Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
This kind of harassment, which was widespread, made the Tripsingers who did it feel slightly better, but did almost nothing to mitigate the danger to the Presences. The troops kept on moving eastward, and when the orders from Colonel Lang began to reach them, there were bodies of well-equipped men dallying along within a few hours’ march of almost twenty major Presences.
The orders told them they needed delay no longer.
Sergeant (sometime) Halky Bend had been detailed to lead a small group of men at a fast pace, guided by an unwilling Explorer knight, by a circuitous route to the Watchers. The route was no good for wagons or mules, but men on foot could make it. Bend had been released from the disciplinary barracks in order to lead the group because he was known to move quickly, he was thought to be indomitable, and he had been in the stockade only for breaking most of the bones in a woman’s face, not for any serious breach of military discipline.
When the orders came, Halky, his men, and the Explorer – who had been marching for some days at the end of a short and uncomfortable rope – were still miles from the Watchers.
‘Get a move on,’ Halky instructed the Explorer, both verbally and physically. ‘Accordin’ to this map, we’ve got five miles to go yet!’
His instructions were interrupted by the return of a point man who came back over an eastern ridge at a run, hollering, ‘Sar’n, Sar’n,’ as though he’d spotted a diamond mine. When they arrived at the top of the ridge, it was easy to see why. The False Eagers lay below them, ranked towers of glittering gems. Halky’s lips parted in a lascivious smile. He licked them with a suddenly dry tongue, then spread the map to see whether anyone had identified this opportunity for him.
The glittering spires of the Eagers were regarded as one of the visual wonders of the known universe; they were not listed on the map as a target; they threatened no shipping route; no one had thought to guard them. To Halky Bend, however, they were an irresistible lure.
Halky had left Heron’s World just one step ahead of the planetary police. He had stolen nothing much, killed nobody important, and engaged in no large-scale fraud or blackmail. Halky’s crimes were often not motivated by profit at all. He simply liked to break things. His earliest years had been made joyous by destruction. His first orgasm had been accompanied by the incomparable clatter of huge windows falling before a fusillade of stones. He and several adolescent cronies had twice managed to shatter millennia-old stained-glass windows in a historic church and get clean away, though later and more ambitious exploits, which brought together certain incendiary devices and several large public buildings, brought the police closing on his heels. Well aware of this, he had joined the military and shipped out.
Now as he stared at the marvelous scintillation of the Eagers, he heard in his mind the tinkle and crash of broken crystal, the satisfying impact one felt when hitting something that would not bend or give way and could not hit back. With a feeling not so much akin as identical to sexual lust, he announced target practice. The troop set up their simple mortars and fired a few rounds to get the range. Thousand-year crystals shattered and fell. Diamond towers shivered into glittering shards. A cry as of agonized reproach came from the ground, and hearing this the troopers whooped and cheered, bringing the mortars to bear upon the few Tineea Singers that were still intact. Within the hour, the Eagers were no more.
While everyone was having fun, the Explorer escaped.
Within the next hour, every Presence of Jubal knew the Eagers were gone. They told every Tripsinger and every viggy within range of their voices. As soon as the Explorer found friends, every Presence, every Tripsinger, and every viggy also knew the name of Halky Bend.
* * *
A large company, under the command of Colonel Roffles Lang himself, was brought by coastal flier to the southern coast and then inland as far as was safe to do so. The company needed to march only a little farther north to reach the Enigma and begin an assault on it. Tripsingers from Deepsoil Five fought in defense of the shrieking Presence alongside a dozen Explorer knights, but they could not get close enough to the well-armed troops to cause them any real damage. The Enigma shuddered, screamed in two voices, and fell at last into a mountain of scarlet glass, a bloody wound on Jubal’s skin. The Tripsinger defenders retreated northward to the citadel at Deepsoil Five, which they felt they would have to defend before long. Colonel Lang regarded the results of the action with satisfaction and sat down to look at the map. There were other targets listed on their route of march: Sky Hammer, the Amber Axe, the Deadly Dozen, Cloud Gatherer, and then, finally and most importantly, the Black Tower. The Presences were so close together that Lang felt they could probably all be destroyed within a day. In fact, he could leave the closer and lesser targets to a junior officer and quick-march with a select group to take care of the Black Tower himself.
