He froze. He had stopped having answers. The instructions did not come. There were only the guards, who were always about him, Hale and his comrades who were always with him, day and night, his personal and unshakable nightmare.
They had their rifles on the techs now. He turned, looked at Hale to appeal to him to use the helmet com to contact the Fleet, to ask information, whether it was attack or malfunction, or what had sent a Fleet carrier ripping over their heads and three others on its tail. Of a sudden Hale and his men stopped, all at the same time, listening to something only they could hear. And all at once they turned, leveled rifles.
“
They fired.
ix
There was little chance for sleep. They took it when they could, man and hisa, crouched the one in Q dome and the other in the mud outside, sleeping as best they might, shift by shift in their clothes, in the same mud-caked, stinking blankets, what sleep they were allowed. The mills never stopped; and the work went on day and night.
The flimsy doors of the lock slammed, one after the other, and Emilio lay stiff and still, apprehension confirmed — a sound had wakened him. It was not time to wake, surely it was not time. It seemed only minutes ago that he had lain down to sleep. He heard the patter of rain overhead; heard a number of boots crunching the gravel outside. There was no shuttle down; they roused both shifts of them out only for loading.
“Up and out,” a trooper shouted.
He moved. He heard moans about him, the other men wakened, winced in the strong light which swept over them. He rolled out of the cot, grimaced with the pain of strained muscles and blistered feet onto which he pulled water-stiffened boots. Fear worked in him, small things wrong, different from other nighttime rousings. He fastened his clothing, put on his jacket, groped at his throat for the breather mask which always hung there. Light hit his face again, drew groans of misery from others. He walked for the door among others who were going; outside, through the second door, up the wooden steps to the path. More lights in his face. He flung his arm up to shield his eyes.
“Konstantin. Round up the Downers.”
He tried to see past the lights, eyes watering… on a second try made out shadows beyond, others of their number brought up from the mills. Shuttle had to be coming down. It must be. No need to panic.
“Get the Downers.”
“All of you out,” someone inside shouted; the doors opened then straight through, deflating the dome crest as all others were herded out at gunpoint
A hand found his, childlike. He looked down. It was Bounder. The Downers were up. All the other hisa had gathered, bewildered by the lights and the hard voices invoking their name.
“All of them out now?” a trooper asked another. “We got them all,” the other said.
The tone of it was wrong. Ominous. Details became strangely clear, like the moment of a long fall, an accident, a time stretched thin… Rain and the lights, the glistening of water on armor… he saw them move… rifles lift…
“Hit them!” he yelled, and flung himself at the line. A shot popped into his leg and he hit the barrel, shoving it aside, following armored arms to armored body. He bore the man over, ripped for the mask while armored fists flailed, battered his head. Rifles went off; bodies hit the ground about him. He scooped up a handful of mud, Downbelow’s own armament, slammed it into armor faceplate, into the breather intake, found a throat under the armor rings and kept after it while shouts and Downer shrieks rang through the rain.
A shot went overhead and the man under him stopped fighting. He scrabbled in the thick mud for the rifle, rolled with it and looked up into a gun leveling at his face; he squeezed the trigger and slagged it before it aimed, the trooper staggering under fire from another quarter, screaming in the pain of diffused burns. Fire from behind, near the dome. He fired at anything in armor, heard Downer shrieks.
Light hit him; they were spotted. He rolled again, fired for the light, no skill at aiming, but it went down.
“Run,” a hisa voice shrieked at him. “All run. Quick, quick.”
He tried to get to his feet. A hisa seized him up and dragged him until another could help, into cover by the dome, where his own men had taken cover. Fire was coming back at them from the hill, the path which led to the landing field, their ship.
“Stop them!” he yelled at whatever of his men could hear. “Cut them off!” He managed a limping run, a little distance; shots hissed into the puddles about him. He slowed as others of his men kept going, tried to keep going.
“You come,” a hisa shrieked. “You come me.”
