Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (17 page)

A second piercing scream sounded—like death itself.

“Jamal,” Queen Clan breathed.

She hurried from the temple, the priest following.

As she opened the portal door into the tunnel, she was met by four black-leather-clad figures, wearing odd-shaped boots and gloves to outline their various missing limbs.

Two of the soldiers took an immediate hold on Queen Clan, while the other two fired rasers simultaneously at the priest, Jon-Ten, who had stopped, startled, in the open portal and then turned to run. He was cut down with both shots in the back and fell dead to the ground.

A third piercing scream came from Jamal’s room down the tunnel.

“My son!”

Without a word, the black-clad soldiers began to drag the queen toward Jamal’s room; when they arrived, they stopped outside.

A fourth scream, horrible to Kamath Clan’s ears, issued from within; then the door was opened, and Wrath-Pei’s gyro chair, guided by the boy Lawrence from behind, glided from the room and stopped before the queen. Within, Kamath’s view was blocked by more black-clad soldiers.

The tunnel’s sulfurous odor was subsumed by a sweet coppery smell. Wrath-Pei lovingly wiped something viscous and red from the tip of his shears and sheathed them.

He looked at Queen Clan and smiled.

“Happy to see me?” he said.

Chapter 19

B
enel Kran called him the Ghost.

Benel felt like something of a ghost himself. Ever since the war, which had taught him survival skills he had never dreamed of needing, he had avoided human contact. In the beginning, with Martian Marines rounding up every child and plasma soldiers killing every adult, Benel Kran had found himself some very interesting hiding places. The most interesting, and uncomfortable, had been the hollow inside of a feeder tube support column; once inside, Benel had quickly deduced that he was both safe from capture and probably dead anyway, since the squared opening of the tube was now fifty feet above his head and he, at the bottom, had no way to climb out.

But fate, in the form of luck, had helped him out, as the Martians, not content with their plunder of the feeder tube itself, decided to take its support columns also; after a little jostling, followed by a quick change of direction as the tube was craned from vertical to horizontal, he found himself in the open, at night, under a glorious mantle of stars in a now-empty work area. The next day he watched what had been his prison for five days hauled away atop a massive ground shuttle; watched, through his right eye only, since the cheap corneal implants he had foolishly favored over eyeball replacement had favored him with the left one peeling away and lost, from the safety of a smaller and more convenient hiding place, through the tiny window of a locked (he had jammed the lock himself) construction toilet.

The first six months after the war’s quick end had gone this way, with Benel always in hiding, often close to capture, but managing to retain his freedom.

Not bad for a physicist, he had thought.

And then, gradually, the planet had become quiet.

He watched the Martian Marines pull out from an empty house in Frolich City; out the kitchen window a breeze was moving a child’s swing on its creaking chain; and, through the space between the chains, and through his right eye, Benel watched the sleek orange Martian Marine shuttles take off, one by one down a row, as if peeling away. Inside those rockets were the last of Venus’s children and loot. In a few moments they were gone, along with their hissing stream of rocket fire.

Suddenly Benel felt alone, sitting there on a stool munching from a sealed can of peanuts he had found (food had never been a problem from the beginning: the Martians had stripped off anything they favored, but there were many foodstuffs the Martians did not favor, which had left Benel with plenty to eat from a rather restricted menu: dried cereals, nuts, anything generally dry; the Martians greatly prized Venus’s store of vegetables and especially canned fruits, which Benel had come to sorely miss) and watching the last vapors of the Martian rockets dissipate into the powder-blue sky. But his loneliness was short-lived, as a plasma soldier appeared in the backyard, sending Benel scrambling for the house’s attic, a trail of dropped peanuts behind him.

Which would have sealed his fate, had a Marine been hunting him; but as it was, his perpetual luck held and the plasma soldier, after a cursory examination of the house, went the way he had come.

And then, soon after, the light soldiers were gone also.

