Jack Williamson - Eldren 01, page 24
“So?” A derisive rasp. “Why ask me?”
“Because—because we’re fighting the aliens in space.”
He caught his breath.
“Sir, I’m not alone. Runesong—the being my mother called a skyfish—is with me on the spaceplane. She’ll die here unless I get her back where she belongs. But her people have a weapon against the things that hit the sky-web.”
“A weapon? Where?”
“Aboard the wreck of a drifting spacecraft that Jason Kwan disabled. With luck enough—”
A snort of disbelief.
“Runesong—” Desperately he plowed on. “Runesong says they can be killed. She calls them seekers. Cyborgs. They’re breeding now, out in a Trojan asteroid. She says they’ll be back.”
Barranca stiffened, dead eyes blazing.
“They were sent.” His raspy voice had risen. “They have done their work. The skyweb has fallen, and the Tycoons are dead. They will not trouble us again.”
Quin looked away, into the driving snow beyond the window.
“Sir?” He nerved himself to try again. “May I see Dr. Thorsen?”
“You’re two days late.” That fanatic fire had faded into casual-seeming malice. “He’s gone. His engine with him.”
“Gone where, sir?”
“You might ask my niece.” A harsh, ironic little laugh. “Mindi Zinn. Your own first love, I understand?”
“I loved her,” Quin muttered. “Once.”
“People did.” Dark fire lit Barranca’s eyes again. “She charmed me. Charmed Benito. When she came here to live after her parents died. Almost a daughter to me. We trusted her—too far.”
Quin waited, uncertain what to say.
“Puta! Infatuating poor Benito.” A burst of brittle passion. “Her devil’s face! Her yellow mark! Her foul Sun kin! We should have suspected. We never did.”
He quenched that flash of feeling.
“A slick little bitch.” A sardonic rasp. “Our double agent in Security—long enough to sell us out. Slick enough to get away with Thorsen and his engine. Escaped while the rocks were raining out of space.”
“Where did they go?”
“Would I tell you?” A scornful snarl. “The Tycoon’s by-blow? I know what you are, and you’re a fool to think of any reward. If you gave Benito his opening, it wasn’t for love of the cause.”
Barranca sat silent for a time as if to control emotion. The dead eyes turned critical.
“Kerry McLenn? Your stepfather?”
Quin nodded, cheered by a hint of feeling in that gritty voice.
“I knew him. In the barrio long ago, when he was still a child. A better man than you are, Dain, when he was eight years old. Hauling goods for the cause in his toy wagon.”
Quin stared.
“You were the Santissimo agent? Your cell name was Saladin?”
“Long ago.” Barranca shrugged. “McLenn served us then, but we owe you nothing now.” That hint of warmth was gone. “All I want from you is Benito’s spaceplane. Stolen property—”
The computer hummed, and he turned toward it.
“You Santissimos!” Desperate, Quin raised his voice. “You’re finished. Admiral Kwan says your Revelator is only a hoax.”
“The Kwans are damned!” Barranca swung back, glaring at him. “I know the holy Revelator. I’ll follow him to Paradise.”
Barranca’s voice had a sudden ring of iron, and his black eyes loomed mad as the eyes of the white-bearded image Quin had seen in that computer simulation.
“We are building the Eden of the Triplex God to be an eternal haven for the chosen. We build it on the bones of the unholy, out of famine and terror and death. Those who die at His work will be born again in Paradise.”
The computer kept on buzzing.
“My inquisitors will find out where you left Benito’s spaceplane.” Malice edged the loud mad voice. “If you die telling, you’ll find no room in Eden for a hellborn bastard.”
He swung to the insistent machine, and the green-clad blacks took Quin back to the room where he had been. The winter dusk had fallen. Lights came on before they reached it, flickering unsteadily.
The guards stood watch at the open door. The room was cold. He asked for food, asked for blankets. The guards merely stared. Pacing the floor to keep warm, he wondered if Barranca himself had created the computer simulation of the Revelator. The gravity of Earth grew too heavy, and he lay down across the bed.
