Meantime, a clerk in the personnel department got to the main network stage outside Dern’s office and sprayed a warning to all the settlements that CM was being invaded. The clerk did not know enough to key the audible warning, which meant that the warning light blinked unobserved in most of the settlement administrative offices. It was lunchtime, and no one was there. In Settlements One and Ten, however, people were present, the audible alarms were set off, and both defensive and offensive tactics were hastily planned.
The invading force was unopposed as it took twelve fliers, disabling but not destroying all others in the park. Eleven of them set off for the settlements. The twelfth, which contained the linking Door and was commanded by Mordy Trust, lifted only briefly, then set down again outside the temple of Horgy Endure. The God Horgy was dragged out of the temple by grunting Baidee. Churry had decided not to destroy the temples. He didn’t want to appear wantonly destructive, and the temples themselves weren’t implicated in the possible swallowing Shan was afraid of. Once outside, the God was laid on an incinerant pad, another was thrown over the top, and the assemblage was ignited.
Five people came running out of the management area, brandishing one thing or another and screaming at the Baidee to leave the God alone. Mordy Trust started to tell the troopers to ignore them and get into the flier, but she was too late. None of the intensive drills in which the Baidee had engaged had focused on withholding reaction or minimizing damage. Every drill had had as its purpose shortening reaction time to any observable threat. The troopers saw threat and reacted with deadly force. The five Hobbs Landers went down in a flurry of broken bone and spattered blood before Mordy could get her mouth open. Several of the missiles used, which were lethal at great distances, went on down into the management area and killed other persons who were merely standing there, watching. One of the missiles hit a fuel store in a repair building and set it on fire. The fumes of the fuel were lethal. One hundred CM staff members died from inhalation of poison before the confused, grieved fire-squad got the flames out.
Mordy didn’t stay to see the God burn. She had decided that things were already out of hand. Praying that the damage in Central Management had been the only damage done, she got her troopers into the flier and set off for the meeting point. Her group had yet to find an appropriate hiding place and set up the linking Door.
Meantime, in settlement after settlement, the Baidee troops encountered what they interpreted as resistance or threat by monsters, with the same unthinking responses they had shown at CM. Some settlers moved to defend their temples and were killed. A few troopers were killed by hidden defenders. Despite the carnage, each of the Gods was pulled from its temple and burned. In one settlement, the God was defended by children, though the troopers did not realize until they had killed them that they were children, some of them not more than eleven lifeyears old. The God in that settlement had been less solid than in the others, more crumbly. When they threw it down upon the mat, it broke into fragments, dirtying their uniforms with the fine, black dust.
Sweating and sick, one of the troopers said to Churry that they ought to kill everyone. ‘They’ve seen us,” he said. “They’ve seen us, and we’ve killed the kids, and we have to kill them, too, so they don’t …” The trooper had begun to doubt that the victims were monsters. They acted like people. They acted like kids. And killing people, kids, wasn’t going to set well with those in Authority.
Churry slapped him, hard, and told him to get into the flier. All the way to the meeting point, he kept wondering if that had been the right response. Maybe the man had been right. They had sufficient weaponry with them to wipe out the settlements. Maybe …
Common sense prevailed. What had happened was unfortunate, he told himself, but explainable as the kind of mistakes untried men make in their first combat situation. If the Baidee wiped out Hobbs Land, however, no explanation would be acceptable. Besides, they couldn’t guarantee to wipe out everyone unless they stayed here for days, and it would mean killing the children and babies as well, and by that time they’d be outlawed in the System.
While carnage and destruction went on among the settlements, Dern Blass’s group on the escarpment finished its lunch, got into the flier, and returned in leisurely fashion toward CM, following the line of the river which would take them past Settlements Seven and Five and then south.
“Smoke,” said Sam, suddenly alert.
“Right,” said Spiggy, who was piloting. “At Seven.”
“At Five,” said Dern, pointing ahead of them, then off to the left. “And Six.”
Spiggy dropped to a lower altitude and took refuge behind a convenient hill.
“Voorstoders?” asked Sam. “It couldn’t be!” Who else would invade Hobbs Land? The prophet had threatened to do just that!
“I don’t know who,” said Africa. “Take us up a little, Spig.”
From the slightly higher altitude they saw the telltale sparkle of a Door, off to their right, in an area heavily cut with canyons. A dozen fliers rose suddenly from the site and sped south.
“Those are our fliers,” cried Dern, outraged.
Spiggy held the flier low. “They haven’t seen us,” he said. “Perhaps better they don’t.”
“Who in hell,” muttered Sam.
“Baidee,” said Saturday, suddenly sure of it.
“Baidee!” blurted Harribon.
“Not the girl,” she said. “Not the fat one. The other one. The one who talked to me when we left for Ahabar. The one who wanted to know why there was a temple at CM. The one who wanted to know if CM
