Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Clausen was hauled to the Sled and hoisted into the hold with Liphar’s unwilling assistance. McPherson raced to the cockpit to strap in. “We’re out of here in sixty seconds!”

  Danforth hovered by the open hatch. Susannah ran back for Ghirra.

  He sat unmoving at his sister’s side.

  “We have to go,” she urged, beginning to fold Aguidran’s limp arms across her blood-soaked chest.

  But Ghirra stilled her hands firmly. “You go, Suzhannah.”

  “Ghirra…”

  “I will be with my sister.”

  “COME ON!” yelled McPherson from the Sled.

  “Ghirra, don’t you understand? This whole place is going to explode!”

  “I understand this.”

  “She wouldn’t want this. You can mourn her better by staying alive.”

  Danforth’s imperative shout reinforced McPherson’s.

  Susannah tugged pleadingly on Ghirra’s arm.

  “My sister dies but Clauzen will live,” he observed quietly. “Go, Suzhannah. They call for you.”

  “Ghirra, I’m a doctor! I had to do what I could for him!”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Damn it, I’m not leaving unless you come with us!”

  Her declaration brought the first hint or pain to his impassive face. His shoulders sagged. He threw his head back and let out a a howl of grief that rose above the whine of the fans like a roll of thunder.

  “Twenty seconds, Susannah! Get him the fuck over here!”

  Susannah grabbed him then, with the strength of desperation, and yanked him to his feet. She dragged him unresisting half the distance to the Sled, but suddenly, he stiffened and jerked away from her, then stumbled back to where Aguidran lay in her darkening blood.

  “For the love of God!” Danforth bellowed over the fan noise. “We can’t wait any longer!”

  Desperate eyes watched her from the Sled.

  Susannah looked back at Ghirra, struggling now to haul away his sister’s body, too heavy in death for him to manage alone. Before she was aware of it, she was rushing to help him.

  “Tay, hold tight!” McPherson screamed. “We’re outa here!” The Sled lifted with a burst of wind, the hatch gaping open, the ladder dangling furiously. Danforth clung to the lashings of a crate, yelling unheard protests into the roar of the engines.

  Susannah caught up with Ghirra and grabbed Aguidran’s legs. “Under here!” she shouted.

  The disabled B-Sled was the only possibility for shelter from the coming blast. They dragged the body under the belly of the craft. Susannah rammed the hatch shut above their heads. The hum of the escaping Sled receded into the green-amber sky above the rift like a fading dream. Aguidran’s knife lay beside the thick tread of the wing wheel, Clausen’s blood drying on its blade. A mental countdown blared in Susannah’s mind. She huddled close to Ghirra and tried to block its second-by-second yammer with a memory of Stavros, stretched languidly on the river rock where they had first made love. She waited.

  Five seconds after the rift wall was due to erupt and rain destruction on their heads, the ledge shook with a single violent jolt, like a deep shudder of fear or cold. Susannah pressed her face to Ghirra’s back, waiting for the ground to crack and yawn beneath them. She felt his body, expecting death, relax in welcome.

  But stillness returned, descending like a gift of rain in the desert.

  Minutes later it was broken by the hum of the distant Sled, growing louder as McPherson circled cautiously back. Susannah dared to lift her head. The Sled approached.

  She left Ghirra sitting stunned and motionless. She moved out into the open to gaze up uncomprehending as the returning craft dropped slowly past the undisturbed four-kilometer rise of amber rock drilled with its neat black holes.

  A-Sled settled with a more sedate rush and roar than it had departed with. White-clad legs appeared in the open hatch, and Stavros dropped heavily to the ground. He staggered weakly and recovered his balance.

  With a cry, Susannah ran to meet him.

  He caught her unsteadily in his arms, leaning into her for support.

  “Stav, are you all right…?”

  His only response was to hold her closer.

  The access ladder clanged into place. Liphar tumbled down and sped past to fling himself down before Aguidran’s body. McPherson followed, shamefaced.

  “You know, Susannah, eh? I had to think of the others.” She shrugged defensively and moved on.

  Susannah eased out of Stavros’ tight embrace. His sustained silence unnerved her. “What happened? Why didn’t it…?”

