Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (22 page)

“Where is your master?” the general snapped.

The boy said nothing. He seemed immobilized, lines of nonsensical data flowing across the front of his visor: “Ohhhhhhohhhhhohhhhhhh.”

The general took the boy by his stick-thin arms and shook him. A measure of pity went through him to see how damaged and frail the child was; it was like holding a bundle of twigs.

Suppressing his disgust, Pron-Kel knelt down to look straight into Lawrence’s visor; he hoped the boy could sense his concern behind the data-spewing plastic shield that wrapped around his face.

“Where is your master?” the general said slowly, kindly.

The boy’s ruined mouth tried to speak, but only managed to make a sound and movement like a fish pulled from water.

Lawrence’s visor went suddenly blank, startling Pron-Kel; the general could see the boy’s terrified face in vague form through the semi-translucent screen.

Again the boy’s mouth gurgled.

The word GONE scrolled across the boy’s visor, in sudden large letters. There was a roll of nonsense symbols, and then an unbroken line of script: GONEGONEGONEGONEGONEGONEGONEGONE …

Though he wanted to fling the boy away, the general willed his hand to pat Lawrence’s shoulder and say, “There, son. We’ll take care of you.”

When Lawrence was taken away, Pron-Kel allowed his frustration to vent and hit his palm with an open hand.

“Damnation,” he hissed.

I
n the deepest cellar of the palace, a room with a door that was never opened had been set aside. Behind that door Prince Jamal raved, still confined to his cage, eyes rolling and unfocused. His left hand, still attached to his left arm, the single remaining of his limbs, pulled him from bar to bar while he drooled and gibbered and laughed and spoke to invisible others and sometimes himself: “And she’s the
princess
she is, and what a
beautiful
princess she is! She’s the
princess
she is …”

In another place, deep in the bowels of the planet, Jamal’s mother, Queen Kamath Clan, had returned to Earth, far away from any sound but the warm push of spring breeze through tall fragrant grass; overhead, by the power of projection, her own warm sun shown upon her, and a single apple tree dappled the cloud-studded sky with pink blossoms that fell like petals of snow.

And, attached to her now in permanent symbiosis by a long red tube of pulsing flesh of his own devising, hanging like a grotesque bat from his trussing pole, Quog breathed from the queen’s thoughts and mixed them with his own, strangely feeding on his own essence: and he lived again when he was a young man of handsome age and straight back, black hair and confident smile, before the Puppet Death turned him into an oozing creature, and when women including his wife found him handsome of feature and desirable.

A limpid smile spread across Quog’s tallowed features:

I could dance

I
n the middle of the Ruz Balib section of Huygens, a man made himself into … something else.

Trel Clan, fourth cousin to Jamal Clan, twentieth removed from the throne—outcast, layabout, unemployed, clever, calculating, and pensive—saw the future and determined to make it work for him. From the confines of his office where he did no work, in a bureau that had been created only to employ him, he closed the door and window. The room, already small by any standards, became oppressively so; now Trel Clan sought to make it even more so. He activated the shades, closing out the nondescript view, and locked the door against entry. Grunting with effort, for he was not a strong young man, he pushed a cabinet in front of the door, further ensuring privacy.

Then from his desk he drew, with trembling fingers, a kit of his own devising. For a year he had assembled the pieces; for the last six months he had quietly sought out advice—under the pretense of official business, for his was a department of such vagueness that any enterprise could be given purpose if that purpose was both obscure enough and surrounded by enough false paperwork to cause anyone with interest to quickly lose it—on the usage and application of each part of the kit.

In his facility with intrigue he was much like his Great Aunt Kamath, whom he had met once and from whom he felt so impossibly distant. But genes have a way of overcoming distance, and in certain ways he and the Queen were much alike.

Trel Clan was not only weak, but he was small—painfully so. (The pain had not only been psychic but physical, too: his school beatings had been legendary.) And he was not only small but cursed (so he had always thought) with the kind of hard, angular body that bespoke, rather than a frailty that might have saved him from beatings, a sort of jutting dare. His chin was sharp, his stare hard and resentful, his wiry hands often balled into hard fists. He had never won a fight, but always, to his misfortune, looked ready for the next. He weighed an inconsequential amount; and, when he sat down in a chair, often his feet did not touch the floor.

