"One marine, with one rifle, and my people just ran away."
"There may have been more. It was a very dark night. Electricity was off, and our informant could not call for backup."
"And he expects to get paid!" Victoria shrieked. "Next you're going to tell me he deserves to get paid."
"No, ma'am."
"You bet he's not going to get paid. And don't you think you can slip this one by me. I'll go over your department's expenses for the next six months, line by line. I better not see this—this—coward and traitor being paid."
"Yes, ma'am. Certainly, ma'am."
"Now, go find out how somebody made a mountain disappear. If the star people are scared of it, who did it?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Idiot." He had escaped out the door and was saved from having to answer that remark.
Ray lay on his back, a gray briefcase under his arm. This case carried an emergency cardiac kit, not explosives. Still, it should be all the reminder he needed in his sleep. If he slept. His heart pounded, his blood raced. Sleep was not going to come easy. He willed himself to relax.
And was marching across the polished marble floor of the Unity presidential briefing hall, toward President Urm and four of his honchos. Ray wore the uniform he'd worn to that fateful meeting; his polished boots clicked with each step on the cold marble. Despite the chill, Ray felt sweat trickle from his armpits. Under his left arm, he carried the briefcase of explosives he'd risked his life to transport to this moment.
With a blink, Ray rejected the scene. Yes to the hall, yes to his uniform. No to the Teachers as powerful Unity thugs. They became five squabbling Wardhaven politicians. Ray considered that, then rejected it again. If his mind was translating the Teacher to him, quite possibly it was also projecting images to the Teacher. Ray would control those images.
Five university professors stood before Ray in dowdy regalia. Ray remembered them, an economics professor who couldn't balance his own checkbook, a philosopher who couldn't prove his own existence, a counselor who'd lost his wife to a convicted mass murderer. Ray smiled, not a bad representation of what he'd seen so far of the Teacher.
"You 're back," one on the right growled. "Want more ?"
"No. I've come with a message for you."
"What kind of message?" the center asked.
Ray brought the briefcase out from beneath his arm. A table appeared in front of him. He put the briefcase down, entered its combination, the one that set the charges, and turned it toward the five. "I am Colonel Raymond Longknife. I command Captain Mattim Abeeb, formerly commander of the Humanity cruiser Sheffield. In the recent war, he was ordered to kill a planet, and the billion people living on it. To prevent that, I killed the president of the political group known then as Unity and ended that war."
"Ancient history," one on the right wing grumbled.
"If you cause any further damage to the humans living on this planet, or by your actions or inactions cause them to do further damage to each other, I will order Captain Abeeb to use the resources at his disposal to move the asteroids in this solar system out of their orbits and onto a collision course with this planet. He can and will see that this planet is hit so hard and so often that it is shaken to its very core. The next ship arriving around this star will find only an asteroid belt where this planet is. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes," the center said, chastened. Ones on the right and the left started to speak. Several looked on the verge of apoplexy. The center waved them to silence. "I think we have a much better understanding of your people now."
"Good. Leave us alone."
* * *
And Ray rolled over and went to sleep. His dreams were of Rita, a tiny baby in her arms. He kept wanting to ask her if it was a boy or a girl, but it was so much fun just looking at the child, he never got around to saying a word.
Ray enjoyed breakfast the next morning, right up to when Mary glanced behind him. "Dumont, where have you been?" Ray turned to find Dumont, Jeff, and a teary-eyed young teenage girl.
"I think you ought to hear Nikki," Jeff said.
"I made the mountain disappear," the girl blurted out. "Or we did," she corrected herself. All conversation around the room died, like a fuse had been pulled.
Ray looked the trembling girl over. She couldn't be more than thirteen. Now he remembered her, the brewmaster's other daughter. Jeff hung around the older one, or vice versa. "You look exhausted," Ray said. "Find her a chair."
Kat was off hers in a flash, got it under the young woman a split second before the local collapsed, then pulled over another chair for herself. Ray motioned Dumont and Jeff to sit; he didn't want anyone towering over this poor kid as she told her story. There had to be a lot more behind the few words she'd gotten out.
With a nod to Kat, Ray gave her the go to be the friend, the big sister, in the interrogation. Much better approach than a rubber hose. Kat leaned forward, rubbed Nikki's hand gently. "How did you make the mountain disappear?"
"We didn't mean to," Nikki said slowly. Then the dam broke. "Daga found it. Daga's always finding things. Small stuff. This was big. A box, three feet long, maybe a foot and a half square. Cold. Boy, it was hard carrying it, but it got warmer as the morning went on. I thought I was getting warmer with the sun up, but I think it was, too. We didn't know what the box was for. We didn't know," she pleaded with Kat.
"I believe you. What did you do with it?"
"We lugged it out to this hill west of town. We couldn't get it open, not even Daga, until I found the right place to push. Then Daga found the other place, and it opened. All it looked like was a piece of window glass. You could see through it." Nikki scrunched up her face. "At least on one side. But it was all black on the other side; you couldn't see anything that way. And when you looked through it, things got really close. Emma wanted to look at Hazel Dell, but Daga wanted to look at the mountains. We were looking at one when it happened."
"What?" Kat encouraged Nikki over the pause.
Now the young woman spoke slowly. "The machine started making this noise. It got worse and worse. We were trying to find a way to turn it off. Really we were. Then there was this flash, and the mountain disappeared and the box closed up on itself. All by itself!"
"Did you try to reopen it?"
"No! I just wanted to find a hole in the ground to bury it again. Find a deep pool in a cave and sink it. But Daga would have nothing of that."
"What did Daga do?"
"She made me carry the box off to a cave. We had to carry it all by ourselves because Emma and Willow never stopped running after the mountain, you know, disappeared."