  “It did,” he said. “Not as powerful as we expected, but enough to do the work.” He let her go, slumped with defeat. “It’s over, Suze. We failed.”

  “Failed? You mean…?”

  Stavros nodded, staring at the ground. Tears glistened unshed in his half-lidded eyes. “I can’t hear Her anymore, there’s nothing on the com, no signal, nothing. It’s all gone dead.” He spread his hands, palm up, his familiar gesture now weighted with tragedy. “Even my guar-fire’s gone. He killed Her. And I had almost… I tried to warn Her!” The tears spilled over and he pulled her close again. “Ah, my people!”

  McPherson and Liphar passed, returning with Aguidran’s body in the blanket sling. Ghirra paced numbly behind, the bloodied knife dangling in his hand.

  Over Stavros’ shoulder, Susannah watched him pause beside the hatch as the others lifted his dead sister into the hold. With almost formal deliberation, he raised his arm and wiped the knife blade on the white sleeve of his borrowed therm-suit. He studied the dark, lustrous metal thoughtfully, spat on it and wiped it again.

  Danforth called to him from above. The hatch was clear. The Master Healer pressed the knife blade briefly to his cheek, then slipped it between his belt and the small of his back. His characteristic stoop reclaimed him for a moment. Then he lifted his head and started up the ladder.

  Intuition struck home. Susannah gasped and struggled against Stavros’s suddenly restraining grasp. He held her fast. His tears wetting her cheek, he murmured gently, implacably, “No, my love. Not this time.”

  Danforth limped forward to the cockpit as the Master Healer climbed through the hatch. A fleeting look passed between them, a nod, and Danforth beckoned Liphar and McPherson away from laying out Aguidran on the floor of the hold. McPherson covered the dead Ranger with a silverfilm tarp and went to join him.

  Clausen lay on a blanket at the rear. His chest rose and fell in shallow gasps, but his head was turned, his eyes alert. They widened faintly as the Master Healer approached, but Ghirra’s hands were empty and his handsome face serene. Clausen’s breathing quickened as he felt the healer’s cool fingers surround his jaw, but he did not cry out. He stared up at Ghirra warily.

  “You have much pain?” Ghirra inquired.

  “Hell, no. I feel just great.”

  The long fingers probed gently. “I can help this pain.”

  Clausen twisted his head to throw off the Master Healer’s touch.

  “You must lie quiet, Clauzen.” Ghirra’s hands worked and soothed. A disbelieving sigh escaped the prospector as numbness seeped through him. Slowly, he relaxed.

  “This is better, Clauzen?”

  Clausen’s eyes were heavy-lidded with relief. “Inspired hands,” he murmured.

  Ghirra smiled his da Vinci angel smile, light seeming to suffuse his brown face from within. He eased one hand away from its healing work and reached around his back to draw the knife from his belt.

  As the prospector lapsed into sleep, the Master Healer brought the eight-inch blade around and calmly slit his throat.

  When Ghirra descended the ladder again, Stavros let Susannah go and did not try to stop her as she snatched up her kit and bolted for the Sled.

  She accosted the Master Healer as he stood methodically cleaning the blade of his sister’s knife. His white therm-suit looked like a butcher’s apron.

  She almost screamed, How could
you?, but his blank calm stopped her. His movements were slow and mechanical, his eyes like dark glass. She could see nothing of him in them, only her own appalled reflection.

  She pushed by him and scrambled up the ladder.

  Blood pooled in the floor grating. Clausen’s eyes were closed. He had died quickly and without a struggle.

  Danforth waited wrapped in the silence of the cockpit, his arms folded over the tops of his crutches. Beside him, McPherson shared his look of grim relief. Liphar shivered against the padding of a bench. In answer to Susannah’s accusing stare, Danforth shrugged faintly and shook his head.

  “We had to!” McPherson blurted. “No other way he’d ever stop hurting people!”

  Susannah had no response. It appalled her that what they had done might just be defensible in the larger scheme of things, that her doctor’s reflex to sew Clausen up had disregarded the future for the sake of present moral self-image. A doctor saves lives…

  In the end, Clausen’s executioners had acted as pragmatically as he, lured at last into his Machiavellian universe where any means could be justified if the end was great enough.

