The Witling

Twenty

Ajão struggled to wakefulness, trying ineffectually to shake off the hands on his shoulders. From all around him came the crash of thunder—and something that sounded terribly like small-arms fire. He forced his eyes open and looked blearily at the shadowed face above him.

The count’s voice was barely intelligible over the noise outside: “Blood and bile, good witling, I was beginning to think nothing would stir you—Lan, he’s awake—” He shouted the words over his shoulder, then turned back to the Novamerikan. “We’ve got to get out of here, and fast. Can you walk?”

Bjault came cautiously to his feet, but felt little of the earlier pain. Only now did he see the extent of the disaster that was falling about them. Across the room, Pelio and Mileru were helping county troops slip Yoninne onto a stretcher. Less than three meters from her feet, the thick wood wall lay in shattered ruin. From the moonlit landscape beyond, the sounds of destruction continued. “What’s happening?” he shouted to Dzeda, but a thunderclap blotted out his words. He let the count push him into the room’s transit pool, along with the other witlings and Samadhom.

A second later they emerged in the meeting hall of the county manse. This was several kilometers from the bedrooms, and the sounds of combat were muted here. A moon shone through the room’s crystal windows; the soldiers standing around the water looked pale and worried. Ajão repeated his question, and this time Dzeda replied, “—tried to surprise us. There are a few Sandfolk who have made the pilgrimage to the Tsarangalang transit lake. They are being used to reng the Snowman army into the city. I’ll bet Tru’ud thought if he hit us hard enough he could capture or kill you two before we could react—and he was almost right.”

A nearby soldier interrupted. “The messengers say they’ve got roadblocks on nearly every lake within three leagues, M’Lord.”

Dzeda frowned, and said to Lan Mileru, “What do you seng?”

“I think he’s right, Dzeru. The lakes are quite turbulent.”

“Very well. We’ll pull back. If the Snowfolk keep this up, I’ll be asking for Guild assistance.”

“You’ll have it,” Lan replied.

The count gave instructions to a squad of messengers, then turned to Ajão and Pelio. “By the monsters in the sea, Tru’ud is risking everything to get his hands on you. And as long as you’re in the county he stands a fair chance of succeeding. Adgao … are you up to going through with your plan right now?”

Bjault looked down at Yoninne’s still form on the litter. Pelio said, “She’s no worse than before, Adgao.” Outside, the crack and rip of war sounded louder. He looked at the count and nodded. The pain in his gut had diminished—though not as completely as at Grechper. This was the best chance they would ever have.

“Good. Lan?”

“I’m ready, Dzeru.” They walked across the hall to the ablation skiff. The Guildsman had the soldiers turn the skiff to the compromise attitude he and Ajão had decided on: something Mileru could manage, that would leave the skiff’s center of mass roughly in line with their direction of flight when they emerged at Draere’s island; otherwise, the hypersonic entry would put them in a spin that would rip the interior ballast from its moorings and splatter them to pulp. But the skiff was so small and dense that the troopers had a hard time getting leverage on it. And the further it was tipped to the side, the more dangerous its tendency to roll.

They had finally wedged the skiff in place, when a ripping stutter of explosions—like automatic gunfire—traced across the meeting hall’s upper windows. Around them, the troopers dropped to the floor. Dzeda shouted into his ear, “Get down! They’re renging rocks.”

They fell to their bellies and crawled around to the west side of the skiff. “One nice thing about living at the equator,” the count continued, “is that renged projectiles must always come out of the east.”

In the moonlit night they heard screams mixed with the staccato impacts. A soldier crawled swiftly across the floor to them. “Dzeda! Snowfolk squads are moving in our direction from the lake.”

Crump. An immense crash sounded from down the hillside.

“I doubt they know where the witlings are,” said Mileru, “but if their reconnaissance squads get this far—”

“—They’ll reng in whole companies, and we’ll be overrun,” Dzeda finished. “But see here, Lan, I’ve ordered the area around the lake evacuated. I want Guild assistance to wipe out the forces there. That will give us time to finish what we have to do here.”

The frail, aged Guildsman was silent for a long moment, then spoke agreement—to what, Ajão didn’t discover till a couple of seconds later:

Pearly light shone through the west windows, silhouetting the ridge line that separated them from the main transit lake. The hall was briefly lit as bright as day, and the moon seemed insignificantly pale. As the light began to fade toward crimson, the ground beneath them jolted and danced; the skiff rocked genriy where it sat, but the calks held. Lan said, “A rock from the outer moon, perhaps one hundred tons in weight… I renged it down to the transit lake.” Ajão looked at the Guildsman, but saw no sign of triumph in his old face.

