was overdue, the Cavorite would be long gone.
Jude and Celline continued to scuff meteorites from the snow while I stared at a group that dragged stiff bodies to the tank farm fire to be cremated.
I could tell myself that the broad-nosed guard whom I had killed had himself brutally, unnecessarily, and without remorse killed an innocent man. I could tell myself that, if the man I had killed had in fact left behind a widow and children, the greater good produced by his death would save their lives and all mankind. I could tell myself that he, as a soldier, had accepted the risk.
But, finally, I would have to tell myself that I had arrogated to myself the right to take the life of another.
“Jason!”
I ran toward the sound of Aud’s shout, Jude alongside me.
FIFTY-SIX
AUD PLANCK STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of a room in the camp commandant’s quarters hut as I ran up. The windowless room wasn’t more than an oversized closet, and its only furnishings were a simple table, a chair, and a sputtering oil lamp suspended from a ceiling beam.
A figure in Tressen colonel’s uniform slumped in the chair, head down across the table. One hand clutched a service revolver that had been inserted in his mouth, and what had been the back of his head splattered the far wall of the tiny room.
Presiding over mass murder, in a frigid, forsaken outpost, would drive a normal human being near suicide, I supposed. Facing up to the reality that your sloppy command had gotten all your troops killed could drive a soldier the rest of the way. Or maybe he had been a fanatic, more afraid of having let down his RS bosses than of burning in hell.
Aud said, “I wondered why we hadn’t found the camp commandant.” Aud stepped to the table, slipped his pistol’s barrel beneath the empty hand of the dead man, and lifted it. Beneath the hand was a wood slab with a pivoting brass arm six inches long fixed above it.
Jude stared first at the body, then at the brass and wood device, then swore.
Jude turned to Aud. “You think he transmitted anything?”
Aud shrugged. “He could have been transmitting for the last hour.”
“Or not at all.”
I raised my palm. “The Tressens haven’t invented radio.”
Jude pointed at the wood block, and at bright copper wires that curled away from it, then disappeared over the table’s real edge. “Telegraph. It’s so new that it’s more a parlor trick than a practical system. At least that’s what I thought.”
“I looked out of that sledge for six days. I never saw one pole.”
Jude shook his head. “Wood’s rare here. Insulated cable would be buried in the roadbed.”
I shrugged at Aud. “It could be nothing.” I didn’t believe myself, but there was also nothing we could do now.
An hour later I sat on the edge of a barracks bunk, cleaning Ord’s pistol. My wrist ’Puter vibrated. I scrolled through functions. It wasn’t an alarm. It was an incoming call.
I picked up.
“General Wander?” It was Bill the Spook. Howard’s bargain satellites delivered terrific sound quality.
“Bill? I thought phone calls were off limits.”
“Officially, they are.”
“This contact is freelance? You could lose your pension.”
“The dental’s awful anyway.” He paused. “That was a rough trip you took.”
The Spooks may have been forbidden to help us, but that didn’t mean their overhead eyes weren’t watching us while they tracked the ’Puters that Aud, Jude, and I wore.
I shrugged, invisible to him. “I’ve had better.”
“But it looks like your operation’s off to a good start.”
“Successful’s a better word.” I shifted on the bunk.
“You have company coming.”
Hair stood on my neck.
“Some local eyes reported that Forty-fifth Infantry started scrambling onto a sledge train pointed north thirty minutes ago.”
The Forty-fifth Tressen Infantry, the Quicksilver Division, took its name from the commander that had made it into Tressen’s best outfit, prematurely silver-haired Audace Planck.
I swore.
Bill said, “I dunno what tipped them.”
I did. The camp commandant had tapped out a warning that had also served as his suicide note. “Bill, there was a telegraph line running south from here.”
Silence. A good Spook took a failure of combat intelligence personally.
“Sorry.”
“So we got, what, six days?”
“They’re loading on a streamliner, not a slow freight like you came on. And the Forty-fifth is garrisoned on the northern frontier to begin with. The only good news is it’s a passenger train. They’re leaving their artillery at home.”
Why bother? Artillery to quell a mere prison riot?
“That’s a small favor. You got an ETA?”
“The best eight thousand infantry on this planet are gonna land on your doorstep in forty-eight hours, ready to rumble.”
“Can you bring the rain?”
“The Duck’s been ragging the
I stared at my ’Puter, numb. “Thanks for the heads-up, Bill. Tell the Duck thanks for trying. And tell Admiral Duffy thanks for nothing. See you around, Bill.”
Silence. Then he said, “Sure.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
IN THE NEXT MORNING’S SPARSE DAWN, Aud, Jude, Celline, and I stood together in the wind shadow cast by the train that had brought us, which had been reversed on a spur overnight, so that it pointed back toward the spiked black mountain range through which we had come, ten miles to the south. Smoke from the smoldering oil fire overhung the plain like dirty gauze in the pre-sunrise calm.
Around us by twos and threes, those of our companions who had been revived by a meal and a night in barracks bunks that their captors no longer needed already scoured the snows. They bent, gathered meteorites, then stuffed them into knapsacks and into the pockets of coats for which their captors also had no further need. Periodically, someone gasped as, beneath the snow, they touched the frozen corpse of an earlier and less fortunate arrival.
In the midst of the vast and unmarked graveyard, Aud knelt in the snow and pointed at his makeshift sand table map. A line of stones bisected the flat, swept area that represented the plains south and north of the mountains. A red string, laid south to north, represented the ice road line. The string snaked across the stone “mountain range” wedged into Aud’s paper-narrow “mountain pass” like dental floss.
He pointed at the north end of the red string. “We’re here. Without the refueling oil we planned on, this ice