Their leaving was much more abrupt, and spectacular. Benel, having become a nocturnal scrounger, was poking through a trash heap of tools the Martians had left in the middle of a public street when a monstrous humming sound commenced. When Benel looked around, it seemed the night sky was filled with bright shafts of light bursting from the ground to the sky. Only after the fact did Benel realize that what he had witnessed was the plasma soldiers being dematerialized, literally sucked back up to their orbital transmitters.

They were gone—just like that.

“Amazing,” Benel said, out loud, the first words he had uttered in more than half a year.

He spent the next months being careful, because someone was still bound to be around. And he was not wrong. There were still plasma soldiers to be found, but they were easy to avoid, since their only function seemed to be to guard Venus’s remaining feeder tube stations. Food storehouses and equipment dumps were out of their range of orders (they had absolutely no volition of their own), and so Benel was free to raid them as he wished.

The Martian Marine presence was, however, ended; and though a few Martian technicians still puttered around here and there, they were even easier to avoid than the plasma soldiers. Being engineers, they were generally loud and clumsy, and disliked to be inconvenienced.

They, too, eventually left, after denuding the planet of whatever they felt might be valuable.

Which left (if one didn’t count the robotlike plasma soldiers) only Benel.

And the Ghost.

Benel stumbled upon the Ghost on what he later calculated to be the first anniversary of the One-Day War. The physicist had spent the preceding months establishing a laboratory of sorts in what had once been Frolich City’s recreation center. Game tables, he found, made excellent lab benches, and the colorful gaming room had soon been converted into something else, its billiard tables overflowing with electrical equipment, its dart board supporting the thick line of an antenna cable, the smooth long line of its bar sporting beakers and electronic circuit boards where once drinks and pretzel bowls had ruled. The huge Screen, which covered one wall to the left of the bar, had once shown sporting events from Venus and the other Four Worlds; now showed, alternately, the wavy frequency lines of test equipment and the crystal-clear picture from the security cameras Benel had mounted on the recreation center’s roof and jerry-built into the system.

That was how Benel first saw the Ghost.

On what he later realized was the war’s anniversary, Benel was absorbed, as he had been all day, and all month, and all year, in miniaturization problems. For Benel, who was not an engineer, it was not the basic problems that were bothersome, but the practical application of them. This, of course, had been his main concern during and after the war. It was something Cast-Prin, a fellow physicist, would have helped him with in a second—but Cast-Prin, unfortunately, had not made it through the war. And now that Benel Kran had every single theoretical problem solved in his project—he had, in effect, solved, a day too late, the problem of how to neutralize the plasma soldiers—he had no way to test it out. The mess of cables, circuitry, and other paraphernalia could only be tested if, incongruously, a plasma soldier walked in front of it. Which wasn’t about to happen, since Benel had chosen a place where plasma soldiers would not bother to come.

Benel was bent over a particularly nasty nest of wiring, trying to squeeze it into a bulky, unattractive chromium box (how did those engineers manage to make everything look so elegant?) when the chiming alarm on the security camera system went off and the Screen broadened into a view of the outside perimeter.

A lone figure was making its way past the recreation center, with no apparent interest in the center, or anything else, for that matter.

“Screen, zoom,” Benel ordered—but by the time the Screen obliged, the figure had rounded a corner and was lost to the camera’s sight.

Benel hurried from the lab to the street and cautiously looked out.

But the streets were as empty as they had been before the appearance of the mysterious figure.

Thinking himself prone to hallucination, Benel returned to the lab and had the Screen review the pictures of the intruder; sure enough, he had been real, though Benel could not make out his features and he seemed vague in other ways—like a man not entirely in control of his own faculties.

“Wonderful, a crazy man,” Benel mumbled, returning to his work and forgetting for a moment the vision. As long as he didn’t bother Benel, the crazy man could do whatever he wanted. The brief thought that the crazy man might bring the attention of the plasma soldiers to Benel’s laboratory gave Benel pause, but he dismissed the threat with a vow to set up his weapon facing the front entrance, just in case.