  Even Ghirra… Emil would surely approve.

  Clausen’s still, waxy face, furred with sandy three-day stubble, made Susannah infinitely sad.

  The smartest and ablest, she mused. He had died for the sake of greed and in the service of a faceless entity that would mourn him briefly if at all. She shook open a silverfilm tarp and crouched to spread it over him, touching his cheek in farewell.

  When she rose again, she stood for a moment gazing vacantly at the swollen vermilion sun, beginning its descent, huge and clumsy, its belly flattened by the western rim of the rift. Darkness approached with the march of shadow across the flat, granular ground. Four kilometers higher, at ground level, it would still be late afternoon.

  She saw Ghirra drift a distance across the ledge to kneel at the edge of the shadow. He settled himself cross-legged and something flashed dull amber sunlight in his hand.

  Susannah squinted, then stared in horror. “O my god…”

  She had thought the worst was over, but it was not.

  She nearly fell down the ladder, yelling for Stavros, charging across the ledge at a dead run with her medikit banging at her side, screaming now to Ghirra, pleading, begging him to stop.

  Unheeding, the Master Healer raised his sister’s blade. With a surgeon’s precision, he drew its needle point down one wrist and then the other, laying open his veins.

  Susannah knocked the knife from his hand. “NO! I WON’T LET YOU!”

  She grabbed his blood-slick wrists. Stavros caught up, breathless. He wrapped his good arm around Ghirra’s chest as he fought to shake off Susannah’s restraint. Even in the fury of his determination, Ghirra could not overcome their equal determination to deny him the death he desired. Stavros wrestled him to the ground while Susannah wrapped his wrists tightly, then knocked him out with a shot of tranquilizer. When he lay limp in Stavros’ lap, she began a desperate attempt to stitch him back together.

  Liphar ran up behind them, then knelt in dumb shock. Danforth and McPherson gathered in a silent anxious circle. Susannah glared up at them once, then bent back to her work.

  “You let him do it,” she muttered. “You let a man committed to saving lives be the first of his kind in who knows how many centuries to take one intentionally! You let him be Executioner without a thought of what it would do to him!”

  Stavros began, “He was the only one of us with the guts to actually…”

  “You used him! You, Stav, who claim to love the Sawls so well!” Susannah bit her lip. A quick brush of her hand left a smudge of blood across her cheek. She whispered, “We are worse than the Goddesses could ever be. They wreaked their havoc without a thought for human life, but us… we knowingly took a man of saintly brilliance, a healer, and made him into a murderer!”

  44

  A-Sled sped homeward over the silent desert planet.

  “The dead and the living dead,” McPherson remarked as she powered the craft for its final departure from the shadowed ledge. “Can’t even get damn CRI to talk to me.”

  “If you can suggest a cause for celebration,” returned Danforth darkly, “I’m all ears.”

  “We made it out, how ’bout that?”

  “Some of us did,” murmured Susannah.

  Stavros wrapped himself in a fog of self-recrimination and failure. Letting exhaustion be his excuse, he retreated into constant sleep, under Liphar’s worried and watchful eye. He stirred occasionally to eat in a desultory fashion, but that only, Susannah thought, to set a positive example for the Master Healer, who would eat or drink nothing at all.

  Ghirra sat unmoving beside his sister’s silver-wrapped corpse. Susannah kept him under mild sedation as a precaution. She had done her best to sponge away the blood that had spattered him, Aguidran’s, Clausen’s, his own. Still, he passed the long hours staring in horror at his hands, which lay heavily in his lap as if weighed down by the bandaging on his wrists, or by some less material burden. He would not speak, would not acknowledge Susannah’s presence as she sat vigil with him for long patient hours, offering him endless reasoned arguments for continuing his existence.

  “Damn crew of zombies,” complained McPherson a day into the return, taking her next turn at the stick. But there was no heart to her complaint. Her tone was disconsolate, and she moved about as sluggishly as Danforth, retiring to the benches to brood or sleep when not active in the cockpit.