An hour past midnight, Jason Kwan attacked.
Estrella Navarro was a raven-haired beauty, with brains enough and a mind of her own. She was born in Incamarica. Her lowsider mother had been chief design engineer for the surface power net that fed a third of the continent from the gravity terminal at Pampas Down.
Her biological sire was Maximilian Chen, a Company expert who lived with her mother while the project was under construction. When it was done, he accepted a promotion for it and returned to Coto High.
With enough of such Sunfolk, her embittered mother went on to design a new power net around Sahel Down and marry a Saudi banker who wanted no whimpering whelps of Abaddon in his house.
They sent Estrella to be raised by the Daughters of Fatima, holy zealots who tried and failed to instill their ritual contempt for the Kwans and the Company. Despising them, she used to spend her midnight prayer hours standing at the window of her convent cell, eyes lifted to the skyweb.
A splendid arch of woven fire, it spanned the whole north sky, many-colored marker lights and navigation beacons glittering like diamond frost all along the wires. The web became an enchanted kingdom in her imagination, ruled by gold-maned gods.
Jason Kwan became her idol. She kept a contraband holo of him hidden under her mattress and nursed improbable dreams that he would somehow come to carry her into that shining skyworld. Toiling toward that vision, she won a scholarship to the Kwan College of Space Medicine at Azteca Down.
Graduating with honors enough, she applied for Sun citizenship and duty in space. Her application was denied. All lowsider quotas, they told her, had been filled years ago. Lacking registered Sun paternity, she wasn’t eligible even to be tested.
Grown beautiful, she rejected a handsome Synfare billionaire because he wore no Sunmark. Working as a temporary medic at the Azteca terminal hospital, she kept on waiting for her break.
She was still there when the seeker knocked her dreamworld out of the sky. Making her way through wrecked streets to the hospital, she worked without relief for thirty hours patching up the injured.
One of them was Jason Kwan.
Still on duty when his shuttle crashed, she led the rescue team that pulled him out of the wreckage. Though hurt, he was still fit enough to enjoy her eager consolations.
His cocky charm rekindled her old infatuation, and elation made her lovelier. In Jason’s bed at Company House, she found her broken dreams restored. What if the aliens had crushed the Company? The Kwans had never been vanquished. Fusion power would energize his new empire.
And she would be his empress.
Armageddon. The final war between the hosts of the Triplex God and the space-bred hordes of Satan, foreshadowed in ancient texts, prophesied by the Revelator, fulfilled in dreadful cataclysm, and recorded in the annals of the damned. It came in an evil age when no man could buy or sell, save that he wore the mark of the Beast. The harvest of mankind was ripe, and blood came out of the winepress. The Revelator called upon the Triplex God to pour out his wrath, and there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven. The Sun Tycoons were fallen, and all their Babylons on Earth. Their plagues came in one day, death and mourning, and famine; and they were utterly burned with fire.
20
SOMETHING WOKE HIM FROM A DREAM OF JANOORT.
He had come with the engine and found Halo Station stricken. Jason’s missiles had cratered the snow and brought his spaceplane down. Kerry and Noël lay dying in a shattered tunnel, blue-faced and gasping for air. Pinned under the wreckage, he couldn’t move to help them.
Mindi stood near, saved from harm by her bright Sunmark. He begged her to start the engine to let them breathe. She laughed at him instead and turned to look for Benito Barranca, who came stalking through the ruins, red knife slashing, cutting down people trying to escape.
Benito dropped the blade when he saw Mindi, and she ran into his arms. Her eager kiss changed him into Jason Kwan, who grinned at Quin indolently.
“Tough luck, brother,” Jason drawled. “But you’ve got no Sunmark—”
Something crashed, and the dream was gone. The weight of the wreckage was the gravity of Earth. He sat up, shivering with his own sweat and blinking at the light. His prison room was cold and still and empty. The guards were gone.
Silence all around him, till something crashed again. Falling glass jangled. The lights flickered and went out. He rolled off the bed and groped in the dark for his boots. Another crash, closer. Light blazed through the window. He stumbled to look out.
