War World X: Takeover (29 page)

“Just remember,” Thomas Erhenfeld Bronson said then, voice low and slow and as certain as stone. “Politics is theatre, and the best politics is Grand Guignol.”

Ibansk looked puzzled again, but Cole explained the reference, particularly as it related to the French Revolution, as they walked back into the General’s office for the real meeting. “Short horror plays,” Cole said. “Theatrically macabre, meant to shock. By-passes the intellect, you see.”

“Ah,” said Ibansk. “Surprising they’d bother by-passing what little intellect can be found around here. They’re taking things quite seriously, aren’t they? I mean, after all, it’s a
Harmony
planet.”

“Do you know the definition of non-combatant? According to Ambrose Bierce: it’s a
noun
, means
a dead
Quaker—meaning pacifist. Change Quaker to Harmony and you’ve up-dated the Devil’s Dictionary nicely. And you’ve also pretty much defined the CoDo’s stance, I suspect.”

They sat down and drew on other traditional Earthish parallels, from Entebbe and Murchison Falls to Dusa Marreb, from vertical insertions into Panama for Operation JUST CAUSE to the orchestrated ‘salvation’ of Grenada and even the stage-managed confrontations between the UN Forces and Iraq. Ibansk even knew about Central America.

The plan Cole had ad-libbed, from dropping off arms with Jomo and other Docktown rubbish, to the Janesfort War and its taste of organized resistance in the form of the food boycott, to the later machinations with the purloined ore, pirated barges, social revolt in Castell City, and the frame-up of apparent Harmony complicity; the plan made sense in retrospect: That was all that counted. “And then I’ll retire,” Cole said several times during the meeting. It was his goal, his dream, his cherished hope.

He might not have mentioned it had he glimpsed the cold glitter it caused in Thomas Erhenfeld Bronson’s hooded eyes.

One watchtower burned where it stood, two toppled and burned where they fell. Two chicken coops on the Compound’s east side and the barn on its northwest side burned flat, but with minimal loss of stock. Crews of resourceful acolytes salvaged carcasses, and completed cooking the meat in huge pots hung over the Common Lodge fire-pit. Loose animals were gathered by children, some of whom had to wade into icy dewponds to fetch recalcitrant oxen and Long Angus cattle. The city gate had held, but a wagon of cayenne pepper had been dumped there, then set on fire. The stench drove everyone back, and it continued to smolder. “If we could’ve mixed the pepper with the meat we would’ve had a nice base for curry,” one of the Deacons observed.

Mud froze where water had sloshed. Scorched gaps along the top of the palisade resembled cavities in an otherwise healthy smile. Some lodge roofs had burned, one had collapsed. Survivors wandered dazed, helping as much as possible to restore harmony, the kind found in order. The injured lay in the Birth and Medical lodge and only one was expected to die, a young woman who’d braved the burning barn to set free oxen from their stalls. Her robes had caught fire just as she ran out and she’d burned until a Bead, unable to wait for someone to fetch water from the north side dewpond, dropped to his knees and rolled her, smothering the flames. His hands required salve, but others, who’d done nothing but gape, needed balm for their consciences.

“It’s a mess,” Kev said, “but it’s still here.” He surveyed the Harmony Compound from atop the Reverend Castell’s lodge. Ice coated the stone where water had splashed. Kev watched his footing, uncertain in torchlight, as he climbed down.

“All’s discord,” Castell said. He sat just inside his entranceway, hands on his ankles, face resting on his knees. “And my father’s journal’s been stolen,” he added, sobbing: “All the secrets, all the tricks.”

Kev squatted down beside his leader. He reached out a hand, placed it on a scrawny shoulder. “Saral wants to see you,” he said.

“Her place is here. With me. Where I can look after her, get her healthy again.” Castell looked up. “Maybe the echo of a miracle’s been planted by all this noise.” He gazed with desperation into Kev’s eyes. “Maybe I can cure her legs, have her walking straight and proud again.”

Kev looked away. “Maybe,” he said. He dropped his hand. “Just remember that polio is a song of its own, as tuneful to some as a child’s happiness.”

“You learn too well,” Castell said. He placed his forehead on his knees. He shuddered a few times.

Kev stood, moved away, letting the man cry in privacy.

To the first Beadle he encountered, Kev said, “Saral Castell must be bundled in blankets and carried with care to her own home. Can you get some help?”

“Yes First Deacon.” The man made the sign of the staff and eight notes, then scampered off, eager to please. He wanted now more than ever to be accepted, to qualify as a full-fledged acolyte and thus have a chance at becoming a Harmony. In such people Kev had placed his darker faith, for Beadles were the outer edge of the Church of New Universal Harmony, the ones who could still use violence when necessary, the ones whose easy transgressions and sins would be just as easily forgiven, as long as what they did served the interests of the kirk.

Kev’s eye saddened as he watched the man run off. “Enthusiasm is Harmony’s greatest danger to itself,” he said, quoting the Writings. Then he added, in his own tone and words, “And I’ve manipulated it shamelessly.”

“First Deacon,” Wilgar said, running up, leading Bren by the hand. “We saw the fire, from the palisade.”

“Much of Castell City is gone now,” Bren said. “The rickety places all fell down and burned.”

Kev began to smile and nod, then gave a sober look and glanced at Wilgar who had taken it all in. “There will be people needing help,” the First Deacon said, in a First Deacon kind of voice. “We must go to them.”

“Should we not administer to our own needs first?” Wilgar asked. “The better to be able to help others?”

Bren grinned and glanced away, still viewing Wilgar’s precocity as cute and relatively harmless.

Kev, however, knowing now what the boy had stolen from the core of the massive knot, but not knowing how cynical or manipulative or Machiavellian or useful the advice it contained might prove to be, said only, “Your heritage must serve others to be worth anything.”

