Dirge (18 page)

13

I
t was a good life. Mallory was happy with his decision to resign his position on the
Chagos
in order to become one of the first settlers of the new world. That choice would not make him rich, but perhaps his progeny, if he ever had any, would one day find it useful to be able to boast that their great-grandfather, or whatever, had been among the original surveyors and colonizers of Argus V.

Despite his irascible, often contentious personality, he had no difficulty finding work. As a jack-of-all-trades on KK-drive craft like the
Chagos
and a retired ship’s engineer—and at a precocious age, at that—he was a master of many skills that were highly valued in the new colony. Disdaining seductive offers from the rapidly burgeoning municipality of Weald and the innumerable companies and concerns that specialized in abetting the development of new colonies, he set himself up as an independent consultant. Wealth did not flow in his direction, but he made a more than adequate living. In his ample free time he visited many of the beautiful and as yet unexplored regions of the temperate equatorial belt or enjoyed the home and shop whose construction he had supervised. Its isolation on an uninhabited mountainside deep within a choice patch of virgin alien woods gave him the freedom to tinker with the surplus freighter-class lifeboat he had purchased on a whim for an astonishingly modest sum.

When he needed credit he would choose from among the many standing assignments on offer. Given the headlong forward expansion of the colony, these were always in plentiful supply. There were few newly arriving settlers with his knowledge and experience. His expertise was eagerly sought.

In this manner five years passed during which Mallory, while not entirely happy—such a state of existence not being in his nature—was forced to concede that he was less discontented than usual. When compelled to visit the city for those necessary items he could not manufacture or grow himself, he tolerated the occasional company of others. As a known recluse who was irritable by nature, he was not sought out except when his professional abilities were in demand. This suited both him and everyone else on the planet just fine.

He did not hear the general announcement that interrupted all tridee programming. That particular morning was unusually bright and clear, even for pristine, unpolluted Treetrunk. As the sun rose and warmed his mountainside he ate a leisurely breakfast on the hand-hewn porch and then prepared to spend a stimulating and enjoyable day working in the simple shed that housed his shop and hobbies.

The walk from his home to the outbuilding was a short one. Though he had built a covered walkway to shield him from the rain and snow of Argus V’s wet season, he had no need of it that day. The sun was out, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. The shed itself was a single large enclosed structure stained brown and green to match the surrounding trees. Such a large, unmasked building would have attracted the attention of the passing curious. Having no wish to be disturbed and being fanatical in his desire for privacy, Mallory had caused both his home and workplace to be camouflaged from the rapidly expanding population. Newcomers in particular he sought to avoid. They were invariably effusive and friendly, two qualities he did not seek in neighbors.

Four months before, he had taken the old lifeboat out for a short flight from the capital district over to Demure and back. While successful and as smooth as could be expected, the journey had predictably loosened some internal components. Entering the open boat, he found his tools where he had last left them and settled down happily to effect the necessary repairs.

Several times during the morning he thought he heard the echo of distant, dull booming. Despite the absence of clouds when he had made the walk from home to shop, he put the noise down to an approaching thunderstorm. Rough weather could blow up on Treetrunk at any time, and with summer approaching abrupt atmospheric disturbances could be expected. Or it might have been a construction team excavating new foundations for large buildings on the outskirts of Weald itself. Or perhaps it was simply boisterous adolescents working mischief closer to his home. He gave the random, sporadic echoes barely a second thought.

It was nearly two when, sweaty but satisfied, he set the industrial-strength tools aside and resolved to get something to eat. As he often did, he’d labored through the lunch hour. One of the pleasures of working for oneself, he reflected as he wiped at his face and rose to leave the lifeboat, was the freedom to eat when one was hungry instead of when it was expected.

Exiting the shed, he started back toward the house—and stopped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he stared in the direction of the capital. Rising into the crystalline air, smoke from numerous sources drifted together to form an enormous dirty brown cloud that had begun to block out the sun.
What the hell…?
he thought.

Moving a little faster, he hurried back to the house. Some kind of widespread industrial disaster had struck Weald. At the moment he could not imagine its nature. Modern fire prevention techniques prevented destructive blazes from spreading freely from house to house, building to building. Yet the distant glow of flames and widely separated pillars of smoke suggested not only spreading, but that the conflagration had broken out simultaneously in different parts of the city.

Hurrying straight to his den, he activated the tridee and waited for the first three-dimensional image to congeal above the floor. Colors and shapes appeared, but did not coalesce. No matter how much he fiddled with the controls he could not induce the flickering polygons and sparking clouds to come together into anything recognizable. Similar static dominated every infochute. Then he lost the static, too. The air in the room was silent.

Something was very wrong.

Not panicked yet, but anxious and concerned, he rushed back outside. If anything, the smoke cloud had grown larger in his absence. He couldn’t be certain, but it seemed as if new smoke pillars were appearing even as he watched. The recurrent booms he had heard before were sounding more frequently now.

He had never seen a city under attack, but he had seen tridee recordings, both fictional and historical. Who would assault a defenseless colony and why, he struggled to imagine. His first thought was of the AAnn. The thranx insisted the aggressive reptilian species would jump on any advantage it could find. But Treetrunk was much too cold to suit them, far from the nearest of their own worlds, and did not even lie along a potentially Empire-threatening vector. Nor was it a storehouse of valuable resources that could not be found elsewhere.

The same reasons only more so applied to the thranx. Like the great majority of humankind his feelings toward the insectoids was ambivalent. They wanted to be friends, but most people were not anxious to jump at the opportunity. Distance remained largely because of the species’ appearance. Having spent thousands of years battling the thranx’s much smaller very distant terrestrial relatives, it would take time before people were ready to invite them into their homes.

