THE SWORD: BOOK V
CHAPTER ONE
"Raj?" Thom Poplanich muttered.
Then, slowly: "Raj, how
old are you?"
Raj Whitehall managed a smile. "Thirty," he said.
The perfect mirrored sphere of Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000
Mk. XIV's central . . . being . . . showed an image which seemed to give the lie to
that. Raj was tall, 190 centimeters, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, with wrists
that would have been thick on a much larger man. His eyes were grey; there were wrinkles
beside them now, and deep grooves running from beak nose to the corners of his mouth;
grey frosted the bowl-cut black hair at the temples. It wasn't the grey hairs or the
scars on the backs of his hands that made him seem at least forty, or ageless.
It
was the eyes.
Thom looked at his own image. Nothing at all had changed since
that moment when he'd frozen into immobility, five years ago. Not the unhealed shaving
nick on his thin olive cheek, or the tear in his floppy tweed trousers from a revolver
bullet. Raj had tried to shoot their way out when they'd been trapped here, far below
the Governor's Palace, in labyrinths unvisited since the fall of galactic civilization.
It hadn't worked. There was no escaping from some things.
life is change,
Center said. The voice of the ancient computer was like their own thoughts, but with
a vibrato overtone that somehow carried a sense of immense weight like a pressure
against the film of consciousness. even i change.
Raj and Thom looked
up, startled. "Center? You're alive?" Thom asked.
No words whispered
in their skull. Thom looked at his friend. Raj looks like an old man. For five
years he'd fought the battles of the Civil Government, under the orders of Barholm
Clerett, current occupant of the Chair . . . and with the ancient battle-computer
whispering at the back of his mind. Five years of that could change a man.
I
haven't changed a hair, outwardly . . . but that's the least of it. Five years
of mental communion with the machine that held all Mankind's accumulated knowledge.
Five years, or eternity. He thought of his life before that day, and it was . . .
unimaginable. Less real than the scenarios Center could spin from webs of data and
stochastic analysis. He'd been as carefree as a young man could be, whose grandfather
had been Governor until the Cleretts usurped the Chair. Free enough to strike up an
unlikely friendship with a young professional soldier, to share an interest in the
relics of pre-Fall Federation civilization hidden down here.
The two men gripped
forearms, then exchanged the embrahzo of close friends. Thom could smell coal-smoke
and gun-oil on the wool of his friend's uniform jacket, that and dogsweat and Suzette
Whitehall's sambucca jasmine perfume. The scents cut through the icy certainties
Center's teaching had implanted in his mind. Unshed tears prickled at his eyes as
he held the bigger man at arm's length.
"It's good to see you again,
my friend," he said quietly. "Back from another campaign?"
"Back
from the Western Territories, nearly a year," Raj said. "It went . . . successfully.
On the whole."
observe. The cool voice of the unliving mind spoke
in their brain:* * *
A trumpet sounded, flat blatting notes under the lowering rainclouds,
echoing back from the narrow shoulders of the cutting heading down to the river. The
platoon columns of Civil Government troops halted and the giant riding dogs crouched.
Men stepped free and double-timed forward, spreading out like the wings of a stooping
hawk. Thom could see the advancing enemy columns halt; they were barbarians in the
black-and-grey uniforms of the Brigade, the rulers of the Western Territories for
the past five centuries. Their banners held the double-lightning flash, white on red
and black.
Before the enemy a few hundred meters ahead had time to do more
than begin to recoil and mill, the order rang out:
"Company--"
"Platoon--"
"Front rank, volley fire, fwego."
BAM. Two hundred men in
a single shot, the red muzzle-flashes spearing out into the rain like a horizontal
comb.
The rear rank walked through the first. Before the echoes of the initial
shout of fire had died, the next rank fired--by half-platoons, eighteen men at a time,
in a rapid stuttering crash.
BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.
Center's viewpoint
was Raj, looking out through his eyes. The field-guns came up between the units.
"If
they break--" the officer beside Raj said. Thom recognized him as Ehwardo Poplanich,
his cousin.
The troopers advanced and fired, advanced and fired. The commanders
followed them, leading their own dogs.
"If," Raj replied.
The
guns fired case-shot, the loads spreading to maximum effect in the confined space.
