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