All of which had served him no useful purpose in life—until now.

Another of his qualities was that, once those he had dealt with had finished with him (either physically or psychically), they left him alone. He was ignored. In all of his years in the Ministry of Foreign Import Trade, Second-Class Division, Expendable Goods (MFITSCDEG), Trel Clan had never had a direct dealing with anyone else within the ministry. From the day he had arrived, five years before, with a writing instrument in his pocket and a meager lunch clutched in his wiry grip, he had never dealt personally with another denizen of another office either in his ministry or any other. Every transaction (what few there were) had been handled on Screen, where his dangling feet remained safely from view behind his desk. The single time that another worker had walked into his office it had been a mistake—and by the time Trel had looked up from his blotter the intruder had already mumbled an apology and the door was closing on his back.

Which served him well now.

Outside in the hallway, there was a kind of hive-like chaos ensuing, with comings and goings, whispers mingled with high voices of alarm. It had been such for most of the morning, since the announcement that a shield breach had been attempted by Prime Cornelian’s forces—in other words, the war that everyone knew had been coming was here. The buzz had increased somewhat; Trel Clan knew that at some point, especially if a breach was effected, that buzz would increase to a shrieking drone followed by who knew what, and by then it might be too late.

So he drew out his carefully assembled kit now—slim boxes, tiny cases, a pouch or two—and went to work, ordering the Screen to become a mirror, which it did, silvering immediately over.

It was also best to finish before power was lost to the Screens; it would be difficult enough applying the professional (only the best!), carefully assembled parts with only a Screen mirror for help.

In a while, Trel Clan was finished, and stood before the mirror admiring his handiwork. Something that did not often pass across his lips—a smile—told him that he had done more than well.

He had done splendidly.

During the entire exercise his hands had neither trembled nor balled into fists, but worked with a dexterity and loving precision that he didn’t know he possessed—another genetic gift from the faraway queen.

“Perfect!” he said, and the smile stayed.

T
o General Pron-Kel’s relief, the shields were holding.

He had expected no less; one of the reasons he had consented to take the job that had once been held by General Tarn was the first-rate nature of Titan’s defenses. This would not be a walk-through for Prime Cornelian, like Venus had been: and for two reasons. First was the unbreakable nature of Titan’s shield. No one man could betray it; security had been honed to an art on Titan.

The other reason Pron-Kel had taken the post was his unassailable belief in the fighting spirit of the Titanians themselves. Almost to a man they would battle to the death to defend their homeworld and their families. They all knew what was at stake; all knew that if Cornelian’s plasma soldiers were able to reach the moon’s surface they would be nearly unstoppable (though Titan’s scientists had tried for years to devise an effective deterrent, they had been unsuccessful); and all knew, finally, that if Cornelian followed his Venus plan, what it meant for each and every Titanian.

But they were as ready as they would ever be—
and the shields were holding.

“Every breach attempt has been repulsed, sir,” Pron-Kel’s second in command, the native Titanian and religious figure Solk said. Though she had had no formal military training, it had been obvious to Pron-Kel for some time that Solk would make an excellent second: she was respected worldwide, was one of the few of the religious sect not of Queen Clan’s family, which made her valuable as a uniting force—and she just plain seemed to understand what had to be done. Pron-Kel’s only reservation had been her age, ninety-three, but Solk had quickly dissipated that worry by pitching in to help move heavy equipment when the current command post, outside on the grounds of the palace under a huge tent, had been established.

“I expect no less,” the general said, and by the twinkle in Solk’s eyes he knew that she understood his bravado and recognized his relief.

To reassure him, she touched the sleeve of his tunic lightly and said, “They can hold indefinitely, General.”

Holding her gaze, Pron-Kel said, “Do you think Cornelian will settle for a long siege?”

“We both know he will not. He is impatient and testy. He will either retreat or do something foolish.”

The general said, “It’s a shame that Wrath-Pei could not be made use of.”

For a moment, Solk’s face hardened. “It is not a shame that he is gone. And as for being useful to us, there is nothing in his past history to indicate that he would have been useful to anyone.”

The general nodded.