Stopping in the Redfang Range on their way to the Jammers, a gun crew took sight on the Redfang and saturated the area with explosive charges. When they were finished, only rubble remained – rubble and the far-off sound of viggies grieving.
Outside Splash One, the CHASE Commission members, all of whom had seen and heard both the Emerald Eminence and the viggies, stubbornly insisted on arguing their findings for what remained of the day.
‘A trick,’ asserted one dewlapped man with darting and suspicious eyes who had been paid well for his participation on the commission and had already spent the money. He was convinced the credit would have to be returned if he did not do what he had been paid to do, and he did not have it to give back. ‘It was a trick,’ he said firmly, eyes flicking from left to right to left again.
‘What about the viggies?’ someone demanded for the tenth time.
The viggies were inarguable. The viggies were sitting there, occasionally bouncing in their comfortable chairs, looking interested and asking questions. Enough of the commission members clung to their commitments, however, that it was not until very late that night that the exact wording of the findings was agreed upon. Since it was so late, the commission retired without announcing what those findings were.
In the bowels of the BDL building, Harward Justin blew the dust from a cracked notebook he had dug from the back of a long-closed drawer and flipped the pages to find the checklist he had written there years ago. Reading from it, item by item, he crossed the room to a locked control board, which he tugged at in futile impatience for a moment before fumbling in his pocket for keys. He had not been in this room for almost ten years. He had not really thought the time would ever come when he would need it.
Staggering footsteps on the stairs brought him away from the control board, teeth bared, furious at the interruption. Wuyllum Thonks was stalking down the stairs as though he were at home in the gardens of Government House, Honeypeach behind him, both wearing expressions of angry disdain.
‘Justin,’ complained Honeypeach. ‘We’ve just been watching troopers marching in from somewhere. They’ve surrounded us. I don’t think it’s Colonel Lang’s men. I haven’t seen him. But they do have guns and things. And I can’t reach Ymries at all, I’ve tried and tried…’
Wuyllum added his own comments. ‘It’d be smart to go on out and give ourselves up, Justin. Put a good face on it, show them we’re innocent. They’ll never convict us of anything anyhow. Not you or us, not with the friends we have and the money we can put into our defense. If we stay in here, they may assault the building! We could all get killed.’
‘Shut up,’ snarled Justin. ‘You and your whorelady get out of here, Wuyllum. I’ve given you guest rooms. Go stay there.’
Ignoring the insult to his lady, Wuyllum went on. ‘At least tell your security people to let us out. If you don’t want to give up, all right…’
‘Justin!’ cried Honeypeach, ‘why, how could you say such a horrible thing …’
Justin turned, arm out, catching her across the face with the full force of his weight, crumpling her against the wall. ‘I said to get that slut out of here,’ he instructed Thonks. ‘I’ve still got a chance if I can bring enough of those damned crystals down in a hurry, and I’m not going to waste time fooling with you or your trull. If you want to go on living, get away from me.’ He turned away from them, not bothering to see whether Wuyllum dragged the bloodied Honey-peach away.
The installation before him controlled a battery of chemical rockets, rockets without electronic components, rockets carrying nothing that could be altered or burned out by the mysterious interventions of Jubal. The Watchers, the Mad Gap, the Enigma, the Black Tower, and half a hundred other Presences had been pretargeted by these missiles. Though Verbold’s troops had probably demolished some or even many of these Presences, the fact that troops now surrounded the BDL building argued that the destruction orders had already been countermanded. Justin could not depend on the troops to clear the transportation routes on Jubal …
But if the troops couldn’t, the rockets could. Let the rockets fly and the routes to the dirt towns would be open. There wouldn’t be any Presences left on this part of Jubal! Even if he had to lie low for a while, he could come back to pick up the pieces. With all that money on Serendipity – his own and what his phoney Crystallites had squirreled away – there was plenty to start again. Even if he had to leave Jubal for a while …
With the redundancies he’d programmed in to prevent accidents, it would take an hour’s work to set up the firing sequences. Once they were set, however, Justin could leave them to their work. He had a bolt hole, an escape tunnel dug ostensibly as a sewer line when the BDL headquarters was built. At the far end of it was a cavernous garage, and in that garage was a quiet-car. Eastward, about two hours’ drive, there was a refuge he had prepared years before. He could hide there until he could get off-planet to collect the money that would let him come back and start again. He had planned for trouble. Justin always planned for trouble. Just as he planned for Jubal!