  Susannah left her vigil at Ghirra’s side to catch Danforth as he came off his shift. They shared a cold meal and a subdued discussion about how Clausen’s murder should be reported. CRI’s silence since the detonation, though still unexplained, had saved them from the need for a quick decision.

  “We can’t let Ghirra be made the scapegoat,” Susannah insisted.

  “Two bodies, two murders. It’s easy,” McPherson offered over her shoulder from the pilot’s chair. “They had a fight and killed each other.”

  “One look at his throat and the forensics will know better.”

  “Can’t we just lose him someplace in this godforsaken desert? Say he got blown up by his own charges?”

  “That’s sure what he’d do if it was one of us,” Danforth declared quietly.

  McPherson flew at the upper limit of the Sled’s altitude range, seeking the fastest possible straight-line return. The mountain ranges were hard sweeps of serrated shadow. The cracked yellow planet rolled by beneath them, its barren monotony echoed by the dimming, empty sky. They took no rest stops, racing to reach DulElesi before darkfall yet dreading the news they carried with them.

  “Stav’s still talking as if Lagri ‘died’ in the explosion. Wonder how the Sawl myths cover the death of a goddess,” Susan nah mused.

  Danforth was grim. “Probably don’t, but those weather priests are sure to have figured out something bad’s occurred. Must he getting really unlivable back there about now.”

  “What are their chances, Tay?”

  He shook his head. “Goddess or machine, whatever it was Emil blew up, the climate is reverting to what it ‘should’ be in the presence of the Coal Sack. Survival for the Sawls is measured now by how long their supplies of food and water hold out. They’ll never harvest another crop on this world. They’ll never see another rainfall, I doubt even so much as a cloud. It’s what Emil intended, I’m sure: that if there were machines and he destroyed them, our only recourse would be to encourage the CONPLEX claim, in order to effect an emergency evacuation of the population, which only CONPLEX has the resources to carry out.”

  The second silver-shrouded bundle drew their simultaneous gaze. It lay at the back of the hold, unattended. Susannah said musingly, “So he wins in the end anyway.”

  “Yeah. But at least we don’t have him around to gloat.”

  Later, Susannah tried to interest Danforth in her theories about the building of the Nolagri tunnels, He nosed casually through her data,
yawning, depressed, weary from his turn at the controls.

  “Organic, huh? All of it.”

  She was not sure he believed her, She showed him a curl of the horn-like material. “Even the big slanting walls where the sun was shining in.”

  He grunted politely, “Interesting.”

  But after several hours of sleep and a few more in the cockpit, sunk deep in a pensive, dusky silence, Danforth called to her suddenly.

  The edge in his voice and the brief veer and drop of the Sled sent Susannah scurrying forward, scattering the cup of water she had been unsuccessfully urging on Ghirra.

  “What? What is it?”

  The Sled flew steadily again, but Danforth looked as if he’d been struck by an attack of vertigo. “Wake up Ibiá,” he demanded. “Get him up here!”

  “Tay, are you…?”

  “Just get him up here!”

  Stavros had no stake in dire emergencies, survival being low on his current priority list. But to please Susannah, he got up and shuffled to the cockpit like an old man routed out of bed in the middle of the night.

  “Sit there.” Danforth brusquely indicated the copilot’s seat. “Tell me again about that Sawl genesis myth, about the king and his daughters.”

  Stavros blinked at him dully and backed away from his vehemence as if from a blinding light. The Sled began a slow, sickening slide to starboard as Danforth grabbed him.

  “No, you don’t, Ibiá! This is important!”

  Stavros let himself be dragged forward. While Danforth leveled the veering craft, he settled heavily into the empty chair. He began the Tale of Origins in chanted Sawlish, then caught himself in confusion as Danforth turned to stare. Images of his Dance haunted him. He began again in English, stumbling at first but gaining confidence as the two languages merged in his brain and he could sing his translation with the grace and rhythm of the original.

  “Raellil,” Liphar murmured in admiration, and squeezed into his chosen burrow between Stavros’ knee and the hull.

  Danforth interrupted the recitation mid-sentence. “That’s it, right there! There’s no other explanation, given the data. It says three daughters: the two goddesses and the third is the Sawls. The two stronger sisters were charged with the protection of the weaker middle child.