale. It would have taken a direct bombing better than it was taking the evacuation.
They were embedded in traffic. Most of it was town vehicles, with a few trucks and offroaders from neighbouring farms, some of which had passed them on the way down, sounding their horns. They were not sounding their horns now. Pindar was gridlocked but eerily quiet.
Military groundcars were positioned at intervals along the main street, turning it into a one-way through road to the lowlands. The traffic was like a stream of food passing down a long mouth, with the groundcars as inward-pointing teeth.
It looked like much of Pindar was already evacuated. The main street resembled a table-top onto which the contents of buildings had been emptied like the contents of pockets. For collection later, Foord thought, as though the urgency dwindled once people were put on the road, and pointed in the unvarying direction of the lowlands.
Thahl was right. And this, thought Foord, must be happening all the way around the rim of the Bowl. Here, though the crowding was heavy, it was still rather small-scale, just one modest town in the foothills; the entire population of the foothills wasn’t that large, but if this was happening here, it was the tip of something far larger. And something quite desperate.