Merciful smoke hid the result for an instant, and then the rain drummed it out of
the air. For fifty meters back from the head of the column the Brigaderos and their
dogs were a carpet of flesh that heaved and screamed. A man with no face staggered
toward the Civil Government line, ululating in a wordless trill of agony. The next
volley smashed him backward to rest in the tangled pink-grey intestines of a dog.
The animal still whimpered and twitched.
Only the smell was missing. Thom
swallowed dryly, past a tight throat.
The advancing force had gotten far enough
downslope that the reserve platoon and the second battery of guns could fire over
their heads. Shock-waves from the shells passing overhead slapped at the back of their
helmets like pillows of displaced air. Most of the head of the Brigaderos column was
trying to run away, but the railroad right-of-way was too narrow and the press behind
them too massive. Men spilled upslope toward the forested hills where the Civil Government's
nomad auxiliaries waited.
Just then the mercenaries--Skinners from the northeastern
steppes--opened up themselves with their two-meter sauroid-killing rifles. Driving
downhill on a level slope, their 15mm bullets went through three or four men at a
time. A huge sound came from the locked crowd of enemy troops, half wail and half
roar. Some were getting out their rifles and trying to return fire, standing or taking
cover behind mounds of dead. Lead slugs went by overhead, and not two paces from him
a trooper went unh! as if belly-punched, then to his knees and then flat.
The
rest of his unit walked past, reloading. Spent brass tinkled down around the body
lying on the railroad tracks, bouncing from the black iron strapping on the wooden
rails.
"Fwego!" * * *
Raj shook his head slightly; his hands were making unconscious grasping
motions.
"Yes, that's . . . well, I came to say goodbye."
"Goodbye?"
Thom asked sharply.
"That's right," Raj said, turning slightly away.
His eyes moved across the perfect mirrored surface of the sphere, that impossibly
reflected without distorting. "Things . . . well, Cabot Clerett, the Governor's
nephew--" and heir, the both knew "--was along on the campaign. There were
a number of difficulties, and he, ah, was killed."
observe: *
* *
Cabot's snarl turned to a smile of triumph as he leveled the revolver
at Raj; he was a stocky dark young man, much like his uncle. His finger tightened
on the trigger----and the carbine barked. The bullet was fired from less than a meter
away, close enough that the muzzle-blast pocked the skin behind his right ear with
grains of black powder. The entry-wound was a small round hole, but the bullet was
hollowpoint and it blasted a fist-sized opening in his forehead, the fid of hot brain
and bone-splinters missing Raj to spatter across his desk.
Clerett's eyes
bulged with the hydrostatic shock transmitted through his brain tissue, and his lips
parted in a single rubbery grimace. Then he fell face down, to lie in a spreading
pool of blood.
Strong shoulders crashed into the door. Raj moved with blurring
speed, snatching the carbine out of his wife Suzette's hands so swiftly that the friction-burns
brought an involuntary cry of pain. He pivoted back towards the outer doorway.
Raj's
officers crowded through. Among them was a short plump man in the knee-breeches and
long coat and lace sabot that were civilian dress in East Residence. His eyes bulged
too, as they settled on Cabot Clerett.
Raj spoke, his voice loud and careful.
"There's been a terrible accident," he said. "Colonel Clerett was examining
the weapon, and he was unfamiliar with the mechanism. I accept full responsibility
for this tragic mishap."
Silence fell in the room, amid the smell of
powdersmoke and the stink of blood and wastes voided at death. Everyone stared at
the back of the dead man's head, and the neat puncture behind his ear.
"Fetch
a priest," Raj went on. "Greetings, Illustrious Chivrez. My deepest apologies
that you come among us at such an unhappy time."
Chivrez' shock was short-lived;
he hadn't survived a generation of politics in the Civil Government by cowardice,
or squeamishness. Now he had to fight to restrain his smile. Raj Whitehall was standing
over the body of the Governor's heir and literally holding a smoking gun. *
* *
"Spirit of Man of the Stars," Thom blurted. "You came
back to East Residence after that? Barholm was suspicious of you anyway."
