Voice of the Whirlwind (8 page)

“He’s giving me something else I want.”

She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, made a face at the discovery that it had gone out. She dropped it in an ashtray. “He’s giving you a chance to get into space, right? Money? Lotta good it’ll do if you’re dead.”

He looked at her. “Sheol,” he said.

The word seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, like honey dropping from a spoon. Ardala shook her head and fell back to the pillows. “It’s like you want to give Sheol a second chance to kill you. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.”

He reached out, put a hand on her knee. “I can’t do anything about whether the job’s dangerous or not. All I can do is be ready. I’m ready.”

She turned her head away. He could see her throat working. “Dead man,” she said. “A fucking dead man.”

Steward took his hand back, gazed down at the book. “I’ll be back in a day or so,” he said.

Ardala was still looking away. “So you say.”

*

“At the beginning it was easy. Sheol was pioneered by Far Ranger, but Coherent Light got the Icehawks into the Wolf 294 system before anyone else. Mobilized, declared hostilities Outward, and went. Only the male Icehawks were sent Outward; the women’s battalions were kept in-system to guard against sabotage and maybe try some themselves. The women weren’t happy about it—what were they trained for, anyway?—and a lot of the men were pissed off because they got separated from their girlfriends.

“Far Ranger only had a few pioneers down in the northern hemisphere, and a small base on the big moon. We captured all their personnel and got all their artifacts and data. Fortified the moon base, put some ships in orbit, put our people down. We had the Icehawks plus two brigades of corporation grunts that had been recruited and shipped up from Earth at the last minute. Plus support personnel and a couple hundred archaeologists, xenobiologists, scientist types.”

Griffith let his head fall forward. He passed his forearm across his eyes, wiping away invisible sweat. His voice changed, lost in a grating reverie. “Sheol was…lovely,” he said. “It was summer in the northern hemisphere when we landed. The planet had been tamed by the Powers over thousands of years…they’d arranged it like a garden, landscaped the mountains and rivers. It had overgrown and changed, but the intent was still there. The…harmony of the way they’d set things.”

He raised his head. “The Powers—they’re not like us.” Griffith’s watery eyes seemed to shine. “They’re older,” he said. “Better. They…they know how to live with each other. What we found on Sheol and its moon reflected that. They built well, but after all the years they’d been away, there wasn’t much intact above ground. But they live in tunnels as well as on the surface, and there was a regular underworld there, hundreds of thousands of tunnels and rooms, some wrecked or collapsed but most intact, filled with stuff that had been packed carefully for storage… and there were tunnels on the moon as well, still pressurized with air we could breathe. The Powers knew they were coming back, even if we hadn’t twigged to that. It was…beautiful. A wonderland.” He shook his head. “And we fought our filthy little war in there. In all that magnificence, amid all the beauty….”

Steward sat quietly in his plump chair, feeling the scratchy fabric against his forearms. There was a tingle in his limbs, a lightness, as if he’d just warmed and stretched and was ready to move, waiting for the signal that would take him into whatever was waiting…. It felt right. He tried to picture in his mind the waiting planet, green and blue against the black and patterned stars, the surprised Far Ranger personnel, the waiting tunnels where the Icehawks, taller than the Powers, would have had to crouch as they moved….

Griffith was fumbling for a cigarette. “I remember that at the beginning, you—the Captain—said we were dispersing too much, trying to hold too much ground. There were just stacks of artifacts everywhere we looked—there was no point in dispersal, he said. We could concentrate and still have more loot than we’d know what to do with. But Colonel de Prey said he didn’t have any choice. That the plans were based on maps of Sheol that our agents had got out of Far Ranger, they’d been set in advance, back in the Sol system. And then the Colonel left, returned to headquarters with the data we’d captured. He said he’d be back, with reinforcements, once he made his report. He left Major Singh in charge.” Griffith shook his head. “The Captain was right. When the next wave came, it was from Far Ranger, and they hurt us bad.”