Solk said, “But perhaps we should plan on using his ship as a possible lifeboat for the children, in case something unforeseen should happen? All of WrathPei’s men have more or less been incorporated into our own forces, and there would be no problem getting the ship piloted.”

“I don’t like that word: unforeseen,” Pron-Kel said.

Again Solk touched the general’s arm with two gentle fingers. “No one likes it,” she said, smiling thinly. “But it is what we live by.”

“Or die by,” General Pron-Kel said.

T
welve hours later, at the end of the first long day of what General Pron-Kel figured to be many, an aide summoned him not ten minutes after his head had found his pillow, which had been a stranger to him lately.

“General, Commander Solk thinks you should come immediately.”

Hauling himself with a grunt out of his bed and putting on a tunic, the general said, “The shields haven’t been breached, have they?”

“No, sir,” the aide said. “Not exactly.”

The general cocked an eyebrow at the aide—who quickly added, “I’m sorry, that’s all I know, sir”—then quickly finished his dress and joined Commander Solk in the command center.

Studying a bank of Screens, Solk said, “Cornelian’s plasma generators have disappeared.”

Pron-Kel was filled with a thrill of hope, which he quickly calmed with rational thought. “Has he cloaked them again?”

“No. Now that we are aware of his cloaking device we would have been able to pick that up. They’ve been … removed.”

“Removed? Could he have given up so soon?”

Solk said grimly, “It’s more likely that this is one of those ‘unforeseen circumstances’ we spoke of.”

“But what—” the general began.

“General Pron-Kel! Commander Solk!” came a frantic voice down the line of consoles. “The plasma generators are back
—inside our shields!”

Solk turned back to her own Screen. “It’s true,” she said grimly. “Every one of the Martian plasma generators is now in low orbit
—below
our shields.”

“That’s impossible!” Pron-Kel said. “Our shields were never breached, were they?”

There was silence, and then another voice on another console said, “No, General. The shields have held steady.”

“Can we move the shields closer, to shut out the generators again?” Pron-Kel said.

There was stony silence.

“Can we?” the general shouted.

“No, sir,” a voice came.

Unable to hide a roar of rage, Pron-Kel strode out of the command tent; almost immediately, his eyes were blinded by shafts of light streaming down from the newly positioned plasma soldier generators.

Solk had joined him, her severe face upturned. When the general’s eyes met hers, he tried unsuccessfully to hide his resignation.

“Get the children onto Wrath-Pei’s ship,” General Pron-Kel said quietly, then went back into the command tent to coordinate a last stand.

W
aiting patiently by his desk, Trel Clan knew what was happening. His Screen was on, the sound off, but the shouts and cries outside in the ministry’s hallway perfectly mimicked the Screen’s action.

Occasionally a plasma soldier, a humanoid form made all of light, could be glimpsed on the Screen—soon after, that picture would go blank and another view would replace it. The outside wide-angle shots were spectacular: Titan’s dark sky lit with light brighter than the daylight generators had ever produced—so bright that, for the first time in Trel Clan’s life, he could not see the stars, only the radiant beams from the plasma soldier generators low in orbit. Then all of the beams went out as one, bringing back eerie darkness, permeated by the soft glow of plasma troop movements.

The close-in shots were more horrific—fierce close-in battles that ended with a blank Screen or a close-up remote-controlled shot of a pile of severed Titanian bodies, some with battle cries still locked on their dead lips and useless weapons clutched in dead hands. Trel Clan watched with interest as raser fire, whether at close quarters from a hand weapon or by rifle or cannon fire, went right through the light soldiers, impeding them not in the least. A stick of wood or metal rod used as defense seemed to bounce off the plasma bodies; such an attack was inevitably followed by a lightning-quick movement from the assaulted light soldier, resulting in a bisected human attacker, lifeblood pumping onto the ground. Waves of attacking Titanian soldiers were quickly reduced to dying piles of twitching bodies by as little as two or three plasma infantrymen; desperate measures, such as the spilling of hot liquids from rooftops, attempted rammings by vehicles, all met with failure. A group of enterprising young men managed to tilt a ground transport over onto two plasma soldiers; after a moment of seeming victory the light forms seemed to flash out from beneath the wreckage, regained their forms, and proceeded to destroy the young men in an instant.