Dirge (19 page)

Sitting alone in the boat’s cockpit, he watched in stunned silence as the mobile unit’s pickup roved the city. There was fire everywhere, and smoke that obscured many of the images. Trained to seek out the visible, the unit kept moving. In the absence of directives from an accompanying commentator or its home base, it relied on the fallback instructions programmed into its memory.

Not every building was on fire. Some had been spared or missed. Others had been melted, and gaping, smoking craters marked the prior location of those that had been completely obliterated. A man appeared from off-image left, running at an angle across the pickup’s field of view. Dirty and bleeding, his clothes torn, he carried a baby in his arms while a teenage boy ran along parallel to him. The man kept looking around as if in search of help or a refuge. He might have been an office worker or a technician or a civil servant.

The boy looked back, and as he did so, his head vanished in a rainbow puff of blood, brains, bone, and flame. Ducking to his left, the man tried to bend as low as possible while shielding the child in his arms. One of his legs exploded, and he went down. Unlike the teen, who had perished in silence, a horrified Mallory heard him scream. The mobile remote picked up the shrill sound with detached efficiency.

Dumped from cradling arms, the infant went rolling across the street. It too was screaming. One leg gone, the man began to pull himself across the street toward the child. As Mallory bit down on the back of one index finger hard enough to draw blood, shapes appeared out of the smoke, advancing from the left. There were two of them, tall and straight, clad in protective helmets and bulky body armor. One of them walked up to the crawling man, put the tip of a long, unrecognizable instrument against the side of his head, and activated the device. The man’s head blew apart, blood and fragments of bone splattering against the armored legs. The killer’s companion walked over to the squalling infant and without hesitation repeated the action. Mallory ordered his body to breathe.

The mobile unit moved sideways, traveling along the street, emotionlessly following its programming. When it found a scene that would trip something within its set of internal commands, it would stop and focus, then move on again. Twice Mallory lost the image; both times frantic manipulation of the lifeboat’s outdated but still functional instrumentation brought it back. As he worked at the controls something large and powerful screamed past overhead, loud enough to be heard within the lifeboat that was inside the shed. Transfixed by the images he was seeing on the tridee, he ignored the sonorous echo of the object’s passing.

Drifting aimlessly in a fallback news search pattern, the mobile reached Weald’s central plaza. Carefully and lovingly laid out to resemble a series of concentric gardens, the square had been planted with blossoming plants and exotic growths gathered from all over Treetrunk. Many of these careful transplants were dead or dying now, incinerated or blasted from their planters. The square’s central fountain, a gift from the populace of the enormously successful colony of New Riviera, was a shapeless lump of ceramic and composite slag. Water from broken source pipes ran in a steady, aimless stream into surrounding drains.

Several air repulsion-type vehicles were clustered together near the center of the square, hard by the demolished fountain. All boasted protrusions that, while not immediately identifiable, were easily recognized as weapons. More of the armored body shapes were moving about nearby. In addition, there were a large number of figures engaged in other activities.

The mobile moved in closer. For some reason it was not immediately noticed by the invaders. Or perhaps, having already destroyed all known communications facilities, they felt no urgency to eliminate a single mobile device of obviously mechanical origins. The tridee image in the lifeboat flickered and danced. Cursing, hammering on the console, Mallory fought to stabilize it.

A small vehicle arrived and halted. Several of the more lightly clad figures moved to its side and helped those aboard to unload. Mallory leaned forward slightly, expecting to see valuable electronic components or containers full of informational recordings. The objects the aliens disbursed were somewhat larger, though equally recognizable.

Bodies.

Whether they were dead or simply paralyzed Mallory could not tell. In any event, none of the dozen or so exhibited any visible signs of damage. They were all, insofar as he could tell from the unsteady, intermittent image, female. Ranging in approximate age from fourteen to forty, they were carefully laid out on a prepared portable platform.

