George Zebrowski (26 page)

The soldiers took a few steps toward him and stopped. He aimed his beamer and it fired, but his screen did not come back on.

He fired again at the advancing line. The weapon died. Slowly, he retreated, hoping that his power would return. He glanced back at the hill; in a few moments his back would be pressed against the barrier.

He stopped and aimed at Kurbi. The beam came to life and licked feebly at the Earthman’s screen. Gorgias struggled to hold the weapon steady in his shaking hands.

The beam weakened and went out.

He opened his mouth to shout an obscenity, but his throat was too dry to make a sound. His legs were stone; his body shuddered.

“Kurbi!” he rasped and fired again. The beam died. His hands were fragile glass. He dropped the weapon.

Kurbi was walking toward him alone.

Gorgias cried out and ran forward, reaching for the last light-scatter bomb around his waist. His fingers closed around it. He raised his arm for the throw.

Fire reached into his eyes, and the sun exploded in his head.

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THE CRESCENT OF SOLDIERS closed into a circle around the fallen Herculean, their shadows forming the spokes of a black wheel.
It’s all over
, Rafael Kurbi thought as he knelt beside the charred body,
I’ll be free to live other lives
. A sense of relief struggled to assert itself within him, but he held it back. He was only dimly aware of Poincaré standing at his left.

Kurbi reached out and touched the blackened corpse. It was still warm. At any moment, it seemed, the burnt flesh would blow away and the Herculean would stand up, shrugging off the ashes as easily as he had evaded his pursuers in the past. Death would be only a minor inconvenience.

“He’s dead,” Poincaré said, “there’s no use …”

“Shut up!” Kurbi looked around at the soldiers, wondering which one had fired the final, agonizing burst. The helmets made it impossible to tell the men apart. They were all guilty, he thought, including himself.

“His ship has not destructed,” Poincaré said. “The explosion he promised would have ripped the canopy apart.”

Kurbi stood up. “We might have gone with it, maybe the whole planet. The fool who fired the last shot risked everything.”

“You believed the threat?”

“We had no choice.” Kurbi looked at the covered hill. The inverted bowl loomed above them, looking like the bald summit of a buried mountain.

“Lift the canopy,” Kurbi said.

“He was obviously lying,” Julian added. “He’s dead and we’re still here.”

“Hold that order,” Kurbi said suddenly. “Do not lift the canopy.”

“Standing by,” a distant voice said in his ear.

“What’s wrong?” Julian asked.

“If there’s a link between Gorgias and the ship, then maybe we screened out the destruct impulse when we cut him off from his power. We lift the canopy and the whole planet goes up.”

“But there’s nothing left on the body that works, Raf.”

“There might be a delay in the ship sensing his death. There might be an implanted device inside the body for that. Or it might work through a simple failure of the Herculean to report in.”

“I think you’re giving him too much credit for cleverness. He wasn’t thinking too well when we trapped him out here.”

“You’re probably right,” Kurbi said. “Imagine yourself losing such a large force.” He thought of what life would be like for the survivors.

“Do we lift the canopy or not?”

“What do you think?”

“You’re still in charge, but I say go ahead.”

The whole planet will go
, Kurbi thought.
Gorgias will win after all
. He was startled by the realization that he was almost hoping for it to happen.

“We can’t just leave things like this,” Poincaré said.

Why not? Leave and never come back
. “Just to be safe,” Kurbi said, “we’ll stand off the planet and lift the field from a distance. We have no choice. Too many lives.”

“I’ll send a crew to stow the body,” Julian said. “We’ll take it with us.”

“We’re out far enough,” Poincaré said. “Shut off the canopy now.” Kurbi sat back next to him and waited, watching the screen.

“Nothing,” Poincaré said after a moment.

“Leave the other ships,” Kurbi said. “We’ll go down in this one.”

“You were right to be cautious. We could take a shuttle this time.”

“We may need the medical facilities. How are the prisoners?”

The nightside rushed up at the screen as the ship plunged into the planet’s atmosphere.

“Doing well — Crusus is in good shape.”

Kurbi watched the planet.

“Can I say something to you, Raf?”

Kurbi turned and looked at Julian. “What is it?”

“Can I be candid?”

“Sure, go ahead.…”

“You don’t make it easy for a friend.”

Are we friends
? Kurbi asked himself, searching for an honest feeling about Julian.

“What is it?”

“It’s a number of things, Raf, all mixed inside you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why do you think you went hunting the Herculean?”

“Why ask me? You’re going to tell me your answer.”

“I think Grazia’s death precipitated it. Then you saw all that dying on New Mars. Some part of you made catching Gorgias the same as saving lives.…”

“That’s to say nothing, Julian. Gorgias killed a lot of people and had to be stopped.”

“Let me finish, I’m not that obvious. Gorgias became a standin for Grazia. You blame yourself for not saving her. You took it on yourself to help revive a dead civilization — but neither you nor Gorgias could have done that by yourselves.…”

“If he could have worked with me …” Kurbi said.

“All your best motives got mixed in with your personal tragedy. Gorgias became a lost son to you.…”

“The problem had its own merits also. Besides, you pressured me into the search.”

“That’s true.”

“It would have been better to have saved him, regardless.”

“Possibly.”

“There will be other things for me now.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

The ship touched down on the darkened battlefield. The lights of the house looked almost friendly.

“I’ll take a few men and investigate,” Poincaré said.

Kurbi was pacing back and forth when the screen came on.