Then the shock wave—refracted and attenuated by its passage over the ridge line—slammed against the meeting hall. The west wall bulged inward like some arthritic curtain, then crashed across the marble floor. The timbers above them first lifted, then settled lopsidedly.

Bjault watched, his jaw sagging: one hundred tons, the Guildsman said. One hundred tons, renged down through 200,000 kilometers. The potential energy released would be on the order of a small fission bomb. And the palsied Guildsman could bring such destruction to any point in the world. Tru’ud must be desperate indeed to risk such retaliation.

Dzeda was already on his feet. “Hurry. Lan’s wiped out the force at the lake, but there are still enemy scouts in our area, and if there’s any water left in the lake—”

“There isn’t,” Lan said sadly, almost to himself.

“—They might try to reestablish a roadhead.”

In the ringing silence, Ajão and Pelio opened the skiff’s hatch and helped fit Yoninne into her acceleration webbing. It was strange to see her face so peaceful and composed, while Armageddon itself played around them. Beyond the ruined wall, dust rose shimmering into the moonlight, softening the outlines of the wrecked buildings down the hillside. The scene might have been out of the Last Interregnal War on Homeworld, the aftermath of an aerial bombing. Yet there was no sign of smoke or fire. Except for Lan’s weapon, all the destruction had been done by wind and cold stone.

Bjault climbed aboard the skiff, and settled into his harness. Pain was beginning to pulse through his middle again—this latest recovery had been the briefest yet. He looked back through the hatchway to see Pelio turn aside from Dzeda and Lan.

“Here, Samadhom,” the boy said. The watchbear crawled awkwardly across the debris-strewn floor to his master. Pelio knelt and held the animal’s large head in his arms. “Goodby, Samadhom,” he said sofdy, voice quavering.

The watchbear could not come with them on this trip. The skiff’s acceleration webbing could protect two—at most three—passengers. That hadn’t mattered much during their relatively gentle flight with Bre’en over the mountains, but when the witlings slammed into the air at Draere’s island, the initial deceleration would amount to more than twenty gravities. Dzeda was right in a way: when you strike air at hypersonic speeds, it is something like a stone wall. Sam would die if they took him along.

But Sam understood none of this; as Pelio climbed into the skiff, the creature bumbled frantically after. Dzeda caught him bv the shoulders and pulled him back; Sam’s meeping was weak but desperate. Pelio leaned out of the skiff and said, “Please, good Dzeru, will you care well for him?”

For once the count’s face was absolutely serious. “I will.” He looked back into the cabin at Bjault and added significantly, “I will keep him in good health … in expectation that you will return.”

Dzeda stepped back from the hatchway, and Bjault conferred one last time with Lan Mileru. Then the hatch was shut, secured—and they were alone. Through the window slits, Ajão watched the others depart; no one wanted to be anywhere near when the skiff jumped. As Bjault and the Guildsman had planned it, the skiff would emerge about a hundred meters above the ground near Draere’s station, which itself was three hundred meters above sea level; conservation of energy was not violated, however, since Tsarangalang stood at least four hundred meters above sea level. But the air they displaced over Draere’s island would be renged back here—to emerge moving at better than a kilometer per second. Woe betide anyone standing in the way.

The silence stretched on. Ajão had hoped that there would be no time in these last seconds for thought, for fear. As long as this moment had been days away, he could regard the plan as a simple problem in aerodynamics—one that math and common sense could solve. But now he was staking their lives on that solution, and the risks that he and Yoninne had glossed over could not be ignored: they might as well be sailing the ocean in a leaky rubber raft, or falling over a cataract in a wooden barrel. The skiff had been designed to fly at speeds far greater than a thousand meters per second—but only above the stratosphere, through air ten thousand times thinner than at sea level. Even with all the ballast they were carrying, the dense lower atmosphere would generate twenty gravities of drag. Could the hull and the ballast restraints take that? After all, the skiff was primarily intended to sustain thermal stress—not high-gee loadings.

Ping. Pingping. The skiff jiggled slightly against its calking blocks. Ajão looked across the dark cabin at Pelio. “Someone’s renging stones again,” the boy said. A muffled explosion sounded from overhead and the ruined ceiling sagged even lower toward the skiff. Through the narrow windows he saw soldiers moving in the moonlight, soldiers who wore heavy leggings instead of Summer kilts.

Lan, reng us out of here! prayed Bjault.

And the prayer was answered: one instant Ajão hung loosely from his harness, and the next—the next, he was squashed back in the webbing, and the skin on his face and arms tried to slide from his bones. In one crushing blow, the air was forced from his lungs and no more would enter. The wavering haze of blackout closed in upon his mind…

… But not before he saw, through the window slits, a sunlit morning horizon falling away above them.