His plans for Jubal were not going to be forestalled by a few talking crystals and a mutinous commission. His lips drawn back into an animal snarl, Justin set to work.
‘Stalemate,’ said Rheme Gentry to Tasmin. ‘Justin’s holed up in the BDL building. I’m afraid of what he has in there. Logically, we should take the place out now, but we don’t have the weapons here to knock it down – all the heavy weaponry on the planet is with Lang’s men. We won’t even have enough men to mount an assault until Lang’s troops return, assuming they do. All we can do is keep Justin and his men penned up in there until the General can get some help from off-planet.’
‘The General?’
‘My uncle. Zorton Pardo. He’s the commander of CHAIN, and if you don’t know what that is, neither does anyone else. It’s the very quiet, almost invisible enforcement arm of the PEC. I sort of work for him. He showed up here as one of the PEC observers. He’s taken command of the troops on Jubal. But my message never got off-planet, and with a typical lack of foresight, he didn’t bring a gun-ship with him.’
‘Has he stopped the destruction!’
‘Orders have gone out. It may take a while for them to arrive. You know that, Tripsinger.’ Rheme’s face was blotched and gray with fatigue. ‘And if Justin does what I think he means to, it won’t make any difference.’
Tasmin put his face into his hands. The Enigma was gone. Redfang was gone. The Eagers were gone. All the Presences had trumpeted the destruction of the Eagers. Tasmin remembered the Eagers. He remembered traveling through them with Clarin, when he was first aware of Clarin. He remembered going home from them to Celcy, when Celcy was still alive. The memories swirled and twined to become joined in his mind, twisted together like a striped candy, infinitely sweet, nauseatingly sad, a pain that clenched the guts like a cancer, eating him – women and Jubal, love and love – the one destroyed, the other destroyed. His woman, women, this place. Everything he loved. This man, he said to himself with hating fury, this man is destroying, has destroyed everything. Harward Justin!
‘What d’you think he’s got in there?’ Tasmin gasped.
‘We know what he has. I’ve picked up some of the original construction workers, and they’re happy to tell us everything they ever knew. He’s got over a hundred pretargeted chemical rockets without any fancy electronics at all. No seeker components. No hunters. They’re aimed just as you’d aim a projectile rifle. By aiming the launch tubes.’
‘He’s going to set them off,’ Tasmin said definitely.
‘He may, yes.’
‘Not may. Will. That’s exactly what he’ll do. He’s like an animal when you corner it. He’ll go down fighting with everything he has.’ Tasmin’s mind spun, jittered. He knew his perception of Justin was true. ‘Justin’s theory would be he could always pick up the pieces. Break Jubal into enough pieces, no one else will care about it, then he’ll salvage what’s left. Or he’d think that if he committed enough destruction, he could get away in the confusion. Either way, Rheme, he’s going to set them off.’
‘How do we stop him?’ Rheme asked helplessly.
Tasmin concentrated, his nose wrinkling almost like an animal’s. ‘Evacuate the area around the BDL building,’ he demanded. ‘Move. Right now. Get the troopers away from there.’
‘What do you …’ Rheme stopped as he saw he was talking to Tasmin’s fleeing back. He was headed away at a run, toward the Eminence. Cursing briefly, Rheme turned to do what Tasmin had suggested.
Tasmin found Don and Clarin beside the Eminence, together with Bondri Gesel. He hailed them breathlessly.
Two verbal acknowledgments, one quaver of song, and a deep musical tone that was somehow interrogative.
He blurted out what Rheme had told him, what he himself suspected, repeating and stuttering, trying to make both Bondri and the Eminence understand projectiles, what they were, where they were, what they might do. ‘There!’ he pointed. ‘Behind the BDL building wall.’
‘More destruction?’ queried the Eminence, the mighty voice trembling, shivering. With fear? Apprehension? Fury? It was the Eminence that had told them the Eagers were gone, the Enigma, Redfang, the Amber Axe – the list had seemed endless.