“The ship is still here,” Poincaré said from the house. “So is the woman Myraa.”

Kurbi nodded. Julian was sitting in the main room, alone.

“One strange thing, though.”

“What?” Kurbi asked.

“It’s probably nothing. Our cyberneticist is questioning the artificial intelligence in the Whisper Ship, to see if there is any hidden delay in its destruct sequence. The destruct has not been tripped. The ship is behaving as if Gorgias were still alive.”

“So their technology was not infallible.”

“That or it was not Gorgias who died.”

It’s not over
. The words repeated in Kurbi’s head. He felt a sudden surge of hope — and with it came the realization that Julian’s view of him was correct, or as nearly correct as words could be made to express reality.

“… The ship doesn’t give any sign of malfunctioning,” Poincaré was saying. “It’s as if it’s waiting …”

“The ship is very old,” Kurbi said softly.

“So, you think he’s dead?”

“Yes — but send out search parties. He would have to be on foot.…”

“What about the ship?”

“We’ll stow it in our hold and take it with us,” Kurbi said.

“What about the woman?”

“Leave her. She obviously had no part in any of this. We’d violate our agreement with the Herculeans on this world by taking prisoners. Has she told you anything?”

“They’ll cheer us back home,” Poincaré said.

“But I know I’ve failed.”

“I’ll let you know if we learn anything more. We’ll leave the screen open.”

Kurbi turned away and went to the door. It slid open and a watch officer came in to take his place. Kurbi walked into the open elevator and rode it down to the locks.

He came out into a chilly morning. A warming sun crept up from behind the mountains. Long glowing clouds streaked the sky. He wondered about the Herculean army. Maybe Myraa’s people had collaborated with Gorgias to bring the force here? But from where? Myraa seemed to be at the center of something.

He took a deep breath and went back inside.

Poincaré came into the control room with a tripod on his shoulder. He opened it and set it down on the floor.

“What is it?” Kurbi asked as he stood up.

“The troops were stored in this cylinder casing, in the crystalline structure of the material inside.”

Kurbi took the casing and examined it.

“We knew they were working on various things toward the end of the war,” Poincaré said, “ — but this!”

“So it was all Gorgias’s doing,” Kurbi said.

“We’ve examined the entire assembly,” Julian said. “What’s really interesting about it is that with a slight modification it might have thrown up the same army again and again, using the patterns to create an indefinite number of doubles, as long as there was energy to feed in. Gorgias did not know this at all.”

“What else did Myraa tell you?”

“Crusus helped us figure out the tripod. He knows a few things about it. He’s a sad person, Raf, filled with doubts now.”

“What else?”

“There is a base. We think the ship can take us to it. Myraa also showed me what she says is a teleport link with the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, but it’s dead now, she says.”

“Will the ship listen to our commands?”

“In time, she says, it might.”

Kurbi found himself only half-listening as Poincaré finished his report. Despite Julian’s explanation of his preoccupation with Gorgias, the future seemed empty without the hope of getting through to the Herculean.

“… and then, Raf, her face became strange and drawn, and she looked old, as if she were staring into another universe. Raf?”

Kurbi rubbed his eyes. “That’s it?”

“No — you need sleep.”

“Finish what you were saying,” Kurbi said.

“She wouldn’t say another word to me. Well — it’s not a total loss. We have the ship. We may have the base in time. Think of what we may find there — think of the archives it might contain!”

Kurbi was silent. Even if Julian was right about his tangled motives, it would still be a long time before he could weave another web half as meaningful. There was nothing left but empty possibility, unconnected to him in any personal way. He was going to become someone else, for whom none of this would have any interest.

“You can’t go on like this,” Julian said.

“Hurry things along,” Kurbi said. “I’m weary of this place.”

Poincaré sighed.

Kurbi looked at the tripod. He stepped closer and inserted the cylinder carefully. With these things, he thought, Gorgias called up the past to help him, but the past came forward with all its defects. The patterns of men long dead were rebuilt into flesh and blood, then burned into ashes. When he had first come to hunt Gorgias, the Herculean’s life was already a mere echo, a life which had started somewhere with groping motions, had reached several stages of twisted development and had settled into a wayward spiral, winding from a ruined past into an empty future. He thought of the Federation’s snaking corridor of worlds — turning, twisting as it grew, until it had reached the Hercules Cluster, there to light the spark that gave birth to Gorgias’s people. The Herculean terrorist had been the puppet of a greater will, growing more desperate with each failure.

Julian was speaking, but Kurbi could not listen. A cold pain grew in his stomach. He was marching with Gorgias across a barren waste, toward a dawn that could never come. He hated himself.

I might have saved him
, he told himself, and each word was a star being born in a terrifying darkness.

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GORGIAS STRUGGLED to open his eyes.

“
You must try to understand
.” Myraa’s voice was all around him, soft and caressing.

“Where are you?”

“Here, near you. You’re safe. They cannot hurt you now. You’ll know everything soon.”

He tried to move his arms.

It felt … as if he did not have any.

He remembered the blinding flash. His screen had been down and he had been hit. Nothing could survive a direct hit from that kind of weapon; but he was alive.

The ship. Myraa and he were safe in the ship, fleeing back to the base. Maybe the ship was still on the planet, waiting for the moment when the canopy would lift. The pain would come when the drugs wore off. He imagined that he was lying in a gel bath, waiting for the protective mass to heal his burns.

No
, Myraa said. She seemed to speak from inside him.