Raj
gave a small crooked smile and shrugged. "I didn't reconquer the Southern and
Western Territories for the Civil Government just to set myself up as a warlord,"
he said. "Center said that would be worse for civilization than if I'd never
lived at all."
an oversimplification but accurate to within 93%, +-2,
Center added remorselessly. Over the years their minds had learned subtlety in interpreting
that voice; there was a tinge of . . . not pity, but perhaps compassion to it now.
the long-term prospects for restoration of the federation, here on bellevue and eventually
elsewhere in the human-settled galaxy, required raj whitehall's submission to the
civil authorities. too many generals have seized the chair by force.
Thom
nodded. The process had started long before Bellevue was isolated by the destruction
of its Tanaki Spatial Displacement net. The Federation had been slagging down in civil
wars for a generation before that, biting out its own guts like a brain-shot sauroid.
The process had continued here in the thousand-odd years since, and according to Center
everywhere else in the human-settled galaxy as well.
"Couldn't Lady Anne
do something?" he asked. Barholm's consort was a close friend of Raj's wife Suzette,
had been since Anne was merely the . . . entertainer was the polite phrase . . . that
young Barholm had unaccountably married despite being the Governor's nephew. The other
court ladies had turned a cold shoulder back before Barholm assumed the Chair; Suzette
hadn't.
"She died four months ago," Raj said. "Cancer.
A
brief flash of vision: a canopied bed, with the incense of the Star priests around
it and the drone of their prayers. A woman lying motionless, flesh fallen in on the
strong handsome bones of her face, hair a white cloud on the pillow with only a few
streaks of its mahogany red left. Suzette Whitehall sat at the bedside, one hand gripping
the ivory colored claw-hand of her dying friend. Her face was an expressionless mask,
but slow tears ran from the slanted green eyes and dripped down on the priceless snowy
torofib of the sheets.
"Damn," Thom said. "I know she wanted
every Poplanich dead, but . . . well, Anne had twice Barholm's guts, and she was loyal
to her friends, at least."
Raj nodded. "It was right after that
that I was suspended from my last posting--Inspector-General--and my properties confiscated.
Chancellor Tsetzas handled it personally."
"That . . . that . .
. he gives graft a bad name," Thom spat.
Raj smiled wanly. "Yes,
if the Chancellor didn't hate me, I'd wonder what I was doing wrong."
A
flash from Center; a tall thin man in a bureaucrat's court robe sitting at a desk.
The room was quietly elegant, dark, silent; a cigarette in a holder of carved sauroid
ivory rested in one slim-fingered hand. He signed a heavy parchment, dusted the ink
with fine sand, and smiled. A secretary sprang forward to melt wax for the seal .
. .
Raj nodded. "I expect to be arrested at the levee this afternoon.
Barholm's worried--"
worried at the probability of events which would
occur were raj whitehall any other man.
"observe: "*
* *
--and troops in the blue-and-maroon uniforms of the Civil Government's
army cantered across the brick-paved plaza before the Governor's Palace. It was late,
the gaslights flaring along the streets of East Residence, but the hurrying throngs
of civilians crowded aside to the sound of the bugle and the iron clamor of field-guns
on the cobblestones. Light sheened on metal, the dull enamel of helmets, brass saber-hilts,
the wet fangs of the giant riding dogs.
The troops reined in before the gates
and deployed in line, stepping off the saddles of their crouching dogs and working
the actions of their rifles, click-clack a thousand times repeated. The field
guns swung about, teams unhitched, trails falling to the ground with heavy thumps
as the gunners lifted them off the limbers. The breechblocks clanged as 75mm rounds
were pushed home.
An officer strode up to the gates. "Open!" he
barked.
"In whose name?" the watchstander replied, turning grey
about the lips. Only a platoon was deployed across the gilded ironwork of the main
gate. "By what authority?"
"Fix--" the first officer said.
"Fix--" a hundred voices repeated it.
"--bayonets."
A long repeated rattle and clank as the long blades snicked onto the rifles.
A uniform flash of gaslight on steel as they came to present.
"In the
name of the Sovereign Mighty Lord, Governor Raj Whitehall," the officer went
on, grinning. He waved back to the riflemen and guns. "And there's my authority."
The watchstander nodded stiffly. "Open the gates."