Who else, then? he wondered as he stood stunned and watching the distant destruction blossom. Surely not the Quillp, as inoffensive a species as humans had yet encountered. Still, the Quillp were colonizers and settlers, too, and their sphere of influence lay much closer to that of the rapidly expanding humans than did the empire of the AAnn, though not the thranx.

Might it be a new, previously unencountered race? Standing there on the mountainside watching the city he had helped to found burn, that seemed to him at that moment the most likely explanation. Whoever it was, they were technologically sophisticated.

Retreating back into the house, he returned to the porch carrying a handheld scoper. Methodically, he played it over the perimeter of the great cloud, then scanned the interior. There was no sign of aircraft. The descending explosives were extraatmospheric. They were being launched from orbit and then guided to their targets with precision. A more distant pillar of rising smoke marked the location of the city’s shuttleport. Two others indicated the sites of outlying towns.

While thorough, the intent of the attack was apparently not to annihilate completely. Had that been the case, he would not have heard multiple booms while he had been working on his salvaged lifeboat: only one overwhelming one as a single nuke obliterated the entire city. Instead, it was still there, albeit burning furiously. He did not doubt that the attackers, whoever they were, possessed such weapons of mass destruction or the ability to manufacture them. Any sentience sufficiently advanced to negotiate space-plus had to first achieve nuclear technology. You couldn’t learn to manipulate the components of other space until you had mastered the minutiae of this one.

What were they after? What did they want? If total obliteration was not their aim, it suggested they wanted something intact. He couldn’t imagine anything that an invading force could not have acquired simply through threat. The only explanation, he decided, was that the attackers wanted to protect their identity. Based on the collapse of planetary communications and on what he could see from the front of his home, it was a hypothesis that gained credence with every passing moment. He had no doubt that the space-minus communications facility near the shuttleport was one of the first sites to be targeted. Almost certainly the other one at Chagos Downs had suffered a similar fate.

If so, it suggested that the aliens knew what targets to hit first and where to find them. That put the lie to the notion that the attackers were a new, previously unknown and unencountered species. There were always KK-drive ships in orbit around Treetrunk, and they would have noted and communicated the presence of any alien vessels embarked on a survey of strategically important locations. Therefore the attackers must have arrived with a carefully laid-out, premeditated plan of assault based on prior research already in hand.

Even so, the unannounced arrival of one or more large alien craft would have been noted by the government and as a matter of course passed along to the citizenry through the usual media channels. He had seen no such bulletin on the tridee, not the previous night or this morning during breakfast, when everything had been operating fine.

He was missing something, he realized. Something important. Whatever it was, the authorities had missed it as well. Not that there was much they could do to stave off a determined attack by a properly equipped military force. As a new, developing colony Treetrunk had only domestic policing weaponry of its own. Humankind was not at war with any of the known intelligent species. Disagreements that revolved around matters of commerce and settlement were settled by discussion, sometimes loud but never physical. Interstellar war on a large scale was too complex and expensive a proposition to be viable. Even the AAnn realized that and limited their occasional depredations, usually in thranx territory, to isolated, confinable piratical acts. No one thought of assaulting an entire world.

Until now, he told himself grimly.

Having returned to the notably aggressive AAnn, his thoughts once again considered what reason the bipedal reptilians might have for launching so violent an assault on an innocuous colony world. Try as he might, he could not conceive of one. Of course, he was speculating from the standpoint of human motivation. The AAnn might have reasons for attacking Treetrunk that were quite incomprehensible to him or to any other human.

He needed information. In the absence of the usual tridee chutes, he would have to try something else.

Rushing back into the shop, he activated the antique communications console on board the lifeboat. Designed to scan and decipher every possible corner of the spectrum that might contain downloadable information, under his direction it began by checking the bands that carried information from ship to ship and ship to ground. There was plenty of chatter, but it was all in colors and hisses unknown to the unit. It was the attackers, he decided. Talking among themselves. It was maddening to know that he was seeing and hearing the answers to his most pressing questions but could not decrypt them.

Changing focus, he sampled more familiar bandwidth. As expected, all the usual tridee chutes were either dead or suffocating in visual static. Weald was silent. So were Chagos Downs and Waldburg and every other town that boasted its own chute or uplink. Nothing came from above, the dozen or so communications satellites proving as quiet as their land-based transmitters and translators. Destroyed during the initial attack, most probably. It was what he would have done. Blind and isolate your prey first, then butcher at leisure.

He had almost given up hope and had decided to fly his truck as close to the city’s outskirts as he dared in hopes of learning what was happening when something flickered in the lifeboat’s viewing alcove. It was smaller than similar images would have been in his house because the display space was smaller.

What he was picking up, distorted and intermittent, came from a mobile remote, an automated unit that was the property of one of Treetrunk’s two independent media concerns. He identified it by the small rotating logo that hovered above the floor of the lifeboat. There was sound but no commentary. Whoever had been traveling with the unit was quite likely dead, murdered by the invaders. Since communications both local and extraplanetary had been among the invaders’ first targets it was not unreasonable to assume that everyone back at the media concern’s main offices were dead by now as well.

Unconcerned and oblivious to the fate of its human operators, the independently powered robot soldiered on, obediently transmitting tridee images to a base unit that probably no longer existed. No home or commercial receiver could pick up its pictures. For one thing, such interception of a commercial signal would have been illegal. It would take a skilled technician working with specialized equipment to make the grab. Someone like Mallory, for example, working with something like a lifeboat’s all-encompassing emergency instrumentation.