saying, “Well done,” to a dying youth, when a runner brought news of six galleys rowing toward the estuary. Arnanak must have an amphibious assault in mind, doubtless conjoined with a fresh attempt on the shore sides.
Larreka considered, looked around the officers and, beyond them, enlisted soldiers who ringed him in, and asked, “Who’d like to head a really wild mission?”
There was the briefest stillness, then a cohort leader whom he knew for a promising lad took a step forward. “I will,” he said.
“Good.” Larreka clapped his shoulder. “Get a few volunteers, enough to bend sail on a ship. Wind and tide are right; you can come in after those bastards. They could beach, but they’ll use the fishery dock instead—I’m glad now we didn’t demolish it earlier—that being a lot handier. Set the ship afire and crash it among them. Escape in a boat, or swim. We’ll make a sortie, chop down the crews, and let you back in.”
“Sacrifice a whole ship?” wondered Seroda the adjutant.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Larreka reminded him. “We’ll torch the rest to keep ’em out of buccaneer hands. I’ve only delayed to see if we can find some use for them first, like this.”
His main attention was on the young officer. Through heat and dust and wind, the noise outside the walls and the vigils and quiet dyings inside, their eyes met. They both knew what the odds were. In the face before him, Larreka recognized that the soldier had begun—at the back of his mind—to shape the dream he hoped would see him through his death. The commandant tightened his shouldergrip. “Fare in love, legionary,” he said. That adieu went back to the last cycle of civilization.
A lull came in the combat. The Tassu ground forces grumbled back in a vast, disorderly mass, to take what rest and refreshment they could. Larreka figured the galleys would stand offshore till dark. Then the sailors would want moonlight while they established their beachhead and raised their scaling ramps. Probably they didn’t imagine they could get over the stockade. But they must number in the sixty-fours; staving them off would occupy males who’d be sorely missed at the landward crunch.
I’d better slack off myself while I can, Larreka thought. Weariness was lead within his bones. Accompanied by Seroda, he plodded along thinly trafficked lanes to the headquarters building. The broadcast tower on top reared skeletal against a sullen sky. The Sun was down and the Rover low: light the color of Terrestrial blood, shadows the color of Ishtarian. At least the next round of fighting will be cooler.
Irazen, vice commandant after Wolua’s disaster, met him in the entrance, a stout, scarred veteran, lacking in flair or imagination but—since matters had gone this far—a good bet to hang in and make the enemy’s victory expensive. “You’re right in time,” he said. “We have a call from the hostage humans. When they learned the situation, they—the female, anyhow—insisted on talking to you.”
Jill would. Well, Ian would want to almost as much. but he’d be more patient about it. What a pleasant surprise. She rose before his inner vision, narrow headbanded face in its coif of dusky-yellow hair, eyes more blue than skies above tropical islands when he had wandered thither in his youth and smile more bright and ready than sunlight on their surf, tall slenderness where hid the ghost of a chubby little person who had stumped out laughing for joy to meet him. Let the Three bring more such unto her, though he wouldn’t see them… Larreka trotted briskly down a hall to the communications room.
“Here he is,” the technician on duty said, and saluted his commandant. Larreka took stance before the blank screen.
“Uncle!” Jill’s cry broke through. “How are you?”
“Still on deck,” Larreka said, as they do in Haelen. “And you?”
“Oh, we, we’re all right—went for a sunset walk, and we’re sitting on a hilltop watching the dale underneath fill up with twilight—but. Uncle, you’re being attacked!”
“They’ve gotten small joy of it so far,” Larreka said.
“So far?” she pounced. “What’s next?”
“More of the same. What else?”
Silence buzzed. Maybe Jill and Ian whispered to each other. Or maybe not. This room on this evening was of all the world the most eerily unreal place to be in. When she spoke at last, her tone was hard: “How long can you hold out?”
“Why, that depends—” Larreka said.
A legionary obscenity cut him off. “I quizzed your technie while we waited for you. No help is coming. Right? You haven’t even had us, for what bit of good we might’ve done. Uncle, I know you, and God in heaven damn it, I claim soldier’s privilege—you level with me.”
“I thought we might simply gab for a spell,” Larreka said into the cold countenances of instruments and controls.
“I’m beyond the age where a piece of candy will do me,” Jill said. “Listen, I know. The rest of the Gathering has written you off. Supposing they did change their minds about what it’s worth to hold Valennen, as you hoped they would if you held out—supposing that, they’re too late. Arnanak’s outsmarted them. My people are… paralyzed, or leashed by their own Navy. Your retreat is blocked and, since you won’t surrender, you’re to be annihilated. Arnanak was quite frank about that to both Ian and me. Your aim now is to make your annihilation so expensive that civilization gets a breathing space. Right?” Jill’s voice broke across. “God damn it, I repeat, we can’t let the thing be!”
“All die at last, dear,” he told her in a surge of gentleness. “Look at it this way; I’m spared watching that happen to you.”
The shaken answer came: “Ian and I have decided we’ll get them off their asses in Primavera… somehow… But Ian, we will!” After she had shuddered, she spoke steadily. “Keep this circuit available to us. Stand by for a patch-in to Hanshaw’s office at any hour. You savvy?”
“What do you have in mind?” Larreka asked. A fear sharpened his words.
“We don’t know yet. Something.”
“You must not risk yourselves. That’s an order, soldier.”
“Not to save Port Rua?”
Larreka stared into the abyss before he remembered how he had sent the chief of cohort off on a fire ship, and Jill had always liked to think of herself as attached to the Zera Victrix. “Well,” he said slowly, “check with me beforehand, okay?”
“Okay, old dear,” she whispered.
Sparling’s dry, abashed tone: “Uh, considering drain on batteries, we’d better stick to immediate practicalities. Have you any estimate of how long you can hold out unaided?”
“Till sometime between tomorrow morning and the fall equinox. It involves a clutch of imponderables,” Larreka said, while he thought what a grand mate for Jill this Ian would have been if twenty years didn’t make such a grotesquely big difference to humans. “Eventually they’ll cross our barriers and breach our walls. We can’t shoot that many fast enough to prevent it. But if we inflict heavy casualties early in the game, Arnanak may elect to go slow, spending fewer males he’ll be wanting later on. Once they are inside, we’ll make them capture the town house by house.” He pondered, “Ng-ng, split the difference and call thirty-two days a reasonable guess.”
“No more than that?” Sparling asked low. “Well… we’ll have to think and act fast. I may already have the germ of an idea. Luck be yours, Larreka.”
Across the wilderness and those same two decades, little girl Jill said, “Smoo-oo-ooch.” The connection broke instantly—lest he hear her crying, Larreka thought.
He turned to Irazen, who had waited. “Anything further to report to me?” he inquired.
“Nothing important, sir,” his second replied.
“I want a nap. Action should resume shortly after first moonrise. Call me then.”
Larreka sought his quarters. They had been Meroa’s too, and still held things of hers and memories. As he doffed his armor, he stood before a photograph of the two of them and their latest child at the time, taken by a man in the early years of Primavera. Jacob Zopf had died a bachelor, his own race had no more memory of him than lay in their archives, but whenever she visited there, Meroa tended the Earth flowers she had planted on the grave of her friend. Well, you’re that sort, Larreka thought to her.
He stretched flat on his left side because he had the double mattress to himself, closed his eyes, and wondered what to dream about. Fun and fantasy were probably wisest—let him, say, have wings and see what happened. It could be too saddening to wake with a mindful of ghosts. And yet, how much longer did he have for