--and
Raj walked through congealing pools of blood in the Audience Hall. The bodies of the
Life Guards sprawled across it, where they'd tried to make a stand behind barricades
of ornate gilded furniture. Barholm Clerett sagged on the Chair itself, the pistol
that had blown out the top of his skull still clenched in one hand.
Raj hooked
the body out of the high seat with his toe and turned. A howl arose from the soldiers
who crowded the great chamber, a howl that died into a steady chant:
"Raj!
Raj! Raj!" * * *
Thom laid a hand on Raj's shoulder. The muscle under the wool jacket
was like indiarubber. It quivered with tension.
"You should make
yourself Governor, Raj," he said quietly. "Spirit knows, you couldn't be
worse than Barholm and his cronies."
Raj smiled, but he shook
his head. "Thanks, Thom--but if I have a gift for command, it's only for
soldiers. Civilians . . . I couldn't get three of them to follow me into a whorehouse
with an offer of free drinks and pussy. Not unless I had a squad behind them with
bayonets; and you can't govern that way, not for long. I'd smash the machinery
trying to make it work. Barholm is a son-of-a-bitch, but he's a smart one.
He knows how to stroke the bureaucracy and keep the nobility satisfied, and he really
is binding the Civil Government together with his railroads and law reforms . . .
granted a lot of his hangers-on are getting rich in the process, but it's working.
I couldn't do it. Not so's it'd last past my lifetime."
observe:
* * *
--and they saw Raj Whitehall on a throne of gold and diamond, and men
of races they'd never heard of knelt before him with tribute and gifts . . . . . .
and he lay ancient and white-haired in a vast silken bed. Muffled chanting came from
outside the window, and a priest prayed quietly. A few elderly officers wept, but
the younger ones eyed each other with undisguised hunger, waiting for the old king
to die.
One bent and spoke in his ear. "Who?" he said. "Who
do you leave the keyboard and the power to?"
The ancient Raj's lips moved.
The officer turned and spoke loudly, drowning out the whisper: "He says, to
the
strongest."
Armies clashed, in identical green
uniforms and carrying Raj Whitehall's banner. Cities burned. At last there was a peaceful
green mound that only the outline of the land showed had once been the Gubernatorial
Palace in East Residence.
Two men worked in companionable silence by a campfire,
clad only in loincloths of tanned hide. One was chipping a spearpoint from a piece
of an ancient window, the shaft and binding thongs ready to hand. His fingers moved
with sure skill, using a bone anvil and striker to spall long flakes from the green
glass. His comrade worked with equal artistry, butchering a carcass with a heavy hammerstone
and slivers of flint. It took a moment to realize that the body had once been human.
* * *
Raj shivered. That was the logical endpoint of the cycle of collapse
here on Bellevue, and throughout what had once been the Federation; if it wasn't prevented,
there would be savagery for fifteen thousand years before a new civilization arose.
The image had haunted him since Center first showed it. It felt true.
"Spirit
knows, I don't want Barholm's job," he went on.
"I like to
do what I do well, and that isn't my area of expertise. The problem is getting Barholm
to understand that."
barholm's data gives him substantial reason for
apprehension, Center pointed out. not only does raj whitehall have
the prestige of constant victory, but more than sixteen battalions of the civil
government's cavalry are now comprised of ex-prisoners from the former military
governments.
Squadrones and Brigaderos; Namerique-speaking barbarians,
descendants of Federation troops gone savage up in the desolate Base Area of the far
northwest. They'd swept down and taken over huge chunks of the Civil Government, imposing
their rule and their heretical Spirit of Man of This Earth cult on the population.
Nobody had been able to do anything about it . . .until Barholm sent Raj Whitehall
to reconquer the barbarian realms of the Military Governments.
Governor Barholm
had officially proclaimed Raj the Sword of the Spirit of Man. The prisoners who'd
volunteered to serve the Civil Government had seen him in operation from both sides.
They believed that title.
"Then stay here!" Thom said. "Center
can hold you in stasis, like me--hold you until Barholm's dust and bones. You've done
all you can, you've done your duty, now you deserve something for yourself.
It won't further the reunification of Bellevue for you to commit suicide!"
probability
of furthering the restoration of the federation is slightly increased if raj
whitehall attends the levee, Center said.