"Smart kids," Dumont growled.
"I couldn't leave it lying there!" Nikki defended herself.
"No, you couldn't," Ray said softly.
Go easy on this kid. She's our only lead
, he sent with a glance around his team.
"Do you remember where you put it?" Kat asked.
"We checked this morning, sir," Dumont put in. "It's gone."
"I think Daga took the others there," Nikki said, "the ones who want to save the land for farming. And the three quiet city folks who came out to see you mine that hill."
"Well, that changes everything," Mary growled.
"A gadget two teenage girls can carry that will make a mountain disappear fifty klicks away," Ray breathed. "Oh, hell."
"Mountain, city, my base," Mary expanded. "I don't think 'Oh, hell' quite cuts the mustard, Colonel."
They adjourned to the HQ. Ray, Mary, Lek, and Chief Barber tried to figure out how to chase a vanishing box and protect a base from it. "Chief, launch the shuttle to the west. Sweep from here to Refuge on full sensors. Put everything we've got analyzing the results. If we spot half a dozen people carrying a one-by-half-by-half-meter box, get a sky eye on it immediately."
"Yessir."
"Kat," Ray said into his commlink.
"Yessir."
"Bring back all the sky eyes. Get the location of the target cave from Jeff. Assume a circle fifty klicks out from it and expanding at a walking pace. I want the eyes on it like a blanket. You'll be getting some shuttle feed. We're looking for a group of seven or less people carrying a large package among them or one with a backpack."
Ray and Mary retreated to the map table. At least here their problem could be reduced to a familiar drill: Find them, fix them in place, take them down. Could be fun except for the minor fact that all this group had to do was point a windowpane at you, and you vanished. Hum, maybe Mary's pass wasn't the worst tactical problem he'd ever faced.
Protecting the base was hardly an easier problem. There were several knolls and hills that had a direct line of sight on them. "No way we can move our gear out of here," Barber said.
"Maybe we won't have to," Lek said. "Last blimp out from Refuge had a couple of
resident experts on low-metal electronics. You know they're using salt water in place of metals."
"I know about their trains," Ray nodded.
"Well, between us, we came up with an idea for plastic polymer and saltwater ID cards. Won't be as small as ours"— Lek pointed at a wrist unit—"but it'll give us something we can give to everyone living near the base. If a blimp picks up someone with a heartbeat and no card, we check them out."
"Sounds good. Let's launch the northern recon group today. I want to move up the raid on the Sterling archives."
Mary shook her head. "You got to remember, boss, I only got fifty-three marines, and seventeen are in Refuge. You want to send the recon out without an escort?"
"No. Cut the northern recon to one day. The other project goes as soon as they get back."
An hour later, a blimp headed north to take core samples in out-of-the-way places that wouldn't bother the Covenanters, and might give Ray a taste of any new electronic systems recently put in place by the Teacher. The shuttle was making its return pass at thirty-five thousand meters, shooting its data take to Kat and her analysts. One spy eye was giving them its view of the immediate area around the cave from ten thousand meters; the other two were winging their way back.
Half a dozen people with a very dangerous box were doing their best to stay lost.
Ray needed data about these people, data he didn't have. "Where's the padre?" he asked the duty section.
"Ah, sir, he's at his church. Hearing confessions, I think he said. All day."
Ray's first drive was not quite as exhilarating as his first walk, but it was fun to control his own vehicle. It also served as a reminder that not all the things this crazy planet was doing were bad. Could any of them have survived if their white cells hadn't been modified?
The church was stone, with a thatched roof. As Ray stepped into its shady nave, he paused. To let his eyes adjust, he told himself, not because the transition to this sacred space required it. The church smelled of wood from the rough-hewn benches, beeswax from the single candle burning on the altar, and incense. A kneeler creaked as Father Joseph turned from his prayers to observe who had wandered into his quiet reserve.
Ray gave him a half salute. "Hearing confessions all day? You don't look busy." If Ray had caught the priest in a lie, he wanted it out in the open now, not later.
The priest took a length of purple cloth from his pocket, crossed himself with it, kissed it, and put it around his neck. The stole seemed out of place against the common peasant dress he wore. Then Ray blinked. He'd seen chaplains put the same stole on over battle dress as well as black shirts with Roman collars.
"People will be wandering this land today" the priest said quietly, "hungry, hurting, maybe in need of confessing something they did or didn't do. There are extra potatoes in the rectory to feed the stomach. I'm here to feed the soul. What have you come for?"
"Food for my mind. I have a problem."
The priest did not seem surprised. He motioned Ray forward. As Ray joined him beside the first pew, the priest genuflected to the altar and headed toward two comfortable chairs off to the side before a roughly worked statue of a woman and child. Ray gave the altar a nod, out of respect for the priest's belief, and followed. The priest settled into one chair, said nothing, steepled his fingers, and leaned back calmly with the air of one ready to listen patiently to anything and everything. As Ray sat, he decided to pull no punches.
"There is a device loose on this planet that can make a mountain disappear, or a city—and everyone in it."
The priest whistled. "God has granted you such power."
"Nope, not God. And not us. Apparently Daga from your parish discovered it. Now it's in the hands of radical folks. I don't know what they intend to do with it, and that scares me."
"And any reasonable person," the priest breathed. "Daga was a delightful child. Something came over her last year." The priest tapped his forehead. "This thing your doctor has found in our heads must be a great challenge to Almighty God's mercy."
"I think this is just normal human cussedness," Ray said. "I need to know what you know about what's going on."
The priest started in his chair. Back straight, he shook his head. "There is little I can tell you. Daga has rarely been to Mass this last year. Parents worry. I tell them to pray, and show their children love. This is a stage they must walk through. They will come out the other side."