Context (105 page)

Tom looked at Corduven, wondering
if he understood any of this. It made no—

“The Dark Fire,’ Sentinel said, ‘has
taken the Collegium Perpetuum Delphinorum. One of the Collegium’s three sites
has fallen; the other two are at high risk.’

He gestured, rotating the
display.

“There, near the place where
Oracles are made’—Sentinel spoke without regard for Corduven’s feelings:
without realizing the emotional significance of the place which had turned
Corduven’s brother into something both more and less than human—‘lies a place
which appears to be a death camp. We have no agents in place around there, so
our details are sketchy.’

Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t—•’

‘Captain Strelsthorm is there.’

‘In the death camp?’
Tom was half out of his seat.

‘Not as a prisoner.’ Again, the
placating hand gesture. ‘She’s infiltrated their command structure in a way we’ve
never achieved. Her cover name is Herla Hilsdottir, and she’s safe enough for
now.’

At the heart of Blight territory,
in a camp where who knew what atrocities were being carried out, at this
moment.

Elva. You really
are
alive.

‘We want you to—’

Tom stood up. ‘I’m going to get
her out.’

Reservation
Gamma was a vast series of interlinked natural caverns, never before used, to
anyone’s knowledge, since the colonists’ founding of Nulapeiron twelve
centuries before.

But now it was an
assault-training area, purchased at minimal cost from High Duke Frendino (in
whose realm it was nominally located), sealed off by opaque smartfilm while the
men and women inside faced their fears and drilled their reflexes. And the
training casualties sometimes included life-threatening injuries; everyone knew
that sooner or later trainees were going to die.

A guard saluted as Tom stepped
through the membrane. Inside, a black-visored sergeant bowed.

The cavern was gone, or so it
seemed.

Open sky
—

A holo-sky, lemon-tinged and
grey-clouded, replaced the cavern ceiling, and troops crawled across the broken
ground, as though they were on the world’s surface. But, even as Tom watched—standing
there without flinching, while the training officers stared at him, obviously
unable to believe his lack of reaction—five soldiers, in catatonic foetal
positions, were carried by aides from the battlefield.

Those aides, like the training
officers, wore polarizing smartfilters to block out the nonexistent sky: to
them, the rock above them was as solid and reassuring as ever.

‘How goes it?’ asked Tom.

‘Poorly, my Lord.’ The sergeant,
face hidden behind his visor, shook his head. ‘Perhaps we should increase the—’

‘No.
Decrease
the duration’—it
was the way Tom had conditioned himself — ‘but increase the frequency.’

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘They will acclimatize.’
Remembering: his long hard climb up the terraformer sphere, the Oracle’s
skyborne home, with murder in his heart. ‘Believe me, they will.’

Next
day, when he returned from his run, a message was waiting for him in his
quarters: an invitation from Lady Sylvana.

Tom wiped the crystal,
reinitializing it with a waved command, then tossed it into a communal storage
bin on his way to the mobilization caves.

Extract
from an internal report:
Beyond the Academy zone, where veterans are
billeted awaiting their return to the front, discipline grows increasingly
difficult to maintain.

Tom saw what that meant in human
terms as he passed a grim scene: two cargo-levs smashed into one pile of
twisted junk, and a torn bloody corpse.

Platoons from two rival services
had been involved. One of them stole the cargo-levs—from their rivals—then
drove the two vehicles straight at each other, diving from the controls just
before they hit.

If it had been only a matter of
wrecked vehicles, the situation would have been little more than an annoyance,
a symptom of cooped troops, fearing uncertainty more than death, blowing off
the pressure with an act of uncontrolled vandalism. But the man who had been
guarding the cargo-levs had been tied by smartrope to the front of one of them,
and when the two vehicles collided head on, he had been crushed into red pulp
by the impact.

A hard-faced military proctor
told Tom the story, while his colleagues used sting-batons on the now-sober
perpetrators—already confessing their guilt; one of them was weeping — before
taking them away for trial.

This was nothing which would
appear in any propagandized report on the war’s progress. It would remain yet
another dark secret until the war was won, or until the failings and weaknesses
of human civilization ceased to matter.

Tom pulled his cloak round
himself, and walked on.

By
a turquoise, mineral-saturated pool in another cavern, a small group of young
bare-chested soldiers held up their dead trophy, posing for a holocamera-bead:
a five-metre-long sealaconda, viciously barbed with long dorsal spikes. They had
used knives for the kill, which was a local tradition though the soldiers
looked to be from far away, and they pulled open flagons of gripplewine and
drank a victory toast, the pale liquid running down their bare smooth-skinned
chests, knowing that this was a moment of brief shared joy they would remember
forever if they survived this long dark war.

But Tom knew that the sealaconda,
for all its fierce appearance, was a gentle coward which fed on microflukes and
fungi and the occasional ciliate-newt, and offered no threat to the band of
bipedal killers which had hunted it down for sport.

He quickened his pace, nearing
his destination.

In
the final cave, a squad of quiet, watchful men was waiting, and their commander
was Adam Gervicort. Tom’s former servitor was now a battle-scarred veteran with
a habit of holding himself very still, like a neko-feline with prey in sight.

‘My Lord.’

There was camouflaged smartfilm,
and Adam led him through.

‘Look at this, Tom.’ They were
alone, in the membraned-off end of the cave, where he could ignore Tom’s rank. ‘Talk
about stripped for speed. What do you think?’

It was a low-slung arachnabug of
mottled grey, with a collapsed sled and food bundles tied behind the seat. The
vehicle’s tendrils looked like faded rope.

‘It’ll burn itself out,’ added
Adam, slapping the nearest tendril, ‘to get you there. Programmed to
self-immolate when it can go no further, or at your command.’

No comfort. Everything sacrificed
for speed and endurance.

It’ll get me to Elva.

‘Is it ready to go?’ Tom asked.

‘Aye, it is. And’—Adam held out
his hand—‘sooner you than me, my Lord.’

~ * ~

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