"I must go. I must.
I--"
Raj turned back, and Thom recoiled a half step. The other man's
teeth were showing, and a muscle twitched on one cheek.
"I . . . there's
been so much dying . . . I can't . . . so many dead, so many, how can I save
myself?"
"They were enemies," Thom said softly.
"No!
Not them. My own men! I used men like bullets! There aren't one in three of
the 5th Descott Guards remaining, of the ones who rode out with me against the Colony
five years ago. Poplanich's Own--raised from your family estates, Thom--had a hundred
and fifty casualties in one battle, and I was leading them."
Thom
opened his mouth, then closed it again. Center cut in on them, an iron impatience
in its non-voice:
leading is the operative word, raj whitehall. you were
leading them. observe: * * *
"Back one step and volley!" Raj shouted, hoarse with smoke
and dust.
Around him the shattered ranks firmed. Colonial dragoons in crimson
jellabas rode forward, reins in their teeth as they worked the levers of their
repeating carbines. The muzzles of their dogs snaked forward, then recoiled from the
line of bayonets.
BAM. Ragged, but the men were firing in unison.
"Back
one step and volley!" Raj shouted again.
He fired his revolver between
two of the troopers, into the face of a Colonial officer who yipped and waved his
yataghan behind the line of dragoons. The carbines snapped, and the man beside Raj
stumbled back, moaning and pawing at the shattered jaw that dangled on his breast.
"Hold hard, 5th Descott! Back one step and volley." observe:
The men's hobnailed boots clattered on the surface of the pipe; the sound was
dulled, as if they were walking on soft wood, but the iron left no scratches on the
plastic of the Ancients.
The surface beneath the fingers of his left hand
might have been polished marble, except for the slight trace of greasy slickness.
There was old dirt and silt in the very bottom of the circular tube, and it
stank of decay; floodwater must run down from the gutters of Lion City and through
this pipe when the floods were very high.
Behind him the rustle and clank
of equipment sounded, panting breath, an occasional low-voiced curse in Namerique.
Earth Spirit cultists didn't have the same myth of a plastic-lined tube to Hell; the
center of the earth--This Earth--was their paradise.
This particular tunnel
was intimidating as Hell to anyone, though. Particularly to men reared in the
open air, there was a touch of the claustrophobe in most dog-and-gun men. There certainly
was in him, because every breath seemed more difficult than the last, an iron
hoop tightening around his chest.
this is not an illusion, Center said
helpfully. the oxygen content of the air is dropping because airflow is inadequate
in the presence of over six hundred men. this will not be a serious problem
unless the force is halted for a prolonged period.
Oh, thank
you, Raj thought.
Even then, he felt a grim satisfaction at what Army
discipline had made of last year's barbarian horde. Vicious children, he thought.
Vicious grown-up children whose ancestors had shattered civilization over half a continent--not
so much in malice as out of simple inability to imagine doing anything different.
Throwing the pretty baubles into the air and clapping their hands to see them smash,
heedless of the generations of labor and effort that went into their making. Thirteen-year-olds
with adult's bodies . . . but they can learn. They can learn.
The
roof knocked on the top of his helmet. "Halto," he called quietly.
The column rustled to a halt behind him. A quick flick of the lense-lid on his bullseye
lantern showed the first change in the perfect regularity of the tunnel. Ahead of
him the roof bent down and the sides out, precisely like a drinking straw pinched
between a man's fingers.
you are under the outer edge of the town wall
on the north side, Center said. .63 of a kilometer from the entrance.
M'lewis had come this far on his scout; he'd checked that the tunnel opened
out again beyond this point, and then returned. Raj had agreed with the decision,
since maximum priority was to avoid giving the entrance away. And the little Scout
had been right, air was flowing toward him, he could feel the slightly cooler
touch on his sweating face.
Of course, the air might be coming through a hole
the size of a man's fist.
"Crawl through," he said to the man behind
him, clicking off the light. "Turn on your backs and crawl through. There's another
pinch in the tunnel beyond. Pass it down."
He dropped to the slimy mud
in the bottom of the tunnel and began working his way further in. The plastic dipped
down toward his face, touched the brim of his helmet. Still smooth, still untorn.