Other figures came forward. They carried small devices that Mallory at first thought were sidearms. They were not. Three of the figures immediately set to work on the nearest of the neatly laid out torsos. Silently, stolidly, having no one to lament with, Mallory watched as the aliens carefully and efficiently sliced into the abdomen and removed, insofar as he was able to tell, the complete set of female reproductive organs: uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, everything. Wet and glistening, these were smoothly transferred to a waiting container from which smoke/mist drifted, indicating that its interior was either very hot or very cold.

Their excision completed, they moved on to the next body in line, that of a girl who looked to be close to but not quite twenty. Whether the woman they left behind was still alive or not Mallory could not tell. It did not matter to the aliens, who made no attempt to close the gaping wound they left behind, and he found that he did not want to know.

He wanted to look away, to stare at something else, to put what he was seeing out of his mind, but he could not. The mobile unit, following its programming, continued to focus on the grisly biopsies, following the horribly inevitable course of one after another. So stunned was Mallory’s system by what he was witnessing that the shock was sufficient to suppress even his nausea reflex. At least, it was until he saw one of the eviscerated women twitch and try to sit up. Not through any dint of empathy but operating strictly from efficiency, one of the patrolling armored figures noticed the movement and shot her before she could rise far enough to comprehend the gaping crater in her belly. She had been granted the mercy of indifference.

Devoid of involvement beyond its unemotional programming, the mobile was relentless. It watched, it transmitted, it commented not. Pausing before the seventh helpless, prone figure, one of the alien exenteraters paused to adjust his protective gear. In the course of so doing it momentarily removed its helmet. Reacting to this action, a companion did likewise. Mallory stared. Humans. Other humans. Then he took note of the subtle differences, of the prismatically colored hair, the too-perfect posture, the sculpted countenances. Not human.

Pitar.

Why?
he felt himself screaming silently. Why, why, why? What reason could there be for the Pitar to attack an inoffensive and harmless colony like Treetrunk without warning, without reason? It made no sense. Exultant madness ruled the day, and dementia had taken control of the plenum. And what were the invaders doing, what could they possibly want, with the preserved reproductive organs of human females?

To these hopeless questions he could configure no rational answers. It made no sense, none whatsoever. Surely the Pitar knew the consequences of their actions! Not only humankind but sentience throughout the Arm would react with outrage, with anger, and then with retribution. Whatever they hoped to gain through the successful fulfillment of this atrocity would be infinitely transcended by the devastation a united and fully mobilized humankind would wreak on the perpetrators of the outrage.

Which would only happen, he realized with abrupt, exquisite clarity, if the identity of the perpetrators became known.

He was already moving when one of the body-armored Pitar finally took notice of the hovering mobile, turned directly toward it, raised a weapon, and fired. By the time the tridee image vanished, Mallory was out of the shed and racing back toward the house.

There was no need for structures and facilities on Treetrunk to be camouflaged. Who would want to attack a colony with a restricted habitation zone, limited industry, and still underexploited resources? Only someone who wished to be avoided by his fellow settlers would seek to distance himself from them and to make an effort to conceal his abode. There were no true hermits on Argus V, but there were a number who cherished their privacy. Among these, only one had the skill and the wherewithal to render himself and his habitation semivisible.

That wouldn’t save him, Mallory knew. It might keep him from discovery by the invading forces for a while, but eventually they would seek him out. They had to. The horrors they were committing demanded no one be left alive to speak of what had been done. The Pitar would scour the habitation zone for colonists and the cold wastes of the north and south for exploration parties. If they carried life detectors they would be able to track down and analyze even minor ambulatory patterns. On such instruments a human being left a signature as clear and sharp as a tridee paragon. Only a deep cave or oceanic environment could mask the individual autograph, and he didn’t doubt that the Pitar would search beneath the ground and sea as well.