As Griffith spoke of what happened next, Steward tried to picture the Far Ranger ships leaping across the blackness, the sudden blossoms of light in the sky that marked the battle in space where the Coherent Light ships were blown apart. The atmosphere cutters coming down, swooping on the Coherent Light positions out of a sky cut by the trails of defensive rockets, rising slow-motion tracer, straight-line bolts of lightning that were particle beams… the arc of the bombs and rockets as they fell, the way the flames leapt boiling from the perfect green landscape. Troopships landing, disgorging soldiers in Far Ranger colors. Fire snapping from ruins, from tunnels. Soldiers groping for one another amid the dense green. Urgent cries on microwave channels.

And then a repeat as the whole thing happened all over again—first the silent flares in the sky, then the shriek of the cutters, these from Policorp Derrotero, which had come to seize their share of Sheol. More flares in the sky as Derrotero and Far Ranger ships, united in a brief alliance, drove off an assault from Gorky. Then treachery on the part of Far Ranger, a preemptive strike on Derrotero once Policorp Gorky was driven off, a strike that weakened Derrotero but didn’t knock them out. A counterstrike, and Derrotero ships held the sky. The Coherent Light troops, barely holding on, went on the offensive, in an alliance Singh had arranged with Derrotero against Far Ranger. Then a new flood of invaders, Policorps Magnus and OutVentures in alliance, blasting away the Derrotero presence from the system, landing fresh, well-trained troops in vast numbers.

A flare on the face of the largest moon. “We’d put a tactical atomic under the moon base, just in case we lost it. De Lopez was hidden in one of the moon tunnels with the detonator. Killed a lot of people that way. Took out ships that were in for maintenance.” Griffith swallowed. “Maybe that wasn’t good, to be the first to use atomics. Maybe that meant they weren’t inclined to be civilized with us anymore.”

Then, the winter.

Griffith was drinking his second beer. “The grunts died like flies. They were tough and smart, but they hadn’t trained together long enough, didn’t know how to work with each other, and their bad deployment at the start just made them targets, isolated them so their units couldn’t support one another. Only the Icehawks stood a chance against the numbers, the weapons they were using. We had the training, the morale. The capability. We could fight a sustained guerrilla war with a limited base, but once the grunts lost their cushy foam bunkers, their fuel-cell heaters and vid sets, they just fell apart.” He shook his head. “Christ. They had no winter training at all.” The parchment skin of his face was pale. His eyes were black and empty, staring blindly into the landscape of his memories. Smoke drifted up from the cigarette in his hand, but he’d forgotten it was there.

“Winter is bad, there on Sheol. That’s why the Powers built so many tunnels—to hide in the wintertime. It’s a flat planet, mostly, with a lot of ocean…. The winds just build up to hurricane velocity, pushed by Coriolis force and Christ knows what, and there’s nothing to stop them. They just come howling out of the prairie like perdition on a picnic. Storms could go on for days, weeks sometimes. The Far Ranger people, the first pioneers—they had landed in the winter. They knew what they were talking about when they called the place Sheol.” Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. He looked down in an abstracted way, brushed it off. Stubbed the cigarette out with a savage gesture.

“We were getting messages from home every now and then. A ship coming in-system, firing off messages, then running. Sometimes a supply ship would get in past the blockade. But eventually they stopped trying to supply us. We didn’t know that CL was devoting all its energies to supporting Far Jewel’s fight in another system. That two battalions of women Icehawks and a new wave of grunts had been sent out there, instead of to help us. We had to live off what we captured, that or what we found in the tunnels. Or could grow ourselves in the vats.

“We were still hitting them, though. From the tunnels. Flying in on isolated posts under cover of the storms. Sometimes we’d attack just to steal their food. We’d have to kill any that surrendered. We had no place to put them, no food to give them. If enemy reinforcements came after us, we’d hide in the tunnels.”

Griffith was shaking now. His hands were trembling, the beer splashing up the sides of the bottle. “They couldn’t get us out of our holes. It would cost too much to dig us out. That’s when they started using gas on us. Extermination drones. And biologicals.” Tears were running down Griffith’s face. He swallowed hard. “That’s when things broke down. That’s when we all knew… we’d been sacrificed. That Coherent Light wouldn’t be coming back for us.”

*

The warm night seemed full of sound and light. Todo music throbbed from the small shops crowding the wide alloy street that mirrored the bodies of those who walked on it, the crystal windows and bright holograph displays that soared soundlessly above the walkways. Steward wore a charcoal-colored jacket over a black T-shirt that featured a liquid-crystal display on the front, one that ran the text of Jack Totem’s poem “551” in three-inch rainbow letters across Steward’s chest….