A hot white point floated high in the black sky. Ciudad Barranca and the park he had crossed lay naked to its savage glare. The snow had stopped falling, but it lay white on roofs and streets and the empty park. He heard no sound, saw no motion anywhere.
The light drifted lower, slowly fading. He saw clots of shadow darting among the leafless trees, spitting fire. Night came back. He heard the war machines roaring closer. Their guns thudded, and the building shuddered. Hard-heeled boots came pounding down the corridors. Sudden light dazzled him.
“Dain?” A hoarse shout. “You’re Quin Dain?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Sun Security.”
“My name—” He groped for survival. “My name’s McLenn.”
“Falso!” A sharp voice out of the glare. “Es el asesino.”
“We’ve got you, Dain. Stand where you are.” Boots thumped around him. “I am Captain Abu Rasul, acting for Admiral Kwan. You are under detainment, charged with killing the Sun Tycoon.”
He squinted into the light, trying to see Rasul.
“I am Quin Dain,” he admitted. “I didn’t kill the Tycoon, but I know who did. I can tell you—”
“Save all that.” Cold steel clicked around his wrists. “Just come along.”
“I want to see Admiral Kwan. He knows me.”
“He knows you killed his father—”
“Fuego!” A shout in the corridors. “Fuego!”
The building was on fire. They marched him down smoke-choked stairs. In the bitter air outside, he heard guns crashing. Another sudden star blazed in the sky. It showed war machines stopped in the street and a huddle of Barranca’s guards, disarmed and shuffling uneasily in the snow.
“Mueva! Pronto!”
They shoved him into the back of a captured guard car. It lurched away, skidding on the snow, following one of the armored machines. Locked in the jolting cage, he was numb and shaking with the cold, yet he tried to see what he could.
That high star was gone, but new flames towered from burning buildings all around them. The tank led them out of Ciudad Barranca and back across the empty park. Off in the east, low clouds above Azteca were lined with lurid red. They came to the terminal concession. The mobs around it blocked the road. Blazing bonfires lit a black-clad figure on a rooftop, screeching into the night.
“Muerte!” A savage chorus from the mob. “Muerte a todos!”
Death to them all.
Men with red armbands surged toward the car, waving staves and throwing rocks. Glass sprayed him from a shattered window. A machine gun rattled. He saw men crumpling into the snow.
“El Revelador…” Mad voices screaming, “… venganza de Dios…”
The car slewed and roared into the mob, jolting over bodies. A new light bloomed overhead. They lurched between two machines now defending the gate. Inside the wall, the car stopped in a court behind a blinking sign.
Sun Security, Azteca Detention Center.
A stark prison, guarded by white-turbaned Sikhs. They tapped his name into a computer and locked him into an unheated cell. He spent the rest of the night there, shivering on a bare iron ledge.
The corridors were busy with black-bearded Sikhs and manacled prisoners. They brought him no food, no information. Noon was near before two of them unlocked the cell to march him into a grimy little office. He had to stand until Jason Kwan strolled in.
“Well, Dain!” A tone of casual mockery. “Never thought I’d meet you here.”
Jason Kwan in a torn yellow dutysuit, right eye patched, one arm in a dirty sling. His visible eye was lit with a reckless elation, as if the space attack and the skyweb’s fall and the Revelator’s threats were a relished challenge.
“Security says you killed my father?” A tone of amused inquiry. He sat on the corner of cluttered desk, swinging a scuffed Fleet boot. “I must say you keep surprising me.”
“I didn’t—” He had to gulp for his voice. “I didn’t kill the Tycoon.”
“Security says you did.” Jason seemed not to care. “They reported at first that you died on the spot.” The green eye narrowed. “You admit you were there?”
“I was.”
“How’d you get in?”
“The Tycoon—” His heart throbbed hard, and he had to get his breath. “The Tycoon sent for me. He had loved my mother. He said I was his son.”
“Huh?” A lowering scowl. “You claim you’re my half-brother?”
“That’s what he believed.”
“No matter to me.” An untroubled shrug. “How’d you get away?”