The weight of the city wall was on it here, had been for five hundred years. Mud squished
beneath his shoulderblades, running easily on the low-friction surface of the pipe.
The weight of a wall fifteen meters high and ten thick at the base, two courses of
three-by-three meter stones on either side, flanking a rubble-concrete core.
Do
not tell me how much it weighs, he thought/said to Center.
Now he was
past the lowest point, and suddenly conscious of his own panting. Something bumped
his boots; the head of the man following. One man following, at least. At least two
or three more, from the noise behind. No way of telling what was further back, how
many were still coming, whether the last five hundred or five hundred and fifty had
turned and trampled Ludwig in a terror-filled rush out of this deathtrap, this anteroom
to hell.
The plastic drank sound, leaving even his breath muffled. Sweat dripped
down his forehead, running into his eyes as he came to hands and knees. He clicked
the bullseye open for a look when the surface began to twist beneath his feet. Another
ten meters of normal pipe, and then--Spirit, he thought. What could have produced
this?
the pipe crosses under the wall at an angle of forty degrees
from the perpendicular. this section is under the edge of a tower, Center
said with dispassionate accuracy.
The towers were much heavier than the walls.
The sideways thrust of one tower's foundations had shoved the pipe a little sideways
. . . and squeezed it down so that only a triangular hole in the lower right-hand
corner remained. This time the fabric had ruptured, a long narrow split to
the upper left. Dirt had come through, hard lumpy yellow clay, and someone recent
had dug it out with hands and knife and spread it backwards.
Raj waited until
the man following him came up behind. "No problem," he said, while the eyes
in the bearded face were still blinking at the impossible hole. "Come
through one at a time; take off your rifle, helmet and webbing belt, then have the
man behind you hand them through. Pass it on."
He kept moving, because
if he didn't, he might not start again. One man panicking here and the whole column
would be stalled all night.
He took off the helmet and his swordbelt, snapped
the strap down over the butt of his revolver and dropped the bundle to the floor.
"Keep the lantern on," he said to the soldier behind him.
Right
arm forward. Turn sideways. Down and forward, the sides gripping him like the clamps
of a grab used to lift heavy shells.
Light vanishing beyond his feet; they
kicked without purchase, and then the broad hands of the trooper were under them,
giving him something to push against. Bronze jacket buttons digging into his ribs
hard enough to leave bruises. Breathe in, push buried in hell, buried in hell
. . .
His right hand came free. It groped about, there was little leverage
on the smooth flaring sides of the pipe, but his shoulders came out, and that was
the broadest part of him.
For an instant he lay panting, then turned. "Through,"
he called softly. "Pass my gear, soldier." A fading echo down the pipe,
as the man turned and murmured the news to the one behind him.
It had
only been a little more than his body length.
Difficult, but not as difficult
as concrete would have been, or cast iron, anything that gripped at skin and clothing.
The light cast a glow around the slightly curved path of the narrow passage.
Again
he waited until the first man had followed, grabbing his jacket between the shoulderblades
and hauling him free.
"Second birth," he said.
The Squadrone
trooper shook his head. "The first was tighter, lord," he said. His face
was corpse-pallid in the faint light, but he managed a grin. Then he turned and called
softly down the arrow way:
"Min gonne, Herman."
Not
much further, Raj thought, looking ahead. Darkness lay on his eyes like thick
velvet.
.21 kilometers. observe:
"Quick," Raj said to the man with the charges.
The door opening
right into the rooms above the arch of the gateway was barred. Raj thrust his pistol
into the eyeslot and pulled the trigger; there was a scream, and somebody slammed
an iron plate across it. The cloth bundles of gunpowder tumbled at his feet.
"Good
man," Raj said. "Now, pack them along the foot of the door, in between the
stone sill and the door. Cut them with your knife and stick the matchcord--right."
He raised his voice; more men were crowding up the stairs, some to take the ladder
and others filling the space about him. "Everyone down the corridor,
around the corner here. Now!"
The quick-witted trooper and Raj and
a lieutenant--Wate Samzon, a Squadrone himself--paid out the cord and plastered themselves
to the wall just around from the door. The matchcord sputtered as it took the flame.
Raj put his hand before his eyes.