“
Our tongues are electrons, tasting the silicon heart of America
.” Magic. An incantation. Invoking the local demons, calling them to Steward’s aid.

He was spiraling inward to the meet, trying to get a feel for this town, for the connections that existed here and for the rhythm of its life. He couldn’t match any of the locals for knowledge, but maybe he could taste a little of this city’s silicon heart, enough to give him a purchase on the way things worked here. He walked on tennis shoes with red balls on the sides, shoes he’d been unable to resist buying in his last hour in Arizona. A reminder of where he’d been, why he was here.

He felt the weight of the package in his pocket and wondered whether or not to carry it to the meet. Griffith said it was safe. Not to appear trusting might cost Griffith something with the people he worked with.

He moved down the bright reflective street, weighing things in his mind.

*

Griffith was lying on his bed. Smoking, staring at the ceiling. Breathing easier now. The trembling fit had passed. “A message came through. From Colonel de Prey. He ordered Singh into an alliance with Far Ranger and Gorky against Magnus and OutVentures. Ordered us to take the offensive. They didn’t even know, back home, that Gorky had never landed.

“We were living behind biologic seals, down in the tunnels. The food vats had been poisoned. Whenever we went out, we had to wear our environment suits, live in them every minute. People were getting sick, wasting away. There were only a thousand of the grunts left, and they’d lost all their heavy equipment…. They were just guerrillas now, like the Icehawks, only not as well trained. Far Ranger was worse off than we were. Singh decided to obey his instructions. You— the Captain—you argued against it. Told him that Coherent Light was months out of touch, couldn’t possibly know the situation. But Singh trusted the Colonel, said that CL must have based their decision on factors we didn’t know, that there was probably help on the way, or alliances that we didn’t know that would work for us.”

He turned toward Steward. Steward saw the recognition in his eyes, sensed that he wasn’t talking to himself anymore, or to Steward, but to a dead man. To the Captain.

“I heard you and Singh shouting at each other. But I saw you after the meeting, and you were calm. I remember you quoted Corman at me. Our old martial-arts teacher. Remember when Corman was talking Zen? She said that the world, that reality, was like a whirlwind. That the Zen warrior did not fight the whirlwind, that she gave the whirlwind nothing to strive against, that the whirlwind passed through her and left her unaffected, unmoved.”

You, Steward thought. He called me “you,” talking about the Captain. I’m enough like him, then. A feeling, cold and then hot, passed through his bones.

“You were a little sick, like we all were. Feverish. Either the enemy’s biological weapons, or our own preventive vaccines, always had us sick. You’d lost weight, you hadn’t slept in days, kept going with speed. You looked like a fucking phantom, man. We all did. And what you said was, that it wasn’t enough to be unmoved, to let the whirlwind pass. You said that the only way we’d survive was to
become
the whirlwind.”

It seemed to Steward that he could see right into Griffith’s head, that his eyes were black holes leading into an emptiness, a place where invisible snow beat against the confines of his skull and the voice of the whirlwind shrieked in his ears.

“I’ve been through combat,” Griffith said. “I’ve been shot at and gassed and lost in a snowstorm. But I’ve never been as scared as I was when I heard you say that. Because I knew you were the only one who understood what kind of war we were in. And that you accepted it, and that you could still act. You were crazy, I think, out of your mind on combat and speed. But I knew that if I wanted to get out of this, I’d follow you. I wasn’t alone. People were trying to get out of other units, to join the Captain. Trying to find reasons to be with him. People were starting to figure that if anyone was gonna live, it would be him.” His voice dropped, and he spoke with calm authority.

“
You
were the whirlwind, Captain,” he said. “The rest of us just followed along. But you were the whirlwind. You were Sheol.”

*

No cabs. Steward noticed that right away. Lots of private cars and cycles, but no cabs.

There were a lot of little neighborhoods here, condecologies on a small scale. Self-contained, easily defined. The buildings were old, sometimes centuries old. On the ground floor only, the facades were recent—clubs, shops, boutiques, all striving for something new.