“I hid in Thorsen’s lab till the skyweb was hit. Got out in a spaceplane—”
“Thorsen’s?” Jason slid off the desk. “Where is it now?”
“Where I landed. Useless, with the fusion engine gone—”
“I’ve got Thorsen and his engine.” The nonchalance gone, hard purpose rang in Jason’s voice. “I can use the spaceplane. To reach Fleet units trapped in orbit now, with their bases gone.”
“I want the engine.” Quin straightened himself to meet that hard green eye. “For Janoort—”
“Wake up, Dain!” A sardonic laugh. “Look where we are! Under siege here. Ten million maniacs yelling for our blood. And you’re raving to rescue a handful of outlaws marooned on a snowball.”
“Sir, it’s not just them. With Earth in trouble, the halo can be a better place—”
“Listen, Dain.” Jason strode closer. “I’m trapped here. My shuttle crashed, coming in. I’ve got nothing else able to climb off the Earth. The spaceplane can, if and when Barranca’s maniacs break through the wall.
“So let’s have it!” Brittle impatience. “Tell me where you left the craft.”
“Sir, here’s an offer.” He tried not to tremble. “Get me back to it, with an engine to run it, and I think I can tell you who the Revelator is.”
“Barranca?” Jason shrugged. “Do you really want a bargain?”
“I want a way back to Janoort.”
“Okay.” Behind the flowing beard and the golden Sunmark and the strong Kwan nose, Jason was suddenly radiant with that old genial charm. “Brother or not, I’ve always rather liked you. And I can use you now. I need that craft and a pilot for it. Play my game, and take the plane when I’m through with it.”
“Thanks! But I’ve played your games before—”
“Think again, brother.” Jason’s silky voice grew softer, genial no longer. “Don’t forget you’ve been condemned to die.” Bright-nailed fingers flicked his whole existence away. “Sentenced in absentia. We’ve set your execution for midnight.
“Your choice, brother. Talk or die.”
“Sir, Janoort can’t wait—”
“You’ve got your option.” Jason tossed the bright hair back. “Your guards will have instructions. If you decide you want to live, just let them know.”
A wave at the Sikhs to take him away.
Back in his cell, they gave him a lump of hard bread and a plastic bag of water. He ate the bread slowly, chewing till it turned sweet in his mouth, and watched the two Sikhs silently watching him.
In the windowless cell, he had few clues to the time. His guards were changed. Hungry again, he knew that a good many hours had passed. He paced the cell and lay on the cold iron bench and paced again, and still he found no hope.
Two new guards arrived. The corporal unlocked his door. Midnight? Dry throat constricting, he scanned the beard-veiled faces and saw no hint of anything. Expecting to be taken away, he hardly saw the slim figure slipping past them into the cell.
“Quin—?”
An uncertain whisper. He spun to find Mindi with him in the dimness, peering at him warily. Lithely slight in a black-and-gold Security dutysuit, she recoiled from the steel clang of the closing door.
“Mindi—”
A gasp of pain. The lover of his father’s killer, was she now to be his own executioner? He sat back on the cold metal bed.
“You hate me.” Her gold Sunmark shone in the gloom, and her voice was very small. “I knew you would.”
He could only nod.
She stood looking at him, slowly shaking her head. The dark Sikhs stood silent beyond the bars, watching them both. Faintly, through the stale prison stinks, he caught her haunting scent.
“I loved you, Quin. When I could love. I had to see you, when Jason told me you were here.” She glanced at the guards. “He wants to know where you left the spaceplane.”
“I don’t want to tell him.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t.” She sat far from him, on the other end of the shelf. He caught the wildwood again, a fragrance recalled from Janoort so long ago when their love was everything. “I guess you despise me.”
“It’s hard,” he whispered. “Hard to hate you.”
With a wry glance at the listening Sikhs, she dropped her voice.
“Forget the spaceplane.” A tiny shrug. “With the mobs already ramming through the walls, Jason’s too busy to think about it now.” Her face looked pinched with pain. “While we’re both alive, I want you to know why I’ve done what I’ve done.