White noise, too loud for sound. He tensed
to drive back around to the door----and strong arms seized him, body and legs and
arms.
"Ni, ni," a deep rumbling voice said in his ear. "You
are our lord, by steel and salt. Our blood for yours."
Lieutenant Samzon
led the charge. A second later he flung back, hands clapped to the bleeding ruin of
his face, stumbled into the wall and fell flat. The men who followed him fired into
the ruins of the door and thrust after the bullets, bayonets against swords, as their
comrades reloaded and fired past their bodies close enough for the blasts to scorch
their uniforms. When they forced through the shattered planks the men holding Raj
released him and followed them, with only their broad backs to hold him behind them.
* * *
Raj blinked back to an awareness of the polished sphere that was
Center's physical being. That had been too vivid; not just the holographic image that
the ancient computer projected on his retina, he could still smell the gunpowder
and blood.
if you had not struck swiftly and hard, the wars would have
dragged on for years. deaths would have been a whole order of magnitude
greater, among soldiers of both sides and among the civilians. as well, entire
provinces would be so devastated as to be unable to sustain civilized life.
Images flitted through their minds: bones resting in a ditch, hair still fluttering
from the skulls of a mother and child; skeletal corpses slithering over each other
as men threw them on a plague-cart and dragged it away down the empty streets of a
besieged city; a room of hollow-eyed soldiers resting on straw pallets slimed with
the liquid feces of cholera.
"That's true enough for a computer,"
Raj said.
Even then, Thom noted the irony. He was East Residence born, a city
patrician, and back when they both believed computer meant angel he'd
doubted their very existence. That had shocked Raj's pious country-squire soul; Raj
never doubted the Personal Computer that watched over every faithful soul, and the
great Mainframes that sat in glory around the Spirit of Man of the Stars. Now they
were both agents of such a being.
Raj's voice grew loud for a moment. "That's
true enough for the Spirit of Man of the Stars made manifest, true enough for God.
I'm not God, I'm just a man--and I've done the Spirit's work without flinching. But
I'd be less than a man if I didn't think I deserve death for it." Silence
fell.
"They ought to hate me," he whispered, his eyes still seeing
visions without need of Center's holographs. "I've left the bones of my men all
the way from the Drangosh to Carson Barracks, across half a world . . . they ought
to hate my guts."
they do not, Center said. instead--*
* *
A group of men swaggered into an East Residence bar, down the stairs
from the street and under the iron brackets of the lights, into air thick with tobacco
and sweat and the fumes of cheap wine and tekkila. Like most of those inside,
they wore cavalry--trooper uniforms--it was not a dive where a civilian would have
had a long life expectancy--but most of theirs carried the shoulder-flashes of the
5th Descott Guards, and they wore the red-and-white checked neckerchiefs that were
an unofficial blazon in that unit. They were dark close-coupled stocky-muscular men,
like most Descotters; with them were troopers from half a dozen other units, some
of them blond giants with long hair knotted on the sides of their heads.
There
was a general slither of chairs on floors as the newcomers took over the best seats.
One Life Guard trooper who was slow about vacating his chair was dumped unceremoniously
on the sanded floor; half a dozen sets of eyes tracked him like gun-turrets turning
as he came up cursing and reaching for the knife in his boot. The Life Guardsmen looked
over his shoulder, calculated odds, and pushed out of the room. The hard-eyed girl
who'd been with him hung over the shoulder of the chair's new occupant. The men hung
their swordbelts on the backs of their chairs and called for service.
"T'Messer
Raj," one said, raising a glass. "While 'e's been a-leadin' us, nivver a
one's been shot runin' away!"* * *
-- they do not hate you. they fear you, for they know you
will expend them without hesitation if necessary. but they know raj whitehall
will lead from the front, and that with him they have conquered the world.
"Then they're fools," Raj said flatly.
"They're
men," Thom said. "All men die, whether they go for soldiers or not. But
maybe you've given them something that makes the life worth it, just as you have Center's
Plan to rebuild civilization throughout the universe."
They exchanged
the embrahzo again. Thom stepped back and froze, his body once again in Center's
timeless stasis.
Raj turned and took a deep breath. "Can't die deader
than dead," he murmured to himself.
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