Wilgar’s eyes glinted. He grabbed a torch from a sconce and said to Kev, “Let’s go, there’s something you should know about,” and ran off.

Kev kissed Bren, shrugged and smiled in ignorance and apology, and dashed off after Wilgar whose reserves of energy and lung capacity easily let him out-distance the older man.

They went from the Reverend Castell’s lodge past the dewpond and a fallen, burned watchtower. There Wilgar paused to examine the damage, seeming to look for something in the smoldering planks. He poked with his feet, risking the muskylope-hide boots which Bren had crafted for him last Eye-cycle.

Wilgar led the way around the back of the burned barn. Carcass-mining still went on, and wagons and barrows trundled back and forth, carrying slabs of scorched, bloody meat to the Common Lodge. Wilgar skirted the corral’s fence, went behind the unscathed chicken coop, then approached the palisade through thorn bushes and mounds of reinforcing dirt. He slapped an upright pole and said, “I think it’s this one.” “This one what?” Kev asked.

Wilgar only grinned and returned to the chicken coop. They entered, and he led the way to the rear corner. He moved some supplies and showed Kev the trap door. “A tunnel. My secret entrance and exit, leads to a sewer nexus.”

Kev said, “Why show me now?”

And Wilgar said, “Because we have a few things to do and we’d better do them right away. Come on.” And with that, he jumped down into the tunnel and vanished.

Kev glanced back at the coop’s door, which he’d closed. It was warm in the coop, from the body heat of the chickens, and it stank as only chicken coops can stink. Clucking, ruffling of feathers and pecking were the close sounds, while outside the coop people worked, shouted, even laughed and sang. Kev sighed, shoulders slumped from fatigue. He brushed at the smears of soot and scorch marks and just plain dirt which soiled his robes. “Our balbriggans don’t suffice,” he quoted, citing one of the Reverend Castell’s first pronouncements regarding the Harmonies’ advent upon Haven.

With that, Kev climbed down into the tunnel, dropped the trapdoor over himself, and crawled after Wilgar, who was whistling a fugue softly at the far end, as a guide. Echo, stench and blind faith defined Kev’s next few minutes, and then he came to the sewer which offered secret escape from the Harmony Compound.

“Pre-positioning,” Cole said, “is essential in normal raids, but Haven doesn’t exactly have a communications network needing cut.” He surveyed the office. He sat at one battered collapsible field desk, while Ibansk sat at another. Each had before him a field-issue note-box, and each processed his report in his own way. As they worked, they chatted.

Cole continued. “Vertical insertions usually involves paratroop units, but we’re not bothering here on Haven, because there’s not only no professional military, there’s also no expected resistance, outside the usual mob-scenes stuff and, hell, police can handle that. Our soldiers should slam down like a cast-iron toilet lid. And, as I said, without effective real-time communication, word of the presence of CoDo troops won’t spread much faster than the troops themselves.”

“I know about Haven’s static, Byers is mostly too active,” Ibansk said, “but during lulls the indigs have used radio, for example.”

“Sheer luck. Unpredictable. Hell if I’d want to lug around CBs or field-pack radios on the off-chance of being able to use them.”

“What do the shuttles use during splashdowns?”

Cole grinned. “Line-of-sight lasers,” he said. “They’re almost perfect. No side-band bleed, which means you can’t passively monitor it, and you can’t decipher a laser transmission unless you directly intercept it. Try doing that on a battlefield sometime. You’re infantry, aren’t you? If you were a tanker, or artillery, you’d know about such basics.”

Ibansk pretended to be insulted, but smiled as he said, “Well, at least my family never had to sell a son into the slavery of spying.” He paused, made a note, then said, “But tell me, what do they do in heavy fog, for example?”

“They have problems,” Cole said. “And if necessary they can resort to burst-repeaters. They call the system MOSAIC, just to be cute. It’s not an acronym, I mean. Same as a normal squirt radio, compresses the message, but it repeats at random and the receivers build up the complete coded message from multiple scans of what ever punches through the interference each time.”

“Then why not issue those to field units?”

Cole shook his head. He lifted his fingers from the keyboard long enough to spread his arms wide, palms facing each other. “Hardware’s too big, you’d need about an APC and a half just to haul them to the transceivers. Shuttles can carry them, but only a few bother.”

Ibansk grunted, impressed. “Should’ve opted to fill in my professional military education gaps,” he muttered.

Cole said, “Forget that. PME doesn’t cover this kind of stuff. Fact is, no one does. You just sort of learn it if you ever need to, and if you don’t, then you’ll probably never hear about it.”

“You’re saying this information is classified?” Ibansk looked both startled and slightly frightened at the possibility.

Cole put him at ease with a shrug. “Damned if I know.”

Both men laughed, then continued processing their reports. Cole occasionally asked Ibansk for help with local nomenclature or map specifications.

“That’s a quern,” Ibansk said, “it mills grains, hand-cranked.” He pointed to the diagram, then said, “Obviously not the one you’re seeking, eh?”

“It’s these access binaries. Somebody’s got them scrambled. “Cole clattered a few keys and tried another, then sighed and slumped back as a diagram of a roller coaster came on screen.

“What is it you want?” Ibansk said. “Perhaps my access is better.”

“I’m arranging the evidence we’ll use against the Harmonies to revoke their settlement rights. We’ll find piles of ore on Harmony farms, proving they were in on the pirating. I got Kennicott and Dover miners to help with that, and they even pitched in some equipment, trucks and shovels. We’ll find a stockpile of cayenne pepper at the Harmony Compound, proving they intended to make pepper mace, an illegal weapon. I got that from the Docktown and Cambiston restaurants; good thing BuReloc’s sending out so many ethnic types these days.