Then, if a visit from the light soldiers should occur, he could, at the very worst, test the machine as they stormed in.

Crazy man.

Ghost…

Maybe I’ll never see him again…

But the Ghost did appear again, the next day, under similar circumstances, though this time in the midst of a rain shower. The streets of Frolich City were being pounded with rain, and above the sound of it on the thin resin roof of the recreation center Benel did not at first hear the chime of the alarm system. By the time he did look up at the Screen, the Ghost was already disappearing, hatless and umbrellaless, around the same corner that had hid him the day before; and, once again, as Benel reached the street there was no sign of him anywhere.

He may be a ghost,
Benel thought,
but I’ll find out what he’s up to.

And so, the next day, under bright sunshine, Benel climbed early up onto the roof and, pushing puddles from yesterday’s storm aside with his boots, realigned one of the security cameras to give a wider sweep.

The Ghost didn’t appear that day or the next, leading Benel to think that perhaps he was gone for good, or captured, or dead—

But the following day the security chime went off, and Benel gave his full attention to the Screen.

“Zoom, and follow,” Benel ordered, and the Screen obeyed. Benel could almost feel the roof camera swiveling to follow the Ghost—but still he could not get a good look. The man’s face was averted, hidden in shadow. He walked like a person in a dream, unheedful of his surroundings, hands at his sides. His tunic looked as if he had worn it for days.

In the labyrinthine streets surrounding the recreation center, Benel followed him until he was finally lost in the distance. Benel was amazed to see that he was heading for Frolich City’s feeder station, but the camera’s limited range could not overcome distance, and the Ghost was soon, once again, lost from sight.

“We’ll see about this,” Benel said.

And so began a six-month campaign to track the Ghost to his lair. Two months for Benel to find, and install, a superior surveillance system, salvaged from Martian equipment partially damaged by raser fire; Benel had to design circuitry to replace what was blown out in the Martian rig; it took two weeks alone to find a single Venusian part that did what an inefficient Martian one, with twenty times the components, had done. In the end, though, Benel Kran had his camera and had it mounted so that it could cover the landscape to the horizon. It could almost reach into space, so sensitive were its optics.

But then the Ghost didn’t come.

Four more months passed, during which time Benel struggled with his miniaturization problems. He still longed for a plasma soldier to test the rig, as bulky and unwieldy as it was. Eventually, the Ghost slipped from Benel’s mind. Occasionally the security system, overly sensitive, was set off by a high-flying bird and, once, by a groundhog appearing in the mouth of its burrow a half mile away. The system became an annoyance, and Benel determined to dismantle it.

And then the Ghost returned.

A darkening, gray, cloudy day this time, with rain promised for later. Benel was not even in the lab, but had given himself a day off, to be spent trying to come up with something new to eat. He was in the recreation center’s supply closet, going over cartons and cans of dried foods, trying to figure out a way of spicing up their various combinations, when the chime of the security system went off out in the lab.

“The groundhog returns!” Benel said to himself; but the chime was insistent.

Sighing, Benel went to the lab.

And there, on the Screen, was the Ghost.

Benel stared for a moment, openmouthed, not so much at the appearance of the Ghost but at the sensitivity and excellence of the equipment Benel had installed. He was nearly looking into the Ghost’s tunic pockets, so good was the camera’s resolution. And yet, the figure’s features were still a blur. Benel squinted his one good eye at the Screen, but the best he could make out was a face oddly blackened and a scruffy beard. The man’s tunic was positively filthy; Benel was sure that he had not looked this unkempt before. His hands were palsied, and he walked oddly, as if sure where he was going and yet still tentative.

“Zoom on face,” Benel ordered, and the camera tried, but the Ghost had already turned away from the recreation building and was shuffling toward the edge of the city.

“Follow,” Benel commanded.

And the camera did so, splendidly, keeping the Ghost’s back centered in the picture and anticipating his reappearance when he was blocked from view by an occasional building.

At the edge of Frolich City the Ghost did not stop; he was heading for the feeder station.