He couldn’t remember from the last time he had viewed the news if any KK-drive ships were currently in orbit. If they were, none were likely to be warships. Undoubtedly their unlucky crews had been among the first to fall victim to the Pitarian treachery. Vessels stopping at Argus could not continue to disappear without notice, but given recent shipping patterns he estimated it might be several months before another called at Treetrunk. Several months would give the Pitar more than enough time to search the length and breadth of the planet for possible survivors and then depart without notice.

They would know where to look: what zones were being surveyed for minerals or development; what areas were under consideration for future expansion; where important communications, power-generating, and transportation facilities were situated. And why not? After the first several calls, their regular visits to Treetrunk had ceased to be restricted. Why circumscribe the movements of amiable, considerate, congenial friends? All the time they had been helping the colony to expand, they had been recording and consolidating data for the day of the attack.

They might not immediately notice his home and shop, isolated and concealed as they were on the side of the mountain. But after securing the few cities they would methodically move on to the larger towns, then the smaller villages, and finally to outlying farms, infrastructure postings, and individual structures. Even the forest would be no refuge. It would be expected that some people would flee into the Argusian wilderness in search of safety. Ruthless and relentless, the well-prepared Pitar would have anticipated that and would have come prepared for it. Mallory’s expression tightened. After the cities and towns, there would be hunts. Human hunts.

Any ships, satellites, or free-orbiting maintenance craft would already have been captured or destroyed. A competent attacking force would first secure the space around a world before turning its attention to the helpless surface. Shuttleports and airfields would be next in line for destruction or occupation, together with any craft capable of flight that happened to be on the ground. Once confident of having eliminated a target’s ability to fight or flee in atmosphere or free space, invaders could settle down to methodically exterminating the local population.

A few companies and citizens operated aircraft of their own, he knew. But such craft, while they might preserve their owners for a while longer, could not escape the attentions of much faster, higher-flying, orbit-capable shuttle craft. Anything with the ability to reach orbit required the long runways and support facilities of a port, or in an emergency a spacious open field or dry lake. Nothing robust enough to escape the pull of the planet’s gravity could take off straight up. That would require a craft with a short, explosive propulsion system: one designed to generate a single sustained but brief burst of speed before its motive source gave out.

In short, a lifeboat. Alwyn Mallory had a lifeboat. It was intact, more or less. It was internally equipped and provisioned, more or less.

The question was, could it exceed orbital velocity, more or less?

Having no options, he did not hesitate. If he remained where he was he would undoubtedly survive longer than the great majority of his unfortunate fellow colonists. It might be a matter of days, it might be a matter of weeks, but eventually the Pitar would come for him, as they would for everyone else. He did not intend to wait helplessly for that moment, like a rat chittering impotently at the back of its burrow.

Without hesitation, he tore through his once orderly home, ripping into cabinets and storage lockers. Anything that might prove remotely useful he threw into the transport cart from his shop. Food, medical supplies, reading material, raw electronic components, clothing, small tools—all found their way into the bowels of the old lifeboat. There was plenty of room. Designed to carry and care for a dozen people, it would soon be serving as refuge for only one. He would be short of everything but space.

It took him less than a day to scavenge his home of several years, the home where he had expected to live out a long and reasonably contented life. With luck he might see it again someday, but he did not stand around dwelling on distant possibilities. The lifeboat would be his home now. Or it would if he could escape the attention of the Pitar. When the last bar of sustenance had been thrown aboard, the last potentially useful tool stowed away, he rigged a line to fill the boat’s tanks with water. There was none aboard, just as the craft was devoid of food. It had been so when he had purchased it, everything useful and portable having long since been salvaged by the previous owners.

One tank leaked copiously before he noticed it. Despite the urgency and desperation of the moment he had to laugh at the idea of fleeing into the cold, heartless vacuum of space with water sloshing around his feet. It was a short, terse laugh. He had neither the time nor the inclination to indulge in any extended bouts of hilarity. Outside, down the mountain and beyond the woods, the beautiful, the glamorous, the estimable Pitar were slaughtering and eviscerating. The noble Pitar. The neighborly Pitar.