He fired as he could, ignoring the hisa that wanted him to retreat to the woods. Fire came back and a man of his fell, and fire started coming from the flanking woods, hitting the troops, driving them to run again, and he limped after. The troops had reached the hillcrest, disappeared over the shoulder of the hill; had surely called for help, reinforcements, for the probe’s big guns to be trained on that path to meet them the moment they charged over it. Emilio cursed tearfully, used the rifle for a crutch, and some of his men kept going still. “Keep low,” he yelled, and struggled further, with visions of the ship lofting, of all the helpless thousands who waited by the images. The troops had distance on them, and armor that protected them, and once over that hill…
They came up over it. Fire lit the dark, and most of his men flung themselves down at once, squirming back to cover from a fire they could not face. He crouched, came as far as he could, lay on his belly to look down from the hill into the fire of the heavy guns. The ground itself began to steam downslope. He saw troops regrouping against the probe’s lighted hatch, under an umbrella of fire that laced the slope, beams steaming through the rain and boiling earth as well as water. The troops could reach that safe haven; the ship would loft and hit them from overhead… nothing,
Shadow flooded toward the field, behind the lines of rallying troopers, like illusion, the pouring of a black tide toward that hatch. The troops silhouetted in the hatchway saw it, fired… must have called the others; they started turning and Emilio opened up fire on their backs, heart-chilled with the sudden realization what it was, what that other force
Fire bloomed in the hatchway, spread and swept through the troops and the attackers; the sound came, and the shock hit his bones. He sprawled in the mud and lay there. Firing had stopped. There was silence… no more war, only the patter of rain in the puddles.
Downers babbled and chattered and scurried up behind him. He tried to gain his feet, meaning to get down there, where people of his own had fallen, blasting that hatchway.
Then the ship’s lights came back on, and the engines rumbled, and it began to fire again, guns sweeping the slope.
Still alive. He raged at it, hardly felt the hands which crept about his arms and sides and tried to carry him… Downers, bent doggedly on helping him, chattering and pleading with him.
Then the ship shut down both the firing and the engines. Rested dormant, lights winking, but with the hatch gaping dark and fire-blackened.
Downers pulled him away, threw arms about him as he tried to stand, and dragged him when his leg went out from under him. A hisa’s thin hand patted his cheek. “You all right, you all right,” a voice pleaded. Bounder’s. They crossed behind the hill, hisa gathering up more of the dead and wounded, and suddenly human figures were coming toward them out of the woods, humans and hisa together.
“Emilio!” he heard, Miliko’s voice. Others were running toward him behind her… Men and women left behind… he struggled for a few running steps and reached her, hugged her insanely, with the taste of despair in his mouth.
“Ito,” she said, “Ernst — they got them. The blast jammed their hatch.”
“They’ll get us,” he said. “They’ll call down the bigger stuff.”
“No. Got a com station in the bush; one message… one fast message to base two com unit at the gathering… it’ll get them out of there. We
He let go, because he could, began to fade — looked back toward the ship, invisible behind the hill; there was another flare of engines, ominous thunder, a desperate ship trying only to save itself.
“Hurry,” she said, trying to help him walk. He came, hisa hovering all about them. “Hurry,” the hisa kept saying, over and over again, surrounding all of them, some walking, others silent, carried by the hisa, over the face of the hill and beyond, deep among the rain-dripping trees, up into the hills… they kept moving until sense grayed and blackened and he sank down into wet bracken, was hauled up again by a dozen strong hands and carried at the last almost running. There was a hole in the hillside, a place among the rocks.
“Miliko,” he said, irrationally fearing the dark, close tunnel. They took him into it, and let him down, and in a moment arms gathered him up again and held him, rocking gently, Miliko’s voice whispering into his ear. “We’re all right,” she kept saying. “The tunnels will hold us all… the deep winter burrows, deep in all the hills… we’re all right.”
Chapter Four
i
